These are the classical stations, WQED-FM Pittsburgh and WQEJ Johnstown, WQED Multimedia. Now stay tuned for Shickley Mix.
Time now to meet our master, Peter Shickley.
I'm here, isn't that enough? Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley 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.
I'm in a little bit of a hurry here, but I do want to thank the people who pay our bills. That's this radio station. Now the thing is, there's a severe storm warning in effect, including a tornado alert.
And frankly, I... I mean, I know the show must go on and everything, but the truth of the matter is your host is about to get his tookus down into the basement of this building. They're predicting a triple whammy.
A storm at sea, followed by a tornado, and then a brief thunderstorm. Or a thunderstorm. Now the good news is that the whole thing should be over in less than seven minutes. Man, I'm outta here. See you later.
Say, it's running right up the coast,
and they see just another dream.
The justice of the peace don't know his own fate, but he'll be down in the shelter.
Okay, I'm back.
I'm back. The storm, as predicted, is basically over, although it is still raining out there a bit.
Now, let's check. Everything seems to be working here electrically.
The triple weather whammy began with the first movement of a Vivaldi concerto, the concerto The Storm at Sea.
This is a performance by Nicholas Harnoncourt with the Consentus Musicus. Nicholas Wien and Alice Harnoncourt was playing the violin on that.
That was followed by a song from one of the greatest rock albums ever made, The Band. And that tune was Look Out Cleveland. It has one of the great lines in rock.
They talk about having heard the word, it did not come by train nor bird. I don't write them any better than that. And then finally, that wonderful, peculiar, short little piece.
It's a piece by Mozart called Das Donnerwetter, The Thunderstorm, which is quite a civilized little thunderstorm and ends with the storm over already after 48 seconds.
That was the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Now, you know, composers in Vivaldi's day didn't put much into their written scores about performance, playing loud or soft, getting faster, slowing down, things like that. Partly because there was more of a common practice then.
Less individualism than there is now. And partly because composers were so often directly involved with the performance of their music.
But it does leave the door open for a wide range of interpretation by modern performers. I listened to several different versions of that Vivaldi piece.
And although I feel that Harnoncourt sometimes takes a little bit too much liberty with the tempo and dynamics, there's no doubt that his version is far and away the most tempestuous of the ones I've heard. Let me play it again.
Let me play one little passage from that movement we just heard, but from another recording.
Now that's perfectly respectable, but you don't really fear for your safety. Now listen to those waves on the Harnoncourt recording.
We're talking tie yourself to the helm there. Storms, of course, mean motion. Lots of it and fast. Strings can get a lot of motion even on one note by going back and forth with the bow.
Woodwinds can't do that because the players can't tongue that fast. You can do it for two or three notes. It's called double or triple tonguing.
But you can't keep it up. So storm music is apt to find the woodwinds running up and or down, as they do in today's tidbit.
This example of storm music is from the incidental music for a drama. And you might want to try to figure out what kind of drama. I'll give you a hint. The way it ends is a clue.
Tidbit time today featured the composition Storm and Falling Trees by Alberto Colombo from the old Republic serial The Fighting Devil Dogs.
What I said about the ending is because you can usually tell movie cues they don't end with a big ending, a satisfying music ending. They end with a sort of a questioning ending because you want to go on to the next scene.
Also, there are a couple of funny things there. There's one place where it sounds like there are a couple of 3-4 bars for no particular musical reason. I'm sure that was for a timing reason.
That was James King conducting the Cinema Sound Orchestra from an album called... Let's see, I folded it all up here. Music from the serials, from the original Republic serials.
I'd like to read just a little bit about this particular one. A 12-chapter Marine Corps thriller, The Fighting Devil Dogs, 1938, finds our devil dogs, aka Leathernecks, in Lingchuria,
protecting American interests against that megalomaniacal villain, the lightning. Storm and Falling Trees achieves these effects by placing an imminently whistle-able melody
in the mid-range and separating each phrase with whirling woodwinds that simulate a howling gale. On the other hand, in Chapter 9 of The Fighting Devil Dogs,
it works equally well accompanying a conflagration and gun battle with Chinese mercenaries following an aerial torpedo attack ordered by the lightning.
The attack itself is carried out to the music of Beethoven's Egmont Overture. I used to go to those serials when I was a kid. My dad wouldn't take us to war movies. He didn't approve.
But we'd go to cowboy movies and detective movies and sci-fi movies. Those were the kind of serials I saw. Detective and sci-fi movies always had a lot of fights in warehouses.
Okay, my name is Peter Schickely, the eponymous host of Schickely Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. Today's show is called Weathering the Storm.
