Announcer: Approaching the 2 o'clock hour and Schickele Mix, but first, I must remind you, this is WLRH Huntsville, with offices and studios located on the campus, the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Schickele, are you ready?
No, I'm not. Why don't you do the show today? Just kidding, 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. Created equal is one thing, equally available is another. Fortunately, our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this very radio station right here on this very dial. Once the show has been created equal, it is made equally available by PRI, Public Radio International.
Okay, I'll admit it. In 1960, In 1962, I complimented a woman I knew by saying she drove a car like a man. I now see the error of my ways, yes I do. But I guess I also do feel like defending myself a little bit by saying that even then, I didn't think there was necessarily any inherent difference, you know, a difference in the car-driving genes of the two sexes.
It was just that in those days, which was still almost the 50s, girls just didn't grow grow up driving as much as boys did. When a girl had a date, she was picked up by the guy in his car. In many cases, she didn't get much driving practice till she got married. Be that as it may or may not be, I also remember subscribing to the idea that the reason there were plenty of female writers around, but hardly any composers, was that women are most at home dealing with the specific and the concrete, while men like the general and the abstract.
And music is more inherently abstract than the other arts. Thirty years later, I don't pretend to understand exactly how extensive the inborn differences between Dick and Jane are, but I'm certainly a lot more aware of just how thick the ice in the old glacier of social conditioning is. Since this is supposed to be a show about music, let's turn to music. In fact, let's turn to the authentic instrument here. Not a copy, folks, an original early 1990s Casio tone bank.
In musical as well as poetical terminology, a phrase that ends on a strong beat of the measure
[music: keyboard demonstration]
is called a masculine ending, whereas one that ends on a weak beat
[music: keyboard demonstration]
is called a feminine ending. Now I think most people my age, or at least most men my age, learned terminology like that in school without giving it much thought. My musicologist friend Leo Treitler has written, There is a backdrop in an ancient mythology that explains human consciousness as divided in two permanently antagonistic parts, a mythology in which reason and sensuality are mutually opposed, and that opposition is characterized as the duality of the masculine and the feminine.
The linkage of the duality of the rational and the sensual with that of the masculine and the feminine is a fact embedded in Western tradition. Now, when I read that, my first thought is, well, it may be limiting to associate each of those qualities with one sex, but hey, I like reason and I like sensuality, and if they're both going to be involved in a work of art, what's the big problem?
But it becomes clear that in the past, most theoreticians and historians, all of whom were men, regarded the masculine trait as superior to the feminine. The feminine is something to be resisted. Here's Boethius, writing in the 6th century, Ruder peoples delight in the harsher modes of the Thracians, civilized peoples in more restrained modes. Though in these days this almost never occurs. Since humanity is now lascivious and effeminate, it is wholly captivated by scenic and theatrical modes.
It's sort of comforting, isn't it, knowing that a millennium and a half ago somebody was complaining about new music?
Anyway, moving on to the 20th century and back to Treitler's article, he says, okay, here is Bruno Stäblein, a preeminent German plainchant scholar, writing about old Roman chant, endless streams of melody that overflow the boundaries of textual divisions, melodies that spread over their texts like a chain of pearls or a voluptuous gown, soft, elegant,
The Gregorian melodies, by contrast, are disciplined and ordered, a product of rational thinking. They are clear, sculpted configurations, systematically chiseled. A system of musical rhetoric reigns in them. They display a more perfect quality, perfectior scientia.
Stäblein appends a list of attributes medieval writers had themselves found in Gregorian chant, strength, manliness, vigor, power, reason.
Now when I hear that, I want to say, hey, sing me some of that old Roman chant. I want to hear that chain of pearls, that voluptuous gown. But then I worry that Boethius will call me lascivious and effeminate. Or Charles Ives. Here is how some of the residents of the musical hall of fame sounded to Ives. Mozart, Mendelssohn, early Beethoven, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Gounod, Massenet, all emasculated.
