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Schickele Mix is next. Are you ready, Peter?
You bet your sweet bippy. 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 I'm happy to express my gratitude to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and this up-to-the-minute radio station for paying the bills. The show is distributed hither and yon by PRI, Public Radio International.
Okay, all you tune detectives out there, get out your auditory magnifying glasses and see if you can tell me what these two pieces of music have in common. Here's part of Mozart's Symphony No. 3.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 3 in E Flat, 3rd Mvt.; Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London/Leinsdorf]
And here's Carl Friedrich Abel's Symphony No. 6.
[music excerpt: Abel, Symphony No. 6 in E Flat, 3rd Mvt.; Cantilena/Shepherd]
Okay, what do they have in common? Everything, that's what. The technical term for the relationship between those two pieces is identity. And that's not just true of this part, the third movement, either. These two symphonies are identical in their entirety. Well, actually, they're not completely identical. The notes are the same, but there is a slight difference in orchestration. Let's listen a little bit further into the movement.
Here's the Abel, which, by the way, was written first.
[music excerpt: Abel, Symphony No. 6 in E Flat, 3rd Mvt.; Cantilena/Shepherd]
And here's Mozart ripping him off.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 3 in E Flat, 3rd Mvt.; Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London/Leinsdorf]
The only difference is that Abel wrote for a pair of oboes and Mozart replaced them with clarinets. Hey, very significant difference. I hope you can hear the sound of irony dripping from those words. So what's the story here?
Mozart's third symphony, which exists in his handwriting and to which his posthumous cataloger gave the opus number 18, turns out to be by a now obscure composer named Carl Friedrich Abel. Oh man, does that mean that the Jupiter Symphony may have actually been written by Haydn or Boccherini or Christopher Marlowe? Not to worry. Our hero was only eight years old at the time of this symphony. His father had brought him to London to show him off.
You know, Mozart was a child prodigy. He would sit on women's laps and improvise sonatas. And there he became acquainted with two of that city's brightest musical lights, Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian, and Carl Friedrich Abel. Little Wolfgang really liked their symphonies, so he wanted to study them, especially since, at the age of eight, it was high time he wrote a symphony of his own.
And in those days, the way you studied a piece was to copy it, which, by the way, is by far the absolutely, hands down, no doubt about it, best way to study a piece. Somebody once told me that he'd seen the Beethoven symphonies, all of them, in Wagner's hand. It's too bad that cheap printing has made us so lazy about doing that.
At any rate, when the Mozart manuscript was catalogued, the Abel piece had been forgotten, so it was assumed, since it was in Mozart's handwriting, that the wretched little tyke had composed it himself. But there is no evidence to suggest that any Mozart of either generation tried to palm it off as original. Why don't we listen to the whole thing, the third movement of Abel's Symphony No. 6. This is what Mozart was listening to when he started writing symphonies.
[music: Abel, Symphony No. 6 in E Flat, 3rd Mvt.; Cantilena/Shepherd]
Lively stuff. Cantilena, led by Adrian Shepherd, performing the finale of the Symphony No. 6 in E-flat by Carl Friedrich Abel. Incidentally, the Mozart excerpts heard earlier were done by the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London under Erich Leinsdorf. Today's show is called License or Larceny. In other words, when are composers borrowing and when are they stealing?
They've certainly done both, but the truth of the matter is that there's a very large gray area between those two words. Certain ideas are like pollen in the air. The stuff is bound to fall on more than one receptor. Or, to put it another way, it's going to make more than one person sneeze. Here's the opening of Beethoven's Third Symphony.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E Flat, Opus 55, “Eroica,” 1st Mvt.; The London Classical Players/Norrington]
And here's the overture from an early Mozart opera.
[music: Mozart, Intrada to “Bastien und Bastienne”; Wurttemberg Chamber Orchestra/Faerber]
Roger Norrington conducted the Beethoven, and Jörg Faerber conducted the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra in the Intrada from Mozart's very early opera, Bastien und Bastienne. This is surely not a case of larceny. The chances that Beethoven had heard the Mozart work are virtually nil.
