Hummin’ to Myself (FAIN/MAGIDSON/SIEGEL) Performer: The Chenille Singers Mama, I Wanna Make Rhythm (Red House RHR CD 39)
“Bachianas Brasileiras” No. 5, Aria (VILLA-LOBOS) Performer: Victoria de los Angeles, soprano/Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion EMI/Angel 7 61015 2
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 our bills are paid by the good people at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, at the National Endowment for the Arts, and at this good, good, good radio station, Where I'm provided with this really good studio. And if the show turns out to be good enough, which thank goodness it has been so far, it gets distributed to a goodly portion of the country by PRI, Public Radio International.
Good. That's out of the way. I mean, I'm genuinely grateful for the support, but it's a lot of words and I say basically the same thing every week. Do you ever get tired of words? Enough already. Or frustrated with them. I know I'm not the only songwriter who has sketchbooks or work tapes full of melodies that he's never been able to come up with good lyrics for.
Why do songs have to have words? Sometimes, even in music with texts, one is struck with how beautiful the human voice can sound when it's unencumbered with the mechanics of elaborate pronunciation.
This often happens during melismas. A melisma is a phrase in which there are many musical notes to one syllable of text. Listen to this Alleluia from a 13th century manuscript. The word Alleluia, of course, has four syllables. But there are 39 notes in this musical setting of the word. The al gets one note, the lu gets three, and the ya gets one. The other 34 notes are all in the service of the second syllable, le. That syllable goes on for so long that you can almost forget that there's a text.
[music excerpt: Anon., "Offertory: Felix namque" (An English Ladymass); Anonymous 4]
The Anonymous 4, singing the Alleluia from an offertory called Felix namque. Another word that often gets the melismatic treatment is Amen. Now, in the congregational church that I used to go to, Amen usually adhered to the democratic principle of one syllable, one note.
[sung: a congregational "Amen"]
But hey, we were only the congregation. The professional church singers of the last millennium or so have gotten to sing amens in which the ah is like the body of a bulldog and the men is the tail. Like this one.
[music excerpt: Anon., "Gloria" (An English Ladymass); Anonymous 4]
The Anonymous 4 again, with the amen from an anonymous medieval Gloria. Now, it does make a difference what syllable you use for a melisma. Some sounds work better than others. Composers You won't find many composers writing a melisma like, I think I'll wear my fur
[sung: "coat," as a long melisma]
Well, maybe in a country song. But the reason so many classical singers love the Italian language is that most of its consonants are simple. There is no TH or KSJ, and its vowels tend to be pure and full so that you can get a nice mellifluous tone on almost any syllable. Anyway, the answer to my earlier question, why do songs have to have words, is that they don't.
Today's show is called Words Fail Me, and we'll be dealing with the vocalese, which is a composition that is sung but has no text. If you want to get picky about it, the term vocalese is usually used for a piece featuring a solo singer, but we won't restrict ourselves to that. The human voice can operate in a broad spectrum ranging from expressionless speaking to singing like an instrument, and there are all sorts of fascinating places along that spectrum.
Your typical opera recitative is an attempt to sound as much as possible like speaking while still singing.
[sung: a mock opera recitative]
Big deal. Well, you won't hear many melismas in recitatives. The next two numbers, however, are at the opposite end of the spectrum. The voice is trying to sound as much as possible, but actually I don't mean sound in the sense of tone color. Let's say that the voice is trying to behave as much as possible, like an instrument. You could also describe this as seven and a half minutes of pure melisma.
Schickele Mix is the only place you can have suites with only two numbers in them. This one is called Vocalists as Instrumental Soloists.
[music: Ellington, Second Sacred Concert, “T. G. T. T.” (Duke Ellington); Alice Babs]
Better check your wine glasses. Vocalists as instrumental soloists. First we heard Alice Babs singing Duke Ellington's TGTT with the composer at the keyboard. TGTT stands for Too Good to Title. Even in the title, he didn't want to be bothered with words. And it comes from Ellington's second sacred concert.
