Carl Haas returns tomorrow evening after the NPR News at 10 with a glimpse of some of the significant works of Latin American composers. That's next time on Adventures in Good Music on WQED-FM Pittsburgh and WQEJ Johnstown, WQED Multimedia. Happy Thanksgiving. Now stay tuned for Schickele Mix. Peter, are you ready? Refrain from bovine birthing, man. 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. But it can't sound good if you can't hear it, and you couldn't hear what you're about to hear if the bills weren't being paid, which they however are, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this munificent radio station amid whose walls I serenely sit. Our program is launched to the four corners by PRI, Public Radio International. Now, I don't know anything about anthropology, but I know what I like. And it seems to me that when you're talking about the list of human drives, or human needs, music has to be right up there with food, sex, and religion. People will play anything. Gourds, grass, shells, rocks, logs, pods, vines, and silverware, as well as assorted animal parts.
I'm not just talking about their horns, either. I saw an ethnic group performing yesterday, and one of the guys was playing a rattle that turned out to be made of sheep ankle bones inside a hardened bull scrotum. Waste not, want not. Today's show is called Instrumental Exotica, and we're going to check out some of the rarer specimens in the Western Musical Zoo.
The Mbuti Pygmies of Africa make hunting bows out of bent saplings strung with vine, and long ago some hunter noticed that if you hit the vine with the side of an arrow, you get a sound with a definite pitch. Then he discovered that if you put one end of the bow on the ground and hold your open mouth by the other end and tap or pluck the vine, you get the basic note plus another higher note that you can control by changing the cavity of your mouth.
The Mbuti still play their hunting bows sometimes, but they also make special bows for musical purposes.
[music: "Field Recording: Musical Bow"; Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest]
It is a pretty good bet that this is the origin of the instrument we now call the Jew's harp, although nobody can figure out why we call it that. It has apparently never been associated with the Jewish people, and no one has made a convincing case for the jaw's harp derivation. In parts of England, it's called a gewgaw, which comes perhaps from the German word for fiddle, Geige. In parts of Germany, a Jew's harp is called a Maulgeige, mouth fiddle.
Be that as it may or may not be, it consists of a frame, usually 3 to 5 inches long, surrounding a vibrating tongue. You hold the thing in front of your open mouth and twang the tongue while you vary your mouth cavity. You can also vary the sound and rhythm by breathing in a particular way. Incidentally, when I say you, I mean you, not me. I play a lot of weird instruments, but playing the standard kind of Jew's harp we have in this country involves holding something metal against your teeth and then making it vibrate. Gives me the creeps just to think about it. But it's a great sound, and I'm glad somebody doesn't mind doing it.
We're going to hear the Jew's harp in a variety of settings now, and remember, this is an An instrument in which what you might call the accompaniment part of the sound, the twang, is usually louder than the melodic part, the higher sort of whistly notes. So don't get fixated on the twang. Cherchez la tune. The Jaw Suite has four numbers and lasts about eight minutes.
[music: "Field Recording: Wooden Jew’s Harp"; Tuva: Voices from the Center of Asia]
[music: Trad. arr. Hankin, "Introduction" (Early On); Wayne Evan Hankin]
[music: Trad., "Pig Town Fling" (Green Rocky Road); Guy Carawan]
[music: Albrechtsberger, Concerto in E, 1st Mvt.; Fritz Mayr/Munich Chamber Orchestra/Stadlmair]
The Jaw Suite. Four numbers. They're a musician from Tuva, Wayne Hankin, Guy Carawan, and Albrechtsberger. Going back to the first one there, that was from the Autonomous Republic of Tuva. A wooden Jew's harp being played. By the way, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that if the tongue and the frame of a Jew's harp are made from the same material, we call it idioglottic.
