Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele 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 today we're going to listen to some words as well as music. And the good word is that our bills are paid by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the Ford Foundation, and also by this radio station.
Since the voice is the basic human instrument, there's a natural desire on the part of humans to want to sing their favorite music, whether it was originally vocal music or not. And this, combined with the fact that music with words is generally more fun to sing than music without, has given rise to the practice of putting words to instrumental pieces.
Sometimes the results become full-fledged popular songs like Stranger in Paradise, which is based on music by the Russian composer Borodin, and Full Moon and Empty Arms, which is based on a theme from Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, or as some musicians call it, Rocky II. Now sometimes words become attached to well-known music without anybody knowing where they come from.
I assume that this, for instance, this bugle call, did not start out its life with lyrics.
[sung: words to the bugle call "You're in the Army Now"]
You know, that chip in that naughty word detector must really be something. It seems to know at the beginning of a word, I guess from the context maybe, that it's got to go. Anyway, there's a long-standing tradition of putting words to classical themes simply for fun and also for instructional purposes. Many people know,
[sung: words to the theme of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony]
Probably not so many are familiar with the later version,
[sung: the same words, with Schoenberg in place of Schubert]
I read somewhere once that there was a man named Ebenezer Prout who took it upon himself to write words to the subjects or themes of all 48 fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which led someone else to set the following words to another Bach fugue subject.
[sung: words to a Bach fugue subject, addressed to Ebenezer Prout]
Now here's one that I find tantalizing. A friend says he used to know words to the famous theme from Haydn's Surprise Symphony.
[sung: words to the theme of Haydn's Surprise Symphony]
But he can't remember the rest. Be that as it may, I have here in my hands a book that is a classic in this field. I look for copies of this book every time I go into a second-hand bookstore and I've probably given it to at least a half a dozen friends over the years. It seems to be getting harder to find these days, so maybe it's getting used up or maybe other people are catching on. It's called Great Symphonies: How to Recognize and Remember Them, and it's by Sigmund Spaeth.
It was published in the 1930s, and in it, Mr. Spaeth puts words to the principal themes of the most often played symphonies of the 18th and 19th centuries. The chapters are called Beginning with Papa Haydn, The Miraculous Mozart, The Climax of Beethoven, Schubert's Singing Symphonies, Schumann's Four Symphonies, he doesn't get a real adjective there, Masterpieces of Mendelssohn, Bowing to Brahms, César Franck's One Symphony, and Russia's Symphonic Contribution.
Very dry title for Russians. Now, this book was begun for children, but the author discovered, in his words, that adult music lovers, and particularly the confessed laymen, which implies that there are a lot of closet laymen about, were enormously enthusiastic over the possibility of securing an informal, non-technical introduction to the most important symphonies, particularly with the promise of simple aids to remembering the outstanding tunes or themes.
Mr. Spaeth does acknowledge that some might object to the whole idea, but he feels that the educational value outweighs any objections. He says, No justification or apology is really necessary, therefore, although there may be those who will find fault with the details of wording here and there. The following rules have generally governed the creation of these symphonic texts. One, they must be easily singable, fitting the natural accents of the notes and the spirit of the melody.
Two, they must be simple and direct enough to appeal to children, but not so silly as to offend intelligent adults. Three, they should, if possible, draw some attention to the composer or the character of the symphony, or both. He goes on to say, In this connection, there is a horrible memory of one musical educator who undertook to analyze Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for an audience of children in New York.
For the opening four notes, definitely described by the composer as representing fate knocking at the door, this gentleman used the words,
[sung: "I've lost my hat!"]
Without undue arrogance, it may be assumed that no such desecration has been committed in this volume. Well, I'll leave it to you to decide.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Mozart, Symphony No. 40 (K. 550), 1st mvt.; with Prague Chamber Orchestra, Mackerras]
Okay, let me fade this out here.
Now, uh, there. Now, in his preface to the second movement of Mozart's 40th Symphony, Mr. Spaeth reminds us that the actual meaning of the tempo indication andante is walking.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Mozart, Symphony No. 40, 2nd mvt.]
