What You Please

Schickele Mix Episode #54

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1993-12-25
“Peter, are you ready?”
As ready as a guy has any right to be

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You can listen to this episode on the Internet Archive, and follow along using the transcript.

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Transcript

[This is a machine-generated transcript, corrected by hand and formatted as HTML. You can download the original as an .srt file.]

As ready as a guy has any right to be, 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 it is with great goodwill that I thank our benefactors, the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the Ford Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also this magnificent and munificent radio station.
It must have been back in about 1958 when I was a student at Juilliard that I wrote a letter to Peter Rosenfeld. He was a friend from Swarthmore College days and he was and is a cellist. I actually studied cello with him for about a month. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to add a little musical P.S. to the letter and I started thinking about the beginning of Bach's first suite for unaccompanied cello. Here's how it goes.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Suite for Violincello Solo, No. 1 (BWV 1007); Pierre Fournier]
That was Pierre Fournier playing one of the great cellists of the middle of the century. Well, it occurred to me that what Bach wrote there works as an accompaniment to another well-known melody. Now, to show you how they go together, I'll play the top melody on the authentic instrument. I think the flute stop would probably sound good, yeah, I think that's it, while I play the LP of Fournier playing Bach.
Now, I hope I can coordinate this with the turntable here.
[music: Schickele playing "Brazil" on the keyboard over the Fournier recording of the Bach]
Okay, that worked pretty well. Well, Bach and Brazil, the real Bachianas Brasileiras, played by Fournier and Schickele, the most unforgettable transgenerational collaboration since Natalie Cole and her father Nat King Cole overcame that pesky duet barrier, death. So I wrote those two lines of music at the end of the letter to Peter, and it got me to thinking about separately written pieces that fit together.
A year or so later, a conducting student named Jorge Mester and some other friends and I put on a humorous concert at Juilliard, an event that turned out to be the prototype of P. D. Q. Bach concerts. And for that program, I decided to string together a bunch of the multi-tune combinations I'd thought of, add some new ones, and end up with a whole three-movement piece made up entirely of quotes.
But I realized that the trick to doing such a piece was to make the stringing together part as seamless as possible. That is, to give the piece an overall coherence that minimizes its patchwork nature. It's especially important when, and this is more often true than not, two or more themes fit together at first but not throughout their length. Which, in fact, is the case with Brazil and the Bach cello suite.
So what do you do when two themes stop sounding good together? You can abandon both of them and go on to something else or you can continue one of them and find something that fits with the rest of it. Here's the Bach-Brazil combination as I orchestrated it and I decided to continue with the pop song.
[music excerpt: Professor Peter Schickele, "Quodlibet for Small Orchestra, 3rd Mvt." (An Evening with P. D. Q. Bach); Chamber orchestra under the direction of Jorge Mester]
Okay, but what to do now? Well, I had the bass instruments change from the Bach to a sort of tango-ish accompaniment figure there. [sung] And instinctively reinforced that with a related but simplified rhythm in the woodwinds. [sung] Hey, what does that sound like? The slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 7, 2nd Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
And sure enough, that melody, not the chords, you have to change the harmonization, but the melody fits with the second half of Brazil, at least till the very end. And then the way it doesn't fit is funny, so I left it in. In this live recording of the first public P. D. Q. Bach concert, you can tell when different people realize that the woodwind line isn't just an accompaniment. It's Beethoven's Seventh, and the double whammy is when the Beethoven ends in a different key than Brazil has been in.
And then to end the section, I brought back the Bach cello suite with a new tune on top. Here's the whole section now featuring the three B's, Bach, Beethoven, and Brazil.
[music excerpt: Professor Peter Schickele, "Quodlibet for Small Orchestra, 3rd Mvt." (An Evening with P. D. Q. Bach); Chamber orchestra under the direction of Jorge Mester]
Well, I did end up with a whole three movement piece that, and you don't hear composers boast about this very often, that does not contain a single original theme. But I had to stay up the whole night to finish it. Some of my composer friends came over to the apartment to help with the copying. I would finish a page of score and hand it to one of them to do the individual parts. It was like a sweatshop.
I had occasion to look at those parts in 1989, 30 years after that concert, and it sure brought back the old memories. Because each part changes copying hands several times, right in the middle. The flute part, say, starts out in Richard Peaslee's handwriting and then suddenly turns into that of Lawrence Widdoes and finally Philip Glass. I'd forgotten how familiar those musical handwriting styles were to me. So anyway, the concert went pretty well, but it wasn't all smooth sailing.
