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 takes a lot of do-re-mi to float that good music on the air, and for supplying the necessary moolah, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and to this indispensable radio station, where I am hunkered down in modest splendor.
Our program is distributed on Wings of Song by PRI, Public Radio International.
On another edition of this show, we talk about how the growth of Romanticism in 18th and 19th century Europe was accompanied by, or expressed itself in, more and more variety within one movement of a musical composition. More frequent changes of texture, or tempo, or tonality, or whatever, and more extreme contrasts among sections.
Let's encapsulate that development by listening to the last movement of a Bach piece, followed by the last movement of a Brahms piece. In the Bach, the musical material for the whole movement is presented in the first few seconds, literally. The material will be spun out in delightful ways, it will be led through various keys and given to different instruments. But in terms of building blocks, what you hear in the first few measures is what you're going to get.
There won't be any contrasting material introduced, there won't be any change of tempo, and there won't be much variation in dynamics, that is loudness. It's all smooth sailing. Paul Simon described this piece: "Was a sunny day, not a cloud was in the sky." Now when we get to the Brahms, written about a century and a half later, we're talking about one of those dramatic summer days that's partly sunny, There is a strong wind up there because the clouds are moving swiftly across the sky.
Sometimes it's bright, sometimes it's dark, sometimes it's balmy, sometimes it's threatening. But there's an urgency that is never completely dispelled, even during the quiet parts of the day. Love those days! This movement features great contrasts in tempo, texture, tonality, and dynamics. Here's some great music by two of the three B's.
[music: J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (BWV 1047), 3rd Mvt.; The English Concert/Pinnock]
[music excerpt: Brahms, Quintet in F minor for Piano & Strings, Opus 34, 4th Mvt.; Clifford Curzon/Budapest String Quartet]
Okay, two pieces displaying two extremes of contrast and variety. First, the last movement of Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. That was the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock. And then, the last movement of the Brahms Piano Quintet, meaning, of course, piano and string quartet, performed by the Budapest String Quartet and Clifford Curzon.
I should say that that's an old recording. Legendary performances, the album says. The album says, available in mono only, and that's why it's mono. I just love that performance, and even though it's a little noisy, I wanted to use it. I should mention, by the way, that there is a slow introduction to that last movement, which I omitted for reasons of time.
Man, I love that piece. I would give anything to be able to play the piano in that, but listen, I could practice every day for 17 years, and it would still sound as if I had mittens on. I was at a chamber music evening at Itzhak Perlman's house once, and they were doing the Brahms, and Emanuel Ax was playing the piano, and I got to turn pages for him. I mean, he didn't even really need a page turner, but I was in seventh heaven.
I'm afraid that's as close as I'll ever get to playing that piece. My name's Peter Schickele, and the program is Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
Variety, variety, we want more variety. We want more surprise, less predictability. I'm telling you, it got to a point where at a special seminar I attended at Princeton the composer Milton Babbitt described the research, I guess you'd call it, of some musician mathematicians who were trying to determine, given a certain bunch of notes that had been played, what the least expected next note would be.
And the idea was that that would be the most desirable next note for a composer to use. I kid you, as they say, not.
It certainly smacks of decadence, and it also feels wrong-headed. It seems to me that the more repetition you have, the easier it is to create surprise by breaking the pattern. But what do I know? I know what's up next, that's what. It's a little suite of 20th century pieces in which you can never tell what's around the corner. There are three of these pieces, and unfortunately we don't have time to hear all of the first one. We'll just hear the first half of it.
The What Next Suite lasts a little under nine minutes. I'll see you then.
