Say It and Sing It

Schickele Mix Episode #66

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1994-04-16
“Peter, are you ready?”
Well, let's take a chance

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

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Transcript

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

My name is Bruce Duffy. Thank you very much for selecting WNIB. We invite you to stay tuned now for Schickele Mix, and your host, Peter Schickele, as we've been mentioning in recent weeks, is into all kinds of things, many and diverse items that he does and thinks about and pursues in his life. I'm just wondering, are you anything of a gambling man, Pete?
Well, let's take a chance. Here's the theme.
[No speech for 14s.]
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 here's to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and this fine radio station, whence my voice reaches you, for paying the bills.
Our program, when it attains a certain minimal level of competence, is distributed by PRI. Public Radio International.
On other editions of Schickele Mix, we consider different kinds of contrast in music. You can have contrasting dynamics, tempo, orchestration, harmonic structure, all kinds of stuff.
But when voices are involved, I guess the greatest contrast you can have is between speaking and singing. We're going to explore that contrast today in a program called Say It and Sing It. Opera grew up in Italy. And Italians love to sing. They'll sing anything. Your typical 18th century Italian opera had two basic kinds of numbers.
The arias and ensembles, which are the song-like pieces with melodies we remember. The lyrics are usually poetic and employ a lot of repetition. Then there are the recitatives, whose words are prose. They avoid repetition and are sung freely, more or less imitating natural speech. Now, outside of Italy, there's often been a considerable amount of resistance to recitative.
Perhaps especially among English-speaking people. It may be okay as long as it's distant and artificial enough. But the closer it gets to everyday life, the harder it is for some of us to face the music.
Oh my goodness, I see that my shoelace is untied. I must bend over and tie it before I trip. Oh, my back hurts. I knew I shouldn't have played touch football with that wretched brother in law of mine yesterday evening. Well, you know, I'm fooling around there being a wiseacre. But I was listening to part of Owen Wingrave, an opera by Benjamin Britten. I saw it staged at Santa Fe years ago. And I don't know, even though that's a completely serious opera, when I hear him saying, Oh, do you have the maps? Bring them over here. It just, I don't know, sounds weird to me. It's no surprise that what must be the most successful musical theater works ever created in England were by Gilbert and Sullivan, who wrote operettas. That is, the dialogue between the main musical numbers is spoken rather than sung.
Whereas the warhorses of the Italian musical stage are fully sung operas. And in this country, it's probably true that operetta, in the form of Broadway musicals, has fared better than true opera.
At least, B.L.A.W., before Andrew Lloyd Webber. There is a certain intimacy, a comparative lack of artifice about speaking, that can be heightened by juxtaposing speech and music. In our first suite, the contrasts are abrupt. Whenever there's talking, the music either drops out completely, or holds a single static chord. The first number is in German. The speaker is trying to find out where he is. The singer is ignoring him while warbling a quasi-folk song about the dangers of trust. Trusting women. The second piece is in English, and the third is in German again. The text goes, I entwined for you, two flowers for love and constancy.
Now I can give you nothing but flowers of doom. But from the earth on my tomb, the lily and rose bloom anew. I call this suite, Stop the Music, and it lasts about eight and a half minutes.
[No speech for 27s.]
Trust makes you sweet for the rest of your life,
keep pure love, Hey friend, isn't that the Bazaar?
But she deceives you, it's just a flower,
a heartthrob,
Hey old man, don't you hear?
Is this the Bazaar's palace?
a flower. A flower,
[No speech for 40s.]
Hello, I'm the guy who sits next to you and reads the newspaper over your shoulder. Wait, don't turn the page. I'm not finished.
Life is so uncertain.
Yes, it's me. Take my hand and you'll see. Here I am.
Yes, it's true. All I want, girl, is you.
Given that true intellectual and emotional compatibility are at the very least difficult, if not impossible, impossible to come by, we could always opt for the more temporal gratification of sheer physical attraction. That wouldn't make you a shallow person, would it?
Here I am. Yes, it's me. Take my hand and you'll see.
Here I am. Yes, it's true. All I want, girl, is you.
