The Whole Picture Includes the Frame

Schickele Mix Episode #108

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1996-08-21
“Peter, are you ready?”
Have I ever not been ready?

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[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?
Have I ever not been ready? Here's the theme.
[No speech for 15s.]
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. And it is good to be able to report that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this forward-thinking, yet at the same time laid-back radio station, where I am given enough studio time to explain myself and enough rope to hang myself. And after these processes are completed, with a little music thrown in for good measure, the result is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
We're going to start right off today with three folk song settings.
The first and last songs are from the British Isles, the middle one from France. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to see if you can figure out which arrangement was made around the year 1800, which was made in the first half of the 20th century, and which was made in the latter half of the 20th century. Good luck! I call this suite the setter and the settee, even though it's not about a dog and a sofa.
I'll be back to collect your answers in about seven and a half minutes.
Sir Watkin intending the morning befriending Through the woods he's sending to hunt the wild deer,
Now slumbering, of course, the dreams of his beholder And proud of his saucer begins his career
And so does his sallies of hills and valleys Around him he rallies a train like a pier.
His hunter goes feekly, his stag howls run fleetly, The bugles sound sweetly, they raise a fat doe, Now turning and whirling, then losing and finding No obstacle binding, still forwards they go,
Only to the viewing, impatient, pursuing With ardour renewing, yet ever too slow.
With whoop and with hollow, his merry then follow, She schemes like a swallow and flies like the wind. Sir Watkin, however, who queens that she's never, Swam over a river and left them behind.
The day was fast closing, his way he was losing, The road was so posing, no path could he find.
A castle high frowning, the lofty though crowning, Deep twilight embrowning, hollow under his head, And fear the world bending, with steps so ascending, The cause our attending he cautiously meant. Now look the thought taking, and cracks the way breaking, He fell and awaking, the vision was fled.
[No speech for 18s.]
The day was fast closing, his way he was losing, The road was so posing, no path could he find.
The day was fast closing, his way he was losing, The cause our attending he peacefully meant.
[No speech for 206s.]
Away with the buff and the blue, Away with the cap and feather, I want to see my lass, Who lives in Hexhamshire.
Under the baby's eye and over the bars of the bayou, I want to see my lass, Who lives in Hexhamshire. The Setter and the Settee was our first suite. And now for the answers to our brain-tickling test.
The Setters were Haydn, Cantaloupe, and Fairport Convention. The Settees were Sir Watkins Dream, Lukuku, and the Hexhamshire lass. And the performers, we might call them the setting servers, were in the Haydn, Mary Lawson, Olga Tverskaya, Rachel Podger, and Oleg Kogan.
And the Cantaloupe, Kiri Takanoa, and the English Chamber Orchestra under Geoffrey Tate. And of course, Fairport Convention performing their own arrangement. Terrific, all three of them.
Now you may have detected a note of irony in my challenge to you before the suite to see if you could guess which song was arranged when. If you didn't guess correctly, either you have very little sense of musical history, which is fine, or you assumed that I was playing a very devious trick, to which I can only say, moi, and express my severe disappointment in your lack of faith.
The point is, of course, that folk settings reflect the Setter as much as the song.
Ostensibly a portrait of the song, a folk setting is just as likely to be a self-portrait of the portraitist.
Some composers, in fact, show little or no interest in evoking a song's original musical environment.
They simply use the tune as a catalyst for their own imaginations. They are inspired by the song, just as many a male artist has been inspired by a woman, even though when it comes right down to it, he doesn't really want to know that much about her. As a matter of fact, not knowing much about her probably enhances the inspiration for those guys. You notice I don't include myself among them. I'm a complete homebody who never looks at or even thinks about any woman other than his wife. And if you'll just sign here on this dotted line, the bridge is yours. Now, I don't necessarily pooh-pooh that kind of inspiration, by the way.
Even though placing a woman on a pedestal leads and should lead to complications in everyday life, by which I mean that women deserve to be treated as people and not ideals, it is nevertheless true that some great artists are inspired by ideals.
And I refer not only to the rarefied, one-way eroticism of Dante's yearning for Beatrice, but also to the more socially conscious yearning for universal love and permanent peace, which is just as unrealistic as a woman on a pedestal that has inspired so much beautiful religious art. Sometimes I think that the art inspired by ideals is about as close as we'll ever get to the ideals.
The thing is that- Oh, there goes the irrelevancy alarm. I guess I was straying from the point a bit. Wait a minute, wait a minute. It's printing out. I guess it wasn't reacting to irrelevance, after all. Let's see what it says.
