1
00:00:08,029 --> 00:00:17,150
A world of music and NPR news on WUGA, Athens, Georgia. The classic 91.7 and 97.9 FM.

2
00:00:19,440 --> 00:00:25,080
The time is 11 o'clock. Stay tuned for Shickley Mix coming up next.

3
00:00:38,950 --> 00:00:46,720
And now, Shickley Mix. Ready, Mr. Shickley? I'm ready for takeoff. Here's the theme.

4
00:01:02,080 --> 00:01:14,120
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.

5
00:01:14,740 --> 00:01:25,780
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,

6
00:01:26,040 --> 00:01:38,760
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.

7
00:01:38,960 --> 00:01:51,800
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,

8
00:01:52,370 --> 00:01:55,460
and it's easy to see, or rather hear, why.

9
00:02:22,420 --> 00:02:35,220
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 says, or talks about, the second theme of this movement.

10
00:02:35,680 --> 00:02:46,700
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.

11
00:04:14,910 --> 00:04:27,270
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.

12
00:04:27,790 --> 00:04:37,870
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.

13
00:04:38,390 --> 00:04:47,610
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,

14
00:04:47,810 --> 00:04:58,730
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 bring him to. He wouldn't be able to breathe on such a small planet.

15
00:04:58,990 --> 00:05:07,990
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,

16
00:05:08,550 --> 00:05:20,650
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

17
00:05:20,650 --> 00:05:31,910
these seemingly innocent names lead to. Another problem, in addition to the impossibly short rotation, period implied, is that there is no one climax in the opening theme.

18
00:05:33,070 --> 00:05:43,030
Representations of sunrises require a climax. The eastern sky gets lighter and lighter, until finally Hyperion's chariot bursts from below the horizon

19
00:05:43,030 --> 00:05:53,750
to begin its daily journey across the heavens, eventually plunging out of sight in the west, after which the horses get a good rubdown in a bag of oats with some apples mixed in.

20
00:05:54,390 --> 00:06:05,190
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.

21
00:06:05,550 --> 00:06:15,270
And imagine how hard it must be to keep your bearings on cloudy days. Nah, that Haydn quartet isn't a sunrise. This is a sunrise.

22
00:11:51,510 --> 00:12:03,370
Charles Munch, conducting l'Orchestre de Paris in the daybreak scene from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé ballet score, or rather the second concerts we have, are a complete suite thereof.

23
00:12:04,190 --> 00:12:14,630
Today's show is about musical climaxes, and Ravel's sunrise certainly qualifies. Actually, you know, if the truth be told,

24
00:12:14,890 --> 00:12:26,910
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 sunrise,

25
00:12:27,430 --> 00:12:39,330
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,

26
00:12:39,330 --> 00:12:49,170
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.

27
00:12:49,370 --> 00:13:02,030
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.

28
00:13:02,030 --> 00:13:12,390
Probably because of New Jersey, I guess. Hmm, maybe better take the phone off the hook. Anyway, I finally figured out that with sunsets,

29
00:13:12,390 --> 00:13:24,930
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

30
00:13:24,930 --> 00:13:35,510
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.

31
00:13:35,670 --> 00:13:47,470
In a sunset, the delicious moment isn't when the disk of the sun first touches the horizon. It's when that last little sliver disappears. So it makes sense that with a sunrise,

32
00:13:47,970 --> 00:14:00,850
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 Revellion climax. Big deal.

33
00:14:00,850 --> 00:14:10,890
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.

34
00:14:12,190 --> 00:14:23,030
Well, I guess I should reach over and get it here. Let's see. Oh, that's from the station manager.

35
00:14:23,390 --> 00:14:27,810
Put the phone back on the hook. Oh. Okay.

36
00:14:31,170 --> 00:14:31,650
Huh.

37
00:14:32,870 --> 00:14:44,890
That's what I call timing. Hello? Oh, hello, sir. Oh, yes, I have a lot of music coming up. I, uh... Okay, very well. No, no, no, you're right.

38
00:14:44,970 --> 00:14:56,270
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,

39
00:14:56,330 --> 00:15:06,910
but maybe that's exactly the reason I should be doing it on Shickle... All right, all right. Okay. No, I'll get right to it. Okay. Well, um...

40
00:15:06,910 --> 00:15:17,850
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.