If Ford is to Chevrolet, what Dodge is to Chrysler, what Cornflakes are to Post Toasties, what the clear blue sky is to the deep blue sea, what Hank Williams is to Neil Armstrong, what Neil Armstrong. Can you doubt we were made for each other?
Here I am. Yes, it's me. Take my hand and you'll see.
Here I am. Yes, it's true. All I want, girl, is you. Here I am.
Look, I understand too little too late. I realize there are things you say and do you can never take back. But what would you be if you didn't even try?
You have to try. So after a lot of thought, I'd like to reconsider. Please, if it's not too late,
make it a cheeseburger.
Here I am. Yes, it's me. Take my hand and you'll see. Here I am. Yes, it's true.
All I want, girl, is you. It's me. Take my hand and you'll see. Here I am. Yes, it's true.
[No speech for 69s.]
Dem sie gewunden. Es waren dein zwei Blumen für Liebe und Trost.
Ich weile. So toten Blumen dir weilen. Wachsen an meinem Leichenstein.
[No speech for 77s.]
Then we had, from Lyle Lovett, Here I Am, that classic of honky-tonk existentialism, followed by a bizarre little piece by Beethoven, a melodrama for glass harmonica and voice.
Now, before it got the connotation, in this country at least, of a sort of a cornball-type drama in which you boo and hiss the villain, melodrama in the 19th century, meant something for spoken voice with a musical accompaniment. It was actually very popular in the 19th century. A lot of them were written, and they tend to sound incredibly dated now, so that they're almost never done. But this one was done by Beethoven. It was part of some incidental music he did for a drama called Leonora Prohaska.
And the speaker on this recording I can't seem to find the name of, but the glass harmonica was played by... by Dennis James. The glass harmonica in this practical form was invented by Benjamin Franklin, and what it is is a mechanism allowing you to use the phenomenon of rubbing your fingers around the edge of a wine glass to produce a tone. He put the glasses on an axle so that they were constantly being dipped in water and kept wet so that you could play chords and you could play quite rapidly on it as well. And you know who was very interested in Benjamin Franklin's? Invention there? That was Mr., or rather, Dr. Mesmer.
As in mesmerism. He liked to use the glass harmonica apparently in conjunction with hypnotizing patients. You might have to hypnotize me to find out my first name, but my second and third are Peter and Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Back in 1959, 1960, right off Times Square, in Manhattan, there were 12 movie theaters on 42nd Street between 6th and 8th Avenue, in two blocks.
And they showed quite a variety of fare, ranging from the sleazy to the sublime. On the one hand, there was what passed for porn in those days, films that would now probably be rated PG-6 or something like that. On the other hand, I saw my first Bergman movie there before I'd ever heard of him. A friend and I just wandered into Smiles of a Summer Night.
What a delightfully surprising... And then there was everything in between. Westerns, sci-fi, adventure, you name it. A couple of Juilliard and Columbia friends and I had a fairly regular ritual of dropping down to the block, as we called it, around 9 or 10 in the evening and seeing whatever looked most promising. One day, I was... No, come on, come on, this is not irrelevant.
I'm leading up to something here. Man, that thing is adjusted so tight. Anyway, one day, Philip Glass, who was one of the regulars, called up and said, Peter, go down to the block tonight and see Bucket of Blood. I'm not going to tell you anything about it, except that whatever you expect, you'll be wrong. So I went down, and it turned out to be one of those low-budget Roger Corman movies. But even though it was advertised as a straight horror flick, it's actually a hilarious takeoff on the beat poetry and art scene in California in the 50s.
It's taking all the restraint I can muster right now to resist telling you the whole plot. Just go out and rent it. Which reminds me, in 1962, long before video rentals, when my wife and I had only been married a few hours, and we were on our way to the little country hotel at which we spent our one-day honeymoon, we passed a drive-in theater that was showing Bucket of Blood.
Hey, what can I tell you? There was no choice. She'd never seen it. We were going to spend thousands of evenings together in the years to come, but how often would Bucket of Blood be playing? Of course, we were going to spend thousands of evenings together in the years to come,
Of course, the movie has several scenes featuring that signature phenomenon of the beat scene, poetry combined with jazz. And if you're doing, as we are, a survey of speech alternating with music, what clearer example could you have than this 11-and-a-half-minute relic from 1957 recorded at a club called The Cellar in downstairs San Francisco?
