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CO Bites: A Pitch-Perfect Vermont Songbook
57 Plays1 year ago
In this Curious Objects Bites episode, Benjamin Miller examines an 1830s manuscript tune book from rural Vermont. Bound crudely in leather, this book of sacred music was made by a farmer named Bernard Ward as a gift for his grandson, and many years later passed into the major collection of musical instruments, books, scores, and ephemera assembled by Frederick R. Selch. Filling Ben in on the details of this unusual item is Brenton Grom, executive director of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum in Connecticut.
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Transcript
Introduction to Curious Objects
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by The Magazine Antiques, I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:15
Speaker
This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
00:00:22
Speaker
Today, we are doing another Curious Objects bite, a quick and dirty episode that might not get you all the way through your commute, unless your commute is a lot shorter than mine, in which case I don't want to hear about it.
Envisioning Early Vermont
00:00:34
Speaker
But today, let's take a little commute together to Vermont.
00:00:38
Speaker
Why not?
00:00:39
Speaker
And because this is Curious Objects, let's also commute back 200 years to the 1830s.
00:00:45
Speaker
So imagine with me Vermont, but without the leaf-peeping tourists and the artisanal cheese stands and the small batch breweries, I mean, this place was remote.
Bernard Ward's Manuscript
00:00:57
Speaker
Now, I have biked across Vermont on back roads and through the farms and the mountains, and I can tell you it feels pretty darn rural today.
00:01:04
Speaker
But in the 1830s, it had a third that many people.
00:01:08
Speaker
And I haven't checked this, but I'm pretty sure the interstate highway system was way less reliable back then.
00:01:13
Speaker
And so here we are on a farmstead belonging to Bernard Ward.
00:01:18
Speaker
with very poor wi-fi signal and after we finish milking the cows and tilling the fields what are we going to do to pass the time?
00:01:27
Speaker
Hmm, how does religion sound?
00:01:30
Speaker
Should we try some religion?
00:01:32
Speaker
Well if that sounds a little boring maybe we need to spice it up with some music?
00:01:36
Speaker
Well in fact religious music was a central element of culture and identity and it was one of the most reliable ways to bring the community together.
00:01:45
Speaker
And today's Curious Object is, in fact, a book of music.
00:01:49
Speaker
But it's not a mass-printed, distributed book.
00:01:52
Speaker
It's a manuscript written by hand by our friend Bernard Ward.
00:01:58
Speaker
And writing a book by hand is a lot of work, but Bernard had a very good reason for doing it and a very special person to give it to.
00:02:05
Speaker
And understanding that reason is going to give us an intimate view of what he and many other early Americans really valued in their lives.
Expert Insight: Brenton Grom Joins
00:02:13
Speaker
And it might even give us some inspiration about our own.
00:02:17
Speaker
And I can't tell you how happy I am to have the chance to explore all of this with my friend and long overdue Curious Objects guest, Brenton Grom.
00:02:25
Speaker
Brenton is the executive director of the Webb Dean Stevens Museum in Connecticut.
00:02:30
Speaker
And he is literally the perfect person to guide us through the story of this manuscript.
00:02:35
Speaker
And that's not just because he trained as a pianist.
00:02:39
Speaker
He literally wrote a dissertation about it.
00:02:41
Speaker
Brenton, thanks so much for joining me.
00:02:44
Speaker
Glad to be here, Ben.
00:02:45
Speaker
So who was Bernard Ward?
00:02:48
Speaker
Well, Bernard Ward was a farmer in Vermont, but by the time he comes onto my radar, he's sort of semi-retired and he's moving around every so often between the mid-1830s and mid-1840s when he dies among a series of little towns to the east of Burlington.
00:03:09
Speaker
And whether it's Underhill, Jericho, Essex,
00:03:13
Speaker
Fletcher, Fairfax, I think that accounts for all of them.
00:03:17
Speaker
He seems to spend time sort of lodging with different people, providing a little bit of work to earn his keep along with his wife.
00:03:26
Speaker
And in the evenings, we know from the diary he kept during that time, he would occasionally spend time writing tunes, as he put it.
00:03:36
Speaker
And it just so happens that we have the manuscript tune book in which he was presumably writing
00:03:42
Speaker
writing tunes during that period.
