Is There Actual History in the Song “With a Hundred Pipers”?

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Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Eldest son of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart. Painted by William Mosman around 1750; accessed via Wikipedia.

I’ve written about the history of conflict between England and Scotland in several other posts, but if you’re coming to this material without having read those a bit of background is in order. Scotland and England fought each other for centuries, but it looked as though things were settled in 1603, when Queen Elizabeth I died and left no children, naming the king of Scotland, her cousin James Stuart, as her heir. He became James I of England and in theory united the countries. (He is perhaps most famous for commissioning the King James Bible.)

Alas, relations between the two countries did not remain peaceful. A big bone of contention was religion, even though both countries were Protestant. Charles I, James’ son, riled the Scots by his determination to control Scottish church government. England was also determined not to go back to the Roman Catholic church. In 1688 James II, who was James I’s grandson, was kicked off the throne over this very issue. He had converted to Roman Catholicism before becoming king, and his second wife was French and Catholic.  But his first wife had been Protestant and English and his two daughters from that marriage had been raised Anglican. So the English kept their fingers crossed that he wouldn’t have any sons from this second wife. A male heir would automatically take his place at the front of the succession line, but James was 51 when he became king and his wife had a long history of miscarriages and stillbirths. So what could possibly go wrong? Well, as it turned out, a lot. James’ wife did indeed finally produce a surviving son, and a Catholic dynasty seemed in the offing. England rose up against him and offered the throne to Mary of Orange, the eldest daughter of James’ first marriage, and her husband William. (“Orange” is a region in The Netherlands.)

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How do we know that “She Moved Through the Fair” is a true folk song?

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Image accessed via the “Why Donegal?” Facebook page; no source given.

We know this because it has so many different versions, points of origin, and people claiming to have had a part in its creation. Any time you have a song that simply refuses to be pinned down, rest assured that it can truly be categorized as “folk.” If there is a known author, then the most you can say is that the piece is “in the style of” a folk song. I have been fascinated to read the Wikipedia article on this piece; the various claims and counterclaims are so multi-branching that they almost form a spider’s web.

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The Shakers’ Simple Music Inspires Dance and Song

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By Unknown author – Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons. Shakers dancing.

It seems a little unfair that the word “Shakers” nowadays calls up only a furniture style and, probably, the tune “Simple Gifts,” when this religious group had such a long and fascinating history. Honestly, the Wikipedia article about them is well worth a read if you’re at all interested in early American history and/or revivalist religious movements.

I’m going to get into Shaker music, but I do need to explain their beliefs and practices a bit in order to do so. This sect, which got its start in Britain around 1750, was a fascinating mixture of strict rules on the one hand and ecstatic outbursts on the other. Absolute celibacy was required for full membership; the sexes were housed separately and could not even shake hands or pass one another on the stairs. (I’m assuming the latter rule was in place because the staircases were so narrow.) They also lived communally and were strict pacifists. Yet their worship services were a mixture of music, dancing, and manifestations of spirituality that included twitching, jerking, and shouting, usually in some type of unknown language. (Those outward physical actions gave the group their name; originally they were called the “Shaking Quakers” and were an offshoot of the original Quakers.) They had to let off steam somehow, I guess. In spite of all the kerfuffle, though, the music itself was very plain, with no musical instruments used for accompaniment and no harmonies, just the melody. You can do a lot with a little; as our friend Wikipedia says:

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How Did the Moody Robert Schumann Come to Write the Spritely “Zigeunerleben”?

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Image by William Adams from Pixabay–these are obviously costumed actors/dancers, but they are quite true to the Romantic idea of this people group.

In May 2013 the community choir to which I belong, the Cherry Creek Chorale, performed a concert with the title “Isn’t It Romantic?” One of the pieces was the rousing song “Zigeunerleben” by Robert Schumann. I got a little tickled with myself when I realized later that not only did I not read a translation of the text in preparation for the concert, having only a vague idea that it was something about gypsies, but I also assumed that the song was by Robert Schubert. (The confusion of Schubert and Schumann is very common; East Germany issued a commemorative stamp in 1956 that had a picture of Schuman against a backdrop of music by Schubert; the stamp had to be re-issued in corrected form.) But during some later work on Johannes Brahms, who was closely associated with the Schumanns, I realized that Robert was a fascinating study unto himself. There’s no way I can do justice to the whole complicated story of this complicated man, so let me attempt to explain how he came to write this song.

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Copland Struggles to Put the Struggles of a Poor Farming Family On Stage

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Image by Colin Ross from Pixabay

As you know if you’ve read many of the posts on this site, I love tracking down the origins of creative works. So “The Promise of Living” from Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land has provided me with a number of rabbit trails to pursue in this regard. My choir sang it several years ago as the finale to a concert, and while I didn’t manage to squeeze in a post about it then it’s been on my list of Intriguing Pieces To Discuss.

On the surface the words would imply that this is a harvest/Thanksgiving piece, and indeed some program notes or even sheet music characterize it as such. Here’s how it starts:

The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving
is born of our loving our friends and our labor.

