Chapter 20
Quedlinburg
December 1635
The chairs in the room that was being used as an auditorium at the Abbey of Quedlinburg were straight. Wood. Hard. Veronica Dreeson re-settled her bony rear end in search of a more comfortable angle.
“Having Annalise here has made such a difference.” Iona Nelson wanted to hug Ronnie, but didn’t think that she would take it right. Not hug her because the chairs were hard—they were, but Iona contributed considerably more natural padding than the other woman—but because life itself wasn’t easy. “I wouldn’t have wished any harm for Henry, no not for the world, believe me that, please, Ronnie. But if it hadn’t all happened, then she would have stayed in Grantville, helping you manage the St. Veronica’s there, and things would have kind of kept rocking along.”
“You,” Veronica said, “understand more than most.”
The two of them kept an unacknowledged moment of silence in memory of Billy Nelson and Henry Dreeson, both of them, in different ways, sacrifices to the changed world caused by the Ring of Fire.
“She’d have had to go to college somewhere,” Ronnie said abruptly, “and she’s not scientifically inclined, so she didn’t want to go to the new technical college right there and spend the rest of her life in a lab coat working for Phillip Gribbleflotz in Jena doing something that bored her if she didn’t absolutely have to. The way things are for us now, she didn’t. If it wasn’t here, it would have been the normal school in Amberg, or maybe Bamberg. But she wouldn’t have been home and I didn’t want to stay in Henry’s big house.”
“Rattling around by yourself,” Iona nodded. “I know the feeling.”
“Do you know? Even when I complained loudest, I never thought that Gretchen and Jeff would take the children to Magdeburg. Well, Martha and Baldy stayed in Grantville, of course; he’s more than half way through his apprenticeship now and she’s in her second year at the technical college. I rather expected that all of them would be with Henry and me until they grew up and gradually each went their normal ways. But after the assassination . . . Jeff and Gretchen did take the four younger ones. Thea and Nicholas moved into their own place. When Annalise went, it would have been so empty.”
There was a sudden, ominous, different kind of rattle behind the curtains hung in front of the large dais. Iona yelped, “Excuse me a minute,” and dashed off.
“Children!” Ronnie muttered to herself. At least the rattle had not concluded with a crash.
Iona’s head poked through the opening. “You might as well go back to my rooms and find a more comfortable chair for a while. We’ve sort of got an emergency here. If you can come back in a half hour, maybe, we’ll probably be ready to go into the dress rehearsal.”
* * *
By the time Iona got the drums (yes, the drums were the culprits for the rattle) reorganized, Ronnie was back. Iona signaled to Annalise and headed out to the chairs again. From backstage, you could never get a perfect idea of how it would all look from the front.
“I’d planned to do a program like this the first year I came,” she whispered. “When I was traveling up from Grantville, my head was stuffed full of plans. I had no idea how much of a challenge it would be, adapting to an entirely different school setting and system. I didn’t have the contacts, either with the rest of the faculty or with the community, to do one last Christmas. Or enough time with the children. And I hadn’t had time to think what songs I would put in it.”
There had been a lot of discussion, here and there, since the Ring of Fire, about what up-time music the down-timers would or would not “accept.”
Iona was inclined to think that a lot of it was off the mark. She was willing to grant that she was just a middle-school music teacher rather than a great composer or performer, but, still . . . Why didn’t they stop to think? Outside of concert pieces, it wasn’t like music was carved in stone. Outside of the realm of people with a lot of professional training, or sophisticated patrons of the arts, would it come down to a matter of “accept” or not? Or would it be more a matter of “if I like it, even a little bit, I’ll just modify it until I like it even more”? If people liked a song—the melody and lyrics—but thought the harmonies were odd, they could just change the harmonies.
After all, most people didn’t feel any real obligation to perform a song exactly as the way it was originally written, even up-time. She herself had turned SATB into SSA on occasion, if SSA was what she needed. Music got rearranged, and changed. If it wasn’t, you’d never have had anything as different as Ella Fitzgerald singing “Mood Indigo”2—that magnificent 1957 recording—from some of the atrocious pop versions. So there.
Which had led to the rehearsal today.
Thank heavens for Annalise Richter. The girl wasn’t a particularly good singer, but she had a talent for organizing small children, and that’s where the program would lead off, gradually progressing in complexity as the performers aged, ending up with the young women of the new college. Junior college. The abbess had visions of a full four-year college, but there were staffing issues.
