The brilliant music has been snapped up for Bugs Bunny cartoons and TV commercials. Rossini's Il Barbieri Siviglia, broadcast live over the station.
Tune in Saturday afternoon at 1.30 here on WHQR Wilmington. It is coming up just about an hour from now. I believe there was a rabbit of Seville with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.
This is your public radio station, WHQR Wilmington. Peter Shigley is next. Peter, are you ready to go yet? Do I look ready? Nevertheless, here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shigley, and this is Shigley 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 the bills for the goodness we are about to receive are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Broadcasting Service,
by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this very radio station, where I'm provided with this unique studio space. Our program is distributed, on the other hand,
by PRI, Public Radio International. One of the characteristics of a lot of 20th century music has been extreme fragmentation,
sudden and frequent changes of tempo, dynamics, instrumentation, and texture, as in this case, the music of the 20th century. this brief excerpt.
That was a little bit of Gruppen for three orchestras by Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. Now here's another example of extreme fragmentation, but this one is interesting because its harmonic
language ranges from completely atonal to quite traditional.
I'll bet there are some people listening who know what that is.
I mean exactly what that is. If you're not one of them, I'll give you a little hint.
That's right, we're talking Warner Brothers cartoons here. That previous excerpt was from a Roadrunner cartoon called There They Go Go Go, music by Carl Stalling.
Now if you were to record a whole six or seven minute Roadrunner score as one continuous piece, it would take a tremendous amount of rehearsal because the music shifts gears so often.
And the timing has to be so precise. So the score is recorded in small segments, some as long as a couple of minutes and some as short as a few seconds.
Especially with cartoons, where the music usually mirrors the action to an exaggerated degree, it's called Mickey-mousing, at least everywhere except at the Disney studios.
The timing has been worked out to the fraction of a second with the storyboards and the segments are recorded to a click track. A metronomic beat. Audible only to the conductor and musicians through their headphones.
This delightful album called The Carl Stalling Project has a cut that is a montage of different takes for a single cue from the score for Putty Tat Trouble.
You can hear the voice from the control booth and also those of the musicians themselves.
All right, here we go, production number 1171. We're going to start with a little bit of the music. We'll hear the first track and we'll play it for you. Putty Tat Trouble, part six. Take one.
Are you a bit make of the blasting?
What's wrong? That's all right.
Okay. Is that okay?
music from putty tat trouble today's show is called sickly mix the movie
back when i was about eight nine ten years old my dad used to take my brother and me to the movies just about every friday night the features we saw were mostly westerns my favorite was hop along
cassidy because he didn't kiss girls or sing songs but in addition to the feature there would be a
preview a cartoon and or a comedy short like the three stooges a newsreel plus one of the best parts of the evening you
effusive music by william lava from the adventures of red rider one of the many
serials made during the 30s and 40s as i remember they usually had 13 chapters a new one each week and of course each chapter ended with the hero or heroine in a dire situation
from which there was seemingly no escape possible and you had to come back next friday to see how they got out of it
it was very satisfying when the detectives say escaped by doing something really clever like fitting the barrel of his pistol over the point of one of the solid steel spikes that's
advancing on him and holding the handle of the pistol against the wall behind him so that eventually the wall of advancing spikes breaks down the wall behind him
but usually it would be more like one chapter ends with the hero's cargo out of the car before it goes over big deal
still there were always lots of chases and fights in warehouses just like detective shows on tv now
one difference between then and now however is that even in lowbrow movies like the serials and cookie cutter westerns that we went to in the forties the music was symphonic it was basically
if you want to be snotty about it vulgarized classical music written for symphony orchestras
by the nineteen seventies most movie and tv music was more influenced by non classical stuff jazz rock folk and blues
now i'm not saying that's a good or bad thing and of course john williams and george lucas brought the old fashioned symphonic score back with a bang in star wars
but i guess what i'm getting at is that i think one of the things that symphony orchestras are having to face these days is the fact that the sound of traditional classical music
is not as much a part of the fabric of our culture as it was when i was a kid in those days even if you never went to concerts you heard bugs bunny and elmer fudd singing wagner at the movies
spike jones desecrating offenbach on your turntable and pieces by rossini liszt and prokofiev being used as theme music for radio programs
the old hollywood composers were usually classically trained and they shall we say leaned heavily on the symphonic repertoire
dimitri tyomkin when he won an oscar in nineteen fifty five is supposed to have said in his acceptance speech something like i want to thank everybody who made this possible
tschaikovsky wagner debussy ravel prokofiev he didn't mention shickley so i guess i'll have to that's peter shickley and the show is shickley mix
from p r i public radio international shickley mix the movie
actually quite a few film scores have been written by symphonic composers who didn't specialize in the genre and we're about to hear selections from three of them the opening number by the way has the distinction of being part of
the very first movie score ever written now i'm not including what somebody hacking away at a piano or an organ might have made up but this is the first piece of
ensemble music written specifically for a film if you don't know already and few people do i'll bet you would never guess who the first film score composer was
the second composer in the suite is pretty guessable if you're into guessing the third and final peace was written for an animated film and i get a kick out of how much it sounds like cartoon music
even though it was written in nineteen thirty three and a long way from hollywood Movie music by composers who were not primarily known for movie music.
