Announcer: And now, Schickele Mix. Ready, Mr. Schickele?
I'm about as ready as they come. Here's the theme.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
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. 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 umpah technique, arpeggios, and probably some others, too. Today's show is called "And How 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.
[music excerpt: Stravinsky, "Petroushka"; Columbia Symphony Orchestra/Stravinsky]
[music: Trad., "Nasori" (Gagaku); Kyoto Imperial Court Music Orchestra]
[music: Trad., "Entrada Salida de Pampa Cruz" (Huayno Music of Peru, Vol. 2); Conjunto de Cacho Hermogenes Romero]
[laughs] Indeed. The I'll Do a Melody, You Hit Something Suite had seven numbers and began with a brief excerpt from Petrushka by Stravinsky, and that was Stravinsky conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, the trumpet and drum there. Then we heard Pamela Warrick-Smith sing part of a song called Poor Boy, and clapping her hands very gently, not the big clap that you get going when you get the audience singing along with you. And then the third one, that terrific fiddle music, and the only percussion there, by the way, was foot tapping, is what I assume it is.
And that was a group called Fiddlesticks and they were playing Stirling Castle and Miss Ramsay. I'm not sure which one we heard, actually, or maybe parts of both. Then the solo guy singing with the drum, or somebody plucking along with him there, was by Oswald von Wolkenstein, who lived from 1377 to 1445. That song is called "Nu huss, sprach der Michel von Wolkenstein."
I don't know enough German to translate that whole thing, and they don't give it, but it's apparently about his family's adventures. And that was Bernhard Michaelis, the tenor. And then that drum, you know, I can't figure out what the relation and the rhythm between the drum and the voice is. I've had this record, I think, 35 years or something like that. I've always particularly loved that cut, but it doesn't seem like the drum has any relation to the singer.
I sometimes wonder if when they were recording it, they had the singer in the main studio, and the drummer was in an isolation booth, and they were feeding him the wrong track in his headphones. I don't know. Anyway, the next thing was from a nice album featuring hammered dulcimer, played by Karen Ashbrook with Sue Richards, playing Celtic harp. They form a group called Ceoltoiri. The name of this album is Celtic Lace, and we heard McHugh's and The Legacy.
Then that next really weird flute stuff with the drums behind was gagaku, the imperial court music of Japan. This is music that has been preserved from the 6th century, and it's very serious stuff. This piece is called Nasori, and it says, Nasori is a dragon dance dedicated to the victors in sports and games, classified as light music.
Those 6th century Japanese were certainly a fun-loving lot. And then we ended up with a terrific album called Huayno Music of Peru. And that was the last cut on the album, Entrada Salida de Pampa Cruz, the entrance-exit of Pampa Cruz. Two trumpets, and in the case of the Santiago trumpet, the instruments are made of joined cow horns, coiled to make a trumpet, or of a long wooden tube.
And terrific, raunchy trumpet playing accompanied by drums. My name is Peter Schickele and the show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. We're talking about rhythmic accompaniments here and we've heard a lot of drumming which reminds me of a nice musician's joke An anthropologist gets wind of the existence of a jungle tribe that has never been studied She gets very excited. She knows this could make her reputation.
So she goes down to a town at the edge of the jungle and manages to find a man who speaks some English and knows all about the tribe and is willing to be her guide. So they go into the jungle. And when they arrive at the village, the first thing she notices is the drumming. It's incessant. In fact, it goes on day and night. It never stops. And whenever she asks the guide about the drumming, all he says is, Drumming good. Everything fine as long as drumming go on.
When she says why? What does it mean if it stops? He just rolls his eyes to the heavens and says, Everything fine as long as drumming go on. Well, she stays there several weeks during which time there is not a moment of silence from the drums. As a matter of fact, she gets used to it. She gets to where she hardly notices it anymore. But when the time comes for her to leave, and she packs her bags and finds her guide, she suddenly realizes that the drumming has stopped.
With panic in her voice, she asks the guide, The drums have stopped. What's going to happen? And the guide says, Oh no! Bass solo!
