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, and also by this radio station right here at this point on your radio dial.
Now, at the end of the 20th century, Charles Ives is certainly one of the most highly regarded composers America has ever produced. Some would say the most highly regarded. But a century ago, when he was starting out, American composers in general were not very highly regarded, and the few who won some acclaim tended to write in styles heavily indebted to those of European composers.
Ives was a particularly iconoclastic, not to say ornery, person, and he decided early on that he didn't want to depend on the musical establishment for his livelihood. He went into the insurance business, at which he was certainly successful, but the received wisdom among musicians is that he was also quite well known in that field. Back in the early sixties, less than a decade after Ives' death, my brother used to tour as an orchestral violist.
He once talked to a fellow musician who said that at one of those post-concert dinners, he found himself sitting next to an insurance man, so he decided to test that received wisdom. He asked his neighbor if he'd ever heard of Charles Ives. And the fellow said, oh sure, he wrote one of the best books about insurance around. This guy had no idea that Ives was a composer.
And I'm sure that most people who knew Ives as the co-founder of the most successful insurance agency in the country would have thought it highly unlikely that he was an important composer, especially since he hardly ever got his music played. But he was an important composer as well as an important insurance executive. Furthermore, Ives believed that there's a composer in all of us, which is the name of today's program.
We're going to hear some music by unlikely composers. Unlikely only in the sense that most of these people are well known, but we don't associate them with composition. When you think about it, it should come as no surprise that there's going to be a preponderance of piano music today. Someone who only composes on the side, as it were, is unlikely to have enough time and performance possibilities to master the craft of orchestration. We'll start off with a trivia question.
You are about to hear two movements from larger works, one of them an extremely obscure violin sonata and the other an extremely well-known piano trio. What do they have in common? I'll tell you in about ten and a half minutes.
[music: Archduke Rudolph Of Austria, Sonata in F minor for Violin & Piano, 3rd Mvt.; Josef Suk, violin/Susan Kagan, piano]
[music: Beethoven, “Archduke” Trio (Trio in B-Flat, Opus 97), 2nd Mvt.; Suk Trio]
The second piece, the one we just heard, was the Archduke Trio by Beethoven. And the first piece was written by the Archduke of the Archduke Trio, Archduke Rudolph of Austria. Rudolph was Beethoven's only composition student for over two decades, and Beethoven can be very glad that he met Rudolph.
Rudolph supported Beethoven financially, he let Beethoven use rooms in the palace for rehearsals, and apparently he was a good musician. The piano part of Beethoven's triple concerto was written for him, and he also played the piano in the first performance of Beethoven's last violin sonata.
It's pretty nice stuff actually. It's not a hackneyed piece at all. That was the Minuet Allegro Molto from Archduke Rudolph's Sonata in F minor for Violin & Piano played by Josef Suk and Susan Kagan. And then we heard the Scherzo from Beethoven's Archduke Trio performed by Jan Panenka, Josef Suk, and Josef Chuchro.
Jan, Josef, and Josef. Gee, they could call themselves the Three Js. They could, but they won't.
Next, we'll hear a suite of three pieces. The first was written by a bureaucrat, the second by an actor, and the third by a painter. Which is why I've decided to call this suite, The Bureaucrat, the Actor, and the Painter. I'll be back in nine and a half minutes.
[music: Chaplin, "Beautiful, Wonderful Eyes"; Thomas Beckmann, cello/Kayoko Matsushita, piano]
[music: Lyonel Feininger, "Fuge III for Piano"; Annie Gicquel]
The Bureaucrat, the Actor, and the Painter. Music by Wim Statius Muller, Charlie Chaplin, and Lyonel Feininger. The first piece was one of a set of Antillean Dances, Opus 4, by Wim Statius Muller, who was born in, and apparently lives in, the Netherlands Antilles in Curaçao. He studied composition with a local composer, Jacobo Palm, and then piano at Juilliard. He's obviously a highly trained musician.
Bureaucrat is probably not the right word for him. The person who turned me on to this album says he understands that he's head of security in Curaçao or something like that. It's obviously not a sinecure job. It's also a very high-up job, apparently. He's a real part of the government. A sinecure job is one of those ones that sometimes governments give important artists just to support them, you know, the ambassador to Antarctica or something like that.
Anyway, the middle number was by Charlie Chaplin. Now, he's perhaps the least surprising composer on today's program because we all know that he wrote things like Smile and a lot of scores for his movies.
