Hello there, I'm Peter Schickely, and this is Schickely 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 I'm feeling good today, partly because, well, I've just got happy feet. And partly because our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts,
and by this toe-tapping station, which supplies me with everything I need, and more, there's a dish of little mints out by the receptionist,
to create a program so educational, and yet so entertaining, that the folks at PRI, Public Radio International, just can't wait to distribute it.
Today, we're going to talk about the background of a dance, the development of the dance.
You know, when you're out there swirling around on the dance floor, you don't really care about the history and the development of a dance.
But as a scholar, I feel that it's my duty to point out how a dance developed from its ancestors,
because I think in the long run, the scholarly knowledge is at least as important as the much more momentary pleasure, you know, that you have when you're actually out there on the dance.
But, wait a minute, I've got to dance!
Oh, man. Wait a minute. I better turn this off.
Oh, brother. You know, that lamp was always in the way, even when you were just walking through the studio.
I don't know if it's salvageable or not, but if it isn't, I won't miss it. You shouldn't have floor lamps in studios anyway. It should be track lighting.
Well, anyway, today's program is called What It Takes Two To. That's right, we're talking tangos here, and we're going to concentrate not so much on the history or the development of the tango.
To do that, we'd have to talk about Argentine bordellos, and we simply don't do that kind of thing on highbrow shows like this one here.
It's interesting, though, that the light outside a studio door, you know, the one that's lit up when you're on the air, is usually red.
Well, be that as it may, we're going to just touch on the development of the tango by mentioning two dances that are perhaps its most immediate ancestors.
The slower habanera and the faster milonga. Now, I'm not even going to play a complete habanera, because everybody knows the one from Carmen.
Now, that rhythm, is the most characteristic rhythm of the tango as well. That, and the closely related rhythm,
I'm talking about the accompaniment now, not the melody. Although, actually, come to think of it, let's compare the melody of what is probably the world's most famous habanera
with the melody of what is probably the world's most famous tango.
Coincidence? I think so. Now, the other dance I mentioned that influenced the tango is the milonga.
Here's one played on a guitar and a bandoneon, which is a kind of accordion.
Balthazar Benitez and Alfredo Marcucci performing a milonga called La Puñalada.
The milonga is not only faster than most tangos, but also, at least judging from my slight experience, it tends to be cheerier. Tangos, especially the early Argentine ones, were bitter.
The music was aggressive and punchy. Another rhythm associated with the tango is .
It's real in-your-face music, reflecting, as does rap music in our culture, an unforgiving anger caused by poverty.
And if the jaggedness of the music lets up, it's only to make way for an astringent melancholy. Caused by unfaithful lovers.
As far as the dance itself is concerned, the tango is a choreographic definition of macho. And raunchy macho at that.
With the dominating man bending the passive woman over backwards until they almost look like they're in bed. Or at least on a sofa towards the end of the evening.
Naturally, the tango was thoroughly disapproved of in many quarters. Which puts it in the company of waltzes, sarabands, chaconnes, and more.
And other staples of the high-art dance suites of Western musical culture. But by the 1920s, when the tango craze had swept over Europe and North America,
the influence of more middle-class popular songs in the foxtrot vein began to be felt. Have you ever thought about what a great name that is? Foxtrot.
Anyway, sentiment gained the upper hand over rancor. Here's a lovely example. With an unusually poignant opening section.
Followed by a section whose melodic phrases are often three measures long. Instead of the usual two or four measures.
Vida Mía. A tango from Argentina. Beautifully arranged by Michael Saul and William Schimmel. And performed by the Tango Project. A New York group of whom they are members.
Who also played the parts of Jealousy. We heard earlier in the program. The program, by the way, is called Schickely Mix. That's right. I am Peter Schickely. And it comes to you from PRI.
Public Radio International. What it takes two to. What it takes two to is tango, of course.
