1 00:00:00,370 --> 00:00:12,640 And now, Shickley Mix. Uh, Mr. Shickley, we're ready. Oh, yeah, hold on just a second. Here we go, and here's the theme. 2 00:00:27,880 --> 00:00:40,300 Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley 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. 3 00:00:40,720 --> 00:00:53,600 And it is good to express my gratitude for 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 right here on your dial. 4 00:00:54,480 --> 00:01:05,519 I guess that really dates me, doesn't it, saying right here on your dial. Anyway, this fine radio station right here on your digital readout, where they give me everything I need to do the show, 5 00:01:05,620 --> 00:01:14,460 which is then distributed all over by PRI, Public Radio International. Well, actually, they give me almost everything I need. 6 00:01:15,040 --> 00:01:22,380 Now, as you regular listeners know, Shickley Mix is sort of like a really good retirement home for LPs. 7 00:01:22,780 --> 00:01:32,660 They can live here, as hundreds of them do, and still make a meaningful contribution to society. But even I don't have occasion to play 78s very often. 8 00:01:32,980 --> 00:01:45,300 And this studio, although it still has a rotary dial telephone, does not have a turntable equipped for 78s. So for today's show, I've had to bring in my old portable phone, which is a phonograph. 9 00:01:45,840 --> 00:01:57,660 It's a wind-up, you know, so you could bring it on picnics, or take it to your friend's house if he didn't have a record player. You used to have to, especially with the portable ones, you used to have to replace the needles fairly often. 10 00:01:57,980 --> 00:02:10,220 And during the Second World War, steel was so scarce that they used cactus needles for phonographs. But I still have some unused steel ones, so it should sound pretty good. 11 00:02:11,360 --> 00:02:21,540 I was 10 years old when World War II ended, in Washington, D.C., and on Friday nights, my dad would take my brother and me to the movies. It was almost always a Western. 12 00:02:22,320 --> 00:02:32,560 My dad grew up in Germany, but he used to play Indians with his friends when he was a kid. Because of a series of books by, I think his name was Carl May, but I may have that wrong. 13 00:02:32,720 --> 00:02:44,800 He was a German author who wrote about Indian life, even though I don't think he'd ever been to North America, much less lived with Indians. Anyway, what I do remember is that my dad did not regard the Indians as bad guys. 14 00:02:45,040 --> 00:02:57,680 And our favorite Westerns were the ones in which the villain was a rustler, or a wealthy ranch owner, or a banker, whoever was being played by Brian Donlevy, rather than the Cowboys and Indians kind, 15 00:02:57,880 --> 00:03:10,700 where the U.S. Cavalry saves the day. Of course, Indians were almost always played by whites in those days, and the presentation of Native American music was about as authentic as the casting. 16 00:03:11,320 --> 00:03:23,560 When I was about 12, I loved listening to our copies of the New York Times, the name of the original cast album of Annie Get Your Gun. And for me, like millions of other Americans, Indian music sounded like this. 17 00:03:27,340 --> 00:03:38,800 Cute love, Shanae mocked in time Chawa uay, Uay Ahh 18 00:03:38,800 --> 00:03:46,520 a song for women songs for women. 19 00:03:46,540 --> 00:03:55,440 Like the Seminole, Navajo, Kickapoo, like those Indians, I'm an Indian too. 20 00:03:58,160 --> 00:04:07,560 Ethel Merman singing the beginning of I'm an Indian Too from Annie Get Your Gun. By now, the lyrics to that song are pretty embarrassing. 21 00:04:08,400 --> 00:04:18,860 And of course, what I really mean by that is that by now the lyrics are pretty embarrassing even to many white people. I assume they were always embarrassing to Native Americans. 22 00:04:19,459 --> 00:04:27,840 And the imitation of Indian music in the song is based on an inaccurate and condescending stereotype that had been around for a long time. 23 00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:37,780 You know, one rhythm you just about never hear in real North American Indian music is bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. 24 00:04:38,260 --> 00:04:46,660 Now, when I was a teenager, after the family moved to North Dakota, we made a trip one summer to Mesa Verde Park. And we went to the Mesa Verde Park in the Southwestern Colorado. 25 00:04:47,220 --> 00:04:54,980 And in the gift shop there, I heard for the first time records of actual Navajo songs and dances. And I bought some of them. 26 00:04:55,120 --> 00:05:06,860 And the amazing thing is that I still have a couple of those 10 inch 78s. Let me crank up the old phonograph here and play you one of them. 27 00:05:07,600 --> 00:05:10,520 This is a song called The Train to Gallop. 