41
00:15:18,330 --> 00:15:27,530
Does that make me a pessimist? I don't know, but it makes me Peter Shickley, and it makes the show Shickley Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.

42
00:15:33,580 --> 00:15:44,420
I must say, I'm sort of proud that I got all those comments about sunrise and sunset in without setting off the irrelevancy alert. It just wasn't sure, you know what I mean?

43
00:15:45,120 --> 00:15:55,120
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.

44
00:15:55,560 --> 00:16:07,900
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.

45
00:16:08,060 --> 00:16:19,480
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.

46
00:16:20,120 --> 00:16:30,620
Here's a good example. The main part of the melody happens several times, but each time it rolls around, the composer changes the end of the refrain to take it a bit higher.

47
00:16:52,020 --> 00:17:03,780
It keeps on rollin' along He don't plant taters

48
00:17:03,780 --> 00:17:06,480
He don't plant cotton

49
00:17:18,700 --> 00:17:19,700
Keeps rollin'

50
00:17:38,050 --> 00:17:39,290
He gets a little

51
00:17:39,290 --> 00:18:05,800
A-go-l-l-a-n

52
00:18:26,640 --> 00:18:38,820
Part of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Old Man River from the musical Show Boat, sung by Paul Robeson. Why use the highest note for a climax? Why not use the lowest?

53
00:18:39,600 --> 00:18:51,220
Well, the whole idea of climax involves tension, and tension means effort. It takes effort to climb. If you relax, you fall. And especially in singing, it takes effort,

54
00:18:51,380 --> 00:19:01,040
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

55
00:19:01,040 --> 00:19:08,540
that composers sometimes create a striking effect by denying it, by making the high notes... surprisingly soft.

56
00:20:06,520 --> 00:20:14,760
From Geistliche Wegenlied, Sacred Lullaby, the second of Brahms's songs for contralto, viola, and piano.

57
00:20:15,300 --> 00:20:25,940
That was Jesse Norman, Ulrich von Wrochem, and Jeffrey Parsons. Now, here's a song that, to my way of thinking, reaches its high point too soon.

58
00:20:26,380 --> 00:20:37,760
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.

59
00:20:38,200 --> 00:20:48,060
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

60
00:20:48,060 --> 00:20:59,960
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.

61
00:21:00,640 --> 00:21:11,520
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,

62
00:21:11,580 --> 00:21:23,940
and they haven't taken the grand piano back to the other studio yet. Here we go. Oh, beautiful for spacious skies

63
00:21:23,940 --> 00:21:36,000
For amber waves of grain For purple mountain manna For majesty's above the fruited plain

64
00:21:38,360 --> 00:21:40,440
America, America

65
00:21:41,580 --> 00:21:50,440
God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood

66
00:21:50,480 --> 00:21:53,940
From sea to shining sea

67
00:21:57,130 --> 00:22:08,250
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.

68
00:22:08,770 --> 00:22:20,650
I wonder if Samuel A. Ward considered doing it this way. Oh, beautiful for spacious skies

69
00:22:20,650 --> 00:22:29,730
For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties

70
00:22:29,730 --> 00:22:33,090
Above the fruited plain

71
00:22:34,290 --> 00:22:42,370
Oh, beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassioned stress

72
00:22:43,270 --> 00:22:50,750
A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness

73
00:22:52,310 --> 00:23:00,590
America, America God shed his grace on thee

74
00:23:01,690 --> 00:23:09,910
And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea

75
00:23:13,340 --> 00:23:23,680
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.

76
00:23:24,660 --> 00:23:35,960
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.

77
00:23:36,220 --> 00:23:42,900
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.

78
00:23:50,070 --> 00:24:01,900
Inouye crée desandit jusqu'à nous

79
00:24:09,480 --> 00:24:17,800
Effacer la tache originale Et de son père arrêté

80
00:24:17,800 --> 00:24:28,760
Le coureau de mon dieu Très seuil d'espérance

81
00:24:28,980 --> 00:24:40,260
À cette nuit Qui lui donne un sauveur Peuple à genoux

