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The time is 11 o'clock. Stay tuned for Schickele Mix, coming up next.
[music]
And now, Schickele Mix. Ready, Mr. Schickele?
I'm ready for takeoff. 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. Now the bills for this chock-full of goodies enterprise are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the folks at this good radio station, whence the musical thoughts of a goodly number of composers, interfaced by your humble host's connective comments, roll along on the macadam of good intentions to your place, than which there's no place we'd rather be, and can be, thanks in good measure to PRI, Public Radio International.
The String Quartet Op. 76, No. 1, by Haydn, is called the Sunrise Quartet, and it's easy to see, or rather hear, why.
[music excerpt: Haydn, String Quartet in G, Opus 76, No. 1, 1st Mvt.; Amadeus Quartet]
It seems quite natural to associate the gently rising melodic lines in the first violin with the rising of the sun. But what gets me is that nobody ever talks about the second theme of this movement. Let's listen to it a little bit more. About a minute into the piece, the music comes to a cadence, that is, it stops, and then you'll hear the cellist of the Amadeus Quartet playing the second theme.
[music excerpt: Haydn, String Quartet in G, Opus 76, No. 1, 1st Mvt.; Amadeus Quartet]
Now, anybody can hear that the second theme is just an upside-down version of the first theme. In other words, it's a sunset. Well, the ramifications of that observation are enormous. It means that wherever Haydn was when he wrote that quartet, the days were only about two minutes long, one minute of sunlight and one minute of darkness, depending of course on the season.
But you'd think that any planet or asteroid small enough to have a two-minute day wouldn't have enough gravity to keep a man of Haydn's bulk on its surface, especially if he was trying to juggle a quill pen, an inkwell, and a bunch of unbound sheets of music paper. Besides, there wouldn't be any atmosphere to breathe on such a small planet.
I can't believe that nobody has written a thesis on this, but I think the inescapable conclusion is that Haydn wrote this piece on earth, and that the name was given to it not by Haydn as a serious description of his surroundings, but casually, by someone of limited intelligence, who didn't realize what a quicksand of logical inconsistencies the seemingly innocent name leads to.
Another problem, in addition to the impossibly short rotation period implied, is that there is no one climax in the opening theme. Representations of sunrises require a climax. The eastern sky gets lighter and lighter, until finally Hyperion's chariot bursts from below the horizon to begin its daily journey across the heavens, eventually plunging out of sight in the west, after which the horses get a good rub down in a bag of oats with some apples mixed in.
That's no easy trip for the horses, you know. As tough as the morning climb is, from the horizon up to the zenith, I should think that the afternoons would be very hard on the knees. And imagine how hard it must be to keep your bearings on cloudy days. Nah, that Haydn quartet isn't the sunrise. This is a sunrise.
[music excerpt: Ravel, "Daphnis et Chloe"; Orchestre de Paris/Munch]
Charles Munch, conducting l'Orchestre de Paris in the daybreak scene from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe ballet score, or rather the second concert suite thereof. Today's show is about musical climaxes, and Ravel's Sunrise certainly qualifies.
Actually, you know, if the truth be told, I find real sunrises a bit anticlimactic. I'm not a super early riser, but at various times in my life, I've gotten up in the dark on a summer morning and gone someplace beautiful to watch the sun rise. And I've often had a slight feeling of disappointment when the sun finally comes up.
Now, I'm a big fan of sunsets. I guess I got that from my father, who came to this country in the early 1930s when the West and Midwest were suffering from those terrible dust storms. He was an agricultural economist, so he had the greatest concern for the farmers being ruined, but he used to say that he thought one of the reasons he stayed in the United States was the spectacular sunsets.
You know, stuff in the air makes for good sunsets. New York City has good sunsets. Probably because of New Jersey, I guess. Maybe better take the phone off the hook. Anyway, I finally figured out that with sunsets, the best stuff usually happens after the sun has disappeared. The colors, the light, gets more and more subtle until it finally fades away.
But with a sunrise, the light gets more and more boring until finally the sun comes up and washes everything out. If you don't get to your vantage point while it's still pretty dark, you're apt to miss the best stuff. And think about this. In a sunset, the delicious moment isn't when the disc of the sun first touches the horizon. It's when that last little sliver disappears.
So it makes sense that with a sunrise, the delicious moment is when that first little sliver appears above the horizon. Not when it finally clears the horizon and you supposedly get the huge Ravelian climax. Big deal. I mean, I've always felt that what... What is that? Oh, man, it's the fax machine. I told them not to put it in the studio.