And if the tango is a dance of seduction, it certainly seduced classical composers. Probably more than any other dance since the waltz. The two works we are about to hear forcefully illustrate
the shift from dance hall to concert hall. The first is obviously a concert piece, but you can imagine dancing to it. Whereas the second is as abstract as a sarabande
in a Bach unaccompanied violin partita. The first piece is by a composer whose spiky style is well suited to the tango. The second piece is by a composer whose music doesn't usually have
the feeling of a regular beat in it. But he lets a little bit of that feeling slip into his tango. I call this the take it to the limit tango suite. And I'll be back in about six minutes.
.
Olé. The take it to the limit tango suite. Began with Uncle Igor. Igor Stravinsky's tango in a version he later orchestrated from an early piano piece.
As a matter of fact, Stravinsky visited Argentina in 1939 and then settled in the United States. And the piano version of that tango was the first piece he wrote in this country apparently.
And then the second piece was called It Takes Twelve to Tango by Milton Babbitt. Played spectacularly. by Alan Feinberg.
Now, the next two pieces you're going to hear owe a lot to jazz as well as classical traditions. They might not even be called tangos in a strict sense. But who cares about strict senses?
I'd rather have a sixth sense than a strict sense. The first work is called tango by its composers, but its rhythms, I must say, sound more like those of other Latin dances to me. Whatever.
It's a real tour de force no matter what you call it. And the second work, which is by one of the great names in tango music, is, honest to Betsy, a fugue. As you regular listeners to Shickley Mix know,
and some of you other smart alecks might have found out from other sources, a fugue is a contrapuntal piece in which each part comes in, one after the other, with the same melody.
Sort of like a round, except that fugues are much more complicated than rounds and they aren't circular. They don't keep going back to the beginning. Anyway, when was the last time you heard a fugue
written for and played by a tango band? Here's the Take It to the Limit One More Time tango suite. I'll see you in about nine and a half minutes. .
Okay, that was the Take It to the Limit One More Time tango suite. We began with a tune called Tango off a fascinating album called
Bass, Bass, Bass, Bass, Bass and Bass. That's right, folks. This is a sextet of string bass players. They call themselves l'orchestre de contrebasse. French players, as you might have guessed.
And that piece was by Christian Jante and Matthias Pizarro. And I guess I should take back some of what I said about it not sounding very tango-y.
Certainly that central section has the accompaniment bass going bum, bum, bum, bum, ba, dum, bum, bum. That's very, very tango. And as a matter of fact, as you heard in the other number,
that bum, bum, bum, bum, that sort of steady beat is often a part of the tango. I sit corrected. And that second piece, that spectacular fugue, was called Fugata from a Piazzolla album.
Astor Piazzolla, who was one of, as I mentioned before, the great names in tango. And he is responsible for what he called the new tango.
He broke a lot of the rules of the old way of doing things and started a new kind of tango. And a friend of mine says that she read somewhere that he got death threats when he did that.
I mean, Argentina. The Argentinians are very passionate about the tango. I wonder if Bob Dylan got death threats when he went electric.
Peter Shickley here, laying down another Shickley mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
What It Takes Two To is the name of today's show. And we're talking about the... I hate this non-disconnectable phone. Hello?
What It Takes Two To, that's right. Well. It's not really a matter of making sense, you know. It's just a play on... No, it doesn't have anything to do with a ballet skirt.
The first two is spelled T-W-O and the second two is T-O. It's a play on the old saying, it takes two to tango. No, no. It's It Takes Two To Tango.
Not It Takes Twelve To Tango. It Takes Twelve To Tango is what Milton Babbitt called his piece because he uses the twelve tone method of composition. And he was making a play on It Takes Two To Tango, too.
As well. Also. Well, of course, of course it's more obvious if it's written. But I think that most listeners have very... Oh, hey, do you hear that, ma'am?
I have to hang up now. Man, you know, I never thought I'd be glad to hear the old irrelevancy alarm. Saved by the bell. Okay, now, where were we?
Oh, yeah, we've talked about the two sides of the tango coin. The brusqueness and the sentimentality. Actually, jealousy, with which we began this show, has both sides.
It has both sides now, and it had both sides then, too. After a long introductory section, the first main theme is...
