Soul of discretion

Some years  ago I wrote (here):

Songs in my forthcoming concert have made me think about gender. My first ..issue, thinking point.....? comes in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (written  'when Fauré was still at school', as programme notes tend to say, although he was a fairly mature 19-year-old at the time). The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great discovery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well....

This was a bit defeatist (Defeatist? Moi?); there could still be a musicological point worth making. There are, as I wrote before looking at the score, two possible interpretations of the sounds:  

1. qui la conduit is an admission of (present) human weakness
   Here, la conduit means "[it] leads"  [the soul is being led by human frailty]
2. qui l'a conduit is a confession of (past) misdeeds (l'oubli de tes lois)
   Here, l'a conduit means "[it] has led" [sleep – human fecklessness – has led to l'oubli de tes lois]

   <autobiographical_note>
   I can almost hear Fr Gregory saying 'I hadn't time'. 

   <inline_PPS>
   The context was a soul in Purgatory aspiring to get into Heaven, speaking to the celestial bouncer in justification of their sins of omission.
   <inline_PPS> 

   </autobiographical_note>

There is a pun here, based on the two meanings of conduit and Fauré knew that. It's not inconceivable that he wanted the basses to sound Sam-the-Eagle-like. After all, the phrase is  marked by a very prominent bass entry. Perhaps the 19-year-old was having a sly dig at his schoolmaster father, who sent him away  from the family home in the South of France twice: he lived at home for only 14 five of his first 19 years –  with a foster mother until he was four, and then after only  five happy years...

<parenthesis>
(of the chapel near his home he wrote:

I grew up, a rather quiet well-behaved child, in an area of great beauty. ... But the only thing I remember really clearly is the harmonium in that little chapel. Every time I could get away I ran there – and I regaled myself. ... I played atrociously ... no method at all, quite without technique, but I do remember that I was happy; and if that is what it means to have a vocation, then it is a very pleasant thing.

quoted in Wikipedia

)
</parenthesis>

... he was sent to Paris to study at the Ėcole Niedermeyer.

L'Envoi

Meanwhile, a pedant's life doesn't get any easier: in My soul doth magnify the problem I wrote (of a concert that include the Magnificat)

...The words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted".

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ]) is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises..

And this a/u problem hasn't gone away. In the ENO's recent rendition of Mozart's Requiem one of the alternations between in aeternum and requiem eternam was a fleeting blemish (at 51'14") on a very welcome live concert. I'm sure I'd be happier if I didn't notice this sort of thing, but there we go. The choir of ENO usually sing in English, so maybe I should cut them some slack; shame though.

b

PS My choir was rehearsing (via Zoom) last night, and it reminded me of a previous concert, of which I had written:

...My favourite moment during rehearsals involved a private joke – private, that is, to people who have a bit of Latin. 

We were singing an arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo that involved only half the choir singing the second verse and the other half joining in at the words Trahe me post te. As often happens when more people sing, there was a tendency to slow down. Our conductor said 'I feel as if I'm having to drag‡ you along after me.' This was my moment of private hilarity [little things...], as the words mean 'Drag me after you' (think of tractor on the one [Latin] hand and draught [animals] on the other [English].) 

More here

Update: 2020.11.2311:45 – Added <inline_PPS /> and fixed dodgy maths re Fauré's time spent  at home.

Well said, that man

In this week's Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, Rowan Williams was talking about his new book The Way of St Benedict., which led me to think about the many appearances of Benedict in my life.

The first was as near home as you can get. When looking for a house to buy, my father had three priorities: nearness to church, RC school, and Ealing studios (in that order). He got the first two spot on: the church and the school were within walking distance. The journey to Ealing Studios (where he worked at the time)  would have taken a little longer – maybe 15-20 minutes in the Standard Vanguard (known, for reasons I never questioned, as "the Green Lizard"):

The church and school were named for St Benedict, as was indirectly... 

<parenthesis>

Very indirectly. Father Ben (sic  – younger and trendier than most of his peers) named the youth club he started after the bird that figured on the school's emblem: "the Corbie":

 

<subparenthesis>  

And there are twa. I wonder.... Probably not though. I suspect the corbies were just a heraldic pun referring to the great Benedictine foundation in Picardy: Corbie Abbey. (Although perhaps the designer of those arms knew the song.) 

</subparenthesis>

</parenthesis>

... the folk club that was the scene of my first guitar-related efforts.

Benoît ....

<you-at-the-back command="Wake up">
Do I really need to point out that this is one of several French names cognate with "Benedict"?
</you-at-the-back>

... was "my" member of the Regnault family, who lived in Motteville.

<background-info>
Throughout the 1960s my family took part in a number of exchange visits with a family made up of conveniently spaced children. Jo exchanged with Odile, Mick with Denis, Angela with Vincent, I with Benoît, and Yag [don't ask] with Nicolas (note the names; we were matched in religion, an important consideration at the time,  as well as age).
</background-info>

Which brings me to Bene't – presumably the anglicized version of Benoît.  My college at Cambridge was built next to St Benet's Church – and at one time was known colloquially as "Bene't College". The church stands in Bene't Street, scene of a bit of unconsummated ésprit d'éscalier recounted here: 

A few years ago I was in Cambridge, and missed a trick. I was at the front of the crowdlet in front of the Chronophage [HD: See here], and a tourist behind me wondered aloud what the inscription meant: 

Mundus transit, et concupiscentia ejus 

It took me a while to work it out, as two of the less obvious words (everything except transit, et and ejus) had glyphs that hid the letters un and en behind the conventional stone mason's tilde, giving ũ and ẽ. But what it says could be rendered as The world passes, as does its concupiscence. (I think the comma justifies my as does).

