Dainty fine Aniseed water (ANON.) Performer: The Baltimore Consort & The Merry Companions Dorian DOR 90155
I Like to Go to Peaslee’s (SCHICKELE) Performer: The Canticum Novum Singers/Rosenbaum Personal collection
A Round of Rounds with a Twist
Fly, Fly, Fly (ERDELY) Performer: Libana A Circle Is Cast (Spinning Records SRCD 002)
“Guys & Dolls,” “Fugue for Tinhorns” (LOESSER) Performer: Original Cast Recording The Smithsonian Collection of Recordings: American Musical Theater (CBS Special Products RD 036 III)
As I Mee Walked (TRAD.) Performer: Libana A Circle Is Cast (Spinning Records SRCD 002)
Tidbit Time
An Malzel (BEETHOVEN) Performer: Vienna Akademie Kammerchor/ Mayer The Comic Beethoven (Seraphim S 1 60180)
Symphony No. 8, 2nd Mvt. (BEETHOVEN) Performer: Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan Deutsche Grammophon 429 036 2
This is WMUK Kalamazoo at 102.1 FM. You can also listen at our website, WMUK.org.
Affirmative. 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. Say it once and say it twice. Our bills are paid, and that's very nice, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and also by this radio station right here on your radio dial.
I must be the only guy to grow up in this country after World War II who has never sung 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, at least the entire opus. Eh, I probably did. I probably just blocked it. My first summer job, when we moved to Fargo, North Dakota, was detasseling corn. You see, with hybrid varieties, you don't want the corn to go to seed naturally, so you hire a bunch of junior high school kids, pile them in buses, and take them out into the fields to walk up and down, pulling the seed-bearing tassels off of each stalk.
So what did we do on those bus rides? I can't remember. But I do remember something that our family used to sing on trips. My father grew up in Germany and Switzerland, and he taught us a beautiful round by Mozart called Alles schweigt. Here, let me sing it for you with a little help from the authentic instrument. Not a reconstruction, folks. An original, early 1990s Casio tone bank here. Let's see.
I'll sing my mom and dad, and the authentic instrument can be Peter and David in the back seat. So,
[sung: Schickele sings Mozart's round "Alles schweigt" in German, the Casio keyboard playing the other parts]
etc. You can go on for hours with a good round if you want to. Well, I don't know about hours, but there is a kind of trance-like feeling that can set in as the miles go by. Alles schweigt, all is quiet, nightingales flow with sweet melodies, tears in the eye, heavy mood in the heart, or something like that. You know, when I was singing that as a kid, I had no idea what the words meant. It wasn't until I studied German later.
In the opinion of your humble host, rounds are one of the great musical inventions. Today's show is called Imitation is the Sincerest Form, and we're going to be dealing with pieces in which all the voices, every individual part of the texture, are based on the same single line of music.
Such pieces are called canons, we'll talk about that word later, and by far the most popular kind of canon is the round, which is simply a melody that sounds good sung in unison, but is written in such a way that it also works with staggered entrances, the voices coming in one after another. It's also circular. When you get to the end, you go back to the beginning and keep doing that until you're not having fun anymore. The important thing is you get this rich polyphonic texture from one tune.
By the way, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall is not a round. It's more like a mantra. If that melody is sung with staggered entrances, it's for another reason. And it won't work, either. It won't sound good. But just about everybody knows a few rounds, at least. Who hasn't sung,
[sung: "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"]
Or,
[sung: "Frère Jacques"]
We're going to start off today with some lesser-known examples of the genre. Four of them, to be exact. A round of rounds lasts about eight and a half, nine minutes, after which I'll be around again.
[music: Trad., "Russian Lullaby" (A Circle Is Cast); Libana]
[music: Mozart, "Bona Nox! Bist a Rechta Ox"; Le Lieder Quartett]
[music: Anon., "Dainty fine Aniseed water"; The Baltimore Consort & The Merry Companions]
[music: Schickele, "I Like to Go to Peaslee’s"; The Canticum Novum Singers/Rosenbaum]
Round of rounds. We began with Libana, an album called The Circle Is Cast, A Circle Is Cast, a wonderful album of rounds and pieces that apparently they use often to warm up. That was a Russian lullaby. It says traditional Russian, also of Jewish origin. And the soloist was Susan Robbins.
