Your ear to the world, this is KISU Pocatello, a listener-supported service of Idaho State University at FM 91.1. Please stay tuned, coming up next, Schickele Mix with Peter Schickele.
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You could say that. 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. The bills for the goodness we are about to impart are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this forward-looking radio station to which I weekly trudge to do the imparting which finally is distributed by PRI.
Years ago, I did a P.D.Q. Bach concert with the orchestra of a small city in Texas. It was in the spring, I remember, and the people running the program said there would be a little presentation before the concert proper. I'm always wary of that kind of thing because I don't like concerts to be too long, but I thought, fine, somebody's going to give a little speech, maybe thank some committee members, and then present an award to someone.
Well, when I arrived at the hall the evening of the show, there were flowers all over the front of the stage, plus a little leafy arbor, you know, a latticework arch set up downstage right. The program did indeed begin with a short speech or two, after which the orchestra began to play.
[music]
As they played, each female member of the high school graduating class, wearing a formal gown, walked through the arch on the arm of her father, while the announcer read her name, a list of the activities she participated in at school, and what college she planned to attend, if appropriate.
I can't remember how many girls there were, but it went on for a considerable stretch, and during it all, the orchestra played this theme over and over and over again.
[music]
That's the slow movement of Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto, performed by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under the direction of Murray Perahia. That concerto is nicknamed the Elvira Madigan because of its extensive use in a popular Swedish movie of that name.
Some purists are deeply offended at the idea of identifying such a sublime piece with a movie title, but as far as I'm concerned, it's no more obnoxious than other tacked-on names like the Jupiter Symphony and the Moonlight Sonata, and considerably less obnoxious than some of the names given to works by the composers themselves, such as Nielsen's Symphony No. 4, the Inextinguishable.
Give me a break. The thing about these titles... Okay, okay, okay. I can't really argue with the irrelevancy alarm this time. The show is not about nicknames. What I was groping towards back there is that one of the things that makes the slow movement of that Mozart concerto sound so languid, so dreamy, so appropriate for graduating girls in their formals, is that the strings are muted.
On another edition of Schickele Mix, we talk about mutes for brass instruments, and how they not only dampen the sound, but also change the quality or color of the sound, sometimes drastically. Mutes have been used with string instruments, as with brasses, at least since the early 17th century. But with strings, the difference between muted and unmuted isn't as pronounced. Here's the Andante from Mozart's Divertimento K136.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Divertimento in D (K 136), 2nd Mvt.; Members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra/Zukerman]
And here's the slow movement of his 28th Symphony.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 28 in C (K 200), 2nd Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
The strings in the Divertimento had no mutes. Those in the Symphony we just heard were muted. I have to admit that I almost used that Symphony movement we just heard as an example of strings without mutes. And then I thought, wait a minute, and listened again and thought, no, they are muted. And then I checked it out, and they are muted. And it seems obvious to me now, but, you know, it's hard to tell sometimes, especially since the way different musicians play and even how they're recorded can affect the string sound considerably.
String mutes are little clamps made out of wood or metal or whatever, and you push the mute onto the wooden bridge that holds up the strings. What happens is that the mute absorbs some of the vibration of the bridge, so that the sound is softer and thinner.
There's a heavy metal mute called, I mean it's a metal mute that's quite heavy. I don't mean a mute that's used in heavy metal music. You don't find heavy metal musicians looking for ways to make their instruments softer. But this metal mute is called a practice mute. It deadens the sound so much that you can practice in your apartment without breaking your lease.
It used to be that when a muted passage was coming up in an orchestral piece, you'd see the violinists, all men of course, reach into the little watch pockets of their starched shirt fronts for their mutes. But the thing about separate mutes is that they're easy to forget to bring. Nowadays, many players use a kind of mute that can be attached permanently. It has an on and an off position, as it were.
But just because mutes deaden the sound doesn't mean you can only use them in slow, soft music. In fact, mutes impart a sort of a nervous energy to fast, loud passages. Here's part of Bartok's Fifth String Quartet. In the beginning part of this excerpt, all four string instruments are muted through thick and thin, loud and soft.
About a half a minute into it, the cello has a solo during which the upper strings remove their mutes, and you can hear the difference when the first violin plays again.
Okay, so it's true that violin mutes don't change the sound as much as trumpet mutes. But the thing about string instruments is that there are so many different ways of playing them even without mutes. There's pizzicato, which means instead of bowing the strings, you pluck them,
[music excerpt: Mingus, Folk Forms No. 1 (The Complete Candid Recordings of Charles Mingus); Charles Mingus]
Charlie Mingus, the intro to Folk Forms No. 1. Then there's harmonics. To play a harmonic, one of the left hand fingers simply touches a string, rather than pushing it all the way down to the fingerboard. If you do it in the right place, you get an ethereal flute-like sound. Here's the same passage, first played just regular, then with harmonics.
