And now, Shickley Mix. Ready, Mr. Shickley? They don't make them any readier. 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.
This program is democracy in action, folks. This is the program that marches to a different drum machine. Highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow, nobrow. Nobody gets turned away from this disco.
And whom do we have to thank for that? I'll tell you whom. This radio station. That's whom. And the name of the game today is parallelism in instrumental music. Two or more lines moving in parallel intervals.
I will illustrate intervals on the authentic instrument with which this state of the art studio is equipped. This is not a reproduction, by the way. This is an authentic early 1991 Casio tone bank.
Okay, now here's a note. I think we can agree on that. And here's a major scale on that note. Okay, now you go up five notes up the scale here to get to the fifth.
So this is parallel fifths. You go four notes up the scale to make a fourth.
But by far the most common interval for parallel ambulation. Nice word, huh? Remember, you heard it here first. The most common interval for parallel ambulation. These days is the third.
Thirds make for a sweet sound that a lot of people can't seem to get enough of.
It's hard to imagine where the trumpets in a mariachi band would be, for instance, without parallel thirds, not to mention the Everly Brothers, the Righteous Brothers. And hey, who knows what the Brothers Karamazov sounded like.
So let's launch into our first suite. The first two numbers of which feature mostly parallel thirds when the instruments move together, but they don't always move together.
The third and last item, however, consists of nothing but thirds. And I think you'll agree that the variety of sounds the composer gets out of one interval is impressive.
The parallel thirds suite lasts about ten minutes, at which point we'll meet again.
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The parallel thirds suite began with the first movement of Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Trumpets, Op. 46, No. 1. It says here, I don't know what opus numbers mean with Vivaldi, but that's what it says.
The trumpeters were Maurice André and Bernard Soustreau, and the Academy of St. Martin's in the Fields Orchestra was conducted by Neville Mariner.
You could hear the two trumpets interlocking, sometimes not doing parallel anything, but when they move together, . All that stuff was parallel thirds.
Then we had a tremendous cut from a group called Les Miserables Brass Band, an album called Manic Traditions on Northeastern.
And that was a tune called Rommo Rommo, a traditional tune, it says, arranged by Les Miserables Brass Band.
And finally Debussy's Les Tiers Alternés, alternating thirds from the second book of his Preludes for Piano, played by Walter, or Valter if you want to be technical,
Gieseking, recorded in 1954. It's on EMI. I'm Peter Schickely, and this is Schickely Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Now we're going to move on into other parallel intervals here, and I'm going to do something, well, I think historic is the only word. I'm going to play the very first piece of music I ever composed.
It's called the Chic of Palamazoo. I think I was 13 when I wrote it, and it contains a truly classic example of parallel fourths.
The original performers were the hottest band on North 12th Street in Fargo, Jerky Jems and his Bommie Brothers.
We had big band-type music stands made out of orange crates, but we staunchly refused to conform to the instrumentational conventions of the other late 1940s bands.
Our lineup consisted of my brother David on violin, John Helgeson and myself on clarinets, and George Tharlson on tom-tom and cymbal.
Most of our repertoire was remarkably similar to that of Spike Jones, but like Spike Jones, we had a serious side, too, and the Chic of Palamazoo was our first completely original chart.
I'm going to switch the authentic instrument here to the clarinet mode, because we had, after all, in that band two clarinets. Here's the Chic of Palamazoo.
That's the parallel fourths part.
The Chic of Palamazoo. And they say that contemporary American pieces never get a second performance. The better part of Valor, however, spurs us on to our second suite,
which consists of three pieces featuring a variety of parallel intervals. In the first piece, it's fourths. In the second one, it's fifths. And in the last piece, we'll hear five pairs of instruments taking turns,
moving in consistently parallel fashion, with each pair characterized by its own interval.
Bassoons in sixths, oboes in thirds, clarinets in sevenths, flutes in fifths, and trumpets in seconds.
