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. Now we wouldn't be able to hang out with all this good music if it weren't for certain good guys, like this radio station, which has set me up in this state-of-the-art cubicle.
Good music. Good, everyone knows that's a highly subjective term. Music. Okay, what is music? What's the meaning of life, right? No, we're not going to try to define music here. But certainly anybody defining music is bound to talk about sound. Organized sound, whatever. And in music, or at any rate in written down music, a sound is called a note. Music is a succession of notes created by one or more performers. But that That leaves out a very important element in music. Silence. Today's program is called, What Happens Between the Notes?
In most kinds of music, the individual players or singers are silent some of the time. They don't play or sing continuously. The silences may be long, the performer may lay out for a whole section, or they may be short, very short, as we'll see later in the program.
In written-down music, silences are called rests, and usually, most of the time, in most kinds of music, individual performers have plenty of rests, but at different times, so the listener is always hearing sound from somebody or other. But sometimes everyone is silent at the same time, and the resulting pauses can be used to very dramatic effect. If they're properly set up, rests can feel as loud as notes.
In Western music, pauses that are rather long and filled with tension are sometimes indicated in the written parts with the initials GP and such pauses often come as a surprise in the music, not only to the audience, but sometimes to inattentive musicians who are playing the piece as well. A GP has been defined as an opportunity for an individual musician to become a soloist.
Our first suite today is called Great Pauses in Western Music. Four examples of a single, surprising, long pause being used to create dramatic tension. A couple of little comments before we hear this suite. Some of these pauses are not, literally speaking, silences. There may be a bit of room echo or reverberating string sound, but they are definitely striking interruptions in otherwise pretty continuous soundscapes.
The other comment is an apology. I hate going into or out of music while it's in progress, but the length of the symphonic pieces represented here leaves me no choice. I've tried to do it as gently as possible. I'll see you in about nine minutes.
[music: Rodgers/Hart, "The Lady is a Tramp"; Gerry Mulligan Quartet]
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, 1st Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Bernstein]
[music: O'Dell, "Mama He's Crazy" (Greatest Hits); The Judds]
But to go back to the beginning of our great pauses in Western music suite, we began with Schubert, the Unfinished Symphony. That was Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. A very dramatic... Then Gerry Mulligan, The Lady is a Tramp, as performed by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet way back there in the old days. Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax, Chet Baker on trumpet, Chico Hamilton on drums, and Carson Smith on bass.
And they do a thing there that Mulligan was very fond of, which is at the beginning, after they've stated the melody and are about to go into the improvised solos, They just stop everything. The rhythm. The rhythm section and the soloists all stop. And it's in time. They don't stretch the time but there's just a couple of bars there where nobody plays and then when they come in again it just gives it a real kick.
After that we had Leonard Bernstein leading the Vienna Philharmonic with a part of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. And that rest there, you, you think the symphony's perhaps coming to an end, rather the first movement of the symphony is coming to an end, and it goes
[sung: Schickele sings the passage from Beethoven's Fifth]
And that pause right in there, one of the reasons it's so dramatic is that it's a bar longer than the similar pauses that are around it. In fact, most musicians are very aware of that because more than one time in rehearsals, and I expect it has occasionally happened in your less well-rehearsed concerts, some musician has come in during that rest because, as I say, it's longer than you expect from the context.
Beethoven's Fifth. Beethoven was a great one for using dramatic rests. And finally, The Judds with Mama, He's Crazy. I've got it on their Greatest Hits album. And as far as I'm concerned, that's one of the great pauses there between the verse and the first time you hear the refrain. I'm Peter Schickele and the show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about rests in music. Rests can be very important for practical reasons as well as artistic ones. If you've got a long piece of written down music without any rests, how are the players going to turn their pages? You may think that's a little thing, but it isn't. That's one of the things that good music copyists concern themselves with, figuring out page turns. Sometimes you have to leave as much as a whole page blank just to make the page turns work out.
I remember being at one of Philip Glass's earliest concerts back in the 60s. He had a piece for solo violin that must have been 15 or 20 minutes long without a single sizable rest in it. Now it's distracting to have a page turner for any musician who's playing something smaller than a piano or a harpsichord. What to do? Well, the concert was in an art gallery. So they printed up the music on one side of the paper only, taped the sheets together, the whole strip must have been about 20-25 feet long, and they pinned the strip up on the walls, and the violinist who was standing simply moved along as she played.
