1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:14,060
[music: theme; Mozart, Symphony No. 24 (K 182), 2nd Mvt.; Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London/Leinsdorf]

2
00:00:14,060 --> 00:00:20,000
Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that

3
00:00:20,060 --> 00:00:25,840
all musics are created equal, or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.

4
00:00:26,200 --> 00:00:39,020
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.

5
00:00:39,020 --> 00:00:48,560
Now, at the end of the 20th century, Charles Ives is certainly one of the most highly regarded composers America has ever produced.

6
00:00:48,860 --> 00:00:57,080
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,

7
00:00:57,300 --> 00:01:04,200
and the few who won some acclaim tended to write in styles heavily indebted to those of European composers.

8
00:01:05,620 --> 00:01:15,440
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.

9
00:01:16,040 --> 00:01:25,640
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.

10
00:01:26,440 --> 00:01:32,820
Back in the early sixties, less than a decade after Ives' death, my brother used to tour as an orchestral violist.

11
00:01:32,820 --> 00:01:43,460
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.

12
00:01:43,900 --> 00:01:54,200
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.

13
00:01:54,200 --> 00:02:09,320
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.

14
00:02:09,800 --> 00:02:21,440
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.

15
00:02:22,160 --> 00:02:24,840
We're going to hear some music by unlikely composers.

16
00:02:25,860 --> 00:02:30,660
Unlikely only in the sense that most of these people are well known, but we don't associate

17
00:02:30,660 --> 00:02:31,620
them with composition.

18
00:02:32,480 --> 00:02:36,780
When you think about it, it should come as no surprise that there's going to be a preponderance

19
00:02:36,780 --> 00:02:37,920
of piano music today.

20
00:02:38,480 --> 00:02:43,180
Someone who only composes on the side, as it were, is unlikely to have enough time

21
00:02:43,180 --> 00:02:47,000
and performance possibilities to master the craft of orchestration.

22
00:02:47,700 --> 00:02:49,500
We'll start off with a trivia question.

23
00:02:49,500 --> 00:03:04,780
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.

24
00:03:06,100 --> 00:07:48,060
[music: Archduke Rudolph Of Austria, Sonata in F minor for Violin & Piano, 3rd Mvt.; Josef Suk, violin/Susan Kagan, piano]

25
00:07:52,200 --> 00:13:40,360
[music: Beethoven, “Archduke” Trio (Trio in B-Flat, Opus 97), 2nd Mvt.; Suk Trio]

26
00:13:41,040 --> 00:13:53,720
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.

27
00:13:53,720 --> 00:14:03,420
Rudolph was Beethoven's only composition student for over two decades, and Beethoven can be very glad that he met Rudolph.

28
00:14:03,600 --> 00:14:12,800
Rudolph supported Beethoven financially, he let Beethoven use rooms in the palace for rehearsals, and apparently he was a good musician.

29
00:14:13,040 --> 00:14:23,140
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.

30
00:14:23,140 --> 00:14:38,240
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.

31
00:14:38,640 --> 00:14:48,480
And then we heard the Scherzo from Beethoven's Archduke Trio performed by Jan Panenka, Josef Suk, and Josef Chuchro.

32
00:14:50,060 --> 00:14:56,280
Jan, Josef, and Josef. Gee, they could call themselves the Three Js. They could, but they won't.

33
00:15:02,510 --> 00:15:10,730
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.

34
00:15:11,500 --> 00:15:18,920
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.

35
00:15:20,160 --> 00:17:48,240
[music: Wim Statius Muller, Antillean Dances, Opus 4, “Escondida”; Wim Statius Muller]

36
00:17:52,100 --> 00:20:34,060
[music: Chaplin, "Beautiful, Wonderful Eyes"; Thomas Beckmann, cello/Kayoko Matsushita, piano]

37
00:20:37,720 --> 00:24:45,460
[music: Lyonel Feininger, "Fuge III for Piano"; Annie Gicquel]

38
00:24:45,780 --> 00:24:53,080
The Bureaucrat, the Actor, and the Painter. Music by Wim Statius Muller, Charlie Chaplin, and Lyonel Feininger.

39
00:24:54,030 --> 00:25:07,030
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.

40
00:25:07,030 --> 00:25:15,750
He studied composition with a local composer, Jacobo Palm, and then piano at Juilliard. He's obviously a highly trained musician.

41
00:25:17,310 --> 00:25:26,950
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.

42
00:25:27,010 --> 00:25:34,750
It's obviously not a sinecure job. It's also a very high-up job, apparently. He's a real part of the government.

43
00:25:34,750 --> 00:25:44,630
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.