This is called autobiography.
[No speech for 17s.]
I'm leading a quiet life in Mike's place every day, watching the champs of the danty billiard parlor and the French pinball addicts.
I am leading a quiet life on Lower East Broadway. I was an American. I am an American boy. I read the American Boy magazine and became a Boy Scout in the suburbs.
I thought I was Tom Sawyer catching crayfish in the Bronx River and imagining the Mississippi.
I had a baseball mitt and an American flyer bike. I delivered the woman's home companion at five in the afternoon or the Harold Trib at five in the morning. I still can't hear the paper thump on lost porches.
I had an unhappy childhood. I saw Lindbergh land. I looked homeward and saw no angel.
I got caught stealing pencils from the five and ten-cent store the same month I made Eagle Scout. I chopped trees for the CCC and sat on them. I landed in Normandy in a rowboat that turned over. I have seen the ignorant armies on the beach at Dover.
I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds, shopkeepers rolling up their blinds at midday, potato salad and dandelions at anarchist picnics. I am reading Lorna Dune and A Life of John Moose, Terror of the Industrialist, a bomb on his desk at all times.
I am leading a quiet life on Lower East Broadway. I have seen the garbage men parade in the Columbus Day Parade. I have not been out to the Cloisters in a long time, nor to the Tuileries, but I still keep thinking of going. I have seen the garbage men parade when you're in the middle of the night, when it was snowing.
I have eaten hot dogs in ballparks. I have heard the Gettysburg Address and the Ginsberg Address. I like it here and I won't go back where I came from. I too have ridden boxcars, boxcars, boxcars.
I have been in Asia with Noah in the ark. I was in India when Rome was built. I have been in the manger with an ass. I have seen the Eternal Distributor from a white hill in South San Francisco and the Laughing Woman at Luna Park outside the Funhouse in a great rainstorm, still laughing.
I am leading a quiet life outside of Mike's place every day, watching the world walk by in its curious shoes. I once started out to walk around the world, but ended up in Brooklyn. That bridge was too much for me. I have engaged in silence, exile, and cunning. I flew too near the sun and my wax wings fell off. I am looking for my old man whom I never knew.
I am looking for the lost leader with whom I flew. Young men should be explorers. Home is where one starts from. But Mother never told me there'd be scenes like this. Still weary, I rest.
I have traveled. I have seen Goof City. I have seen the mass mess. I have heard Kid Horry cry. I have heard a trombone preach. I have heard Debussy strained through a sheet.
I have slept in a hundred islands where books were trees. I have heard the birds that sound like bells. I have worn gray flannel trousers and walked upon the beach of hell. I have dwelt in a hundred cities where trees were books.
What subways? What taxis? What cafes? What women with blind breasts? Limbs lost among skyscrapers.
I have seen the statues of heroes at Carrefour's. Danton weeping at a metro entrance. Columbus in Barcelona pointing westward up the Rambla toward the American Express. I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds. They should all be freed. It is long since I was a herdsman.
I am leading a quiet life in Mike's place every day reading the classified columns. I have read the Reader's Digest from cover to cover and noted the close identification of the United States and the Promised Land. Where every coin is marked in God we trust, but the dollar bills do not have it, being gods unto themselves.
I read the want ads daily looking for a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. I hear America singing in the yellow pages. One could never tell the soul has its rages.
I read the papers every day and hear humanity amiss in the sad plethora of print. I see where Walden Pond has been drained to make an amusement park. I see there making Melville eat his whale. I see another war is coming but I won't be there to fight it. I have read the writing on the men's room wall. I helped Kilroy write it. I marched up Fifth Avenue but hurried back to the Casbah looking for my dog.
I see a similarity between dogs and me. Dogs are the true observers. Walking up and down the world. Through the Malloy country. I have walked down alleys too narrow for Chryslers. I have seen a hundred horseless milk wagons in a vacant lot in Astoria. Ben Shawn never painted them, but they're there, askew in Astoria.
I have heard the junk man's obligato. I have ridden super highways and believed the billboard's promises. Slept in mailbox overnight. Cabins crossed the Jersey flats and seen the cities of the plains. And wallowed in the wilds of Westchester with its roving bands of natives in station wagons. I have seen them. I am the man. I was there. I suffered somewhat. I am an American. I have a passport.