28 00:06:23,120 --> 00:06:52,430 Yo ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho 29 00:07:46,050 --> 00:07:58,810 The Train to Gallop, a Navajo song recorded at Mesa Verde, or at least somewhere there in the Four Corners area, probably in the late 1940s or early 50s. Let me turn this thing off here. 30 00:07:59,270 --> 00:08:11,470 The crank comes out and fits in under these little clamps. Hey, it's no Walkman, but it's still a pretty nifty machine. It's about the size of a portable typewriter, if you remember what typewriters are. 31 00:08:12,210 --> 00:08:25,150 It's certainly smaller than some of the boom boxes I see being carried around. So anyway, one of those records I bought at Mesa Verde had a song on it that I could play. It's a song that I particularly loved. I memorized the melody, which was lucky, 32 00:08:25,250 --> 00:08:37,870 since I seemed to have lost or broken the record itself. And decades later, I was still thinking about that song. I can't remember what it was called, but I do remember that the drum, instead of being continuous, 33 00:08:38,669 --> 00:08:43,309 stopped every once in a while, left out a beat, as in this Zuni song. 34 00:09:39,100 --> 00:09:48,480 That's a Zuni Pueblo Rainbow Dance song. Now to get back to my beloved Navajo song, I had always wanted to use it in a piece, 35 00:09:48,720 --> 00:09:57,780 but I could never figure out how to imitate that strange sort of nasal but powerful texture of Navajo vocalizing. 36 00:09:58,440 --> 00:10:09,500 Also, in addition to using non-European intonation, some parts of the melody slide around so you're not sure what the notes are, I mean in a classical music sense. 37 00:10:10,440 --> 00:10:21,440 Well, finally, three decades after getting to know the song, when I got a commission to write my first string quartet, I figured out what other composers had figured out before me. 38 00:10:21,660 --> 00:10:33,340 You don't have to imitate the texture. You don't have to figure out how to reproduce the pitches exactly. You can devise your own texture, perhaps making it pointedly different from the original. 39 00:10:33,760 --> 00:10:44,620 And you can devise your own notes for the slidey sections. In other words, I realized that there's not much point in trying to imitate the original as closely as possible. 40 00:10:44,900 --> 00:10:57,760 If you want to hear the original, then listen to the original. Instead of presenting the melody as an archaeological artifact, I used it as an inspiration for my own invention, and that freed me up, even though I stuck to it. 41 00:10:57,780 --> 00:11:09,320 It was pretty close to the song, as I remembered it. In place of a rather loud texture featuring a drum and strident voices, I had the cellist softly tapping a string with the wood of his bow, 42 00:11:09,860 --> 00:11:18,120 while the melody is played by the muted viola. The effect is sort of like a memory of the Navajo song, or a dream of it. 43 00:11:18,600 --> 00:11:28,980 And it was probably this passage that gave me the idea of subtitling the quartet, American Dreams. I'd like to play the quartet, American Dreams, in a different way than the original. I'd like to play that section of the piece. 44 00:11:29,440 --> 00:11:39,420 The Navajo song is interrupted, by the way, by a sort of a down-home waltz that's original. But before I do, I'd like to sing the song, since I no longer have the record. 45 00:11:39,740 --> 00:11:48,720 Okay, everybody, hey, hey, hey, hey, no phone calls, please. No complaints from the BIA. No hastily convened meetings of tribal councils. 46 00:11:49,160 --> 00:11:57,740 Let me just say right up front that I am fully aware that I cannot begin to do justice to this song. But I want to sing it so that you can hear it. 47 00:11:57,760 --> 00:12:04,360 You can hear how it was transformed when it became part of that most European of genres, the string quartet. 48 00:12:05,300 --> 00:12:15,920 Because the Navajo singing style is so sophisticated and so different from any singing that I've ever done, I want to say quite seriously that I'm not trying to be funny here. 49 00:12:16,140 --> 00:12:24,800 I'm just going to sing the melody as well as I can, and then play part of the quartet. Now, let me move back from the mic a bit here. Okay, here goes. 50 00:15:44,850 --> 00:15:50,670 The Audubon Quartet, playing part of the fourth movement of the string quartet number one, 51 00:15:51,290 --> 00:15:58,230 subtitled American Dreams, by a man who was born in 1935 and whose parents gave him the name 52 00:15:58,230 --> 00:16:04,770 Peter Shickley. I must say that that makes me very proud. You know, the fact that a mother and 53 00:16:04,770 --> 00:16:12,450 a father would name their child after the host of Shickley Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. 