The trick I missed was the opportunity to give the tourists the impression that round every corner (the Chronopage is on the corner of Bene't St) in Cambridge there lurks a Vulgar Latinist. (And if you want to know more about concupiscence, read that post.)

There are other Benedicts in my life; a nephew, the celebrant of my little sister's wedding, the patron saint of Europe (who seems to have taken his eye off the ball spectacularly in the last few years), my choir's multi-talented accompanist ...

But what of my subject line, particularly the expression well said?  Well, according to Wikipedia, ...

Etymologically it [HD: Benedict] is derived from the Latin words bene ('good') and dicte ('speak'), i.e. "well spoken" [HD:my emphasis] 

...which strikes me as broadly true (though I wonder what 'dicte "speak"' is supposed to  mean...

<tangent>
Why the inflexion -e on dicte? Why cite a root in the ablative? I suspect the writer had only a passing acquaintance (if that) with Latin, and maybe once had a penpal called Bénédicte.
</tangent>

...) but crucially irrelevant. A person who in Latin is benedictus is not "well-spoken" but is BLESSÉD*. In the words of the Sanctus "he who comes in the way name of the Lord" is blesséd:

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini

<tangent>
"He who comes in the way name of the Lord is well-spoken?" Just as well, really. We don't want any of those ill-spoken yobs coming in the name of the Lord.  What would people think?
</tangent>

The speaker of the good things is Himself – and it would be either anathema or pointless or meaningless (depending on your beliefs) to pass judgment on His elocution.

That's all for now

b

Update: 2020.10.02.10:05 – Added PS

PS

When listing Benedicts in my life, I missed an obvious one, which I might have remembered if I'd read the WCS rehearsal schedule for last night before I hit Publish. We were due to sing the Benedictus  from Beethoven's Mass in C (although in the rehearsal we overran on the Credo and didn't get round to it).

<parenthesis>
And when I said "in the words of the Sanctus " I meant it. Most composers treat the Sanctus and the Benedictus as separate movements (though often there is an actual or implied attaca linking the two, and each is followed by a Hosanna with broadly the same notes). But the Benedictus is part of the same prayer – at least it was in my altar-boy days.
</parenthesis>

Update: 2020.10.09.10.15 – Fixed misquote. Mea maxima culpa.

Update: 2020.10.24.14.15 – Added footnote

* I've just become aware of a case of contrasted benedicts versus Bad Lots that will be well-known to singers of various Requiems. The Ur-Requiem in my mind is Mozart's: in the Confutatis maledictis an ominous figure in the lower voices is interrupted by an angelic Voca me cum benedictis in the upper voices ("Call me [to be/to stand/to stay] with/among the blesséd [as opposed to the maledictis]. The music forces an interpretation that isn't strictly there in the prayer. The infernal tune and lower voices mark the maledicti. The angelic tune and upper voices stand for the benedicti ...

<inline-p⁴s>
(strictly, I suppose, benedictae)
</inline-p⁴s>

.... But in the prayer there is only one voice – that of a soul awaiting judgment: "When the wrong-doers have been condemned to Hell [confutatis maledictis] ...

<inline-pps>
(Some of the more attentive readers, if not deprived of the schooling in Latin that is everyone's birthright,  may have recognized the ablative absolute here –  "Caesar having thrown a bridge across the river" sort of thing.)
</inline-pps>

 ...call me ...". It's a bit like when a teacher is choosing the worthiest in the class: "Ooh me, pick me".

Update: 2021.03.31.15:00 – Added <inline-pps />

Update: 2021.12.22.11:35 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've only just learnt, from an alumni magazine [incidentally, I wonder when "old boys/girls" became "alumn-i/-ae"] of another instance of "Benedict" turning up in my back-story: this fore-runner of that termly publication:

The Benedict was first published in 1898, and continued under that name (with a break in 1914-18) until 1928.

Update: 2022.12.31.15:00 – Added <inline-p⁴s>

Nascent, adolescent, dehiscent, and crepuscular

Nearly eight years ago here in the first months of this blog (when this blog was nascent [before  its adolescence and – some would say – senescence]) I first visited the idea of inchoative infixes. Etymonline skates over them, rather missing the point, I would suggest, by calling -escent a suffix...

<weasel-words>
(in case anyone actually bothers to follow that link, I'd better admit that Etymonline doesn't actually use the word "suffix"; but it does call -escent a "word-forming element", showing a cavalier disregard for Occam's razor and ignoring all the -asc, -isc, and -usc- cases hinted at in my subject line.

<FFS> 

<order-order scurrility-quotient="0"> 

And no, the  S doesn't  stand for "sake". FFS means "For Further Study". 

</order-order> 

There may well be an -osc- word to complete the picture, but I can't think of it off-hand. Maybe "osculate" is all about puckering up before you O someone. Or "proboscis"...? But what's starting or growing about a proboscis, except in a special case such as Pinocchio? (That's not a serious suggestion, although some research into whatever preceded Latin might be interesting.... Probably not though.)
</FFS>

...What Latin did with an inchoative infix was take a verb like florere (="to flower") and add an  -esc-   before the ending to make it mean "start flowering"/"burst into flower": florescere. 

<road-not-followed> 

(Which, incidentally, is where our verb "flourish" comes from [ultimately].) 

</road-not-followed> 

And while I'm in the realms of full disclosure, I should admit that experts say infixation only happened with -esc- and -isc-; I'm not so sure, although those two infixes are by far the most common.
</weasel-words>

But this coining of new inchoative words by using an infix was not what linguists call "a productive mechanism" in the forming of Romance languages; they simply took the verb form and did what suited their needs. As I wrote in  that old post

In fact Elcock, in The Romance Languages says 'of all the innovations in the active verb of Vulgar Latin, perhaps the most noteworthy is the extension of the -ESC/ISC infix'...[which was] more influential as a basis for the formation of Romance language verbs [Fr.  finissons/finissez/finissent/etc from  finir, etc] – where there is no sense of 'inchoateness', and the infix just introduces this 'regular irregularity' to French -ir verbs;... 

