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 how good it is to be able to report that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this very radio station,
situated right here, where I am surrounded with everything necessary to produce nuggets of musical wisdom that are then scattered, e'en as are the delicate seeds of the dandelion,
by the gentle zephyrs of summer, by PRI, Public Radio International. When I was a teenager, living in Fargo, North Dakota,
the eccentric Australian pianist and composer Percy Granger gave a lecture recital across the river at Moorhead State Teachers College. It must have been about 1950.
I wish I had a videotape of that concert. Now I say videotape because he used music, but he didn't want to have anybody turning pages for him.
So he had invented a gizmo that had the music on a scroll, with two rollers, that were connected via a bicycle speedometer kind of cable to a roller on the floor next to the pedals,
so he could, with his foot, scroll the music forward, or in the case of repeat, backwards. The trouble was, the contraption really needed some oil.
I can't recall what pieces he played, but the effect was something like this.
Not having a recording of Percy Granger's concert, I used Walter Gieseking playing a Mozart Minuet and Trio K1.
Now I don't remember the Granger presentation in much detail, I wish I did, but I do remember one thing he said.
He announced that all the wars of the last two centuries have been caused by the martial character of the themes of Mozart and Haydn.
A few Mozartian warmongers, there!
Now, of course, Kettledrums came into European music via warhorses. And I don't mean pieces, I mean, the horses that were used in war.
And Bugles and early Trumpets, of course, are associated with war and can only play certain notes, most easily the ones outlining a major triad. . . .
So to say that there's some connection between those themes and war is not so far-fetched. But to say that they have caused wars, well, I think that any one of those themes has a right to say,
You can't pin that on me! Which, as it happens, is the name of today's show.
Some people have an urge to hang very specific images, or even a narrative story, on a piece of music.
Now that's fine if it's regarded as a personal thing, an individual reaction, perhaps one that even has meaning to others. But if you present it to others as an explanation of the piece,
it seems to me you're almost bound to make the piece smaller, not larger. My wife's a poet, and most poets have had the experience of having someone ask them, What does that poem mean?
And most poets have talked about how hard it is to answer that question. If you say, in prose, what a poem means, you're leaving out part of what it means. And that goes double for music.
Now some folks might accuse me of being a formalist, and maybe I am, but let me tell you that I react to music very emotionally. There are certain pieces, a couple of the ensembles in Mozart's Così fan tutte,
the end of Ravel's Child and the Sorcerers, Gene Richie's, singing, Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah, or Aretha Franklin singing, Never Grow Old, that almost always bring tears to my eyes.
Just recently, on one of the editions of this program, I was illustrating something with the first slow movement from the big Mozart wind serenade, the piece used so effectively in Amadeus,
and I really had to concentrate on regaining my composure in time to talk after the excerpt. Music affects us so chemically. Describing the chemical reaction in words is a letdown.
Stravinsky wrote his Symphony in Three movements in the early 1940s. Here's how the last movement starts.
Years later, in one of his memoirs, he talked about seeing newsreel footage of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers while he was working on the symphony. And it's easy to make a connection with the music.
And yet at the time of the premiere, Stravinsky said, music expresses nothing but itself. That's an intentionally provocative statement.
But you know, it's really not mutually exclusive with the idea of being partially inspired by the newsreel footage. I knew and loved that symphony for years before reading that memoir.
And since I'm a fan of Uncle Igor and also of information about the creative process, I was interested to know that tidbit. But it didn't change or enrich my experience of the piece.
The title of one of Charlie Mingus's pieces is A Roman Numeral II followed by the initials B and S. According to Nat Hentoff's liner notes,
if you read the Roman numeral with which it begins as 2TO and then add the common meaning of BS, you arrive at Mingus's occasional exasperation
at having to find titles for compositions after they've been created. Often, he explains, when I'm sitting at the piano developing a piece, it's difficult to put a label on the particular feeling I have going.
He was a great musician, and I'm glad he spent his time getting the notes right, not the titles. Now, there are some paintings whose titles make you look at the work in such a specific way
that the title has to be considered part of the painting. But when a piece of music has a poetic title, my usual reaction is, hey, that's a good title for that music. Rather than,
hey, that's good music for that title. The title is like just the right frame for the painting, not something without which the painting is incomplete.
Now, everybody knows that music has something to do with the emotions. But it's one of those fields where it's pretty easy to talk about the extremes, but there's a huge swamp in the middle.
I don't think anybody would fail to find these two vignettes questionable. Yeah. I know it's almost closing time, Joe,
but she left me. I mean, she didn't even call, Joe, or write a note.
She just packed up and left.
Wouldn't it be okay if I had the band to play another tune? Hey, fellas, play me a sad song. I mean, a really sad song.