This suite is about six minutes long, and it's called... I don't usually do this sort of thing, but...
I don't usually do this sort of thing, but...
Movie music by symphonic composers. That last one was Shostakovich, preceded by Copland, and... Who was the first composer to write a film score?
The envelope, please. Camille Saint-Saëns.
The film was The Assassination of the Duke de Guise, and it was made in 1908. Can you believe that the first movie score was written by a man who was born in 1835?
A contemporary of Brahms and Lewis Carroll? It sounds so much like movie music, too. Not only because movie music sounded like symphonic music, but because the emotions in early movies tended to be very strong,
exaggerated and direct, like the stage acting then. And that's what that music certainly is. That was performed by the Ensemble Musique Oblique.
Then we had Copland, Barley Wagons, the second movement of a suite called Music for Movies, that was originally written for Of Mice and Men. Leonard Slatkin conducting the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
And then Shostakovich. The overture from the suite, from the music for an animated cartoon based on that rollicking story we all remember from our youth,
The Tale of the Priest and His Hired Man Balda, with Robin Williams as the samovar. The USSR Academic Symphony Orchestra, led by Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
That's worse than Peter Shickley. Who happens to be our next composer. I'm a bit of a movie nut. And the first orchestra...
The first orchestra-type piece I ever wrote was a score for an 8mm movie I made with my friends when I was 14. It was called Rocky Stone Rolls On. And the movie itself turned out pretty well.
Although not everyone can appreciate one of my favorite scenes. It's the one where I run out of a building, hop into our Ford convertible and drive away.
What you don't know, if you weren't there, is that I only had a learner's permit at the time. So my mother is lying down on the floor of the back seat. Just in case a cop should come along.
Well, I never got the people together to play the score for Rocky Stone. But over the next couple of decades or so, I wrote music for a pair of independent features and a bunch of short films.
Two of them were educational films with almost constant narration. So I learned to be very careful about instruments like the bassoon, whose central range is about the same as that of the male speaking voice.
And they can sort of cancel each other out if you don't watch it. In fact, I learned to be very careful about instruments like the bassoon, whose central range is about the same as that of the male speaking voice. And they can sort of cancel each other out if you don't watch it. In the features, I learned that for scenes with dialogue, the music has to be quite unobtrusive. It can't draw attention to itself.
Even in a film without dialogue, like Sweet Visions, the very 60s little movie in which my wife played a belly dancer, you have to be careful not to overwhelm the mood with too much detail.
I know some people who don't cotton to minimalism much, who have nevertheless enjoyed Philip Glass's movie scores. Not only the sumptuous Koyaanisqatsi, but the moodier ones like The Thin Blue Line.
He has a very good sense for what will compliment or enhance an image. Anyway, on a sweltering July day in 1971,
I was standing on a stepladder in a house in Brooklyn steaming wallpaper off a wall when the phone rang and it was Hollywood calling. Douglas Trumbull, who was one of the special effects designers for 2001,
was directing his first movie, and he asked me about doing the music because he liked it.
I told him I wanted to do it, so he asked me to do it. And we did it for a reason.
He wanted to have a sound track for which I was the arranger. Well, okay. So he also was hoping to get her to sing on the soundtrack, which, as it turned out, she did. The movie was called Silent Running.
It's a strange sort of ecological sci-fi flick, and it takes place entirely in space. The opening is all interior shots, and then at one point, Bruce Dern is standing in the galley of the craft,
and he pushes a button that opens a sort of a mechanical window shade, and then you see him from the outside, and the camera pulls back and back and back
till you see not only that he's on a huge spaceship, but that it's only one of several. Here's the music I wrote for that first view of the space fleet.
The Space Fleet from Silent Running.
Now, gradually, you come to realize from the film's dialogue that the surface of the Earth is now a completely devastated or artificial environment,
and that the large domes on these spacecraft contain the last examples of natural earthly flora and fauna. The drama in the story begins when the crew is ordered, for budgetary reasons,
to destroy the domes and return to Earth. But the interesting thing was that at test screenings, nobody over a certain age, I can't remember,
whether it was the Dread 30 or maybe it was 40, anyway, nobody over a certain age understood the setup in the movie. They didn't get why the spaceships were there in the first place.
So they added a voiceover in that first space fleet scene, a presidential-sounding voice, delivering a speech at the launching of the fleet, expressing the hope that someday these animals and plants
can once again be introduced onto the Earth. That worked, but the trouble now, was that the soaring music I had written didn't fit the ceremonial nature of the occasion. It wasn't solemn enough.