A nice, tart, lemon-rind sound. I'll be back in about eleven minutes when the Parallel Various Intervals Suite is over.
The Parallel Various Intervals Suite. We began with a staple of this program. L'Enfant et les Sortilèges.
The opera by Maurice Revelle, with a text by Colette. A Fantasie Lyrique en deux parties.
And that was the very beginning of the opera, with the oboes moving in parallel fourths, beautifully there. The Child was sung by Flora Vendt, and that's a soprano. She was singing, I do not want to...
It's a he, but she's playing the child. I do not want to learn my lesson. I'd much rather go for a walk. I wish I might eat up all the cakes. Oh, how I'd like to pull the cat's tail very hard and cut off the squirrels, too.
I wish I might growl at everybody. Oh, how I'd like to make Mama feel very sorry. And that's the section we heard. And then, by the way, that was Ancermet conducting L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
And then a wonderful cut from an album called Masters of Early English Keyboard Music, played by Thurston Dart. This was from a manuscript called the Roberts Bridge Manuscript,
a fragmentary collection containing the earliest known keyboard music, English organ music from around 1325, a Retroux or Petron, it says.
Or, if we're talking English, I guess it's Retroux or Petron. Anyway, this is interesting, and the stop, you know, organs have all those things you can pull out. They're called stops, and they change the sound of the organ.
And that featured a sound on the organ. In which you get not only the basic note, I'm going to play the authentic instrument here, which I've changed miraculously. I've got the organ stop up here.
And that sound has a lot of other sounds in there. You can hear overtones if you listen carefully. And there was one particular stop that organs like to use. It isn't here on the authentic instrument, but I'll sort of imitate it. Sort of...
And you have this very strong note. It's higher. From the basic tone.
So everywhere the basic tone goes, that other note goes as well in parallel fifths. And what's interesting about this is that this is a standard organ sound right up to the present.
And yet for a large part of Western music history, the 16th through the 18th centuries, to be vague about it,
parallel fifths were completely avoided in composing in parts. You know, for instance, writing a chorus or an orchestra or something. That...
That parallel fifth sound was something that they didn't care for. And they avoided it. And yet this organ stop was always used, which has this very strong parallel fifth sound.
Although they probably didn't use it for the beginning of a fugue, where you heard the note alone.
You probably used that stop more when it was mixed in with other things and just gave it that particular color. A very strong color.
The noise you heard in the background, by the way, during that cut, was not somebody stacking logs. That was the actual sound of the organ.
The mechanical sound of the keys, which have to travel mechanically a long time to the pipes and open up the various little stoppers which make the organ work.
And then finally, we have the second movement of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. Andre Previn was conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Games of Couples. And this features the panoramic.
The pairs of woodwinds. Each one, as I mentioned before, characterized by a different interval. Peter Schickely is the name and Schickely Mix is the program.
From PRI, Public Radio International. Now the thing about parallel intervals is that you hear them all the time, even when you're unaware of it.
If you play a single note on almost any instrument, you are hearing, in addition to that note, a bunch of overtones. Higher notes that occur in fixed ratios to the fundamental tone.
And although they're generally much softer than the fundamental, they're definitely there.
Part of what you might call an instrument's fingerprints, what makes, say, a clarinet sound different from an oboe, has to do with which overtones are prominent and which are weaker.
Now I want to try to illustrate this on the AI here. I'm going to play a note, just a single note. Let me play this one.
Okay.
Now, if you can focus, this is very hard, tricky to do. You have to sort of hear it first in your mind and then find it. Can you hear the note?
That's a note an octave and a fifth above the fundamental, and it's the second overtone, the strongest one aside from the octave. And, by the way, this works a little bit better on a real piano.
I mean, you know, an old-fashioned piano. If you have one at home, why don't you go over to it after this program is over, of course.
And play a C, say the second C below middle C, and then see if you can hear that G in there. You can sort of play the G below middle C to help yourself find it. And that's only one of the notes.