Okay, everybody.
Ladies and gents. Now, it's not every day that we celebrate a 100th birthday, particularly for somebody who's as spry as Axel Fogel. I mean, I've got a friend named Alex Farrelson here.
So let's get out on the dance floor and kick our heels up a bit.
You ready over there in the bandstand, maestro? Take it away. Come on, everybody, get out there. Okay, here we go.
Grab your partner, do-si-do. Allemande left, and around you go. Hee-hee. Meet your partner. Halfway there.
Music is certainly about something, and it certainly affects us.
And the effect of this is certainly different from the effect of this.
But I still say that the more subtle a piece of music is, the more it is lessened by descriptive
words. Here is a commentator, Sigmund Spaeth, writing in the 1930s about Beethoven's Fifth.
The Fifth is unquestionably the most popular of the nine Beethoven symphonies. This is partly because of its real greatness, and partly because it represents a clear and interesting program.
This plot or story is fascinating to most people, for it deals with the eternal struggle against fate. Beethoven himself said of the opening movement,
In the beginning notes of this symphony, Thus fate knocks at the door, and there is no mistaking their rhythmic significance. I am your fate, come let me in.
The same rhythmic pattern appears no less than forty-five times. The horns finally call a halt to permit ordinary mortals to have their say, but they do it
in a very superior and contemptuous fashion. You can't escape your fate. I am your fate. The human voice speaks up rather timidly, yet showing no inclination to give in too easily.
We can make our lives courageous. Even as it is uttered, you hear the impatient pounding in the bass, indicating that fate does not intend to be kept waiting long.
So with shrieking woodwind and hammering blows, the battle is on. The development that follows is a real plot, not just a musical exercise. So what Spaeth is saying there is that, when you are in a situation where you are in a
development section great is that it has a story that he can express in words. It's not just a musical exercise, a term he obviously uses in a pejorative way. Fate has all the better of the
argument thus far, and the opening theme comes back in full force with every appearance of victory.
There is a long coda, which first gives fate the advantage, but then also turns the human answer into a new and daring series of chords. Both sides finally seem ready to stop, and with plaintive
comments from the pacifist oboe hovering like a bird above the orchestra, fate is allowed to shout its final defiance, just as dictators do when they think they have won a war. This battle,
however, is far from over. Now here's a recent commentator writing about a contemporary piece called Genesis II by Janneke van der Velde.
Once the harmonious world of the opening clockwork is shattered by the goal-oriented strings, the two elements are set on an inevitable collision course. The possibility of peaceful
coexistence and reconciliation disappears. The aggressive strings are intruders into a musical landscape that had set up no expectation for change, no suggestion that a narrative was lying
in wait. They seize the role of dominator and subject the compositions unfolding to the sadistic demands of story.
The confrontation between the two elements culminates in a violent explosion, after which the triumphant strings, now all by themselves, lonely yet gloriously autonomous, perform a tortured,
self-alienated romantic cadenza. They succeed, finally, in harnessing and usurping the patterns of the clockwork, which causes the piano part to disintegrate into agitated arpeggiation.
The resulting disorder leads to a second, even more overwhelming explosion. Van der Velde follows the detonation by the scattering of withered fragments and silence,
a post-nuclear silence within which the listener is left to ponder the cost of the excitement generated by the strings. And then she pulls back and presents a second prologue, characterized by
sustained, pulsating energy, the embryonic promise of a new and perhaps different scenario. She reveals a nightmare of possibilities and then wakes us up,
relieving us by telling us it was all a dream, but also warning us that these are our choices, that the collision course is in fact in motion, and that we must do something to prevent the
devastation glamorized by this dynamic paradigm so very central to our culture's consciousness.
Sigmund Spaeth on Beethoven and the feminist musicologist Susan McCleary on Janica van der Velde. Both commentaries highly condensed. The commentary on the commentary...
The commentary is that of Peter Schickely, host of Schickely Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
Janica van der Velde's Genesis II is a good piece, and I wish it weren't too long to play on the show, but I would like to do a little bit of the opening.
According to McCleary, Genesis II opens with what van der Velde intends as a musical image of childbirth, the pulsation of a fetal heartbeat, the intensifying strains of labor,
and the sudden emergence into a fresh and calm new world. It's a beautiful opening, and I can imagine that image guiding the composer.
But I don't think the image is necessary to the piece. In the first place, I could play quite similar passages from pieces by men who were probably not thinking of childbirth.
And in the second place, as another feminist musicologist, Paula Higgins, has written, Paula Higgins, a feminist musicologist, wrote,
piece would consider the quote aggressive self-determined and goal-oriented strings culminating in the violent explosion to be more descriptive of the actual birth event than the
quote sonically idealistic image of childbirth intended by the composer. It seems to me that it's hard to think of any human endeavor more goal-oriented than giving birth.
