And now, Shickley Mix. Well, Mr. Shickley, looks like you're actually ready today. Just wind me up and point me towards the console. Here's the theme.
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. And our bills, it's good to know, are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts,
and by this excellent radio station whose very broadcasting captured me in its net. And they've kept me around to make these intoxicatingly educational shows,
which, as luck would have it, are distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. You know, it's bound to come out sooner or later. So I guess I might as well.
I'll come clean right now and admit that I am a member of a cult. Not a religious cult, a movie cult. No, it's not Rocky Horror. I've only seen that once. It's a John Huston movie called Beat the Devil.
And I suppose I've seen it 15 or 20 times, and I mean in movie theaters. It used to play pretty regularly on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the late 50s.
You knew you were surrounded by fans when there was a sort of expectant laughter before the jokes. Humphrey Bogart. Robert Morley. Gina Lola Brigida. Jennifer Jones. Peter Lorre.
Anyway, there's one scene in which a bad guy nicknamed the Galloping Major is playing the old upright piano in a bar. And sort of around the corner, out of sight, in another room of the bar,
Bogey is worrying that the Galloping Major might try to bump off one of the good guys. And Bogey says, well, as long as the Major is playing the piano, he can't be up to any mischief.
A few moments later, Bogey goes like, uh-oh, and gets up and rushes into the room with the piano. And there it is, playing by itself. The Galloping Major's long gone.
You may think you can tell the difference between a piano being played by a person and a piano being played by a mechanical role. But can you?
Remember, instruments may be mechanical, but they're programmed by humans. Here's your chance to find out if your musical nose, as it were, is acuter than Humphrey Bogart's.
Of course. Of course, to some people, nobody's cuter than Humphrey Bogart. Okay, for ten points, which piece is being played by a warm body and which by a robot?
Okay, Mead Lux Lewis, playing his honky-tonk train blues, followed by Jelly Roll Morton, playing the jelly roll blues. And the envelope, please.
Mead Lux Lewis was recorded live. The Jelly Roll Morton was a piano roll. But of course, the point is, that the piano roll was made directly from Morton's playing,
not by somebody with a piece of sheet music and a slide rule. The mechanical system was used to preserve and duplicate an original performance as faithfully as possible,
including, in the more sophisticated systems, dynamic shading. Remember, in the 1920s, phonograph recordings were still pretty low-fi. But if you had a good player piano in your home,
it was almost like being able to call Jelly Roll Morton up anytime you needed it. And say, Hey, JR, come on over and play for me. So that's one way of looking at mechanical instruments.
They're a way of making specific performances of music available to anyone, just like a phonograph. But another way of looking at them is to see them as a way of expanding the sonic palette.
For instance, why not write a piece taking advantage of the fact that a player piano is not restricted to what can be accomplished by ten fingers on two hands?
Both in terms of reach and rhythmic complexity. To boldly go where no pianist has ever gone before. Here are some examples of music written expressly for mechanical instruments.
No live performance was used to make the rolls or cylinders. Okay, the first and last of these four pieces are for player pianos,
and in between we'll hear a mechanical organ and a music box. I'll see you in about nine minutes.
Whew, beat me daddy, eight to the bar. Our mechanical instrument suite began with Stravinsky's Etude for Pianola, a kind of player piano,
and it continued with part of Hindemith's Suite for a Mechanical Organ. How about those drum solos, huh? That instrument was obviously more like a theater organ or a merry-go-round organ
than what Bach played on. And speaking of Bach, the third item, the one with the music box, was the trio of the fourth movement of a piece for nine instruments
called the Nono Nanette by P.D.Q. Bach. And then that last toe-tapping lollapalooza was Conlon Nancaro's
Study for Player Piano No. 3E. I guess you could work the pedals for that one with very small feet.
Nancaro has devoted much of his composing life to the player piano and has done things that you could never do in a live performance.
As usual, I was intimately involved in bringing the P.D.Q. Bach work to light, and it was a kick getting the music box made. There was a bit of time pressure, but somebody gave me the name of an outfit in Switzerland,
I wrote the music box part out on manuscript paper and sent it over there, and true to the Swiss reputation, the mechanism and cylinder with properly placed pins came back like clockwork,
exactly when they said it would. It was easy. So, why don't modern composers write for music boxes and music clocks the way Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven did? Two reasons, I think.