Then we had Mozart, a round called Bona Nox, Bist a Rechta Ox, which you may have noticed has some Latin and some German and some English in it. And this was sung by a group called Le Lieder Quartett from a Mozart Lieder, duos, trios, and quartets, vocal quartets album, a French group. And I can't help noticing, I've seen this round in other sources, and I can't help noticing they're singing a cleaned-up version of the words.
You know, Mozart did not have a very clean mind when it came to humor. And their version was quite clean. I happen to have with me here the original words.
Yeah, well, they are singing a cleaned-up version. And then the next one was from an album called The Art of the Bawdy Song, sung by the Baltimore Consort and the Merry Companions. And that was a tune called Dainty Fine Aniseed Water, anonymous, from 1652. Quite a nice little round. And we ended up with a round by the regarded American composer Peter Schickele. That was from one of the concerts of my comparatively serious music that I do in New York City.
And that was the Canticum Novum Singers. I want to thank them and their conductor, Harold Rosenbaum, for permission to play that tape. And it refers to singing get-togethers at the house of Richard Peaslee. A good composer and a good friend. We get together over there every once in a while. It gets harder and harder as we all seem to get busier and busier. And we sing some madrigals and we sing some... Very often the composers in the group bring something. And we usually do some rounds.
And we often end up with shape notes singing from the wonderful Sacred Harp stuff from the South. Our next suite consists of three rounds that have an unusual twist to them, either in their presentation or composition. As we've mentioned before, a round is a circular canon, but another characteristic is that the entrances of the voices are equally spaced.
That is, if you have a four-part round, and the entire melody is eight measures long, you know that the voices will enter two measures apart. Because eight divided by four is... let me check that... Yep, every two measures. Okay, but the group, Libana, whom we heard in the first suite, they do a nice variation on some rounds. Taking our hypothetical eight-measure round as an example, they go through the tune once, then when they go back to the top, the second voice comes in two bars later, and then they go through the whole rest of the round with only two voices.
Then on the third time through, they add the third voice, etc. It makes for a longer period of variety, because the thing about rounds is, especially if all the voices are in the same range, once all the parts are in, you're simply hearing the same, say, two measures over and over again. The only difference is spatial, the stereo factor, which group is singing which part at that moment where in the room. Otherwise, it's two bars over and over and over again in Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
The second of the next three rounds is atypical in a different way. Usually the words repeat as well as the music, but in this case, the lyric of one of the phrases is different each time through. And since this is from a musical, whoever has new words sings louder and the other two get softer so that we can hear the lines. And the last one of this group is a beautiful example of the trance potential, which I referred to earlier.
A round of rounds with a twist is a bit over five minutes long. I'll be back around then. Cuckoo.
[music: Erdely, "Fly, Fly, Fly" (A Circle Is Cast); Libana]
[music excerpt: Loesser, “Guys & Dolls,” “Fugue for Tinhorns” (The Smithsonian Collection of Recordings: American Musical Theater); Original Cast Recording]
[music: Trad., "As I Me Walked" (A Circle Is Cast); Libana]
I could go even longer with that. A round of rounds with a twist. We began from that same Libana album, A Circle Is Cast, with a beautiful round called Fly, Fly, Fly by Peter Erdely. And then we heard from Guys & Dolls, one of the great works of the 20th century, the Fugue for Tinhorns. Stubby Kaye, Johnny Silver, Douglas Deane.
And now, I gotta say something here. I'm all for calling things what the composers call them. You know, there are two forms called passacaglia and chaconne. People like to sit around arguing, well, is this really a passacaglia? Is this really a chaconne? Who cares? If the composer calls it a passacaglia, it's a passacaglia. But hey, this is not a fugue. This is a round. Fugue is a neat word, And it has a highbrow sound, and that sort of rubs against the lowbrow world of Damon Runyon and Guys & Dolls.