<INLINE_PS> 

This one took me a while to work out after eight years. I suppose readers at the time just dismissed it as further evidence of a confused mind. What I meant by "regular irregularity" was just that "-ss-" suddenly appears from nowhere in the new verb paradigm. 

<INLINE_PS>

...in Spanish and Portuguese they didn't use it as an infix at all, and used -ESCERE as a rather long suffix. to create verbs such a aparecer – 'appear' – presumably distantly related to Latin aperire   'to open' (as in French, careful readers will notice that it happens only to –IRE verbs). 

And this all started with a harmless reflection on the word "opalescent".  Like "fluorescent" and "iridescent"  the idea of inchoateness (="beginning/becoming", roughly) is here only in the sense that the image is always becoming something else. It is, to use a word coined by the wearer of the opal in question many years ago, sprickly. 

b

 

 

PS A chance observation. There exists in English the word flatty. Its primary meaning (among several) is a sort of shoe:

But it's not that common a word. Collins gives this usage graph:

It was quite popular (with some meaning) in the eighteenth century, went downhill in the nineteenth, and has been next to moribund since then (but not so moribund as to escape my attention: I first met it when such footwear was prescribed for my oldest sister when she played a pirate in HMS Pinafore).

Now good old M&S  has resurrected it, and not without effrontery they have even slapped a trademark on it. Flatties^TM  are escalopes of chicken tenderized/marinaded in various ways. They are quite pleasant to eat; I'm not sure what makes them trademarkable though.

 

And this is not the first time a shoe name has been used to refer to a foodstuff. In 1982 "a baker in Adria, province of Rovigo, Veneto, Italy [created them]  in response to the popularity of French baguettes", says Wikipedia. Whereas the French called their sort of bread "drumsticks" (which takes us in a coincidental circle back to chickens) he called his new loaf a ciabatta (which means slipper). And don't talk to me about choux buns [Bou-boum]

 

But there is an ongoing biomass crisis in the garden that I must attend to. 

 

b

"Nesciens" - know what I mean?

... 'having no [carnal] knowledge of'.

Nearly 7 years ago, having mentioned german-ness (that is, I suppose, if you'll excuse the neologism (come to think of it, whether you excuse it or not) teutonicity, I remembered something I heard in a Golden Age lecture ...

<parenthesis>
Everyone in the Spanish Department seemed to assume I'd know what 'Golden Age' meant in the context of Spanish literature. With most of my colleagues (who'd been studying Spanish literature for 2 or 3 years) this was a reasonable assumption. As I was starting from scratch, without the benefit of Wikipedia, I didn't know that

[t]he Spanish Golden Age (Spanish: Siglo de Oro [ˈsiɣlo ðe ˈoɾo], "Golden Century") is a period of flourishing in arts and literature in Spain, coinciding with the political rise of the Spanish Empire under the Catholic Monarchs of Spain and the Spanish Habsburgs. It started in 1492, with the end of the Reconquista, the Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World, and the publication of Antonio de Nebrija's Grammar of the Castilian Language. It ended with the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 or in 1681 with the death of the Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the last great writer of the age.
Source 

</parenthesis>

...in my first year as a student (or "gentleman in statu pupillari" as we were known by the powers that ... were?  might be?)

I added this clarification:

<digression theme="germaneness(sic)">
That's germanness. But while we're in Spain, I'm reminded of various Romance words for brother. In Italy (fratello), French (frère) (and I'm sure many others, which I can't recall off-hand) they used the Latin FRATRE(M) [and you really should recognize this convention by now; if you don't, have a look here]. But in the Iberian peninsula, this wasn't enough. As I remember (but don't have chapter and verse) according to one estimate there was a time when it was said that 1 in 3 adult males were in holy orders of some kind^PPPS; for this sort of 'brother' they used Spanish fray, Portuguese frade, Catalan frare.... A brother by blood, or a germane brother became in Spanish hermano, in Portuguese irmão, in Catalan   germã  .... As we've seen before (here again) an adjective in a Noun Phrase often comes to be a noun.
</digression>

And in that PPPS I added (years later):

I have long felt, in a Wikipaediesque sort of way, that this needs further citation. I don't have it from a book, as I heard it from the mouth of Professor E. M. Wilson, dedicatee of the snappily-titled...

<digression>
This compound escapes my hostility to "titled" in a literary context, expressed in the rant here.
</digression>

...Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age: Presented to Edward M. Wilson (30) (Coleccion Tamesis: Serie A, Monografias) 

[He was] author of the Calderón chapter in the standard work on Golden Age Drama. In  fact, now I think of it, his influence may have been behind the CU Hispanic Society's choice of the play that marked my only outing as a tragedian, mentioned  here. Anyway,  whether the statistic (1 in 3 men in Holy Orders) was from his own (or one of his students') research or that of some other scholar, he regarded it as authoritative – good enough for me.

Now then (getting to the point at last ;-)), if you will refer back to that Wikipedia snippet, the Golden Age is known among Spanish students (and Spanish people in general if truth be told) as "el siglo de oro"; which brings me to my main reason (excuse?) for writing: a virtual performance of  Mouton's ...

<inline-PS>
Revenons?
</inline-PS>

...Nesciens mater given by the choir Siglo de Oro

To hear the piece, click here.

