Well, I see Peter Sickley over there in the wings. I wonder if I can startle him. What do you think? Peter?
Don't you think that I am absolutely the best radio announcer you've ever heard?
Uh, uh, yeah. Here's the theme.
Hello there. I'm Peter Sickley, and this is Sickley 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.
Our bills, as luck would have it, are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this influential radio station right here,
where I'm provided with this professional studio space filled with state-of-the-art thingies that do state-of-the-art things, after which the program is sent out to the public.
Welcome to the Wide, Wide World by PRI, Public Radio International. John Dunn said, No man is an island. And he's right, you know.
How many of us are surrounded by water at all times? But on the other hand, we are surrounded by influences, constantly lapping at us from all directions.
We're more like sponges than islands. Although, actually, I guess you could say that an atoll, since it's made of coral, is both an island and a sponge. So that...
Okay, okay, okay. Can't really argue with the irrelevancy alarm on that one. The point is that whatever your position on the old nature versus nurture debate is,
we are obviously not born fully formed on the half-shell, like Botticelli's Venus de Mylar. Many different influences go into shaping our personalities,
and the same is true of the musical personalities of composers, as well, too. Some of these influences are obvious and profound, such as that of Beethoven upon Brahms.
Some are more complicated, but nevertheless undeniable, such as the influence of Stravinsky's early music upon his later music. And some influences are so tenuous as to be hardly worth talking about,
such as that of Palestrina upon Spike Jonze. Some influences are fleeting, and others are long-lasting. In the 1860s, for instance,
there was a vogue for the sounds of Turkish military music. It was sometimes called Janissary music, because of the two-faced scouts employed by Turkish armies. They could keep track of where the army was going,
and at the same time make sure that nobody was sneaking up on them from behind. To a composer like Mozart, adding some Turkish flavor involved, aside from an occasional exotic scale tone,
the use of percussion instruments other than timpani, usually the bass drum, triangles, and cymbals.
Nicholas Harnoncourt, conducting folks from the Zurich Opera, in a chorus from Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio, that is, the Pasha's Harem. Now that goes into the category of fleeting influences.
Mozart's adding a bit of local color there, but you would not say that Turkish music significantly influenced his style in general. I'm pretty sure I'm safe in saying
that not one of Mozart's dozens of symphonies has parts for bass drum, triangles, and cymbals in it. And I know for a fact that they're not used in any of the string quartets.
Actually, and seriously, you know, it's interesting, when you consider everything we know about the music of this world, past and present, it's interesting to realize that Baroque and classical European music is only a part of the music of this world.
It's almost unique in its avoidance of percussion instruments. A couple of tuned kettle drums, used in a fairly small fraction of all the music written in that culture, that's it.
Whereas in most of the musical cultures of North and South America, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific, drums and other percussion constitute the basic framework for many or most kinds of music.
Percussion provides for these musics what the bass line provides for Baroque and classical, and even Renaissance and Romantic music. Between the dance bands of the Renaissance
and those of the 20th century jazz scene, there stretches a vast percussion desert. Well, be that as it may or may not be, however, the point is that to say,
on the basis of the abduction and a few other works, that Mozart's musical style as a whole was influenced by Turkish music, would be like saying that Richard Rodgers' style as a whole
was influenced by Siamese music on the basis of this.
The End of the Overture to the King and I, conducted by Milton Rosenstock. Another fleeting influence, an accent appropriated for a particular character in the novel.
There are some composers, however, whose musical lives were turned around by exposure to exotic material. And by exotic here, by the way, I simply mean stuff that wasn't taught in the country. It wasn't in the conservatories.
It didn't have to be exotic geographically. In fact, it could come from right in your own backyard. Here's what Vaughan Williams sounded like at the beginning of his career.
Chromatic, liquid, quite French, quite Romantic. Brydon Thompson conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in part of Toward the Unknown Region, an early work by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
At about the same time he was writing that piece, Vaughan Williams started collecting images of English folk songs, not from books of concert settings, but by tromping around the countryside
and notating the songs as sung by honest working folk. I mean, as opposed to professional musicians. He heard songs like this.
Oh, some do say the farmer's best But I do need say no If it weren't for we poor laboring men
What would the farmers do?
They would beat up all their old Stuff until some new come in There's never a trade in all England Like we poor laboring men
Oh, some do say the baker's best But I do need say no If it weren't for we poor laboring men What would the bakers do?