00:03:44
Speaker
And it's something that he was doing for his grandson who lived in the town of Fletcher.
00:03:49
Speaker
And so these are religious tunes, right?
Communal Singing Challenges
00:03:52
Speaker
Not secular?
00:03:54
Speaker
That's right.
00:03:54
Speaker
They're almost exclusively sacred tunes.
00:03:57
Speaker
But from the period before the revolution into the early 19th century, a lot of this music doubled for both church purposes and social purposes.
00:04:09
Speaker
So you might just as well sing it in the home.
00:04:11
Speaker
So I just want to share a recording so listeners have an idea of the kind of music that Bernard was working with here.
00:04:20
Speaker
God is the road that leads to death, and thousands walk together there.
00:04:34
Speaker
But wisdom shows a narrow path, with here and there a traveler.
00:04:50
Speaker
So this communal singing really required everyone to be on the same page, literally, you know, to have the same versions of the same songs to sing.
00:05:00
Speaker
But that turned out to be easier said than done, right?
00:05:04
Speaker
Well, that's the crux of it.
00:05:06
Speaker
And in some cases, the issue was that you couldn't all be literally on the same page because you might be seated in different parts of the galleries of the meeting house.
00:05:15
Speaker
So you had to have multiple copies in many cases in order to be able to sing this music.
00:05:21
Speaker
Now, what was happening in the music publishing industry at the time is that there were a handful of
Preserving Musical Tradition
00:05:29
Speaker
well-known titles that were collections of this sacred music, but they kept going through successive editions.
00:05:36
Speaker
I mean, in some cases, dozens of editions.
00:05:39
Speaker
Every year or two, there'd be a new one.
00:05:41
Speaker
And so... It's good for business, but it's not so good for communal singing.
00:05:46
Speaker
Well, that's right.
00:05:46
Speaker
There was also a polemical aspect to this.
00:05:50
Speaker
There were folks who were pushing to reform the way that this music was both composed and performed to sort of elevate tastes, make it conform more to European rules of counterpoint and harmony.
00:06:03
Speaker
And
00:06:05
Speaker
It was a project to sort of gradually, over many printed editions, shift people's tastes in a certain direction.
00:06:11
Speaker
The thing is, if you wanted to sing something that wasn't hot off the presses, or a version of something that wasn't hot off the presses, then you had to be able to have multiple copies together.
00:06:22
Speaker
And that's where...
00:06:24
Speaker
Bernard Ward's tune book for his grandson really comes in.
00:06:29
Speaker
He's not only documenting certain versions of these tunes to pass along and kind of fix as a tradition, but in fact, he's making these remarkable annotations on each page saying exactly how
00:06:44
Speaker
how the version that he's copied in here compares with a handful of the most prominent published collections at the time.
00:06:54
Speaker
And he says specifically which edition and, you know, which page it's found on.
00:06:59
Speaker
So he's being very analytical about what he's doing.
00:07:03
Speaker
But I think the result is that he's trying to...
00:07:09
Speaker
negotiate between a print culture that is changing very rapidly and a practiced culture that is social, it's embodied, it's local to where he is and where his grandson is.
00:07:26
Speaker
I mean, this sounds like a musicologist's wet dream, but is it a nice looking book?
00:07:34
Speaker
Well, it's kind of homely, actually.
00:07:36
Speaker
And, you know, that's not all that surprising.
00:07:40
Speaker
It was probably made by Ward with materials and skills that were available to him.
00:07:47
Speaker
And so it has a thick leather binding that is stitched up in a rather obtuse way.
00:07:54
Speaker
It was probably pretty durable, actually.
00:07:55
Speaker
And that may have been more important to do that than to have it be as aesthetically
00:08:05
Speaker
As a raider scavenging a derelict world, you settle into an underground settlement.
00:08:12
Speaker
But now you must return to the surface, where arc machines roam
00:08:19
Speaker
If you're brave enough, who knows what you might find?
00:08:22
Speaker
Arc Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure video game.
00:08:26
Speaker
Buy now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S and PC.
00:08:31
Speaker
Rated T for teen.
00:08:33
Speaker
Pleasing as possible.
