...readier than you'll ever know, here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.
And it is good to be bringing you these sounds which I wouldn't be able to do without the help of funds provided by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the Ford Foundation,
by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also by this radio station. Now there are a couple of things that you can usually count on in this program.
One of them is that I'll mispronounce somebody's name or some piece's title, and the other is that the music played will come from all over the place, with respect to both geography and brow height.
But today is different in two ways. In the first place, the music will be classical from top to bottom, and secondly, the show is built around a book.
No, I am not going to intersperse classical selections with readings from The Joy of Cooking. The book that serves as the skeleton for this program is The Lexicon of Musical Invective,
Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time, compiled by Nicholas Slinimsky, and published by the University of Washington Press. A whole book of nothing but bad reviews,
of the music of well-known composers over the last two centuries. It's a fascinating tome, and if you're familiar with classical music, I encourage you to go out and buy it.
Completely unsolicited, by the way, that plug. But there are a couple of caveats to remember while you're rummaging through it. One is, as Slinimsky points out, that the book is intentionally restricted to bad reviews,
and you shouldn't assume that that's the only kind the composer got. Beethoven's Septet was so popular during his life, for instance, that he got sick of it himself.
And what was it? Something like 20,000 people attended his funeral. But the other thing to remember is that, with the exception of some of the reviews that make prophecies, there is no right and wrong when it comes to taste.
The first thing you do when you flip through this book is to laugh at entries like this one on 222, I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him.
Or this one here. Rigoletto is the weakest work of Verdi. It lacks melody. This opera has hardly any chance to be kept in the repertoire.
Or finally, one here about the Eroica Symphony, written in 1829. If this symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse.
Now, there are plenty of perfectly respectable people, and I mean people you can respect, who don't like works of art that are commonly regarded as masterpieces. I'll go even farther.
I think one of the problems that contemporary music has had in this century is some people being afraid to say what they feel about a piece, because they might turn out to be wrong. Hey, if you don't like something, you don't like it.
And if a century from now, something you don't like turns out to be regarded as a masterpiece, what difference does it make? You won't be around to take the blame any more than you'll be around to get the points, if you turn out to have been right.
Besides, worrying about posterity is the intellectual equivalent of buying paintings as an investment. That's not, or at least shouldn't be, what it's all about.
A certain part of the contemporary music establishment encourages the notion that everything that's vilified now will eventually come to be a part of the repertoire. But of course, that's not true.
Having said all that, though, let me add that it is true that the very unfamiliar may take more than one hearing to appreciate. My father went to college in Berlin in the 19th century,
in the 1920s, and he remembered going to concerts at which a new Bartok or Schoenberg string quartet, say, was being premiered. And they would play the new piece, and then an older repertory piece, and then the new one again. Good idea.
On the other hand, they didn't do that in Bach and Mozart's day. To me, what's really fascinating about this book is how differently some of the pieces were regarded when they appeared. I don't mean just good and bad, but differently they were perceived.
A lot of people in my kids' generation think of the standard classical repertoire as easy listening, like elevator music. But here's what a Viennese critic said about Beethoven's second symphony in 1804.
Beethoven's second symphony is a crass monster, a hideously writhing wound of dragon that refuses to expire,
and, though bleeding in the finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect. .
Actually, that's not such a bad description, is it? But the thing is, there hadn't been many dragons in classical music before Beethoven.
Now, here's a little gallery of pre-20th century comments on other Beethoven symphonies. All the performances are by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. For those of you who may have joined us late,
these comments come from the Lexicon of Musical Invective compiled by Nicholas Slinimski. There are 24 parts participating in the explosion
which marks the transition from the scherzo to the finale in the C minor symphony of Beethoven. I speak of the 50 measures of the scherzo that precede the allegro.
There is a strange melody which, combined with even a stranger harmony of a double pedal point in the bass on G and C,
produces a sort of odious meowing and discords to shatter the least sensitive ear.
Here you have a fragment of 44 measures
where Beethoven deemed it necessary to suspend the habeas corpus of music by stripping it of all that might resemble melody, harmony, and any sort of rhythm. Is it music? Yes or no?
If I am answered in the affirmative, I would say that this does not belong to the art which I am in the habit of considering as music.