They would beat up all their old Stuff until some new come in There's never a trade in all England Like we poor laboring men
Oh, some do say the butcher's best But I do need say no If it weren't for we poor laboring men What would the butchers do?
They would beat up all their old Stuff until some new come in There's never a trade in all England Like we poor laboring men
Let every true born Englishman
Lift up a flowing glass
And Toasty John is working man
Likewise is Barney Lass
And when these cruel days are past Good times will come again There's never a trade in all England Like we poor laboring men
on these tunes, just as Liszt and Grieg had done on theirs, he wrote. We simply were fascinated by
the tunes. Vaughan Williams made settings of some of the songs, and he used some as themes in larger
works. But most importantly, he allowed his whole compositional style to be influenced, to be
informed by the melodies and their harmonic implications. Here's the third movement of his Pastoral Symphony. You can still hear traces of the composer of Toward the Unknown Region.
But even though the thematic material here is original, the influence of those folk songs he
collected is unmistakable. Sir Adrian Bolt, conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra
in the third movement of Vaughan Williams' Third Symphony. He called it a Pastoral Symphony. My parents called me Peter Shickley, and I've called this program Shickley Mix,
unburdened as I am with a surfeit of modesty. It, the program that is, emanates from PRI,
Public Radio International. Today's show is called He Hasn't Been the Same Since. We're talking about
three composers whose lives were changed by exposure to music outside the European classical tradition. Like Vaughan Williams in England, Bartok collected folk songs in his native Hungary
and surrounding areas. He took them to the New Philharmonic Orchestra in the late 19th century. He too was blown away by what he heard. Man, who wouldn't be? Some of that Balkan stuff makes the
English folk songs, which I dearly love, sound as square as a deacon trimming a hedge. I wonder if Albert Einstein ever studied time in Bulgaria. I think clocks must tick differently
there. I mean, our old clocks go tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. The tick and the tock are the same length, right? Bulgarian clocks must go tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. The tick and the tock are the same length, right?
This is a Bulgarian dance song in 516 time. That's two plus three. One, two, one, two, three,
one, two, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one. Now, since the basic unit
is too fast to tap your foot or snap your fingers to, you can't hardly even clap that fast. You have to keep time, as does the drummer on parts of that cut,
two uneven beats. The second beat is one and a half times as long as the first beat.
So, if you tap your foot, you've got to tap two uneven beats. But the Bulgarians do these uneven meters so naturally, so evenly, that you almost feel as if you could tap your foot evenly,
but it doesn't quite work out. Let me show you what I mean. Let's play that again. I'll get it set up here, okay.
It's almost like a waltz.
You almost feel like you go one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, but I'm forcing that. That isn't what they're
playing there. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, it's almost tempting to make it into
like a waltz kind of feeling, but that's a very Western sort of way of looking at it. The thing is, they play that so easily. A lot of Westerners playing those uneven rhythms worry
about them a lot. Over accent. They just dance to that, you know, and they're not
doing weird sort of uneven beats. It all feels very natural. It's almost like a waltz, as I say, but not quite, and the not quite is the enchanting part.
Bartok makes use of this. Deliciously unsettling kind of melody in his fifth quartet.
It's the same thing. You can almost tap your foot evenly, but not quite. There, the unit is so fast,
you can't even count it. You can't even count that fast. Like I say, Bulgarian clocks are different. This next one goes two plus two plus two,
plus three. In other words, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
Indeed. Sit no horror. A Bulgarian dance in 916 time. In mainstream classical music,
916 would be divided three plus three plus three. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three,
one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, but not in Bulgaria. Oh, no, that would be much too easygoing. I can just hear some Bulgarian musician saying,
It's Dalsville, man. Except in Bulgarian, of course. It's got to go down two plus two plus two plus three. Like this.
Is that a great piece or what?
The entire middle movement, we heard just the middle section earlier, of Bela Bartok's Fifth String Quartet, played by the Emerson Quartet,
named after the famous Bulgarian writer Rolf Valdo Emersonova. The movement, by the way, is marked in the Bulgarian manner. But even when he isn't being so specific,
Bartok's mature music is often infused with the sounds of Middle European folk songs and dances, the rhythms, the scales, the harmonies, the often bracing textures.
