Clangor tubarum: a response to Peter Downey

I was happy to read Peter Downey's letter (EM, xxxv/2 (May 2006), pp.347–9) in response to my article 'Gottfried Finger's Christmas pastorellas' (EM, xxxiv/4 (Nov 2005), pp.591–606) and welcome his interest in the subject. His basic argument is that Pavel Vejvanovský's sources and inspiration for treatments of the popular Christmas hymn Resonet in laudibus and its variants are not, as I (indirectly) argued, part of a long tradition of central European and Roman Catholic Christmas devotions where the faithful sang songs for the baby Jesus, but rather as part of some special repertory of trumpeters and trumpet guilds.

Downey's comment that 'a single ur-melody demonstrably underpins these works' is puzzling; it is explicitly stated in my article (and in numerous others) that vernacular lullabies such as Joseph lieber and Hajej můj andílku are all derived from the Latin hymn Resonet in laudibus. This is one of the most popular and frequently quoted Christmas melodies of the entire Baroque era (there are countless contrafacta in dozens of languages), yet Downey wants to argue that 'it had long been known that this ur-melody actually functions as a recurring feature in Vejvanovský's entire output'. Variants of Resonet appear in Vejvanovský's instrumental works for the same reason they appear in the pieces of countless other composers-it is an extremely popular Christmas song and known throughout most of Europe.

It is difficult to say much about some of Downey's other assertions about Vejvanovský because of confusion regarding the sources. Of the Vejvanovský examples Downey puts forward, only two are authentic Vejvanovský compositions. Not only is the Sonata à 10 mentioned by Downey not an authenticated Vejvanovský piece, but he assumes that it is identical to the Resonet in laudibus à 10 mentioned in my article. However, they are not the same piece. (The latter was only recently identified by Konrad Ruhland.) These problems seem to arise from Downey's sources of information, a combination of record sleeves and Breitenbacher's 74-year-old catalogue (a much improved and updated catalogue is Jiři Sehnal and Jitřenka Pešková, Caroli de Liechtenstein-Castelcorno epsicopi olomucensis operum artis musicae collectio cremsirii reservata (Prague: Supraphon, 1998)). For reasons of relevance and space, therefore, I cannot discuss Downey's 'Vejvanovský' examples here in much detail.

Downey allows his fascination with trumpet guilds to lead him up a blind alley from where he concludes that one of the most frequently quoted and most popular of all Christmas hymns is somehow part of a special repertory of such guilds. There is no evidence that Vejvanovský ever belonged to a trumpet guild (the assertion on which Downey's central arguement hinges). Furthermore, this argument was settled decades ago by Jiři Sehnal, who has written on the subject numerous times (in particular see Hudba v Olomoucké Katedrale v 17. a 18 století (Brno: Moravské muzeum v Brně, 1988) and Pavel Vejvanovský a biskupská kapela v Kroměříži (Kroměříž: Muzeum Kroměřížska, 1993)); he concludes that Vejvanovský used the title tubecin campestris without having fulfilled the usual requirements. His father, Václav, was indeed a soldier and even fought the Swedish in the Thirty Years War, but young Pavel, it seems, just left home and went to university.

Downey's sidetrack about the echo effects used in instrumental settings of Resonet where the word 'Maria' is normally sung only furthers one of my main points, which is that at least some instrumental versions had a text in mind–but there are so many variants in both text and melody that it is not always possible to tell which is being quoted (hence the need to consider the devotional contexts of pieces, where possible). This should also draw attention to the suggestion that the models for these variants are vocal ones and had little or nothing to do with trumpet guilds.

Downey complains that I claim that the connection between Resonet in laudibus and the Czech lullaby Hajej můj andílku was first made in 1968. He conveniently omits the rest of my footnote that continues to...