And, of course, the Ur-storm, the original storm, the mother of all storms, was the one in the Bible that produced the Great Flood.
Now, it may be that when God first started talking to Noah about the imminent inundation, it may be that Noah's initial reaction was, in Bill Cosby's words, Who is this, really?
But he had faith, and he built that ark, and as a result, you and I are here spending an hour with each other. Our next pair of selections deals with two floods, one ancient and one more recent.
The second number is about the ancient one. It's an instrumental depiction of the biblical flood, the relentless wind and rain going on day after day after day. The first number is about the ancient one.
It's about a flood that happened within my lifetime and perhaps within yours. It has a particular resonance for me, because I experienced a miniature version of the same thing back in the early 60s.
My wife and I had driven from New York to Colorado on a motorcycle that summer. We hooked up with some friends in Aspen, and we were heading down to the Monument Valley area in Arizona, two motorcycles and an old Chevy.
Early one evening, we drove through Grand Junction and started looking for a place to stay. We found a little state park in a nice, narrow canyon with pretty steep sides,
a sandy bottom, and a small stream trickling through it. The stream was maybe a foot or two wide. We were setting up camp when we, especially the young couple with the young baby,
who were two of our friends, began to worry that it might rain, and maybe we shouldn't be at the bottom of a narrow canyon. So we moved to higher ground, further from the stream. By now, it was dark. We had a lantern on.
And I remember hearing a strange sound. I thought maybe it was a big truck, far away, going up a hill in low gear. But as it got louder, it became obvious that it weren't no truck.
And soon we saw a wall of water come down that canyon. Now, I don't want to exaggerate. That wall of water wasn't more than a couple of feet high, maybe three. But within a minute, that stream was eight or ten feet wide.
As it turned out, we would have been okay at our original site, but barely. And I'll never forget the fact that the water level didn't rise gradually, or even quickly but evenly.
The new water level of that stream arrived all at once. The next day, we got down into the desert, and we came upon a ford, a place where the road dips because of a stream bed,
but it's not worth building a bridge because there's hardly ever any water in it. But that day there was. It was at least 30 feet wide. It wasn't deep, but it was deep enough. Just about everybody who drove up just turned off their engines,
got out of the car, and waited. It would have taken hours to drive around. One guy got impatient. He backed his car up to get a running start, revved the motor, and tore into the river, stalling out halfway across.
So he had to wait anyway, this time for a tow truck. But by lunchtime, it had gone down enough to where we could drive slowly across even the motorcycles. Easy come, easy go.
There's certainly no doubt about why they call them flash floods. And last about seven and a half minutes.
In white man's history, there'd never been a flood in the big Thompson Canyon. But on a cool July evening in 1976, 11 inches of rain fell in less than an hour. And the water rose over 30 feet, raging down through the canyon,
destroying everything in its path. That night I chanced to sit near a couple of highway patrolmen drinking coffee in a truck stop, and they were discussing a fellow trooper who had been killed in the flood. It seems Kenneth Purdy had been told to seek higher ground,
but instead had turned his car and raced the water down the canyon,
saving dozens of lives before it finally caught him.
They said his last words were, my car won't move, the mud is up to the windows, here comes the water.
This is to Kenneth Purdy, wherever he may be.
Just about sundown, the wind got strange
Coming off the prairie like the tide
Spilling down whenever summer rains
Old man wind on the nighttime Fireballs on the telephone wires
Heat lightning all over the park Somewhere in the distance there's a fire
The rains begin, it gets dark
Three feet of water running the street
Picking up speed, picking up power
There where the two rivers meet
They say it hit fifty miles an hour Nowhere for the water to go but down
Down the big Thompson it did roll
Everyone in Esther's Park town
Listening heard it on the radio
Patrolman Purdy number 213
Racing the canyon like a dash Warning everybody by the stream
Earned in time to see the splash
10-33 my car won't move
Then so everyone could hear The mud is up to the windows
Then with just a trace of fear
He said, here comes the water 213, what's your 10-20 over? 213, do you read, do you call channels?
We have a Mayday condition Mayday, what's your location over there?
Do you copy, Mayday, come back?
Mayday, do you read, come back?
Mayday, do you copy, come back?
Mayday, come back?
Come back, Mayday? Mayday, come back? Mayday, come back?
Mayday, Mayday, come back? Mayday, Mayday, come back?
Mayday, Mayday, come back? The earth is overflowed with flood!
Flood report number one began with a song called Here Comes the Water by Chuck Pyle. Wrote it and sang it. I heard him sing it recently in Dornan's Bar
in Moose, Wyoming. I was very taken with that song. And then we heard a portion of Igor Stravinsky's The Flood, a biblical allegory that was done for television.