I did not suffer in public. And I'm too young to die. I am a self-made man.
And I have plans for the future. I am in line for a top job. I may be moving on to D.C. I am only temporarily a Thai salesman. I am a good Joe. I am an open book to my boss.
I am a complete mystery to my closest friends.
I am leading a quiet life in Mike's place every day, contemplating my navel. I am a part of the body's long madness. I have wandered in various night woods. I have heard the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
I am the man. I was there. I suffered somewhat. I have leaned in drunken doorways.
I have written wild stories without punctuation. I have sat in an uneasy chair. I have heard the tolling bell. I am a tear of the sun. I am a hill where poets run.
I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain.
I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry. I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have made paraphrastic studies in worn-out poetical fashions. And my equipment is always deteriorating.
I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out, but my tongue lived to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song. I am a player of piano in an abandoned casino. On a seaside esplanade in a dense fog, still playing. I see a similarity between the laughing woman and myself. I have heard the sound of summer in the rain.
I have seen girls on boardwalks have complicated sensations. I understand their hesitations. I am a gatherer of fruit. I have seen how kisses cause euphoria. I have risked enchantment.
I have seen the virgin in an apple tree at sharp. And St. Joan Byrne at the Belly Union. I have seen giraffes in jungle gyms, their necks like love, wound around the iron circumstances of the world.
I have seen the Venus Aphrodite armless in her drafty corridor. I have heard a siren sing at 1 5th Avenue. I have seen the white goddess dancing in the Rue des Beaux-Arts on the 14th of July. And the beautiful dame without mercy, picking her nose, in chumleys. She did not speak English. She had yellow hair and a hoarse voice. And no birds sang.
I am leading a quiet life in Mike's place every day, watching the pocket pool players making the minestrone scene, wolfing the macaronis. And I have read somewhere the meaning of existence, yet have forgotten just exactly where. But I am the man and I'll be there. And I may cause the lips of those who are asleep to speak. And I may make my notebooks into sheaves of grass.
And I may write my own eponymous epitaph, instructing the horsemen to pass.
[No speech for 13s.]
All right. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reading his poem, Autobiography, which, according to Ralph Gleason's liner notes here, is perhaps the first poem in the English language written specifically to be read with a jazz accompaniment. Ferlinghetti himself says in these liner notes, My whole kick has been oral poetry. The poets today are talking to themselves.
They have no other audience. The competition from the mass media is too much. And the poets don't write their poem with the idea of its being read aloud in mind when they write it. Poetry used to have an audience. Lindsay went around the country reciting poems for bread. That was his phrase. And Sandberg, when he was younger, went around with a guitar and had an audience. We're trying to capture an audience. And this next sentence is great. This ought to be made into a bumper sticker. Gutenberg had a good idea with printing, but it ran away from him and ruined it for the poets. And he says, The jazz comes in as part of the attempt to get the audience back.
The voice by itself gets pretty monotonous, unless the person is unusual and the average poet doesn't have the voice. Dylan Thomas was the exception. There's a lot of sense to what he's saying, and what's interesting reading those complaints is that I've heard a lot of the same sentiments voiced about the music that was being written around that time in classical musical circles.
Okay, it's tidbit time here at the Say It and Sing It Club. Here's a fine example of the same person alternating singing with speech.
Okay, guys, you ready?
One, two, three, four.
I'm a woman, I'm a human, I'm a sister I'm a singer, I'm a person, I am me
I have to be alone to get myself together I have to be myself so I can be
Free, free, free and not from under Free, to sing it right out loud
Free, a woman
You're not singing it right, understand? I'm a woman, I am free, I'm respected I'm not getting that?
Okay, Rina, tell me, I'll tell her.
I thought I was getting that across.
Tomato Sauce people are going to be here, clients, and we're trying to syndicate this internationally. Okay, I understand.
I was thinking of melody and not meaning.
I'm sorry. I was concentrating on the melody and everything. Right, okay.
You're doing fine, you're doing fine. Okay, thanks. All right.
Honey, I think what they need is a little more anthem quality, you know? Okay. Free, it's all up, everything ends up, you know, it's not singing.
