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PAN PIPES WintER 2014 sai-natiOnal.ORg 18 putting shaKespeare to musiC inventive small formal structures as related to the fourteen-line sonnet form. He was always concerned with the smallest detail, and there are many examples of exquisite text painting. Simpson also showed he was able to incorporate imitative musical ideas into his songs and that he was aware of music history and older forms of counterpoint by using canon and fugue, as well as drawing on musical allusions to the music of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. e 700 pages of Simpson's manuscript pages were separated into three volumes: Volume 1, Sonnets 1-54; Volume 2, Sonnets 55-105; and, Volume 3, Sonnets 106-154. Simpson was rather meticulous, thorough, and deliberate in the manner of laying out the pages. For most of the songs, he used four manuscript pages. Each manuscript page had twelve staves, and he divided them up into four sets of three staves, with a treble or bass clef for the soloist and a two-staff piano part. In the le hand corner of the first page of each sonnet, he had the tempo marking (Allegro, Largo, Andantino, etc.). In the right hand corner he had the sonnet number and the dates that he worked on the sonnet. He usually worked from one to three dates on each sonnet (Sonnet 1: July 14 and Dec. 7, 1864). Most of the dates of composition are during the years 1864-1866, though some dates go back to 1861. It is unclear exactly what the dates signify, but one can assume that given Simpson's deliberate nature, that he must have worked on these songs on those dates. As indicated on the cover page, he dedicated these three volumes to his wife in 1867. So, he would have completed his settings of Shakespeare's sonnets the year prior to the publication of his literary work Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, published in 1868. In his correspondence with scholarly friend Lord Acton, Simpson occasionally mentioned his music writing. In a Feb. 16, 1865 letter, he wrote to Acton: In the autumn I was ill and unable to do anything except music-indeed the doctor forbad my looking at a book under pain of paralysis or some such vile result…and I have so taken in the sweetness of doing nothing, that the spirit of idleness is being difficult to cast out. 10 In my examination of his musical manuscripts and the dates of composition for each sonnet, I was able to tabulate his creative production for each day of each month for the years 1864-1866. It is true that he was very productive in his "spirit of idleness": October, 1864, 12 days of composing; November, 1864, 14 days of composing; December, 1864, 13 days of composing, and January, 1865, 12 days of composing. Simpson's manuscript calligraphy is incredibly neat, and he used a ruler to draw the measure lines which he did at measured lengths depending on the expanse of the surrounding measures. He fit most of the sonnet settings onto four pages, so it appears that he planned out how the measures would look on each page. ese manuscript pages were undoubtedly "fair copies" or close to fair copies because there are virtually no indications of the pages being "composing copies," where there would be sketches, cross outs, irregularly written measures, and hurriedly written notes. Everything is neatly spaced, ruled, and written: dynamic, tempo, and notational markings, as well as the handwritten sonnet texts. Even when he made some changes to the music, he cut and pasted the newly written measures exactly over the ones he was revising. ere are some pencil sketches on various pages where there was space available, but not oen. Some of the fair copies were more neatly written then others, suggesting that he had thought about that sonnet more and was more certain what he wanted to put down. Some were more hurriedly notated. He must have worked on other manuscript paper to do his composing and when he had completed the piece to his satisfaction, he then wrote the final fair copy into his volumes. He worked on these sonnet pieces mostly from January 1864-December 1866. Prior to January 1864, he entered 17 days of work on the sonnets. In 1864, he worked 56 days, in 1865, 99 days, and in 1866, 60 days. He worked most during the late fall and winter months in 1864-1865, 1865-1866, and fall and winter 1866. Generally speaking, he was working through those years from the beginning of the Shakespeare's sonnet cycle to the end. However, he sometimes appeared to be working on a random group of sonnets as in November 1864 when he worked on the following Sonnets: 146, 99, 119, 126, 31, 44, 92, 8, 132, 123, 20, 72, and 135. On the other hand, he must have been feverishly working during the week from December 1-7, 1866, when he worked on 152, 137, 139, 144, 131, and 128. A few times he worked on two sonnets in a day. All total from January 1864 until December 1866, he worked 215 days on his sonnet settings. So, when Simpson dedicated these three volumes to his wife "as a New Year's gi for the upcoming year" he must have been referring to a New Year's gi, Jan. 1, 1867, the last sonnet worked on was Sonnet 128 (a music sonnet) on December 7, 1866. In another letter to Lord Acton on December 13, 1866, Simpson wrote: I have got rid of another plentiful source of idleness, for I expect back from the binders today my third and last volume of Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets, all set to music with original tunes since (18)62. It is a monument of perseverance if of nothing else; but I hope that there are among them some songs that might live, if they ever attained the luck to be born. When I have got rid of Campion, I hope to turn my hand to Shakespeare, which will be a subject of infinitely greater interest. 11 e "fair copies" of the 154 sonnet settings that are in the three volumes give us ample evidence of Simpson's facile ability to provide music for texts in a seemingly effortless way. While he indicates between one and three dates on each setting when he composed the music, these pages are not his "composing copies" as we have indicated because of the measured way in which he prepared each page, though some appear to be more carefully written than others and some composing might have been done last minute as he put down his fair copy. So we don't get a glimpse as to how he might have revised songs as he moved from the composing score to the subsequent revisions until he wrote the fair copy that we have. A composer might initially put down "filler notes" or accompaniments that allow him to accompany the melodies that he is writing, since the melody would be the primary mover and shaper of the musical elements as texts were set to music. It appears that in putting down some of these songs he called upon some tried and true mannerist and cliché-ish accompaniment figures that would allow him to work through the sonnet text quickly and easily. Not until one moves to a secondary step of slowing down the composing process and revising the melody or the accompaniment to refine it and make it more perfectly fit the words, does real composing, as opposed to glib improvising, take place. e only real glimpse we have of assessing Simpson's composing mastery is by comparing the thirteen published songs of 1878 with the earlier written manuscripts from the three volumes written between 1861 and 1866. Simpson revised some of his sonnets during the years 1868-1876, aer completing these three SIMPSON continued from page 17

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