You know, I was kidding about Rolf Valdo Emersonova. But I'm not kidding about Peter Schickely, or the name of the program, which is Schickely Mix. From Peter... from the WBRI, Public Radio International.
He hasn't been the same since. Our third composer, whose spirit has soared on exotic wings, is Lou Harrison. Exotic is, of course, a relative term.
The French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote a piece called Oiseau's Exotique, and one of the exotic birds he lists in the score is the North American robin.
One man's exotic is another man's meat and potatoes. Not that I'm advocating the human consumption of song, but... OK, oh, all right, OK.
Lou Harrison studied with Arnold Schoenberg, but with his teacher's encouragement, gravitated towards simpler textures, and with his friend John Cage, became quite involved with percussion,
often using found instruments such as brake drums from cars. He early on became drawn to the music of what most of us call the Far East, although Harrison likes to chide us on our Eurocentricity
by referring to Europe as Northwestern Asia. OK. Long before he actually visited the Orient and Indonesia, its music had begun to exert a powerful influence on him.
Here's a bit of actual Balinese gamelan music, followed by a movement marked gamelan from a piece written in 1951 by Lou Harrison.
A ritual Balinese dance, played by the gamelan Selunding,
followed by the third movement of Lou Harrison's suite for violin, piano and small orchestra. Lucy Stoltzman and Keith Jarrett, with an in-depth introduction to the gamelan, and an instrumental group under the direction of Robert Hughes.
Happens to be one of my favorite pieces in the world. Now Harrison didn't just imitate some of the sonorities and figurations of the gamelan,
he also relinquished two of the basic models of Western music during the last couple of centuries. The dramatic narrative, with obvious build-up and climax and relaxation,
and the logical argument, with rhetorical development of motivic material. The suite has a stately serenity that feels Eastern, at least to a Westerner.
Years later, Harrison took a step beyond Bartok, a giant step. As far as I know, Bartok never actually wrote any music for the folk instruments he recorded.
But Harrison eventually started writing pieces for gamelan ensembles and other Asian instruments, either alone or, as we will hear, in combination with European instruments.
But before we listen to the last movement of his double concerto for violin, cello and Javanese gamelan, I'd like to play the first couple of phrases of Schubert's B-flat piano trio.
Each of these two phrases begins with the violin and cello playing in octaves.
The souk trio, playing the opening of Schubert's first piano trio. That sound of the violin and cello in octaves is so characteristic of the Romantic piano trio.
The passionate pairing of the two vibrato instruments soaring over the accompaniment of the comparatively mechanical piano. I've just lost a bunch of friends.
And it fascinates me to hear the same string texture accompanied by Javanese instruments in the Harrison work.
The passion is still there, but it's, shall we say, a kinder, gentler passion? A more sensuous passion, perhaps. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not making value judgments here.
Anybody tries to take Schubert away from me gonna find out what trouble's all about. I'm just saying that we're talking about more than some detailed, little scales of orchestration here.
We're talking about a very different sensibility. I'll see you in about seven.
The last movement of Lou Harrison's double concerto for violin and cello with Javanese gamelan. Kenneth Goldsmith and Terry King with a gamelan designed by William Colvig
and named after Darius Mio, like Harrison, a former composition teacher at Mills College, and his wife Madeleine.
You know, with regular gamelan music, actual Indonesian gamelan music, I find that I love the texture of it, I love the sound of it, but I don't really know how to listen to it, I guess,
because I do glaze over after a while. The pieces are often quite long, and I find myself sort of losing track of detail.
And even this piece, which is very short compared to a long gamelan piece, I had a little bit of that feeling the first time, but it has grown and grown on me every time I've heard it.
Apropos of my comment about the romantic string writing combined with the gamelan, Lou Harrison's liner notes report that when Goldsmith was asked by a friend
what it was like to record the work in the Mills College Art Gallery, a very live room, the violinist replied, like playing Tchaikovsky inside Big Ben.
Well, I don't know about Bulgarian time, but American time, we've got a couple of minutes left. So why don't we hear another movement of that beautiful suite for violin, piano, and small orchestra by Lou Harrison.
This is the second gamelan, which is the one, two, three, four, fifth movement of the piece. Lucy Stoltzman, violin, Keith Jarrett, piano, and Robert Hughes conducting a small orchestra.
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 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 96. 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.
S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickly Mix.
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