But I didn't realize until I researched this program, which means reading the album notes here in this CD, that he actually started a music publishing company in 1916 and wrote pieces separately from the movies and long before he had hit songs. This piece is called Beautiful, Wonderful Eyes, and it was arranged for cello and piano.
Presumably, it was just originally written as a piano number or as a song. It doesn't say exactly, but it does say that it was arranged for cello and piano. The cellist was Thomas Beckmann, and the pianist was Kayoko Matsushita. The next one, and the last one, was from a very interesting album called Dichter und Maler als Komponisten, Poets and Painters as Composers.
And that was Fugue III, a Gigue by Lyonel Feininger, a painter who I remember being very conscious of when I was in college. I think I had a reproduction of a Feininger up on my wall. I'm saying that in a very American way. I hope that's okay. Apparently, he studied violin for a few years, but other than that, had no musical training whatsoever and just wrote by ear.
It's one thing to write a song like Smile without musical training. It's another thing to write a fugue like that, a gigue fugue like that, and I find it a very fascinating work. It's so Bach-y in some ways, and yet in some places, like that ending, it's whoo, all of a sudden, things are really popping. He wrote that in 1921 when he was working in the Bauhaus movement in Weimar.
Wagner's ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a production making equal use of all the arts, was a very 19th century ideal and was reflected in the lives of the composers. I think it's safe to say that Wagner and Strauss hung out with writers and painters more than Bach and Mozart did. Haydn was a liveried servant for Pete's sake, not an artsy intellectual. So I guess it's natural that there should be a lot of interdisciplinary creative work in the 19th and early 20th century.
Wagner not only wrote his own opera libretti, he was ticked off that they weren't treated more seriously as literature and published separately. And of course, some of his more virulent essays are still getting him into trouble, and rightly so. Berlioz was a delightful memoirist. Schumann edited and wrote for a musical journal.
Schoenberg was a painter. One of the many ways in which Brahms was an old-fashioned composer is that all he did was compose, and maybe edit some other composer's music here and there. Our next suite is made up of pieces composed by people who are known, well known, for writing words, not music. There are again three selections, two piano pieces separated by a number from an opera, and together they last a little over seven minutes.
For reasons you may be able to divine, I'm calling the suite The Philosopher, The Poet, and The Novelist.
[music: Friedrich Nietzsche, "Im Mondschein auf der Puszta"; John Bell Young]
[music: Ezra Pound, “La Testament de Villon,” “Faulse beaute”; Marius van Altena/ASKO Ensemble/de Leeuw]
[music: Boris Pasternak, "Prelude for Piano"; Annie Gicquel]
The Philosopher, the Poet, and the Novelist. Music by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, and Boris Pasternak. The Nietzsche piece is from a new CD of his music, and is mostly piano music. As a matter of fact, it's all piano music. It's mostly solo piano music, some of it arrangements of songs, and then there are a couple of things for piano four-hands.
He was quite a guy, old Nietzsche. He was not too dumb. He was learning Latin and Greek and writing poetry and six-act plays and writing music. Apparently, one of the pieces on this album, which I couldn't play because it's too long for this show, was something that he played as a present for Wagner's wife, Cosima.
And at one point while it was going on, Wagner sort of left the room and somebody followed him out to check on him and found Der Meister, as it says, rolling about on the floor convulsed with laughter. I'm not sure if it was just the music or if it was the fact that he had quoted something of Wagner's in that piece and that sort of set Wagner off.
Anyway, he later, Nietzsche that is, sent some of his music to Hans von Bülow, the famous conductor, also famous for his sharp tongue, and von Bülow wrote back that the piece must be some kind of joke, a parody of the music of the future, which is what Wagnerian music was called. He wrote, Have you no better way to kill time? You have raped the muse of music.
Really nice guy, von Bülow. No wonder his wife left him for Wagner. And the second piece was from one of the strangest things I've ever heard, Le Testament de Villon, an opera by Ezra Pound. And we heard a number sung by de Minard. Now, this album is in Dutch, as far as I can tell, and there's no translation, so I'm not going to give you an awful lot of help here. But the singer was Marius van Altena.
And then finally, a prelude, quite a striking prelude, I think, by Boris Pasternak, which he wrote at the age of 16. He apparently was very seriously considering being a composer. He was extremely impressed by the music of Scriabin.
