If It’s a Folk Song, It Isn’t Stealing

Schickele Mix Episode #109

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1996-08-28
“Peter, are you ready?”
If I were any readier, I'd have to take a downer.

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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.]

All that later tonight right here on WNIB.
Now we invite you to stay tuned for Schickele Mix and Peter Schickele along with everyone else is getting tired of all of the winter weather and the snow and of course the cold.
Are you ready, Pete, to have the temperatures go up, up, up?
If I were any readier, I'd have to take a downer.
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.
But here's a good deal, our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this, this very radio station where I'm
given the wherewithal to produce incredibly concentrated nuggets of musical scholarship, which nuggets are then distributed at large by PRI, Public Radio International.
If you asked me to make a list of my favorite movies, not a list of the best movies of all time, I don't go for that absolutist kind of thinking, but just my favorite movies, quite a few of them would be sort of in the cracks comedies like Shoot the Piano Player, Beat the Devil, Local Hero, and the list would definitely include A Hard Day's Night, the
Beatles' first movie.
I think it came out in 1964, that was of course before VCRs, and I probably saw that thing about a dozen times in the first year it was out. The word I would choose for the movie is exhilarating, alright so it gets a bit coy at times, but in general, Richard Lester and Alan Owen found a way to compliment the great songs and endearing personalities of the Fab Four.
I felt buoyant every time I walked out of the theater.
I love being exhilarated.
There was an entertainment magazine in New York then that had thumbnail reviews of all the movies that were playing in town, and when A Hard Day's Night opened, they ran a brief paragraph dismissing it as just another rock and roll exploitation movie. Now you youngsters have to remember that this was before the Beatles had been deified. But somebody at the magazine must have caught on that all these intellectuals and trendsetters were seeing the movie and loving it. So guess what?
A couple of weeks later there was a different and highly flattering description of the movie. So much for the courage of your convictions. Anyway, I was teaching at Juilliard at the time, and there was a musicologist there who saw the flake and loved the songs, and he said, if this were the Renaissance, composers would be using those songs in masses.
What he was referring to is the fact that early masses were organized around a cantus firmus, a long note melody that was based on Gregorian chant.
It was usually sung by the tenor.
In fact, the name tenor comes from the same root as tenacity.
It means the part that holds those long notes. But in the Renaissance, composers started basing masses on popular songs of the day, and the most often used song was L'homme armée.
Now I want to play you part of a du-fi mass based on L'homme armée, but you know, those
composers, they wove the song into the general polyphonic texture.
They didn't make it stand out. In fact, it can be quite difficult for a listener to isolate the tune. It wasn't supposed to be a presentation of the song, a setting of the song in the sense of a frame for a painting.
It was mostly a unifying device for the composer. But when it comes to shiggly mix, no expense is spared to create a more fulfilling educational
experience.
If it will benefit you, the listener, I simply go ahead and do it and let someone else figure out how to pay for it.
So I flew over to London on the Concord and got together with the Hillyard Ensemble, one of my favorite vocal groups, and I said, fellas, I'd like you to book a recording session in whatever church has the best acoustics. Now I know the minimum session length is probably three or four hours, but all I want to record is about 35 seconds of this du-fi mass.
Money is no object here.
What I'd like you to do is make the tenor part a little bit louder than you would usually sing it so that my listeners can hear the cantus firmus. And you know what they said? They not only agreed to do it, but they said, say, Peter, would you fancy singing along with us on that part?
Well, I can't tell you what a thrill that was for me. And here's the result. The beginning of the Agnus Dei from du-fi's Missa L'homme Armée with the Hillyard Ensemble joined by your humble host.
The first two phrases of L'homme Armée, which is what you'll hear, go like this.
L'homme, l'homme, l'homme Armée, l'homme Armée, l'homme Armée doit en dute.
One should fear the armed man.
But you won't hear those words, by the way.
Since it's a mass, du-fi puts the words Agnus Dei, peccata mundi to the melody.
Also, the cantus firmus doesn't come in immediately.
It begins about 10 seconds into the piece. Here we go.
Agnus Dei.
Agnus Dei, peccata mundi, l'homme Armée, l'homme Armée, l'homme Armée, l'homme
Armée, l'homme Armée.
Part of the du-fi Missa L'homme Armée. What beautiful music that is. And you'll hear more of it later, sung by the Hilliard Ensemble, without the colorful, but ultimately unnecessary contribution of yours, truly.
So the cantus firmus of a mass might very well be a popular song, but used in a very
subtle way.
What if you went to mass and heard the choir sing this?
Now, unless you're an extremely sophisticated listener, you wouldn't think twice about it.
But if you heard the tenor part alone, you might think, I know what that is, or at least,
that sounds familiar.
And it is familiar.
Speed it up and put different words to it, and you've got this.
The Beatles, in all their beatitude, singing If I Fell from A Hard Day's Night. So now that you know what the cantus firmus is, let's hear that portion of the Missa If
I Fell again.