I don't have any objection to calling it Fugue for Tinhorns, but just since we're a highly educational program here, I just want you to know, that's a round, it's not a fugue. We talk about fugues on another program. And then, the third one, that beautiful cuckoo, was back again from the Libana album, and I want to say there's no payola involved here. I just like this album a lot. A Circle Is Cast, and that was As I Me Walked, and it's from Renaissance England.
I'm Peter Schickele. The show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
And now it's Tidbit Time at the old roundup. This is a nice little bridge, an umbilical cord, between the most jovial of party pieces and high symphonic art. Beethoven knew and actually collaborated with Nepomuk Mälzel, the fellow who developed the first successful metronome. Of course, metronomes are all electronic now, at least all the ones I see.
But I'm sure a lot of us remember the pyramid-shaped boxes with the weighted metal arm that went...
And we're going to hear a round that Beethoven wrote for Mälzel, followed by the second movement of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, which he based on the same material. The words to the round are, Tick-tock, tick-tock, dear, dear Mälzel, Tick-tock, tick-tock, fare you well, fare you very well, Tick-tock, tick-tock, giver of time, giver of time, Tick-tock, tick-tock, you great big metronome.
[music: Beethoven, "An Mälzel" (The Comic Beethoven); Vienna Akademie Kammerchor/ Mayer]
[music: Beethoven, Symphony No. 8, 2nd Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
Okay, two very different treatments of the same material. First, the round An Mälzel, To Mälzel, and that was sung by the Vienna Academy Chamber Choir under the direction of Xaver Mayer. And then we heard the second movement of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, conducted by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic. So what is the difference between a round and a canon?
The word canon, with one N in the middle, has nothing to do with Big Bertha or Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. It's the Latin word for law or rule, and in music it simply means a piece in which the parts, that is, voices or instruments, imitate each other strictly according to some rule. The rule for rounds is that all the parts do the same material, but with equally staggered entrances, and it repeats indefinitely.
But you can have other rules. In other words, a round is a canon, but a canon is not necessarily a round. The rule could be that the second voice comes in two measures after the first, and that's it, rule-wise. No going back to the beginning. You could have a hundred measures of music, the voices bopping along two measures apart, and when they run out of music, the piece is over. Here are three canons that begin like rounds. The entrances are staggered, and the parts all start on the same note.
But the form is not closed. There is some repetition, but it's not circular. The parts don't keep going back to the beginning over and over again. They go on to new material. The first one of these canons has two parts, the second three, and the third six, which is why I call them How Many Times Do I Have to Tell You Canons.
[music: Mozart, “Heiterkeit und leichtes Blut” (K 507) (The Comic Mozart); Vienna Akademie Kammerchor/Mayer]
[music excerpt: Moondog, “Witch of Endor,” “Dance”; Moondog]
How many times do I have to tell you?
We began with an excerpt from the minuet movement of Haydn's String Quartet, Op. 76, No. 2, the Quinten Quartet, played by the Takács Quartet. That's that very clear two-part canon. It goes on to the trio and then goes back to the canon again. Then, from an album called The Comic Mozart, an LP, we heard a canon called Heiterkeit und leichtes Blut, a three-part canon for the women's voices.
And here again, the Vienna Academy Chamber Choir. And then we ended with a piece by Moondog, a man who used to stand on street corners in New York, playing his music sometimes or selling his poetry. And he was quite a sight, because he would stand there in his Viking garb. He was blind, and he would talk to you.
I remember I couldn't help but get a kick out of it. I went up and talked to him one day. And here he is, this wild, far-out guy, right? I mean, strange guy, standing there in the corner, right in corporate New York, 56th Street and 6th Avenue, in this wild garb. And I struck up a conversation with him, and he ended up saying, well, you know, young people today, they don't have any respect for their elders. And it was just like somebody in an old folks' home.
But he was quite a guy. He used to invent his own instruments. He studied somewhat with some American Indians. He wrote some wonderful rounds. He wrote a lot in 5-4 time and 7-4 time. What we heard was in 5-4 time. And it was part of a score he wrote for Martha Graham, The Witch of Endor. This was the first part, 5-4 time. I goofed, by the way. It's not a six-part canon. It's a seven-part canon.
