Johannes Brahms' birthday is Sunday, and tomorrow evening on Adventures in Good Music,
Carl Haas features some music of Brahms, which he says reveals a double identity as both a classicist and a romanticist. That's tomorrow evening on Adventures in Good Music.
Here on the classical stations, members supported WQED-FM Pittsburgh at 89.3 and WQEJ Johnstone 89.7, WQED Multimedia.
Now stay tuned for Shickley Mix. Peter, are you ready?
Oh, of course I'm ready. 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.
Shickley Mix is the show that plays everything from William Byrd to Charlie Parker, although neither one of them is represented on today's program, which is called A Musical Aviary.
And it's taking off thanks to seed money, you get it, provided by this high-flying radio station. We're going to start off with about 39 seconds of solo piccolo music.
Here are two pieces from a set collected in 1717 called The Bird Fancier's Delight,
and if you're like me, you'll enjoy them, but make an incorrect assumption about why they were written.
Two pieces from The Bird Fancier's Delight, played by Lawrence Trott. And if you assumed that they are part of the large repertoire of music that imitates birds,
you are about 180 degrees wrong. These pieces were written to teach to birds. Training songbirds was very popular in the 18th century. In fact, Mozart had...
He had a pet starling that could learn to sing melodies that Mozart wrote for it. Is there anything Mozart didn't write for? Anyway, imitation between humans and birds goes both ways.
But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, birds certainly get flattered a lot more often than humans. Our first suite today is a vocal one, four songs about birds.
The first one is in English, but it's very contrapuntal. The voices move independently, which makes for a certain amount of diction friction. So I'll read the words.
The nightingale, the organ of delight, the nimble lark, the blackbird and the thrush, and all the pretty choirsters of flight that chant their music notes in every bush.
Let them no more contend who shall excel. The cuckoo is the bird who bears the bell. And then the second song is in Spanish, and the translation reads...
It's right here. I bought a hen and chicks for five duros.
Cro-clo, cro-clo, cro-clo.
I bought it in the morning, and in the afternoon it lost its way. My dear neighbors who live around me, have you seen a hen yesterday which lost its way in the afternoon? I am not sorry about the hen or the money which it cost me.
I am only sorry for the poor chicks who are left without a mother. The other two songs are in English and pretty intelligible. The All About Birds song cycle lasts close to...
I'll see you then.
The cuckooRay
The plight bus
The blackbird and the thrush
And all the pretty choirsters of flight That chant their music notes in every bush That chant their music notes in every bush
Let them... Let them no more contend, who shall excel?
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, who cares the better?
Who cares the better? Who cares the better?
Let them no more contend, who shall excel? Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, who cares the better? Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, who cares the better?
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, who cares the better?
I don't feel the hen nor the money, Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, who cares the better?
I only feel the chicks that they were left without their mother
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, who cares the better?
I said the leather wingman I'll tell you the reason that The reason that I fly by night I've lost my heart's delight
Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day Hey-lee-lee and a lali-oh
I said the morning dove
I'll tell you how to regain your love
Quarter night, quarter day
Never give a time to say your name I said the owl, his head so white Another day and a lonesome night
Thought I heard a pretty girl say She'd quarter all night and sleep all day Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day
Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day Hey-lee-lee and a lali-oh Hey said the red bird sitting on a chair
Once I quartered a lady fair She got saucy and she fled
Ever since then my head's been red Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day
Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day
Hey-lee-lee and a lali-oh
I said the black bird sitting on a bench
Once I quartered a handsome wen
She got fickle and turned her back
Ever since then I've dressed in black
I said the blue bird as he flew If I were a young man I'd have two One got saucy and one to go
I'd have a new string to my bow I said the jaybird sitting in a tree
He too got saucy and took to flight
The one that's left don't treat me right Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day And a diddle-um-a-day
Lali-lo and a diddle-um-a-day
Hey-lee-lee and a lali-oh
When rose the eastern star
The birds came from afar In that full night of glory
With one melodious voice They sang a lullaby for me They sweetly did rejoice
And sang the wondrous story
Sang, praising God on high And roamed above the sky
And his fair mother Mary
The eagle left his lair
His past eyes seeing
And his joyous frown The sparrow maid replants
Her sweetly voicing For come Lord Death on strike
This night is the new life The robin sang rejoicing
When rose the eastern star
Came from afar
The All About Birds Song Cycle We began with the King's Singers from their album Madrigal Collection a beautiful piece by Wilkes
called the Nightingale the Organ of Delight for three voices and then we had Jermaine Montero singing from an album called Songs of Spain
and this is a song from Castile called Coro-Clo-Clo but you can work on it then we've got Peggy Seeger this old ten inch LP of mine
and I can't help but I just like it so sorry about the quality and that was Leatherwing Bat and for the purposes of this video and this program we're considering a bird
and then finally Joan Baez from Noel The Carol of the Birds also a Spanish folk song which was very much associated with Pablo Casals
who used to play a cello version this is from Joan Baez's album Noel which is the first of the three albums that I had the pleasure of arranging for her
there are several major changes in scientific understanding that have taken place in my lifetime now I'm talking about changes that can be understood by a layman with a somewhat sloping forehead