One is that the advent of the phonograph changed how we listened to music at home, and the other is that, well, to be quite frank,
most modern composers haven't written tunes that people want to wake up to, or hear every hour. In the 18th century, the same composers often wrote music for every kind of occasion,
from dances to church services, whereas 20th century classical composers have tended to concentrate on high art,
and usually very high art with a very furrowed brow. Now, I brought along my music box that plays part of
Webern's Variations for Piano, Op. 27. It's all wound up here, I'll just open the lid.
I was thinking of going into business, selling music boxes, featuring the greatest hits of the Second Viennese School, but I don't know, I don't think that they'd ever really move,
like pet rocks or piano keyboard neckties. It's just that I've always wanted to have a company and an office with my name on the door, you know what I mean?
You know what? That gives me an idea. Excuse me, just a minute here while I make a quick call. This won't take long. Just a second.
Hello? Is this the Lord High Executioner? Oh, come on, I'm just kidding. I know your title is Station Manager.
Listen, I was wondering, since I'm probably the main person using this studio, I mean, in terms of, well, anyway, do you think it would be possible
to have maintenance paint, you know, on the door, on the outside of the door,
Shickley Mix, Peter Shickley, proprietor, from PRI, Public Radio International? Yes, yeah, I can see that.
Of course, yeah, I know other people do use the studio. It's just that I've always, you know, wanted my name on the door. Well, it was worth a try. No, no, no, oh, no. Oh, no.
I wouldn't make a call like this while I'm on the air. Okay, well, thanks anyway. Bye. I hope they don't have the air check tape rolling.
So anyway, folks, as I was saying before I was interrupted by that phone call, there are many interesting things about piano rolls, and here's one of them.
In the 1920s, Igor Stravinsky supervised the making of piano rolls of his works, including the Rite of Spring at the Pleyel Studio in Paris.
Now, in those days, no orchestra could play the last section of the Rite of Spring as fast as Stravinsky wanted it. But on the piano roll, of course, it's up to tempo.
Now, here's a theory that somebody has come up with. It just so happens that Bartok, Copland, and Prokofiev all made piano rolls at Pleyel around that same time.
And they certainly would have been interested in hearing the Rite of Spring rolls. And all of them later wrote musical passages. And all of them later wrote musical passages that bear a strong resemblance to the sacrificial dance at the fast tempo,
not at the tempo they would have heard at an orchestral performance. For instance, when you hear the piano roll of the sacrificial dance,
followed by the last movement of Prokofiev's seventh piano sonata, you have to say, coincidence? I don't think. Well, maybe, but I doubt it.
Wowee! Two etudes in the key of adrenaline. The Pleyel piano roll of the sacrificial dance at the end of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring,
followed by Maurizio Pollini playing the last movement of Prokofiev's piano sonata number seven. Today's show is called Revenge of the Nerdy Instruments, and I'll tell you why.
Music boxes and player pianos and musical clocks have always been regarded as charming and fun, and perhaps of historical interest, but not really to be taken seriously,
in spite of the sporadic interest of serious composers. But after World War II, they were dealt a death blow as serious contenders,
when their twin functions of preserving performances and expanding performance possibilities
were quite suddenly taken to new and giddy heights by the development of audio tape recording and of computers and digital techniques.
First, someone figured out how to record on wire. When I was a kid, I knew somebody with a wire recorder. That must have been 1946 or 47.
But the trouble with wire recorders was that if the wire broke, there was no way to splice it. You could tie a knot, but it wouldn't go through the machine too well, to put it mildly.
Now, I think my brother and I must have had a tape recorder by 1949. We used to tape music from records. To accompany the 8mm movies we made.
Tape recorders not only permitted a quantum leap in the fidelity of recorded sound, but as soon as they appeared, people began to realize how they could be used to manipulate sound.
You could not only speed things up and slow them down, but you could play them backwards, and make loops, and combine many different layers,
and, very big and, you could edit with tremendous precision. After centuries and centuries of tinkering,
the musical inventors, not the practical instrument builders, but the nerdy idealists who wanted to preserve performances and release instruments from the physical limitations of the human body,
after almost a millennium of being treated like court jesters or society band leaders, they finally struck pay dirt.
When they invented the tape recorder, and then much later digital storage systems, they finally created what we may loosely call a mechanical instrument that has changed the face of music.
See, in the 1930s, the very best recordings of, say, the Boston Symphony or Duke Ellington's Orchestra, were no more than souvenirs of live performances.
They may have been in a hall, or they may have been in a recording studio, but they were live, real-time performances. But by the middle 1960s, not only far-out so-called experimental composers,
but even the maximally mainstream Beatles, were making recordings that could not be duplicated live. For better or worse, the recording was the work of art.
