And now, Shickly Mix. Ready, Mr. Shickly?
Yes, uh-huh, that's right, I am. Yep, here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickly, and this is Shickly 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 although I've done it many times before, it's always 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 top-notch, I'll say it again, top-notch radio station,
whose top brass repeatedly, time after time, again and again,
provide me with the wherewithal to make yet another installment
of this intellectual tryst that you and I share, this ongoing weekly tete-a-tete,
which, as intimate as it is, is blabbed all over the place by PRI,
Public Radio International.
As an instrumentalist, I've always been known more for my fearlessness
than my finesse.
As a teenager, I actually practiced the piano and bassoon every day,
but I also played saxophone in a dance band occasionally,
and my grandfather's tuba was in our basement,
so I fooled around on that enough to get a little one-time gig
in an ambulatory polka band during a fair celebrating the founding
of Fargo, North Dakota.
And my best friend played trumpet.
I can still do the fingerings for most of the trumpet parts I write,
but you wouldn't want to hear me.
My tone sounds like a wet wash rag in a bowl of gumbo.
And I played the old Albert System clarinet my mother still had
from her college days.
And I studied cello for a month, but it was too much trouble to carry around.
And when my brother started playing square dances on the fiddle,
I sometimes backed him up on string bass.
Now, in some ways, that was the easiest gig of all,
because you don't have to use the bow,
and most fiddle tunes are in one of about three keys,
and the main notes of those keys are open strings on the bass,
so you can go a long way without even using your left hand
except to hold the thing up.
And you get to watch people having fun dancing,
as opposed to playing in combos for frat parties
where the lights are too low for you to see the necking going on in the corner,
and what you can see on the dance floor is guys bending girls over backwards
so far that I don't see how they could walk afterwards.
Maybe that was the idea.
And the other good thing about square dances
was that sometimes the cake and cookies were homemade
instead of coming from the day-old section of the supermarket shelves.
But there is a downside to being a part-time square dance bass player.
Aside from having to carry what is essentially an extremely expensive
and fragile ranch-style doghouse,
you have to play for what feels like hours at a time,
and if you don't do it every day, you lose the calluses on your fingers.
And when you notice blood trickling down the strings,
and you look out and see that your best friend is still three partners away
from the one that he started with,
you begin to suspect that that young blonde sitting over against the wall
is Sissy Spacek, and she blames you for the fact that she's not dancing.
A reel may go on for 20 minutes.
That's not only a long time for a reckless amateur bass player,
it's a lot of music, period.
It's four or five times as long as your typical ballroom dance arrangement,
your Glenn Miller arrangement.
Man, it's half as long as Brahms' First Symphony,
and he took years to write that.
Whether it's a folk musician or a conservatory-trained composer,
somebody has to make up the music that gets played at dances,
and sometimes it feels as if it's being ordered by the yard.
So one thing that almost all social dance music has in common
is a highly sophisticated musical technique called repetition.
In certain situations, the closely related technique,
endless repetition, is used.
Western musical notation employs two vertical lines
to define a metric unit called a measure or bar.
When you surround a group of measures with double bar lines,
with a pair of vertically aligned dots next to them in the middle of the staff,
you have indicated that that section should be repeated.
Now, I'm no expert in the history of notation,
but my theory is that the two dots derive from the Cro-Magnon practice
of holding up fingers to indicate how many times a passage is to be played.
The next suite today is called The Band on the Stand.
It has four numbers, and they're all dance music.
And you'll notice that just about everything that gets played gets played again.
Okay, everybody, out on the floor.
I'll see you in about 9 1⁄2 minutes.
¦
All right! Great set!
The Band on the Stand. Four bands, actually,
playing music in which almost everything is repeated.
We began with a wonderful old album that first came out in 1961,
Dance Music of the High Renaissance, Michael Pretorius,
a Volte from Six Dances from Terpsichore,
played by the Collegium Terpsichore, conducted by Fritz Neumeier.
And then the second one, the Cajun one, was Steve Riley and the Mamoo Playboys,
doing the Paradigm Two-Step.
Third one, one of the great dance composers of all times, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
a little contradance in G major called Les Filles Malicieuses, Malicious Ladies.
That was the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, playing without its conductor, as usual.
And then finally, that really wild one was from Bulgaria, naturally.
It's the Krivohoro, and that was the Bitov Orchestra.
You remember them, don't you?
That's the band with Atanas Volchev on gadolka,
and Ruman Sirakov on tambura, and Gospodin Tanev on kaval,
and Nikola Altonov on gaida, and Semenon Georgiev on tupan.