[music excerpt: Stravinsky, "Symphonies of Wind Instruments"; London Sinfonietta/Salonen]
[music excerpt: Krenek, "Sechs Vermessene"; David Burge]
Featuring a lot of variety and contrast in texture within each piece. The first was the first half of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, one of my favorite pieces around. That was the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
I was reading something recently that was talking about a very early piano sonata by Stravinsky, and it was saying this was basically a sort of a student work, and it was saying how the greatest weaknesses in this piece were in the transitions between sections and between themes. And of course what Stravinsky ended up doing was saying, okay, I just won't use transitions. I'm exaggerating, but what he did was take building blocks of material and just emphasize the seams rather than try to disguise them. Put those blocks up against one another and relish the differences between them. Then we had from an album called Avant-Garde Piano, another old LP, Ernst Krenek. The piece is called Sechs Vermessene, and that does not mean very messy sex. It means six pieces. Vermessen means measure, so I guess six measures. And these pieces are examples, I think they were written, yes, in 1958, a time when people were applying serial techniques, which means arranging the tones in an order, C would be 1, F sharp is 2, A flat is 3, and then you use them consistently in that order, or in versions of that order, and then people started serializing other things, dynamics, you call forte, loud, 1, you call mezzo forte, which is rather loud, you call that 2, and so then you use the dynamics serially, which of course results in music that is anti-expressive. Because we think of, if you're singing softly and all of a sudden you sing loud, that that has a dramatic, expressive, human feeling, an outburst. But here it is being used absolutely mechanically. It's now time for a forte, so you put in a forte. The rhythm is also serialized, and one of the effects that has, of course, is you don't have any feeling of beat. As a matter of fact, when you write a completely serialized piece like that, it's almost like you're building the machine, and I heard Krenek say this himself at that seminar I mentioned. It's like you build the machine, and once you've built the machine, the piece is written. It's almost as if you just start the machine, and it writes the piece according to the rules that you've made. The other interesting thing, however, about that total serialization, is that you end up with a piece that is so irregular that it almost sounds like a random improvisation, which according to David Burge's liner notes, he's the pianist, is a thought that delights Krenek a great deal. And finally, Heroes & Villains, The Beach Boys, and The Beach Boys fans among you, and I certainly include myself among them, will recognize that that is not the form of Heroes & Villains that became a hit.
This is an alternate take, an earlier take, 1967, when they were working on an album that was going to be called Smile. And this was a very enigmatic period in the Beach Boys history because this was going to be a breakthrough album. This was going to be the kind of album that blew everybody's minds. But then some minds got blown within the group and somehow the album never got made and even parts of it got lost.
Smile never happened, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band did happen, and the Beatles sort of became the music-changing group, and the Beach Boys really got shut out for a long time. The album that did come out was Smiley Smile. Now, I happen to feel that it's one of the best albums ever. I love Smiley Smile. But people who were expecting a sort of a Sergeant Pepper were very disappointed.
The interesting thing is that the original idea of the album Smile, though, was, to quote Brian Wilson in an interview, it will include lots of humor, some musical and some spoken. It won't be like a comedy LP, there won't be any spoken tracks as such, but someone might say something in between verses. And as you heard, there was a you're under arrest in there. That's apparently the kind of thing he was talking about. He called Heroes & Villains a three-minute musical comedy.
In the final version, the one that got released, it has a rather different feel. It's smoother and doesn't have as much comedy.
So now I think it's time to... I can't believe this.
[sound: phone rings]
Hello?
Yes, well, so do I. Yes, they're one of my favorite groups too, but the Beach Boys song happened to fit in better with what I was illustrating if you were paying attention to what I was saying.
No, I'm not being impudent, sir. It's just that I'm on the air here, and... Well, go ahead. I don't care. Sure. My name is Peter Schickele. S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E. E-L-E. And the program is called Schickele Mix. From P. R. I. That stands for Public Radio International.
Well, that's all very interesting, sir, but I really have to get back to the show. Goodbye. Man. So where were we? Oh yeah, the 20th century. In Western music, as in Western physics, there's a law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So while many Romantic composers were writing longer and longer symphonies involving more and more sudden contrast or gradual transformation within movements, other composers started going back to the idea of shorter movements with little or no change of texture.
There was often a nostalgic aspect to this development. Many of these pieces were neo-Gothic or neo-classical, meaning neo-18th century, or neo-folk music. There was a feeling of back to basics, which, as it happens, is the name of this show. Of course, lots of composers during the 19th century wrote short pieces, especially for piano that had one character throughout. As a matter of fact, they were usually called character pieces.
But I'm talking about the forms associated with major works. As early as the 1820s, Beethoven and Schubert were writing piano sonatas that lasted 40-45 minutes. A century later, Hindemith wrote three piano sonatas ranging in length from a mere 11 minutes to 26 minutes. A Mahler symphony can last well over an hour. Milhaud wrote a little symphony that lasts three and a half minutes.
Of course, the interesting thing in terms of contrast is that the late Romantic symphonies got so long. How long did they get? They got so long that one part of a movement, one section with a fairly uniform texture, might be as long as a whole movement of a Bach or Vivaldi piece. Now one of the most important figures in the development of the short uniform texture aesthetic was Erik Satie.