The curtain opened. The youngest children, already positioned, started to march around the stage to Tom Paxton’s “The Marvelous Toy.”3 The girls with the drum set made bop sounds, chug sounds, and other sound effects with supreme glee.
Iona nodded. That would work well. The littlest ones were almost all day students from the town of Quedlinburg itself. Down-time parents didn’t usually send young children to a boarding school, barring some kind of domestic disaster that made it impossible for them to remain at home. Now that the abbey school was open to commoners, quite a lot of the more prosperous burghers had chosen it over the four-year girls’ school that the city council had been running for close to a century. So she could count on almost all the interested parents of pupils at this level coming and, she hoped, liking it, if only because they admired their own special little performer.
Space for bows and, she profoundly hoped, applause.
Then the audience would stand and sing “Ein’ feste Burg”4 in the original uneven time signature. Well, in what for this audience was the standard time signature; the only one they knew. She couldn’t see why so many up-timers thought that irregular time signatures would be a problem in the seventeenth century. A lot of the hymns she sang growing up had them, so, pouf on them! The new for this was the piano accompaniment, on a new down-time built piano.
Space for the audience to sit down and get settled.
The next oldest children, aged 10-12, enter; yes, yay, all lined up in the correct order; Sabina Lechner comes to the front and announces, “The music of our day was not lost in the up-time world.”
“What Child Is This,”5 set to the melody “Greensleeves.”
She couldn’t lose the visual interest, so the next was a standard seventeenth-century line dance, familiar steps and therefore easily learned, but set to the up-time music of “Once in Love with Amy,”6 alternating sung verses with instrumental interludes. Bethany Leek brought her up-time flute to this. She played it well. When it came to singing, she had reminded Mrs. Nelson, it was a good idea for her to stand in the back of any chorus or choir and hum softly. Iona remembered.
First real challenge. Annalise to the front, explaining that a particular kind of song beloved of the up-timers had been called “western.” They would now present three of these, moving from the simple kind taught to young children to the complex requiring a highly skilled performer.
“Home on the Range.”7 The littlest to the front of the stage again, looking sweet. A sheet, with a painting on it, rolled down to the left side of the front curtains, showing a West Texas landscape. Or maybe the Dakotas? With bison, anyway, according to the legend. Or buffalo? She had asked to borrow something from the high school library in Grantville and this was what they sent.
Annalise again, with a little introduction, explaining that the tune for the next song was from this era, although it possibly, even probably, had not been composed quite yet, an Irish melody that would be called “The Bard of Armagh.” The middle school girls started “Streets of Laredo.”9
Iona hoped the audience would like it, because the next was going to be a lot dicier. Even the college-age girls had a terrible time getting the rhythm; she only hoped the pianist would keep them focused. “El Paso.” She shivered with delight at the memory of Marty Robbins’ haunting voice and hoped that the audience wouldn’t shudder with distaste; not that the girls’ version offered any significant competition to Marty.
Intermission.
In case “El Paso” had been a bit too much, even for people who were paying out good money for the specific purpose of having an up-time woman teach their children up-time music, she was starting with a slight re-group after the intermission. Sabina came out again, reminding the audience of the survival of music of their own day into the future: a short medley of “Quem Pastores,”10 “In Dulci Jubilo,”11 and “Puer Nobis Nascitur,”12 with up-time lyrics, ending with what would be to the audience an extraordinarily contemporary, because not exactly written quite yet, hymn by Paul Gerhardt “whom many of you may have met at St. Jacob’s in Magdeburg” and Johann Crueger: “O Lord, How Shall I Meet You.”13
Now, age thirteen to sixteen. Osanna Merkur, a student from Suhl so no parents in the audience, which was a pity. Osanna was a miner’s daughter, here on a UMWA scholarship. She spoke well in public, so had the task of explaining that there were other sources of up-time religious music than the European continent and distinguishing between folk “spirituals” and deliberately composed music in the same tradition.
“Go, Tell It on the Mountain”14 (Osanna on solo, with the younger children joining in the choruses; Osanna wouldn’t grow up to be Maria Callas, but she might equal Dolly Parton: Iona was waiting for her voice to mature before trying “Farther Along”15).
