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| The time is six o'clock, and next we have for you Peter Schickele and his Schickele Mix. Peter, are you ready? I thought you'd never ask. Here's the theme. | |
| [No speech for 15s.] | |
| 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 it's good to know that our bills are being paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this outstanding radio station, which has furnished me with this really quite dear little studio. What goes on when I'm here is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. Now, I wasn't there myself, but I've read that the audience at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913 included the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who by then was in his late 70s. | |
| The ballet score starts with a bassoon solo in an extremely high register, and Saint-Saëns is supposed to have said, what is that instrument? And that's the name of today's show. What is that instrument? We're going to look at some new ways of playing old instruments, playing things that people don't think of as instruments, and familiar instruments in unfamiliar surroundings. | |
| There used to be a chain of restaurants in New York. There used to be a chain of restaurants in New York and some other East Coast cities called Horn and Hardart. They were the automats. One wall of the restaurant was a lot of little glass doors with slots beside them. | |
| You put in one or more nickels and then opened up the door to get your sandwich or piece of pie. When I was a student at Juilliard around 1959, a remark was casually dropped in conversation that was to have a profound effect on my life. I can't even remember who said it. But what they said was, you know, somebody should... You know, somebody should write a concerto for Horn and Hardart. Soon after that, the opportunity arose to put on the first of what later came to be known as PDQ Bach concerts. | |
| And for that first concert in May 1959, I decided to follow up on the Horn and Hardart idea. The horn, of course, would be a French horn. In classical music, that's what you mean when you say horn. | |
| But what would the Hardart be? As an old Spike Jonze fan, I loved the juxtaposition of vastly different sonorities. Such as cowbell, trombone, car horn, and pistol. | |
| So I resolved to build an instrument each of whose notes was texturally as different as possible from all the other notes. For one note, you plucked a string. For another, you blew on a Coke bottle. For another, you struck a mixing bowl with a mallet. For another, you rang an electric doorbell, etc., etc., etc. There were 28 notes. That's over two octaves. I shopped for weeks in toy stores. Hardware stores and houseware stores. I got some strange looks from people as I wandered around hitting things and putting a tuning fork to my ear to figure out what note they made. | |
| At first, these various objects were simply mounted on a plank, probably eight feet long. But for the first public concert, six years later, we enlisted the help of Wally Zuckerman, who made the do-it-yourself harpsichord kits that were very popular in the 60s. He incorporated the sound-producing devices into the instrument. He made the sound-producing devices into a beautiful, ornate sort of store counter, but with gold leaf and cherubs and everything. And to obtain one special vibrating mallet, the player had to put a nickel in a slot and open the little glass door. | |
| Now, meanwhile, decades earlier, Harry Parch had started adapting instruments to his own tuning systems, building original instruments, and using found objects as instruments. The cloud chamber bowls, for instance, consist of fourteen sections of large Pyrex bottles salvaged from a radiation lab glass shop. | |
| The cone gongs come from the nose cones of airplane gas tanks. And one instrument is called the spoils of war because it includes seven brass shell casings with definite pitches. | |
| And then I want to mention the probably age-old phenomenon of the one-man band. Many different instruments can one person play simultaneously, or in rapid succession. | |
| Our first suite is called one-of-a-kind instrumental aggregations. We're going to hear about seven and a half minutes of Harry Parch's fantastical sound world. Then comes part of PDQ Bach's concerto for horn and hard art. And finally, a gigantic one-man band set up called the Kaleidokosmik Orgrig. See you in about ten and a half minutes. | |
| [No speech for 511s.] | |
| One-of-a-kind instrumental aggregations. | |
| We started out with Harry Parch. The first few sections from his album called And on the Seventh Day, Petals Fell in Petaluma. It was written in the early 60s. | |
| And one instrument I forgot to mention was the blowboy, which is a bellows painted with an African mask attached to an auto horn and three small organ pipes. We heard that in the last section we heard. | |
| And that was some musicians that he had trained himself, Harry Parch. Then we heard from P.D. Cubach's Concerto for Horn and Hard Art. Your humble host playing the hard art and a chamber orchestra under the direction of Jorge Mester. And then finally, the Kaleido Cosmic Orgrig performed by Professor Nick Elodian. I think that Nick Cornwell probably has about the same relationship to Professor Elodian that I do to P.D. Cubach. | |
| A description of his instrument here on the back of the jacket is this is accomplished conveniently by the one person via a contrivance of pedals, keyboards, pulleys, mousetraps, electrical wires, wind machines, magnets, bellows, fishing weights, stove pipes, and bicycle wheels, arranged so as to control a parlor piano, 30 tuned bottles, 13 10-foot tuba pipes, a fine bass drum, two tambourines, a mariachi marimba, a wooden xylophone, Swiss glockenspiel, castanets, maracas, woodblock, cymbals, bonkers, zonkers, and taxi horn. A 12-foot gilded megaphone and earplugs enable the performer to sing above it. That tune, by the way, was called Penny's Tune, written by the player. | |
| And my name is Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. | |
