Your Feet’s Too Big (BENSON/FISHER) Performer: Fats Waller & His Rhythm Ain’t Misbehavin’ (RCA LPM 1246)
Wir haben drey Katzen (SEYFERT) Performer: Udo Wildenblanck, boy soprano/Wolfgang Anheisser, baritone/Munich Instrumental Ensemble/ Neumeyer Angel S 37107
Four Eyes Performer: The Lovin' Spoonful Hums of The Lovin’ Spoonful (Buddah PCD 3305)
Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning (BERLIN) Performer: Irving Berlin The Smithsonian Collection of Recordings: American Musical Theater (CBS Special Products RD 036 II)
The "Lack of Money Is the Root of All Evil" Song Cycle
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. Now today's program has a distinct downer aspect to it, but the good news is 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 radio station, whose ultra-modern facilities I am ensconced amid.
I had a history teacher in high school, I think his name was Philip Wrongly, and his name notwithstanding, he was a very nice guy. We had to do a book report every six weeks in his class, but I remember I talked him into letting me make an 8mm movie about a pre-Civil War incident in Kansas and having it count as the whole semester's book report.
Okay, I guess it was a bit of a scam. It probably didn't take me and my friends more than a couple of weekends to make the movie, but hey, I had to research the script and it turned out pretty well and Shostakovich's First Symphony worked very nicely for the soundtrack. Alright, alright, alright. Sometimes even I can't really argue with the old irrelevancy alarm.
The point of bringing Mr. Wrongly up was that I remember him saying once in his laid-back manner, you know what most poetry is about? No one answered. And he says, love. And everybody's like, oh, man. It's incredible, you know. This was junior or senior year in high school. Nobody's thinking about anything but sex and love. But at least in 1951 in Fargo, North Dakota, you still had to be embarrassed by the word love.
Love. Eh, maybe only in public. Anyway, what's true of poetry is also true of songs. Most songs are love songs. Happy love songs are about the joys of love, and sad love songs are about the pains of love. In fact, that may be the most popular subject of all, the pains of love. But there are other afflictions in the world, and today we're going to hear some songs that touch upon some of those other problems. Problems ranging from the trivial to the catastrophic. Our show is called Woe Is Me, and we're going to begin with a bunch of songs about perfectly legitimate but rarely aired complaints. Or anyway, rarely sung about complaints.
The Nobody Knows the Very Specific Kinds of Trouble I've Seen song cycle has five numbers in it. The third one is in German, and I'm telling you, you know, you think you have it bad. Listen to the translation of these lyrics. We have three cats, not one catches a mouse. We have three maidens, not one is pretty. We have three coachmen, not one can drive. We have three doctors, all three are fools. We have three skillets, not one has a handle.
We have three millers, not one has a mill.
We have three fathers, not one has a child. We have three oxen, not one's good for beef. We have three tailors, not one makes a suit. We have three fiddles, not one has a string. We have three knives, not one has a point. We have three fires, not one gives any heat. We have three invalids, not one has a pain. We have three daughters, not one gets married. We have three hens, not one lays an egg. We have three cocks, not one of them crows. So here we go.
I guess you could say that the first of these five songs is a song about love, but what's unusual about it is that in most songs of unrequited love, it's the singer who's the faithful one, scorned by his beloved. I'll see you in about 13 minutes.
[music: Hicks, "How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away"; Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks]
[music: Benson/Fisher, "Your Feet’s Too Big" (Ain’t Misbehavin’); Fats Waller & His Rhythm]
[music: Seyfert, "Wir haben drey Katzen"; Udo Wildenblanck, boy soprano/Wolfgang Anheisser, baritone/Munich Instrumental Ensemble/ Neumeyer]
[music: "Four Eyes" (Hums of The Lovin’ Spoonful); The Lovin' Spoonful]
[music: Berlin, "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" (The Smithsonian Collection of Recordings: American Musical Theater); Irving Berlin]
Nobody Knows the Very Specific Kinds of Trouble I've Seen song cycle.
We began with Dan Hicks and his hot licks, singing a song called How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away. That's from an album, I guess it's his first album, original recordings. Then we had the classic Fats Waller tune, Your Feet’s Too Big. And I mentioned before that we were going to have songs that touched upon problems that weren't often aired, and I think you'll agree that in our society, at least, feet, no matter what kind of shape at least, feet, no matter what kind of shape they're in, are rarely aired. Then from an album called In Praise of Pleasure, songs in quodlibets by Valentin Rathgeber and Johann Kasper Seyfert. We heard a quodlibet Wir haben drey Katzen. That was sung by Udo Wildenblanck, that was the beautiful boy soprano voice, and Wolfgang Anheisser, the baritone with the Munich Instrumental Ensemble directed by Fritz Neumeyer. Next came one of my favorite songs.
From the album Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful, that was John Sebastian singing his song Four Eyes, a song about growing up with glasses, and it sounds to me like a very heartfelt song. John does indeed wear glasses, and the song is not only about how many fingers, but also the business about who gets to choose what the glasses look like.