Balanchine doing the choreography. The one line we heard was Noah in the person of Sebastian Cabot. That was the Columbia Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Well, we didn't hear the chorus.
That was the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by, it says here, Igor Stravinsky and Robert Kraft. I wonder which was the last left hand and which was the right. Which one of them held the baton?
Flood report number two also has two numbers, but they go in the opposite direction chronologically. We start with the biblical flood. This piece has a wonderful evocation of the rain starting and stopping.
And then we move on to a classic account of a 20th century flood. I'll be back in about 12 minutes.
Ah, children,
we think my boat's removed. Over the land the water has fled.
The moon will be gone.
This window will lie shut anon. And into my chamber I will go. Till this water, so great a one,
is that it will come.
When it rained five days in the sky,
turned dark as night. When it rained five days in the sky,
turned dark as night. Then trouble's taken place in the lowland.
Can't even get, can't even get,
gone somehow, lonesome, yet.
Flood report number two began with an excerpt from Neue Flüde, from the Chester Miracle Play. Sent to music by Benjamin Britten.
We heard Owen Branigan as Noah and Sheila Rex as his wife. And the English Opera Group Orchestra under Norman Del Mar. That was from a live performance.
And then we heard Bessie Smith singing backwater blues. I'm Peter Schickley. The program is Schickley Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're weathering the storm here, listening to some accounts of floods. Humans have intentionally created floods for irrigation and other purposes for millennia. But certainly the most spectacular
non-natural flood was when God parted the waters of the Red Sea to let the Israelites pass, and then un-parted them when their pursuers tried to do the same thing.
Handel's great oratorio, Israel in Egypt, has some of the best descriptive music ever written, including a wonderful account of the Red Sea incident. We're going to hear a suite of four numbers from that work.
I've rearranged the order in one case, but the event is covered from start to finish. I'll read the words here, even though it is in English and it's a wonderful performance. It's all chorus work, the things I've chosen,
which makes it sometimes a little hard to understand. We start with, He rebuked the Red Sea and it was dried up. This is just 51 seconds. It's just amazing. It has the effect.
It's loud followed by very soft. It has the effect of a stern father and an obedient child. Then we have, He led them through the deep as through a wilderness. And this is a fugue, natch.
A fugue, just not to get too fancy about it, is a form related to the round where one part comes in and then the others. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Row, row, row your boat gently down. In other words, one voice starts
and the others follow. That is natural. For he led them through the deep. And then we have, But the waters overwhelmed their enemies. There was not one of them left. And that's the real storm music
as the waters come crashing back down. And then from part two, I've taken a chorus, The depths have covered them. They sank unto the bottom as a stone.
And this is an absolutely beautiful piece which has a sinking feeling. The line, Dee da dee dee. Dee da dee dee. Has a sort of a sinking feeling, but it's also so peaceful.
It's like the storm is completely over and there's this complete calm on the sea, which is now a giant graveyard. Here's how the crossing of the Red Sea is reported by Handel.
He with old hands
He led them through the deep.
He led them through
He sank
He sank into
He sank
Selections from Israel in Egypt by Handel. That was Simon Preston conducting the English Chamber Orchestra and the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
You know, thinking back about that flash flood business, I was told once that you really shouldn't camp at all in those narrow arroyos, which are sort of even smaller than canyons,
you know, just places where water comes down, eroded places. Because if you get a flash flood, what it does is it washes all the rattlesnakes down on you. Yuck!
In spite of that, however, I love storms. I mentioned earlier that storms mean motion, and all the actual storm music we've heard has been fast, or at least agitated.
The aftermath of the storm, as we've heard from Bessie Smith and Georgie Freddie Handel, is a different matter. Let's go out with a historic recording of a song whose words and melody have an air of resignation,
but whose arrangement here has a jaunty feel that almost belies the lyrics, as in, perhaps, trying to keep your spirits up. This is the composer of the song, Harold Arlen, singing,
with Leo Reisman and his orchestra.
There's no sun up in the sky all the time
Life is bare Gloom and misery everywhere
Stormy weather
Just can't get my pool of water
It's up to the tide
All the time When she went away The blues walked in and met me If she stays away
Old rocking chair will get me All I do is pray The Lord above will let me Walk in the sun once more Can't go on
Everything I had is gone Stormy weather Since my gal and I And together Keeps raining all the time
All the time All the time
Weathering the storm with stormy weather. That's Sickly Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by this radio station and its members. Thank you all.
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 60.
And this is Peter Schickely 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.
Dr. Toby Cosgrove, heart surgeon and CEO, the Cleveland Cleveland.