But if they're from a different material, heteroglottic of course is the term. Okay, then next, from an album by Wayne Hankin, Wayne Evan Hankin, and that was the first part of a cut called Introduction, Pavane, and Piva. We heard just the introduction, which featured the lute and the jaw's harp in C. Since the basic tone of a Jew's harp (he calls it a jaw's harp) is always the same, they do come in different keys.
Then we have Guy Carawan, an album called Green Rocky Road, and that was the beginning of a tune called Pigtown Fling. And then finally, that was not P. D. Q. Bach, folks. That was a for-real piece by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, who was a teacher of Beethoven, and it's a concerto for Jew's harp, mandora, and Orchestra. The mandora is a guitar-like instrument. That was Fritz Mayr playing Jew's harp, Dieter Kirsch playing the mandora, with the Munich Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Hans Stadlmair, and it reminds me, you know, the Jew's harp, the cavity of the mouth determines the pitch of the melodic part there, and I once did a concert in San Francisco, and a friend of mine who was playing in the concert said, I've got this friend who lives here, you've got to hear him, he pounds his knuckles on the top of his head, you know, and then changes the mouth cavity, and he can play tunes, well, I've heard of doing that, I can't I can't do it myself. I got a real soft head, folks.
But he came back after the concert, and he started doing it, but it was very noisy backstage. You really couldn't hear anything. He said, oh, you can't hear this. And he goes over and he grabs two Coke bottles, two empty Coke bottles, and starts beating himself on the top of the head with the two Coke bottles, playing.
It takes all kinds of heads to make a world, boy. Not on my head, you don't. My head, by the way, belongs to Peter Schickele. The show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Instrumental Exotica. We began this program with a hunting implement turned into a musical instrument, the bow. Another tool that has been put to musical use is the saw, just a good old carpenter's saw.
You know, there's a video artist named Nam June Paik. I wonder if he used to play this instrument. I mean, because if he did, you could say, Nam was a saw-man. That's pretty natural-sounding for a palindrome, isn't it? Nam was a saw-man. You know, a lot of palindromes sound so stilted or awkward or don't make sense. I mean, Able was I ere I...
Alright, okay, alright, alright. There are some times, I must admit, when I really can't argue with the irrelevancy alarm. Okay, now, the way you play a saw is, and I've done this, you hold the handle between your knees, and let me tell you, you have to hold it very tight, unless you really don't want any more children.
Then you bend the blade with one hand while you bow it with the other, using a violin or cello bow. Originally, apparently, it was struck with a mallet, but now bowing is the standard method. You get an ethereal, sort of ghostly sound as you can hear in the three movements of the Saw Suite. I'll see you in about seven minutes.
[music: Doyle, "Mysterious Mose" (R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders); R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders]
[music excerpt: George Crumb, “Ancient Voices of Children,” “Me he perdido muchas veces por el mar”; Jan DeGaetani/The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble/Weisberg]
[music: "Lady of Spain" (Super Saw); Jim Leonard]
...abrupt endings there. The Saw Suite, which actually might also be called the Double Crumb Suite, very unusual. We had Robert Crumb and George Crumb there. The first one was Robert Crumb, he's part of a group called Cheap Suit Serenaders, And Crumb plays banjo and vocals. He is the Crumb, by the way, of the cartoonist who does Mr. Natural and other things.
And they were doing a tune called Mysterious Mose. And then we had George Crumb. By the way, when I say Robert Crumb, it's R. Crumb. I don't know. Maybe it isn't Robert. George Crumb, Ancient Voices of Children, a haunting piece that we've used before.
And this was the second song. It was Jan DeGaetani, by the way, mezzo-soprano, and The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble under the direction of Arthur Weisberg. The text of that second song, which is from García Lorca, is, I have lost myself in the sea many times with my ear full of freshly cut flowers, with my tongue full of love and agony. I have lost myself in the sea many times as I lose myself in the heart of certain children.