If you listen very carefully, you can hear the tune in the middle part.
Now, in case you think that I'm being unduly flippant or even sacrilegious in using the
title Missa If I Fell, let me say that that's exactly what it would have been called in
the Renaissance.
L'homme armée happens to be a song about war, but some of the other songs used for masses back then were love songs, just like If I Fell.
But let's get back to l'homme armée.
Here's a suite with four numbers in it.
An unaccompanied singer presenting the whole melody, an instrumental rendition of a chanson based on it, and then the first two sections of the Agnus Dei from Dufay's Missa l'homme
armée.
You can hear the song emerging in different parts of the texture, sometimes more prominent,
sometimes submerged.
And finally, what might be called a worked-out improvisation based on the song by a group that specializes in but does not restrict itself to early music. The l'homme armée suite lasts about eleven minutes, after which I will return completely
unarmed.
L'homme armée.
L'homme armée, l'homme armée quelque lute.
[No speech for 540s.]
L'homme armée quelque lute.
[No speech for 24s.]
L'homme armée, l'homme armée quelque lute.
The L'homme armée suite began with a complete rendition of the anonymous tune sung by Frank Kelly.
And that was followed by a setting by Robert Morton, who died in 1476.
These are both from an album by the Boston Camerata under the direction of Joel Cohen.
The album is called L'homme Armée.
And then we heard the first two sections of the Agnus Dei
from that beautiful Missa L'homme Armée from Guillaume
Dufay, who died in 1474.
And that was the Hilliard Ensemble, all by their glorious selves.
And then finally, that sort of improvisatory thing was done by a group called Calliope.
And we heard soprano recorder, viol, sackbutt, cornetto, and tambourine sort of being played in an Eastern technique with the fingers on the edge while you sort of shake it. That whole thing was just a large tambourine used as both a drum and with the jingles.
The group was Calliope.
And me?
You can touch me if you want.
I'm the guy who once sang with the Hilliard Ensemble.
Peter Schickele is the name, and the show
is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
When it comes to appropriating popular songs for what we might call concert pieces, the main difference between now and the Renaissance is that Dufay didn't have to worry about copyrights.
Bizet never pretended that he wrote the melody of the famous Habanera in Carmen, but he thought it was a free-floating folk song.
He didn't realize that its composer was alive and well. More recently, Stravinsky wrote a piece based on Happy Birthday, only to find much to his chagrin that it was under copyright.
And the same thing happened with Richard Strauss and Funiculi
Funicula.
We make a distinction, at least in this country,
between popular songs and folk songs.
The French term chanson popular, by the way, points up the dangers of trying to translate from a foreign language using nothing but a knowledge of cognates.
The proper translation of chanson popular is not popular song, but folk song, song of the people.
We use the term folk song in several senses, one of them being a song that's been around a long time
and nobody knows who wrote it, which means it's fair game for composers. Today's show is called If It's a Folk Song, It Isn't Stealing.
Many composers who wouldn't dream of borrowing a theme from another composer's symphony feel perfectly free to use large swatches of folk song in their pieces. Their enthusiasm for this form of legal larceny is dampened only when they find out that it's not legal, that is, that the song is not in the public domain. Incidentally, I'm not putting those composers down.
I'm one of them myself.
And in fact, I wish there were some way,
without endangering composers' livelihoods, of making it easier to refer to the works of others.
As I said before, you didn't have to worry about that in the old days, and you still don't have to worry about it
with the old songs.
After all, what really matters is what you do with them.
Here's a Russian folk song, first sounding very Russian in Mussorgsky's opera Boris Gudnoff, and then sounding not at all Russian in a string quartet by Beethoven.
[No speech for 251s.]
Two uses of a Russian folk song. The first from the coronation scene in Mussorgsky's Boris Gudnoff that was the Victor Symphony Orchestra and the Victor Chorale conducted by Nikolai Berezovsky.
And then the scherzo movement, that is the trio of the scherzo movement from the string quartet by Beethoven Op. 59 No. 2
that was the Amadeus Quartet that was one of three quartets that were commissioned by a Russian was he a count, I think, Razumovsky?
And he asked that a Russian song be used in each quartet.
Beethoven did it in the first two quartets but he sort of, I guess, lost his interest by the third.
Now to Beethoven that was an exotic theme that he Germanized. But sometimes composers find music right in their own backyards songs that have been around for years without the composers knowing about them or maybe knowing about them but not paying them much mind. Here's a Shaker hymn sung by a member of the Shaker sect which has always, I think I'm correct in saying, sung unaccompanied.
Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free, tis the gift to come down where we ought to be and when we find ourselves in the place just right we'll be in the valley of love and delight
when true simplicity is gained to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed to turn, turn, we'll be our delight till by turning, turning we come round right Sister R. Mildred Baker and somebody else unidentified singing Tis the Gift to be Simple which dates back at least as far as 1848.
Now I must say it seems a bit contrary to the spirit of those words to set the song like this.
