choral singing

Alleluia x 162 (approx)

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Easter Day services feature the word Alleluia/Hallelujah/Alleluya (see this previous post, 4th and 5th paragraphs) a lot. On the train home from church yesterday afternoon I counted 162 (maybe plus or minus a couple) throughout, mostly sung but sometimes spoken. Most notable are the hymn Light’s glittering morn bedecks the sky, which has seven per verse and nine verses, for a total of 63, and the anthem Ye sons and daughters of the King, arranged by Martin Baker, which has six at the start, one plus six after four of the verses and six after the other two, for a total of 46.

I have written a medium-sized anthem using this one word, which has at least 95 depending on how you count them (there are some overlapping entries and truncated words) and a round which could theoretically continue forever, but only has two per repetition of the round, so it would need to be sung 48 times to beat the anthem.

A correctly used apostrophe

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After I mentioned a hymn in my previous post, I remembered another hymn I sang last year where a correctly used apostrophe causes another issue. I have sung the hymn many times before, but not noticed that issue.

Most hymnbooks have the music and words separate, with the music at the top and/or on the left hand page and the words in verses at the bottom and/or right hand page. Some hymnbooks always and others sometimes, especially for hymns with an irregular number or stress of words, have the words between the two staves, with each syllable placed under a note, separated by a hyphen whenever necessary. This hymnbook has the first formatting by default, but this hymn has an irregular number or stress of words, so this hymn has the second formatting.

The hymn Holy Spirit, ever dwelling in the holiest realms of light has the words Holy Spirit, ever living as the Church’s very life and Holy Spirit, ever working through the Church’s ministry in the second and third verses. The ’s turns the one-syllable Church into the two-syllable Church’s (compare justice’s sake in my previous post). In the first formatting, there’s no problem. In the second formatting, the editors must decide to use either Church -’s or Chur – ch’s, both of which look strange and are problematic in different ways. The editors’ solution is to sidestep the choice by setting Church’s without a hyphen, spanning both notes. I can’t immediately decide which I would choose.

The same issue occurs in the hymn The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord. The English hymnbook we use has the first formatting, but the US hymnbook I have a copy of at home has the second formatting, and uses Church’s unhyphenated spanning both notes. Both of these are major hymnbooks within the Anglican/Episcopalian Church. There are also free versions of both hymns on the internet, which use Church’s, Church – ’s and Chur – ch’s. Most people wouldn’t notice.

More catastrophic apostrophes

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Since posting about apostrophes twice recently, I encountered two more usages which are plain wrong.

The first was in a legal document, discussing social conditions in a country which I can’t remember but is irrelevant to the point (warning, brief mention of abortion):

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Loath and forfend

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During the week I encountered two moderately less-used words which piqued my linguistic interest, in the first instance partly because it was incorrectly used. 

In a legal document I was editing, a legal officer wrote, in summary: “I am loathed to make that decision/take that course of action”. 

The second was in a text message from a chorister friend. I am just recovering from an end-of-winter cold which has kept me from a number of choir rehearsals, with concerts coming soon. He texted, in part: “If you are unwell for this concert (Heaven forfend!), please come back for the next one”. 

So, loath and forfend.

The adjective loath and verb loathe are related (I can’t immediately think of any other similar pair of adjective and verb), but the verb is probably stronger in feeling: I am loath to eat Brussels sprouts v I loathe to eat Brussels sprouts/I loathe eating Brussels sprouts/I loathe Brussels sprouts. Loath could be replaced by hesitant, reluctant or unwilling, and loathe by hate or despise. I am loathed can only be the past participle of loath, meaning that other people loathe me, though Wiktionary lists loathed and loth as very rare alternatives for loath. 

I can’t remember the last time I used loath, and have used loathe once on this blog (I referred to StrunkandWhite as “loved-by-some, loathed by others”).

Loath is an adjective but doesn’t have comparative and superlative forms, though we can say “I am most loath to …” (Google’s AI overview is a jumble of nonsense: “The phrase ‘more loath’ is grammatically incorrect. The correct comparative form of the adjective ‘loath’ (meaning reluctant or unwilling) is ‘more loathsome’ or ‘more loath’ (in formal or archaic usage). ‘Loath’ is already an adjective and doesn’t form comparatives by adding ‘-er’. The phrase ‘more loath’ is sometimes used in older or poetic contexts, but ‘more loathsome’ is the more common and accepted form in modern English.”)