And then the second theme is about as sweet as they come.
Jealousy is, by the way, just for the record, a European tango. It was not written in Argentina. Okay, now, unlike Stravinsky and Babbitt in today's first suite,
many classical composers who have written tangos in their concert works have appropriated the bittersweet, nostalgic side of the dance music rather than the aggressive, passionate side.
Imagine yourself sitting in an open or glassed-in courtyard of a nice hotel, or at a sidewalk café on a plaza,
surrounded by gently swaying palm trees and the sounds of the tango band. We've come a long way from the glowering rap songs, as it were, of the streets of Buenos Aires.
Our last suite is called Afternoons at the Palm Court. It has three numbers, the first of which is from a French recording of a German opera based on an English plot.
The singers are reminiscing about better times, and the second of which is from a French recording of a French opera. We'll meet again in about nine minutes.
Don Pasquito arrived at the seaside Where the donkey's hide-tide grayed He saw the bandito Joe
Whose slack shape waved like the sea Thetis wrote a treatise noting, Wheat is silver like the sea The lovely cheat is sweet as foam He wrote his notices that she will steal The Wheat King's luggage like Babel
Before the League of Nations grew So Joe put the luggage on the label In the pocket of Flo the Kangaroo Through trees like rich hotels
That bode of dreamless ease fled she
Carrying the load and goading the road
Through the marine sea to the sea
Don Pasquito, the road is eloping
With your luggage though heavy and large You must follow and leave your moping
Bright to my guidance and charge
When Don Pasquito returned from the road's end
Where vanilla-colored ladies ride
From Sevilla, his mantilla And his figured bride and young friend Were forgetting their mentor and guide For the lady and her friend from the Touquet
In the very shady trees upon the sand
Were plucking a white satin bouquet
Of foam while the sand's brassy band blared Don Pasquito hid Where the leaves drip with sweet
But a word stung him like a mosquito For what they hear they repeat
Afternoons at the Palm Court We began with an excerpt from the Three Penny Opera Of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht
But that was from a series of discs That were made in Paris The piece was already getting very popular And so this was what in the French version
Is called the Tango Ballade From the L'Opéra de Katsu I don't know why it's a three penny opera In English and German But a four penny opera in French
Um And I should say that Even though these characters Are not sitting in a palm court They're poor and they are actually Reminiscing about life in a brothel
The nostalgia seems genuine and resigned Not glowing with anger Like the early Argentine tangos Then we had from Facade By William Walton
With poems by Edith Sitwell The Tango Paso Doble That was actually two dances The beginning and the end Were the tango With a Paso Doble in the middle Which I assume is Spanish
For two-step Some kind of two-step That was Jeremy Irons reciting And Ricardo Shailly With the London Sinfonietta And then finally one of my own works
The tango from my string quartet number four Inter-era dance suite That was the Audubon Quartet playing And it's tidbit time Here at the Tango Palace
This is another number From the group known as The Tango Project And you'll want to keep A close ear on this one It might turn out to be Something you didn't expect
Our tidbit today was
The Tango Project's arrangement Of White Rabbit Grace Slick's classic song About Alice in Wonderland Monster hit for the Jefferson Airplane
Way back there in the days Of Samson and Psycho Delight I guess it is pretty frustrating to hear four times a dozen seconds or so of jealousy and
then never really get into it. So let's go out with it. You know, how do you pronounce
the original title anyway? It's J-A-L-O-U-S-I-E. Now, in Spanish, J is Y, right? So is that
Yalouise? No, wait a minute. It's not Argentine. It must be French. Jalouse. Yeah, that's the
ticket. And that's Shickley Mix for this week. No animals were harmed in the making of this
show, and yes, I do know that sweets usually have more than two movements. 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 members, for which we thank you all. Our program is distributed to the Four Corners 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 85. And this is Peter Shickley 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. If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped, self-addressed
envelope to Shickley Mix. That's S-C-H-L-O-U-S-E-N-G-Y-M-I-X.com. I-C-K-E-L-E, Shickley Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street,
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