And besides, that melodic idea, da-dee-da, da-da-da-dee-da, seems so basic to the musical language of that time and place that I wouldn't be surprised if it had occurred to some other composer in addition to Mozart and Beethoven. Okay, now, Mozart's Haffner Symphony was written in 1782. Here's how it begins.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 35 in D, “Haffner” (K 385), 1st Mvt.; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Marriner]
Three years earlier, Johann Christian Bach wrote a symphony that begins this way.
[music excerpt: J. C. Bach, Symphony for Double Orchestra in E Flat, Opus 18, No. 1, 1st Mvt.; The Academy of Ancient Music/Standage]
Now it has been suggested, due to the similarity of those openings, that Mozart may have intended his work to be a tribute to Johann Christian Bach, whom he liked personally and admired as a composer, and who died right then in 1782 when Mozart wrote his symphony. Well, maybe so. But it seems to me equally possible that they just both got dusted by the same batch of pollen. By the way, I don't mean to imply that there wasn't any musical larceny in those days.
It happened all the time, especially since there weren't any copyright laws then. They say that Mozart, when he was touring with a new piano concerto, wrote his own part in shorthand so that no one could swipe the piece. Although, personally, I've always suspected that laziness had something to do with it, too. That's probably projection on my part. Did you know that in Shakespeare's day, an actor's script only had his own lines in it, along with the last few words of the preceding lines for cueing purposes?
That meant that no one actor had the complete play, which prevented him from being able to defect to another company and take the play with him. In one of his letters, Mozart talks about making a wind band arrangement of the highlights from his latest opera. He says, I might as well do it before somebody else does. Now, there was also reverse stealing. A little-known composer, especially if he was also a publisher, would write a piece and put a famous composer's name on it so that it would sell better.
Last I heard, the jury was still out on whether one of Haydn's most famous pieces,
[music]
was actually written by Haydn or by one Roman Hofstetter. Nice try, Roman. No, I mean it. It is very nice. I don't know. I always feel a bit ambivalent about copyright, the strict protection of intellectual property. Because who does it best seems more important than who did it first. But on the other hand, I do believe that creative people should be able to make a living off their work.
And these days, music doesn't have lots of patronage coming from the aristocracy and the church as it once did. These days, composers like Peter Schickele do things like radio programs called Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about similarities here. But at least among the works of first-rate composers, any striking similarities you may hear are likely to be brief and superficial. Superficial in that they have little to do with the personality of the piece as a whole. Still, even if they're not larceny, they're fun to run across. Here's a little trio of pairs of singularly similar passages. First, Handel and Mozart.
[music excerpt: Handel, “Messiah”, “Hallelujah”; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Shaw]
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 36 in C, "Linz" (K 425), 1st Mvt.; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Marriner]
The Hallelujah Chorus from the Messiah, followed by part of Mozart's Symphony No. 36, Written right around the time Wolfgang was being introduced to the music of Handel and Bach. In fact, Mozart later reorchestrated the Messiah, but did he know that piece in 1783? Who cares? The two works are completely different. Now here's Bartok, followed by Stravinsky.
[music excerpt: Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta, 2nd Mvt.; Detroit Symphony Orchestra/Dorati]
[music excerpt: Stravinsky, Symphony in Three Movements, 1st Mvt.; Columbia Symphony Orchestra/Stravinsky]
Excerpts from two pieces written within ten years of each other, Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. Now, here's a very interesting one, brought to my attention by my friend John Michel. We'll hear two excerpts from Miklós Rózsa's Spellbound Concerto, based on music from the movie of that name. And let me point out right now that it uses that weird electronic instrument, the theremin.
It sounds like a ghostly female voice. The reason I'm mentioning that is that I don't want you to focus all your attention on the theremin. If you listen to the music itself, you'll be very interested in the excerpt from Howard Hanson's Second Symphony, written about a decade and a half earlier.