Great tupan player. Okay, that was our first suite there.
You know, I used to love being on the bandstand playing,
but I do have one regret, and it's a big one.
The combination of being a musician and shy about, you know, girls,
meant that I almost never went to dances as a dancer,
and I remain, to this day, el dancer lousy.
I used to dance a bit in the 60s when lights were low and consciousness was high
and everybody did their own thing, but I really love real couple dancing.
I'd love to be part of one of those old couples you see at resorts,
effortlessly gliding around the floor.
I truly believe that dancing is right up there with singing and meditation.
It's good for your body and good for your soul.
It's good for flirting and it's good for affirming,
and I really wish I weren't so self-conscious about it.
I love Western dancing, too.
My wife and I did step out a bit a year ago or so at the Cowboy Bar in Jackson, Wyoming.
The floor was so crowded that nobody could see that I was Peter Shickley,
the host of Shickley Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Again.
Now, in spite of all my ranting and raving back there, trying to exorcise my dance demons,
repetition is, of course, not confined to dance music,
nor can its origins be laid exclusively at dance music's door.
Certainly one of the most basic musical forms in the whole world is the strophic song,
a song in which the same music is sung to different lyrics, different verses.
The number of verses may vary from 2 to 99.
How many bottles of beer there are on the wall depends on how long the hike is.
Now, the idea of picking one song to illustrate this genre seems ridiculous.
Using my extensive knowledge of history and musicology,
as well as my command of statistics, probability, and chaos theory,
I would estimate that there are approximately 79.53327 million such songs in the world today,
and each one of you knows at least dozens of them.
But I am going to play one for you, not because you don't know what a strophic song sounds like,
but because I want to make amends for something I did on a previous show.
Way back on Shickley Mix number 106, now this is 114,
I played the refrain of an Irish song as an example of using a counter melody as an accompaniment,
but I didn't play the whole thing, and I've always regretted it because it's such a great song.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, here is a fine, and incidentally quite charming,
example of the cantus versus, the strophic song.
Have you seen him on the corner and his lip would reach the pavement?
He's been hiding from his razor, is he not an awful sight?
In love he was the purest, now he's frightening our tourists.
If he'd gone and asked his father, oh, I'm sure he'd said him right,
saying, take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
Take her in your arms and hold that woman tight.
Won't you take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
If you're going to love a woman, then be sure and do it right.
Now he met her at a disco, in a dive in San Francisco,
and it all might have been different, had he seen her in daylight.
She was fainted, she was scented, but she drove your man demented.
If he'd gone and asked his father, I'm sure he'd said him right,
saying, take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
Take her in your arms and hold that woman tight.
Won't you take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
If you're going to love a woman, then be sure and do it right.
Here's a pub with fun and laughter, the landlord's buying bevy.
There's a session in the corner and the crack is grand tonight.
But your man who lost his woman, he's still at home lamenting.
If he'd gone and asked his father, oh, I'm sure he'd said him right,
saying, take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
Take her in your arms and hold that woman tight.
Won't you take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
If you're going to love a woman, then be sure and do it right.
Now depression's not a million laughs, but suicide's too dangerous.
Don't go leaping out of buildings in the middle of the night.
It's not the fall but landing that'll alter social standing.
So go first and ask your father and I'm sure he'll said you right,
saying, take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
Take her in your arms and hold that woman tight.
Won't you take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
If you're going to love a woman, then be sure and do it right.
And here's a health to all true lovers, their sisters and their brothers
and their uncles and their grannies, for this thing is black and white.
If you're keen to start romancing with this lapping and this dancing,
then go first and ask your father and I'm sure he'll said you right,
saying, take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
Take her in your arms and hold that woman tight.
Won't you take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
If you're going to love a woman, then be sure and do it right.
And take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
Take her in your arms and hold that woman tight.
Won't you take her in your arms and tell her that you love her.
If you're going to love a woman, then be sure and do it right.
Our tidbit today was Andy M. Stewart and Manis Lunny
doing Stewart's song, Take Her In Your Arms.
Of course, when you come right down to it, repetition is a basic part
of almost all music and probably almost all art,
especially non-narrative art. Patterns in rugs,
rhyme schemes in poetry, recurring dance steps.
Sometimes it's so subtle that it's not even experienced consciously,
as in the repetition of a 12-tone row in serial music.
Western classical music has a great deal of repetition,
and here's an interesting question. Do you think that has anything to do
with sound? There's certainly much more repetition in a Mozart symphony
than in a Duke Ellington chart, which is mostly given over to improvisation.
The whole idea of improvisation goes against the idea of repetition.