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How Ralph Vaughn Williams launched his career into the Unknown Region

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I have to say that I hadn’t realized what a fruitful source of lyrics for choral music Walt Whitman has been until I started writing this article. My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, has sung a couple of other pieces besides this one with lyrics by Whitman over the years that I’ve been involved with the group. (You can read about them here and here–you’ll have to scroll down to read about the Whitman poem in that second article.) His poetry is so open, fresh and enthusiastic that music seems like a logical next step in presenting his work. About five hundred composers have written about twelve hundred works rooted, in some way, in Whitman, and the use of his poetry has only grown over the years.

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A Rich American Musical Tradition in “Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal”

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Image by falco from Pixabay

There’s approximately ONE TON of information that I could include in this article, ranging from Gregorian chant to early American shape-note singing to the great Alice Parker and her arrangements for the Robert Shaw Chorale, of which “Hark” is one of many. I’m going to rein myself in at least somewhat, though, fascinating as all of this is.

Let me just briefly say first of all that we haven’t, of course, always had the musical notation that we have today, nor have we had the mathematical theory behind it. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras is the one who came up with at least the basic ideas of how pitches work. (So he wasn’t just about triangles.) He figured out that a plucked string vibrated at a certain frequency, or pitch, and that a string half that length vibrated an octave above it. In other words, the same note, but higher. I guess one of these days I’ll have to read up on how he figured all of this out, if indeed we have any info about that process at all. Then, as far as we know, it took only about 1500 years for the notation system of today to get its start, in connection with what we call “Gregorian chant,” used in services of the Roman Catholic Church. But this system didn’t really specify pitches but only direction of pitches—up or down. Someone who knew the melody had to teach the monks or nuns or whatevers the actual tune. The music, an oral (or aural) medium, had to be passed down orally, that is, by memory. But that idea shouldn’t be terribly strange to us, as we know that verbal material was also passed down orally. Ancient poets and bards who didn’t have access to writing recited long stories that they had learned “by heart.”

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A Smaller Version of the Brahms “Requiem”–“Nanie”

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“Orpheus and Eurydice” by Anselm Feuerbach, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

It has been fascinating to read about the life of Johannes Brahms, and his late composition “Nänie,” written over the course of a year from 1880-1881, is a good example of how he viewed relationships. This piece comes well over a decade after his Eine Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) was finally completed in 1869, but both that major work and this single piece are focused on the theme of consolation for those who are mourning a death. (As I write this article in early February 2021 I’m planning to make my next project in book form to be on the Requiem. This is therefore a good warmup! If the subject of the Requiem intrigues you, be sure to check back on this website for updates. And of course the best way to be sure you do that is to subscribe to the blog. Go to the sidebar to do that.)

“Nänie” was written to honor the memory of Brahms’ friend Anselm Feuerbach, a painter who died at the tragically young age of 50. Brahms knew Feuerbach because of his own interest in art; he had a circle of friends who were painters, among them Feuerbach. In fact, the painter’s style was compared to that of Brahms: both were interested in severe classical restraints on personal emotion. Feuerbach’s paintings were focused primarily on Classical themes and subjects, so when he died Brahms’ choice of text illustrated the painter’s style as well as his own. The piece was dedicated to Feuerbach’s stepmother Henriette; more about her below.

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The Many Creative Wellsprings for the Musical “Guys and Dolls”

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English: Portion of title page of Guys and Dolls, Libretto and Vocal book, printed by Music Theatre International, 1978.

First, let’s define a few terms that will help along the way in outlining the wellsprings mentioned in the title above, particularly “libretto” or “lyrics” vs. “book.” I’ve run into these terms before and never quite gotten them straight. So the “libretto” (literally “little book” in Italian and typically used for opera) is the text of the sung parts, including the individual songs (or arias, again used primarily in opera) and any recitatives (that is, sung exposition). While an opera is usually all sung (but there are certainly exceptions such as The Magic Flute), musical theater typically has spoken parts as well. So the “book” is the compendium of everything the performers say or sing, as well as the stage directions. And thus the stage is set (ahem) for endless combinations, borrowings and re-workings. You’ll hear about someone getting an idea for a musical or an opera from seeing a play or reading a book and then going through the long and sometimes tortured process that will turn one format into another. Unless the creative mind behind it all is capable of doing everything—the words, the music, the staging—various roles have to be farmed out.

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Who are the two heavy hitters involved in the light, shimmering piece “A Boy and a Girl”?

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

And they are: Eric Whitacre, one of today’s most popular American composers of classical choral music, and Octavio Paz, Nobel-Prize-winning poet, essayist and diplomat. Quite a team!

Let’s start with Paz and his poem. While the title’s translation from the original Spanish is typically rendered as “A Boy and a Girl,” I ran into an interesting blog post that had this to say:

As a side note, the title “Los Novios” is very difficult to translate into English without losing something.  The word “novio” means a boyfriend or a romantic partner and comes from the Latin novus, or new.  The feminine form “novia” means the same thing, and in Spanish, if there are multiples in a group consisting of females and males, the plural word takes the masculine plural.  While “los novios” could be translated as “the boyfriends,” context here is clear that it is the sum of a boyfriend and a girlfriend and not some sort of homoerotic message.  Because “The Boyfriend and the Girlfriend” is an awkward title, I took the liberty of translating the title as “The Lovers,” which seems to me to capture the essence of what Paz was trying to convey. (from “The Lovers”: A New Translation of Octavio Paz’ “Los Novios”)

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