Richie Wagner is a soft-bodied sensualist. The three B's? Too much of the sugar plum for the soft ears. Chopin? One just naturally thinks of him with a skirt on. Debussy? Sensual sensuousness. Better if he had hoed corn or sold newspapers for a living, Sibelius, an emasculated cherry, but Franck, d'Indy, and Elgar are praised for their wholesomeness, manliness, humility.
In other words, it all boils down to the age-old question.
[music: Lerner/Loewe, "A Hymn to Him" ("My Fair Lady" Original Cast Recording); Rex Harrison]
Rex Harrison (recorded): Pickering, why can't a woman be more like a man?
Robert Coote (recorded): Hmm?
Rex Harrison (recorded): Yes. Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square, eternally noble, historically fair. Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat? Why can't a woman be like that? Why does everyone do what the others do? Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Rex Harrison (recorded): Why do they do everything their mothers do? Why don't they grow up like their father instead? Why can't a woman take after a man? Men are so pleasant, so easy to please. Whenever you're with them, you're always at ease. Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?
Robert Coote (recorded): Of course not.
Rex Harrison (recorded): Would you be livid if I had a drink or two?
Robert Coote (recorded): Nonsense.
Rex Harrison (recorded): Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?
Robert Coote (recorded): Never.
Rex Harrison (recorded): Why can't a woman be like you? One man in a million may shout a bit. Now and then there's one with slight defects. One perhaps whose truthfulness you doubt a bit, but by and large we are a marvelous sex. Why can't a woman behave like a man? Men are so friendly, good-natured and kind. A better companion you never will find.
Rex Harrison (recorded): If I were hours late for dinner, would you bellow?
Robert Coote (recorded): Of course not.
Rex Harrison (recorded): If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?
Robert Coote (recorded): Nonsense.
Rex Harrison (recorded): Would you complain if I took out another fellow?
Robert Coote (recorded): Never.
Rex Harrison (recorded): Why can't a woman be like us?
Rex Harrison (recorded): Mrs. Pearce, you're a woman. Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so decent, such regular chaps. Ready to help you through any mishaps. Ready to buck you up whenever you are glum. Why can't a woman be a chum? Why is thinking something women never do? Why is logic never even tried?
Rex Harrison (recorded): Straightening up their hair is all they ever do. Why don't they straighten up the mess that's inside? Why can't a woman be more like a man? If I was a woman who'd been to a ball, been hailed as a princess by one and by all, would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing? Carry on as if my home were in a tree? Would I run off and never tell me where I'm going?
Rex Harrison (recorded): Why can't a woman be like me?
Rex Harrison singing, as it were, part of A Hymn to Him from My Fair Lady. Actually, you know, I did catch him singing a couple of notes there. You'd better watch it. When I was talking about this program to my wife, I said, you know, when Henry Higgins says, why can't a woman be more like a man, it gets a chuckle. But now there are a lot of feminists around who say, why can't a man be more like a woman and woe betide anybody who chuckles.
And my wife said what has to be said to what I said, which is that it's easy to chuckle at Henry Higgins because no matter what happens, he'll come out on top. He's in the position of power. He may have a little problem of the heart, but he represents the status quo. The feminists are trying to change the status quo. Which leads us into comparatively new territory, that of feminist musicology.
Now, you know, I try to give the impression of being a real scholar on this program, but in point of fact, most of what I know I've learned from reading liner notes and composer trading cards. I don't really keep up with the musicological journals. I just don't have the time, especially since the pool hall opened up in my neighborhood. And I'd like to thank my friend Leo Treitler for sending me several articles from journals like 19th Century Music.
You know, journals I'm not really apt to run across in the pile of magazines at the pool hall. You know, I own my own cue stick. It doesn't have my name printed on it, but if it did, it would say Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
A lot of these essays from academic journals and books are fascinating stuff. Susan McClary, perhaps the best known or at least the most wave-making of the feminist musicologists, says that the tonality that underlies Western concert music is strongly informed by a specific sort of erotic imagery.