| In that first suite on today's show, one might have said, what is that instrument? Because never before in one's life had one heard airplane gas tanks in a musical composition. This next suite features an instrument we've all heard, but there's a very good chance that we haven't all heard these sounds coming from it. Every note you hear for the next seven minutes or so comes from the instrument that, at least until recently, was a ubiquitous presence, the bread or pasta of most Western musical life. The suite has three numbers, and we'll call it Teaching Old Pianos, New Tricks. A word to the hi-fi purists who might be listening, these are historical recordings, i.e. they sound pretty funky. The Banshee. | |
| [No speech for 430s.] | |
| Teaching old pianos new tricks. | |
| Two pieces by Henry Cowell, separated by one by John Cage. The first one by Cowell, which he announced himself, Banshee. | |
| He doesn't play any notes at the keyboard at all, as far as I can hear. He's leaning inside the piano the whole time with the pedal down. | |
| According to the liner notes of this old Folkways record, by scratching, plucking, pounding, and sweeping the strings and taking full advantage of the strings' sympathetic vibrations, the composer has perfectly evoked the Banshee of Irish and Scottish folklore, the female spirit whose wailings forewarn families of the approaching death of a member. | |
| It's a very evocative piece. I don't know about this next sentence. Cowell has almost entirely obliterated the sound of the original instrument so that all attention can be drawn to the work itself. | |
| I don't know about that. Do you think you have to obliterate the sound of a violin to draw attention? Do you draw attention to a violin concerto? Anyway, next we heard a dance by John Cage for prepared piano. | |
| This is a process in which you put various screws and nails and erasers between the strings in the piano so that when you hit the note on the key, instead of getting the note that the strings would play naturally, you get or whatever those things give you. Obviously, the way you set the piano up determines how you play it. | |
| It's how it's going to sound. The derivation of this modification of the piano is rather interesting. John Cage and some of the other people he was working with at the time used to pick up odd objects and use them as percussion instruments for dancers, to accompany dancers. And the problem was that they got so many of these things that there wasn't room for all these instruments in a studio and then have any room left over for the dancers to dance. So they began putting stuff in the piano in order to make it sound like a piano. So they began putting stuff in the piano in order to make it sound like a piano. in order to make it sound like a percussion instrument | |
| that didn't take up as much room. And in that particular dance, you hardly hear any regular piano notes at all. And it has a very sort of Eastern gamelan sort of feeling that he explored more in the sonatas and interludes for prepared piano. And then finally, a piece that is listed, I think, incorrectly on this old Folkways record album. | |
| It's listed as Aeolian harp, but I've heard Aeolian harp, but I've heard a different piece. This one, somebody has corrected here on this copy, Sinister Resonance. Neat piece, I think. And Henry Cowell is apparently playing both those pieces. And as far as the Cage goes, I don't know who's playing it. The notes don't tell us. I would expect that maybe it's Cage playing himself, but I can't guarantee that. Okay. You know, I love radio, and I'm glad we're on radio, but this next suite is one time I wish we were on TV. | |
| We're going to hear some more examples of common instruments played in an uncommon way. Completely uncommon. Or as they say in bilingual areas of Canada, Teuton common. | |
| The trouble is, in some of these cases, you may not realize how Teuton common the technique is without being able to see it. Not so much in the first selection, which features woodwinds playing multifonics. Usually a bassoon, for instance, can only play one note at a time. But if you lip the reed in a special way, you can actually produce two or more notes simultaneously. | |
| One bassoonist can actually play multi-note chords. Now, the players don't really look very different when they play multifonics, except that they may get a bit red in the face and ain't easy. In the second selection, we hear a kind of smooth sliding on the banjo that shouldn't be possible on a fretted instrument. Fretts are those little bars that go across the fingerboards of banjos and guitars and mandolins. | |
| When you slide them, you can actually hear them. If you slide up or down with one of your left-hand fingers, unless the frets are quite low, you can usually hear the very slight bump of the finger going over each fret. But in this number, the slides are super smooth, and that's because the player is doing them by turning the tuning pegs with his left hand. He's not using the fingerboard at all at those places in the music. The third piece in this suite, without any visuals, seems like a nice, fairly ordinary little piano piece. What's the big deal? But if you're a pianist, you might realize that the chords in the left hand are too big to be played by one hand. | |
| The right hand is playing the melody, and the left hand, anybody's left hand, just isn't big enough to encompass all those notes. Well, if we were doing this show on TV, you could see that the pianist is playing the accompaniment with his whole forearm, hand to elbow. Football linemen would be good at this technique. Of course, using your arm or a piece of wood, as has been done as well, you can't leave out selected notes in the middle, like a regular chord. It's all or nothing. What you get is called tone clusters. White tone clusters sound quite different from black tone clusters, because of the different spacing of those two kinds of keys. The fourth and last number is the most interesting of them all. In fact, it's quite amazing. Okay, now, the way you play a guitar is, you pluck a string with your right hand, fingers or pick, and you determine what note that string is going to be. And you determine what note that string is going to be, by putting the fingers of your left hand on the fingerboard. Correct? But electric guitarists have known for ages that if you slap a left hand finger down on the fingerboard, you can hear the note even if you don't pluck it. You just get this . | |