Actually, you know lead sheets, which are the simplest written manifestations of pop or folk songs, nothing but the melody, lyrics, and chord symbols to indicate the harmonies, lead sheets often have no rests at all. This is not because they're meant to be performed that way, it's because it's assumed that non-classical singers aren't going to follow the music exactly as written anyway, especially with respect to rhythm, And also because of a rarely commented upon fact, which is that it's easier to read notes than it is to read rests.
It's not at all uncommon for a musician to play a tricky series of notes perfectly, but then come in at the wrong time after a series of rests. There are reasons for that, which we may get to some other time, but in the meantime, just take my word for it. Now, the most notorious use of silence in Western music is undoubtedly a John Cage composition called Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds. It can be played by a performer on any instrument since it consists of the player coming out on stage and remaining tacit, that is, not playing, for the required time and then leaving.
It is probably the most vilified piece of music around, especially since it's published. I mean, you pay money to get the score. Someone just told me they heard it had been recorded, which is sort of like that famous reputed record album The Best of Marcel Marceau. Hey, it's hard to deny that the concept of 4 minutes 33 seconds veers towards the precious.
But someone who has seen the piece performed told me recently that he found himself focusing on what was going on in the almost silence of the hall in a way that was very different from being by himself, and I believe it. When I attended Swarthmore College in the 50s, they still had a compulsory weekly gathering of the entire college. The purpose was no longer religious. The program was a concert or a lecture. But the one holdover from the days when Swarthmore was a Quaker school was that collection, as it was called, started with a minute of silence.
About a thousand people, together in a room, being silent. I always found it very moving. By the way, let me get everybody straight on something. Swarthmore is not, nor was it ever, a girls' school. So many people... Okay, okay, okay, man, that irrelevancy alarm gets on my nerves, but I guess I have been going on for a while. You know, somebody told me recently that Paul Krasner, the editor of The Realist, has an irrelevancy alarm when he lectures.
I've never seen him, but I commiserate with him thoroughly. Okay, all right, all right, let's move on to our second suite. Suite, which features pieces that use silence a lot, not just for one dramatic moment. The Hooked on Pauses Suite also has four movements and lasts about eight and a half minutes.
[music excerpt: Messiaen, "Oiseaux Exotiques"; London Sinfonietta/Salonen]
[music: Gesualdo, "Itene, o miei sospiri"; The Consort of Musicke/Rooley]
[music: Mathysen, "De Postbode" (Hackadja!); De Nieuwe Snaar]
[music excerpt: Stravinsky, "Symphonies of Wind Instruments"; Symphonieorchester des Nordwestdeutschen Rundfunks/Stravinsky]
Hooked on Pauses Suite. We began with the beginning of a piece, and I apologize again for not using entire pieces. Messiaen, a piece called Oiseaux Exotiques, Exotic Birds, a very striking piece.
You know, a lot of composers have used bird sounds in their pieces. As a matter of fact, another edition of Schickele Mix is devoted completely to bird music. But most older composers would fit the calls into a tonal system.
Now, Messiaen was a nut and there were two things that he was particularly obsessive about. Catholicism and birds.
And he would go around notating bird sounds and then imitating them as closely as possible in his scores he's got another piece called the awakening of the birds it's just nothing but one bird after another you know when they each wake up the earliest to the to the latest risers. Oiseaux exotiques, which is for piano and a small orchestra is also completely concerned with birds except for some of the rhythmic thing that goes on I've got a reproduction here of part of the preface to the score To show his obsessiveness a little bit, the first preface is concerned with musical things, but then it says, The second preface explains the rhythms and bird songs used. The names of rhythms and birds are entered in the score at points exactly corresponding to their actual entry in the music. There now follow certain details about some exotic birds. I strongly urge conductors and pianists to read this commentary, which will help them a good deal in their task. They should not forget that this work is highly colored. It contains all the colors of the rainbow, including red, that color especially associated with hot countries, the color of the American bird known as the cardinal. Messiaen was very much one of those people who associated colors with music too. Then there follows a long list of birds here with their habits and markings and everything. One of the things that is amusing to us Americans perhaps is that exotic of course means whatever comes from where you're not. So one of his exotic birds is the North American robin for instance, which he describes and then there's a whole list of rhythms and then finally even though he's described most of these birds the last thing in the preface is a complete catalog of the birds in the score by country India China Malaysia Canary Islands South America and North America which has by far the most birds represented in it I'm telling you this is one exotic country then we had a beautiful madrigal by Gesualdo.