I'll tell you where to go. Just kidding. Now, in the minuet of this symphony, I think Mozart really outdoes himself. And the same may be said of Mr. Spaeth.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Mozart, Symphony No. 40, 3rd mvt. (Minuet)]
Okay. And the finale presents some daunting vocal problems, but let's give it a whirl.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Mozart, Symphony No. 40, 4th mvt.]
Okay, okay, I admit it. I added some of those tra-la-la's.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Mozart, Symphony No. 40, 4th mvt. (continued)]
The first movement of Brahms' Fourth Symphony is one of those pieces in which it can be very tricky to get just the right tempo. One conductor taught me these words to the opening theme.
[sung: a conductor's words to the opening of Brahms, Symphony No. 4]
Now, Mr. Spaeth's words are not so sacrilegious. They make up in taste what they lack in imaginative content.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Brahms, Symphony No. 4, 1st mvt.; with Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Davis]
But the words for the slow movement are among his richest and most memorable.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Brahms, Symphony No. 4, 2nd mvt.]
One of my favorite pieces in the entire symphonic literature is the first movement of Brahms' Second Symphony. Hey, I liked it even before I heard Mr. Spaeth's words for the two main themes.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Brahms, Symphony No. 2, 1st mvt., first theme; with Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Walter]
Well, he's putting the words to it, not me.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Brahms, Symphony No. 2, 1st mvt., second theme]
In the 19th century, it was very common to describe pieces in dramatic terms, and I mean in concrete dramatic terms, to construct dramatic, not to say melodramatic, scenarios for pieces. Now the brasses attack. The strings and woodwinds fight back valiantly, but in the end, or in the development section, the hero, represented by the first theme, must find his way out of the maze constructed by the wizard, second theme, before he collapses from exhaustion. Now you know why Stravinsky said music expresses nothing but itself. Anyway, Spaeth was, in the mid-1930s, writing at the end of this tradition. And in the opening section of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I'm going to not only sing the illuminating words, I'm also going to read some of Mr. Spaeth's descriptions of the music in between the principal themes so you can properly understand the whole drama.
This is the story behind the story. Here we go.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, 1st mvt., opening; with Berlin Philharmonic, Bernstein]
The horns finally call a halt to permit ordinary mortals to have their say. But they do it in a very superior and contemptuous fashion.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, horn call]
The human voice speaks up rather timidly, yet showing no inclination to give in too easily.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, second theme]
Even as it is uttered, you hear the impatient pounding in the bass, indicating that fate does not intend to be kept waiting long. But the courageous voice goes serenely on in spite of the threatening noises, and soon turns the actual fate motif into a bold challenge.
[sung: Spaeth's words to Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, fate motif as challenge]
So, with shrieking woodwind and hammering blows, the battle is on. The development that follows is a real plot, not just a musical exercise.
And there's the key word, plot. Mr. Spaeth's book, Great Symphonies: How to Recognize and Remember Them, might be subtitled Cliff Notes on the Plots of the Great Symphonies.
Hey, listen, it's out of fashion now, but there's really nothing wrong with thinking about pieces in a narrative way as long as you, and this is my own humble opinion here, as long as you don't work too hard at imposing your story on others. Let people make up their own stories. Okay, we're going to end this part of the program with a real jaw-dropper of the genre in which we've been wallowing, a choral arrangement with words of Maurice Ravel's instrumental warhorse, Bolero.
Now, I can't, all by my lonesome, be a chorus, but I will sing the melody line with orchestral accompaniment thanks to this handy little compact disc. And for this one, I'm going to add a little reverb here. I certainly nagged and nagged to get this thing installed. I might as well use it. And I want to emphasize that I am not putting you on here. This is a published arrangement, and I had nothing to do with the words. Nor, incidentally, did Sigmund Spaeth. Or Maurice Ravel? I don't know.