Like, wonderful lyrics there, he's just tremendous, I love that second verse, "When you're so blind they call you Batman, you can't even see a fat man, you can't dig just where it's at, man, without windows on your eyes. But the things ain't your decision, and they're fitted with precision, and they magnify your eyes like they're a pair of cherry pies." John Sebastian, The Lovin' Spoonful. Then, finally, from an album. The way I have it is a series of recordings of the American Musical Theater. And this is from This Is the Army, a show by Irving Berlin.
Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning. And that was Irving Berlin singing. This was apparently taken from a radio broadcast made in 1942, which was already years after the musical ran, but this was a special production, I expect, for the boys overseas. Me, I'm Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix on APR.
Woe is me. So far, the woes we've heard about have been specific and mostly quite individual. But there's one woe that most of the people on this planet have. Not enough money. It has been observed that money is the root of all evil. It has also been observed with equal acuity that the lack of money is the root of all evil. It's like power. You got too much, you're a tyrant. You got too little, you're a slave. The thing about about money is that even with a good job, a sense of contentment is hard to achieve, since our spending habits tend to at least keep up with our earning habits.
There was an interesting bit of revisionism going on in musicological circles a while back. Somebody went through all the letters and papers of Mozart and those around him and actually added up the number of piano lessons he gave and everything, and came to the conclusion that in point of fact Mozart made a lot of money. And if our boy Amadeus died deeply in debt, it was because he spent so much on clothes and gambling and other fine things he was an avid billiards player you know and maybe it wasn't just a matter of putting a quarter on the rim of the table for the next game well money's like electricity it's got to circulate and if you don't handle it carefully you get burned my experience is that it's hard not to worry about money even if you're being paid well, but hey, I'm lucky. I'm doing things I really love doing.
Unlike the singer of the next song. There are a lot of things he'd rather be doing than keeping a ledger correct, but as he says more than once, I guess that a guy gotta eat. The lack of money is the root of all evil song cycle has three numbers and lasts about nine minutes.
[music excerpt: Britten, "Paul Bunyan," "Inkslinger's Song"; Dan Dressen/The Plymouth Music Series/Brunelle]
[music excerpt: Bolcom, “Satires for Madrigal Group,” “The Subway Beggar”; The Western Wind]
[music: Charles, "Blackjack" (The Birth of Soul); Ray Charles]
Ooh, man. The lack of money is the root of all evil song cycle. We began back there with an excerpt from Benjamin Britten's early opera, Paul Bunyan, written in this country, with a libretto by W.H. Auden. And that was Dan Dressen singing the part of Johnny Inkslinger. That was the soloist's chorus and orchestra of the Plymouth Music Series in Minnesota, conducted by Philip Brunelle.
That opera was written before Peter Grimes and for a long time it lay fallow. Britten apparently wasn't sure he liked it but later they revived parts of it and he decided I guess it was okay. Then we heard one of the satires for Madrigal Group by William Bolcom from an album called Satires, Ballads & Bop by The Western Wind. That one was called The Subway Beggar and Bill Bolcom points out in his notes, he says, most people think the meaning of the word satire is a farce, a joke, but as any dictionary will tell you, a satire is a commentary, a criticism, funny or sad, or otherwise, on human behavior.
He says Daumier was a satirist, so was Andy Warhol, perhaps Americans understand pictorial satire better than satire in music or theater, which reminds me, I think it was Moss Hart who said satire is what closes on Saturday night. Anyway, we ended with a tune from one of the classic albums of the century, in your host's humble opinion. It comes originally from Ray Charles' album, Yes Indeed. The tune is Blackjack, of course.
And it's been re-released on a compilation that I strongly recommend. Atlantic has brought out a whole bunch, I guess there are about three CDs in it, called The Birth of Soul. And you know, Ray Charles is always good, but those early charts were so spare, so lean, that band was so funky. I really prefer it to the later ones that often have the rich string backgrounds.
You know, every once in a while a work of art comes along that, well, sort of puts things in perspective.
Philosophy 101, our tidbit today was Carson Robison singing Life Gets Teejus, Don't It. According to this album, he was known as the granddaddy of the hillbillies and he had this form of rhymed monologue which he called a musical talk fest. That was recorded in 1947. I remember that from my youth. Even then, my name was Peter Schickele. This is Schickele Mix on APR.
You know, during Tidbit Time, I was thinking about the title of today's show, Woe Is Me. And being one of those people who's interested in language, I mean, even grammar I'm interested in, I got to thinking, why is it Woe Is Me? I mean, if it means I am sadness, shouldn't it be woe is I? By the way, let me say right now that I am not one of those people who feel that the language should never change.
It never has stood still, and it never will stand still. In fact, I used to work with a singer, John Ferranti, who was a real stickler about correct grammar, and I used to enjoy inventing sentences that would sound outlandish even to John, in spite of their correctness. For instance, you're worried that somebody you really can't stand is going to drop by. The doorbell rings and you go and peek through the window and say, oh no, it's they!