As early as the 1880s, while Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Bruckner were creating huge symphonic edifices, Satie started writing short, simple, hypnotic pieces, the most famous of which are the Gymnopédies. Our next suite is the Set It In Motion and Let It Run suite. Now, I don't mean to imply anything mechanical in a pejorative way. I just mean that the texture you hear at the beginning of each piece will be pretty much retained throughout, just as in the Bach work with which we started the program.
This suite has three numbers and lasts about ten minutes.
[music: Satie, Preludes du Nazareen, No. 2; Aldo Ciccolini]
[music: Parker, "Confirmation" (Charlie Parker); Charlie Parker]
[music: Harrison, Piano Concerto, 4th Mvt.; Keith Jarrett/New Japan Philharmonic/Otomo]
Set It in Motion and Let It Run Suite: Erik Satie, Charlie Parker, Lou Harrison. We began with the second of Satie's Préludes du Nazaréen. These are three preludes written in 1892 and they're mostly one texture. In this case, most of the texture is this chorale-like, this sort of hymn-like writing, and then an occasional solo line.
That was Aldo Ciccolini playing the piano. Then we had Charlie Parker, a tune called Confirmation, one of his own tunes, and that was Al Haig on piano, Percy Heath on bass, and Max Roach on drums. And the only major textural change in a cut like that is during the solos.
The sax drops out for the piano solo, and the piano more or less drops out for the bass solo, and everybody drops out for the drums. Otherwise, there's not a big attempt to get different sounds. You just spin it out wonderfully in this case when you're talking about Charlie Parker. You spin it out just as Bach does. As a matter of fact, a lot of people have commented on the similarities between what you might call mainstream jazz and Baroque music.
In both cases, you have a bass that tends to go along, in this case, for almost that whole cut, the bass is basically walking along on quarter notes, which is very much like a Bach bass. [imitates a walking bass] Et cetera. And also, the use of only a few note values rhythmically. Bach can just go a long time with just eighth notes and sixteenth notes.
[imitates eighth and sixteenth notes] You get whole movements that have hardly anything but those two note values in them. And jazz gets a lot out of just swung eighth notes with wonderful little triplets, little three notes in a beat thrown in there. Okay, and then finally, we had Keith Jarrett playing Lou Harrison's Piano Concerto.
The New Japan Philharmonic was conducted by Naoto Otomo, and that was the last movement, Allegro Moderato, and in this case we have an interesting combination of Asian influences with a sort of a perpetual motion that as a matter of fact sounds somewhat like some Satie pieces, not the one we heard, but other ones. Okay, I mentioned folk music earlier as a uniform texture influence. A lot of folk music comes from situations that are not performances in a formal concert sense. Singing or playing for yourself, family gatherings, dances. Musicians in such surroundings don't feel that they have to make quote, interesting arrangements of songs or dance tunes, or that they have to build interesting programs with a lot of variety in them, as they might feel or be told to feel if they were performing for a large audience of total strangers sitting in auditorium seats.
A lot of folk music, even if it's fast, has an unhurried feel to it. It can be refreshing to hear music that says, you come to me, I'm not coming to you. I'm here, and I'm taking my time. You're welcome to listen if you like.
[music: Fahey, "Requiem for John Hurt" (Requia); John Fahey]
John Fahey playing his own composition Requiem for John Hurt certainly not without variety but with a lot of repetition and a hypnotic feel and a very folk feel using folk guitar picking techniques and it's not a folk song of course in the sense that we don't know who wrote it or anything but it has a lot of...
[sound: phone rings]
Hello?
Listen, you know, I am on the air here.
No, I know, but listen, I love them too.
But I don't have time for that. But I don't like to play just part of a... Okay, yeah, now that's right. I only played part of the Stravinsky, you're right. Just what, the last 32 seconds, you say? Look, I'll make a deal with you, okay? I'll play it and you get off my back and don't call the station manager, okay? Is that a deal? Alright folks, I didn't think we were going to be having Tidbit Time this week, but I was wrong. Here, by miniscule but insistent popular demand, is some music that I think you'll agree is not cluttered with excess variation.
[music excerpt: Lennon/McCartney, "Hello, Goodbye" (20 Greatest Hits); The Beatles]
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
The Beatles, the coda section from Hello Goodbye into Mozart Symphony No. 24. And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this radio station and its members. 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 number 71. 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.