We were still copying the parts to the last movement of one piece while George was rehearsing the first movement with the little student orchestra he'd put together. There was one unexpected moment during the rehearsal. It had occurred to me that this oboe theme from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 7, 1st Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
would fit together with another well-known theme. Now, most musicians have a great sense of humor, but when we got to this point in the rehearsal...
[music excerpt: Professor Peter Schickele, "Quodlibet for Small Orchestra, 1st Mvt." (An Evening with P. D. Q. Bach); Chamber orchestra under the direction of Jorge Mester]
One of the violinists stood up, walked out, and never came back. There was nothing we could do about it. It was a volunteer orchestra. Now, one section of the piece was inspired by a magazine ad I saw. It was for a set of recordings called The Heart of the Symphony and The Heart of the Piano Concerto. The gist of the ad was, what makes these great pieces great is the beautiful melodies that everyone knows and loves. Why listen to all that boring stuff in between?
I remember thinking, well, that's as fine as far as it goes, but if the object is to save time, wouldn't it make more sense to play all the great themes simultaneously? And that led to the idea of combining themes from all nine Beethoven symphonies. I gave myself a head start by picking the most common harmonic progression in Beethoven. Da-da-da, da-da-da, and then back to...
We professional musicians, in addition to being incredibly sexy, refer to those chords as tonic and dominant. So I went through all the Beethoven symphonies looking for themes that used the tonic dominant chord scheme and figured out which could be made to fit together. The ones I found were in the slow movement of the first,
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 1, 2nd Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
the slow movement of the Second,
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 2, 2nd Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
the opening movement of the Eroica,
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, 1st Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
The slow movement of the Fourth Symphony.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 4, 2nd Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
The last movement of the ubiquitous Fifth.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, 4th Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
the last movement of the Pastoral Symphony,
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, 5th Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
the scherzo movement of the Seventh Symphony.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 7, 3rd Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
You know, I cheated a bit on that last one. I omitted the pause between the two phrases of the melody and strung them together. Instead of [sung], I went [sung]. I had to do that to make it fit, but more than 30 years later, it still bothers me.
Going back to our catalog, from the 8th symphony, I used the very beginning.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 8, 1st Mvt.; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
And from what they always referred to as Beethoven's famous Ninth Symphony in the Beatles movie Help, I fashioned a two-part phrase taken from the beginning of the scherzo and the beginning of the theme that calmed the tiger in Help.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, 2nd Mvt., then the finale; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
Okay, so I was through, right? Wait a minute. Then I remembered that when Brahms' First Symphony was premiered, its admirers paid Brahms the ultimate compliment by referring to it as Beethoven's Tenth. So it seemed like there ought to be something from that in our Dagwood sandwich, no? Well, how about this?
[music excerpt: Brahms, Symphony No. 1, 4th Mvt.; Los Angeles Philharmonic/Giulini]
Put them all together, and they spell
[music excerpt: Professor Peter Schickele, "Quodlibet for Small Orchestra, 2nd Mvt." (An Evening with P. D. Q. Bach); Chamber orchestra under the direction of Jorge Mester]
Jorge Mester conducting a nameless chamber orchestra in the first part of the middle movement of the Quodlibet, which, although it is by my good friend Professor Peter Schickele, appears on the album An Evening with P.D.Q. Bach. Those Beethoven excerpts, by the way, were done by von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, the Brahms by Giulini and the L.A. Phil. Me? I'm Mr. Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix on APR. So what's with the title Quodlibet? What does that mean? Well, I'd love to leave you with the impression that I invented this idea of combining themes, but I'm afraid it goes back many centuries. And Quodlibet is the The Latin words Quod Libet mean what pleases, or as you will, or what you please, which is the title of today's show.
I assume libet is a cognate of license. My dad grew up in Germany and had to take nine years of Latin, and when he wanted to point out to his kids that just because he was allowed to do something didn't mean that we could, he would say, Quod licet jove, non licet bove. What Jove may do, a cow may not. As a musical term, it goes back to 1544, but according to Grove's dictionary, it was already the name of an improvised oral examination in German universities, the Disputatio de Quodlibet.
Originally, the disputation was a serious scholastic exercise at the Sorbonne in Paris during the Middle Ages, but in Germany it became a humorous parody featuring ridiculous lists of items loosely combined under an absurd theme, e.g. objects forgotten by women fleeing from a harem. I guess David Letterman has been doing quodlibets all along. One of the most famous musical examples is the 30th and last of Bach's Goldberg Variations. This is really a great quodlibet. Here's Rosalyn Tureck playing it.