“Shall We Gather at the River?”16
Those two should go over well, but then she was taking a chance on Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,”17 which she thought was much more impressive when rendered by an adult male bass voice, but on the other hand was so distinctive . . . There weren’t a lot of girls at the college level, yet, but they had worked hard on it and the pianist, for a fifty-five-year-old organist from one of the city’s churches, had taken to gospel music as if he were born to it.
Let the sound die off.
To the left, over the sheet, there rolled down a large wall map of the United States of America with, clearly marked and a spotlight directed at it, the tiny portion of it that was Grantville.
“This Land is Your Land,”18 with her hand-maneuvered, jury-rigged spotlight tracing from place to place as the song mentioned each of them.
Then she would come out. Thank them for their attendance. Invite them to come back next year to hear more about up-time music, all the time wondering if there was to be a next year.
And an encore, if the applause this evening justified an encore.
Randy Sparks’ “Today,”19 in unison by all the girls.
* * *
“It was a success,” Ronnie said at breakfast.
“It wasn’t bad,” Iona admitted. “Without Annalise’s assistance, it could have been a catastrophe. I’m so glad she chose to come to Quedlinburg.”
“I chose it for her. She didn’t have a strong preference. When Mary Simpson and the abbess offered her this chance . . . As a college for women, it’s new, too, as new as the normal school in Amberg or Bernadette’s experiment in Bamberg, but as a school, it’s been established for centuries. And even if Annalise is Catholic and this is Lutheran, she’s not the kind of girl ever to be obnoxious about religion. She’s not upset by having to attend chapel with the others. It’s not even as if I had anything resembling a lifelong religious commitment, given the way the rulers of the Upper Palatinate jerked us from one to another under cuius regio. Nor Gretchen, heaven help us!”
Iona nodded. “Plus, the girls she’s meeting here are from influential families. Not that Annalise even appears to care about that. She’s so sunny. Truly, all the time, she’s mostly happy, and at her worst, she only gets mildly upset. Gretchen must have worked miracles, sheltering her from the horrors of those years you were with the mercenaries. Or else—what did they used to say about Reagan?—she’s Teflon.”
Ronnie beamed. She might be a down-timer, but she had met Teflon and she had loved it. She thought anyone who had ever scoured a cast-iron pot would love it. Among the few things she had taken from Henry’s house when she joined Jeff and Gretchen in Magdeburg, Teflon had been a high priority.
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaq9Gx9GT5E Ella Fitzgerald - Mood Indigo (Verve Records 1957)
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahWcocGtEyA The Marvelous Toy - Tom Paxton (with Sean Silvia) at Mason District Park in Annandale, VA
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDdHtOSHIXE The Wartburg Choir: Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, arr. W. B. Olds
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3XTbTUBXos 2011-12-16 The Elm City Girls Choir - What Child is This
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqiNkkTwSn4 Frank Loesser - Once In Love With Amy
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8IrXMjhb0w Home on the Range - Milwaukee Children’s Choir
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpFBT_NUECg Burl Ives - Cowboy’s Lament (I couldn’t find as a children’s chorus, but remember that we sang it in grade school.)
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-y3DB0wLh4 EL PASO by MARTY ROBBINS: BEST VERSION ON YOU TUBE.
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG_oJICD-Dw The Choir of Canterbury Cathedral sing “Quem Pastores.”
11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOyEbmZUSHQ In dulci jubilo by R.L Pearsall/John Rutter performed by Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir’s Ancora on December 2, 2017 in Berkeley, CA.
12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbbYId6w6U4 O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright (Puer nobis nascitur).
13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc-3wB7OI_g O Lord, How Shall I Meet Thee - Christmas Carols Lyrics & Music.
14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3Nu_0ufdI “Go! Tell It on the Mountain!” - UCC Children’s Choir.
15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igrBCBlsovU Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris - Farther Along from the 1987 vinyl LP “Trio.”
16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHO8GWllwz8 Provided to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises Shall We Gather at the River? · The Christian Children’s Choir.
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1SZKJPrKc Children’s Chorus of Washington -- Precious Lord Take My Hand.
18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwgvM9yc5xU This Land is Your Land. Fairfield County Childrens’ Choir.
19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teHe-JIj7EY Today-Randy Sparks(original).