Anybody who says I'm not is a liar. 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 let me tell you, it's good to know that our bills are being paid by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the Ford Foundation, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also by this upstanding station right here on your radio dial.
Today's program is called Varieties of Organic Experience. The title refers not to different vegetables in a healthy garden, nor to notches on the holistic pistol of life, but rather to the alleged king of instruments, the organ. Or, I guess in these politically correct days, we should say the ruler of instruments. But that sounds like something they use at Steinway to see if it's a seven-foot grand or a nine-foot grand.
Emperor of Instruments is sort of hard to say. Czar of Instruments? Pope of Instruments has obvious problems. How about Top Dog of Instruments? Or maybe the CEO of Instruments? Well, it's probably beside the point anyway. The synthesizer may have usurped whatever title we come up with. After all, the synthesizer...
Okay, okay, I'm not even gonna answer. Okay, can the calls, folks? I wasn't really serious. Everybody knows that nothing could ever take the place of the mogul of instruments. Boy, organists are, well, they're a breed apart. I studied composition at Juilliard with Vincent Persichetti, who was an organist as well as a composer, and he said to me once, You know, Peter, organists and librarians don't sweat. There is something a bit alien about organists. But nice, and very proficient. No other instrument engages as much of your body when you play it as does an organ with pedals.
Well, I guess a one-man band. But a one-man band is to a large pipe organ what a sideshow is to the circus. And believe me, a large pipe organ is a three-ring circus. It consists of several keyboards, including a pedal keyboard, hooked up to hundreds of pipes capable of producing a great variety of timbres or tone colors.
You select the timbre you want by pushing tabs and buttons or pulling plungers that are situated above, beneath, and beside the keyboards. You can mix different kinds of pipes to get combination timbres, and you can couple pipes in such a way that any note you play will be accompanied by the same note an octave above or an octave below or two octaves above or two octaves below.
On a big organ, you can set up a registration that will enable you, by pushing one single key on one keyboard, to produce an ear-splitting sound whose notes encompass the entire range of the piano keyboard. And talk about power. No wonder organists are a bit out there. It's bound to go to your head.
Now, of course, we're talking about traditional pipe organs here. There are many kinds of organs in the musical body, and we're going to hear several of them on today's program starting right now. Varieties of Organic Experience 1 has three numbers, and I'll be back in about ten and a half minutes.
[music: Handel, Organ Concerto in D Minor, Opus 7, No. 4, 1st Mvt.; Simon Preston/The English Concert/Pinnock]
[music: Ebb/Kander, "Cabaret" (Here’s Bubbles); Marilyn Libbin]
Varieties of Organic Experience 1. We began with a movement from a concerto by Handel, the Concerto in D Minor, Opus 7, No. 4, the first movement, that fantastic sombre sonority of divided bassoons and cellos.
By the way you know that whole concerto let me just take a look here that whole concerto lasts 16 minutes about and you know if you think symphony orchestra concerts are long now they are nothing compared to what they were a couple centuries ago Handel wrote his organ concertos to be played between acts of his oratorios gives you an idea of how long they went on then we had Crosby, Stills & Nash, Marrakesh Express and of course that was a little electric organ with a sort of an oboe near Eastern oboe sound and an electric organ of that kind the tones are actually electrically generated it's really a completely different thing from the kind of organ we were talking about before but they're still grouped together because the music sounds similar they sustain notes they can change quality as if they had stops the same way as a regular pipe organ then we had from an album called Here's Bubbles, Cabaret, played by Marilyn Bubbles-Libbin on the mighty Wurlitzer Theatre Organ at Cincinnati's Emery Theatre, where, at the time this recording was made, she'd been having a wide-open love affair with that organ for the past two years.
And a theater organ is just a big pipe organ, but all the connections are electric. In the first place, there's a lot of vibrato, and then also it usually has a lot of percussion stuff hooked up to it, drums, bells, even sound effects sometimes, like car horn, police whistle. Now, if you listen to that carefully, you'll notice that the drum type effects, the snare drum, there was a tambourine in there, you know, if you have an orchestra and you have somebody playing tambourine, they might go They do a particular rhythm that may not be the same as the melody, but if you listen to that, you'll find that the tambourine does the same rhythm as the melody.
Why? Because the tambourine is simply hooked up to that keyboard, and every time that the player plays a note, in addition to the actual pitch, the note of the melody, you also get the tambourine. So the percussion parts on a theater organ are very much related to the melody parts. Or they can be hooked up to a pedal, so you get a bass drum going boom, boom, boom, every time you play a bass note with the pedal.
My mother is old enough to have played organ for silent movies in the 20s. She played piano. She was not primarily an organist. But once in a while, somebody would get sick, and she would get called in to play for silent movies. And she remembers one incident. Of course, you never got to see the movie first. And she was playing and she didn't know that Well, she was sort of grabbing for stops and hoping that things would turn out okay and looking up at the screen and there was this love scene going on and as the man and woman, as their lips got closer and closer together, just at the moment of the kiss, she reached for a stop and played a note and it turned out to be the bass drum and cymbal stop. The humor was unappreciated by the theater manager. I'm her son, Peter Schickele. The show is Schickele Mix on APR.