The merits of Beethoven's 7th Symphony we have before discussed,
and we repeat that it is a composition in which the author has indulged a great deal of disagreeable eccentricity. Often as we now have heard it performed, we cannot yet discover any design in it,
neither can we trace any connection in its parts. Altogether, it seems to have been intended as a kind of enigma. We had almost said a hoax.
In the preceding symphonies, the traces of the 3rd style of Beethoven are limited to a few wrong chords, superimposed intervals of a second, the failure to prepare and to resolve dissonances.
In the 7th symphony, the phantasm mounts. Look, for instance, at the deplorable ending of the Andante. Look and weep.
Can one imagine F sharp and G sharp accompanied by a chord of A minor?
Can one imagine a musician who has the sad courage to debase in this way his own masterpiece, to throw the purest part of his genius into this, into the hideous claws of the Chimera,
as one throws a bone to a dog?
It is in the last movement that the figure of the Chimera is completed by adding melodic ugliness to harmonic ugliness. When I heard this flayed harmony, I experienced a shudder
and a line of La Fontaine came back to my memory. On vous sangla le pauvre Drille. And they whipped the poor devil.
If the best critics and orchestras have failed to find the meaning of Beethoven's 9th symphony, we may well be pardoned if we confess our inability to find any. The Adagio certainly possessed much beauty,
but the other movements, particularly the last, appeared to be an incomprehensible union of strange harmonies. Beethoven was deaf when he wrote it.
It was the genius of the great man upon the ocean of harmony. Without the compass which had so often guided him to his haven of success, the blind painter touching the canvas at random.
We can sincerely say that rather than study this last work for beauties which do not exist, we had far rather hear the others where beauties are plain.
The whole orchestral part of Beethoven's 9th symphony I found very wearying indeed.
Several times I had great difficulty in keeping awake. It was a great relief when the choral part was arrived at, of which I had great expectations.
It opened with eight bars of a commonplace theme, very much like Yankee Doodle.
As for this part of the famous symphony,
I regret to say that it appeared to be made up of the strange, the ludicrous, the abrupt, the ferocious, and the screechy, with the slightest possible admixture here and there of an intelligible melody.
As for following the words printed in the program, it was quite out of the question. And what all the noise was about, it was hard to form any idea.
The general impression it left on me is that of a concert made up of Indian war hoops and angry wildcats.
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there and also dropped hammer.
I'll say one thing about old criticism, it certainly was colorful. I read somewhere that barely a year ago, Berlioz, whose life overlapped that of Beethoven, was arguing with his teacher about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony,
which, by the way, has been popular ever since its premiere. Finally, Berlioz's teacher admitted that it was a powerful work, but said, music like that shouldn't be written.
That's exactly how some folks in this century have felt about jazz and then rock and roll. It's not necessarily the perception of the piece that divides people, it's ideas of what properly belongs.
It's not necessarily what really belongs in the artistic experience. Slonimski quotes Maxim Gorky, to whom American jazz music was a capitalist perversion, describing a jazz concert.
An idiotic little hammer knocks dryly. One, two, three, ten, twenty knocks. Then, like a clod of mud thrown into crystal clear water,
there is wild screaming, hissing, rattling, wailing, moaning, cackling. Bestial cries are heard, neighing horses, the squeal of a brass pig, crying jackasses,
amorous quacks of a monstrous toad. This excruciating medley of brutal sounds is subordinated to a barely perceptible rhythm. Listening to this screaming music for a minute or two,
one conjures up an orchestra of madmen, sexual maniacs, led by a man-stallion beating time with an enormous phallus. Now, I can imagine Charlie Mingus saying, Yeah, man, right on!
Okay, now, before we go on, just to prevent an epidemic of musicus interruptus here, let's listen to the last movement of Beethoven's Second Symphony in its draconian entirety.
The last movement of Beethoven's Second Symphony,
performed by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. I'm Peter Schickely. The program is Schickely Mix on APR. But I must say, it is amazing
how different the perception of a new piece can be. Then and now. Can you connect this review with the music it describes?
In his string quartet, Monsieur Ravel is content with one theme, which has the emotional potency of one of those tunes which the curious may hear in a Chinese theater,
shrieked out by an ear-splitting clarinet. This theme serves him for four movements, during which there is about as much emotional nuance as warms a problem in algebra.