[music: J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, No. 30 (Quodlibet); Rosalyn Tureck]
I mean, it's a great little piece, but as far as being something that'll make you the life of the party, I'd say that it's not quite as funny as wearing a lampshade. The point is, of course, that most of us don't know the songs. There are two of them in there. Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewiss. I've never seen these written out. I mean, I have those words, and they seem to fit that melody. Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewiss. Is that prosody right?
Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir. That accent on the bei, shouldn't it be... Ich bin so lang bei dir nicht gewesen? Why am I doing this? I don't speak German. Anyway, that's I have been so long apart from you.
And the other one, Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben. Cabbages and turnips have sent me packing. Or as another translation puts it, cabbage and turnips drove me away. Had my mother cooked meat, I'd have opted to stay. It's real peasant German, I'm sure. A quodlibet might as well not be a quodlibet if you don't know the songs being quoted. In that way, it's a bit like a newspaper, very topical.
What's the old movie in which a journalist says, tomorrow this will be yesterday's paper and they'll use it to wrap dead fish in? It has been said that one of the reasons Saint-Saëns didn't allow the Carnival of the Animals to be published or publicly performed during his lifetime is that he was afraid too many people wouldn't catch the musical allusions he made. The twelfth number in the suite is a quodlibet in which he starts out by quoting himself from the Danse Macabre.
[music excerpt: Saint-Saëns, "Danse Macabre," Opus 40; Cincinnati Pops Orchestra/Kunzel]
Then there's an imitative section based on a French folk song that we English speakers know as Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. The clarinet plays Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot. My pal Pete in the moonlight. Another clarinet solo swipes a couple of licks from Rossini's The Barber of Seville.
[music excerpt: Rossini, "Il barbiere di Siviglia," "Una voce poco fa"; Agnes Baltsa/Wiener Symphoniker/Marin]
Put them all together and you've got The Fossils.
[music: Saint-Saëns, "Carnaval des animaux," "Fossiles"; Argerich/Freire/Kremer/Van Keulen/Maisky]
Saint-Saëns, The Carnival of the Animals, that was The Fossils, played by Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire, the pianists, and a group of other musicians with Gidon Kremer playing first violin. And before that, by the way, the little excerpt from the Danse Macabre was Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops on an album called Chiller, and Agnes Baltsa sang the Rossini, a little bit of Rossini.
People assume, since I've written a bunch of Quodlibets, that I'm a walking dictionary of themes, but that is certainly not the case. There are several quotes in the Carnival of the Animals, for instance, that I didn't know about until I read about them, including the one from the Barber of Seville. Some Princeton students once played me a tape of an operatic quodlibet they'd done by editing snippets of different operas and having them go into one another in clever ways.
But most of it was lost on me. I'd be embarrassed to tell you how many standard repertory operas I'm not familiar with. What I do in my own quodlibets is try to have a certain number of tunes that just about everybody knows. And then if a few things like Mozart's First Symphony, written when he was eight, slip by, it doesn't really matter. I definitely do not regard these things as a test. But I did know a teacher at Juilliard who used to hand out blue books to his advanced class, put on the piece we're about to hear, and see how many of the themes they could identify. Man, I'd break into a cold sweat.
But what if, unbeknownst to the teacher, you had a tiny earpiece secreted in your ear, and you were listening to this program, and the host was identifying the themes as the piece went along, right in your ear, and you were the only person who could hear it?
[music: Professor Peter Schickele, "Unbegun Symphony," 3rd Mvt. (P. D. Q. Bach at Carnegie Hall); The Royal P. D. Q. Bach Orchestra/Mester]
Strings, Jupiter Symphony, Mozart. Horn, Du liegst mir im Herzen. Trumpet, Cielito Lindo.
[No speech for 28 s.]
Clarinet, Mozart No. 39. Violins, Beethoven No. 8. Then back to the beginning material.
[No speech for 29 s.]
Trumpet, Darling Clementine. Strings, Fledermaus. Woodwinds, Brahms No. 4. Flute, Carmen.
[No speech for 22 s.]
Violins, Blue Danube. Basses, Beethoven Eroica. Woodwinds, The Swan from Carnival of the Animals. Here comes the flute with Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.
[music: Professor Peter Schickele, "Unbegun Symphony," 3rd Mvt. (P. D. Q. Bach at Carnegie Hall); The Royal P. D. Q. Bach Orchestra/Mester]
Horns and violas, The Band Played On.
[No speech for 36 s.]
And we ended with two phrases from the Jupiter Symphony of Mozart in reverse order, with an extra impolite note in the bassoon. That was the third movement of the Unbegun Symphony by your humble host. Being the Unbegun Symphony, of course, it only has a third and a fourth movement.