[sung: Ravel, Bolero, melody with English text by Flora Robles; with Boston Symphony Orchestra, Munch]
Hola, indeed. Now, let's get that echo off. Ravel's Bolero with, it says here, English text by Flora Robles. I don't know if that means there's also a Lithuanian text or whatever, I don't know. I have a friend, a head of the Slavic Languages Department, used to be at Ohio State, who published a reverse Lithuanian dictionary. The words were alphabetized from the end of the word forward because apparently to... Okay, okay, okay. The irrelevancy alarm up there on the wall, it does go off every once in a while. By the way, in case you want to hire me to sing at your next wedding or bar mitzvah or whatever, my name is Peter Schickele.
When I was in college, Jeff Davidson and I wrote a theatrical extravaganza entitled, as I recall, ARGH! You know, it's one of those things where you sit up for two nights trying to think of a name for your show and you end up picking, well, probably one of the worst names you'd thought of because all the good ones are too dirty. One of the skits was a preview, as in previews of movie coming attractions, of a forthcoming film on the life of Beethoven.
I'm going to get my authentic instrument here. This is an authentic Casio Tone Bank made in the early 1990s. Now, in that show, at one point, a nostalgic Beethoven sings,
[sung: Beethoven's song from Schickele and Jeff Davidson's college show, with Casio keyboard]
Ah, college. Two-bit sentiments and ten-dollar words. Last I heard, Jeff Davidson was living in Rome. I think he was teaching... Okay, okay, okay. That's the alarm again, and I can't really argue, I guess, about that. Anyway, Jeff wrote some good lyrics. As I said earlier in the program, the urge to put lyrics to instrumental tunes is, at least among some folks, just about irresistible.
And now we're going to hear three entertainingly clever, as opposed to educational or high-minded or simply stupid, examples. The Singing Music Meant to Be Played Song Cycle is about nine minutes long. I'll see you around.
[music: Flotsam and Jetsam (Malcolm McEachern, B. C. Hilliam), "What's the Matter with Rachmaninoff?"]
[music: King Pleasure, "Parker's Mood" (King Pleasure Sings); John Lewis, piano]
[music: Michael Flanders & Donald Swann, "Ill Wind" (Mozart, Horn Concerto No. 4, K. 495, Rondo)]
Michael Flanders (recorded): It has long been my earnest wish to improve the standard of the music we have in these shows of ours.
Donald Swann (recorded): Thank you very much.
Michael Flanders (recorded): Not at all, my dear sir. I think you know that nobody has a higher opinion of your work than you do yourself. I simply meant we should have some more good music, and to this end I have been practicing the horn, or French horn as they call it, German horn as the French call it, not, not to be confused with the cor anglais.
Michael Flanders (recorded): It's a marvelous instrument. I took it up because I very much wanted to play the music of Mozart, in particular his wonderful horn concerto in E-flat, Köchel rating 495, which he wrote at the age of about 18 months. Marvelous man. I practiced it very hard, against considerable opposition, I may say, and I had hoped this evening to give you the very first performance of the last movement, the Rondo Allegro Vivace.
Michael Flanders (recorded): I think to curious circumstances, as yet unexplained, I am not able to do this. I can only tell you why.
[No speech for 168 s.]
The Singing Music Meant to Be Played Song Cycle, and the first number in that cycle was Malcolm McEachern and B.C. Hilliam, known to audiences between the two world wars as Flotsam and Jetsam, singing What's the Matter with Rachmaninoff.
Next, we heard King Pleasure singing Parker's Mood, based on a Charlie Parker tune. If you listen to those words carefully, they became all the more poignant in the light of Charlie Parker's early death. A beautiful piano solo there by John Lewis. And finally, from the album At the Drop of Another Hat, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. The number is called Ill Wind, and it is indeed based on the last movement of Mozart's Fourth Horn Concerto.
Now, there's a long tradition in jazz of setting words to instrumental music. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross were probably the best-known practitioners of this art. And the words aren't always funny, and they don't always involve just the tune parts, but whole, originally improvised solos, the entire texture of a piece.
