Approaching the two o'clock hour in Shickley Mix, but first, I must remind you,
this is WLRH Huntsville, with offices and studios located on the campus
of the University of Alabama Huntsville.
Shickley,
are you ready?
No, I'm not.
Why don't you do the show today?
Just kidding, here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley 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 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 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 until 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
is called a masculine ending,
whereas one that ends on a weak beat
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?
Let the circle be unbroken...
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, charming,
and graceful without sharp edges or corners.
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,
Massinet, all emasculated.
Ritchie Wagner is a soft-bodied sensualist.
The three Bs, 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, Dandy, and Elgar are praised for their wholesomeness,
manliness, humility.
In other words, it all boils down to the age-old question.
Pickering, why can't a woman be more like a man?
Yes.
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly squared, 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?
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?
Of course not.
Would you be livid if I had a drink or two?
Nonsense.
Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?
Never.
Well, 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.
If I were hours late for dinner, would you bellow?
Of course not.
If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?
Nonsense.
Would you complain if I took out another fellow?
Never.
Well, why can't a woman be like us?
Mrs. Pierce, 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?
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?
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 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 Shickley,
host of Shickley 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
the 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, I'm not
used to these journals, folks, 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.
This is good.
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 10 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.
I mean, say he wants to hum a tune.
No matter how much the guy hummed,
the pianist wouldn't know what to expect next.
["Toccata and Fugue in D Minor"]
Josquin du Pré, Petit 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, you can be fairly sure
that what's going to follow is, there's
the old story about a composer's friend sneaking
into his house one night and playing this on the piano,
and then leaving.
And the composer has to trundle all the way downstairs
and play before he can get back to sleep.
We, on the other hand, will get back to Maclary.
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.
Now, one of the ways that Maclary 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 buildup 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 onstage flash pots
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.
But, 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.
And 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.
When I am laid, am laid at last, may my wrongs
create no trouble, no trouble in my breast.
When I am laid, am laid at last, may my wrongs
create no trouble, no trouble in my breast.
Remember me, remember me, but ah, forget my fears.
Remember me, but ah, forget my fears.
Remember me, remember me, but ah, forget my fears.
Remember me, but ah, forget my fears.
Dido's Lament, from Purcell's Dido and 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.
Up away, fellow sailors, come away, your hands can be weighed.
Have a tie, and let things go delaying.
Take a bow and shore to thee, for going in from the shore.
Outside is the void without of returning,
but never intending to visit them more.
No, never intending to visit them more.
No, never, no, never intending to visit them more.
Up away, fellow sailors, come away, your hands can be weighed.
Have a tie, and let things go delaying.
Take a bow and shore to thee, for going in from the shore.
Outside is the void without of returning,
but never intending to visit them more.
No, never intending to visit them more.
No, never, no, never intending to visit them more.
Come away, fellow sailors, from Purcell's Dido and 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 Altricanti d'amore, from Book Eight 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.
Altricanti d'amore,
tenero, tenero argelo.
Altricanti d'amore,
tenero, tenero argelo.
Dolci, dolci vezzi,
dolci vezzia,
cari caris velli.
Cari caris velli e brava te fa
quando dice due armi
un solo insieme.
Di Marte, O canto,
of Mars, I sing.
Of Mars, I sing.
Oh, tell me all about it!
Strip, strip and tear,
and get us back in the game!
And we'll be back!
The first section of Monteverdi's Altricanti d'amore, performed by the consort of music
under the direction of Anthony Rulli. 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 Shickley, and the program is Shickley 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 McCleary 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 McCleary 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 Fifth Symphony
and in all but the passive third movement of the Ninth, and sexual violence. The point
of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments
in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damning up energy which finally
explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist, incapable of attaining release.
Sexual Violence.
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, yelling
at joy from the tunnel of the ego, 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 cords 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 McCleary'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 McCleary, 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.
The end of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with Carl Böhm conducting the Vienna Philharmonic
on a lot of open mouths.
I do want to get back to something that Susan McCleary, the musicologist we've been reading,
said about cadences, by definition inadequate cadences, by whose definition?
By hers, of course.
A couple of pages earlier, she says,
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, Joan Alden.
In the first place, I think she sells cadences way short.
Harmonically, they may be clichés, but how composers use them is endlessly inventive.
Here's a cadence in the slow movement of a Mozart piano sonata.
Now if you just play the chord structure of that, that's a cliché.
But that's not what Mozart wrote.
He wrote...
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, McCleary'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 and 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.
As far as I'm concerned, that ending is as good as a quiet cigarette.
Sir George Schulte 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 McCleary, 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
we'll 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 – oh, no, wait a minute, man, I was supposed to call him
before I started this show – folks, I try to avoid taking care of personal business
during the program, but I really do have to call him.
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.
I 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.
OK, see you there.
Sorry about that, folks.
And that's Sickily Mix for this week.
I'm out of 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 Poloi 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 Sickily 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
Sickily Mix.
That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickily Mix.
Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
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