54 00:16:14,050 --> 00:16:21,490 Today's show is called Exoticism Begins at Home. On other programs, we've dealt with composers who 55 00:16:21,490 --> 00:16:34,470 use folk material from traditions that are close to home, culturally speaking. Today, we're talking about composers who use material from traditions that are culturally quite foreign. But exoticism 56 00:16:34,470 --> 00:16:46,710 doesn't necessarily have anything to do with geographical distance. During the years following my youthful infatuation with Annie Get Your Gun, I not only got some idea of what some 57 00:16:46,710 --> 00:16:59,350 Native American music sounded like, but I also got an inkling, and I know just an inkling, of what it's like to be an Indian in an Anglo society. For instance, once must have been the 58 00:16:59,350 --> 00:17:10,190 summer of 1961, probably. I remember sitting in a bar somewhere in the middle of the desert, I suppose in Arizona. It was in the middle of the afternoon, no one in there but me and the 59 00:17:10,190 --> 00:17:20,950 middle-aged bartender. She put a bottle of beer in front of me, and she said, we don't serve glasses. We get a lot of Indians in here, and you wouldn't want to drink out of a glass after they've used it. 60 00:17:23,190 --> 00:17:34,450 Separations created and maintained by social prejudices can make music that's growing in your own backyard feel pretty exotic. Of course, exotic is a relative word, but it's not always the case. 61 00:17:34,470 --> 00:17:45,430 The French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote a piece called Oiseaux Exotiques, Exotic Birds. In the beginning of the published score, he listed all the bird songs he'd used, 62 00:17:45,590 --> 00:17:53,190 and one of his exotic birds was the North American Robin. I feel extremely fortunate in having made 63 00:17:53,190 --> 00:18:03,130 quite a few sightings of that bird myself. Be that as it may, or conversely may not be, I think that the most interesting use of folk material by classically trained composers, 64 00:18:04,530 --> 00:18:13,250 is either when the composer quotes the melody but doesn't try to imitate the whole texture, or when they imitate the texture but make up their own melody. 65 00:18:14,310 --> 00:18:20,770 Here's a pair of piano pieces that are almost a century old. Like my quartet, but unlike Annie 66 00:18:20,770 --> 00:18:27,450 Get Your Gun, this music doesn't hang a sign on itself. It makes no attempt to ensure that if you 67 00:18:27,450 --> 00:18:39,470 heard it cold, you'd say, hey, that's music about Indians. It just uses as inspiration what I assume is the story of the country. And I think it's a great way to express the value of the country. is an actual Omaha song in the first piece and a Navajo song in the second. 68 00:23:03,950 --> 00:23:11,930 Pawnee Horses and Navajo War Dance No. 2 by Arthur Farwell, played by Raymond Salvatore. 69 00:23:12,730 --> 00:23:18,710 As I said before, the fact that Native American melodies are used doesn't stand out in those 70 00:23:18,710 --> 00:23:31,210 pieces. But if you compare them with the typical, completely European-influenced American music of the first decade of the 20th century, and I, of course, exclude Charles Ives, who is definitely 71 00:23:31,210 --> 00:23:42,590 not typical, you realize that the exotic input here has made a difference. You know, it's interesting that in the second one, based on a Navajo song, the phrases often stopped at the end 72 00:23:42,590 --> 00:23:48,430 in a rather unusual way, just like the phrases in the song I used, the drum would stop at the end 73 00:23:48,430 --> 00:23:55,910 of a phrase. But of course, in the long run, influence usually runs both ways. For tidbit times, it's usually the same thing. It's the same thing over and over again. It's the same thing 74 00:23:55,910 --> 00:24:02,470 today. We're going to hear a simple, affecting number by a Mescalero Apache who has been open 75 00:24:02,470 --> 00:24:09,950 to both Indian and Anglo, or Euro-American, musical traditions. It's called The Handshake. 76 00:25:15,950 --> 00:25:18,750 The Handshake 77 00:25:22,070 --> 00:25:48,810 I was walking down the street, an Indian stopped me, a gray old man. His inflamed, tearful eyes, thin lips, long worn fingers. Oh, how horrible, how poverty had disfigured this once happy creature. He stretched out to me his red swollen hand, and he whispered and moaned and groaned. 