Okay. Undue pessimism. Huh. Well, one man's pessimism is another man's realism, you know what I mean? One man's optimism is another man's Pollyannaism. Or, as my friend who's in the septic tank business says- never mind.
Anyway, men can be inspired by women in an impersonal way, and composers can be inspired by folk songs in an abstract way that owes little to geography or history.
Here's a little sweetlet containing two folk song settings with very different approaches.
It's as easy to think of the first number as a piece of chamber music by a fine German composer as it is a setting of a Scotch folk song.
It's sophisticated, it's cultured as in high culture, and it's euphonious.
The second number goes out of its way to be unpretty by salon standards.
It's gritty and rude and, to use a musicological term, in your face.
It partakes more of the bar room than the drawing room. Now, I don't know if it's really any more, quote, authentic than the first number, and you know what? I don't care, either.
When it comes to two pieces like this, the Schickele Mix motto is, why choose?
I call this sweetlet, set it high and set it low. What we hear is all we need to know.
See you in about eight minutes.
[No speech for 27s.]
May joy, nor pleasure, care she see.
For he and all she cries, alas!
And rain the salt till you rise for me.
The lass in you, the lass in you, The wayful day it was to me. For thee I lost my father dear,
My father dear, and brother sweet.
Thine ancient, the glory great, Their graves are growing grim to see. And by their lies the dearest land, They freely blest how I once knew. Knowing to be, thou cruel Lord, For through the air I drowned a wind, For through new art thou hast made sail,
I ne'er drowned all thy own fear.
It's salvation,
It's all thy shepherd's daughter dear, Keeping sheep all on the plain, Who should ride by the night with yon man, He'd got drunk by wine with me right for a little old day. Well he has mounted off his horse and quickly laid her down, And when he did it will a fairy rose her up again with me right for a little old day.
Since you have had your will of me, Pray tell it to me your name, So when our dear little babe is born, I might call him the same with me right for a little old day.
Sometimes they call me Jack, he said, Sometimes they call me John, But when I am out thinking so, Can't they call me Knight William with me right for a little old day? He's put his foot all in the stirrup and away he then did ride, She's tied a handkerchief around her waist, And followed up the horse's side with me right for a little old day.
She's run till she come to the river brink, She's fell on a belly and swam, And when she came to the other side, She took to our reels and she run with me right for a little old day. She'll run till she come to the king's high court,
She's knotted and she's ringed, There's none so ready as the king himself, To let this fair maid in with me right for a little old day. Good morn to you fair maid he said, Good morn kind sir said she, Have you a knight all in your court this day, Ever a-bed me with me right for a little old day?
Well have he robbed you of your gold or any of your store, Or have he robbed you of your gold ring, You wear on your little finger with me right for a little old day?
Well he ain't robbed me of me gold or any of me store, But he's robbed me of me maiden man, Which grieves my artful sore with me right for a little old day. Well if he be a married man then dang it he shall be, But if he be a single man then his body I will give to thee, With me right for a little old day.
The king has called all his men by one by two by three, Knight William used to be the foremost man, The one behind comes thee with me right for a little old day. O cursed be the very hour that I got drunk by wine, For to have a shepherd's daughter dear, To be a true lover of mine with me right for a little old day.
Well if you think me a shepherd's daughter leave to me alone, If you make me lady of a thousand men I'll make you lord of ten, And with me right for a little old day.
So then these two went to church, They went and then small things was done, She appeared like some duke's daughter, And him like a squire's son, With me right for a little old day.
Set it high and set it low, What we hear is all we need to know. And what we heard was Beethoven's setting of a Scottish song
Called The Lovely Lass of Inverness,
Performed by Marianne Kvechsilber, Stanley Hoagland, Vera Betts, and Honor Beelsma, Followed by the Young Tradition, Singing their rousing arrangement of the ballad
Knight William and the Shepherd's Daughter.
Two wonderful settings of songs from the British Isles, Back announced by someone who has done a bit of folk song collecting himself.
He once collected a folk song from a drunken classmate
At a post-graduation party, But he's not going to sing it to you now. His name, by the way, is Peter Schickele, And the show is Schickele Mix,
From PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about folk song settings made by classical composers, And in a couple of cases, some very sophisticated folkies.
The name of the show is The Whole Picture Includes the Frame.
Now when I said that composers don't necessarily try to evoke
The area of a song's origin, I didn't mean that they never do. Here's a bit of Gaelic music featuring the Irish bagpipes and fiddle, Followed by another folk setting by Haydn.