It's a lovely piece, and brilliant in its intricate structure. To quote the note provided by their MD (and formerly Wokingham Choral Society's MD):

It's ... a quadruple canon at the fifth, at a distance of two measures. What that means is: the singers who start on the left of the screen are singing exactly the same music as those on the right of the screen, except a perfect fifth higher, and two bars later.

Sublime. Out of this world. But I must return to the land of lawn mowers, hedge-trimmers, and curtain rails (don't ask, but that sorry tale made me forget... [no, I won't go there; time for my walk]).

b

Update 2020.08.04.11:55 – Added inline PS (a bit of esprit d'escalier)

Desktop iconoclasm

<rant>
I blame the desktop publishing  software ("DTP"). When I was at OUP, many moons ago, all was right (recto) with the world. A recto was, as the name suggests, a right-hand page; and on its back, as the name suggests, was a verso. Page numbering started at 1 (or i in prelims, if you were old enough to be fussy about that stuff) on a recto. Except that,  as it was the title page, or the first page of text – in either case a display page – it had no page number (or folio, if you're toeing the Hart's Rules line). A satisfying mixture of Latin, arbitrary rules, and even more arbitrary exceptions, made publishing workers feel special, acolytes in an arcane priesthood.

Then along came DTP, and any Thomasina, Ricarda, or Harriet had the keys to the tabernacle of editorial arcana; they started spraying page numbers around willy-nilly as if there were no rul... Well, I suppose there aren't any more...

<meta-rant>
(and that's another thing; "any more" as one word)
</meta-rant>

...rules, that is.

<meta-rant>
(and that's another  'nother thing; automatic hyphenation. The-/rapist, ency-/clopedia, leg-/end, te-/aching; who writes these misbegotten algorithms? Why not spend some time doing it manually... thoughtfully before dreaming up a bit of software that's guaranteed to go on getting it wrong until Hell freezes over?)
</meta-rant>

</rant>

But what it is is "enabling  technology" – a Good Thing, I suppose. Gutenberg...

<parenthesis>
(or Gänsfleisch, to give him his proper name:

According to Heinrich Wallau, writing in The Catholic Encyclopedia:

Gutenberg was the son of Friele (Friedrich) Gänsfleisch and Else Wyrich. His cognomen was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors "zu Laden, zu Gutenberg". The house of Gänsfleisch was one of the patrician families of the town, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century."

 So, as I said here.

Johannes was as much Johannes Gutenberg as Leonard Woolf was Leonard Hogarth  (whose business just took its name from Hogarth House) 

)
</parenthesis>

...revolutionized the means of disseminating information in the fifteenth century. This put the power to spread the word in the hands of anyone who had access to a printing press (whereas previously – in the West, at least – that  power had been in the hands of  the Church, so that there were strict limitations on what that Word could be). The Church was understandably annoyed  at this encroachment on their monopoly, and argued strongly that such empowerment was a Bad Thing. (Rightly; there do have to be standards; there do have to be rules to prevent perversions of justice. But the Pope doesn't have to  brandish his imprimatur ...

<etymological-note>
and trust Holy Mother Chorch. as Father Steven used to say in my history classes, to hide the agent of a ruling behind the passive voice and in an obscure language: "it may be printed". 

</etymological-note>

... like a spoilt teenager, just because).

So, going back to my opening  rant, you may have noticed that I used the metaphor priesthood. So where does that put me in the case of the Church and Gutenberg? I have to admit, through clenched teeth, that DTP was a Good Thing. (That doesn't mean. though, that I find its giving power to the people comfortable.

<inline-PS>
My feelings on seeing an odd page number on a left-hand page, when someone's cutNpasted from a published source and then re-paginated ...

<rant rejoinder= "Eppur si muove">
(without having the common courtesy to add blank pages to keep the spreads right)
</rant> 

... need have no repercussions in the real world, however violent they may be.
</inline-PS>

 )

Enough for now.

b

Update: 2020.06.2912:05 – Added inline PS.

/e 'luʧəvæn le 'stele/

These are indeed trying times, and made none the less trying by the mispronunciation called out in my subject. I don't know either why this is so painful or why people do it. Puccini has spelled it out in the first four words of the aria....

<aside type="boogy-woogy">
I mean, it's not like, say, Squeeze's Up the junction, where the name of the song is not mentioned until the last line. (Not sure why that occurred to me.)
</aside>

... with stress obviously, clearly, musically on the second syllable of lucevan. And the orchestration is as sparing as can be; the tenor is as clear as... [ed. can you do something with "bell/bel canto" here?] [You'll be lucky sunshine.]...a very clear thing.

The words are there, spelled out, what possible excuse is there for mangling the Italian? But the DJ on Classic FM (it would be invidious [indeed pointless] to name him, but he's an educated chap) says 'Here it is from Tosca, E loochevan le stele'.  Strange that he doesn't pick up the obvious clues; it doesn't take a great linguistic gift to hear something so simple.

Another frequent trial [while we're on the subject of bees in bonnets] comes for the Classic FM listener (or, more regularly except in these days of isolation, for a choral singer) whenever an r closes a Latin syllable. In English (in RP, that is) an r in this position does something strange to a preceding vowel (a bewildering array of strange things ...

<plug>
In due course ...

<really_though>
[hollow laugh; breath retention is not advised]
</really_though>

... WVGT2bk will list these. But its tortoise like progress has already covered most r words; only UR to go. AR, for example, can represent /ɑ:/ (in par), /eə/ (in pare), /ær/ (in parry), /ᴐ:/ (in war),  /ər/ (in parietal),  /ɒr/ (in quarry)... to list only the obvious cases. The whole grisly story (grisly, that is, for students of ESOL) is covered for AR, ER, IR, and OR words in WVGTbk2 , which will be free to download over the Easter weekend.</plug>

) Anyway, that frequent trial. The life of a choral singer is beset by fellow singers who – when singing Mozart's sublime Ave Verum Corpus, for example – insist on pronouncing the last word as if it were some kind of regimental mascot ("corps puss", geddit? [bou-boum tsh].)

