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.
[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 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 loved 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 has 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.
[sung: Schickele improvises an everyday-life recitative about tying his shoelace]
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 theatre 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 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.
[music excerpt: Mozart, "Die Entführung aus dem Serail," dialogue, Lied and Duet: "Wer ein Liebchen hat gefunden" / "Verwünscht seist du samt deinem Liede!"; Peter Schreier/Matti Salminen/Mozart-Orchester des Opernhauses Zürich/Harnoncourt]
[music: Lovett, "Here I Am"; Lyle Lovett]
[music: Beethoven, Melodrama for Glass Harmonica & Voice; Dennis James]
The Stop the Music Suite: Mozart, Lyle Lovett, Beethoven. We began with a number from towards the beginning of the Abduction from the Seraglio by Mozart and we heard Peter Schreier and Matti Salminen there, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt was conducting the Mozart Orchestra of the Zurich Opera House.
Interesting thing about Singspiel, which is the German word for operatic works that have spoken dialogue, and that is that most opera singers don't really like to speak in combination with singing. The kind of vocal production that opera singing requires doesn't go well with speaking, and they would rather do all singing than combine the two.
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 Leonore Prohaska. And the speaker The speaker on this recording I can't seem to find the name of, but the glass harmonica was played 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 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 zephyr that was. 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 take-off 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, 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 eleven and a half minute relic from 1957, recorded at a club called The Cellar in downstairs San Francisco.
This is called Autobiography.
[music: Ferlinghetti, "Autobiography" (the poem read over jazz); Lawrence Ferlinghetti/The Cellar Jazz Quartet]
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.
[music: Jacobs/Kelly, "I'm a Woman" (sung, with spoken studio arguments between takes); Gilda Radner]
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.
[music: Glosson, "Mama Blues"; Earl Taylor & His Stoney Mountain Boys]
[music excerpt: Bizet, "Carmen," song & melodrama; Grace Bumbry/Jon Vickers/Bernard Gontcharenko/Orchestra of the Paris Opera/de Burgos]
[music: Benson/Fisher, "Your Feet's Too Big"; The Ink Spots]
Leave the Motor Running began with Earl Taylor and his Stoney 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 Gontcharenko and André Baptiste. 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 I don't know, what would it be like, you know, the most violent of the, 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 a It's 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 Carnival 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 Liszt 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 91 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.
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.
[music excerpt: Saint-Saëns, "Carnival of the Animals," with poems by Schickele; Peter Schickele/Ralph Markham & Kenneth Broadway, pianists/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra/Levi: "The Elephant"]
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.
[music excerpt: Saint-Saëns, "Carnival of the Animals," with poems by Schickele; Peter Schickele/Ralph Markham & Kenneth Broadway, pianists/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra/Levi: "Kangaroos"]
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?
[music excerpt: Saint-Saëns, "Carnival of the Animals," with poems by Schickele; Peter Schickele/Ralph Markham & Kenneth Broadway, pianists/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra/Levi: "Aquarium"]
Three selections from the Carnival of the Animals, with music by Saint-Saëns and poems written 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. Here 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 cymbal called crotales. They're small. They're almost like bells more than cymbals. They're about three inches across or so, and they're sort of Tibetan kind of heavy, thick cymbals that have a definite pitch. And the percussion player came up with the idea of rubbing a sort of a 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.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
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 Schickele, Schickele Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.
PRI, Public Radio International.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
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.
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My name is Bruce Duffy. Thank you very much for selecting WNIB.