[music excerpt: Rózsa, Spellbound Concerto; Daniel Adni/Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Alwyn]
Daniel Adni, playing the piano with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, under Kenneth Alwyn, Miklós Rózsa's Spellbound Concerto, followed by Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2, the Romantic, played by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony. Fun and games. But now, finally, this next example must surely be a case of real theft. I mean, listen to these two songs.
[music excerpt: Offenbach, “Genevieve de Brabant,” “Duo des Gendarmes”; Malcolm McEachern/Harold Williams]
Sherrill Milnes singing the Marines' Hymn, and I cut him off a bit abruptly there so that we could get into Malcolm McEachern and Harold Williams singing the gendarmes' duo from Jacques Offenbach's opéra bouffe, Geneviève de Brabant. The Offenbach came first. Coincidence? I think not. So that means it must be grand larceny, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, in that the two melodies are substantially the same.
No, in that whoever put the Marine words to the tune, and there's disagreement about who did that, but whoever it was didn't pretend to have written the music. They just appropriated it. Which happens a lot in the world of song. The melody of Elvis Presley's big hit Love Me Tender comes from an old song called Aura Lee. Of course, classical composers use folk songs in their works all the time. As long as a tune isn't copyrighted, you can use it without even formally acknowledging it if you want. This business of appropriation is very interesting in the field of comedy.
Certain kinds of comedians often tell jokes that they didn't make up or that weren't made up for them, jokes that are just going around. But it gets sticky if you consciously use a joke made up by another comedian. Somebody once suggested In my P.D.Q. Bach concerts, I say that the Steinway Piano Company has asked me to announce that I play a Baldwin. Well, I thought that's good, and I used it a couple of times before I found out that it was a Victor Borge line. Dropped it immediately, not kosher.
And yet I feel no undue shame in bringing the P.D.Q. Bach cantata Knock Knock into this world, in spite of the fact that the libretto consists of a bunch of jokes which, coincidentally enough, some of my favorite jokes, but which I don't pretend, nor would P.D.Q. Bach, to have originated. They're folk jokes. By the way, there are several instances of composers using what they thought were folk songs, only to find out later that the songs were not only of known authorship, but copyrighted.
Both Stravinsky and Richard Strauss were thus stung, and Bizet didn't find out until after he had finished Carmen that the habanera was composed
by someone who was alive and kicking. The interesting point, however, is that Bizet's version is much better than the original. As long as Bizet thought it was a folk song, he had no qualms about changing it, and, in the process, improving it. Would he have been so free and easy if he had known it was a published song by the composer of La Paloma? Who knows? Certainly not I, I being Peter Schickele, and the program being Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
License or larceny? Borrowing, appropriating, transforming, stealing other people's music. I doubt if many concert goers notice, I know I never did, a similarity between the beginning of the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67, 3rd Mvt.; The London Classical Players/Norrington]
and the opening of the last movement of Mozart's Fortieth Symphony.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G minor, (K 550), 4th Mvt.; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Marriner]
But Beethoven noticed it and commented on it. Here, let me turn the authentic instrument on here and play the two themes in the same key so the relationship is easier to hear. Here's the Beethoven,
[music: keyboard demonstration]
and here's the Mozart.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that Beethoven consciously based his theme on Mozart's. I would be surprised if that's how it happened. He simply noticed the similarity. There may have been something unconscious there. Unfortunately, we can't ask him. But I am going to give you an opportunity to get a rare glimpse into a composer's thought process. I can do this because I'm on extremely good terms, most of the time at least, with the composer in question. He's my brother's only sibling.
In 1967, I had been listening a lot to the Beatles song, Tomorrow Never Knows.
[music excerpt: Lennon/McCartney, "Tomorrow Never Knows" (Revolver); The Beatles]
I began working on a song of my own. The words were inspired by the experience of staying up all night waiting for our daughter to be born. And I was aware that Tomorrow Never Knows was in the back of my mind. I had no intention of ripping off The Beatles. If I had, I wouldn't be talking about it on the radio. But I didn't worry about it either, because things take their own shapes as they evolve. I'm not one of those see-everything-in-one-flash kind of composers.