The third Madrigal from his fifth book of Madrigals and the text which of course is in Italian reads, Go my sighs, swiftly fly to her who is the cause of my bitter torment. Tell her I beg you of my great grief that at last she may to her beauty yet match pity and that my bitter tears I may joyfully exchange for songs of love. And of course The rests there are between almost every phrase, because Gesualdo and many of the composers of his time, the late 16th century, wanted to get these fantastic mood swings, these tremendously volatile emotional states, they wanted to express that, and having these little rests between each little section keeps it from having the continuous feeling, which is not as volatile, that most of the music of that period had.
And then we have something that I'll bet this is the only program on the block to play a little Belgian rock the group is called De Nieuwe Snaar except I don't know if I'm saying that right but it means the new snaar that's as opposed to the old snaar I have an album of theirs too that tune was called De Postbode something like that but it looks to me like it's about a postman I mean "De postbode rijdt dapper door regen, wind en storm." There's got to be something about riding through rain, wind, and storm.
We are talking about a four-person group here, but they all play various instruments, and as a matter of fact, as far as I'm concerned, that may be the best rock and roll English horn playing I've ever heard. And then finally we ended this suite with the last section of the Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The chorale at the end he originally wrote separately and published in a magazine commemorating the death of Debussy, and later expanded it into the beautiful symphonies of wind instruments.
We just heard the chorale at the end in which each phrase is separated from the surrounding phrases with rests. And now it's Tidbit Time. Our tidbit today only lasts a little over two minutes, but it's a suite with five sections. That's right. Every one of these numbers is a complete piece, but none of them is over 35 seconds long. I've got a lot more of these. I'm bound to do this again in the future. So I'm calling today's tidbit, short stuff number one.
[music: "The New Jazz (One)" (Sex Packets); Digital Underground]
[music: Lennon/McCartney, "Her Majesty" (Abbey Road); The Beatles]
[music: Schoenberg, “Pierrot Lunaire,” Opus 21, “Galgenlied”; Jan DeGaetani, voice/The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble/Weisberg]
[music: "Marianne"; Marilyn Horne]
[music: "Utter Chaos #1"; Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker]
Okay, that was our tidbit. And it consisted of the five numbers, as I mentioned.
And the first one was a number called The New Jazz One, from Digital Underground, an album called Sex Packets, and that's the complete cut. Then we had The Beatles, the notorious little number that was at the end of Abbey Road, and originally on the album it was not listed. You just, if you left the needle on it, it played that little number. I notice now in the CD reissue that it lists Her Majesty at the end.
By the way an interesting thing when I was I couldn't remember when I was looking for this thing whether it was at the end of Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road and so I listened to the end of my CD of Sgt. Pepper and it's got a new little unlisted thing on it that was not on the LP now they have their fun those Beatles then we went right into the shortest number from Schoenberg's classic work Pierrot Lunaire this with Jan DeGaetani singing with The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble under Arthur Weisberg that was the gallows ditty The words are The wood-dry whore with rope-long neck Will be the last lover to hold him tight She sticks in his brain like a hammered-in nail The wood-dry whore with rope-long neck Pine-tree scrawny with hank of hair The lecher shall grab the wretch's neck The wood-dry whore Not a very cheery song. Of course, the music is cheerier than the words and that's very much on purpose to make it all the more unpleasant.
Then we heard Marilyn Horne from an album called Opera Stars in a Silly Mood singing Marianne. It says live performance from 1977 and that's all I know about it. And then we have Utter Chaos No. 1 by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. And what this is, is a lot of jazz groups when they're playing live, and particularly in a club where they're going to do several sets during the night, they have a little signature thing that they play at the end of a set to indicate that they're going to take a break.
And Utter Chaos is the one that the Mulligan Quartet used to do. It'd be a little bit different every time, but the basic structure would be the same. That was Utter Chaos Number One. Okay, my name is Peter Schickele, and I
can't believe this Hello? Yeah. Well, you, yeah, okay. Yes, I did say that every one of those pieces is, by the way, it's is, not are, you said are, not one of them is over 35 seconds long, and I suppose maybe the Digital Underground number might clock in at 37 seconds but what are you anyway a librarian? Yeah well same difference. How did you get this number? He hung up. I don't know about organists. Anyway I'm still Peter Schickele bringing you Schickele Mix in all its human fallibility from PRI, Public Radio International.