| It took this man to figure out that you wouldn't have to pluck the strings at all. You could use both hands directly on the fingerboard. With traditional techniques, it would take at least two guitarists to play what you're about to hear. One for the bass line, and one for the melody, and maybe even a third to play some of the chords in between. But this is all being done by one guy, who, not surprisingly, was trained as a pianist. The name of this suite is, How Do You Do That Anyway? It's a little over nine minutes long, and its four sections feature woodwind players playing multifonics, a banjo player turning the tuning pegs of his banjo, a pianist using his forearm to play large chords, and a guitarist defying the laws of guitar ability. | |
| [No speech for 531s.] | |
| It's a little over nine minutes long, | |
| How do you do that anyway? One guitarist, Stanley Jordan. Going back to the beginning of this suite, Lucas Foss, a woodwind quintet that really makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, doesn't it? It's a real fingernail on the blackboard piece, which is, I guess, what he wanted. It's called The Cave of the Winds. | |
| And then that was played, by the way, by the Dorian Quintet. And then we had a record often used on this show, folk songs from the Bluegrass, Earl Taylor and his Stony Mountain Boys, and that was the Flint Hill Special by Earl Scruggs, one of the great banjo innovators. Then we had, speaking of innovators, from an album called The American Innovator, with Alan Feinberg playing piano, Exultation, played by Henry Cowell. And that's where he was using his forearm. And when I was introducing it, I only talked about the left forearm accompanying the melody in the right hand. | |
| But as you may have noticed, it works the other way around too. Sometimes he plays the melody in the left hand and has the right hand doing the big clusters, all of them black note clusters, by the way. You know, when a pianist works on a really difficult piece, he often writes in fingerings there, what works best. I wonder if Alan Feinberg wrote armings in for this piece. | |
| There's quite a touching little anecdote about tone clusters, and that is that Bartok was working or staying at a house once in a sort of a weekend party, I think it was, or something like this. I read this a long time ago. And Henry Cowell was there, and Bartok heard Henry Cowell working on tone clusters on a piano piece. And Bartok actually wrote to Cowell, asking permission to use tone clusters too. I think that's extremely honorable. And then finally, we had Stanley Jordan. | |
| The tune was called Fun Dance, written by him. And as I say, it's almost impossible to believe that one person was playing all that music on one guitar. | |
| I can't believe it, and I'm Peter Schickele. The program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. So far, we've heard some unusual instruments, some unusual objects used as instruments, and some usual instruments played in unusual ways. Now let's hear some usual instruments in unusual combinations. | |
| Each one of the three pieces in our last suite makes use of ordinary Western instruments, plus something that is, by traditional standards, incongruous. We've got African thumb pianos, in number one, a little toy piano in number two, and in number three, well, number three proves that the Pacific Ocean isn't as big as some people think it is. | |
| Or that it's bigger than some people think it is. I don't know. What do you think it is? This suite is called Strange Bedfellows. I'll be back in less than nine minutes. | |
| [No speech for 213s.] | |
| We'll be right back. We'll be right back. | |
| I'm sure this is a little too much. | |
| I'm sure this is too much for a band. which is the third of the four nationalist groups, in which I'm part of, I'm part of the ensembles. | |
| [No speech for 280s.] | |
| Strange Bedfellows, three numbers. The first one was Lou Harrison, music for violin with various instruments. The instruments, in addition to the African thumb piano, were a bunch of Asian instruments, the zhong and the sheng and various things I can't pronounce. That was the last movement William Boughton was playing the violin. | |
| And then we had, from George Crumb's masterpiece, Ancient Voices of Children. This was the fourth song, Todos las Tardes, haunting, haunting piece, in which the percussion players do a little singing, too, a little evocative singing, and then you hear that toy piano. It was Jan de Gaitani, by the way, mezzo-soprano, and the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, under the direction of Arthur Weisberg. | |
| Maybe just a little bit sacrilegious to follow that with a classic album we've heard from before on Schickele Mix, The Sound of Japanese Music, a Japanese version of an American big band, along with traditional Japanese instruments. And that was a tune called Ichiban Hajimawa, or something like that. The first one is. It's a children's song, according to the liner notes. | |
| And, of course, it was performed by Fumio Matsumoto and Musubi, who are the music makers. Well, it doesn't look like we've really got time for a separate tidbit time, so let's go out on our tidbit. I was going to play this and ask you to figure out what unusual technique is being employed, but I think that would leave me open to a charge of cruel and unusual punishment by means of gigantic anticlimax. | |
| This is a 1920s Ozark mountain band called Reeves White County Ramblers, playing a little thing called Ten Cent Peace. By the way, hi-fi purists, take note. This recording was originally issued on 78 RPM. RPM stands for really pretty murky. Okay, now, once it gets going, you'll hear a sort of a percussion effect. You know what it is? You'll never believe this. See, while one guy is playing the fiddle, another guy is beating on the same fiddle with a straw, with a little piece of straw. Pretty far out, huh? Yeah. | |
| 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 valued 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 68. And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got the right number. It ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week. | |
| [No speech for 84s.] | |
| 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, MN 55403. | |
| PRI, Public Radio International. | |