In the end, the two tunes are almost as different from each other as are the Beethoven and the Mozart themes we just heard. But if you hear the beginnings of the two songs together, you can see how
[music excerpt: Lennon/McCartney, "Tomorrow Never Knows" (Revolver); The Beatles]
grew into
[music excerpt: Schickele, "4:00 A.M., June; The Sky Was Green" (The Open Window); The Open Window]
Now that's just the top of each song. They continue in completely different ways.
[music: Lennon/McCartney, "Tomorrow Never Knows" (Revolver); The Beatles]
[music excerpt: Schickele, "4:00 A.M., June; The Sky Was Green" (The Open Window); The Open Window]
First we heard the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, and then the last section of 4 a.m. June, The Sky Was Green, by your friendly local composer, Peter Schickele. And performed by The Open Window, Stan Walden on organ, Bob Dennis on piano, and me on electric piano, and also singing the song, quadruple-tracked. The recording studio was way ahead of the laboratory in terms of cloning people.
Okay, now we come to a relationship between two songs that has been officially declared larcenous. George Harrison copyrighted My Sweet Lord in 1970. In 1963, the Chiffons had had a hit with He's So Fine. The publishers of He's So Fine charged George Harrison with plagiarism. What do you think?
[music: Harrison, "My Sweet Lord" (The Best of George Harrison); George Harrison]
[music: Mack, "He’s So Fine" (The Chiffons Greatest Recordings); The Chiffons]
George Harrison, My Sweet Lord, and Ronnie Mack's He's So Fine, sung by the Chiffons. Both of them fine songs. Of course, nobody could prove that Harrison had heard He's So Fine, but the earlier song was a hit, and the similarities are so striking that the case was settled in favor of He's So Fine, and 40% of the royalties of My Sweet Lord now go to the publishers of the Chiffons' song. So the Chiffons got back together and recorded their own version of My Sweet Lord, perhaps rubbing it in just a little bit there, after which Harrison wrote a number called This Song.
The words are not always easy to understand in this song, so I'll just read some of them. "This song has nothing tricky about it." "This song ain't black or white, and as far as I know, don't infringe on anyone's copyright." "So, this song will that be. This song is in E. This song is for you, and..." "This song has nothing bright about it." Now, you might wonder what that means, just hearing it.
And if you look at the lyrics here, you might particularly wonder because the B in bright is capitalized. Well, guess what? The name of the publishing company of He's So Fine is Bright Tunes. "This song has nothing bright about it. This tune ain't bad or good, and come whatever may, my expert tells me it's okay." Here is this song by George Harrison.
[music excerpt: Harrison, "This Song" (Thirty Three & 1/3); George Harrison]
George Harrison, This Song. Unfortunately, we don't have time to hear the whole thing. There's another verse or so in there. But I like it when people use their music to comment on everyday life, what's happening to them right then. Oswald von Wolkenstein did it back in the medieval days, George Harrison is still doing it now. Now, we haven't had any jazz on this show, so let's go out with a nice little similarity. This is never going to end up in court.
It's just one of those fun-to-notice things. Similarity between Miles Davis' So What, from the Kind of Blue album, which we'll hear just an excerpt of, the beginning of the main theme, And then Shorty Rogers, Dance Espresso.
[music excerpt: Davis, "So What" (Kind of Blue); Miles Davis]
Miles Davis, a little bit of So What, followed by Shorty Rogers' Dance Espresso. And in that context, at any rate, the Shorty Rogers should sound doubly familiar, not only because of the Miles Davis, and I'm not sure which of those came first, by the way, but also because the Dance Espresso is, of course, a version of the Coffee Dance from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.
Okay, we began this program with a symphony that Mozart didn't write at the age of eight. Let's end with one he did write at the age of 17.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. Not only that, our program is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. 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 65.
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. 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 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.