Why isn't this done more in classical music? I know I've reflected on this before, but most of the examples I can think of in classical music are humorous. How about some just nice words to symphonies or quartets or violin sonatas? I guess part of the problem is the wide range of a lot of classical instrumental music. It's hard to sing, but that can be worked around. After all, it goes the other way: Schubert based instrumental pieces on songs.
Actually, I think the main problem is one of affect, if I may use a small but nevertheless expensive word. There is a conversational quality about much mainstream jazz that seems to welcome narrative words and to accommodate casual and witty or even wry words without sacrificing the basic seriousness of the music. Why is that? I feel a doctoral thesis coming on here, but we don't have time for theses now.
Our last suite on today's program is the Up a Third, Down a Fifth Sequence Suite. Got that? What did I say? You forgot it, didn't you? It's the Up a Third, Down a Fifth Sequence Suite. Now, don't get intimidated there. All that means is this. Up a third. Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, that's a third. Now, if you do the same thing over and over again, Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. The technical term for that in music is repetition.
But if you repeat it starting on different notes of the scale, that's
[sung: demonstration, the figure repeated on different notes]
called sequence, and that's musical sequencing. And there's a sequence that composers have been particularly fond of, all sorts of different composers, and that's this.
[music: demonstration, the up-a-third, down-a-fifth sequence]
It usually goes about that far. And it's made all the more effective, most composers feel. If you combine this melody, which is constantly skipping, with a bass that is not skipping at all, that is going right down the scale.
[music: demonstration, a descending scale]
If you put those two together, here's what you get. But before we do this suite, which has five numbers and lasts about 13 minutes, let me just say something. Some people I know have a little trouble with the way I mix things on this program. Even if they agree that all musics are created equal, sometimes they say, These things just shouldn't be so cheek to jowl. And I have to say that in this suite, some of the most profound, beautiful, deep, if we want to use that cliched word, music ever written in the Western tradition is combined with some pretty cream puff type stuff.
But my feeling about it is this. You give five kids identical sets of building blocks. Isn't it amazing how completely different what each one of them makes is?
[music: James Taylor, "Your Smiling Face" (JT)]
[music: Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, 1st mvt.; Wilhelm Backhaus]
[music: Dionne Warwick, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" (Dionne)]
[music: Gerry Mulligan, "Sextet"; Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Joe Mondragon, Larry Bunker]
The Up a Third, Down a Fifth Sequence Suite. The first number was Your Smiling Face, of course, from James Taylor's monogrammatically titled album JT. Then we have Beethoven's Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109, that beautiful first movement that's so restless, doesn't seem to want to stay in the same tempo, performed by Wilhelm Backhaus.
Then Dionne Warwick, I'll Never Fall in Love Again, from Promises, Promises. It's interesting, one of the hooks, you might say, one of the characteristic things of that tune in the original show was that in the middle of a 4/4 tune is this one 3/4 bar. In other words, they drop a beat out of one place, but in this arrangement, that beat gets put back in, the whole thing's in 4/4. And then we had Chopin, the set of Etudes Opus 25. This was number nine, the ninth one in G-flat, played by Vlado Perlemuter on Nimbus. And the last number in the suite was Gerry Mulligan, a tune called Sextet. And that was Mulligan on baritone sax, Lee Konitz on alto, Chet Baker on trumpet, Joe Mondragon on bass, and the drummer was Larry Bunker.
You know, I think I just have time to put in one little thing here. That suite featured, in most cases, the bass line going down in the scale while the melody skipped. And it's interesting that one of the most famous pieces in classical music starts out at least with the opposite. The melody goes
[music: demonstration, the melody by step]
by scale, whereas the bass does the skipping.
[music: demonstration, the skipping bass]
And you put them together and you get...
[music: demonstration, melody by step over skipping bass]
That's right, folks. It's the Pachelbel Canon.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And there you have it, Schickele Mix, for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the Ford Foundation, and also by this radio station.