Well, I'd have to think about that some more, and you can too.
Obviously, I loaded the dice a bit when I picked a Mozart symphony.
There's much less repetition in Schoenberg's Piero Lunner than in a Mozart symphony.
In fact, it's amazing. When you take a piece
like Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, you know,
baum, baum, baum, baum, baum, baum, baum, baum, baum,
how much of it is repeated? I have a facsimile
of his original manuscript for that piece, and I sat down
and counted the number of measures that are written in the piece.
One movement of the work, by the way, has been lost, but that's beside the point.
And then I counted the number of measures that are played in a performance.
The great majority of measures in the piece are surrounded by repeat signs,
and some sections, because of da capos,
which means go back to the beginning and play part of the movement yet again,
some sections are played three or four times.
Some identical sections that are written out in modern editions
were not written out by Mozart. He uses a da capo indication.
Anyway, I counted 365 bars in the score,
and 784 bars in a performance of the score.
That means that Mozart actually wrote out about
46 percent, less than half, of what is played.
And to get back to our opening topic, when Mozart
was writing music for actual dancing, for use in the ballroom,
he had a system of repeats that reduced that percentage even more.
Let's face it, not only does the dance hall require a wagonload
of music, but the audience is not going to be listening with the same
concentration as they would at a concert, even in those days,
when concerts were much more socially active. Our second suite is called
the write-it-once, play-it-twice suite.
Four pieces that are not dance music, but nevertheless consist almost
entirely of sections that are heard more than once.
And often, by the way, the repeated sections themselves contain
almost identical phrases. I shall return
in about nine minutes.
I shall return in about nine minutes.
Notice how often, when we're hearing stuff based on the first theme, one measure is followed by a repetition of that measure in all or some of the instruments.
.
The first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, with Gunther Kerr conducting the Mainz Chamber Orchestra.
Now here's another example of written-out repetition.
At the beginning of this symphony movement, every little idea we hear is repeated.
Then there's a very brief transition to a new key, and the second section features much more variety and lack of repetition.
In fact, one of the ways we know that the transition section is transitioning is that it breaks the pattern of simple-minded repetition that holds sway up until then.
By the way, I hope you know that in my book, simple-minded does not necessarily mean bad.
.
The first movement of Mozart's 11th Symphony, a delightful piece written when the little twerp was 13 or 14 years old.
I can see it now, Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 3, the story of Mozart's 11th Symphony.
Sir Charles Macarius and the Prague Chamber Orchestra.
Okay, now here's a much fancier kind of repetition.
Many people think that this kind of music sounds completely formless, but if I play you just the first four phrases of this piece, I think that,
even if your idea of modern music is the waltzes that Johann Strauss Jr. wrote after the Blue Danube,
even you will be able to hear that the second pair of phrases is a mirror image of the first.
It goes backwards, right to the beginning.
That's repetition, but it's retrograde repetition.
Rather arcane and usually hard to hear, but in this case very clear, if I may be permitted a bit of 12-tone poetry.
Let's hear all of this piece.
It's less than two minutes long, mostly quite lyrical and even tender,
and though it doesn't have obvious repetition like the Bach and the Mozart,
you can feel the similarity of the shapes and the return to certain notes and the sense of déjà-vu.
It's rigorous yet warm.
That was the first movement of Anton Webern's Variations for Piano.
We heard the second scherzo-like movement earlier.
That was, by the way, Maurizio Pollini playing. I think I forgot to say that earlier.
Webern was smart in that his pieces tend to be very short,
and at least in that piece it doesn't strain my patience for the abstract quality of it.
We're coming to a close here.
We're going to go out with the first movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.
You won't hear all of it, but I want you to listen to this piece because there's a lot of repetition in it.
But what Beethoven does is, in the first place, you're not sure when he's going to repeat and when he isn't.
It isn't as predictable as it was in the Mozart and the Bach.
And secondly, although Beethoven is a composer who broke conventions a great deal
and often wrote things out because he wanted to make some little change in it,
nevertheless he uses a lot of repetition for a dramatic effect.
He'll repeat something over and over and over and over again for this sort of building up of tension.
So it's a very different use of repetition.
And in this piece, of course, the subtitle of the symphony is the Pastoral Symphony.
It also, I think, has a sort of a dance connection
because dance music, as we've seen, tends to have so much repetition.
This is Roger Norrington conducting the London Classical Players,
and we'll hear as much as we can of the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major.
♫ ♫ ♫
And that's Sickly 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 114.
And this is Peter Sickly 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 Sickly Mix.
That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickly Mix.
Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
PRI, Public Radio International.