Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by The Magazine Antiques, I'm Ben Miller.
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.
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.
Speaker: But today, let's take a little commute together to Vermont.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: And because this is Curious Objects, let's also commute back 200 years to the 1830s.
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.
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.
Speaker: But in the 1830s, it had a third that many people.
Speaker: And I haven't checked this, but I'm pretty sure the interstate highway system was way less reliable back then.
Speaker: And so here we are on a farmstead belonging to Bernard Ward.
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?
Speaker: Hmm, how does religion sound?
Speaker: Should we try some religion?
Speaker: Well if that sounds a little boring maybe we need to spice it up with some music?
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.
Speaker: And today's Curious Object is, in fact, a book of music.
Speaker: But it's not a mass-printed, distributed book.
Speaker: It's a manuscript written by hand by our friend Bernard Ward.
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.
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.
Speaker: And it might even give us some inspiration about our own.
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.
Speaker: Brenton is the executive director of the Webb Dean Stevens Museum in Connecticut.
Speaker: And he is literally the perfect person to guide us through the story of this manuscript.
Speaker: And that's not just because he trained as a pianist.
Speaker: He literally wrote a dissertation about it.
Speaker: Brenton, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker: Glad to be here, Ben.
Speaker: So who was Bernard Ward?
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.
Speaker: And whether it's Underhill, Jericho, Essex,
Speaker: Fletcher, Fairfax, I think that accounts for all of them.
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.
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.
Speaker: And it just so happens that we have the manuscript tune book in which he was presumably writing
Speaker: writing tunes during that period.
Speaker: And it's something that he was doing for his grandson who lived in the town of Fletcher.
Speaker: And so these are religious tunes, right?
Speaker: Not secular?
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: They're almost exclusively sacred tunes.
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.
Speaker: So you might just as well sing it in the home.
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.
Speaker: God is the road that leads to death, and thousands walk together there.
Speaker: But wisdom shows a narrow path, with here and there a traveler.
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.
Speaker: But that turned out to be easier said than done, right?
Speaker: Well, that's the crux of it.
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.
Speaker: So you had to have multiple copies in many cases in order to be able to sing this music.
Speaker: Now, what was happening in the music publishing industry at the time is that there were a handful of well-known titles that were collections of this sacred music, but they kept going through successive editions.
Speaker: I mean, in some cases, dozens of editions.
Speaker: Every year or two, there'd be a new one.
Speaker: And so... It's good for business, but it's not so good for communal singing.
Speaker: Well, that's right.
Speaker: There was also a polemical aspect to this.
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.
Speaker: And
Speaker: It was a project to sort of gradually, over many printed editions, shift people's tastes in a certain direction.
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.
Speaker: And that's where...
Speaker: Bernard Ward's tune book for his grandson really comes in.
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
Speaker: how the version that he's copied in here compares with a handful of the most prominent published collections at the time.
Speaker: And he says specifically which edition and, you know, which page it's found on.
Speaker: So he's being very analytical about what he's doing.
Speaker: But I think the result is that he's trying to...
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.
Speaker: I mean, this sounds like a musicologist's wet dream, but is it a nice looking book?
Speaker: Well, it's kind of homely, actually.
Speaker: And, you know, that's not all that surprising.
Speaker: It was probably made by Ward with materials and skills that were available to him.
Speaker: And so it has a thick leather binding that is stitched up in a rather obtuse way.
Speaker: It was probably pretty durable, actually.
Speaker: And that may have been more important to do that than to have it be as aesthetically
Speaker: As a raider scavenging a derelict world, you settle into an underground settlement.
Speaker: But now you must return to the surface, where arc machines roam
Speaker: If you're brave enough, who knows what you might find?
Speaker: Arc Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure video game.
Speaker: Buy now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S and PC.
Speaker: Rated T for teen.
Speaker: Pleasing as possible.
Speaker: Yeah, this was a working book, obviously, or at least that's how he intended it.
Speaker: And what kind of musical notation was he using?
Speaker: Was this related somehow to the shape note tradition?
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.
Speaker: So how do you think this book actually brought people together in rural Vermont in the 19th century?
Speaker: I mean, was this actually used in services or gatherings?
Speaker: Yeah.
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?
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.
Speaker: But let's imagine that his grandson really was interested in this material and wanted to put it to use.
Speaker: What would that have looked like?
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.
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,
Speaker: two or three in this case to tango.
Speaker: But it's, you know, it's not entirely clear.
Speaker: It certainly has some wear to it.
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.
Speaker: So the book obviously didn't just, you know, go onto a shelf or a drawer, into a drawer somewhere and sit indefinitely.
Speaker: Where has it been since the 1830s?
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.
Speaker: And that collection in 2009,
Speaker: went to Oberlin College and that was where I first encountered it.
Speaker: So we can track it back a few decades.
Speaker: But before then, it's hard to say where it bounced around.
Speaker: It doesn't have any other kinds of ownership marks added to it as these books sometimes do.
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.
Speaker: Have you sung things out of this book?
Speaker: I'm embarrassed to say I have not sung them.
Speaker: Um, maybe that means I need to find more friends who would be game to, uh, have a social hour of doing this.
Speaker: Um, but when you, so when you, you look at this stuff enough, you can sort of visualize in your inner ear, um,
Speaker: Sorry to mix the metaphors.
Speaker: What this music might sound like.
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...
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...
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.
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.
Speaker: But Brenton, thanks for being our tour guide and thanks for joining me on Curious Objects.
Speaker: It's my pleasure.
Speaker: Which him a thrift the narrow take, Which false apostates never knew.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.
