‘And How Would You Like that Prepared Sir?’ ‘Rhythmically, Please.’

Schickele Mix Episode #106

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1996-08-07
“Peter, are you ready?”
I'm about as ready as they come.

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Transcript

[This is a machine-generated transcript, cleaned up and formatted as HTML. You can download the original as an .srt file.]

And now, Schickele Mix. Ready, Mr. Schickele?
I'm about as ready as they come. Here's the theme.
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. Almost as good as the fact that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this fine radio station, where I'm provided with this...
Well, a lot of personality is what this studio has, and after each program has been perpetrated, it gets sent out to the world at large by PRI, Public Radio International. Drummers. Can't live with them, can't live without them. I suppose, when you're talking about different ways to accompany a melody, the old drum beat has got to be one of the oldest.
Right up there with the apping three. Foot tapping, hand clapping, and finger snapping. I think I've observed before that the Western classical music tradition during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries is actually unusual compared to world music as a whole in how little use it made of drums.
Aside from timpani, drums were hardly ever used, and even the timpani usually showed up only in the loud parts.
Early revivalist performances of medieval and renaissance music often used no percussion because the written music that has survived includes no percussion parts.
But if you look at the paintings of that period, there are plenty of depictions of drums and other percussion instruments.
So the musicologists figured out that the percussion parts weren't written out, they were improvised. And as a matter of fact, if a musicologist a few centuries from now should discover a trove of big band parts from the 1930s and 40s, and had no photographs or recordings from the period, he might very well present performances to his contemporaries using no drums, because it was quite common for the drummer to read off the first trumpet part.
This was not because of laziness on the part of the arranger, it was just that you wanted to give the drummer free rein to drive the band as he saw fit, but you also wanted to give him something to follow to remind him of what was coming up next.
Imagine hearing a big band chart without a drummer.
In jazz, the drummer is the only guy who never stops playing.
Well, that's not true. He often stops playing when the bassist takes a solo. Because the bass is so soft compared to the other instruments.
And I must say that sometimes that gets tedious.
Especially in a club, it can be very hard to hear the bass.
So what you've got is, there's no accompaniment at all, no rhythm, no harmony, just an unaccompanied melody, which is pretty rare in our culture, being played by a barely audible instrument, which, when it's plucked, as it usually is, can't sustain a note longer than about a second or so, and that's if you're up close.
Of course, exactly the opposite is true when the drummer solos.
Now I've heard some good, varied, inventive drum solos in my day, but often it seems as if the drummer isn't so much taking a solo as he's throwing a tantrum. I worked very briefly with a folk musician once who had written a song that was very tricky to notate.
This guy was crazy. I mean, tragically crazy. He ended up committing suicide.
But he was telling me how this song of his was literally going to change the world.
He was going to start a new government based on this song, there was going to be a new kind of money called gingerbread money, and every once in a while he'd get so worked up that he'd sit down at a drum kit he had set up in his apartment and just flail away at those drums and cymbals for about five minutes.
Then he'd put the sticks down and continue the conversation.
Even when drum solos aren't loud, a little of it goes a long way with me.
Once I was staying in a hotel somewhere in Canada, I think it was, and I saw that a well-known jazz clarinetist was playing there in the evenings, so I caught him one night and, well, he was a good player, but he obviously picked up his accompanying trio in every town he played, so they didn't have much rehearsal time together, and the map was exactly the same for every number.
Opening chorus with everybody, then clarinet solo, piano solo, bass solo, drum solo, and everybody back in for the closing chorus.
Boring!
Hey, listen, John Beale, Bobby Thomas, all the other fine bassists and drummers I've known since Juilliard, if you're listening, please forgive me, but I think it's a drag to have a bass solo and a drum solo in every tune.
But I digress.
Because we're not dealing with drum solos today, we're dealing with accompaniments.
We are, in fact, continuing our irregular and highly inexhaustive survey of accompaniment techniques. On other editions of Schickele Mix, we've talked about drones, harmonizing, ostinatos, the time-honored oompah technique, arpeggios, and probably some others, too.
Today's show is called And Who Would You Like That Prepared, Sir?
Rhythmically, please.
Catchy title, huh?
I feel that what it lacks in concision, it more than makes up for in drama. We're going to start with a nice big dollop of melodies accompanied by drumming.
Now, I think I should mention, class, that in this contextual situation, when I say drumming, I intend it to be taken not in the narrow sense of employing membranophones percussively, but in the ontological sense of hitting something.