A friend of mine in college, David Robinson, he ended up becoming a linguist and, as a matter of fact, published the first, at least as far as I know, reverse Lithuanian dictionary. The words are alphabetized from the last letter to the first, I'm not making that up. Anyway, he picked up a little grammar book in a used bookstore once that provided us with many a chuckle. It had these incorrect sentences that you were supposed to put into good English, after which you turned to the back of the book to compare your revision with theirs.
And the thing was that the original sentences were always so much better than the corrected ones. I can only remember one of them now. The incorrect sentence was, let's scram out of this goofy burg.
And the preferred version in the back of the book was, let's leave this unpleasant town immediately. Man, you know, I can't believe that the irrelevancy alarm hasn't gone off. I guess it's because we're talking about the title of today's program, and the thing about Woe Is Me is that we're not talking about 20th century American English here. This is an old expression, I should think. Uh, as a matter of fact, we can look it up. One of the many things that this state of the art studio is equipped with with, is a, you know, one of those quotation books, and let us take advantage of that here.
I am looking up Woe in the back, and there is Woe Is Me, and it comes from the Bible. It is a quotation from the Bible, it's from Isaiah, Then said I, Woe is me, for I am undone. Okay, now if that's the Bible, it must be, right, the King James Version, which means basically that we're talking about Elizabethan English here.
Now wouldn't you think it would be, woe is I? I mean, we're not talking about French here, you know. French, it's always been different. L'état, c'est moi, you know. Old Louis there saying, the state, that's me. French has always been different. English, well anyway, be that as it may or may not be. We're coming up on our last song cycle here. So far we've heard individual people singing about their troubles. Now we'll hear about some troubles that are visited upon large segments of the population.
The Class Action Woes song cycle has three numbers, the first of which is in German. And it goes, When I observe the married state clearly by daylight, good heavens what a business goes on. Now there's a grumbling, a wailing, a blubbering, now there's something amiss behind, now there, now here, good heavens, the one way, good heavens, the other, in the married state, what a bawling goes on.
Now comes the wet nurse, now the shoemaker and the tailor, now the washerwoman and they make a hole in your purse, now the lace is missing, now ribbons, now clothes, now we're on short commons in the cellar and kitchen, good heavens, the one way, etc.
Now the nurse is grumbling, now the children screaming, Now the little darling whines fit to deafen us, Now the dog dies, now the knacker fetches the cat, And a neighbor drives us mad, Good heavens the one way, good heavens, etc. Now the third number of the three is in English, but it's choral, which makes it a bit difficult to understand, and you have to know the text to relish this wonderful music properly.
Properly. The text is, He spake the word, and there came all manner of flies and lice in all their quarters. He spake, and the locusts came without number, and devoured the fruits of their ground. The Class Action Woes Song Cycle is about ten minutes long. I, like gypsy moths, will be back.
[music: Seyfert, "Die Beschwerlichkeiten des Ehestandes"; Wolfgang Anheisser, baritone/Munich Instrumental Ensemble/Neumeyer]
[music: Ritchie, "Black Waters" (None But One); Jean Ritchie]
[music excerpt: Handel, “Israel in Egypt,” “He spake the word”; Taverner Choir & Players/Parrott]
That was our class action woes song cycle. We began with The Troubles of the Married State. That's from that same album, In Praise of Pleasure, and by the same composer that we heard the Drey Katzen from before, Johann Kasper Seyfert. And this one on The Troubles of the Married State is a good example of how music can contribute to the ironic tone.
If these were truly meant to be serious woes about the married state, surely the music would not be so happy, not to say bumptious. Then the middle cut was a beautiful Jean Ritchie song called Black Waters. The complaint here is an environmental one, and there are a lot of environmental protest songs.
And I must say that I tend not to like protest songs an awful lot because I often find them Just a little bit too direct and often not very satisfying musically, but here I think both the lyrics and the song and particularly the arrangement is just beautiful. That's from an album called None But One, which has been re-released on CD as two LP albums on one CD, None But One and High Hills & Mountains.
And then finally, we ended with one of the great pieces of programmatic music of all time from Handel's oratorio, Israel in Egypt. That was the Taverner Choir & Players under the direction of Andrew Parrott. And that is certainly the best insect music probably ever written, Israel in Egypt.
It's interesting to hear that. It was written in 1738, which makes it approximately contemporaneous with Bach's St. Matthew Passion and how different they are. As a matter of fact, to me, that movement almost has a sort of a Gabrielli-ish quality from a century earlier, from the Venetian school of the early 17th century. And also reminds me of something my father-in-law used to say, and it puzzled me at first.
He would talk about egg-wiped. And I said, what is egg-wiped? And he said, egg-wiped, well, Bert Lahr, I think it was Bert Lahr, maybe it was Jimmy Durant, he used to say that. Egg-wiped, that's the country of which Cairo is the capital.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And 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, 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 and this is program number 46.
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 are looking good. See you next week.
[No speech for 148 s.]
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.