Well, I guess I should reach over and get it here.
[sound: fax machine]
Let's see.
Oh, that's from the station manager. Put the phone back on the hook. Oh. Okay.
Huh. That's what I call timing. Hello? Oh, hello, sir. Oh, yes. I have a lot of music coming up. Okay. Very well. No, no, no. You're right. It's not a nature show.
Well, that's true, sir. But as you say, even nature shows don't run editorials about the relative merits of sunsets and sunrises. But maybe that's exactly the reason I should be doing it on Schickele. All right. All right. Okay. No, I'll get right to it. Okay.
Well, just to recap the thrust of the program so far, I'll just say that as much as I love the early morning, I prefer watching the sun go down to watching it come up. Does that make me a pessimist? I don't know, but it makes me Peter Schickele, and it makes the show Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
Must say, I'm sort of proud that I got all those comments about sunrise and sunset in without setting off the irrelevancy alarm. It just wasn't sure, you know what I mean? But actually, come to think of it, it was a tough call, and the gizmo called it right, because actually, I was leading up to something. Today's program is called Climactic Conditions. What techniques do composers use to create musical climaxes?
One of the most common, especially in vocal music, is to save the highest note till the end. Sometimes it's the very end. Show-offy opera arias often go in for the roof-busting, neck-vein-enhancing last note, but usually it's near the end, followed by some descending notes that relax the tension. Here's a good example. The main part of the melody happens several times, but each time it rolls around,
[music: Kern/Hammerstein, "Ol’ Man River" (American Musical Theater, Volume 1); Paul Robeson]
Part of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Old Man River from the musical Showboat, sung by Paul Robeson. Why use the highest note for a climax? Why not use the lowest? Well, the whole idea of climax involves tension, and tension means effort.
It takes effort. It takes effort to climb. If you relax, you fall. And especially in singing, it takes effort, obvious effort, to get up to those high notes. And the natural thing to do is to sing louder as you get higher. This is such a basic truth that composers sometimes create a striking effect by denying it, by making the high notes surprisingly soft.
Geistliches Wiegenlied, Sacred Lullaby, the second of Brahms's songs for contralto, viola, and piano. That was Jessye Norman, Ulrich von Wrochem, and Geoffrey Parsons. Now here's a song that, to my way of thinking, reaches its high point too soon. Now there are feminist musicologists who would say that that's a male hang-up, and they may very well be right. But hey, I yam what I yam.
A man's gotta postulate what a man's gotta postulate. Okay now, this is a patriotic song, so let me say that I mean no disrespect in criticizing it. In fact, it's one of those melodies that is so natural sounding that it feels as if it could have been picked from a tree rather than composed. But it was composed, and the composer made choices, and he could have made other choices. And that's the interesting part. Here's the first verse of America the Beautiful.
It reaches its melodic apogee exactly halfway through. Lucky for us, they had a staff party in here last night and they haven't taken the grand piano back to the other studio yet. Here we go.
[music: Bates/Ward, "America the Beautiful"; Peter Schickele]
Okay, now I am, I admit it, being very conventional when I say that it would work better to have the high point two-thirds of the way through instead of halfway through. I wonder if Samuel A. Ward considered doing it this way.
[music: Bates/Ward, "America the Beautiful"; Peter Schickele]
Well, it's sort of a trade-off, isn't it? To me, the climax feels better being later on, but you do get a little tired of the first couple of measures when you hear them four times. Anyway, here's a classic example of a song that, like the Ravel Sunrise, actually, and I have nothing more to say about sunrises, has a subsidiary climax and a main one. In this case, a high note at the end of the first verse followed by an even higher note at the end of the second.
[music: Adam, "Cantique de Noel" (Noel); Joan Baez]
Joan Baez singing the Cantique de Noël by Adolphe Adam.
It takes effort to go higher, it takes effort to get louder, and it takes effort to go faster. And all those techniques are used to build climaxes. Here's a hot example of speed. The tempo at the beginning of this excerpt is about 180 beats per minute. At the end, it's about 272.
[music: "Raga Gorakh Kalyan, Fast Gat in Tintala"; Buddhadev Das Gupta]
The second part of the raga, Gorakh Kalyan, as performed by Buddhadev Das Gupta on the sarod, with Debendra Kanti Chakrabarti on tabla, and Uma Mehta on tambura.
