And now, Shickley Mix. Ready, Mr. Shickley? Need you ask? Here's the theme.
Well, 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.
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 farsighted 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 of the songs that I had learned.
I had no 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 la 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 restaurant. 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 Mariottes? I said, no, it's not Mariottes. It's a little bit of a
music or what? He said, you're right, it's Herb Alpert. So, between the boom chick chick and the Tijuana Brass there, you'd think that the words would be, well, maybe a nostalgic sentiment like
this. There's a small pension called Il Duccio, where my sweetheart and I used to smoocho.
But no. You want to know what they're singing about? Here, let me get the booklet. Track eight.
Okay, so it's a bunch of people confronting Lucretia Borgia, and they say, while the
orchestra goes boom chick chick, boom chick chick, Mafio 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, Amapiano'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, you know, this is all over boom chick chick, boom chick chick. Give me a break.
What is this? Lucretia Borgia goes to Disneyland? And you know, in the words of Signor Dave Berry, I'm not making this up.
Part of the prologue to Donizetti's opera Lucretia Borgia, sung by Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, and a bunch of guys, conducted by Richard Bonning.
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 of these pieces, and I'm not
going to go into too much detail about the 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, 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.
Lederhosen ist vermass, und schon geht's jodeln los.
Das Jodeln ist mein größtes Freu, zum Jodeln hab' ein jederzeit. Gejodelt wird zu jeder Jahreszeit.
Es ist beliebt auf der ganzen Welt.
Gejodelt wird zu jeder Jahreszeit. Es ist beliebt auf der ganzen Welt.
Gejodelt wird zu jeder Jahreszeit. Gejodelt wird zu jeder Jahreszeit.
Gejodelt wird zu jeder Jahreszeit.
Standing in the kitchen drinking coffee in your morning gown. Standing in your morning gown.
I was looking out the window. Thinking about leaving staring at the puddles on the ground.
And the rain was coming down. Mama, I don't want to go. In your house I feel at home.
You know I hate to leave you. Won't you write a note or telephone?
The years go by like minutes.
Soon I'll be a grown man with a job and children of my own.
With a family of my own. standing in the doorway early every morning as i leave the kitchen i will moan to my honey i will
moan baby i don't want to go outside so mama if you love me just as one time let me stay at home
you know i hate to leave you just as one time let me stay at home Mama, if you love me say it, so can let me stay here.
That you have been covered, you lie in the sand, stretched out.
On a pointed stone, the name of your love, hour and day.
The day of the greatest joy. The day. The day I gave to you.
From all of us there is a broken ring.
My Lord, in this wake you now recognize your face.
On the bottom of his ring. Where else? Oh, Rhine.
Oh, for all so nice and sweet, my hands, oh, for all so nice and sweet.
Oh, for all so nice and sweet. Oh, for all so nice and sweet.
Our suite called Basic Boomchick, and certainly covering a lot of emotional territory. We began with some great tuba playing, a very small tuba, maybe a baritone or something,
but whatever it is, it sure sounds funky. Tune is called A Lederhosen ist so fein, A Lederhosen ist so fein, and that's the Original Nackernquintett.
From an album called Die schönste Jodler der Berge, The Most Beautiful Jodlers of the Mountains.
Then we had from an old LP that I love by the Boscovsky Ensemble, Creampuffs aus Wien.
Beautiful waltzes, mostly waltzes and lendlers, polkas and gallops from the late 18th century and the 19th century. And like the one you heard, it 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 or small ensembles.
Anyway, that was a waltz, I guess it just says Dances of Old Vienna by Vincenz Stelzmüller, 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, Mark 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 Fluss, On the River, I'll just read a few of the verses, You Who Backed Me.
The last verse is, 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, you know, it 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 Schickly, you can call me Schick. If you want to get your oompah oompah fix, you can get it right here on Schickly Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Boom Chick and Beyond, or to use the layman's term, oompah and beyond. You know, it's true. Musicians usually say boom chick and beyond. There's no such thing as boom chick and beyond.
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 going to make sure it's set on piano. I usually prefer the 99. 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 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 and then you got somebody to do heart and soul on the top 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
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 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 if you listen to the strings that's exactly what they're doing see you in about 12 minutes so
so so so so so so so so so so so so so
so so so so so so
Okay, advanced boom chick. We began with Dove Sono from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and that was sung by Kiri Takanoa.
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 Georgian.
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 UL Levy conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
And then finally, from a terrific album called the Jaino, I guess you say that, Jaino Music of Peru and Our Huli Album, Volume 2.
That was Akel Molilacito, played by the Banda Philharmonica Adahina.
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 um pas almost completely at this time. Um. Um.
A favor to an instrument whose only association in many people's minds is um pas. And I refer, of course, to the tuba. Here's some pretty impressive um pas-less tuba playing.
The Romanian dance number two by Dimitru.
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 Shickley, you can call me Schick. If you want to get your um pa um pa fix, you can get it right here on Shickley 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. I'm going to be playing the Pachelbel Canon a little bit later. That's right, folks. This is a Shickley 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.
I hate it when this happens. Hello? Well, yes. I guess it qualifies as a war horse. Yes, that's true. And movie.
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 Boom Chick and Beyond. So far, we've been dealing with the Pachelbel Canon. We've been dealing with Oom Chick and Boom Pa. Now we're ready for the Beyond.
Our last suite deals with an accompaniment figuration that might be thought of as an exploded Oom Pa.
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 voice, 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.
Will you stay, said he, forever match?
Ah, because the world is round, it turns me on.
Because the world is round.
Ah, because the wind is high, it blows my mind.
Because the wind. Is high. Ah.
Love is new.
Love is all. Love is you.
Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry.
The Four Folk Song Upsettings, sung by Dana Kruger, mezzanine soprano, and performed on the piano by Peter Lurie, 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.
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 se pete, sung by Carabino, who was played by Anna-Sophie von Otter, that again was James Levine conducting
the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Which brings us, ladies and gentlemen, to the end of this week's episode of The Beatles. Welcome 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 se pete 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.
Hey!
What?
Man! That was, that 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?
And that's Sickly Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
and 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 PRR,
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 Shickley, 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.
Bye. Bye.
Bye.
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, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
55403.
Bye. Bye. Bye. P-R-I, Public Radio International.