It needed to be more pomp and circumstance-y. So they brought me back out to L.A., and here's the new cue I wrote for that scene.
The revised space fleet music from Silent Running. From a purely musical standpoint, I still liked the original cue best, so we put them both on the soundtrack album. Here's a bit of trivia.
Remember that the Copeland we heard earlier on the show was conducted by Leonard Slatkin? Well, his mother, Eleanor, played principal cello on the Silent Running score. How about that? This is turning into a Mother's Day show.
My brother's mother has another son named Peter Shickley, and he has a show called Shickley Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. But this isn't just Shickley Mix.
This is Shickley Mix, the movie. We're talking music for the cinema here. During the editing stage of a movie,
directors often put together a temporary score, you know, just from their own album collection, maybe, just to have some music during key scenes. It's a well-known story in the movie music biz
that Stanley Kubrick did just that. While he threw together some stuff by Cacciaturian and Ligeti and a couple of Strausses,
and then eventually they hired Alex North to write the original. He had done the score for Spartacus, so the two had worked together before. Things seemed to be going well,
but after 40 minutes of music had been written and recorded, North received word that no more would be needed, that Kubrick was going to use breathing sounds for the rest of the scenes.
In the end, some say that it's what he intended to do all along, Kubrick went back to his patchwork temporary score, and not a note of North's music was used.
But his score has now been re-recorded, and here's the opening of 2001 as it ended up, with the beginning of Thus Spake Zarathustra by Richard Strauss,
followed by the cue that Alex North wrote. It should be mentioned that North was not, especially by Hollywood standards, a derivative composer.
The similarities between these two selections are due to the fact that North had the feeling that it would be very difficult to wean Kubrick from the Strauss.
The main title music from 2001.
First, Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss with the Berlin Philharmonic under Carl Bohm, and then the never used cue by Alex North with the National Philharmonic
Orchestra conducted by Jerry Goldsmith. Let's make one more comparison, this time involving what has been called the most controversial music cue in film history.
Here's what Kubrick used for our first view of the film. The first cue was the shuttlecraft turning in space and its docking in the larger space
station, followed by Alex North's proposed music for the same scene.
Many people felt that the Blue Danube was too banal, or too associated with old Vienna, or both, and that it therefore detracted from or even ruined the scene.
Others felt that the waltz was banal, but that was good, since the banality of future space travel is what the early part of the film is about.
Kubrick himself said that most people under 35 can think of it in an objective way as a beautiful composition.
It's hard to find anything much better than the Blue Danube for depicting grace and beauty in turning. It also gets about as far away as you can get from the cliché of space music.
Personally, in spite of my respect for North. I think Kubrick's choices were cunning and correct. The New Yorker has described 2001 as some kind of a great movie.
And my feeling is that much of the unsettling, hard-to-put-your-finger-on, criticism-begging quality of the film is due to the strange use of music, including the lack of it in
so many scenes. And as far as previous associations go, it seems to me that Kubrick's final vindication is the fact that, as he predicted, younger people now associate the Blue Danube more
with 2001 than with old Vienna. What I do find absolutely incredible, however, is that Alex North attended the New York premiere
of 2001 without anyone having told him that his music was not being used. But don't get me wrong, I love Hollywood.
Speaking of Hollywood, let's turn to another movie that was... as much of a maverick in its way as 2001 was. I'm talking about Citizen Kane.
You know, Alban Berg and his operas Wozzeck and Lulu would often help to unify a scene by using a traditional form.
A particular scene might be a rondo or a theme in variations or a passacaglia. And Orson Welles and the composer Bernard Herrmann do a similar thing in one scene of Citizen Kane.
In the words of the writer of these notes, Royal S. Brown, The theme in variations represents one of the rare examples in American cinema where
composer and filmmaker collaborated as the movie was being made. For a montage sequence showing the disintegration of Kane's first marriage, Welles had Herrmann
compose a set of increasingly acidic variations on a waltz initially heard when Kane's newspaper colleagues first see their boss.
The so-called breakfast montage starts with that same waltz and then moves through a series
of brief breakfast table mini-sequences, some of them timed to fit the music, that end up in total silence, while the romantic waltz has been transformed into a melancholy drone.
The breakfast montage, a theme and set of variations by Bernard Herrmann for the movie Citizen Kane.
Today's show has been called, Shickly Mix, the Movie.
And let's go out with what to me is an extremely evocative cue from one of my favorite movies, Shoot the Piano Player by Truffaut.
I'll be right back.
This is the sort of bittersweet music associated with the piano playing Charles Assinavour. The music was written by George Delarue.
Subtitles from the Amara.org community Thank you.
Thank you.
And that's Sickly 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 its generous members.
Not only that, our program, Against All Odds, 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 75. And this is Peter, Sickly, 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.
Thank you.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned,
send a stamped self-addressed on envelope to Shickley Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Shickley Mix. Care of Public Radio
International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.
PRI Public Radio International.