And this time, at least in the introduction,
Haydn definitely imitates the bagpipe drone
And unison melody texture that we'll hear in the preceding jig.
[No speech for 42s.]
My love was born in Eberdine
In the polished land that Ere was seen
But noot marks my head
So sad it ought to have failed me
His white copycat
Oh, he's a randon-roven lad
He's a brisk and a bony lad
He be tied with me I'm only one and four
And a boy with a white copycat I'll sell that rock, my real matau My good green mirror and hocket cow Day by my sell at heart and blood And follow the boy with a white copycat
Oh, he's a randon-roven lad
He's a brisk and a bony lad
He be tied with me I'm only one and four
And a boy with a white copycat
Oh, he's a randon-roven lad
He's a brisk and a bony lad
He be tied with me I'm only one and four
And a boy with a white copycat
Oh, he's a randon-roven lad
He's a brisk and a bony lad
He be tied with me
I'm only one
And a boy with a white copycat
Oh, he's a randon-roven lad
He's a brisk and a bony lad
He be tied with me
I'm only one
That was the White Cockade, set by Haydn and performed by Mary Lawson and cohorts, preceded by a bit of a jig called Brian Olin, played by Declan Masterson and a group called Patrick Street. Both Haydn and Beethoven wrote most of their folk song arrangements for publishers in England and Scotland. It was definitely a money-making proposition, as much as they may have actually enjoyed the work.
And Beethoven did write that he labored con amore. By the way, if you don't understand that, con amore means swindle and especially vicious kind of eel. Get it? Con amore eel?
There goes the pun punisher. Speaking of words, did you know that the adjective euphonius, which I used earlier in the show, didn't enter the language until 1774? It's younger than Beethoven. I wouldn't have guessed that.
You know, I love dictionaries, but I must say I'm a bit disappointed in the new edition of one of my favorites, the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. I still have the edition of that dictionary that a girlfriend gave me in college back in 1953.
And at least since then and until very recently, the biographical section in the back, you know, it gives the person's full name and dates and a brief description like American film director and producer or Scottish chemist and physicist or Hungarian statesman. Well, for the Marquis de Sade, the description was French soldier and pervert. And now, after all these years, they've changed it to French writer of erotica. Boring.
I know, we don't want to offend anybody, even people who kidnap young women and hold them prisoner and cruelly punish them at random.
Alright, okay. Can't argue with the irrelevancy alarm there. Anyway, Haydn and Beethoven. Haydn and Beethoven were in it for the money. But for Bartok, the folk music of Eastern Europe was one of the major influences on his whole compositional style.
Echoes of it are heard in even his most abstract pieces, but he also made some simple straightforward settings of folk material and his arrangement of seven Romanian dances is one of the most beautiful folk settings I've ever heard.
But before I play it for you, I'm going to play you about a minute of the Hungarian folk music group Musikas, so that you can hear an accompaniment technique in which the strings repeat chords without lifting the bow.
Now it's true that this is Hungarian and the Bartok suite contains Romanian dances, but it's hard to believe that the similarity between the Musikas excerpt and the opening of the dance suite is a coincidence.
[No speech for 443s.]
Bartok's Romanian folk dances, performed beautifully as usual by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, preceded by an excerpt from Hajnali Nota, a morning song played by Musikas.
I hope my pronunciation of that name is somewhere within the ballpark. That is not my strong suit. Although there is one foreign name that I can pronounce, if not correctly, at least easily, and that's Peter Schickele. I'm pretty good at Schickele Mix, too, from PRI, Public Radio International. The whole picture includes the frame. We're talking about folk settings here, and tidbit time is upon us.
Now, some people get pretty worked up about what constitutes truly authentic folk music. There are those who feel that, musically speaking, the only true folk are those who live way up in the hills or camp out on the prairie, and wherever they live, they certainly didn't go to college. And it's true that radio and television and recordings have dramatically changed the way most people, at least in this country, learn songs. It also tends to be true that the more money people make, the less they sing.
But there are still men and women in all walks of life who have learned old songs when they were young and keep singing them throughout their lives. Today, I'd like to play a true folk song in a true folk performance. You know, tidbit time on Schickele Mix is often an occasion for hilarity or astonishment, but this one is a very personal and touching one for me. It's a recording of my father, probably in his late 60s, singing an old German ballad and accompanying himself on his cheap Gene Autry guitar. Now, my dad was not a musician. He was an agricultural economist, and although he loved and felt very deeply about music, he was shy about performing, even among friends.
