You're listening to member-supported public radio, WFIU Bloomington, broadcasting from Indiana University at 103.7, also heard on translator W264AL Columbus at 100.7, from Indiana University Kokomo on translator W291AM Kokomo at 106.1, and from Indiana State University on translator W236AE Terre Haute at 95.1. Schickele Mix is next. Are you ready, Peter?
Hey, like what's the hurry? Don't have a cow, man. Here's the theme.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
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 financially wise speaking, what's good is that our bills are paid by this radio station.
Have you ever felt nostalgia for something you never experienced?
When I think about the late 60s, I think much more than about the political confrontations and polarization. I think about the late afternoon light coming in the windows, sitting around on mattresses on the floor, maybe smoking a joint and listening to music for hours on end. In fact, going for days on end without worrying about the rest of the world, without thinking about accomplishing things or competing or trying to get ahead. In other words, dropping out of the rat race and digging the infinity of the moment.
The fact of the matter is, however, that I never did those things, at least not for very long, not for long enough to call it dropping out. I had too much of the work ethic installed in me for that. I experienced hippiedom here and there for a few hours at a time. I remember having a beer at a friend's house once. The beer was the icing on the cake, if you know what I mean.
We were sitting in silence at a table, and gradually we became aware that we were both trying to figure out the source of a strange, faint sound. It turned out to be the popping of the bubbles in the beer. Heightened consciousness. Artificially heightened consciousness. You know, I'm making fun of it, but it was nice. There's something to be said for chilling out, even though, or maybe because, it seemed easier to do then than it does now.
I must say I get impatient with people of my generation who put down the young adults of the 90s, saying they're only interested in finding a good job. Man, those of us who came of age in the 60s had it so good. It was so easy. A lot of us fell into jobs without half trying. One of the reasons the hippie movement flowered the way it did is that there was so much food on the table in those days that you could live on what fell off.
When I went to Juilliard in the late fifties, most students had their own apartments. Now everybody doubles or triples or quadruples up, and finding a decent job is a major accomplishment. It's no wonder that "turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream" now feels like quaint advice.
Nevertheless, we all know what stress can do to us, and trying to keep a little bit of the sixties around is not such a bad idea.
Today's program is called The Big Chill Out. Some people think that music should be rigorous, like an intellectual argument, or draining, cathartic, like a Greek tragedy. Then there are people who like music that's, well, just sort of there, like air conditioning. Well, the nice thing about life is that the rest of us don't have to choose. We can enjoy both extremes and everything in between. Now, although I've been known to say that the trouble with most New Age music is that it sounds like old-age music, there's no reason that a piece can't be relaxing and yet not devoid of interest, as we demonstrate with the Chill Out Suite No. 1. It has three movements, and I'll see you in a little under 11 minutes.
[music: Sebastian/Yanovsky, "Coconut Grove" (Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful); Lovin' Spoonful]
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Orchestral Suite No. 3, Air; Philadelphia Orchestra/Ormandy]
The Chill Out Suite No. 1. We began with Eric Satie's Gymnopédie No. 3, the third of the three Gymnopédies that he wrote in 1888. And you have to have some idea of musical chronology to realize how amazing that is.
1888 was the heyday of Wagner and Brahms, big harmonies, big orchestras, everything was big, and these pieces are so simple, so transparent, and so spare, they became extremely influential later on, but it's just amazing that he wrote them in 1888, and that was Aldo Ciccolini playing the third Gymnopédie.
Then we have, from one of my favorite albums, Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful, we have the tune called Coconut Grove. "It's really true how nothing matters, no mad, mad world, no mad hatters. There's no one pitchin' 'cause there ain't no batters in Coconut Grove." Now Coconut Grove isn't the world at large, but it's nice if we can get in a place like that once in a while, for a little while anyway. John Sebastian and the Lovin' Spoonful.