That's all for now; the great outdoors is calling...

b

Update 2020.04.10.17:40 – Added PS

PS A similar mistake  happens with  Che gelida manina. The words are the first thing you hear after an unfussy introduction, and all clearly enunciated on one note. In Lucevan le stelle, the one note statement comes after the clarinet's I left my love in Avalon tune. In Che gelida manina, though, the mangling of the stress is subtly different. Whereas Lucevan is stressed (correctly) on the second syllable, gelida is stressed on the first.

<mnemonic type="approximately homophonic, irreverent">
Think of "jellied eels" – long-short-short.
</mnemonic>

So I ask myself again why the mis-stressed version (gelida) is so common. There's no excuse; the right stress is there, spelled out in the music.

Soothing the savage beast

...a misquote of course. What Congreve [not Shakespeare, the usual suspected source of most iambic pentameter] actually wrote in The Mourning Bride was

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, 

To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.

<digression title="factoid du jour">
The Latin for oak, robur, gave English the word robust. (Further info). Strictly, it was no English wordsmith that came up with a word based on robur. as Latin already had the adjective robustus, but the link is still worth knowing about (and I only recently had the "Of course it means that – DOH" moment).
</digression"> 

A recent Classic FM page reported (if report is not too strong  word in this case –  there was a disappointing dearth of hard facts about the paper in question):

New research from the British Academy of Sound Therapy (BAST) has shown there is a common dosage for music and revealed how long an individual needs to listen to it for a therapeutic effect to be experienced.

Clicking on that inviting link in the first line leads not to an authoritative source but to another – equally unauthoritative  – Classic FM page (which at least gives some detail):

To carry out the trial, students divided 157 adult participants into two groups. The first received ultrasound-guided injections of a benzodiazepine known as midazolam, while those in the second group were given noise-cancelling headphones delivering ‘music medicine’.

For three minutes – the length of time it takes for midazolam to reach optimum effectiveness – patients in the second group listened to a musical recording specially designed to lower their heart rate, blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. 

To ensure accuracy of results, researchers used an approved anxiety scale with patients before and after treatment, scoring them from 1-4 on six simple statements, while doctors also rated them on a 10-point scale
.
.
.
And it certainly had the desired effect, with the abstract of the study describing music medicine as a ‘non-pharmacologic intervention that is virtually harm-free, relatively inexpensive and has been shown to significantly decrease preoperative anxiety’ 

Source

There may be some way of getting out of this labyrinth of self-reference, but I don't have the time to find it. If you have, have at it. But it reminds me of a reference I made here to 

...the madrigal All Creatures Now, written during the reign of Good Queen Bess ('See where she comes, see where she comes with flow'ry garlands crownéd...'). I have sung this madrigal before, and [not] given this phrase a second thought: 'Music the time beguileth'.  It doesn't seem to belong semantically (or musically) with either what comes before or after it. So previously I have dismissed this line as just an Elizabethan filler that doesn't mean very much.

But having so recently written That's 'wile', as in 'beguile'... [HD – in that same post] I realized that Bennet (the composer) was referring to the way music has a beguiling effect on the listener's awareness of the passage of time; it wiles time away.

 (And if you'd like an H in that wiles, read that post: I've highlighted in red my reasons for going H-less; but you do whichever you prefer.)

The BAST article used this infographic, which I found quite interesting (although I think the RDA message (the Recommended Daily Amount) is rather lost. It would have been more persuasive (about the music versus drugs issue) if they had used the term RDA:

 Music as Medicine infographic, from The British Academy of Sound Therapy. 

That's all for now. I must get on my HazMat gear before this evening's TCB concert.

b

Update 2020.03.17.16.45 – Added PS

PS
I wronged the Classic FM report. Because the first two links in it pointed to more fairly vapid editorial I assumed that the whole site would be like that. But there is a link to the original paper if you persist.

<apologia>
But I'm afraid that the more web masters' budgets are splurged on the generation of "content", the more editorialisers churn out verbiage by the yard, garnering the vain clicks of us seekers of wisdom and truth. Classic FM weren't (egregiously) guilty in this case though –  I was just a bit quick to write them off.
</apologia>

Quarantine and epicentre

People who know a bit about the formation of languages learn  that they must beware of the Etymological Fallacy, which this Oxford Reference page defines as

The belief that an earlier or the earliest meaning of a word is necessarily the right one. That it is fallacious is illustrated by the fact that orchard once meant a treeless garden, treacle a wild beast, and villain a farm labourer.

The creeping Wikipedi-ization of the modern world has exposed us more and more to this tendency to hold that words must mean what they used to mean, which implies that meanings must never change. Still, a knowledge of where words come from can be fascinating.

The word "quarantine" has had a long history, originally referring to a period of isolation at the time of The Plague (well  one of the waves of  one of them – it was all a bit muddled back them, TBH).

This page dates it (with annoying vagueness – the site is, after all, designed to drum up business for English Language summer schools, so it would be unreasonable to expect much in the way off academic rigour) to "a document from 1377"  though in an  earlier form that set the safeness-from-plague period to thirty days – una trentina. In an earlier post I briefly referred to "quarantine"‘s ship-of-possible-carriers origin, but I didn't place the first use as coined by Venetians trying to keep the plague out of Dubrovnik (as this page does if you care to read it through):

The word “quarantine” has its origins in the devastating plague, the so-called Black Death, which swept across Europe in the 14th century, wiping out around 30% of Europe’s population. It comes from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian words “quaranta giorni”, or “forty days”, in reference to the fact that, in an effort to halt the spread of the plague, ships were put into isolation on nearby islands for a forty-day period before those on board were allowed ashore.  