44
00:25:45,710 --> 00:25:58,530
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.

45
00:25:58,530 --> 00:26:16,650
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.

46
00:26:16,650 --> 00:26:23,410
This piece is called Beautiful, Wonderful Eyes, and it was arranged for cello and piano.

47
00:26:23,710 --> 00:26:32,390
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.

48
00:26:32,550 --> 00:26:36,910
The cellist was Thomas Beckmann, and the pianist was Kayoko Matsushita.

49
00:26:37,950 --> 00:26:46,790
The next one, and the last one, was from a very interesting album called Dichter und Maler als Komponisten, Poets and Painters as Composers.

50
00:26:47,410 --> 00:27:04,090
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.

51
00:27:05,510 --> 00:27:13,090
Apparently, he studied violin for a few years, but other than that, had no musical training whatsoever and just wrote by ear.

52
00:27:13,690 --> 00:27:33,090
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.

53
00:27:34,150 --> 00:27:40,090
He wrote that in 1921 when he was working in the Bauhaus movement in Weimar.

54
00:27:42,070 --> 00:27:53,130
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.

55
00:27:53,450 --> 00:27:59,990
I think it's safe to say that Wagner and Strauss hung out with writers and painters more than Bach and Mozart did.

56
00:28:00,490 --> 00:28:04,410
Haydn was a liveried servant for Pete's sake, not an artsy intellectual.

57
00:28:04,410 --> 00:28:11,610
So I guess it's natural that there should be a lot of interdisciplinary creative work in the 19th and early 20th century.

58
00:28:12,250 --> 00:28:19,590
Wagner not only wrote his own opera libretti, he was ticked off that they weren't treated more seriously as literature and published separately.

59
00:28:20,210 --> 00:28:25,590
And of course, some of his more virulent essays are still getting him into trouble, and rightly so.

60
00:28:26,710 --> 00:28:31,890
Berlioz was a delightful memoirist. Schumann edited and wrote for a musical journal.

61
00:28:31,890 --> 00:28:43,170
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.

62
00:28:43,630 --> 00:28:50,910
Our next suite is made up of pieces composed by people who are known, well known, for writing words, not music.

63
00:28:51,570 --> 00:28:59,990
There are again three selections, two piano pieces separated by a number from an opera, and together they last a little over seven minutes.

64
00:28:59,990 --> 00:29:07,890
For reasons you may be able to divine, I'm calling the suite The Philosopher, The Poet, and The Novelist.

65
00:29:07,890 --> 00:30:16,360
[music: Friedrich Nietzsche, "Im Mondschein auf der Puszta"; John Bell Young]

66
00:30:18,680 --> 00:31:11,900
[music: Ezra Pound, “La Testament de Villon,” “Faulse beaute”; Marius van Altena/ASKO Ensemble/de Leeuw]

67
00:31:15,280 --> 00:36:03,900
[music: Boris Pasternak, "Prelude for Piano"; Annie Gicquel]

68
00:36:05,060 --> 00:36:13,330
The Philosopher, the Poet, and the Novelist. Music by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, and Boris Pasternak.

69
00:36:13,610 --> 00:36:28,200
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.

70
00:36:28,200 --> 00:36:40,440
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.

71
00:36:41,180 --> 00:36:52,400
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.

72
00:36:52,400 --> 00:37:07,540
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.

73
00:37:08,100 --> 00:37:16,160
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.

74
00:37:16,720 --> 00:37:37,120
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.

75
00:37:37,260 --> 00:37:42,700
He wrote, Have you no better way to kill time? You have raped the muse of music.

76
00:37:42,700 --> 00:37:48,360
Really nice guy, von Bülow. No wonder his wife left him for Wagner.

77
00:37:49,430 --> 00:37:55,370
And the second piece was from one of the strangest things I've ever heard, Le Testament de Villon,

78
00:37:55,550 --> 00:38:03,570
an opera by Ezra Pound. And we heard a number sung by de Minard. Now, this album is in

79
00:38:03,570 --> 00:38:08,870
Dutch, as far as I can tell, and there's no translation, so I'm not going to give

80
00:38:08,870 --> 00:38:12,810
you an awful lot of help here. But the singer was Marius van Altena.

81
00:38:13,310 --> 00:38:23,690
And then finally, a prelude, quite a striking prelude, I think, by Boris Pasternak, which he wrote at the age of 16.

82
00:38:23,910 --> 00:38:31,450
He apparently was very seriously considering being a composer. He was extremely impressed by the music of Scriabin.

83
00:38:32,210 --> 00:38:48,580
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.

84
00:38:49,080 --> 00:39:00,610
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.