And then we ended with one of Bach's greatest hits, as they say these days. The Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 used to be called the Air for the G-string because a famous violinist used to play the whole thing on the bottom string of the violin. And that was Eugene Ormandy conducting the string section of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the second half, you notice he got very emotional there. He really made it get louder and softer and got very emotional, which does decrease its chill-out quotient, but Ormandy wasn't thinking about that. I'm Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
So what makes a good chill-out piece, a good trancy, turn-off-your-mind piece? All the pieces in that first suite were slow. Is that what it is? Nope. Here's some slow music that I don't think anybody would put in the chill-out category.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32; Maurizio Pollini]
Beethoven, Opus 111. It's too changeable, starty and stoppy. You never know what's going to happen next. Too irregular.
Okay, here's something that's both slow and regular.
That's never going to chill me out. R2-D2 maybe, but not me. That's from Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques, Exotic Birds, and it's too loud, too jagged, too punchy. By the way, I want to make it clear here that we're not talking about good and bad. I like Oiseaux Exotiques a lot. We're talking about what makes a piece relaxing, if that's what you're in the mood for. Now here's a piece that isn't loud,
[music excerpt: Randall, "Quartets in Pairs"]
But it is a bit on the disjunct side, not to mention funny sounding.
Some computer music by J. K. Randall called Quartets in Paris [sic]. Now I think we've isolated a couple of qualities that seem pretty necessary for chill-out music. Regularity and smoothness. You want to have a certain amount of predictability and it's hard to imagine a chill-out piece featuring short notes. They're always going to sound punchy. Now you know I cheated a bit back there in the Bach Suite by playing a version by Ormandy. Here, let me put that on again.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Orchestral Suite No. 3, Air; Philadelphia Orchestra/Ormandy]
In the first place, there's no harpsichord in it, which Bach would have had.
And the string orchestra is huge by Bach's standards.
There may be as many as 26 violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos, and 6 basses, whereas he would have had maybe just a couple on each part, maybe only one. And everything is played very continuously. Now, listen to John Eliot Gardiner conducting the same piece with the English Baroque soloists.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Orchestral Suite No. 3, Air; English Baroque Soloists/Gardiner]
That clangy thing is the harpsichord.
Right away makes it a little bit less dreamy, and there are fewer strings, so the sound is somewhat less silken, which is fine. Actually, I think I prefer this sound.
Now, did you hear that? By making some of the melody notes short, he creates a texture that is more dramatic but less sustained than Ormandy's. By the way, you know, this is just how it seems to me. You may have a completely different metabolism. Here, this may be your idea of chill-out music.
[music excerpt: Stockhausen, "Klavierstück VIII (1954)"; David Burge]
Kick off your shoes, open a can of beer. Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Stockster, Piano Piece No. 8. Oh yeah, music for men who are loved by women who love mathematicians who think they're musicians.
[music excerpt: Stockhausen, "Klavierstück VIII (1954)"; David Burge]
Just kidding, folks. Or am I? I'll bet you think I know. Hey, by the way, I can't resist reading some of the liner notes here. This is not from the Stockhausen, but I want you to listen to these liner notes right here. We're talking about a different world here. It says, "Unlike my previous work, which has typically arisen from a primary level of elaborately structured pitch-time configurations true even of the computer part of my lyric variations for violin and computer, notwithstanding its complex expressions of the idea of pitch and notwithstanding the tendency of its gradually evolving individual sound events to trivialize the idea of attack point, Quartersines arises from a primary level of elaborately structured glissando shapes whose elements are the four quarters of a sine wave, and whose expressions within various pitch boundaries over various durations, etc., are supposed to articulate the evolving shape structure."
I couldn't agree more.
So what have we figured out here? For most of us, good chill-out music has to be fairly regular or predictable, but not too much so, or it gets boring, which is not the same as relaxing. It has to be fairly smooth or continuous. Maybe it has to be not too loud, although that's probably more of a generational thing. And, well, how about speed? It seems to me that although it probably can't be very fast and still be relaxing, it doesn't have to be slow, as is demonstrated in the Chill Out Suite No. 2. All three of these pieces have a lot of notes per minute, yet they have a certain serenity, which comes, I think, from the fact that they are quite static in terms of texture and harmony. I'll be back in about twelve and a half minutes.
