A Lederhosn is so Fein (WIEDERSCHWINGER/WIEDERSCHWINGER/VERLAG) Performer: Original Nockalm Quintet Die schoensten Jodler der Berge, Volume 2 (Koch HE 330 023)
Unknown title (STELZMULLER) Performer: The Boskovsky Ensemble Cream Puffs aus Wien (Vanguard VSD 2129 (LP))
I Don’t Want to Go (EVANS (WB Music Corp./Brazen Blue Music)) Performer: Drink Me Drink Me (Bar None A HAON 023 2)
Well, 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. Be that as it may or may not be, one thing is certain. Our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, And by this far-sighted radio station, which provides me with this fine studio, a sort of home base, from which I can spew my message of love and enlightenment, not only to you, but to the populace at large, thanks to the distributory efforts of PRI, Public Radio International.
Let's face it, Italians are weird.
Okay, put that phone down, Luigi. I don't want any calls. Listen to what I mean. I do not mean that I don't like Italians. My parents lived in Rome for 11 years, and I spent four summers over there and had a great time. I was just out of my teens, and I remember the high school-age boy next door had learned some of Elvis Presley's songs phonetically, and I tried, in my hopeless Italian, to give him some idea of what the words meant.
I mean, what is the Italian for hound dog or all shook up? You know, Italian has been the lingua franca of classical music for over 200 years. Composers of many different nationalities have used Italian terms in their scores, especially for tempo indications, Allegro, Andante, Lento, Vivace. And I suppose I'm not the only foreign composer who associated those terms solely with music.
It's very interesting to go to Italy and realize that they're all just regular words. A fermata, for instance, is a place in the music where you stop the beat and hold the note or rest as long as you want. Well, in Italy, a fermata is also a bus stop. Fermata l'autobus. And legato. Legato indicates that a passage should be played very smoothly, as if the notes were tied to one another.
Well, if an Italian were to say, I've got a goat tied up in the backyard, the word for tied would be legato. I once read a story somewhere about a Russian string quartet who had a few days off in a resort town in the south of Russia, a town that had a very fancy restaurant in it. Now in those days, fancy places in Russia were only for foreigners. Russians couldn't get in unless they were high up in the party.
So this quartet had a friend along, a fifth person, and he presented himself to the maitre d' of the restaurant as the manager of this world-famous Italian string quartet. And it worked. It got them in. Because the members of the quartet stood around spouting musical terms to each other. Allegro, Legato, Tempo Primo, pianissimo, fortissimo, con molto, staccato, poco, poco, eh?
pizzicato Another interesting thing about my visits to Rome were that I had studied French and German in school but never Italian. And it's very different learning a language on your feet, as it were, as opposed to studying it. The first word I learned over there was the word for garbage, because the morning after I got there, the garbage man came around yelling, Mondizia! I think that's what it was, Mondizia. It's been a long time, and I...
There goes the irrelevancy alarm. I guess it's time to get back to the subject. Which was Italians, not in general, no problem there, but 19th century Italian composers had some pretty weird ideas about what kind of music should accompany tragic words? Listen to this snippet from a representative 19th century Italian opera.
Okay, first you've got boom chick chick, boom chick chick. Then you've got those two trumpets playing in thirds. I said to my friend Eric, is that mariachi music or what? He said, you're right, it's Herb Alpert. So, between the boom chick chick and the Tijuana brass there, If you were there, you'd think that the words would be, well, maybe a nostalgic sentiment like this.
[sung: Schickele sings made-up nostalgic words to the Donizetti tune]
But no. You want to know what they're singing about? Here, let me get the booklet. Track 8. Okay, so, it's a bunch of people confronting Lucretia Borgia, and they say, while the orchestra goes boom chick chick, boom chick chick, Maffio Orsini, Madame, am I, whose brother you murdered in his sleep. Vitale, I, my uncle, on your orders, was killed within the castle you purloined.
I am Appiano's nephew. He, betrayed, was slain by you in vile imprisonment. Petrucci, I, cousin to the Count, whose estate in Siena you appropriated. I am related to one you oppressed, who you caused to be drowned in the Tiber. Whom you caused to be drowned in the Tiber. I will let that go. Anyway, this is all over, boom chick chick, boom chick chick, give me a break.