Almost became a composer. Decided finally, after much wrenching thought, to become a writer. Now, I know that in presenting him as a novelist, he was a poet as well as a novelist, but I had to distinguish him from Ezra Pound there. This music wasn't discovered until after Pasternak's death. The manuscripts were discovered in his estate. It's interesting to hear that music, Pasternak writing that music.
[sung: snippet of "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago]
I'm not putting Lara's Theme down, by the way. That's supposed to be the French kind of music that Russia was enjoying then, but boy, it sure is different from what Pasternak wrote.
[sung: snippet of "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago]
And it's Tidbit Time, and time for another bit of trivia. The singer you are about to hear is a very well-known singer, but this recording was made when she was 13 years old. Think you can recognize her? Here we go. No fair peeking at the album cover now.
[music: Parton/Owens, "Girl Left Alone"; Dolly Parton (at age 13)]
Dolly Parton at the age of 13 from an album correctly described as a collector's item, Dolly Parton & Friends at Goldband, which is the studio where this was recorded. As the album notes say, In looking back, it seems almost impossible to believe the little girl named Dolly Parton who used to have to sit on a tall stool so the microphone could fit and we could get the fullest capabilities of the songs she was recording, that this same Dolly Parton would, in later years, become the great she has in the entertainment field.
Girl Left Alone was the name of the song. It's credited to Parton and Owens. And the other song she sings on this album, Puppy Love, is credited to D. Parton. It sounds like she was already writing her own songs. I also particularly enjoyed on that cut the drum sound, the good old brushes on newspaper effect. Speaking of singers who write their own songs, we're going to go out with the opposite.
A group of three songs sung by the people who wrote them, But in this case, people who are better known as composers than singers. The first and third are excerpts from larger works that couldn't be included, either for reasons of time or propriety. The composer as singer song cycle lasts a little over eight minutes, after which I will orally reappear.
[music excerpt: Barber, “Dover Beach,” Opus 3; Samuel Barber, baritone/Curtis String Quartet]
Composer as singer, song cycle. We began with Samuel Barber singing his Dover Beach for baritone and string quartet, or rather the first approximately half of Dover Beach, had a very nice light baritone. As I said that was the composer with the Curtis String Quartet. The text is from Matthew Arnold.
Then we had Charles Ives singing, if that's the proper word, his song They Are There. This was recorded in 1943 in New York, which means he was 69 years old, I guess, and They Are There is a war song march that he updated in 1942 from something he'd written in 1917 called He Is There, for the First World War. And then the third selection in our Composer as Singer Song Cycle was I Want It from the musical Oh! Calcutta!, and the composer and singer was, what can I tell you, your host on this show. Yes, I was a member of the group called The Open Window that wrote the music and lyrics for Oh! Calcutta!
And we actually played that show and sang from the pit. It was an unusual show in that a lot of the singing took place in the pit. The show opened in 1969 and of course it was very notorious because it did have a certain amount of nudity in it. Well, it had quite a bit of nudity in it. The actors in the show and the actresses used to say, Camelot had just opened and they used to say, The reason we have to do this show in the nude is that all the costumes are over there at Camelot. But it was a very controversial show, and, well, let's just put it this way, the music is not what people noticed. As a matter of fact, somebody said if you come out of Oh! Calcutta! whistling the tunes, there's something wrong with you. We did previews for six weeks. It was a revue, and we tried different sketches in different orders, chucked some that didn't seem to work, and when we first started doing eight shows a week, and I was doing that number, I lost my voice completely, couldn't utter a sound, and went to a famous voice doctor in New York City, who fixed me up, and I had to, even after being fixed up, I had to tone it down a little bit after that, but I let it go for the recording.
I gotta say, that's a lot of fun to do, and it was also a lot of fun when my kids became teenagers, I don't sit around listening to my records all the time, you know? When my kids became teenagers, I played them that part that I just played, and they said, Dad! That's you? I can't believe it!
Yes, Oh! Calcutta!, it had a lot of nudity in it. If you're offended by that kind of thing, thank your lucky stars that you didn't see it. Also, be glad that this is radio, because I'm doing this program in the nude.
Charles Ives, you know, he thought that there was too much hocus pocus surrounding the image of the composer. He thought that everybody should make up music. We came pretty close to that in the 60s. If only people would have kept it up after the untrustworthy age of 30. Of course, here's something by a composer who wrote an awful lot of music even though he didn't make it very far past the untrustworthy age of 30.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And to the strains of Mozart, that's 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.