And unlike what I said at the beginning, there was an accompaniment here, of course. At the beginning of the show, I said that all voices were going to be from the same material. This did have some accompaniment stuff. Moondog. Back when my brother and I were around college age, we used to play a rather tricky game, improvising canons. Being the composer, I was always the first voice and he was the second.
It was tricky for me because I had to make every measure I sang such that it would fit with the measure I had just sung previously. And it was tricky for him because he had to memorize the measure I was singing while he was singing the measure I had just sung previously. Got that? It's probably just as well that we weren't doing that in the Oval Office of the White House. I doubt if those ad hoc canons deserve to be preserved and published by the New York Times.
Okay, here's a canon with a different rule. This is from Bach's Musical Offering, which is a... compendium, nay, a cornucopia of canonic cleverness. No. 6 of this collection is titled Two-Part Canon, but there's only one line of music, with the subtitle Quaerendo invenietis, that is, Seek and ye shall find.
So he's leaving it to you to figure out how to make that one line of music into a two-part piece. But he gives you a big clue. Those of you who read music, you know how there's always a clef at the beginning of the line over there on the left. Well, Bach puts two clefs at the beginning of the line, one right side up and one upside down. Here's a two-part canon with inversion. Listen to the opening melody in the right hand, and when the left hand comes in, you can hear that it's upside down.
[music: J. S. Bach, “The Musical Offering,” Canon a 2 quaerendo invenietis; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Marriner]
Now this next one, also from the Musical Offering, has a regular clef at the beginning of the line, and then there's another clef at the end of the line pointing backwards. So we're talking about retrograde motion here. This is called a crab canon. Both parts start together, and it takes a more acute musical mind than mine to follow it all the way through just by ear. But you can hear that one part starts, and the other part at the end goes.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, “The Musical Offering,” Canon 1 a 2; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Marriner]
The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, under Neville Marriner, playing two canons from Bach's Musical Offering. Okay, we've heard regular straight-ahead canons, we've heard upside-down imitation, we've heard backwards imitation, what's left? You guessed it, backwards upside-down, or retrograde inversion.
And to illustrate this arcane technique, I'm going to dip into my own oeuvre and perform, live, right here in the studio, a micro-masterpiece entitled The Brothers Joad. This is what I call table music, because it's meant to be performed by two people facing each other with the one page of music between them. Mozart wrote some pieces like this for two violins, but I can't play violins, so you're going to have to put up with my singing.
What I want to do is put the sheet of music on the table in front of me here. Now, as in the last example by Bach, there's a clef at the beginning and a clef at the end. But here, the one at the end is not only backwards, but upside down as well. Also, since this is a vocal opus, there are words below the music as usual, and there are words above the music, upside down for the guy on the other side of the table. Okay, here's the first part.
[music: Schickele, "The Brothers Joad"; Peter Schickele]
Okay, now I am going to the other side of the table here, where I will read the same music from the opposite angle. Fortunately, we have an omnidirectional mic here. And I have not turned the music around, reading it from the opposite angle.
[music: Schickele, "The Brothers Joad"; Peter Schickele]
And I have a great big ol' mirror set up in the chair opposite me, so as I sing the first part, the sound will bounce off the mirror and enter the other side of the microphone backwards and upside down, which is exactly what we want. It's been a long time since I took physics, but I think this is gonna work. Here we go, The Brothers Joad.
[music: Schickele, "The Brothers Joad"; Peter Schickele]
How about that? I mean, how about that? We're Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
You know, these canons that go in all different directions. There's a work by P.D.Q. Bach called The Musical Sacrifice and when we perform that at the concerts in New York, which we do once in a while, we write the music out on a huge strip of music that we then lay down on the floor and the musicians all read from literally the same piece of music but they read from the various directions. In other words, in that last one you'd have one musician, one walking along with his back to the audience, reading, and from the other end, the second musician would be facing the audience, reading the same music, and she would move along to her right, and they'd cross in the middle and go, and it makes all those relationships of the kind of canon that we're talking about very clear and very visual.
It's not quite as effective on radio.