It may indeed involve hitting a drum with a stick, or it may mean the sound of two hands clapping, to paraphrase the Zen master, or the aural impact of the toe of one's shoe striking the floor.
Hitting one's little brother, however, even though he's probably had it coming for a long time, is not recommended, since it produces a dull and indistinct sound that doesn't travel well without an amplification system that he probably wouldn't wear if he knew why you wanted him to wear it.
The I'll Do a Melody, You Hit Something suite has seven numbers and lasts about 13 minutes.
See you then.
The I'll Do a Melody
[No speech for 24s.]
My mother called me to her bedside
And this is the word she said
Son, if you don't quit your rowdy ways Be in trouble all of your days
Be in trouble all your days
Poor boy, in trouble all your days If you don't quit your rowdy ways
Be in trouble all of your days
Will the judge say, boy are you guilty now
No judge, not guilty if you see
[No speech for 22s.]
The I'll Do a Melody
[No speech for 912s.]
Thank you, Jerry Mulligan. Speaking of basses, now we're going to expand the idea of rhythmic accompaniment to include pitch.
I'm talking about bass lines that keep the beat but have different notes like a melody. In fact, they are melodies. They're countermelodies.
But they have much less rhythmic variety than the main melodies because they never forget that one of their main jobs is to keep the beat trundling along.
The tendency of accompaniments to be rhythmically quite independent of the melody so that the melody stands out certainly holds here.
And it's implicit in the term countermelody that it should not try to get uppity and overshadow the main melody.
But it must be admitted that some of these bass lines garner almost as much attention as the melodies they underpin. The You Do A Bass Line, I'll Do A Melody suite has four movements. I'll be back in about 11 minutes.
[No speech for 681s.]
I'll Do A Bass Line, I'll Do A Melody suite
[No speech for 168s.]
Oh, picky, picky. Okay, let me just say that countermelodic activity rarely obviates the need for less obtrusive pulse and harmony generating quasi-melodic configurations.
Furthermore, without rhythmic differentiation, a set of pitch classes will usually fail to be construed by the listener as a melodic as opposed to an harmonic entity. If you hear Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt singing in close harmony, you don't think of it as three melodies, you think of it as harmonizing.
For something to be heard as a countermelody, it has to, of course, complement the melody, but it almost has to have its own rhythm.
I don't mean to be dogmatic about this, folks, and in fact, here's a nice borderline example just to underline my definition.
The main melody is in the accordion or concertina. That's the line the singer sings words to later.
And then there's a beautiful line above it played by the tin whistle.
The tin whistle line has mostly different notes from the main melody, but its rhythm is almost identical.
Does it sound like a countermelody or like harmonizing?
Okay, the chorus from Taker in Your Arms by Andy M. Stewart, along with a harmonizing countermelody above it.
I'm not going to come down on either side of the fence on that one.
Here are some no-two-ways-about-it countermelodies.
The durational dimension of the you-do-a-melody-I'll-do-another-melody suite measures in the environs of eight minutes,
subdivided by a duet of brief temporal interstices to prevent undesired, contential confluence.
And here are some no-two-ways-about-it countermelodies.
[No speech for 458s.]
The You Do a Melody, I'll Do Another Melody Suite.
We began with part of the prelude to the first act of La Traviata of Verdi.
That was conducted by Herbie the Kay and the Berlin Philharmonic.
All right, Herbert von Karajan.
And that was nice because you have the big famous melody in the strings first, and then the second time the cellos play it and the violins have this countermelody that first you can almost hardly hear, but by the end of the prelude, the countermelody has become the melody.
And then from some beautiful settings of folk songs by Luciano Berio, that was Kathy Berberian singing an Armenian song, Lucien Yelav.
That's apparently about the moon rising.
And that was the Juilliard Ensemble conducted by the composer. It has a beautiful countermelody in the clarinet, and the clarinet gets lower and lower throughout the whole rest of the song.
Finally, a piccolo comes in, you end up with two countermelodies.
And then finally, from the Gerry Mulligan Pianoless Quartet of the early 50s, that was Phrenise with Chet Baker on trumpet and Bob Whitlock on bass, Chico Hamilton on drums.
Certainly one of the best examples of countermelody that I've ever heard.
Here's an example of a piece that's a simple melody with a very melodic countermelody kind of bass.
[No speech for 15s.]
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 Munificent members.
It's 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 number 106.
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.
[No speech for 217s.]
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.
PRI, Public Radio International.
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Next comes La Rossignol, The Nightingale, a charming fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.
The cast includes Olga Trifonova and Barry Banks.
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