[No speech for 27s.]
Hey, Beethoven felt no responsibility to make his Russian theme sound Russian and Copland feels no compunctions about setting his Shaker theme bombastically.
Theme, in fact, is the key word here. Once appropriated, the songs become themes in a classical, more or less abstract composition and are subject to the varied treatments such themes, through years of experience, have come to expect. Actually, you know, to be fair, the main section in Appalachian Spring that uses the Shaker hymn
does have quite a simple, modest feel.
[No speech for 131s.]
Aaron Copland conducting 15 players in an excerpt from the original version of Appalachian Spring.
The band had to be small enough to fit in the pit of a small theater.
The excerpt we heard earlier was from the full orchestra version played by the London Symphony Orchestra. Copland didn't think he liked cowboy songs much when he started working on Billy the Kid, but as he checked them out and thought about them, he found his attitude changing.
I think what happened was that he discovered what Bartok once commented on.
The simpler the song, the more latitude the composer has in setting it.
Here's a pretty simple old cowboy song.
Old Payne's a good pony, he paces when he can.
Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
I'm leavin' Cheyenne and I'm off to Montaigne. Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
Go hitch up your horses and give them some hay.
I'm sorry young lady, my horses won't stay.
My horses ain't hungry, they won't eat your hay.
My wagon is loaded and rollin' away. Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
My foot's in my stirrup, my bridle's in hand.
Goodbye young lady, I'm leavin' Cheyenne.
I'm leavin' Cheyenne and I'm off to Montaigne.
Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
[No speech for 29s.]
Glenn Orlin, a bona fide cowboy by the way, singing Goodbye Old Payne.
Copeland used this song beautifully in Billy the Kid. But Orlin sings a different version than the one Copeland knew.
That's the pesky thing about folk music. Can't pin those darn songs down.
Copeland's version is the one I grew up with.
Not Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
But Goodbye old Payne, I'm a-leavin' Cheyenne.
What I love is the way Copeland takes notes from the theme and turns them into an accompaniment figure so that the melody is sort of accompanying itself.
It's very sophisticated and simple at the same time.
Now I'm going to start a little bit before Goodbye old Payne comes in
so that you can sort of get the context.
[No speech for 18s.]
Orlin, a-leavin' Cheyenne.
[No speech for 11s.]
Orlin, a-leavin'.
[No speech for 87s.]
Aaron Copeland conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and an excerpt from Billy the Kid which makes lovely use of the cowboy song Goodbye old Payne. And I use the word lovely advisedly.
When you hear a cowboy singing it, you might not say lovely, but that's the way Copeland uses it. Way back when I was a teenager, I studied with the composer Roy Harris. I once asked him his opinion of Stravinsky and Harris said, well, he's a good folk song arranger.
That was, of course, a dig.
Not an accurate observation, at least as far as I'm concerned. The use that Copeland and Stravinsky made of folk songs went way beyond mere arrangements and Roy Harris knew it. That wasn't the first nor the last time that one composer has dissed another.
Even back then, in 1954, my name was Peter Schickele, but the show was yet to be Schickele Makes from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about composers who have been inspired, and I mean inspired, by folk music from their own backyard.
Music that was there all the time, but that they may not have paid much attention to during their student days when they were studying the Franco-German classical tradition in the belief that they were acquiring all the ingredients of, or at least influences on, what was to become their style.
Bartok was one such composer.
He spent a great deal of time collecting folk music,
mostly in central Europe, and the results of his efforts influenced him so much that sometimes even when he isn't quoting folk material, it sounds as if he might be.
I can't remember who it was who said, always compose your own folk songs.
Maybe somebody who had been caught in the jaws of a copyright trap. Anyway, it wasn't always with Bartok, but as far as I know, he didn't borrow anything directly for this piece. With some composers, it gets so that you can't always tell.
[No speech for 419s.]
That was the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, playing the last movement of Bartok's Divertamento for String Orchestra. And I do believe we have time for a tidbit here. This is a fanfare and a couple of songs for the fool that Shostakovich wrote for a Russian production of King Lear.
This contains one of the most surprising, one of the most sock-knocking-off folksong quotes I've ever heard.
And by the way, it has absolutely nothing to do with the original words or even the original context of the song.
Go figure.
[No speech for 96s.]
Dmitry Shostakovich.
Music for King Lear.
The words of that first song apparently have to do with
Meet Me in the Bushes and stuff like that.
Nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas.
That was Stanisov's Suleymanov with the Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra Berlin, conducted by Mikhail Yurovsky.
When Aaron Copland was asked in an interview about the score for Billy the Kid why he hadn't used Home on the Range, he said that he was tempted but, after all, you have to draw the line somewhere. But maybe he also knew that there was a copyright battle going on over Home on the Range at about that time.
You never know.
Best to stick with P.D. material. Stuff that you know is in the public domain.
Like this.
[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.
We thank you, 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 109.
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.
Hey, you are looking good.
See you next week.
[No speech for 148s.]
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