McCleary goes on to say, the very presence of this image is remarkable, for while Western culture has produced images celebrating such quote universal human concerns as war,
it has avoided dealing with the dynamic moment of birth. Well, I don't know. How about this?
McCleary herself describes the beginning of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as the emergence of the initial theme and its key out of a womb-like void, and we hear it collapse back twice more into that void.
It is only by virtue of the subject's constant violent self-assertion that the void can be kept at bay. Sounds like childbirth to me. Not an easy childbirth, but childbirth.
It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the reason McCleary thinks that composers have avoided dealing with the dynamic moment of birth
is because they haven't written pieces that they've identified as being about the dynamic moment of birth. Beethoven may have characterized the beginning of his Fifth Symphony by saying, Thus fate knocks at the door,
but he didn't describe the beginning of his Ninth as, Thus fate has a baby. But there are lots of sunrise pieces, the birth of a new day, that have exactly the same dynamic.
Be that as it may or may not be, let's turn to another musical imperative. The feeling among some feminists that there is, or ought to be, a women's voice in music.
That is, that female composers should avoid the assertive, goal-oriented, pelvic-pounding of their male counterparts, resulting, perhaps, in music like this.
We'll call this little sweet Three Sisters. See you in about four and a half minutes.
Three beautiful pieces by women.
The first was a sinfonia from an opera, that is, the overture of an opera, La Liberazione di Ruggero, setting Roger free,
by Francesca Caccini. Written in 1625, and that was performed by the Ars Femina Ensemble.
After that, a lovely arabesque by Germaine Tailleferre, played by James Campbell on clarinet and Stéphane Lemelin on piano.
And then finally, a dance from Meredith Monk's score for her movie, Book of Days, performed by her ensemble. Now, even though I'm a man, I like all three of those pieces.
Regular listeners to Schickeli Mix have heard the Tailleferre work and parts of the Meredith Monk album before, but I don't see why women would want to be told how to compose any more than men.
As yet another musicologist has written, if I find a woman's composition assertive and thrusting, for example, Joan Tower's Concerto for Orchestra,
and if a man's composition conveys to me a, quote, sense of existence that is timeless, end quote, I have even thought that about the same, Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.
Am I bound to think that they are cross-dressing? Well, although I have heard and enjoyed Joan Tower's Concerto for Orchestra, I don't have a recording of it. But what about this piece? Not only was it written by a woman,
but by a woman who was born in the Victorian era.
Chicken Chowder Chicken Chowder A rag written in 1905 by Irene Giblin and played by Virginia Eskin. Are we to assume that the high spirits and pelvic bass thumps
perpetrated by the composer and the performer are forced, something they had to appropriate to get along in a man's world? It doesn't sound like it to me. Apparently, women have pelvises too.
Music Music Music Music
Ruth Crawford Seeger's Piano Study in Mixed Accents, played by Alan Feinberg. Reminds me a little bit of Lenny Tristano.
Actually, Virginia Eskin and Alan Feinberg have something in common. They both play the piano about 117 times as well as I do. Me, my name is Peter Shickley.
And the show is Shickley Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about the burdens we sometimes ask pieces of music to bear. The burden to tell a verbally expressible story. The burden to make it clear what kind of a person the composer is.
A white director made a movie about the civil rights struggle in the South. A black director publicly criticized it. Told of this criticism, the white director said, let him make his own movie.
And the black director said, he's right. But of course, it's much harder for a black director to get the opportunity to make a movie. And that, it seems to me, is what we should try to change.
Returning to the subject at hand, it seems to me that we should try to equalize women's access to training and, just as important, performance. And then let them write what they want to write.
Given the prejudices that exist, that's no easy task. But even as a goal, that idea is belittling. It's belittled by some feminists, because the assumption is that given the same access to training and education,
women will emerge as composers indistinguishable from their male colleagues. Well, wait a minute. If our musical training were that narrowly deterministic,
it would follow that the male composers who receive it would be indistinguishable from each other. And boy, is that ever not the case. Here's a suite called Six Degrees of Masculinity.
And just to narrow the playing field, I've chosen six pieces that were all written within about 20 years of each other. Not only were they all written by men, they were all written by men who were formally trained,
that is, who studied the same European-based music curriculum. If the goal of that curriculum was to ensure uniformity, it certainly was an abject failure at the beginning of the 20th century.
Here's nine minutes of the sounds of manhood.