Take something as simple as a fade-out at the end of a song. Properly used, a fade-out is a wonderful thing. In a song like Martha and the Vandellas Dancing in the Streets,
it conveys the feeling that the song is going to go on forever. It's a cosmic block party that will never end. In one of the cuts on the Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain album, it has a cinematic effect.
You feel the procession moving down the street into the distance. But when the Beatles performed live, they put definite endings on the songs.
Because trying, in a live situation, to imitate an electronic fade-to-nothing never works. It always sounds phony. At best, it comes across as cute. But it's certainly not evocative.
Right from the beginnings of electronic music, or tape music, or whatever you want to call it, there have been two basic approaches, which by now have completely merged.
One is to manipulate pure tones produced by oscillators, which, by the way, is what a Hammond organ does. And the other is to manipulate recordings of natural sounds. You could hit two stones together,
you could bang a saucepan with a spoon, you could record the wind in the trees, whatever you want. I'm going to play you a few cuts from an LP that came out in the 1950s, on which the composer Vladimir Usachevsky
demonstrates some basic tools for tape composition. Most reel-to-reel tape recorders have two speeds, one twice as fast as the other.
So anything you record, you can also hear an octave higher or lower. And if you've got two machines, you can repeat that process.
All the notes on this cut are derived from playing the lowest A on the piano.
Now, if you pass a single recorded sound over a series of playback heads, and decrease the playback volume on each successive head, you get the effect of an echo.
Here are the same sounds we just heard, with reverberation.
Now, here's a little experimental piece that Usachevsky called underwater waltz, which utilizes the sounds we just heard.
Usachevsky, underwater waltz. Henry Cowell was at the first demonstration of tape experimentation. He was at the composers' forum in New York on May 9th, 1952. And he wrote,
One would not expect such a series of mechanical repetitions to be related to human experience. Yet to nearly everyone, the effect seems to suggest some half-forgotten, elusive experience.
Okay, now that's extremely basic stuff we just heard. That's like the John Thompson teaching little fingers to play of tape music. But it is true that a lot of early tape music, when it comes to music, when it wasn't being loud and apocalyptic,
was being soft and eerie and liquid, sort of like Dolly's melting watches underwater. Here's something that was recorded in 1969.
That was a piece that... What do you mean? That's the irrelevancy alarm. I was not digressing in the slightest. Wait a minute, it's printing out here. Let's see what it says.
Okay. Oh, man. You know, there's a polygraph built into this thing, and it says I'm telling a lie. Well, thanks a lot. You just gave away the little joke I was playing on our listeners.
I was just about to tell you folks that I was pulling your leg there. That wasn't tape music at all. It was a whale singing in the Caribbean. Were you fooled or not?
I thought I'd just sneak today's tidbit time in without any warning. Well, anyway, so much for that. Why was a lot of early tape music weird and disjointed?
Now, you might think it was to distinguish itself from conventional music, to be as different as possible. But you know what? A lot of conventional music from that time was weird and disjointed.
Weird and disjointed is what those composers were interested in. Here's an interesting opportunity to compare tape and conventional. We're going to use tape. We're going to hear part of a piece called Phonemona
for soprano and tape by Milton Babbitt. He wrote the accompaniment out in traditional notation first, and then it was synthesized at the Columbia Princeton Center.
But the traditionally notated part turned out to be playable on piano, and Babbitt has made both versions available. Let's listen to the beginning, first with tape, then piano.
It's interesting that after your ear gets accustomed to the synthesized sounds, the opening low notes on piano almost sound like tape music.
Now, the text of Phonemona is simply made up of phonemes,
which are the smallest sound units of speech. But any music, and especially vocal music, presents an emotional landscape, and it seems to me that the textures of the synthesized version
change the feeling of the ending of this piece quite a bit compared to the piano version. Here are the last 26 notes. 30 seconds, first with piano, then tape.
The ending of Milton Babbitt's Phonemona, with Lynn Webber singing first with Jerry Kuderna on piano, then with a synthesized tape.
Rather more sinister ending with the tape, I think. Speaking of the Columbia Princeton Center, I was part of a special several-day seminar for young composers at Princeton in August of 1959.
And one day we took a field trip up to the Columbia Princeton Music Synthesizer there on 125th Street in Manhattan, and Milton Babbitt was showing us how it works and everything,
and he showed it off, and it was a big room filled with equipment, you know. And so finally somebody said, well, Milton, do something. You know, synthesize something for us. And so he said, okay, what do you want?