Canon means rule, and the rule can be whatever you want. Okay, now fasten your seatbelts, everybody, because I have composed a canon especially for this show. That's right, another example of live music on radio. I'm going to play the world premiere of this piece on the authentic instrument here. It's called the Not Bad Canon. I'm a modest kind of guy.
And I want all you musical types out there to try and figure out what the rule is governing this canon.
[music: Schickele, "Not Bad Canon"; Peter Schickele]
Okay, now how can that be a canon, right? I mean, it starts out
[music: keyboard demonstration]
okay, that's so, but it's got all that stuff that, you know, all that, uh, it's in the right hand, it's not in the left hand. The left hand just does this. I mean, that's an accompaniment figure, right? It's not a canon. There's no imitation there. But that's because you don't know the rule. The reason it's called the Not Bad Canon, is that the left hand plays everything that the right hand plays, except for the notes whose letter names are in the word bad.
No B's, no A's, no D's. See, so it starts out fine.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
But that's an A, so the other part skips that. And then all these other things, all that stuff up there, all those top notes are A's and B's and D's. The only notes from the bottom there are E and G. Did I fool you or not?
[music: keyboard demonstration]
I slay myself. Alright, now let me tell you about my brother's dream. He plays viola, and one of the best pieces in the viola-featuring repertoire is Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. Here's how it starts.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 6; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Marriner]
Now, when my brother was in high school, he had a dream. He had one of those panic dreams, you know, that you're not ready. He had a dream that he was involved in a performance of the 6th Brandenburg, and somebody had lost the second viola part. And my brother, in his dream, said, Don't worry, I'll just play the first viola part a beat later. Now, he remembered his dream the next morning when he got up. He tends to do that, unlike me.
He went and looked up the music for the 6th Brandenburg and discovered that the two viola parts are indeed a canon one beat apart. The first one starts on the first beat, 1, 2, 3, 4.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
And the second one starts one beat later, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
So that they interlock. It's a canon only one beat apart. This is what it sounds like when you put them together.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 6; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Marriner]
That, again, was the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under Neville Marriner, the sixth Brandenburg, and the story of my brother's dream. He has great dreams. Man, I never remember my dreams. But I love very close canons. To me, the effect is exhilarating. It's like that old vaudeville exit, you know, where the two guys go offstage, walking so close, one behind the other, so close that they're touching and their legs are interlocked. I love that stuff.
Now our last suite today features three such canons. The imitating voices in these pieces come in on different notes from the preceding voice, and only a beat or two later, so they're practically on top of each other. Let's call them tailgating canons.
[music: Mozart, “Auf das Wohl aller Freunde” (K 508) (The Comic Mozart); Vienna Akademie Kammerchor/Mayer]
[music: Schickele, “Epitaphs,” “Orlando di Lasso”; Peter Schickele]
[music: J. S. Bach arr. Swingle, "Canon" (Bach’s Greatest Hits); The Swingle Singers]
We began with Auf das Wohl by Mozart. To the well-being of friends, empty your glasses, let each one among us live in joy. Long live he, hip hip. And that was from that same comic Mozart album. As a matter of fact, I forgot to translate the earlier round we did from that. But it was the same kind of words as that one right there. Just, let's have a good time.
And that second piece, the piano piece, was from Epitaphs for Piano by your humble host, performed by the composer. We heard the first of these pieces, dedicated to the memory of Orlando di Lasso. Back when I was teaching at Juilliard, we used to use his two-part motets in teaching counterpoint, and I always liked them. This piece was inspired by that.
And then finally we ended with one of the great Bach interpreting organizations, the Swingle Singers, from their first album, Bach's Greatest Hits, a canon, a four-part canon, presented in that delayed way. First we heard the first voice, then we heard the first two, then the three, and then all four voices, each one coming in on a different pitch. And of course here, too, there was a little bit added of bass and drums there. That canon, by the way, was comparatively recently discovered, and this performance, I get a kick out of this, this performance by the Swingle Singers is apparently its first modern performance.
You know, I mentioned how much I like really close, tight musical canons. What do you say we go out with a close, tight verbal canon?
That's Schickele Mix for this week! [echoing]
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
Our program is made possible with funds provided 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 49. 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.
Hey, you are looking good. See you next week.
[No speech for 32 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 Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.