Source

My ingrained cynicism about the temptations of the Etymological Fallacy doesn't,  however,  prevent me from experiencing a frisson of "innocent merriment" ...

<PC_defence degree="set phasers to stun">
(at the risk of seeming to make light of a notably unfunny situation)
</PC_defence>

... when the Diamond Princess quarantine forced the word back to its roots (with people not  being allowed to leave a ship).

My other concern at the moment is the snowballing over-use of epicentre. Again, I'm not trying to argue that the word can only be used between consenting vulcanologists ...

<spelling_for_dummies>
(and the infernal machine wants me to write "volcanologists", but quod scripsi scripsi)
</spelling_for_dummies>

... but I just feel my lip curling whenever people use a big word just to make them sound serious. What's wrong with centre? What's wrong with focus?...

<digression>
There's that innocent merriment again. Focus, being derived from the word for fire, seems particularly apt when talking about an infection that causes, among other things, fever.
</digression>

...hub..., source ... There are many ways of avoiding epicentre; but it continues on its juggernaut way. This view of its growth in popularity (sadly out of date – the  latest data they've got is from 2008, and in the last twelve years its use can only have grown) comes from Collins:

 Anyway, it's time I got back to note-bashing for  our next concert:

<incidental_observation>
A fellow choir member has asked about "Jesu chare"  in the Pergolesi Buxtehude  – not having found chare in a latin dictionary.  There are two problems with this search. The first is that the phrase is vocative – addressing Jesus. "Dear Jesus" would be, in the nominative (just naming him), Jesus carus. The spelling of that second word points to the second problem. This recalls my "epicentre" rant; one of the mechanisms of language change is hypercorrection (trying to sound important by a misplaced display of "learning"). The introduction of h after c ...

<inline_ps>
I'm not referring to a /h/ sound following the /k/. The hypercorrect change is from /k/ to /χ/ (like the sound at the end of Bach). Trimalchio – that* character in the Satyricon – is (unwittingly) referring to the influence of Greek sounds on Latin. Greek slaves were common in the Roman world,  and there were Greek-speaking enclaves in what we now know as Italy.
</inline_ps> 

...is usually hypercorrect; this is satirized as early as the first century AD in the Satyricon; which has a social-climbing character who is mocked for saying chommodus rather than commodus; Oops, TMI.
</incidental_observation>

Anyway, it's lovely music. Don't miss it.

b

Update: 2020.02.18.15:45 – Added inline PS.

Update: 2020.02.19.12:15 – Added footnote

* Oh what a tangled web we weave
   When first practice to update with an inline PS

That character is mentioned later on. Sorry.

Update: 2020.02.21.10:20 – Corrected the composer; it was Buxtehude

Zero dark thingy

The Times last week published a crossword that – self-referentially – aroused cross words. The clue (a somewhat feeble one...

<WHOOPS>
I was misled by the angry correspondent's writing, or at least implying by its context, "the Times crossword". It must have been the Quick Crossword, which is a whole 'nother thing. So my "feeble" was undeserved, except to the extent that all such clues are feeble.
</WHOOPS>

....whichever side of The Great am/pm Debate you come down on)   was "12 a.m." and the answer was "midnight".  Aware of the  Great Debate,  their style guide says "Use noon/midnight".

But there is no need for the Debate; it depends on a simple misapprehension. 12 noon is not before or after anything; it is noon on the dot; it is just m.

And the m in "a.m./p.m." does not stand for meridian as many people seem to think...

<DESCRIPTIVIST_CAVEAT>
(except in the sense that all's fair in language use, so that "what people mistakenly think" becomes The Truth.)  But I  know what I know.
</DESCRIPTIVIST_CAVEAT>

... and as I was told at primary school. I lacked the theoretical meta-language to voice my objection (but meridian is an adjective, how can you have BEFORE or AFTER an adjective. Holy Category Error, Batman), but I knew enough to raise an eyebrow. One of the letters to The Times added to the corpus of the poisoned fruits of this widespread misapprehension:

"Surely 12 am follows 11 am, so is noon; any time after 12.00 is post meridian [sic], up to 12 pm."

I'm not sure why Rose Wild (writer of the article in The Times) calls this "logical". By simply swapping a few values, you arrive at the opposite conclusion: "Surely 12 am precedes 01 am, so is midnight".

<CASUISTICAL_EXCURSUS status="dead end">
I suppose it would be possible to argue that – like 'the Orthopedic'  meaning hospital, or 'Local' meaning pub (which itself is an adjective-made-noun, being an abbreviation of  'public house') – meridian is, in the contest of expressions of time, a noun (standing for 'meridian great circle'). The sun has passed that imaginary line. 

That's all very well, but the fact remains that the sun has not passed the line at noon. It is dead on it.
</CASUISTICAL_EXCURSUS>

That m stands for meridiem (the middle of the day). As it happens there is an adjective postmeridian. Most dictionaries carefully define it as of or about something that happens in the afternoon. Onelook will point you to a number of examples. One such (the AHD) is admirably specific:

On the other hand there are some whose obeisance to the God of Usage makes them excessively permissive (in my view, though they would presumably argue that that obeisance reflects the fact that they simply OBEY the trends). But I fear that the obeisance is more a matter of craven idolatry. One such is Collins:

(in which there is only a word space [between after and noon] and one little "in" to emphasize the adjectivity By not emphasizing the "of or relating to" bit, they are holding the door open to illiteracy.

