Alec Ramsay's "Farewell to Lochabor" from Henry Livingston's Music Manuscript - late 19th century

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[mairdie]

Alec Ramsay's "Farewell to Lochabor." This is a more interesting piece, one of my favorites, from Henry Livingston, Jr.'s Music Manuscript. I transcribed it using the computer program Mozart. The fact that Henry changes Ramsay's heroine from Jean to Jane, the name of his second wife, dates the page to after 1793.

Manuscript Book

[mairdie]

We're going crazy trying to find a program that will record a running program on a PC with a guaranteed synch lock between audio and video. I wanted to record the movement of the cursor line through a piece as Mozart plays it. But everything we're finding won't guarantee the synch. I'm hoping someone out there has done this and could recommend something.

Henry was proud Scots, though genetically mostly Dutch, and his poetry harks back to that heritage.

In arts and arms Escotia stands
Foremost of European lands
Dear soil! from whence my fathers came
I bless and hail thy worth and fame.

Thy sturdy sons in martial pride
With their good broad-swords by their side
In tartain plaid and bonnets blue
A band of Heroes in review.

Scotland excels in peaceful arts:
-Her pulpits warm the coldest hearts;
In poetry her Thompson shines
And thrills us with his glowing lines.

Ramsay and Burns each in their day
Attune their lyres in sweetest lay,
While Scot ascends Parnassus heights
And all the listening world delights.

-But - useless grown my broken shell
I bid the land of cares farewell
Oppressed with the lapse of time
I faintly dream of Auld Lang-Syne.

Written in 1827, when he was 78 years old.

[Fiji Hill]

Robert Burns, Allan Ramsay, James Thomson and Walter Scott—the poem is a tribute to Scotland’s literary heritage..

[mairdie]

Notice also the last rhyme as a near-rhyme of Auld Lang-Syne with time. That is one of the non-analytical clues to the Christmas poem authorship. Henry's work is scattered with near-rhymes because he worked fast and sometimes sloppily. In the Christmas poem, the original reindeer names were Donder and Blitzem, rhyming with Vixen. Moore might have been boring but he was spot on with his rhymes and rhythms.

This is a color-coded list of rhymes I produced for Mac. It shows every rhyme in every poem of Henry and Moore, with the near-rhymes shown in italics. Henry is a generation older than Moore. His brother and Moore's father both had churches in NYC. Some of Moore's specific word matches do match the Christmas poem, but they all appear in his later work, after the poem had sunk into the social psyche. Henry's matches appear before the poem's publication.

Rhymes in Night Before Christmas and the poetry bodies of Moore and Livingston

[Fiji Hill]

When "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is recited, the names of the reindeer are usually given as Donner and Blitzen--thunder and lightning in German. Donder and Bliksem are the equivalent terms in Dutch, which was still spoken in New York City at the time the poem was written.

[mairdie]

Exactly.

Here's the history of the changes of the reindeer names from 1823 on. Essentially, most of the changes came from the Troy Sentinel publisher in the variation he did in 1830 that Moore received just prior to publishing the poem as his own in 1844. Moore did make the final change to Blitzen in 1844. But all the other changes came from all the other editors. One of the versions, The Rover of 1843, rhymed Vixen with Nixen.

History of the Reindeer Name Changes

Early Textual Variations in NBC

Here's another database you might enjoy. It's every word in every poem of Henry, Moore and NBC. Color-coded and linked to their original source poems, as was the rhymes list. Useful when researching and a thought occurs to you.

Alphabetized Vocabulary

So you can look up the fact that neither Moore nor Henry use the word rein(-)deer in any of their poetry, though Henry does talk about northern locations in a prose piece about eskimos.

Esquimaux Indians