By the way, I was looking at that Joan Baez CD that we used back there. You know, it's called Noel, and according to the liner notes, the arrangements on that album were done by Peter Schickele. You know, if I'm not mistaken, I think he's that guy who is the host of Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. Sometimes you can get a climactic feeling through the use of slowness instead of speed.
In organ music, it's quite common, towards the end of a piece, to have the parts played by the hands continue at the same speed, while one of the feet plays a very long note called a pedal point. And sometimes, I'm not just talking about organ pieces now, some of the parts continue at the same speed, while a new melody, or a previously heard melody, comes in in long, stretched out note values, so it feels much slower than the surrounding parts.
We'll hear an example of that later on. And then you can create a climactic wind-up to a fast movement by shifting to a slow tempo for the very end. Sometimes the music gradually decelerates to the slow tempo, but often it switches abruptly, in which case the ending is usually preceded by a tension-filled silence so that the audience can wonder what's coming next.
[music excerpt: Handel, "Messiah," Chorus: "Amen"; King's College Choir/Cleobury]
The end of Handel's Messiah, as performed by the Brandenburg Consort and the Choir of King's College under the direction of Stephen Cleobury.
Yet another way of building a climax, and I must admit one that I'm partial to, is through the use of repetition. Working the listener into a sort of a trance by repeating short phrases over and over again, either literally or with slight changes, either in all the parts or only in some of them. Here's a pair of endings, the first featuring a rather short, cool trance, and the second, a longer, hotter one.
[music excerpt: Stravinsky, "Pulcinella"; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra/Hogwood]
[music: Bernstein, "Prelude, Fugue & Riffs," 3rd Mvt.; John Bruce Yeh, clarinet/DePaul University Jazz Ensemble/Lark]
The ending of Stravinsky's Pulcinella, with Christopher Hogwood conducting the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, followed by the last section, Riffs for Everyone, of Leonard Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs. That was with John Bruce Yeh on clarinet and Robert Lark leading the DePaul University Jazz Ensemble One. Now, before we get to our last selection, let me make a couple of observations here. In the first place, there are other ways of building climaxes.
One of the techniques we heard an example of, but that I didn't mention specifically, is harmonic change, going to a new chord. Part of the way we know that Ravel's sun has come up... By the way, speaking of sunrises, I'd like to say that... Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, I guess the old irrelevancy alarm isn't taking any chances. The sensitivity control was probably turned up by...
Anyway, one of the ways we know that the sun has come up in Daphnis and Chloe is that Ravel stays on one chord for the long, gradual crescendo, and then, just as the volume reaches its high point, the harmony changes. He used the same technique in Bolero. In that piece, you've been hearing the same melody repeated in C major for what feels like about three weeks, and suddenly he slides into E major, and you feel like, man, you feel like you've escaped Earth's gravity.
In the second place, these techniques are often, obviously, used in combination. And in the third place, there is a lot of music that is not built around climaxes at all. Much music has a sense of being timeless, timeless in an ethereal trance-like sense, or in the sense of everyday activity, or in the cyclical sense of most dance music.
We, however, are about to hear the mother of all climaxes, surely one of the most blood-vessel-poppingly bombastic climaxes in Western music. I refer, of course, to the end of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture.
Overture. I'm telling you folks, this piece has just about everything, climax-wise. It's got loud. A huge symphony orchestra isn't enough, he adds cannon and church bells. It's got long. This thing goes on forever. It's got fast notes. It's got high notes. It's got stuff coming in slow. The hymn from the opening in the brasses, and later when the rest of the orchestra is going, the bass instruments play the czarist national anthem in long note values.
[sung: from the 1812 Overture]
This is it, folks. This is Armageddon. This is the top of the mountain. This is the end of the line. This is the sunrise to end all sunrises. If this doesn't do it for you, well, you're just a party poop and you can go home for all I care.
[music excerpt: Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture, Opus 49; Philadelphia Orchestra/Ormandy]
The end of the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky, hurled at us by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Quick, before the world ends, a little story. A while ago, I realized I didn't have a score of the 1812 Overture, and I needed it for some reference, and I went down and I bought a score, and I was looking through it for that place where the National Anthem comes in, I couldn't find it. I looked through the whole score, I thought, what is it?
Have I forgotten how to read music or what? And gradually I realized this was a Soviet score, and they had rearranged the end of the 1812 Overture so as not to include the Czarist National Anthem. Some things never change, but some things do. Some things, however, you can count on most of the time.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And that's Schickele 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 in a climax of creative communication 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 92. 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]
[music]
[missing audio] 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.