85
00:39:00,820 --> 00:39:10,320
[sung: snippet of "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago]

86
00:39:10,320 --> 00:39:13,040
I'm not putting Lara's Theme down, by the way.

87
00:39:13,080 --> 00:39:17,160
That's supposed to be the French kind of music that Russia was enjoying then, but boy, it

88
00:39:17,160 --> 00:39:18,940
sure is different from what Pasternak wrote.

89
00:39:19,200 --> 00:39:24,760
[sung: snippet of "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago]

90
00:39:25,560 --> 00:39:28,700
And it's Tidbit Time, and time for another bit of trivia.

91
00:39:29,280 --> 00:39:34,360
The singer you are about to hear is a very well-known singer, but this recording was

92
00:39:34,360 --> 00:39:41,320
made when she was 13 years old. Think you can recognize her? Here we go. No fair peeking at the album cover now.

93
00:39:42,000 --> 00:41:44,530
[music: Parton/Owens, "Girl Left Alone"; Dolly Parton (at age 13)]

94
00:41:44,530 --> 00:41:57,210
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.

95
00:41:57,770 --> 00:41:59,370
As the album notes say,

96
00:41:59,550 --> 00:42:17,570
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.

97
00:42:18,490 --> 00:42:23,170
Girl Left Alone was the name of the song. It's credited to Parton and Owens.

98
00:42:23,170 --> 00:42:28,970
And the other song she sings on this album, Puppy Love, is credited to D. Parton.

99
00:42:29,150 --> 00:42:33,070
It sounds like she was already writing her own songs.

100
00:42:33,630 --> 00:42:40,710
I also particularly enjoyed on that cut the drum sound, the good old brushes on newspaper effect.

101
00:42:41,650 --> 00:42:46,030
Speaking of singers who write their own songs, we're going to go out with the opposite.

102
00:42:46,290 --> 00:42:49,630
A group of three songs sung by the people who wrote them,

103
00:42:49,630 --> 00:42:53,410
But in this case, people who are better known as composers than singers.

104
00:42:54,180 --> 00:42:59,720
The first and third are excerpts from larger works that couldn't be included, either for

105
00:42:59,720 --> 00:43:01,760
reasons of time or propriety.

106
00:43:02,140 --> 00:43:08,020
The composer as singer song cycle lasts a little over eight minutes, after which I will

107
00:43:08,020 --> 00:43:09,140
orally reappear.

108
00:43:10,140 --> 00:46:15,920
[music excerpt: Barber, “Dover Beach,” Opus 3; Samuel Barber, baritone/Curtis String Quartet]

109
00:46:18,960 --> 00:49:44,060
[music: Ives, "They Are There"; Charles Ives]

110
00:49:47,680 --> 00:51:05,470
[music excerpt: Schickele, “Oh! Calcutta!,” “I Want It”; Peter Schickele/Original Cast Album]

111
00:51:05,470 --> 00:51:29,790
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.

112
00:51:29,790 --> 00:51:58,940
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,

113
00:51:58,940 --> 00:52:32,170
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!

114
00:52:32,170 --> 00:52:40,310
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.

115
00:52:40,950 --> 00:52:50,050
The show opened in 1969 and of course it was very notorious because it did have a certain amount of nudity in it.

116
00:52:50,530 --> 00:52:53,070
Well, it had quite a bit of nudity in it.

117
00:52:53,930 --> 00:52:58,890
The actors in the show and the actresses used to say, Camelot had just opened and they used to say,

118
00:52:58,890 --> 00:53:28,870
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

119
00:53:28,870 --> 00:53:46,790
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.

120
00:53:47,510 --> 00:53:55,030
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?

121
00:53:55,030 --> 00:53:59,690
When my kids became teenagers, I played them that part that I just played, and they said,

122
00:54:00,470 --> 00:54:03,610
Dad! That's you? I can't believe it!

123
00:54:05,620 --> 00:54:12,980
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.

124
00:54:13,580 --> 00:54:18,420
Also, be glad that this is radio, because I'm doing this program in the nude.

125
00:54:20,070 --> 00:54:25,050
Charles Ives, you know, he thought that there was too much hocus pocus surrounding the image of the composer.

126
00:54:25,050 --> 00:54:36,030
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.

127
00:54:36,710 --> 00:54:45,290
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.

128
00:54:46,400 --> 00:55:00,760
[music: theme; Mozart, Symphony No. 24 (K 182), 2nd Mvt.; Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London/Leinsdorf]

129
00:55:00,760 --> 00:55:03,880
And to the strains of Mozart, that's Schickele Mix for this week.

130
00:55:03,880 --> 00:55:13,180
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.