It was almost impossible to persuade him to play his old flute. We did have a little what we called family orchestra for a while, consisting of flute, violin, bassoon, and piano. Thank God for trio sonatas. But I'll bet we didn't actually play altogether more than half a dozen times. But Reiner did have a repertoire of four or five songs in German and French that he could be more easily coaxed into doing. This one is called Der schwarz brown ezimmer gesell. He said it was a medieval ballad, but the tune, at least in this form, sounds almost Schubertian to me, late 18th to early 19th century.
I'll tell you the story a bit later during the song.
[No speech for 83s.]
There once was a sparkling young mason who built a mansion for the Duke, a palace glittering with silver and gems and 600 windows. When the house was built, he lay down to sleep. The Duke's young wife came to the door. She called him twice and thrice. Arise, arise, my good mason. Now the hour has come. You have built my house so well. Now kiss me on my mouth. When they were both together and thought they were alone, the devil dispatched the chambermaid to spy through the keyhole.
O Lord, my noble master, come and see for yourself how the dark tanned mason kisses your snow-white wife. The Duke decreed, as he has kissed my beautiful wife, he must die. Hang from a gallows he has built himself on the shore of the Rhine.
When the gallows was built, the mason was led to the spot. The sparkling young mason dropped his eyes to the ground and bowed his head. As he mounted the ladder and reached the last rung, he said, my dear lords, grant me the power of a word. If the Duke's young wife were to come to your bedside, would you hug and kiss her or would you let her go?
The Archduke of the Rhine, a venerable white-bearded man, then said, I would hug her and kiss her and hold her dearly in my arms. The Duke himself then said, we should let him live, as there is none among us here who would not have done the same thing. And as the sparkling young mason walked away across the meadow, there stood the Duke's young wife in her snow-white surrey. And what did she pull quickly out of her pocket? A ring of red gold. Take it, take it, my dear fellow, take it for your reward.
And if you should find the wine too sour, drink sweet Malvasir, but if you prefer my lips, come back to me.
[No speech for 38s.]
And if you should find the wine too sour, drink sweet Malvasir, but if you prefer my lips, drink sweet Malvasir, but if you prefer my lips, drink sweet Malvasir.
And if you prefer my lips, drink sweet Malvasir, but if you prefer my lips, come back to me.
And if you prefer my lips, drink sweet Malvasir, but if you prefer my lips, drink sweet Malvasir, but if you prefer my lips, drink sweet Malvasir.
and I've thought a lot about how to translate Schwarzbraune. It's literally black brown, but that's not idiomatic. I want to get a term that sounds like the language of the old ballads, like idiomatic English of a few centuries ago. While looking through the Oxford Book of English ballads once for another project, I noticed the term nut brown several times, applied to both a man and a woman.
Now, I'm no scholar, but I can't help wondering if nut brown doesn't refer to people with gypsy blood.
Anyway, should it be the nut brown house carpenter? I'll keep you posted.
We're going to go out with two arrangements of a lovely French folk song called Le Folière. It's about a spinning girl, which you'll hear evoked in the first setting, reminiscing about when she was a youthful separatist. Now, the second version you'll hear happens to be the penultimate number in a suite of folk settings, so as a bonus, I'll go ahead and play the last one too, an Azerbaijan love song.
I'll see you in about eight minutes.
Oh yeah.
[No speech for 109s.]
And now
[No speech for 330s.]
First we heard two different settings of the French folk song low fuel air the first one The song was collected by the way by this arranger Joseph cantaloupe and that was sung by
Patricia Rosario with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir John Pritchard and then we heard an arrangement by Luciano Berio
sung by Kathy Berberian and
Apparently according to these liner notes the girl at the spinning wheel
Gave two kisses when a shepherd asked for one
Sale going on there and then the notes say that Berberian found the Azerbaijan love song on a Russian 78 recording and sang it phonetically able only to have the section in Russian translated to reveal a comparison between love and a stove
You know Mozart's opera the marriage of Figaro was a huge hit in Prague and when he went back later for the premiere of
Don Giovanni, he heard numbers from Figaro being played by the musicians in taverns and beer gardens all over the place It must be a wonderful feeling for a composer to have your tunes turned into folk music
The slow movement of his 24th symphony hasn't become quite that popular, but it's still pretty nice
[No speech for 14s.]
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. 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 number 108 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 108s.]
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 900 a
Minneapolis, Minnesota 554 0 3
PRI Public Radio International