What is this? Lucrezia Borgia goes to Disneyland? And you know, in the words of Senor Dave Barry, I'm not making this up.
Part of the prologue to Donizetti's opera Lucrezia Borgia, sung by Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, and a bunch of guys, conducted by Richard Bonynge. Now, seriously folks, even though I find it quite alien to my temperament, I am aware of the special use of trivial and trite material in 19th century music.
As usual, one of the people you can trace it back to is Beethoven. I mean, as usual, he started so many things that flowered in the 19th century. I'm talking about when he brought that seemingly incongruous marching band music into the exalted finale of the Ninth Symphony. And at the other end of the century, there's Mahler knowingly flirting with the trashy. We should do a show on that one of these days.
But there's something about these Italian operas, or certain places in them, that feels like a very peculiar kind of naivete, a kind of childlike presentation of turbulent emotions. It must be remembered, by the way, that the scene we just heard part of takes place on a terrace of a palace in which a party is going on.
So I guess there's an intentional irony going on between the boom-chick-chick accompaniment and limpid melody on the one hand and the vitriolic feelings expressed by the characters on the other. Still, well anyway, let's talk about boom-chick-chick, or to put it in its most basic form, boom-chick-boom-chick. If I use the term for that figure preferred by some scholars, umpah, umpah, you'll probably think of a German polka band.
But I'm going to use both terms to mean the basic accompaniment technique consisting of usually a single bass note followed by at least one chordal note. Bass chord, bass chord, bass chord, bass chord, or in a waltz, bass chord, chord, bass chord, chord, bass chord, chord. This is one of the most common accompaniment procedures in western music, and a complete survey of it would span a lot of different genres and a lot of different emotional states.
Here's a small but tasty sprinkling of them. Our first suite is called Basic Boom Chick, and it lasts a little under eight minutes.
[music: Wiederschwinger/Wiederschwinger/Verlag, "A Lederhosn is so Fein" (Die schoensten Jodler der Berge, Volume 2); Original Nockalm Quintet]
[music: Stelzmuller, "Unknown title" (Cream Puffs aus Wien); The Boskovsky Ensemble]
[music: Evans (wb Music Corp./Brazen Blue Music), "I Don’t Want to Go" (Drink Me); Drink Me]
[music: Schubert, “Winterreise,” “Auf dem Flusse”; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Alfred Brendel]
Our suite called Basic Boomchick, and certainly covering a lot of emotional territory. We began with some great tuba playing, very small tuba, maybe a baritone or something, but whatever it is, it sure sounds funky. The tune is called A Lederhosn ist so fein, A Lederhosn ist so fein, and that's the Original Nockalm Quintet from an album called Die schönsten Jodler der Berge, The Most Beautiful Jodlers of the Mountains.
Then we had from an old LP that I love by the Boskovsky Ensemble, Cream Puffs aus Wien.
I mean, beautiful waltzes, mostly waltzes and Ländler, polkas and gallops, from the late 18th century and the 19th century, and like the one you heard was just two violins and guitar, a lot of these waltzes we're so used to hearing in very overblown arrangements now, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra doing the beautiful Blue Danube Waltz, a lot of these pieces sound wonderful with very modest instrumentations.
Most of these are not just two violins and guitar, they're small orchestras, they're small ensembles. Anyway, that was a waltz, I guess, it just says, Dances of Old Vienna, by Vincenz Stelzmuller, of whom I have never heard. Then, a really nice song by a group called Drink Me, a group that my kids turned me on to, and I'm very grateful. It's basically just two guys, Marc Ampft and Winn Evans, and then they sometimes have some backing up people on their albums.
And finally, from Winterreise, Franz Schubert's great song cycle, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel doing Auf dem Flusse, On the River, I'll just read a few of the verses. You who babbled so cheerfully, You clear, turbulent river, How quiet you have become, You give no word of farewell.
With a hard, stiff crust you are covered. You lie cold and motionless, stretched out in the sand. My heart, in this stream do you now recognize your image? Under its crust, could it perhaps be surging so violently too?