The pipe organ is a wind instrument. Some of the pipes have reeds, as oboes do, and some have fipples, as recorders do, but they're all activated by wind.
One of the reasons you see so many kids hanging out on the street these days with nothing but time on their hands is because the harnessing of electricity has made it unnecessary to have someone pumping the bellows while an organ is being played.
Every time old Johann Sebastian Bach sat down to play the organ, somebody was back there pumping air. Often it was a schoolboy, but not always. I recently saw an old print, an old engraving, showing an organist and his wife. He was playing a small organ, and guess what? She was in back of it working the bellows. Figures, right? Behind every great organ... Actually, the young J. S. Bach got into trouble once for having a woman in church with him late at night, and she might not have been working the bellows. But he ended up marrying her, so I guess it was okay.
I mentioned studying with Persichetti. When I got married, his wife took my wife aside and gave her a bit of advice. Never learn how to copy music. My daughter has made a point of never learning how to type. Well, electricity freed people from having to work the organ bellows, and soon it'll free them from having to write down music and words.
The computer is ready and willing to take over. In the case of organ bellows, there was an ingenious alternative before electricity. Water. Either by having pressure supplied hydraulically through the use of gravity, or by having a fan hooked up to a water wheel outside the church. Pretty nifty, huh? As they say in the Navy, where there's a will, there's anchors away. Okay, here comes Varieties of Organic Experience 2.
The first number features a full-blooded 19th century church organ, the second uses the modern small electric organ, and the last piece is a song accompanied by one of the most modest forms of the organ, the harmonium, in which the bellows are worked by the player's knees or feet. See you in about 12 and a half minutes.
[music: Widor, Symphony No. 5 in F Minor, Opus 42, No. 1 for Organ, Toccata; Daniel Chorzempa]
[music: Glass, "Ange des Orages" (North Star); Philip Glass]
[music: Sebastian, "The Room Nobody Lives In" (John B. Sebastian); John Sebastian]
Varieties of Organic Experience 2. We began with Charles-Marie Widor, his Symphony No. 5 in F Minor for organ. That was the fifth movement, a toccata. And I don't know if other composers used that terminology, but he wrote large pieces in symphonic form and called them symphonies, even though they're for organ alone.
The symphony orchestra was the instrument of the 19th century and it's particularly fitting that he should write a symphony for organ because organ makers in the 19th century tried to build organs that imitated symphony orchestras, tried to make them sound as much like orchestras and orchestral instruments as possible. That toccata is a real rabble rouser. Also some of those arpeggios, those broken up chords, [hums an arpeggio figure] sound an awful lot to me, like Philip Glass.
Who was the composer of the next item in this suite? Philip Glass from the album North Star, which is music he wrote for a movie about a sculptor. And this was called Ange des Orages, which I believe means Angel of the Storms. I assume that's the name of one of the sculptures, probably. And it certainly has a twisting windblown sound that makes you wonder if it isn't something that revolves. I don't know.
But the interesting thing about Philip Glass here is I ran into him at a performance of his opera about Gandhi, whose title I can never pronounce, and it was one of his, I believe, one of his first orchestra pieces. He'd written very much for his own group, which consisted, as in this recording, mostly of organ and a couple of saxophone sounds, perhaps, and some singing.
I forgot to mention, in this one, we hear Farfisa, Yamaha, and Hammond organs, maybe Fender Rhodes piano, although I'm not sure he used it in that cut.
And he loved the sound of the little rock and roll organs that were developed during the 60s. I used to be in a band that had one of those Farfisa organs, too. I loved that sound. And during the period when the musical establishment was completely turning its back on Philip Glass' music and not having anything to do with him, he had his own group to perform his own music and people in the group liked that music and performed it well.
And when I ran into him at this performance of the Gandhi Opera, where there was a regular orchestra in the pit, he said, you know, all during the 19th century, they were building organs, trying to make them imitate orchestras. Well, I'm trying to write for orchestras so that it sounds like organs. And he succeeded in doing that.
And then the last one was John Sebastian's song, The Room Nobody Lives In, from his album John B. Sebastian, and that was John accompanying himself on the harmonium, and there was, I think, also a string bass in there, doubling the bass line. Yes, it was played by Ray Neapolitan.
I'm Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix on APR.
There is another non-electric alternative to wives and water wheels for providing air pressure, and that is steam. The calliope is principally an outdoor organ that was supposedly invented in the 19th century. It originally had a boiler at one end to build up steam pressure to send air through the pipes, and it became associated with circuses and, not surprisingly, steamboats.
Calliope keyboards are rather limited. There are no pedals, and you usually have to settle for one sonority and one dynamic level, usually very, very loud. Otherwise, it's a great instrument. As I said, it was invented, according to the usual suspects, in the 19th century, but my discovery of the manuscript of P. D. Q. Bach's Toot Suite in C Minor for Calliope Four Hands means that Grove's Dictionary and everyone else are almost certainly wrong, since P. D. Q. lived only seven years into the 19th century.