There are actually all sorts of other notes in there that you can hear if you listen carefully. So when an instrument plays a melody, you are actually hearing parallel chords. All these notes are traveling along with it.
I mentioned before that parallel fifths, this characteristic sound here, were avoided in part writing during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, plus a few decades on either end.
And I mean strenuously avoided. Avoided to the point that when I was enrolled at Juilliard, a fellow student came up once and said, Hey, I found a Bach chorale with parallel fifths in it. Get out of here. Where?
No, really, look, right here. And sure enough, there was a single instance of parallel fifths between two voices, the context of which, however, minimized, in fact, more or less,
obliterated the parallel fifth sound. You didn't get that sort of empty sound because of the harmonic context. Which figures, because after all, when you're dealing with art,
rules, like no parallel fifths allowed, are usually not arbitrary proscriptions. They're descriptions, guidelines on how to achieve the kinds of sounds those folks liked.
But because of this aversion to parallel fifths during that period, when it came to three notes moving parallelly, another etymological first, in other words, parallel triads, now this is a triad,
you didn't hear triads moving like this, because it's got those dreaded parallel fifths in it.
But if you take the bottom note of the triad, this one, and put it on top, there, that's called the first inversion of the triad. Then the intervals involved are a third,
one, two, three, and a sixth. One, two, three, four, five, six. So the two intervals involved are a third and a sixth. Now, you can move this little puppy around without worrying about parallel fifths.
Okay, the lecture's over. Our last suite is made up of three pieces that feature, not exclusively but prominently, first inversion triads being moved around.
I've decided to call it the Parallel First Inversion Triad Suite. And it's about 17 and a half pieces. It's about five minutes long. Now, the greater length of this suite can be blamed primarily on the middle number.
This piece illustrates the technique we're talking about only at its beginning and end. Everything in between is completely beside the point. All it is is tremendously powerful music. See you in a while.
That was the parallel first inversion triad suite.
We began with the Beethoven Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 3, the last movement, Allegro a Sigh, played by Emile Guillels.
And then the next one was from the classic Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue, Freddie Freeloader, in which the tune at the beginning and the end is in parallel triads there.
You'll notice also, by the way, the end of the tune there has quite an unusual parallelism, and parallel tritones. That interval is a tritone.
You know, at the end of the solos, when the tune comes back in, does Miles Davis come in two beats early? I think he does. This session was sort of an amazing session, because he arrived with this material.
The musicians had not played any of these things before, and according to Bill Evans' notes on the back, all of them, he thinks without exception, all of the cuts on the album were first takes.
Also, another thing I couldn't help noticing listening just now is that the bass solo takes a few bars to start. In other words, he plays regular time for a few bars, and then finally gets into the solo. It's sort of like he didn't realize it was his solo first.
Or there's another possibility. One is that the material was so new that somebody had to nod to him to remind him that he was supposed to be taking the next solo.
The other possibility is that jazz players get so used, when they play publicly, to applause after the solos, that very often they don't start really getting into it until the applause from the previous solo gets over.
Miles Davis, trumpet. And leader, Julian Ederle, cannonball. Ederle on alto, John Coltrane on tenor, Wyn Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers, bass, and James Cobb, drums.
And then finally, we rounded it out with a piece by Virgil Thompson from an album, Piano... This is a Vox Box, actually, Piano Music in America, Volume 2, 1900 to 1945.
This was from 10 etudes by Virgil Thompson. The first one, Parallel Chords, subtitled Tango.
And the right hand is moving almost completely in parallel first inversion triads there. The funky sound of that piece is due to the fact that the right hand and left hand are not always in the same key.
There's sort of a major-minor androgyny going on there. And there you have it, the story of parallelism in instrumental music.
And that about does it for Sickly Mix this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by... This radio station.
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. This is the tail end of program number 19.
And this is Peter Sickly 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, and I'll see you next week.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to... That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickly Mix.
Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
P-R-I, Public Radio International.