I can remember for instance decades ago reading an article poo-pooing this new theory called plate tectonics the theory that the Earth's crust consists of a bunch of separate plates that are moving around
and... okay, okay, okay I like to think that this program appeals to people who have a wide range of interests but I am a slave to the irrelevancy alarm
up there on the wall anyway another theory that is really intriguing although not as universally accepted I think posits a very close relationship between dinosaurs and modern birds
there are those who think that at least some of the dinosaurs not only were warm-blooded but may have had feathers instead of lizard-type skin I have a little house up in the Catskin and one day recently
I was walking down a road when all of a sudden a whole bunch of wild turkeys came out of the brush just a little bit ahead of me most of them ran right across the road but one I guess a pretty stupid one
ran straight down the road in front of me I... okay, hey, hey, hey, hey okay, look this program's about birds, right? turkeys are birds bear with me now you know, wild turkeys are quite different
from those big old Thanksgiving guys the bodies of wild turkeys are shaped more like a bullet than a beach ball and they have long necks and small heads and I had a little epiphany there watching that turkey run in front of me
I had a moment when I saw that turkey as a dinosaur those reptilian chicken feet that football-shaped body with the long neck and the stupid little head it was a miniature dinosaur, man
that's all there was to it and on the basis of that research I'm definitely a subscriber to that theory now, a lot of bird music is dainty and skittish but our next suite has birds in it
whose sounds range from the sorrowful to the sassy not to mention the dinosaurically bombastic the birds in the orchestra suite has three movements and lasts about seven and a half minutes
after which we'll meet again
the birds in the orchestra suite Messiaen, Ravel, and Respite
The orchestra in the Messiaen was the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vaclav Neumann and the solo pianist was Ivan Loriot
Ivan Loriot was very much associated with Messiaen played all his piano music and it was wonderful to see her come out and play one of these bird pieces this piece is called Rêve des oiseaux
The Awakening of the Birds and because when she was a child when she came out in the first place she looks like a bird she had a long beaky nose and then the name Loriot means aureole
so it's just too perfect and then of course she just plays like a dream bird this is one of a bunch of pieces that Messiaen has written around birds
and he notates these calls as precisely as he can and unlike a lot of dainty little bird pieces he gets these mad, mad jungles and he just keeps the jingles going
and that unfortunately is just a part of a longer piece The Awakening of the Birds way back in the early 60s one of the years that I was at Aspen there at the music festival
Messiaen was the composer in residence and they were playing a bunch of his pieces and so for the humorous concert at the end of the summer that we used to give we did a piece called Cauchemar des oiseaux
The Nightmare of the Birds and we got about eight instrumentalists up there on the stage and Lawrence Smith came out and started conducting and everybody, instead of playing their instruments simply went
did all sorts of bird calls, whatever they could and he conducted away and at one point one of the musicians, the flutist got up and he walked over to extreme stage left right down by the curtain there and he starts playing
and on that third one the flute flew up above the stage into the flies, playing as it went because we actually had another flutist right behind the curtain who was doing the playing
and the flutist on stage, he looks up there and he looks at the conductor and he looks up again, looks at the audience and at that point an egg falls on his head I was the one up in the flies
I had to drop the egg, pull the flute up and drop the egg and I learned something that summer and that is that no matter how sophisticated your audience there's nothing like good old visual, physical humor
I'm telling you that egg was the talk of Aspen for the rest of the summer then the second number on our suite was Ravel from the beautiful opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges The Child and the Sorcerers
Andre Previn was conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the beginning of the garden scene there where the child finds himself out in the garden
and then the third piece was from Raspighi's suite for a small orchestra called The Birds and this was The Hen based on an 18th century piece by Rameau
all the pieces in this suite are very colorful arrangements of earlier pieces that was the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields directed by Sir Neville Mariner
I'm Peter Schickely, this is Schickely Mix from PRI, Public Radio, London. The next piece we're going to hear is one of my own it's a serious piece
but it's got a sort of funny story attached to it I mentioned that I've got a place in the Catskills and one summer morning in 1982 I woke up very early and as I woke up I gradually realized
that I was hearing an especially beautiful bird call it was a call that had short melodic segments that the bird would repeat in different orders with a long pause between
there were about seven maybe fragments the fragments would be the same but the order in which the bird would repeat them would be different he went on singing for a long time and gradually began to fade away
he was obviously flying from tree to tree as he got farther away and I realized I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep so I got up, I went to my desk and I notated the call
I figured someday I'll write a piccolo concerto or something and I'll use this beautiful bird call well, at a couple of minutes after nine o'clock I got a call from my then manager
and Bill told me that there had been a complete hassle complete crisis at the bank with our bank account, the business bank account and the bank was bouncing checks
and the thing is that for once it wasn't my fault I'm very capable of messing those things up but in this case the money was there it was their fault but they had bounced several checks including one for a brand new insurance policy