Okay, you know, I keep forgetting that the authentic instrument here has drum stuff on it as well as other instruments and everything. Let's see what we've got here.
With a boom and a chick and a boom chick chick, I'm Peter Schickele, you can call me Schick. If you want to get your oompah oompah fix, you can get it right here on Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Boom Chick and Beyond, or to use the layman's term, Oompa and Beyond. You know it's true, musicians usually say Boom Chick. Anyway, there are plenty of variations to the Boom Chick formula. Back when I was in high school and there was a piano in the cafeteria, there were three piano duet favorites. One of them, of course, being chopsticks. But I preferred one that used mostly black keys.
It used your basic boom-chick pattern. Let me swing around to the authentic instrument here. I'm gonna make sure it's set on piano. I usually prefer the nine-foot black and decker. Okay, this is the way this thing went. I don't know if it had a name. If it did, I don't remember. It went like this.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
You know, and then you usually got somebody else, preferably a girl, to do the knuckles on the black keys part on top.
Actually, I was never as good in the knuckle part. Anyway, then the other one used a variation of the Boom Chick formula that had two booms and two chicks.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
And then you got somebody to do Heart and Soul on the top.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
You know, went on and on and on as long as lunch period lasted. Okay, swinging back here. There are all sorts of other variations to this formula. Boom chick chick chick, boom chick chick chick, boom chick chick chick, boom chick chick and boom chick chick, boom chick chick, boom chick chick, boom chick chick. We'll hear some other variations yet in this next suite, which is called advanced boom chick. One piece uses boom chicka boom chicka boom chicka boom chicka boom, and one uses an uneven form, boom chick boom chick boom boom, boom chick, boom chick, boom boom. Now, whatever you think of the Donizetti piece we heard at the beginning of the program, the Schubert song we heard in the first suite certainly showed how serious an oompa piece can be.
But nevertheless, it's very obviously oompa, especially since the notes are short.
When they're not short, it can feel quite different. If you know the first number in this suite, check it out with new ears. You might never have thought of it as an oompa piece. But if you listen to the strings, that's exactly what they're doing. See you in about 12 minutes.
[music: Mozart, “Le Nozze de Figaro,” “Dove sono i bei momenti”; Kiri te Kanawa/Metropolitan Opera Orchestra/Levine]
[music: Desmond (Desmond Music Co.), "Take Five" (George Shearing in Dixieland); George Shearing]
[music excerpt: Prokofiev, "Peter & the Wolf"; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra/Levi]
[music: Trad., "Aquel Molalecito" (Huayno Music of Peru, Vol. 2); Banda Filharmonica Andajina]
Okay, Advanced Boom Chick. We began with Dove sono from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and that was sung by Kiri Te Kanawa. James Levine was conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The beautiful, very just serene um-cha, um-cha in the strings. And later we had another form of the formula there, the boom chick chick chick, boom chick chick chick, boom chick chick chick in the strings.
Then the second number was from an album called George Shearing in Dixieland, a wonderful Dixieland arrangement of Paul Desmond's tune Take Five. Um-cha, um-cha, um-um, um-cha, um-chum. Then one of the most beautiful boom chicks ever written from Peter and the Wolf, Prokofiev, that was Yoel Levi conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra And then finally, from a terrific album called the Huayno, I guess you say that, Huayno Music of Peru, an Arhoolie album, Volume 2, that was Aquel Molalecito, and played by the Banda Filharmonica Andajina.
Terrific coming together of European instruments with that very characteristic kind of tune that is famous from the tune that Paul Simon borrowed, El Condor Pasa.
And it's Tidbit Time at the old boom chicory. But actually, we're going to eschew oompa's almost completely at this time as a favor to an instrument whose only association in many people's minds is oompa. And I refer, of course, to the tuba. Here's some pretty impressive oompa-less tuba playing...