If music of earlier times presented models of stable order in keeping with the view of the world that church and courts wished to maintain, music after the Renaissance most frequently appeals to libidinal appetites. During the historical period in which the legitimation of culture moved from the sacred to the secular realm, the, quote, truth that authorized musical culture became expressly tied to models of sexuality.
The principal innovation of 17th century tonality is its ability to instill in the listener an intense longing for a given event, the cadence. It organizes time by creating an artificial need. In the real world there is no reason one should crave, for instance, the pitch D. Yet by making it the withheld object of musical desire, a good piece of tonal music can, within a mere ten seconds, dictate one's very breathing.
Which is a good observation. You know that old joke about the diner in a restaurant who goes over to the blind piano player and says, Do you know your dog is chewing my foot? And the piano player says, No, but if you hum a couple of bars, I'll play along. Now musically, that joke wouldn't have worked in the Renaissance, because basically back then, any chord could go to any other chord of the scale. So no matter how much the guy hummed, I mean forget about the joke now, say he wants to hum a tune.
No matter how much the guy hummed, the pianist wouldn't know what to expect next.
[music: Josquin Desprez, "Petite camusette"; The Hilliard Ensemble]
Josquin Desprez, Petite camusette, the Hilliard Ensemble. But most of the pop tunes of the first half of the 20th century make strong use of the directionality of tonal harmony. If you hear
[music: keyboard demonstration]
you can be fairly sure that what's going to follow is
[music: keyboard demonstration]
There's the old story about a composer's friend sneaking into his house one night and playing this on the piano.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
And then leaving, and the composer has to trundle all the way downstairs and play
[music: keyboard demonstration]
before he can get back to sleep. We, on the other hand, will get back to McClary.
For most of the history of post-Renaissance Western music, and in virtually all of its critical literature, the sexual dimensions of its mechanisms have been shamelessly exploited and yet consistently denied.
The principle of building to climax three-quarters of the way through a piece is discussed in metaphors that almost always betray their underlying erotic assumptions, while at the same time the climax principle has been transcendentalized to the status of a value-free universal form. One of the ways that McClary grabs your attention is by writing luridly.
The sexual dimensions have been shamelessly exploited. One might almost take her for a Puritan. Elsewhere, speaking of the heroic climax of many a tonal composition, she says, this musical gesture appears prominently in many of our favorite repertories.
It guarantees our identification with the music, for its build-up hooks us, motivating us to invest personally in sequences of seemingly abstract musical events, and we are rewarded for having thus invested in its patterns of yearning when they reach cathartic fulfillment, which mysteriously becomes our own experience of libidinal gratification.
In rock concerts, this gesture is celebrated theatrically with the eruption of on-stage flashpots and the vigorous wagging of guitars and mic stands. Later, she says about that same gesture, And the neo-tonality of John Adams and David Del Tredici has promoted its unembarrassed reassertion in compositions that once again give concert audiences what they want to hear.
I guess she really thinks that John Adams and David Del Tredici should be embarrassed about writing tonal music. And then she says, the gesture is only slightly more graphic and literal in pornographic films, which in key structural moments, well, I really can't read the rest of that sentence on a family-oriented show like ours.
Well, you've got to take your hat off to someone who can look you straight in the eye and say that the neo-tonal gestures of the music of John Adams and David Del Tredici are only slightly less graphic and literal than those in pornographic films. McClary's book, by the way, is called Feminine Endings. Great title. Music, Gender and Sexuality. I'm going to get us back to some music here.
McClary says, When composers in the 17th century first turned to the invention of erotic metaphors, they drew upon two distinctly different versions. On the one hand, there were images of pleasure, a quality of timeless, sustained hovering. This quality could be produced through the popular device of ostinato.
Ostinato, by the way, is a repeated figure, usually in the bass, so if you construct your piece over a constantly repeating figure, you create a situation in which, going back to McClary, each potential moment of closure is simultaneously the moment that guarantees continuation.