82
00:24:43,700 --> 00:25:12,820
Attendent qu'un ciel

83
00:25:13,820 --> 00:25:43,920
Bleu et le ciel

84
00:25:43,920 --> 00:25:53,360
Est ouvert Qu'il voit un frère

85
00:25:53,360 --> 00:26:05,120
L'amour unisse Ce qu'enchaîne le frère

86
00:26:07,470 --> 00:26:11,160
Qui lui dira non

87
00:26:11,250 --> 00:26:21,660
Qu'il met, qu'il souffre et meurt

88
00:26:23,800 --> 00:26:59,010
Peuple chantant

89
00:26:59,010 --> 00:27:33,290
Joan Baez, singing the cantata

90
00:27:33,290 --> 00:27:43,810
La critique de Noël by Adolphe Adam It takes effort to go higher It takes effort to get louder And it takes effort to go faster

91
00:27:44,450 --> 00:27:54,530
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

92
00:27:55,050 --> 00:27:57,650
At the end, it's about 272

93
00:29:28,920 --> 00:35:30,490
The second part of the raga Gorak Kalyan

94
00:35:30,490 --> 00:35:42,910
as performed by Budadev Dasgupta on the sarod with Debendra Kanti Chakrabarti on tabla and Uma Mehta on tambura

95
00:35:43,670 --> 00:35:56,130
By the way, I was looking at that Joan Baez CD that we used back there, you know It's called Noël And according to the liner notes the arrangements on that album were done by Peter Schickely

96
00:35:56,130 --> 00:36:04,390
You know, if I'm not mistaken I think he's that guy who is the host of Schickely Mix from PRI Public Radio International

97
00:36:06,790 --> 00:36:19,570
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

98
00:36:19,570 --> 00:36:31,770
while one of the feet plays a very long that is slow 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

99
00:36:31,770 --> 00:36:44,670
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

100
00:36:45,230 --> 00:36:57,970
And then you can create a climactic windup 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

101
00:36:57,970 --> 00:37:06,370
in which case the ending is usually preceded by a tension-filled silence so that the audience can wonder what's coming next

102
00:37:52,480 --> 00:38:03,220
Amen 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

103
00:38:05,280 --> 00:38:17,200
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

104
00:38:17,200 --> 00:38:28,300
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

105
00:38:28,300 --> 00:38:31,500
and the second a longer, hotter one

106
00:41:56,690 --> 00:44:50,180
The ending of Stravinsky's Pulcinella

107
00:44:50,180 --> 00:45:00,680
with Christopher Hogwood conducting the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra followed by the last section, Riffs for Everyone of Leonard Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs

108
00:45:00,680 --> 00:45:11,860
That was with John Bruce Yeh on clarinet and Robert Lark leading the DePaul University Jazz Ensemble I Now before we get to our last selection

109
00:45:11,860 --> 00:45:23,280
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

110
00:45:23,700 --> 00:45:34,620
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

111
00:45:34,620 --> 00:45:45,500
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

112
00:45:45,500 --> 00:45:57,280
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

113
00:45:57,280 --> 00:46:09,900
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...

114
00:46:09,900 --> 00:46:19,940
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

115
00:46:19,940 --> 00:46:30,780
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

116
00:46:30,780 --> 00:46:38,580
or in the cyclical sense of most dance music We, however, are about to hear the mother of all climaxes

117
00:46:38,580 --> 00:46:49,020
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

118
00:46:49,020 --> 00:47:00,640
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

119
00:47:00,640 --> 00:47:10,160
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

120
00:47:10,160 --> 00:47:21,900
And later, when the rest of the orchestra is going The bass instruments play the czarist national anthem in long note values

121
00:47:28,040 --> 00:47:40,960
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

122
00:47:40,960 --> 00:47:42,840
And you can go home for all I care

123
00:51:33,030 --> 00:51:43,030
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

124
00:51:43,030 --> 00:51:55,330
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

125
00:51:58,670 --> 00:52:07,930
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

126
00:52:07,930 --> 00:52:19,550
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

127
00:52:20,330 --> 00:52:23,310
Some things, however, you can count on most of the time

128
00:52:38,060 --> 00:52:50,100
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

129
00:52:50,100 --> 00:52:59,680
Thank you, members And not only that, our program, in a climax of creative communication Is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International

130
00:53:01,380 --> 00:53:13,840
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 Sickly saying goodbye

131
00:53:13,840 --> 00:53:20,460
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

132
00:55:41,220 --> 00:58:34,000
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned

133
00:58:34,000 --> 00:58:44,120
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

134
00:58:44,120 --> 00:58:51,940
100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403

135
00:58:53,720 --> 00:58:56,540
PRI, Public Radio International