Six Degrees of Masculinity
Not arranged in any particular testosteroneic order. We began with Eric Satie, a song called La Diva de l'Empire, an American intermezzo,
which Hans Udine arranged for the piano. That was played... by William Micellos. Then we had one of the six bagatelles for string quartet, Op. 9 by Anton Webern,
played by the La Salle Quartet. And then a really nutty piece by Charles Ives, Gip the Blood, or Hurst, which is worse. No. 2 of set No. 2.
This is played by the Ensemble Moderne, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. Next, a song by Rinaldo Hahn, a South American by birth, but French,
by Residence and Training. And that was a song called Nocturne. On your pale breast my heart sleeps With a sleep as soft as death. Sung by François Leroux,
accompanied by Jeff Cohen on the piano. Then an excerpt from the Alpen Symphony of Richard Strauss. Andre Previn was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
And I think... I think we were on the glacier at that point. And then finally, one of Poulenc's best-known works, the first of the three perpetual motions, played by Pascal Roger.
There is no doubt what a steeply uphill battle women have to wage if they want to break out of the stereotypes. Although most older men in orchestras
might not be as blunt as the welder in a documentary I saw who said, I just can't respect my job anymore now that I know a woman can do it. Orchestras were one of the last bastions
of the all-male membership policy. And if you're a woman with aspirations to ascend the podium, you've really got your work cut out for you. And I also know it's probably impossible for me,
a man who grew up surrounded by, in fact, bathed in encouragement, to imagine being the mother of a friend of mine who, when she was in the sixth grade, was told by her aunt that she'd better watch out
because the aunt knew of two things. Two little girls who had died of brain fever because they were too bright. But, well, I guess there are two themes on today's show. One of them can be illustrated by David's dream.
Years ago, my brother told me about a very striking dream he had about seeing an atomic explosion. And sometime later, I wrote a song about it. That is, I wrote the lyrics in the first person, as if I had had the dream.
Sometime after that, I sang the song for him. And he liked it. But he was surprised when I told him the source. He hadn't recognized his dream at all, even though I had remained completely faithful to what he had told me as far as I knew.
Pieces of music are like dreams. Words can only convey them in the grossest way. Maybe the opening section of the last movement of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements
is Nazi soldiers marching. So what's the next section? Lum-pum-pum, pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum. Anti-Nazi Germans sneaking around,
hatching a plot to blow up Hitler? What it is, is a contrasting musical section. You know, I'm not against using words to describe pieces or to explore how they work.
Where would this show be if I were? What bothers me about the storytellers who take their stories too seriously is not only that they seem to want to put their story on the same plane as the piece,
but also, and this goes back to antiquity, that they then ask us to judge the piece ethically on the basis of their story. And as to gender differences, our second theme,
I'd like to point out that there's a lot of difference of opinion among women on this issue. Katha Pollitt has written, "'In the arts, we hear a lot about what women's real subjects, "'methods, and materials ought to be.
"'Painting is male. Rhyme is male. Plot is male. "'Perhaps,' say the Lacanian feminists. "'If you don't know, don't ask me. I don't know either. "'Perhaps,' say the Lacanian feminists,
"'even logic and language are male. "'What is female? Nature. Blood. Milk. "'Communal gatherings. The moon. Quilts.'"
She's wicked, Katha Pollitt. "'Haven't we been here before?' she goes on. "'Indeed we have. "'Woman as sharer and carer. Woman as earth mother. "'Woman as guardian of all the small rituals "'that knit together a family.
"'Woman as a woman in a community. "'Woman as beneath, above, or beyond such manly concerns "'as law, reason, abstract ideas. "'These images are as old as time.
"'Open defenders of male supremacy have always used them "'to declare women flatly inferior to men. "'Covert ones use them to place women on a pedestal "'as too good for this naughty world.'" Later, she says,
"'The difference theorists posit a world that contains two cultures, "'a female world of love and ritual, and a male world of love and ritual.'" The male world of getting and spending and killing, which mysteriously share a single planet.
That vision is expressed neatly in a recent pop psychology title, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. It would be truer to say that men are from Illinois and women are from Indiana.
Different, sure, but not in ways that have much ethical consequence. As usual, I probably fall somewhere in the middle on this issue.
Men are from Illinois and women are from California? Quebec? New Orleans? Well, I don't know how inherent the differences are,
but they can be quite noticeable. While I was organizing this show, my wife happened to walk by my workroom when I was choosing the Richard Strauss excerpt.
I was listening to Dickie the Lionhearted at his most heroic, his most manly, his most expansive. My wife poked at me, put her head in the door, looked at the stereo,
opened her mouth and stuck her finger down her throat. She's a very subtle critic, my wife.
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 members. Thank you, members.
And not only that, our program is equally 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 number 91. 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.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned,
send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Sickly Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickly Mix. Care of Public Radio International,
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PRI, Public Radio International. Thank you.