It would be helpful – for those of us who crave such systemic balance – if there were  a Latin word *merinoctis to balance the scales; and although the 'word' does exist in some twilight/fictional/pseudo-gothic/'fanfic' sense (that I don't want to pollute my browsing history by researching any further) it is not mainstream enough to pass muster. If it were, we could have md for noon and mn for midnight., each followed respectively by pmd/pmn times. 

But this is getting rather silly; duty calls. We may as well stick with that style guide, and just say noon/midnight; or use the 24 hour clock. And accept, while we're at it, that crossword compilers cock a snook at style guides.

b

Aus der Alten Welt

Shortly after its first performance in Prague in 1880, Dvořák's Stabat Mater was performed several times in the UK, starting with a performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 1883.

Dvořák's Stabat Mater (1880) was performed and very well received at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 10 March 1883, conducted by Joseph Barnby.^[2] The success "sparked off a whole series of performances in England and the United States", a year ahead of appreciation in Germany and Austria.^[2] Dvořák was invited to visit Britain where he appeared to great acclaim in 1884.

More

On 12 September 1884...

<autobiographical note relevance_value="0">
 (135 years ago – a period neatly bisected by my own birth on 12 September 1951)

<inline_pps>  

Dvořák‘s tour was twice as long ago as the origin of Wokingham Choral Society. Precise records haven't survived – "Autumn 1951" is as close as it gets. 

</inline_pps>

</autobiographical note>

... it was performed at Worcester, and this title page of the score was signed by members of the orchestra and by Antonin Dvořák (signing himself "Ant."):

The dot above the n may be a reference to the last syllable of his full name,
or it may just be the end of one of the other signatures on this crowded page

As a fellow member of my choir said 'Where has this piece been hiding for the last 40 years?'

<confession>

I borrowed this observation, and added a few years to the claim - though in all honesty I should admit that although my experience of singing in an SATB choir started in the early 1970s it has not been continuous. 

</confession>

The piece really is extraordinarily tuneful. Don't miss it, or the (free, to ticket-holders) introductory talk.:-)

b





Update: 2019.02.07.09:40  – Added PS

PS
In an earlier post I wrote

I think I've already mentioned (somewhere in this blog) Vulgar Latin's preference for first and second declensions over the less regular third, fourth, and fifth; less to remember – and we are often dealing with Latin for speakers of  a Second or Other Language (LSOL?)

And that preference for regularity extended to  the choice of verbs made by those early speakers of LSOL – not only the choices, but the modifications they made (taking an irregular verb and changing the ending to make it behave like a regular one). This happened to the verb that means give: the irregular

do, dare, dedi, datum

became, in some parts of the Roman Empire, the regular

dono, donare, donavi, donatum

So give in current Spanish is dar, but in current French it is donner.

The last words of Stabat Mater,  a Christian Hymn that dates back to the 13th century,  are

Quando corpus moriétur,  fac, ut ánimæ donétur  paradísi glória. And the rather florid translation given by Wikipedia is While my body here decays, may my soul Thy goodness praise, Safe in Paradise with Thee.

Not only florid, but also fanciful, particularly in the third line. The soul (not necessarily mine) does not do anything; it doesn't praise anything. It is the recipient of something; and to mark it as a recipient it has the dative ...

<digression>
(a word that, incidentally, derives from the irregular sort of "give" verb)
</digression>

... ending -ae (in THIS case). The prayer is that the soul may be given the glory of paradise. And the word donaret derives from the regularized form of the word.

Update: 2019.02.17.18:40  – Added inline PPS (see above)

Update: 2019.03.01.11:40  – Added PPPS

PPPS
The double nn and -er ending of the French example I gave in the first update may give some readers pause. The history of French phonology and orthography are a mystery to me (for reasons I've explained before – basically a lazy choice of study options on my part)...

<rant flame intensity="the heat of a thousand Suns">
I can't use that expression without flashbacks of the horror I (not infrequently) feel when people use "on my behalf" as though it  meant the same.
</rant>

... but I'm happy to regard them as a given (which, after all, they are).

So perhaps another example would be more illuminating. The word donation is also probably derived* (ultimately; via the Old French donacion) from the regularized DONARE. I say "probably" because although there is no hint of an n in any part of do, dare, dedi, datum, there is an obvious direct line from DONATIONE(M) (I've explained this typographical convention before; a classical Latinist would be content to say donatio, -onis).

Update: 2019.03.17.10:40  – Added footnote.

*On further reflection it seems to me that this word is not le mot juste. My mistake was to think in terms of one word directly influencing a new word. But what really happens is a systemic pressure for change to words in a particular  field. Given DONATIONE(M) a new system of words was formed, centred on DONARE.

Wringing out the old

Another of my occasional State of the Blog posts giving you a chance to see a stat display that is normally reserved for the blogger...

<so_whats_new>
(not unlike all the other stats I've blogged about over the years... But what makes these different is that the others have been the default Overview,  whereas these indicate which posts rank in the top 10 of all time [Year Zero being 2012].)
</so_whats_new>

Far and away the most visited, in spite of its age, is one about Latin phrases. It's coming up to six years old, and last time I looked the screen capture it was based on was missing. I've no idea what  makes it nearly nine times as popular as no. 2 on the list. I expect some Influencer has spread the word; maybe it's on a syllabus somewhere perish the thought.

The remaining nine fall into 4 broad groups:

• Two that use the same Pedants of the world unite joke (2 and 6)
• Three on various philological points  (3-5)
• Three relatively recent ones (7-9)
• One that, being on its own at ^no 10, is in no way a broad group; so sue me :-)

In an update (after the New Year's dust has settled) I'll add some links (though in the meantime you can search using dates (or guessed themes, if you're feeling really adventurous)  :-) But I want to get this out there before December 2018 goes down as The Month of the Solitary Post,

Happy 2019!

b

Update – 2019.01.02.16:55: Here are the links and a few descriptive pointers. I've also fixed a pretty gross typo, in blue.