Then we heard the second and last movement of Reinhold Gliere's Concerto for Voice and Orchestra, coloratura soprano, actually, which means an especially agile high voice. In this case, it was Valentina Maksimova with Edvard Grikurov conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. But I probably mispronounced that. It probably should be the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.
Now before we go on, I'd like to make a distinction between vocalese-style singing and scat singing. Scat singing...
[sung: a scat example]
Scat singing uses words, it's just that they're nonsense words. The singer of a vocalese usually uses a pure, consistent vowel sound, although sometimes she might change the vowel slightly or use an almost consonant, as Alice Babs did in the Ellington, and classical singers sometimes put an H in front of short notes to help
[sung: a run with an "h" on each short note]
the articulation. Otherwise, it's... Oh, brother.
Hello? Hello?
Nothing but heavy breathing. Hello? Weird.
I'd like to know who that was. I know who this is. This is Peter Schickele, and the program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about the vocalese, singing without words. Now, I don't know about you, but listening to the Gliere there, For me, the trouble with the vocalese is, if it gets longer than a few minutes, it, well, it gets boring, is what it gets. The Ellington was fine. It was two and a half minutes long. But the Gliere, which lasted something over five minutes, I mean, I got tired of the sound. It became a bit tedious.
And for me, that's true even with pieces that, to my taste, are better music than the Gliere. The Rachmaninoff Vocalese or the Ravel Vocalese in the form of a habanera. The thing is that in the mouths of singers, the value of words is not just in communicating information. They enable singers to achieve the variety of sound that violinists, for instance, achieve by using their bows in different ways.
The most common habitat of textless singing is opera, and what opera composers do is alternate vocalese passages with others that have words, as in the following three examples. I call this suite the best of both worlds. I'll be back in about 11 minutes.
[music: Mozart, “The Magic Flute,” “Der Holle Rache”; Sumi Jo/Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra/Paternostro]
[music: Ravel, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” “Arriere! Je rechauffe les bons”; Sylvaine Gilma/Francoise Ogeas/Orchestre National de la R. T. F./Maazel]
[music: Bernstein, “Candide,” “Glitter and Be Gay”; Barbara Cook/Original Cast Recording]
Three great numbers. The best of both worlds. We began with the Queen of the Night aria from the Magic Flute by Mozart. That was Sumi Jo's soprano. I hope I'm saying her name right. I don't know her singing, but she's great. But, you know, the name sounds a little like Sandra Dee. Anyway, it's the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra with Roberto Paternostro conducting. And then we had, as you regular listeners know, one of my favorite pieces, Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, The Child and the Sorcerers.
And that was the aria of fire. The fire leaps out of the fireplace and says to the child, I burn wicked kids. And that was Sylvaine Gilma. And then finally, of course, from Bernstein's Candide, Barbara Cook singing Glitter and Be Gay. Now, you may have noticed that all the singers we've heard so far have been women.
And although men, especially tenors, do get some vocalese work in operas, it does tend to be a female prerogative. At least with soloists. With a group, it's not quite as true. Although even then, the, the, what, the Debussy Sirènes and Holst's The Planets, they both have female choruses.
I think it's partly there simply because women's voices cut through the orchestra better than men's, but it may also have to do with the fact that both of those composers wanted an ethereal sound, and let's face it, men who are not as modern as I tended to equate ethereal with feminine. So far we've been dealing with bona fide soloists, but the next three numbers feature singers who are not down front with a follow spot on them.
They're singers who are treated as equals of the instrumentalists. The vocal parts in these pieces are no more prominent than those of the instruments. This suite is called Vocalists as Members of the Band, and it lasts a little over seven minutes. See you then.
[music: Vaughan Williams, "Three Vocalises for Soprano Voice and Clarinet," Prelude; Judith Howarth, soprano/Emma Johnson, clarinet]
[music: Glass, "Etoile Polaire" (North Star); Philip Glass]
[music: Milhaud, Six Little Symphonies, No. 6, 2nd Mvt.; Orchestra of Radio Luxemburg/Milhaud]
Vocalists as members of the band. We began with a beautiful piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a late piece. Rafe, I guess I should say, Vaughan Williams, from the Three Vocalises for Soprano Voice and Clarinet. That was the first one, the Prelude. Emma Johnson playing clarinet, and Judith Howarth was the soprano.