We've got the song.
Rico's written the song.
We need the talent. Okay, it's okay. All right, guys, I can do it. It's a perfect key, I'm fine. I don't know what happened there. I just went a little haywire there. Okay, let's go again.
One, two, three, four.
I'm a woman, I'm a human, I'm a dancer
I'm a singer, I'm a person, I'm...
What was wrong?
Jane, talk to her, please.
Wow.
You're using your wine voice.
I wasn't using my wine voice.
I wasn't. All right. Don't bring... Don't bring... Can you raise your voice?
I know the melody, yes. I'm a woman.
I know the melody, fine, if you don't mind.
Please talk to those high parts, okay?
Okay. Clear, open your mouth. All right, I know. If you keep hopping and jiggling around like that... Well, I'm not going to do that on the day that I do it. I'm just doing it now.
It helps me get into the meaning and the rhythm of the song. They're shooting now.
He's singing for right now. Can you do that? Oh, he's shooting right now. Can you sing the lyrics and look at the camera? Yes, I can sing the lyrics and look at the camera, just... I wrote, dear, I'm a woman.
Do you understand that? I understand. She's done this. All right, could you let me start it again? I'll start... Just start it again, all right?
Just give... Do you want a lower key?
Those high notes?
No, I don't need a lower key. Just start it again, all right?
Just start it. Two.
Keep an eye on the headlines.
All right. Let's do it. I'm a woman. I'm a human. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can't...
I can't do it like that. I have to do the jumping around. I have to do it with... Jean, I thought you said she can hack it.
She can hack it. I can hack it. I thought she can hack it. I have to do the jumping around part.
I thought she could hack it, but it looks like she's having a tantrum. I am not having a tantrum. I'm...
I'm...
See how...
I'm not having a tantrum.
I can...
I can do it if you let me do it the way that I want to do it.
He'll do the song with me. Why don't you let me do it the way I... If I want to do it... I will. You don't understand. I'm a woman!
Gilda Radner. Your heart goes out to her, trying to sing I'm a Woman from greatest hits of the National Lampoon.
And I'm Peter Schickele, trying to say this is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. We're talking singing and talking here.
In our first suite, the music stopped to let speech pass, but in this next one, you can't count on that. Which is why I call it... Leave the Motor Running. The second selection here is in French, and it's curious how similar the situation is here, superficially anyway, to that of our very first selection at the top of the show from Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio.
Here too, we have a speaking questioner being ignored by someone singing a quasi-folk song. In this case, however, it's a lot darker.
The questioner is a lieutenant, and the questionee is a woman who has been involved in a knife attack. She ends up being led away with her hands bound.
These three numbers alternate speaking and singing, but there may be musical accompaniment to either or both. Actually, you know, the first piece really has speaking and crying. And if you listen carefully, you'll realize that the harmonica is saying a couple of words. See you in about seven minutes.
[No speech for 10s.]
Who you been a-calling, son?
You want to know? You want your mama?
Well, what do you want with your mama? You want to drink a wand?
Water, well, tell her plain.
[No speech for 51s.]
Did you say, hey, mama? Well, call your mama big and loud, son, and tell her that you want to drink a water, and she'll bring it to you.
[No speech for 23s.]
Eh bien, vous avez entendu? Avez-vous quelque chose à répéter?
Speak, I'm waiting.
These are not songs that I'm asking you.
It's an answer.
This tone.
What is certain, isn't it? Is that there were knife blows.
And that it was she who gave them.
[No speech for 11s.]
Deciduously,
find me a rope.
[No speech for 17s.]
Here is your place of name. Take and tie me these two pretty hands. It's a shame really, because she is kind.
But as kind as you are, you will not go without going around the prison. You can sing your Bohemian songs there. The doorkeeper will say what he thinks.
I will write the order. It is you who will lead it.
[No speech for 11s.]
What's the matter with you, boy? My feet are too big.
Yes, yes.
[No speech for 13s.]
No meat on my bones. No sign of a pot. I look in the mirror and I think I'm hot. I've been to the dentist and had my molars placed. Old boys, but my girl won't listen. Oh, your feet's too big. She don't want you, cause your feet's too big. Mad at you, cause your feet's too big. Hates you, cause your feet's too big. Tell us about it, brother Dick. Look here, boys. I don't pass my choice test.