It is a drastic dose of wormwood and asafoetida.
The beginning of Ravel's string quartet in F major, performed by the Borodin String Quartet. Let's turn to Prokofiev.
I'm not going to read reviews like this one that begins, uh, Crashing Siberia's Volcano Hell Crocatoa Sea Bottom Crawlers,
because Prokofiev was trying to sound barbarian in the Scythian Suite. What I can't get over is things like this, from a 1918 musical America.
In these days, when peace is heralded and the world is turning from dissonance to harmony, it comes as a shock to listen to such a program. Those who do not believe that genius is evident
in superabundance of noise looked in vain for a new musical message in Mr. Prokofiev's work. Nor in the classical symphony, which the composer conducted,
was there any cessation from the orgy of discordant sounds. As an exposition of the unhappy state of chaos from which Russia suffers, Mr. Prokofiev's music is interesting.
But one hopes fervently that the future may hold better things, both for Russia and listeners to Russian music.
The first movement of Prokofiev's first symphony, the classical symphony. How's that for an orgy of discordant sounds? Here are two more reviews of Prokofiev,
first from the Chicago Tribune, December 31st, 1921. The music of the love for three oranges, I fear, is too much for this generation.
After intensive study and close observation at rehearsal and performance, I detected the beginnings of two tunes. For the rest of it, Mr. Prokofiev might well have loaded up a shotgun
with several thousand notes of varying lengths and discharged them against the side of a blank wall.
That piece of unintelligible music, some of my older listeners may remember, became the theme song for a popular radio program about the FBI.
And now, from the New York Times, February 15th, 1922. What can Mr. Prokofiev's music do for the ear? Probably, for most of the listeners, it could do little but belabor it
till insensibility set in, if it did set in, and further suffering was spared. There are a few, but only a very few passages that bear recognizable kinship
with what has hitherto been recognized as music. No doubt there are what pass for themes, and there is ingenuity of some kind in manipulating them, but it seldom produces any effect
but that of disagreeable noise. The orchestra is a noble instrument, but it has seldom been put to so ignoble use as it is in the Love for Three Oranges.
That was the second of two selections from the Love for Three Oranges suite, instrumental music from the opera. That and the first movement of the classical symphony
that we heard previously were all conducted by Eugene Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Prokofiev, by the way, was involved in one of the great critical scandals of all time.
Leonid Sabanyev published a review of the Scythian Suite in 1916 without bothering to attend the concert. It turned out that Prokofiev's piece had been taken off the program
at the last minute, which resulted in Sabanyev losing his job, although he never did apologize. Hey, you heard one Prokofiev piece, you heard them all, right? My name is Peter Schickley.
The show is Schickley Mix on APR. We're grooving and also educating ourselves on old reviews from Nicholas Slonimski's Lexicon of Musical Invective here.
And now we come to perhaps the most famously lambasted piece of all time, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Its premiere in Paris in 1913 caused a riot,
but that had at least partially to do with the choreography by Nijinsky. Contrary to the impression many people have, the score was recognized by some as a masterpiece as soon as it was given a decent performance.
But for others, well, 11 years after its premiere, a poem appeared in the Boston Herald, quoted in the book here. It's called The Rite of Spring.
Who wrote this fiendish rite of spring? What right had he to write the thing Against our helpless ears to fling Its crash-clash-cling-clang-bing-bang-bing? And then to call it Rite of Spring
The season when on joyous wing The birds' melodious carols sing And harmonies in everything. He who could write the rite of spring, If I be right, by rite should swing.
The Boston Herald, 1924, anonymously written, apparently. But it wasn't just the dissonance that upset people. I think that the New York Telegram hit the nail on the head in 1928
when it said, here on page 202, Stravinsky, the big chief of the modernists, the head and fount of those first performances which have inundated our concert halls
since the thump-thump of the sexy violins of Le Sacre first outraged our best families. That's what it always comes down to, doesn't it? Sex and violence.
Now we'll hear a sampling of other comments on this life-changing piece of music, beginning with a report on the premiere from a Paris newspaper. Just gonna read a little bit of that.