Forfend is a verb meaning defend, protect, prevent (essentially, to before-defend), but is only used in the subjunctive (which English doesn’t actually have) as H/heaven, God/gods, saints forfend (compare God save the queen/king and God saves the queen/king). Various dictionaries list the past form of forfended (?Heaven forfended me), but the only instance I can find is from Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which Regan asks Edmund “But have you never found my brother’s way to the forfended place?” (One study website ‘translates’ this as Regan asking “But have you never taken my brother-in-law [Albany]’s place in her [Goneril’s] bed?”)

I have never used forfend in this blog, can’t remember ever using it real life, and can’t remember the last time I heard or read it.

Succamb

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I have been suffering various throat and nose symptoms since mid-May. Last Saturday my symptoms degenerated into a full-blown cold and since then I have had to take sick leave from work and not attend choir rehearsals. I emailed one conductor and when he didn’t reply texted a chorister friend. I said “I have succamb to illness and will not be at rehearsal”. He replied “I’m sorry that you succomb”, then later “Lorraine [another chorister friend] is firmly of the belief that ‘succamb’ is not a word. I had to strenuously disagree and point out ‘It is now!’”. I replied “I actually agree with Lorraine. One person jokingly using a word doesn’t make it ‘a word’.” He replied “Um, er … You do you but, as far as I’m concerned, using a word doesn’t make it ‘a Word’ makes it a word in my book. Doubly so.” (There is, of course, a paradox in stating that something is not a word immediately after using it.)

The question “What is a word?” is one of the great conundra of linguistics.  There is no all-encompassing definition for any one language, let alone for all languages. There is certainly a sliding scale of wordhood, including those which are accepted by all (succumbed, conundrums), or some, or a few (conundra, wordhood), or only just by one (succomb, succamb). One requirement is that it is used in multiple contexts by multiple people. Succamb isn’t. Succumb > succomb > succamb is also an unusual pattern for an English irregular verb, which are usually patterns like fling > *flang > flung, or sneeze > !snoze > ?snozen (the same chorister friend). 

Inextricably rooted in my memory

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I often browse through previous posts. This afternoon as I was walking I happened upon this post from 2019 (scroll down to the fourth paragraph ‘At one choir camp …’), in which I pondered the memory of singing a choral work which contained the words “inextricably rooted”. I didn’t note the author when I sang it, and couldn’t find it online when I drafted that post. I tried again. Searching for “inextricably rooted” brings up a variety of results, none of them them relevant. Searching for ‘“inextricably rooted” poem’ on my phone while I was walking brought up Google’s AI Overview saying ‘The poem you’re looking for is “Inevitable” by Robert Frost’. Searching again on my laptop at home brought up ‘The poem you’re looking for is “Inexricably Rooted” by Robert Frost.’ So possibly Frost, but he certainly didn’t write a poem titled Inexricably Rooted, and appears not to have written a poem titled Inevitable – it’s not on the first few poetry sites I searched, or anywhere where Google can find it.

So either a published choral composition uses a poem which is nowhere on the internet, or I’m misremembering something. 

Singing in Russian (or not)

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One of the choirs I sing in is rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, which is all in Russian. Except it isn’t – it’s his All-night Vigil, which is all in Church Slavonic. But many people say and write “Vespers” and “Russian”. Among the Russian Orthodox Church’s services are Vespers (evening), Matins (early morning) and The First Hour (sunrise),  and Rachmaninoff sets texts from all three. Church Slavonic is the traditional liturgical language of the Orthodox Churches, roughly equivalent to Latin for the Roman Catholic Church, but later, it clearly developed after Slavic-speaking people adopted Christianity. 

Despite the liturgical texts, this is almost always sung in concerts, usually in churches but sometimes in concert halls. Wikipedia notes that a complete liturgical performance was given in 2022.

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Singing in Hebrew

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One of the choirs I sing in is rehearsing Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, which is one of the few pieces in the standard choral repertoire in Hebrew. Unlike singing in Latin, in which most of the words have identifiable English equivalents, or German, which is a strange mixture of the familiar (the function words, some of the content words and the word order) and the unfamiliar (most of the content words), singing in Hebrew offers very little familiarity. 