78 00:25:48,830 --> 00:26:18,810 For money. I felt in all my pockets no wallet, watch or change could I find, cause I've left them all at home. The Indian waited, and his outstretched hand twisted and trembled slightly. Embarrassed and confused, I seized his hand and pressed it. Don't be mad with me, brother. I have nothing with me. The Indian raised his bloodshot eyes to mine, and his 79 00:26:18,810 --> 00:26:39,550 thin lips smiled as he returned the pressure of my chilled fingers. Never mind, brother, he said. This, too, was a gift, he said. I, too, felt that I received a gift from my brother, a handshake. 80 00:27:00,940 --> 00:27:05,940 Ayuhu pawande, ayena ugu 81 00:27:37,780 --> 00:27:48,350 The Handshake 82 00:27:48,350 --> 00:27:53,790 Handshake by A. Paul Ortega. The music at the beginning and the end, which I think is just 83 00:27:53,790 --> 00:28:02,590 beautiful, is adapted from the Zuni Sunrise song. So here's Pete's Law No. 3, and someday I'll get 84 00:28:02,590 --> 00:28:12,250 around to making up numbers 1 and 2. If you get two traditions close enough together, no amount of prejudice will keep them from eventually rubbing off on each other. 85 00:28:13,330 --> 00:28:23,170 I went into the jazz department of a big record store recently, and what was coming over the speakers was Native American singing accompanied by electric instruments and modern drums. 86 00:28:23,590 --> 00:28:32,970 Let's face it, everything is attracted to everything else, as Figg said to Newton. And then, of course, Newton took all the credit and became famous. 87 00:28:34,090 --> 00:28:42,750 Speaking of famous, nobody recognized me in the jazz department of that store, but in the classical department, a clerk came up to me and said, 88 00:28:42,850 --> 00:28:52,890 excuse me, but aren't you Sigourney Weaver? I took it in stride. No, I said, but I did see Doodles Weaver perform with Spike Jones when I was a kid, 89 00:28:53,010 --> 00:28:59,830 and I think he was related to her. Actually, I'm Peter Shickley, host of Shickley Mix from PRI, 90 00:29:00,650 --> 00:29:11,260 Public Radio International. Exoticism begins at home, but it doesn't necessarily end there. 91 00:29:11,960 --> 00:29:22,060 Now we're going to hear some European composers who, well, who kept track of what the Chinese were doing musically. That is, they were Chinese. 92 00:29:22,320 --> 00:29:30,820 Checkers. A little joke there. Not offensive, I hope. And speaking of that, I read a play review 93 00:29:30,820 --> 00:29:37,040 recently, and the critics said, great comedy is cruel. I'm not sure I agree that that's always 94 00:29:37,040 --> 00:29:49,060 true, but it certainly often is, at least. And perhaps that's why comedy runs afoul of the sanctions of what is now called political correctness. And I think that's unavoidable. 95 00:29:49,180 --> 00:29:58,380 You can't kid somebody who has a lot less power than you do without generating resentment. And if you kid somebody with a lot more power than 96 00:29:58,380 --> 00:30:10,080 you, you'd better be ready to get a black eye. You know, in a way, it's a shame about Annie Get Your Gun. Irving Berlin's score is very strong in its corny way. The lyrics are clever, 97 00:30:10,180 --> 00:30:21,500 and the tunes are natural and sure and apt. But the audience's attitudes, not only towards Indians, but also women, have changed enough to make the show feel uncomfortable, 98 00:30:22,740 --> 00:30:35,320 much. But you know, it's always a matter of degree and tone. When Gilbert and Sullivan first produced the Mikado, there were complaints from the Japanese embassy, but that hasn't kept it from becoming and 99 00:30:35,320 --> 00:30:41,800 remaining a classic. Making fun of people who are different from you must be as old as people, 100 00:30:42,400 --> 00:30:49,720 but the wise humorist acknowledges the possibility of warfare. When it comes to kidding, tone is as 101 00:30:49,720 --> 00:31:24,140 important as timing. Now, what could be a greater cliché for Chinese music than this? The child, 102 00:31:24,720 --> 00:31:30,400 from Ravel's The Child and the Sorcerers, bemoaning the disappearance of his china cup. 103 00:31:31,000 --> 00:31:38,220 The tone is so affectionate. And here's the china cup itself singing, using nonsense or humorous 104 00:31:38,220 --> 00:31:46,160 words like mahjong, but the feeling remains affectionate, partly because, and I think this is important, the kinds of music that are so important to the Chinese music, and the kinds of 105 00:31:46,180 --> 00:31:52,520 music being parodied in this excerpt, Chinese songs and American foxtrots, were both serious 106 00:31:52,520 --> 00:31:59,220 influences on Ravel, not just something he dragged in for a laugh. The Chinese tea cup will be 107 00:31:59,220 --> 00:32:07,440 followed by a piano piece called Pell Street, Chinatown, by a contemporary of Ravel. No slow boats here. 108 00:34:01,410 --> 00:35:40,040 An excerpt from Ravel's L'Enfant. 