And we, the cream of the crop of young American composers, all we could come up with was AC Major Skate. He said, okay. So he started at the keyboard there, and as I remember it,
there was no musical instrument-type keyboard on that thing. There was only a sort of a typewriter keyboard, like a computer keyboard. So he started typing in frequency, attack, decay. You know, you have to define all that stuff.
And he went on and on. We got sort of bored. I remember wandering into the next room, looking around at everything. It felt like 20 minutes later or so, he said, okay, everybody, come on back. So we all come back. He pushes the start button.
And it goes . That's it. And it makes you realize in those days it took a long time to do a piece. I mean, I think that machine was really set up as much for research
as it was for performance because it would take a long time to make a substantial piece with that kind of energy going into defining every little detail
and apparently not being able to repeat it easily. I think that Milton Babbitt remembers me from that seminar but probably not for musical reasons.
He's a very affable guy. And a bunch of us went out for beer after one session down in Princeton. And somebody knocked a glass of beer off the table. And I caught it before it hit the ground.
I mentioned that incident to him recently. And he remembered it immediately. I bet if you said, Milton, who was the composer at that seminar
who wrote the songs for baritone, bassoon, and trombone, he would have no idea. But if you said, who was that composer? Who caught the beer glass in midair? He'd say, oh, that was Peter Schickely,
the host of Schickely Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. We're talking about the revolution during the last half century.
Depending on your viewpoint, it's a Promethean or a Frankensteinian revolution in mechanized music making, brought about by the tape recorder and digital storage systems.
One of the problems with tape music has been that the idea of bringing an audience into an auditorium to sit there and listen to a couple of loudspeakers, or even a dozen loudspeakers, has never really caught on.
One of the ways around this is to do what Babbitt did in that last piece, combine a live performer with a prerecorded tape. That not only provides an animate visual focus for the audience,
which seems to be important even for abstract music, it also provides a bit of dramatic tension between the contribution of the warm body and that of the robot. Another thing is that, as I mentioned before,
the album has become an artistic artifact in itself, and since everything you hear on an album is recorded, it's often impossible to distinguish among sounds that are
quote, real, or sounds that are synthesized, or sounds that are sampled. Now, sampled is like when we were doing a PDQ Bach piece
on the Smothers Brothers show, and I was playing the Schlagenfrappe, which is a set of tuned cardboard tubes that you hear on the radio, and you hit yourself over the head with. Here's what it sounds like. Little bunny, hop, hop, hop.
How your ears do flop, flop, flop.
Good gracious, all the...
So, at the rehearsal, the keyboard player in the band said, Hey, can I sample that? And all the band cracked up. He was kidding, but he could have done it. He could have recorded one note from me,
and then the keyboard could reproduce that texture, that timbre, on any pitch in its range. You could play the Moonlight Sonata on the Schlagenfrappe, which in real life, as it were,
would take probably about 60 cardboard tubes and 20 or 30 people to play them. Although I do sort of like that idea of an orchestra of Schlagenfrappes.
Anyway, on a modern drum machine, unless you bought it at the Five and Dime store, what you hear is the sound of an actual drummer playing actual drums and cymbals and stuff. But only one note at a time.
You program the patterns. So here's the story. Even in a live performance, if electricity is involved at all, you can't be sure what the source of the notes you're hearing is.
And any sound from any source can be manipulated. And some of it's awful, and some of it's beautiful. And there's probably more productive cross influence
between classical and non-classical music these days than there has been since the 1920s and 30s. And tape music and computer-generated music
is no longer necessarily avant-garde. And here's a piece by John Adams, a very highly regarded classical composer, but you could imagine this album being in a pop bin.
It's from an album called Who Do Zephyr? And the piece is called Bump. And you know, on a lot of other of John Adams' pieces, you might see credits like this. It's a piece that's under the baton of so-and-so
with so-and-so as soloist. But the credits here read, composed and produced January 1992 to May 1993 in Berkeley, California, utilizing the Korg Wave Station,
Yamaha Electone, Yamaha SY-77 and SY-99, Emu Systems Proteus 1 and Emacs 2, Kurzweil K2000,
and Lexicon LXP-15. Take it away.
And that's Shickly 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. Thank you, members.
And not only that, 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 112. And this is Peter Shickly 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.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Shickly Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Shickly Mix. Care of Public Radio International,
100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403. PRI, Public Radio International.