The Manuscript's Journey
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, this was a working book, obviously, or at least that's how he intended it.
00:08:38
Speaker
And what kind of musical notation was he using?
00:08:42
Speaker
Was this related somehow to the shape note tradition?
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, this whole tradition of New England Solomon hymn singing from this period is kind of a predecessor to the Southern sacred harp and shape note tradition that still lives on pretty robustly today.
00:09:01
Speaker
So how do you think this book actually brought people together in rural Vermont in the 19th century?
00:09:06
Speaker
I mean, was this actually used in services or gatherings?
00:09:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:12
Speaker
Well, we would love to construct a story about it, but the fact of the matter is we don't know whether his grandson actually wanted or used this, right?
00:09:21
Speaker
Well, speaking as someone who has gotten gifts from my grandparents on occasion that, let's say, just didn't survive for very long, I can understand that.
00:09:31
Speaker
But let's imagine that his grandson really was interested in this material and wanted to put it to use.
00:09:38
Speaker
What would that have looked like?
00:09:41
Speaker
Well, the grandfather put a note on the title page that he made, and it said, do not lend this book nor leave it at the meeting house, which suggests certainly that he might have been taking it with him to meeting.
00:09:56
Speaker
Whether that was in order to sing this repertory with other people who wanted to hang on to particular traditions, we don't know, but we might be able to surmise that because, as we said, it takes, you know,
00:10:10
Speaker
two or three in this case to tango.
00:10:14
Speaker
But it's, you know, it's not entirely clear.
00:10:18
Speaker
It certainly has some wear to it.
00:10:20
Speaker
And it has a couple of manuscript editions of tunes toward the end that seem to be in a different hand and seem to be later.
00:10:29
Speaker
So the book obviously didn't just, you know, go onto a shelf or a drawer, into a drawer somewhere and sit indefinitely.
00:10:40
Speaker
Where has it been since the 1830s?
00:10:43
Speaker
There's a gap of many years that we don't know about, but in the late 20th century, it found its way into the hands of a collector named Eric Selch, Frederick R. Selch, who was an advertising executive in New York and amassed a pretty important collection of early American musical instruments, manuscripts, books, artworks, and so forth.
00:11:06
Speaker
And that collection in 2009,
00:11:10
Speaker
went to Oberlin College and that was where I first encountered it.
00:11:14
Speaker
So we can track it back a few decades.
00:11:17
Speaker
But before then, it's hard to say where it bounced around.
00:11:20
Speaker
It doesn't have any other kinds of ownership marks added to it as these books sometimes do.
Ward's Musical Preferences
00:11:26
Speaker
So we're left with the Toon Book and the diary to kind of surmise what might have been going on at the time.
00:11:35
Speaker
Have you sung things out of this book?
00:11:37
Speaker
I'm embarrassed to say I have not sung them.
00:11:40
Speaker
Um, maybe that means I need to find more friends who would be game to, uh, have a social hour of doing this.
00:11:47
Speaker
Um, but when you, so when you, you look at this stuff enough, you can sort of visualize in your inner ear, um,
00:11:55
Speaker
Sorry to mix the metaphors.
00:11:59
Speaker
What this music might sound like.
00:12:02
Speaker
And the choices that Ward makes in what to copy suggests to me that even when there are tunes that were either of somewhat newer vintage or had been reharmonized over the years, he...
00:12:21
Speaker
makes his choices about sources in such a way that they will end up with a sound that's a little bit closer to the old way of singing things, which has sort of, if you know anything about music theory, hollow fifths and...
00:12:37
Speaker
more parallel intervals and a kind of more, to our ear, maybe almost medieval sound rather than the more fulsome harmonies that are done by proper modern period European counterpoint.
Credits and Conclusion
00:12:53
Speaker
Well, I think we'd better leave listeners with another recording of music in this style just to transport us again back to this moment in this period and this experience that Bernard Ward was trying to share with his grandson.
00:13:07
Speaker
But Brenton, thanks for being our tour guide and thanks for joining me on Curious Objects.
00:13:13
Speaker
It's my pleasure.
00:13:21
Speaker
Which him a thrift the narrow take, Which false apostates never knew.
00:13:43
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
00:13:48
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:13:52
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.