That was the Royal P. D. Q. Bach Festival Orchestra under the direction of Jorge Mester. The term quodlibet is usually used for pieces that are humorous, or at least fun-loving, but extensive quotation is not necessarily a sign of mirth and laughter. Charles Ives called the second movement of his fourth symphony a comedy, but it's an infernal kind of comedy. I must say that my reaction is more one of amazement than merriment. Here's how Ives described the movement himself.
The second movement is not a scherzo in an accepted sense of the word, but rather a comedy in which an exciting, easy, and worldly progress through life is contrasted with the trials of the pilgrims in their journey through the swamps and rough country. The occasional slow episodes, pilgrims' hymns, are constantly crowded out and overwhelmed by the former.
The dream or fantasy ends with an interruption of reality, the Fourth of July in Concord. Brass bands, drum corps, etc.
He quotes a whole bunch of tunes. Some of them I know, like Turkey in the Straw, and the Camptown Ladies Sing This Song, and Yankee Doodle Went to Town a-Riding on a Pony, and Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. But the hymns are unfamiliar to me, and, I suspect, to most of us.
But whether or not you recognize all the quotes, the flamboyant drama of this Ives piece comes through loud, and I do mean loud, and clear. Before we hear it, I have to point out that I'm Peter Schickele. This is Schickele Mix on APR.
Most of us quodlibetists try to fit themes together in a way that has some reference to past or current harmonic practice. It should come as no surprise that I do crossword puzzles, for instance, and when I have time I like to make them too. But Ives didn't care about things fitting in any traditional way. He was after a wilder and woolier sound, and boy, he sure got it.
[music: three hymns used in Ives' 4th Symphony: "Sweet By & By," "Beulah Land," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul"; Members of the Chicago Symphony Chorus/Richard Webster, organ/Thomas]
[music: Ives, Symphony No. 4, 2nd Mvt. (Comedy: Allegretto); Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Thomas]
The second movement, marked Comedy: Allegretto, from Ives' Fourth Symphony. That was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. And it's interesting, that's the only conductor listed here, when Stokowski did the first complete performance of this work. Not that long ago, there were two assistant conductors involved, you know, conducting in different tempos to get that incredibly complex web of sound going.
But either musicians can do it on their own now, or Michael Tilson Thomas has three arms, or some uncredited people were helping out there. Anyway, it's a fantastic performance of an absolutely fantastic piece. Okay, Gerard Hoffnung was a tuba player, cartoonist, raconteur, and catalyst who put on several legendary humorous concerts in London during the 1950s.
The Concerto Popolare, a piano concerto to end all piano concertos, has, perhaps unfortunately, not had that effect. But it certainly tries its best. It's over 12 minutes long, which means we don't have time to hear it all, so I've had to truncate it, but I've made the cut in the middle, because the beginning and ending are both classic realizations of a concerto soloist's and conductor's worst nightmares.
[music excerpt: Reizenstein, "The Hoffnung Festival," "Concerto Popolare" (a Piano Concerto to end all Piano Concertos), beginning and ending; Yvonne Arnaud/Hoffnung (alias Morley College) Symphony Orchestra/Del Mar]
Okay, that was the beginning and ending of the Concerto Popolare. It was written by Franz Reizenstein, and the soloist was Yvonne Arnaud, from the first of the Hoffnung records. That beginning is one of the most inspired things in the history of musical humor.
I once heard a story that a very famous conductor came out onto the stage for the second work on the concert and gave a huge downbeat for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, having forgotten that the next work on the program was Sheep May Safely Graze. I said to the person who told me this, a member of the orchestra, what do you do in a case like that? He said, well, we just wait for him to do something that looks like it belongs to the piece, and then we start playing. That's musician talk.
But what if the soloist and the conductor weren't in agreement about what was coming up? What if the orchestra thought it was the Tchaikovsky and the soloist the Grieg? Well, you just found out what would happen. And we heard some Rachmaninoff and Gershwin and Warsaw Concerto, Yankee Doodle, Roll Out the Barrel, other stuff too, which is my way of saying I probably didn't recognize them all.
Well, it looks like we've got time for Tidbit Time here. Let's go out with Garrison Keillor and Frederica von Stade in a little quodlibet put together by Philip Brunelle. The title lays it out: Beethoven Chased by Rossini.
[music: Beethoven/Rossini arr. Brunelle/Keillor, "Beethoven Chased by Rossini" (Songs of the Cat); Garrison Keillor/Frederica von Stade]
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
Beethoven Chased by Rossini, from Songs of the Cat, Garrison Keillor and Frederica von Stade bring Schickele Mix to a close 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. And we 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 54. 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 Schickele, Schickele Mix. Care of American Public Radio, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]