You hear the prelude, where a wind instrument is dominant. We ask each other, which instrument can produce such sounds? I reply, this is an oboe. But my neighbor to the right, who is a great composer,
assures me that it is a muted trumpet. My neighbor to the left, no less learned in music opines, I would rather think that it is a clarinet. During the intermission, we ask the conductor himself,
and we learn that it was the bassoon that put us in such great doubt.
The most essential characteristic of Le Sacre du Printemps is that it is the most dissonant and the most discordant composition yet written. Never was the system and the cult of the wrong note
practiced with so much industry, zeal and fury. From the first measure to the last, whatever note one expects, it is never the one that comes, but one on the side, which should not come.
Whatever is suggested by a preceding chord, it is another chord that is heard. And this chord and this note are used deliberately to produce the impression of acute and almost cruel discord.
When two themes are superposed, far be it from the composer's mind to use themes that fit together. Quite to the contrary, he chooses such themes
that their superposition should produce the most irritating friction and gnashing that can be imagined.
Aside from the excuse that it may offer as an example of the distressingly dissonant extremes to which some of the latter-day composers are going, listening to the Rite of Spring might be regarded as more of an affliction than a privilege.
Such music as Le Sacre du Printemps is physical. Whether the calmer heights of spiritual glory are accessible to the new methods of composition remains to be seen.
They are not likely to be scaled by Stravinsky, who is a stark realist, a caveman of music.
It is as if Stravinsky had discovered in certain rhythmic units a latent energy, just as it has been claimed that the day is near when the scientists will discover and release enough energy
now contained in every atom to blow a battleship from its harbor to a mountaintop. But there is that in this music which repulses as well as attracts. It is an orgy and an explosion of force,
but very brutal and perhaps perverse. It is easy to believe it is the expression of one who is fundamentally a barbarian and a primitive, tinctured with, and educated in,
the utmost sophistications and satiities of a worn-out civilization.
Unless you can feel the primitive urge, the rite of Spring will merely seem one more horrible jargon from the start to finish, sheer discord,
with no right to a place on the same program with true music.
The music of Le Sacre du Printemps baffles verbal description. To say that much of it is hideous as sound is a mild description. There is certainly an impelling rhythm traceable.
Practically it has no relation to music at all, as most of us understand the word.
At a sign given by the conductor,
the players began to improvise with no concern about tonality, dynamics, or measure. At the end of ten minutes, having decided that the amusement had gone far enough, they became silent,
proud for having thus performed the introduction to the second scene of Le Sacre du Printemps by Igor Stravinsky.
A great day, general commotion, Monteuil will play Le Sacre du Printemps. This announcement has put our musicians in a state of exultation bordering on delirium.
Not all of them have experienced unmixed satisfaction. Some, reading this formidable title, clenched their fists and raised their eyebrows. This composition drops into our thinking that it is the most aesthetic discussions
like a shell of melanite in an assembly of entomologists. Our Alexandrine subtleties, our fine studies, our scruples and our consciences are swept to the four winds
by the explosion of these shattering harmonies. An indignant stupefaction renders us mute. Then, little by little, everything is explained. Some cry that the rights of men are violated,
while others admit timidly that there is something good in this violation.
We've heard excerpts from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of Pierre Boulez. We'll finish off with one more quote
from the New York Sun, January 16th, 1937. It is probable that much, if not most, of Stravinsky's music will enjoy brief existence.
Already the tremendous impact of Le Sacre du Printemps has disappeared, and what seemed at first hearing to be the inner glow of inspirational fire is now only a smoldering ember.
A few years later, Walt Disney, never thought of as a sophisticated member of the cognoscenti, used the Rite of Spring in Fantasia. Let's go out with a complete piece, how about it?
The Symphonies of Wind Instruments by Stravinsky is dedicated to the memory of Debussy. According to Slonimski's book, it was greeted with cheers, hisses and laughter at a London performance in 1921.
I think it's a beautiful and, in the end, touching work.
With Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, performed by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the London Sinfonietta, turning into Mozart's 24th Symphony, Schickely Mix winds up for this week.
Our program is made possible with funds provided by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the Ford Foundation, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
and also by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with record numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number.
And this is program number 15. And this is Peter Schickely saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned,
send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Schickely Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Schickely Mix.
Care of American Public Radio, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.