109 00:35:41,380 --> 00:35:50,540 Jeanine Collard, with the Orchestre National de la RTF, which stands for what? Radio Transfusion 110 00:35:50,540 --> 00:35:58,060 French, conducted by Lauren Moselle. And then Pell Street, Chinatown, from New York Days and Nights, 111 00:35:58,120 --> 00:36:08,500 by the American composer and pianist Emerson Whithorn, played by John Kosar. Two gentle plays on the sound of Chinese music. 112 00:36:15,400 --> 00:36:21,320 And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your continuing edification and personal delight, 113 00:36:21,780 --> 00:36:28,760 Sickly Mix is going to trace, in front of your very ears, a Chinese melody through three, 114 00:36:28,820 --> 00:36:41,160 count them, three centuries. In the first half of the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Renaissance man approaching his middle age of enlightenment, published a dictionary of music, 115 00:36:41,400 --> 00:36:51,740 which, being French, he called Dictionnaire. In the appendices of that work, he notated a Chinese song called Air Chinois. 116 00:36:52,140 --> 00:37:27,550 It went something like this. Air Chinois, played on Sickly Mix's exclusive, authentic instrument. 117 00:37:28,310 --> 00:37:41,270 Now, in the early 19th century, Carl Maria von Weber saw that dictionary entry and used that theme in his opera Turandot. Then in the 20th century, Paul Hindeman, a famous English composer, 118 00:37:41,290 --> 00:37:54,090 then living in America, wrote a piece based on themes by Carl Maria von Weber, one of which was, you guessed it, our old friend the Chinese air. So that modest 119 00:37:54,090 --> 00:38:00,750 unassuming song has traveled from China to France to Germany and to Yale 120 00:38:00,750 --> 00:38:10,910 University. Who knows where it will show up next or when? For me the answer to the second question is in about 12 minutes. 121 00:49:58,620 --> 00:50:08,940 The Chinese theme printed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's dictionary of music, followed by the Overture to Turandot by Carl Maria von Weber, and the 122 00:50:08,960 --> 00:50:19,940 Scherzo movement of Paul Hindemith's symphonic metamorphosis on themes of Carl Maria von Weber. The two orchestral pieces played by the Philharmonia under 123 00:50:19,940 --> 00:50:30,720 the baton of Nehemiah Yervey. Now I got a little bit carried away in a circusy sort of fashion there announcing those pieces. I think it is worth mentioning that that 124 00:50:30,720 --> 00:50:38,780 Chinese theme did lead Weber, particularly I think, to write music that was not typical of his or anybody else's music. 125 00:50:39,960 --> 00:50:51,540 In 1809. Hindemith perhaps not so much. We are almost out of time. I'm rushing a little bit here. I would like to show that this kind of influence is not restricted to classical 126 00:50:51,540 --> 00:51:03,400 music. We're going to go out here with a little bit of a Turkish folk song from the Turks on the Balkans. This is called Kostkum Var, followed by a cut from an LP by Carl Berger, 127 00:51:03,480 --> 00:51:12,520 the Woodstock Workshop Orchestra. And the tune is called Zenebim, or something like that, on a Turkish folk song as well. 128 00:52:28,200 --> 00:53:39,350 And that's Sickly Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the 129 00:53:39,350 --> 00:53:50,990 Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. And not only that, our program is 130 00:53:50,990 --> 00:54:02,570 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. 131 00:54:02,930 --> 00:54:13,750 Just refer to the program number. This is program number 110. And this is Peter Sickly saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain 132 00:54:13,750 --> 00:54:17,330 je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week. 133 00:55:31,140 --> 00:58:01,590 If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to 134 00:58:01,590 --> 00:58:09,150 Sickly Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickly Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 135 00:58:09,570 --> 00:58:16,970 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403. 136 00:58:18,130 --> 00:58:21,570 P-R-I, Public Radio International.