Now we've heard some short pieces. Let's talk about short notes. The Italian word staccato means detached and it's used to describe notes that are short and followed by rests. You have to have both conditions for it to be staccato. Here are a couple of notes that are followed by rests.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, String Quartet, Opus 59, No. 3; Les Quatuors a Cordes]
But those notes are not staccato because they're long, not short. That was Beethoven Opus 59 Number 3. Here, on the other hand, are some very short notes.
[music excerpt: Saint-Saëns, "Carnaval des Animaux"; Argerich/Freire/Kremer/Van Keulen/Maisky]
But they are not staccato, because each note is immediately connected to the next instead of being followed by a rest. That, by the way, was from the Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns. The necessary rest, by the way, is not always written out as a rest. A dot placed over or under a note indicates that the note should be played short, like that, which, unless the tempo is too fast, effectively means that there will be a rest after the note. Our next suite has three pieces in it.
The first features some of the shortest staccato playing I've ever heard in my life. The second piece alternates between staccato and long notes. And the third shows off some real virtuoso staccato playing on the violin. Not all the notes in these three pieces, by the way, are staccato, which is why I call it the rather detached suite. It lasts about six minutes.
[music: Stravinsky, Ebony Concerto, 1st Mvt.; Columbia Jazz Ensemble/Stravinsky]
[music: Saint-Saëns, “Carnaval des Animaux,” “Kangourous”; Argerich/Freire/Kremer/Van Keulen/Maisky]
The Rather Detached Suite had three numbers, the first of which was Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto. A piece he wrote for the Woody Herman Band, although here it's played by Benny Goodman in an unidentified big band. Stravinsky, as I mentioned in the introduction there, he loved staccato. That is, I mentioned that this piece had some of the shortest staccato playing I've ever heard.
And Stravinsky was famous for his staccato. There's a wonderful quote attributed to Ormandy somebody gave me a while ago. As a matter of fact, several people have given me a list of Ormandyisms. He is supposed to have said when rehearsing a Stravinsky piece, that was Stravinsky, poor fellow, he's dead now, play it legato. Legato means drawn out, it's the opposite of staccato.
Okay, the Ebony Concerto, first movement. Then we heard Kangaroos from Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals, and that was Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire on pianos, the only instruments playing in that particular movement.
And we ended with Hora Staccato, played by Jascha Heifetz, one of the great 20th century violinists, and that was one of his great favorites as an encore number, Dinicu-Heifetz, Hora Staccato. And I'd just like to make, as Nixon used to say, I'd like to make this perfectly clear. Those short notes there were very fast, and yet they were not connected to each other. Let me show you the opposite. Here is a bunch of short notes, but they're connected to each other. They are not staccato. This is from Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 59 No. 3.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, String Quartet, Opus 59, No. 3; Les Quatuors a Cordes]
Okay, now, here are some notes from the Heifetz that we just heard. They're about the same speed, but you'll notice that each note is detached. There's a little silence after each one. It's not literally a silence because of echo, but you can hear the difference that these notes have a pause after them.
That's staccato playing. The former is indicated in music, if you want to make sure that the violinists don't lift their bow after each note, you put "on the string,"
and that makes them leave the bow on, or you hope it does anyway. String players, a lot of string players just hate playing on the string. You've got to put it in big red letters. Anyway, I'm maligning string players. Don't get me wrong, I love string players. Okay, now, the rather detached suite featured musicians playing instruments that can produce long or short notes. Players in our last number have very little choice. When you play a violin, viola or cello pizzicato, that That means plucking the strings instead of bowing them.
The notes disappear very quickly. That is, they're automatically short. The sound lasts a bit longer if the string is open, if you don't use your left hand. But as soon as you use the fingers of your left hand to produce different pitches by stopping the strings, we're talking pretty short notes here, especially in a concert hall as opposed to a recording studio with mics a foot away from the instruments. We're going to end with a beautiful movement from one of the Bartók String Quartets, This is the fourth string quartet. The whole movement is pizzicato. The whole movement features the players plucking rather than bowing their instruments.
This is the Emerson string quartet playing the fourth movement of Bartok's string quartet number four.
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Bartok turning into Mozart. Our program is made possible with funds provided by this 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 program 31.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. Hey, you are looking good. See you next week.
[No speech for 310 s.]
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Schickele Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Schickele Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.