What?
Everything matches, including my red fit. Which okay. I asked my girl standing and I asked her, said what she said. She said, I don't want you, cause your feet's too big. I don't want you, cause your feet's too big. Mad at you, cause your feet's too big. Hate you, cause your feet's too big. Tell us about it, brother Charlie.
Now, honey, I likes you, cause your show is nice.
Oh, dear. Why, you got just what it takes to paradise.
You think so?
I likes your face and I likes that ring. But I'm sorry, honey, cause your feet is too big.
You don't want you, cause your feet's too big. You don't want you, cause your feet's too big. Man, hate you, cause your feet's too big. Hate you, cause your feet's too big. Hate you, cause your feet's too big. Tell us about it there, brother Hoppy.
Now, up in Harlem, at a table for two, there sit four of us, me, your big feet, and you.
From your ankles up, boy, you sure is sweet. But from your ankles down, you've got too much feet. All your feet's too big. Man, hate you, cause your feet's too big.
Man, hate you, cause your feet's too big. Hate you, cause your feet's too big. What's your gal say to you, boy?
What's your gal say to you, boy?
Shwa, shwabo, shwa, shwabo. Shwa, shwabo, shwa, shwabo. Shwa, shwabo, shwa, shwabo. Shwa, shwabo, shwa, shwabo.
Shwa, shwabo, shwa, shwabo. Shwa, shwa, shwa, shwabo.
Oh, babadoodle, babadoodle, babadoodle, babadoodle, babadoodle. Babadadiddle, babadadiddle, babadadiddle, babadaddle. Cush foot, platter foot, slew foot, flat foot.
Leave the Motor Running began with Earl Taylor and his Stony Mountain boys doing what was that? That was the Mama Blues.
And if you were paying real attention there, the harmonica really sounded like it was saying both mama and water. Wah, wah, I want some wah, wah. I mean, not water, but wah, wah.
Well, as regular listeners to this show know, that's an album that you'll probably hear every cut of by the time this show goes off the air. Then we heard part of Carmen Bizet's fantastic opera. That was Grace Bumbry doing Carmen. We also heard the speaking voices of Bernard Kocharenko and Andre Batiste. It's a scene where Carmen gets led away after getting into trouble with a bunch of the other cigarette factory girls. And this is a particularly interesting thing, the dialogue in this opera, because right after the first performances of the opera, it was performed again in Vienna, and for that sung recitatives were written.
Now Bizet had died, poor Bizet died months after the first performances of Carmen. Those first performances were scandalously received. During the run of those first performances, the reception got better, but apparently the theater was never completely full, and most people were just outraged. You have to realize this is not because of the music, it's because of the subject. It's a little bit the way some people feel now about some of the very violent movies, or movies about nihilistic characters. In those days, the idea of writing an opera about a cigarette girl who stabs people, who's just completely immoral, really upset people, especially since the Opéra Comique in Paris, where this was premiered, was apparently a real family theater. As a matter of fact, every night, four or five or six boxes would be reserved for the purpose of arranging marriages. So the idea of something like this, which would be like, I don't know, what would it be like, you know, the most violent of the sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies or something like that now, the idea of that being put on was really shocking. But within a few years, it was being played all over the world. And poor Bizet never got to know that. Now the interesting thing is that although most people feel that the dialogue version that we heard part of is superior to the version with recitatives, which has been done mostly, Bizet himself had written sung recitatives for a Weber opera that originally had dialogue. So this is an area that was going back and forth a lot in those days. Bizet died in 1875 at the age of 37. And then finally we had the ink spots, the original ink spots, Doing Your Feet's Too Big, which was especially interesting to me because
I only knew the Fats Waller version of that song before. And this one is quite different. Fats Waller doesn't let you know what the song's about first. Here they say right up front what's wrong? My feet's too big. Fats Waller starts with that verse way up in Harlem at a table for two. There were four of us. Me, your big feet, and you. And that's, as I remember it, the first you find out what that delightful song is about.