[music: Purcell, "Dido & Aeneas," "When I am laid in earth"; Emma Kirkby/The Taverner Choir & Players/Parrott]
Dido's lament, from Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, brings me to tears every time, especially when it's sung as beautifully as Emma Kirkby just sang it. By the way, Susan McClary amends her phrase, images of pleasure, to include pleasure-pain, the erotic obsessions of Purcell's Dido.
On the other hand, says McClary, there were images of desire, desire for the satisfaction of what is experienced as an intolerable lack. And that's where the new directional kind of tonality comes in.
Come away, fellow sailors, from Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, both those excerpts were performed by the Taverner Choir and Taverner Players, conducted by Andrew Parrott. Now, going back to the musicologist Susan McClary's essay, she says, compositions that juxtapose the two qualities of being in time are perhaps most telling, For their dramatic effects depend on the listener's ability to distinguish between them in their respective meanings.
Thus Monteverdi's Altri canti d'Amor, from Book 8 of the Madrigals, begins with one of the most luxuriant dissonance-filled of ostinati, let others sing of love, the sweet caresses, the sighing kisses, and then breaks off abruptly to the most self-consciously masculine of styles for a musical staging of military valor. But I will sing of Mars.
[music: Monteverdi, "Altri canti d'Amor"; The Consort of Musicke/Rooley]
The first section of Monteverdi's Altri canti d'Amor, performed by the Consort of Musicke under the direction of Anthony Rooley. I must say that I find the harmonies in the battle section pretty static. I mean, I love the music, but it's not very directional in its harmonies. Tonally, it's more like saber-rattling than a strategically waged battle. But what do I know? I'm the lascivious Peter Schickele, and the program is Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
The name of today's show is Masculine Feminine, and we just heard Monteverdi's presentation of what musicologist Susan McClary identifies as images of pleasure followed by images of desire, that is, achievement of a goal. Now, by the time we get to Beethoven, a couple of centuries later, both tonal gesturing and McClary have heated up considerably.
As the thrusting impulse characteristic of tonality and the aggression characteristic of first themes were not enough, Beethoven's symphonies add two other dimensions to the history of style. Assaultive pelvic pounding, for instance in the last movement of the 5th symphony and in all but the passive 3rd movement of the 9th, and sexual violence.
The point of recapitulation in the 1st movement of the 9th is one of the most horrifying moments in music, As the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, 1st Mvt.; Vienna Philharmonic/Bohm]
The beginning of the recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, heard by Susan McClary as the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release. She goes on to say that Adrienne Rich arrives at a remarkably similar reading of this composition in her poem, The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, understood at last as a sexual message.
A man in terror of impotence or infertility, not knowing the difference, a man trying to tell something, howling from the climacteric music of the entirely isolated soul,
Music without the ghost of another person in it, Music trying to tell something the man does not want out, And would keep if he could, Gagged and bound and flogged with chords of joy, Where everything is silence, And the beating of a bloody fist upon a splintered table. Now, I have to register a couple of complaints here.
That's a powerful poem, but a poem is a highly subjective testimony that tells the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth. It tells us as much about the poet as it does, in this case, about the composer, obviously, since other people hear the piece quite differently.
I happen to have read recently a bunch of Adrienne Rich's essays, and they're terrific, because they're impassioned, but they're also reasoned presentations of a point of view, which is what an essay is. To imply that that poem is an explanation of Beethoven's symphony in any objective way is to skate on wafer-thin ice.
Also, throughout McClary's essay, she associates anger, frustration, and anxiety with the male and regards them as a bad thing, something that female composers should avoid getting involved with. And yet the anger and frustration in Adrienne Rich's poetry, the rage in many of her poems is incandescent. So where does that leave us? I don't know, but let's get back to Beethoven.
According to McClary, the triumphal end of the symphony is likewise problematic, for how could any configuration of pitches satisfactorily ground the contradictions set forth over the course of this gargantuan composition? As the conclusion is approached, the promised, though by definition inadequate, cadences repeatedly are withheld at the last moment, And finally, Beethoven simply forces closure by bludgeoning the cadence in the piece to death.