And then finally from an old LP called Supersaw. And Supersaw turns out to be Jim Leonard. And he recorded this in his own studio and I think does all the instruments. You know, reading the back of this, the liner notes of this album, I read that renowned composers have also included the saw in some of their most inspiring compositions, such as Khachaturian Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra and Crumb's The Ancient Voices of Children.
Well, when I read that, I already knew the George Crumb piece, but not the Khachaturian. So I did some research and found that the Khachaturian Concerto, although it has perhaps been performed using a saw, was actually written for an instrument called the flexatone, which is even rarer than the saw. I had seen and heard flexatones, used as a sort of a novelty sound effects kind of thing, but I guess I hadn't realized you could play a melody on it.
It consists of a metal tongue, maybe 3 inches wide and 8 inches long, surrounded by a metal frame with a handle, sort of like the frame of an old-fashioned potato masher. Then on each side of the tongue is a flexible wire rod with a wooden ball on the end. So you flap this thing, and the tongue vibrates, and the wooden balls strike the metal tongue, and what you've got is one of your weirder instruments.
[music excerpt: Khachaturian, Concerto for Piano & Orchestra, 2nd Mvt.; Constantine Orbelian/Scottish National Orchestra/Jarvi]
That was an excerpt from the second movement of Khachaturian's piano concerto in D-flat major. And that was Neeme Järvi conducting the Scottish National Orchestra, with Constantine Orbelian playing piano. And the, let's see, the flexatonist is unidentified.
Okay, our next exotic instrument is the slide whistle, which might be called the trombone of the flute family. Or you might describe it as a cross between an alto recorder and a bicycle tire pump.
It looks like a large tin whistle with a plunger whose handle curves back towards the player. It's often used for cartoon sound effects. But playing actual melodies on it is actually quite tricky, since, compared to the trombone, quite small changes in slide position result in large changes of pitch. Now, in spite of my natural modesty, I must confess to being a rather accomplished slide whistler.
As a matter of fact, I am perhaps the pre-eminent slide whistler of our time. If somebody needs a slide whistler, I'm the guy they call. Once I happened to see the script of an art appreciation lecture, and at one point I thought they were talking about Elizabeth Schickele, because it said slide whistler's mother.
[sound: irrelevancy alarm]
Okay, all right, all right, so it didn't. I made that up, man. Can't have any fun. The most unusual slide whistle I've ever played was when I wrote a score for the dance company Pilobolus. Martha Clarke and Robby Barnett, the choreographers and dancers of the piece, had gotten to know the curator of the Pre-Columbian collection at a small art museum, and I actually got to write the score for, and play on myself for the recording, ocarinas and flutes and rattles that probably hadn't been played for a millennium. What a kick!
But the strangest of these instruments was a slide whistle that consisted of a hollow clay cylinder with a clay ball inside it. The clay ball was loose enough to move, but almost as big as the opening inside.
So, if you started with the thing pointing down, and then while you blew on it, raised the end up towards the ceiling, the ball rolled from one end of the tube to the other, causing the pitch to go [demonstration]. Nothing that exotic in our slide whistle suite, but there is one quite noteworthy aspect to it, and that concerns the middle one of these three pieces. At least in our culture, it's very unusual to hear the slide whistle used in a serious context.
I'll be back in five.
[music excerpt: P. D. Q. Bach, “Erotica” Variations (The Intimate P.D.Q. Bach); Professor Peter Schickele/David Oei]
[music excerpt: Ravel, "L’Enfant et les Sortilèges"; Orchestre National de la R.T. F./Maazel]
[music: "Henry Thomas" (Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful); Lovin' Spoonful]
Slide Whistle Suite, by the way at the end there we hear a little Jew's harp as well as slide whistle. But we began with P. D. Q. Bach, an excerpt from the Erotica Variations with David Oei playing the piano and yours truly playing the slide whistle. Then from Ravel's beautiful opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, which regular listeners to this show have heard several excerpts from, that was the scene where it moves from the house into the garden, and you hear the birds and the insects. And that was the Orchestre National de la RTF, if that's the way you say RTF, under the direction of Lorin Maazel.