Then we had from Philip Glass's album, North Star, the first cut which is called Etoile Polaire, North Star. The performers were Philip Glass, Dickie Landry, Joan La Barbara, and Jean Rickard doing a certain amount of overdubbing there from the sound of it. And then Darius Milhaud from his Six Little Symphonies, a real reaction against the overblown grand late romantic symphony. These little symphonies, I don't think any of them last more than ten minutes.
Number 6 is for soprano, contralto, tenor, bass, oboe, and cello. This was the second movement. And that was Josette Domer, Marie-Jeanne Klein, Bennett Arendt, Raymond Koster, Norbert Martin, and George Malek. Milhaud, by the way, is known as a...
[sound: phone rings]
Should I answer that? Well, if I don't, it'll just keep ringing. Hello? Right. Same thing. Nothing but heavy breathing. I wonder if whoever that is knows my identity, which is Peter Schickele. That of the program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
One use of the vocalese technique, singing without words, is as a method of clarifying complicated textures. We're going to hear an excerpt from one of my own works now, a sort of a madrigal comedy for chorus called Go for Broke. It's about a guy who wins the lottery and all the people who hit him up for money.
This is part of the third movement, which is a serious number, called Charity. And it begins with a four-part canon, that is, four sections of the chorus sing exactly the same melody, but each one starts a beat later than the previous section. This is written for five-part chorus, by the way. The altos here are simply holding one note, a drone.
Okay, now the first sopranos sing the melody with the words. Then the tenors come in on the following beat, singing ooh. The second sopranos enter next, humming, and finally the basses come in singing uh.
Later, you'll hear exactly the same setup, but with everybody singing the words. And you can't follow the melody because of the way the parts cross, and you can't understand the words because they're singing them at different times. But it doesn't matter, because it was so clear before, due to the use of vocalese in all the parts except one.
[music excerpt: Schickele, "Go for Broke," "Charity"; Dale Warland Singers]
The Dale Warland Singers performing part of Go for Broke by Peter Schickele. Well, yeah, we are, actually. I mean, distantly. He's the uncle of my cousin's daughter. That was, as you may have noticed, a concert tape, not a commercial recording, and I thank the Dale Warland Singers for permission to use it.
I mentioned that the second sopranos were humming. That is, of course, a kind of vocalese singing, extremely limited in terms of tone and volume, but often effective in small doses. Here are two pieces that use humming, the first as an occasional color change, and the second, well, the second piece features one of the most ravishing vocalese melodies ever written.
The movement has three sections. The A section is sung as a vocalese, the B section has words, and the repeat of the A is sung a bocca chiusa, in other words, shut your mouth, which is the name of this suite. See you in about ten minutes.
[music: Fain/Magidson/Siegel, "Hummin' to Myself" (Mama, I Wanna Make Rhythm); The Chenille Sisters]
[music: Villa-Lobos, "Bachianas Brasileiras" No. 5, Aria; Victoria de los Angeles, soprano/Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion]
Some of the most beautiful music ever made with a shut mouth. We first heard the Chenille Sisters doing Hummin' to Myself, and then we heard Villa-Lobos, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, the first movement, the aria, with Victoria de los Angeles, and and Villa-Lobos, the composer, was conducting the eight cellos. Well, that's about it for today. The clock up on... Okay, okay, listen everybody.
I'm gonna pick up the phone and hold it up to the microphone so all of you can hear what I've heard twice already this hour. Okay, here goes.
Hello?
Caller (on the phone): Hello, big boy. Want to talk dirty?
Hey, hey, you know, I liked you better without words.
Sometimes words spoil everything. Yes, there's no doubt about it. But a vocalese can be most effective if it doesn't go on too long.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Eat your hearts out, chipmunks. This program was 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 members. Thank you, 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 album numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program 82. 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. Hey, 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, MN 55403.