[music: "Utter Chaos #1"; Original Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker]
Thank you, Gerry 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 counter melodies. 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 counter-melody 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.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, 4th Mvt.; Mainz Chamber Orchestra/Kehr]
[music: Blythe, "Chicago Stomp" (Boogie Woogie Blues); Jimmy Blythe]
[music: Karla Schickele (Jaspercat Music), "Two Men"; Beekeeper]
The You Do a Bass Line, I'll Do a Melody Suite Began with Lennie Tristano playing his East 32nd Street. Just amazingly virtuoso kind of playing, and there was some sort of apparently brouhaha when this album first came out because he fooled a little bit with the tapes of the bass line and stuff like that. But I have heard him play live and believe me, he could really play like that. It was just amazing. Then we heard a brief excerpt from the first Brandenburg Concerto by Bach.
One of the trios of the fourth movement performed by the Mainz Chamber Orchestra, Günter Kehr, conductor, and those two, the Lennie Tristano and the Bach, we had one bass note per beat. But in the next one, from an album called Boogie Woogie Blues, that was Jimmy Blythe, Chicago Stomp. These are all taken from piano rolls, by the way. There you get two notes to the beat.
They're usually the same note, but different octaves, so it really walks along there. And then finally, the last number in this suite was a tune called Two Men, and the group is Beekeeper.
And I, well I suppose, just to make sure I don't get into trouble with the FCC or something like that, I should admit that I'm engaging in a little bit of nepotism here. Two-thirds of the members of that group, Beekeeper, owe their existence on this earth to my wife and me. And that song was written and sung by my daughter, Karla Schickele.
That last name sounds familiar. Oh, that's right! Peter Schickele is the name, Schickele Mix is the game, from PRI, Public Radio International.
And how would you like that prepared, sir? Rhythmically, please. That's the title of the show, by the way. We've gone from drum beats to walking bass lines, which are a specialized kind of counter melody. And now we're going to open the window to countermelodies in general. They are accompaniments, in the sense that they accompany something, which is often regarded as a sine qua non for accompaniments, but they are rarely sufficient as accompaniments.
That is, countermelodies are usually used along with some other kind of accompaniment. It's sort of like, you might have a slice of bread with butter on it, or a slice of bread with jam on it, but unless you're really weird, you're not going to dine on butter and jam without bread. You see what I mean? I mean, the butter is the main melody, and the jam is like a counter melody above it, and the bread is your more basic...
Hey! There goes the irrelevancy alarm! What's that all about? This is absolutely relevant!
Wait a minute! It's printing out there. Let's see what it says.
Okay.
Underestimating the intelligence of your audience. Oh, picky, picky. Okay, let me just say that counter-melodic 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 counter melody, 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 counter melody, or like harmonizing?
[music excerpt: Stewart, "Take Her in Your Arms" (The Celts Rise Again); Andy M. Stewart & Manus Lunny]
Okay, the chorus from Take Her in Your Arms by Andy M. Stewart, along with a harmonizing counter melody 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 contentual confluence.
[music: Verdi, “La Traviata,” Prelude to Act I; Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan]
[music: Berio, Folk Songs, “Loosin yelav ...”; Cathy Berberian/Juilliard Ensemble/Berio]
[music: Dominguez, "Frenesi"; Original Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker]
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 K 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 counter melody that at first you can almost hardly hear, but by the end of the prelude the counter melody has become the melody.
And then from some beautiful settings of folk songs by Luciano Berio, that was Cathy Berberian singing an Armenian song, Loosin Yelav. That's apparently about the moon rising, and that was the Juilliard Ensemble conducted by the composer. It has a beautiful counter melody 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 counter melodies.
And then finally, from the Gerry Mulligan pianoless Quartet of the early 50s, that was Frenesi with Chet Baker on trumpet and Bob Whitlock on bass, Chico Hamilton on drums. Certainly one of the best examples of counter melody that I've ever heard. Here's an example of a piece that's a simple melody with a very melodic counter-melody kind of bass.
[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 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.
[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.
PRI, Public Radio International.
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