Okay, we'll end with an example of words alternating with music in which the words were added posthumously. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote the Book of the Animals as a party piece. It's full of quotes from other composers' music and intentionally gauche passages. Saint-Saëns was apparently a real party animal kind of guy. He loved charades, for instance. They used to do the very fancy kind where you used costumes and props and everything to enact a scene that was supposed to tell you what book it was or something like that. But, having written this piece, and it created quite a pleasant furor at the gathering he had, and as a matter of fact, a list came to town soon thereafter and had heard about it and wanted to hear it so Saint-Saëns arranged for another performance. But he was so worried that audiences at large wouldn't get the jokes or that the piece would reflect badly on him as a serious composer that he refused to let it be performed publicly or published during his lifetime at all except for the famous cello solo, The Swan. He is presumably rotating wildly in his grave now since it has become his most often played work. Long after Saint-Saëns shuffled off this mortal coil to Buffalo, Ogden Nash wrote a poem to introduce each section of the piece and these verses became a regular fixture of performances of the carnival. It must have been in 1990 or 1991 that I was engaged by the New York Philharmonic to read the Ogden Nash poems at a
New Year's Eve gala performance. And sometime before that, Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of that concert, called me and said do you think you can maybe sort of fix up the Ogden Nash poems so they aren't quite so dated? They sort of talk about Truman playing the piano and there are a lot of people around now who barely know who Truman was, much less that he played the piano. Can you update it a little bit? And I said well, I'll think about that. Then I got a call from the administration at the New York Philharmonic who quite correctly pointed out that if I changed anything in the Ogden Nash, it would have to be cleared by Ogden Nash's estate. Absolutely right.
Well, in the meantime, I'd started to get a few ideas of my own. And I ended up writing a whole new set of poems for the pieces myself, which we did at that New Year's Eve concert. And which have now been recorded and some of which we will now hear. Once there was an elephant who had a very bad cold. He was all stuffed up and he couldn't breathe through his nose.
And he said,
No one has ever suffered as much as I, he said to himself. Eventually he became convinced that his hours were numbered, so he gathered his family and friends around him and gave away all his possessions.
The next day he woke up in perfect health and penniless. The moral is, just because your trunk is packed doesn't mean you're ready to go.
[No speech for 86s.]
When a check bounces it's very bad news. The same is not true of kangaroos. Their bounce, their pouch, their nickname, Roo, is why we like them, if we do. There are some folks, it must be said, who call them pests and want them dead. When someone mentions the kangaroo, these folks say, Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo!
Such hateful people, it seems to me, should all be sent to Hungary and made to stay till they've confessed. That they were wrong when they booed a pest.
[No speech for 61s.]
An aquarium is a fish zoo. Now don't you sometimes wish you were a denizen of the ocean where your world's in constant motion and you float instead of walking and you have no use for talking and you don't keep track of hours and you don't take baths or showers. Don't you ever wish you were a fish.
[No speech for 139s.]
Three selections from the Carnival of the Animals with music by Saint-Saëns and poems written by and spoken by your friendly beat poet, the host of this show.
That piece was originally written by the way for individual instruments. As I said, it was a real party piece. It's almost always now performed by an orchestra, which is really appropriate if it's going to be done in a large hall.
Also, that last section that we heard, that beautiful music for the aquarium, originally had a part in it for glass harmonica, the instrument we heard earlier in the program.
Again, it's almost never done with that now. I've never heard it done with that. We used a rather interesting thing, which is, there is a kind of symbol called a crotales. They're small, they're almost like bells more than symbols. They're about three inches across or so and they're sort of Tibetan kind of heavy, thick symbols that have a definite pitch. And the percussion player came up with the idea of rubbing a sort of metallic cloth along them, sort of like polishing a shoe, so that you get a slightly shimmering effect in that movement, which is similar to what you might have gotten with the glass harmonica.
Okay, now we're going to have a little example here of music under speech.
[No speech for 14s.]
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. And 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 66. 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're looking good. See you next week.
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
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Schickele Mix is a program heard Saturday evenings during the 9 o'clock hour. Right here on Classical 97, WNIB in Chicago, and WNIZ in Zion, and anywhere in the world on the
World Wide Web, we're at WNIB.com. Coming up in just a moment, we have our last program in the series of the Orpheus Young Artists series.
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