The first section of the first movement is:

Urah, hanevel, v’chinor!
A-irah shaḥar 

which could be absolutely anything, and I wouldn’t possibly be able to guess. (The score uses transliterations rather than Hebrew script. Very few people can read Hebrew, and it’s written right-to-left, which would be almost impossible to fit under standard music notation. (I have seen a Christian hymn in Arabic, and the music is written right-to-left.)) 

The Latin is more familiar, and I would possibly be able to guess:

exsurge, psalterium et cithara; exsurgam diluculo

It’s ‘Awake, psaltery and harp: I will rouse the dawn!’ (108:2) in the King James Version – Hebrew numbering is different.

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The world famous “Korean tapdancing museum”

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Wikitravel’s page for Gyeongju lists:

The world famous “Korean tapdancing museum”. You can try on various tap shoes, some dating back as far as 16th century Shilla models.

I was intrigued – not that I’m likely to go there. 

The first search result for Korea tap dancing was a Korean movie from 2018 named Swing kids (Wikipedia, trailer), in which a young North Korean prisoner in the Goeje prisoner-of-war camp in 1951 joins a thrown-together tap dancing group with various others. The trailer is upbeat, but I have the feeling that real life is going to intrude sooner or later …

The second result was for a massed orchestral/choral/tap dancing performance from Pyongyang in praise of and in the presence of Kim Jong Eun titled “Let DPRK Advance”, which is as bizarre as it sounds. 

I then searched for the whole sentence The world famous “Korean tapdancing museum”, and got four results – two on Wikitravel, one on the associated Wikivoyage and one which seems to be directly copied from one or the other. I then realised that Google was treating the quotation marks as an exact match, and looking for tapdancing. (That spelling exists, but is less common than tap dancing and tap-dancing. Pages for Mac just autocorrected tapdancing to tap-dancing.) I tried again without the quotation marks and found a question and answer on Tripadvisor, which suggests it either doesn’t exist or is a “one-room place”.

Tap dancing originated the USA with British and West African roots. I can’t find anything which links it to 16th-century Korea. I’ll cross the world famous “Korean tapdancing museum” off my list. I wouldn’t go anywhere listed on Wikitravel or any similar site without checking further.

pesto knobs

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In the past few months, the three choirs I sing in have all sung a musical setting of the Latin text Ave verum corpus, the best-known one by Mozart, the lesser-known one by Saint-Saëns and the very little known one by me. At one rehearsal for one choir, we were practicing this immediately before our supper break. As we left the rehearsal room, I noticed the two youngest sopranos sharing great amusement about something. I asked them what was so funny. They said that the word esto has the musical marking p immediately in front of it, making pesto. That word is part of esto nobis praegustatum (be for us a pre-taste/foretaste). I said that praegustatum is literally pre-tasted food, or food fit for a king, so maybe pesto is food fit for a king. 

Researching for this post, I can’t find whether praegustatum is pre-tasted (food) or  a pre-taste (or foretaste) of the heavenly banquet. Praegustare is a verb and praegustatum is the past participle, which can be used in verb-y, adjective-y and noun-y ways. It is a very unusual word and I can find it only in this text and a piano piece by Charles Wuorinen (about which I can find no further information).

To the extent that I’d ever thought about it, I had thought that pesto was literally paste, but the two words have different etymologies: pesto from pestare to pound, crush (compare pestle) and paste from Late Latin pasta dough from Greek pastá barley porridge, noun use of neuter plural of pastós, verbid of pássein to strew, sprinkle; a pasta was originally a kind of gruel sprinkled with salt (Dictionary.com).

Pages for Mac’s autocorrect changed esto to pesto and also nobis to knobs. 

PS Sun 22: the other word which was hovering at the edges of my mind is antipasto. There are jokes about what would happen if you ate past and antipasto together, but fear not, antipasto is simply “before food” (anti- (from Latin ante- “before”) + pasto “food,” from Latin pāstus “pasturage, feeding ground,” originally “the act of feeding,” equivalent to pās-, stem of pāscere “to feed” + -tus suffix of verbal action). I also (mis)remembered anitpasto painting, which is actually impasto painting, with the pasto part meaning paste, not food (though there are impasto paintings of antipasto food).