For if death is inevitable in tonal music, and the reticence to resolve in this piece makes that connection quite pointedly, then one may as well make the most of it.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, 4th Mvt.; Vienna Philharmonic/Bohm]
The end of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with Karl Böhm conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and a lot of open mouths. You know, actually, I've never been able to get next to the last movement of the Ninth. It just doesn't do it for me. Please don't tell Ives and Boethius. But I do want to get back to something that Susan McClary, the musicologist we've been reading, said about cadences. She said, the promised, though by definition inadequate, cadences.
Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on there. By definition inadequate cadences. By whose definition? A significant factor that contributes to the violence of tonal procedures is that the actual reward, the cadence, can never be commensurate with the anticipation generated or the effort expended in achieving it.
The cadence is, in fact, the most banal, most conventionalized cliché available within any given musical style. Moreover, its appearance always spells a kind of death, the cessation of the energy flow that up until that point in the piece had seemed to organize all subjectivity.
At the end, the imaginary object of desire remains elusive, and attaining its cadential surrogate necessarily disappoints. But that surrogate is finally all that tonal music, for all its undeniable ability to arouse, has to offer. Well, speak for yourself, John Alden. In the first place, I think she sells cadences way short.
In short, harmonically they may be cliches, but how composers use them is endlessly inventive. Here's a cadence in the slow movement of a Mozart piano sonata.
[music: keyboard demonstration, a cadence from the slow movement of a Mozart piano sonata]
Now if you just play the chord structure of that,
[music: keyboard demonstration]
that's a cliche, but that's not what Mozart wrote. He wrote
[music: keyboard demonstration]
What a beautiful sigh. Now as far as the cadential surrogate necessarily disappointing goes, I'd like to play the Love Death from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. This is a piece that reminds almost everybody of making love, especially since that's what the two title characters come as close as possible to doing on stage.
Now, aside from the fact that this is some of the most sensual love music I've ever heard, there's no gross pelvis pounding here, and in fact, McClary's description of early 17th century images of pleasure comes to mind, A quality of timeless, sustained hovering, in spite of the obvious build-up in high points, that's plural, high points, by the way. Aside from that, I find, now I know, I'm a man,
but I find the aftermath in this piece ecstatically, blissfully satisfying.
[music excerpt: Wagner, “Tristan und Isolde,” “Liebestod”; Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Solti]
As far as I'm concerned, that ending is as good as a quiet cigarette. Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing the Liebestod, the Love Death, from Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner, who, according to one of the footnotes in one of these articles, regarded himself as androgynous.
The feminist musicologist Susan McClary, who has been one of the focuses of today's No, no, wait a minute. Now this is a scholarly program. Who has been one of the foci of today's show, goes on to discuss the role of a woman's voice, compositionally speaking, but that will have to wait for another program. We're out of time.
You know, there is so much interesting stuff out there, articles that make you say not only, boy, I never knew that, but also, boy, I never thought of it that way. I guess the best you can do is have a musicologist friend who sends you stuff every once in a while, stuff you can base a radio program on. Friends like Leo Treitler.
Man, I was supposed to call him before I started this show. I, uh, folks, I try to avoid taking care of personal business during the program, but I really do have to call him. Uh, I hope, let's see, how do you work this thing? Oh yeah, I remember, you put your index finger in one of the little round holes and sort of swivel it around. Hope I catch him.
Hello, Leo? It's Peter. Hey, thanks for sending me the articles. It's fascinating stuff. Yeah, you're right. So, are we on? Great, I'll see you there in about half an hour. No, no, they have cue sticks, don't worry, all you need to bring is your eagle eye. Hey, hey, listen, Leo, if I get there first, I'll be at the table way in the back, I think it's number 15.
Well, I sort of like to be out of the way in case, you know, like if the cue ball jumps off the table when I make the break, It doesn't get into the way of people who don't like to be gotten in the way of. Okay, see you there. Sorry about that, folks.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. I'm outta here. 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. Our program is distributionalized to both academic circles and the hoi polloi 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 number 89. 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. 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, Minnesota, 55403.