And then finally, the Lovin' Spoonful, a tune called Henry Thomas.
My name is Peter Schickele. The show is Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
The next and last suite on this leg of our unending quest for instrumental exotica involves the first successful electronic instruments. By electronic, I mean that electricity is used not simply to amplify the sound, as in an electric guitar, but to generate the sound. In 1920, a bizarre instrument called the etherophone was unveiled to the public in St. Petersburg. It later became known as the theremin, after its inventor. The difference between a purple cow and a theremin being played is that I'd like to see the latter. It must be quite something.
You see, the player never touches the instrument. The pitch is determined by how close the right hand of the player is to a vertical antenna and the volume by the left hand in relation to a metal loop. So the performer must look something like a classical Indian dancer. If I remember correctly, there was a rock group in the 60s that used a theremin. It had one of my favorite rock group names, Lothar and the Hand People.
I'm calling this the Theremin Suite, even though the third of its four movements employs the ondes Martenot, a closely related instrument that can be played either with a keyboard or, if you want to swoop and slide around, with a finger ring attached to a ribbon.
Very exotic stuff. The basic sound is virtually indistinguishable from that of the theremin. Actually, they both sound quite a bit like the musical saw. The highly eclectic, highly electric theremin suite lasts about 12 minutes. I'll be back.
[music: Saint-Saëns, "The Swan" (The Art of the Theremin); Clara Rockmore/Nadia Reisenberg]
[music excerpt: Rozsa, Spellbound Concerto; Daniel Adni/Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Alwyn]
The theremin suite. We began with a cut from an album called The Art of the Theremin, in which Clara Rockmore played the swan from Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals, Nadia Reisenberg played the piano. I usually try to avoid transcriptions, but here the whole album is transcriptions on the one hand, but on the other hand it really gives you a chance to hear the theremin close up in a way that you can't in the other more orchestral recordings.
The second one, music from Spellbound by Miklós Rózsa. The Spellbound Concerto was being played by Daniel Adni and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was under the direction of Kenneth Alwyn. And then we had Olivier Messiaen from his monumental Turangalîla Symphony. That was the seventh movement, Turangalîla Deux, which is French for two when you say it right.
And then finally, The Beach Boys and Good Vibrations, and if you're a big fan of that song, as I am, you will have noticed that something was funny about it, and that's because this is an early take. The CD of Good Vibrations is on a CD that has both Smiley Smile and Wild Honey on it. Those were the names of the LPs. They've got them on one CD, and there are a whole bunch of bonus cuts at the end, outtakes and alternate takes.
This was an early take of Good Vibrations with Brian Wilson himself singing the lead, and it's sort of nice to hear it with a freewheeling lead like that, rather than the beautiful but a little bit machine-tooled later version. Okay, now we do have time for a little tidbit here, or at least almost time for a little tidbit. We're going to hear some Spike Jones, and what's exotic here is not the cowbells.
Cowbells have been around for years, particularly on cows, but most composers treat cowbells as if they didn't have a particular pitch, when actually they do. So Spike Jones had a set of tuned cowbells made so he could actually play a melody on the cowbells. We don't have time for the whole thing, we're going to skip the vocal at the beginning. But here's Morpheus, the music of Offenbach, according to Spike Jones.
[music: Offenbach arr. Jones, "Morpheus" (Spike Jones is Murdering the Classics); Spike Jones]
Spike Jones, Morpheus. Now, I've left the best part for last. I didn't tell you that I actually have a theremin here in the studio, and I'm going to play you a solo on this fantastic instrument.
It's got the antenna here. I put my right hand near the antenna and the left hand near the metal loop to control the volume, and nothing's
happening. Let's see. I can't seem to get any sound out of this thing here. Maybe I better put on the theme.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
Well, it turns out I forgot to plug it in. It's too late now. 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 67. 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.