[music excerpt: Paganini, Caprice No. 9 in E; Midori]
Midori, performing part of Paganini's 9th Caprice. Playing a passage of double harmonics like that is so hard, and she makes it sound so easy. Of course, what do you expect? She was already, what, 16 or 17 when she made that recording. She'd been playing the violin for 12 years, for Pete's sake. Eight of them in front of backup bands like the New York Philharmonic.
Why shouldn't she be able to play the world's most difficult violin music? Music that many fiddlers who've been playing for five decades can't play. Listen, she's something else.
Anyway, then you can also play col legno, which means with the wood of the bow instead of the hairs. Back to Bartok's 5th Quartet. Here's the same little group of notes played three times, twice normally, and then the third time you can hear, in addition to the notes, the wood clicking against the strings.
Now these last three techniques I've mentioned, pizzicato, harmonics, and col legno, can add a lot of color to the proceedings. But, with the exception of pizzicato bass in jazz, they're still not used nearly as much as good old fashioned bowing and fingering. Which is why I call our first suite the Accentuate the Marginal Suite. In terms of how often these techniques are employed by composers in general, the suite gets more marginal as it goes along.
The first piece is entirely pizzicato, the second virtually all harmonics, and the third, which is, by the way, a private recording of a live performance, prominently features col legno. I'll be back in about nine minutes.
[music: Johann Strauss, Jr./Josef Strauss, "Pizzicato Polka" (New Year's Concert 1989); Vienna Philharmonic/Kleiber]
The Accentuate the Marginal Suite began with the Pizzicato Polka by Johann Jr. and Josef Strauss performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Carlos Kleiber. Then we heard that almost-all-harmonics section, part of the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony by Carlos Chavez played by Eduardo Mata and the London Symphony Orchestra.
And I was thinking, while that was playing, sustained harmonics sound quite a bit like running your finger around the rim of a wine glass. Anyway, the last selection, featuring col legno and performed by the Armadillo Quartet, was the end of the String Quartet No. 3, subtitled The Four Seasons, by the Iowa-born composer Peter Schickele, Schickele, now widely known as the genial host of a gently opinionated show called Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about all the things that strings can do. Now some of those things, like col legno for instance, are very exotic, and they add a lot of color, but you wouldn't want to do a whole piece with them. Nevertheless, it's funny how you get to take for granted something that was once a revolutionary technique.
In 1624, when Monteverdi became the first composer to indicate pizzicato in printed music, he had to instruct the player to put the bow aside and pluck the strings with two fingers. In 1688, J.J. Walther, whoever he was, told the player to play senz'arco, that is, without the bow, and with the tip of the finger.
Now you just write P I Z Z period and the players know that they should either pluck the string or phone out for a double cheese with sausage and peppers. Pizzicato technique has gotten pretty sophisticated since Monteverdi's day. And two of the people most responsible for that are Paganini and Bartok. A few for instances. You can slide pizzicato notes.
You can slur pizzicato notes, pluck once with the right hand, then put down or lift fingers of the left hand.
Those were both Bartok's Fifth Quartet. You can play pizzicato notes solely with the left hand, the fingering hand, which makes possible unusually fast passages and the rapid alternating of pizzicato and arco notes.
[music excerpt: Paganini, Caprice No. 24 in A Minor; Midori]
Paganini, 24th Caprice. You can play a left hand pizzicato note while you're playing another note with the bow.
[music excerpt: Bartok, Sonata for Solo Violin, Opus 117, 1st Mvt.; Kyoko Takezawa]
Bartok, unaccompanied violin sonata, played by Kyoko Takezawa. And finally, you can pluck a string so violently that it snaps against the fingerboard. We heard that earlier in one of the Bartok excerpts, and in fact he was so fond of it that it's often referred to as Bartok pizzicato. We'll hear it again as the first of the next brace of pieces. Since the strings play sempre pizzicato in both of these works, we'll call the pair Lots of Pluck.
[music: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus 36, 3rd Mvt.; Philadelphia Orchestra/Muti]
Lots of Pluck began with the fourth movement of Bartok's Quartet No. 4, played by the Emersons, and continued with the Scherzo from Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, performed by Riccardo Muti and his well-shod Pennsylvanians. You'll notice that pieces in which the strings play pizzicato exclusively are always on the fast side. They almost have to be since the sound of each note disappears so quickly.