It's Tidbit Time, and we will now hear the Fuga Vulgaris from P. D. Q. Bach's Toot Suite for Calliope Four Hands, played on an indoor chamber calliope by the great four-handed organist, Emmanuel Pedal.
[music: P. D. Q. Bach, Fugue in C Minor (from the “Toot Suite for calliope four hands”); Emmanuel Pedal]
The Fuga Vulgaris from the Toot Suite by P. D. Q. Bach, performed by Emmanuel Pedal on the album P. D. Q. Bach on the Air. You know, I made that album back in 1967, when Vanguard Records had a studio just a few doors from the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street in New York City. Country Joe and the Fish were making an album there during the same period, and since they lived in California, they were staying at the Chelsea.
I was told that they were in one of their breaking up modes, and that they weren't speaking to each other, so each one of them would come into the studio, record his part, and leave before the next one showed up. Could be. Certainly technically possible. A lot of albums were made that way, even if everybody was good friends.
Anyway, they had rented this little electric calliope for a number I think was called the Vietnam Rag, and I started fooling around with it and fell in love with it, and promptly went home and discovered the manuscript to that fugue. Old P. D. Q. rarely lets me down.
Well, here we are. A lot of wind has gone through the pipes, a lot of electricity has gone through the wires, but we haven't heard from three composers whom I and a lot of other people consider to be giants in the history of organ music. So let's call this suite Three Giants. It lasts about ten and a half minutes. And if you're not driving, try shutting your eyes during the middle one.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Concerto in E-Flat, BWV 597; Hans Fagius]
[music: Messiaen, "L'Ascension," "Alléluias sereins d'une âme qui désire le ciel"; Louis Thiry]
[music: Hudson/Mills/Parish, "The Organ Grinder’s Swing" (The Incredible Jimmy Smith); Jimmy Smith]
Three Giants in the field of organ music. First we heard the Gigue from Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto in E-flat Major, and this means a concerto for organ alone, no orchestra. And that was played by Hans Fagius on the reconstructed 1724 Cahman organ in the Kristine Church in Falun, Sweden.
Then we heard a piece by Olivier Messiaen, one of the great organists and organ composers of this century, a piece called L'Ascension, The Ascension. The second movement, Alléluias sereins d'une âme qui désire le ciel, which I believe means serene alleluias of a soul that desires heaven.
Messiaen orchestrated this piece. Actually, I think the third movement he changed and rewrote for the orchestra, but the others are orchestrations of this organ music. And I want to tell you that the Fargo-Moorhead Community Orchestra, which certain people snickered at in the East when I was going into college, played that piece in about 1949. It's a beautiful piece in the orchestral version, too, and I very much wish that it were available on recording, as far as I know it isn't.
And then finally, we had Jimmy Smith playing the Hammond B-3 in a tune called The Organ Grinder's Swing. The Hammond B3, by the way, one of the things that gives it that characteristic sound is the Leslie speaker. The sound from that organ comes out through a speaker which actually revolves, so that it's actually an acoustic sort of vibrato. You're actually hearing the sound being thrown around the room as you listen.
He's a fantastic organist, and listening you may not realize what he's doing, how much he's doing. He's doing the bass line, for instance, and the bass line in jazz tends to be very independent of what is going on in the other parts. And more than that, he's doing the bass line with basically, if I may be permitted a little word play there, one foot, because the right foot is using the volume pedal for expression.
Now let me remind you, or point out to you, that in an organ, unlike a piano, if you hit the key hard, the note is no louder than if you hit the key soft. The key simply operates the mechanism which allows the air to go into the pipe. You can bang an organ keyboard as hard as you want and it won't be a bit louder.
Now, the electric organ, the Hammond B-3, has an expression pedal, and you push that down and it gets louder. But we're talking here not about just whole sections, where you want to be loud for the whole section, soft this section, we're talking about dee-da, a phrase like that, dee-da, the second note is softer than the first. You couldn't do that on a regular pipe organ. But with the Hammond organ you can do that with the right pedal, It's a simple pedal, but that means that your right foot is constantly doing that expression pedal within each phrase, while the left foot is doing that bassline, and then that still leaves you two hands to think about on top.
By the way, you know, I mentioned three great organ composers. Jimmy Smith didn't write that tune, Hudson, Mills, and Parish did. But the written-out part of a jazz cut like that is a very small percentage of the whole thing. The rest is improvised, which means that any true jazz player is a composer, an on-the-spot composer.
Hey, you know, speaking of on-the-spot composers, I've got the old authentic instrument here. I often use it to illustrate musical points here, but I wonder if it has any organ stops on it. Okay, here we go. 44, electric organ.
[music: keyboard demonstration, organ stops on the authentic instrument]
Oh, that is funky, all right. What's next? We've got jazz organ is 45. 45, oh yeah, got that little punch there like the Hammond B3, then we got the 46 here, is the pipe organ.
[music: keyboard demonstration, organ stops on the authentic instrument]
All right, now the last one is church organ, 47. Let's try that one.
[music: keyboard demonstration, organ stops on the authentic instrument]
That's nice, that's
[music: keyboard demonstration, organ stops on the authentic instrument]
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, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. 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 40.
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 American Public Radio, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.
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