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.
[music excerpt: Canteloube, Songs of the Auvergne, “Lou Coucut”; Kiri Te Kanawa/English Chamber Orchestra/Tate]
[music: Trad. arr. Fairport, "The Hexhamshire Lass" (Nine); Fairport Convention]
Setter and the Settee was our first suite.
And now for the answers to our brain-tickling test. The setters were Haydn, Canteloube, and Fairport Convention. The settees were Sir Watkin's Dream, Lou Coucut, and The Hexhamshire Lass. And the performers, we might call them the setting servers, were in the Haydn, Mhairi Lawson, Olga Tverskaya, Rachel Podger, and Oleg Kogan. And the Canteloube, Kiri Te Kanawa, and the English Chamber Orchestra under Geoffrey Tate, and Fairport Convention performing their own arrangement. 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, or you assumed that I was playing a very devious trick to which I can only say, moi, and express my severe disappointment.
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 poo-poo 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 suitelet 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 suitelet, set it high and set it low. What we hear is all we need to know. See you in about eight minutes.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Four Scottish Songs, Opus 8, “The Lovely Lass of Inverness”; Marjanne Kweksilber]
[music: Trad., "Knight William & the Shepherd’s Daughter"; The Young Tradition]
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 Marjanne Kweksilber, Stanley Hoogland, Vera Beths, and Anner Bylsma, 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.
[music excerpt: Trad., "Brian O’Lynn Jig" (Heart of the Gaels); Declan Masterson & Patrick Street]
[music: Haydn, "The White Cockade" (Haydn: English & Scottish Songs); Mhairi Lawson]
That was The White Cockade, set by Haydn and performed by Mhairi Lawson and cohorts, preceded by a bit of a jig called Brian O'Lynn, 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 an especially vicious kind of eel. Get it? Con a moray eel.
[sound: the pun punisher]
Oh, there goes the pun punisher. Okay, man, I'm going to think twice. Speaking of words, did you know that the adjective euphonious, 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 and every- All right, 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 Muzsikas, 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 Muzsikas excerpt and the opening of the dance suite is a coincidence.
[music: Trad., "Hajnali Nota"; Muzsikas]
[music: Bartok, "Romanian Folk Danses (Sz 68)"; Orpheus Chamber Orchestra]
That was 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 Muzsikas. 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 all together more than half a dozen times. But Rainer 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 Schwarzbraune Zimmergesell. 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.
Once was a sparkling young mason, Who built a mansion for the duke, A palace glittering with silver and gems, And six hundred 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 sari. 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 Malvasier. But if you prefer my lips, come back to me.
Der Schwarzbraune Zimmergesell, sung by my father, Rainer Schickele. If you have kids, I hope you sing to them and with them. That was my dad's translation I read.
And he renders the title either as The Sparkling Young Mason or The Dark Tanned Mason. One of these days, I want to write variations on that song for a movement of a string quartet, 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 Lo Fiolaire. It's about a spinning girl, which you'll hear evoked in the first setting, reminiscing about when she was a youthful shepherdess. 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.
[music excerpt: Canteloube, Songs of the Auvergne, "Lo Fiolaire"; Patricia Rozario/Philharmonia Orchestra/Pritchard]
[music: Trad. arr. Berio, "Azerbaijan Love Song"; Cathy Berberian/Juilliard Ensemble/Berio]
First, we heard two different settings of the French folk song Lo Fiolaire. The first one, the song was collected, by the way, by this arranger, Joseph Canteloube, and that was sung by Patricia Rozario with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir John Pritchard. And then we heard an arrangement by Luciano Berio, sung by Cathy Berberian, and apparently, according to these liner notes, the girl at the spinning wheel gave two kisses when a shepherd asked for one.
A little 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.
[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. 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 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.