The instruments we're dealing with here are not made for pizzicato the way guitars and lutes are. Of course, mandolins are made for plucking and their sound dies quickly, but they make up for it by doing the mandolin thing, you know, a rapid
[music]
tremolo plucking. Now, when it comes to the banjo, what? What do you mean? We're talking about pizzicato here. This is completely to the point. Oh, just a minute here. This new irrelevancy alarm they installed has a little printout.
This is supposed to tell the reason it went off. Let's see. Oh, great, 05. Now you have to look it up in the instruction manual.
Alarm Codes, page 13.
Okay, now, 05. Boring. Well, excuse me! Man, I sometimes wonder if they know who they're dealing with here. I do. Peter Schickele, and the show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Oh, what a piece of work string instruments are. We've discussed different kinds of pizzicato, harmonics, playing with the wood of the bow, and mutes. But there's more! You can play with the bow very close to the bridge and get a metallic, ghostly sort of sound.
[music excerpt: Bartok, Sonata for Solo Violin, Opus 117, 4th Mvt.; Kyoko Takezawa]
Bartok's solo violin sonata again. Unlike brasses and woodwinds, string instruments can usefully play more than one note at a time. I say usefully because there are some sort of special effects involving more than one note at a time that you can do with winds, but they're so dicey, so inflexible and undependable that they're very rarely used.
String instruments aren't as polyphonically flexible as pianos and guitars, but still, you can play octaves, for instance. Here's a melody starting on middle C and the middle C above it.
[music excerpt: Paganini, Caprice No. 24 in A minor; Midori]
Paganini No. 24 again with Midori. By the way, there's a story that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz, who had an impeccable technique, was once asked why, when he played octaves, they weren't in tune.
And he replied, if I played them in tune, nobody would know I was playing octaves. And it's really true, you know. Unlike the piano, on which octaves are very strong, on the violin, if they're really in tune, the upper one sort of disappears somewhat. We've been hearing Midori on the Paganini excerpts. Listen to Ruggiero Ricci, another great violinist, playing part of that same melody.
[music excerpt: Paganini, Caprice No. 24 in A minor; Ruggiero Ricci]
You really know he's playing octaves because many of them are not exactly in tune. Now listen to Midori playing that passage.
[music excerpt: Paganini, Caprice No. 24 in A minor; Midori]
The octaves are much more closely in tune. She does play it a bit slower, which makes it much smoother, but perhaps not as dramatic. Okay, continuing with Midori, here's a passage in thirds, two different notes at once, such as you find in keyboard music all the time.
[music excerpt: Paganini, Caprice No. 24 in A minor; Midori]
And here are three note chords. You would need three wind instruments to duplicate this.
[No speech for 22 s.]
You can even do four-note chords, although the notes won't come in exactly together. Is there anything strings can't do?
Well, let's face it, violins are not as good for making lamps out of as clarinets and trumpets. But I gotta tell you, one of the few strong regrets I have in my life is that I didn't learn to play a string quartet instrument.
I studied cello back in 1957, and I'm not talking about some fly-by-night thing here, either. I studied cello for a whole month. But somehow the Bach unaccompanied suites were still beyond my reach, not to mention the late Beethoven string quartets. There are a lot of great instruments around, but for me there's no family of instruments that has as much variety of sound and variety of expression as strings do.
I'm telling you, man, it's love, which is why I call this program a many-splendored string. Eh, I can't help it. To me, a pun is a term of endearment. Let's listen to the andante movement of the Bartok Fifth String Quartet all the way through. Just dig the variety of sounds, pizzicato, arco, with mutes, without mutes, col legno, The range of dynamics from very soft to very loud, the range of pitches from very low to very high, and the range of texture from single lines to eight-note chords.
Bartok's Fifth Quartet, Fourth Movement, played by the Emerson Quartet. Is all that variety of exotic effects the reason that the String Quartet is so vital and long-lived? Eh, probably not. The bulk of the literature was written before the 20th century when those effects were used very sparingly. Hey, you know, when I was talking about all those different ways of playing a string instrument, I forgot about hitting it.
This technique works best on large instruments such as string basses. It's Tidbit Time.
"Bass, Bass, Bass, Bass, Bass & Bass" by Christian Gentet, played by L'Orchestre de Contrebasses, six, count them, six French bass players. But there are still other ways to play string instruments. Let's go out with a different kind of fiddle playing.
[music: Pinkart/Tauber/Tracey, "Them There Eyes" (85 & Still Swinging ...); Stephane Grappelli]
And Stephane Grappelli is taking us out on Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this radio station and all you members. Our program, once it achieves a minimum level of desirability, 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 album numbers and everything.
Just refer to the program number. This is program 74. 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 are looking good. See you next week.
[music: Pinkart/Tauber/Tracey, "Them There Eyes" (85 & Still Swinging ...); Stephane Grappelli]
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.