• ^no 1 The web page this originally pointed to is gone now but here‘s the jpg it used.
• ^no 2  and  ^no 6 These are the two on pedantry.
• ^no 3 ,  ^no 4, and ^no 5 These are quite old (but rather fun,  TISIAS) philological stories.
• ^no 7  , ^no 8 , and ^no 9   These three, despite their recency, make the top 10 because I plugged them in an MFL Teachers' group that, for reasons best known to Facebook (and I've given up beating my head on that cyber wall), I can no longer access.
• ^no 10 On a machine translation boo-boo.

A brace of coincidences

In the week after my choir's Mozart concert (mentioned last time) a pair of Christmas-related coincidences made their presence felt in my life.

The first was triggered by a visit to Reading's St Mary's Butts to buy Christmas cards.

<autobiographical_note type="aside">
We were welcomed by a gentleman who asked if we'd visited the Minster before. I forbore to say that Yes indeed, I had sung there several times, but that's as may be...
<autobiographical_note>

The view of the Minster reminded me of the leaving presentation for my first manager in DEC's Media and Publishing Production and* Design Services in the late 1980s – as she was given a painting of St Mary's (presumably without the streetlamp).

That evening MrsK and I were watching a US crime thriller. A character whose death was a feature of the leading lady's backstory ...

<etymological_aside>
Interesting word, backstory, and a fairly recent coining according to Etymonline  – c. 1990 (about the time of Linda Pavlik's presentation, as it happens [that was my former manager's name – not a common  one in England, but she was from the USA]).
</etymological_aside>

...had thitherto been known only by his first name. But it turned out that his name, too, was Pavlik.

Perhaps I should put some numbers on that "not a common name" I just slipped out. Well, if you plug in Pavlik to the search engine of your choice you will get something like this: 3.23 million, of which a small handful are contributed by UK sites (add .uk to your searchstring and you get only 337 hits). Eastern European immigration to the United States (a 19th century caravan, I suppose you could call it, really a flotilla though) have made the name a common one in the USA.

But it wasn't a frequent visitor to my brain until that visit to St Mary's jogged my memory. And now here was a US crime drama throwing out the same name. Pretty thingish. I thought maybe I could track it down, like so many "coincidences", to some kind of cognitive bias; but I can't find a suitable suspect,

Souvenir programme

Which brings me to the second coincidence. Later that week was the first rehearsal for our carol service on 15 December (that link will be good until the day after the service, whereafter you will have to click on Past Concerts), and we spent much (if not all – my memory's pretty ropey at short range; 30 years and above is my forte) of it getting our teeth into a setting by Bob Chillcot of the Twelve Days of Christmas. The music was vaguely familiar to me, but not enough to make me stop and think where I'd heard it before, until MrsK called my attention to the composer's note; which starts "This piece was originally written for the Final of Sainsbury's Choir of the Year in 2000...Singers [included]  Berkshire Youth Choir...".

So I heard the world première, as my son was a member of Berkshire Youth Choir at the time.

Programme entry for Carols Galore

Time for walkies. Eheu fugaces, as they say (Latin for Phew, we got away with it.)

b

Update 2018.11.19.16:15 – added footnote

*The abbreviation was "MPDS" but on reflection I‘m pretty sure the P stood for Production. The old department it replaced was just called PUBS (after the computer that was at the core of the [pre-desktop computing] department), and I imagine one of the main considerations in the naming of the new department was the avoidance of anything that sounded too retro. So 4 letters became 4 words: progress. (Note for the irony-impaired: Hmm?)

Update 2018.12.16.12:15 – added PS

Now that the concert's over (and you missed a treat if you weren't there) I can say more about the Chilcott piece (as I didn't want to spoil the musical surprises). BYC sang the main body of the text, with different performers doing a guest spot for each of the 8 iterations of the words 'Five gold rings' ; for example, for the Flower Duet spoof the Opera Babes did the honours.

<background>
The Opera Babes were a 'crossover' duo whose star was rising at the time. As Wikipedia says:

They began busking together in 2001 on London's Covent Garden, where they were first spotted and were signed for their first album by Sony. They became famous for singing "Un bel dì vedremo" ("One fine day we shall see" from the opera Madame Butterfly), the song that ITV used for their World Cup 2002 programmes, at the FA Cup final and at the UEFA Champions League final in Milan.^[1] Knight explained the group's strategy to BBC News as follows: "[W]e have tried to maintain the classical integrity while making these things more appealing to a wider audience."^[2]

</background>

But I  must put in an appearance in the Land of the Living. :-)

Update 2018.12.16.15:30 – added PPS

Another example of a Five Gold Rings spot: the Kings Singers sang as a barbershop quartet. (In the version my choir sang yesterday [the word yestre'en deserves a revival I think] all the tenors and basses were that quartet).

Update 2018.12.17.16:40 – added PPPS

I've been bothered for  the last few days by an apparent inconsistency in the dates. According to that Wikipedia piece quoted in my PS ,  the Opera Babes "began busking together in 2001". If this date is right they can't have sung in the concert I remember from December 2000. Could Wikipedia have got it wrong???! Could I have g... (Sorry, even the rhetorical question sticks in my craw)???!

But a closer reading of Bob Chilcott's note explains it; Wikipedia's reputation for omniscience is safe. "This piece was originally written for the Final of Sainsbury's Choir of the Year in 2000..." he writes, adding "and subsequently revised for the same event in 2002".  At that time the Opera Babes were well established (and the British Airways advert that used their version of the Flower Duet  was probably current).