[music: Dumitru, Romanian Dance No. 2 (Tuba Libera); Roger Bobo]
The Romanian Dance No. 2 by Dumitru from an album called Tuba Libera. The tuba player was Roger Bobo, the pianist was Marie Condamine, and like I said earlier, With a boom and a chick and a boom chick chick, I'm Peter Schickele, you can call me Schick. If you want to get your oompa oompa fix, you can get it right here on Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Don't go away, folks. We've got a special treat on today's show. I'm going to be playing the Pachelbel Canon a little bit later. That's right, folks. This is a Schickele Mix first. Now, I know that some people think that the Pachelbel Canon has been played enough, or played too much, played to death even. But I still get requests for it, and I thought that the time has come to... I hate it when this happens. Hello?
Well, yes, I guess it qualifies as a warhorse. Yes, that's true. And movie theaters. For a while there, you couldn't go into an art movie house without hearing the Pachelbel Canon, but, uh, hey, calm down, sir, huh? Look, I'm sorry you're sick of it, but I must reserve the right to play what I want on my program, okay? Bye. Man, I mean, I'm all for listener feedback, but there are limits.
Okay, where were we? Oh yes! The name of today's show is Boomchick and Beyond. So far we've been dealing with oomchick and boompa, now we're ready for the beyond. Our last suite deals with an accompaniment figuration that might be thought of as an exploded oompa. That is, the bass note is still there, but instead of following it with the notes of a chord played simultaneously, they're played one after another in what's called an arpeggio. In other words, we've still got a bass note followed by a chord, but, well, if we think of the bass note as a woman's neck, the chord, instead of being a brooch, is a string of pearls.
We'll call this suite Beyond Boom Chick. It has three movements and lasts about eight and a half minutes. I'll see you then.
[music excerpt: P. D. Q. Bach, “Four Folk Song Upsettings,” “He Came from Over Yonder Ridge” (P. D. Q. Bach: Talkity-Talk Radio); Dana Krueger, mezzanine-soprano/Peter Lurye, piano/Prof. Schickele, devious instrument]
[music: Lennon/McCARTNEY, "Because" (Abbey Road); The Beatles]
[music: Mozart, “Le Nozze de Figaro,” “Voi che sapete che cosa e amor”; Anne Sofie Von Otter/Metropolitan Opera Orchestra/Levine]
The Beyond Boomchick Suite began with one of P. D. Q. Bach's four folk song upsettings, sung by Dana Krueger, mezzanine soprano, and performed on the piano by Peter Lurye, with your humble host playing the devious instruments in this work, in this case the tuba mirum, which consists of a plastic tube, I use a plastic tube, you put wine in it and you hold it in sort of a U shape. And the higher you hold one end, the higher the pitch goes and the lower the pitch the other. And you have to sort of do it to understand it. That was the third of the songs, He Came From Over Yonder Ridge.
And then our second number was the Beatles tune, Because, from Abbey Road, and the last one, another number from the Marriage of Figaro of Mozart. This was Voi che sapete, sung by Cherubino, who was played by Anne Sofie von Otter. That again was James Levine conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Which brings us, ladies and gentlemen, to the Pachelbel Canon, a long-awaited moment for some of you, I'm sure.
And the reason I'm playing it now is that the pizzicato arpeggios in this famous arrangement, they're not in the original score, sound very much like the plucked arpeggios in Mozart's Voi che sapete that we just heard. I don't know who made this arrangement, but I wonder if that's a coincidence. In any case, it's a good example of the technique we've been talking about in addition to being a, let's face it, an irresistible piece.
[music excerpt: Pachelbel, "Canon in D"; Paillard Chamber Orchestra/Paillard]
[sound: gunshot and breaking glass; the music stops]
Hey! What? Man, that was... I was... Somebody seems to... There he is! Wait a minute! He's on the roof of the building across the street! But he's obviously running away! I can't see him anymore! Man! He shot out the CD player from across the street! I wonder if that's the same guy who called earlier. I'll bet it is. I mean, it's gotta be, right?
Hey, I ought to report this to the police. But in the meantime, luckily I've got another CD player here. Of course, it's a portable one my wife uses when she jogs, but I'm sure I can patch it in here. There. That ought to do it. Gotta calm down here. Man, I call that censorship. Well, what are you gonna do?
[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 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 105.
And this is Peter Schickele, glad to be alive, 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]
If you'd like a 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, Minnesota, 55403.