[music excerpt: Riley, "A Rainbow In Curved Air"; Terry Riley]
[music: Poulenc, Trois Mouvements Perpetuels, No. 1; Pascal Roge]
[music: Berry, "Havana Moon" (Levon Helm & The RCO All-Stars); Levon Helm & The RCO All-Stars]
But to go back to the beginning of the Chill Out Suite No. 2, we started with Terry Riley, an excerpt from A Rainbow in Curved Air, which is the whole side of one LP. And he used to have a setup, I don't know if he still does this anymore, where he could perform in public with all sorts of tape delays and get a very complicated sound in live performance. I'm not saying he didn't do any overdubbing on this album, I don't know, but he used to be able to get a very complicated sound performing live. A Rainbow in Curved Air.
And then we had Poulenc, the first of his Trois Mouvements Perpétuels, Three Perpetual Motions, and that little piece is a piece that used to be played by pianists all the time, it was very popular, I haven't heard anybody play it for years now. It's funny about that, you know, I remember a story where Andre Watts wanted to play the Moonlight Sonata in one of his New York recitals, and his management said, come on, you can't play the Moonlight Sonata. That's such a warhorse. Everybody plays the Moonlight Sonata all the time. And Andre Watts said, you show me the last time a pianist played the Moonlight Sonata in a professional hall in New York. People started looking through the programs. They couldn't find it. They couldn't find it. People avoided it so much that nobody ever played, but it is, after all, a beautiful piece. Okay, anyway, Poulenc, and the pianist there was Pascal Rogé and then finally Levon Helm and the RCO All-Stars, performing Havana Moon, Peter Schickele is my name and Schickele Mix is my game, from PRI, Public Radio International.
But for most of us, it doesn't do to chill out all the time. Not only do we have to take care of business, but we want to partake in the pleasures of bumptiousness as well as repose, stoke up the fire, get the adrenaline flowing and shimmy on down the road. So here's the Busy Busy Busy Suite, three pieces that are full of nervous energy and, compared to the earlier music on this program, unpredictability. No looking over the shoulder as these tunes truck along to their conclusions, which it takes them about nine minutes to do.
[music: J. S. Bach, Fifteen Sinfonias, No. 8; Kenneth Gilbert]
[music: Parker, "Chi Chi" (Now’s the Time); The Quartet of Charlie Parker]
Busy, busy, busy. The first number in our Busy Busy Busy Suite was the Dixie Dregs doing their tune Free Fall, from a Capricorn album of the same name, and then we had Bach, the eighth of his three-part inventions, Sinfonien is what he called them, they're very often called inventions to match the two-part inventions he wrote, No. 8 in F, with Kenneth Gilbert playing the harpsichord, a distinctly non-chill-out instrument to my ear.
And then finally, Charlie Parker, doing his own tune, Chi Chi, and that had Percy Heath on bass, Max Roach on drums, Al Haig on piano. And that nice little quick ending, it's over. So many jazz cuts, you know, nobody wants to end, they go to the end, they go
[sung: Schickele vocally improvises a jazz cacophony]
It's something about, you know, don't want to end it. It's like my daughter, when she was little, she'd never drink all of a cup of juice or milk or something. She left a little bit. Was that to have more the next time or something like that? I don't know. That's not a very good analogy. And it's Tidbit Time. Usually our tidbit is something that's fairly unknown and off the wall.
Well, this time it's something that can certainly be called off the wall, if a piece can be both moving and off the wall, but it's very well known, The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives, written in 1906. Like most, if not all, of Ives' music, it did not receive regular performances until after World War II, at which point it became an extremely influential piece.
Many, many composers of the second half of the 20th century were influenced by the independence of the groups in this piece. We're hearing it now because it combines the extremes of this program. Serenity in the strings and increasingly frenetic activity in the flutes. The questioning trumpet floats between the poles. Its music is slow like that of the strings, but tonally free like that of the flutes.
John Adams conducts the Orchestra of St. Luke's in Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question.
[music: Ives, "The Unanswered Question"; Orchestra of St. Luke's/Adams]
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
Charles Ives shows us that the question doesn't have to be answered. And Mozart's 24th Symphony brings Schickele Mix to a close 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. This is program number 37. 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. You're looking good. See you next week.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
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.