you know that really goes away over well so the rest of the day was spent trying to iron this out calls back and forth and everything it was a terrible day
and then finally by about four o'clock things had been resolved the bank admitted it was their fault so they weren't going to bounce any more checks and things seemed to be under control I went off to play tennis with some friends when I got back for supper
my wife said, call Bill looks like you've got a commission for a string quartet so I called Bill up and he said, well there's a string quartet that wants you to write a piece for them I said, what's the quartet? he said, the Audubon Quartet
well, what could I do? I looked up at the sky I said, okay, okay, I get the message the day had started with a notation of this beautiful bird call and it ended with a commission from the Audubon Quartet
that bird call was obviously not going to wait for a piccolo concerto it was going to end up in this quartet the piece that resulted from that commission was my first string quartet, subtitled American Dreams
and we're going to hear the third movement Music at Dawn and the bird call is in the first violin you'll hear it at the beginning and the end of the movement and it is as close as I could make it
to the way the bird actually sang it
Music at Dawn the third movement of the string quartet number one American Dreams by the less and less young American composer Peter Shigley that was the Audubon String Quartet
now, I couldn't believe it when I looked at the paper today here I am doing a show on birds, right? and what's in the paper? here it is headline is
Pretty Songbird is Poisonous to Predators toppling traditional notions of how birds defend themselves scientists have discovered the first known point in the history of birds Poisonous bird a brilliant orange and black creature
whose feathers and skin are laced with a potent toxin that is thought to deter predators it says the biologists believe the poison works by instantly repelling any snake, hawk, or other predator
that so much as licks one of the bird's feathers the toxin apparently is the same as that frog in South America has that the Amazonian hunters use
to get the poison for the tips of their blow darts now, are you ready for the name of this bird? this bird is called the Pitouhi no, it's right here in the newspaper
P-I-T-O-U-H-I Pitouhi and that seems like a suitable lead-in to the Aren't Birds Cute? suite it has four movements in it
representing the bluebird the hummingbird the nightingale and the cuckoo the natural habitat of the birds in this suite centers around the area known as Upper Kitch
I'll be back in about nine and a half minutes
before starting this show Ruut Ruut Ruut Ruut Ruut
Ruut
¶¶
That was the Aren't Birds Cute Suite. We began with Janacek, the March of the Bluebirds,
which was apparently a group that he belonged to as a child. This was later used in his woodwind piece, Youth. And I have to apologize to Janacek.
I don't think this piece really is around the area of Uppercitch. It's considerably above that. Then we had the group Nexus,
which is a percussion group with a solo xylophonist named Bob Becker. And it's from an album called Nexus Plays the Novelty Music of George H. Green,
who was one of those old vaudeville musicians, and that was the Hummingbird. The third item in our suite was from a fascinating album called Bells, Birds, and Thunder.
And this is stuff from Baroque organs, special stops and special noisemakers. You know, we tend to associate that kind of thing. Or at least I do, with theater organs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But it goes way back. In this case, this was a piece by Martini, Padre Martini, who was a teacher of Mozart. And this piece is called Pastoral.
And it has a tremulant stop, a tremolo stop, that actually makes it sound sort of like a duck or a goose. And then the nightingale, that bird you heard in there, was actually a sound being made by the organ.
And it was so realistic. That people apparently used to look around in the church and try to see where the birds had gotten in. And then finally, an album called Folk Music from the Tyrolean Alps with the Engelkinder.
The Engelkinder are the children of the Engel family, the angel family. And there are seven kids in this family and two parents, and they all play a variety of instruments.
I must say, they play them quite well. And they were playing a tune called the cuckoo. And I must say, I do have to apologize for the sound of that album. I think that was one of my sidewalk purchases.
But hey, you take it where you can get it. I'm Peter Shickley. This is Shickley Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
An awful lot of the bird imitations in music are at least playful, if not downright humorous. And that's especially true of the cuckoo. What with its association with craziness and all.
But before we open up the windows of our musical aviary and let our birds know that we're here, and let everybody fly away, I'd like to introduce you to two serious birds. The first is an imaginary bird who can perhaps see into the future.
The composer calls it the prophet bird. And the second of these pieces is part of a larger work that is primarily humorous. But this movement, to me, is actually quite a haunting evocation
of a cuckoo deep in the woods. I'll be back in about five and a half minutes.
I'll be right back.
The Prophet Bird
Two serious birds. The first, the prophet bird, which is from Robert Schumann's Forest Scenes that was played by Clara Haskell. And then, from The Carnival of the Animals by the band The Prophet Bird,
by Saint-Saëns, The Cuckoo Deep in the Woods. And that was from a Phillips album featuring Marta Augrich and Nelson Freire on piano.
And the clarinetist was Edward Brunner. Well, the time to fly is drawing nigh. Why don't I go over here and open up this window and let everybody go home.
Can't get this thing.
There. There.
And that's Shickley Mix for 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 and this is program number 33. This is Peter Shickley 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 Shickley Mix.
That way you can get a copy of the original album that's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Shickley Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A,
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403.
PRI, Public Radio International.