Molih ta, majcho i molih (TRAD.) Performer: Smolyan Folk Ensemble A Harvest, a Shepherd, a Bride: Village Music of Bulgaria (Elektra/Nonesuch 9 79195 2)
Time now on WFMT for Schickele Mix with Peter Schickele. Ready, Peter? Unlike Ethelred the unready and Ethelwill the unwilling, I am both ready and willing. Here's the theme.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
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.
Now the best things in life may be free, but the good things in life cost money. So I'm happy to report that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this very radio station, which provides me with what it takes to say what has to be said and play what has to be played, after which the whole oral enchilada is distributed to the four winds by PRI, Public Radio International.
On another edition of this program we talk about the pentatonic scale the easiest pentatonic scale to play is simply the black keys of the piano.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
And on that show we deal with the scale mostly melodically, and we also explore the entomology of the name. It turns out that pentatonic means five tones, which happens to be no coincidence, since there are, as luck would have it, five tones in a pentatonic scale.
Today we're going to discuss harmony. More specifically, we're going to address the question, how does one harmonize a pentatonic melody using the procedures of traditional European harmony but staying within the limits of the pentatonic scale? It's not as easy as you might think, because traditional European harmony is based on seven-note scales, for instance, the C major scale, which corresponds to the white notes of the piano. If you take, you know, it's hard to explain some of these things just verbally. They get a bit complicated. I found that it often helps to use the blackboard to illustrate these things, so I brought one into the studio here. I don't think there's anything scheduled in the conference room here? Let me just move it a little bit closer to the mic. There we go. Okay, now, let me write out a C major scale here.
C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. The last C, of course, is a transposition of the first. So that's seven notes plus the octave. Now, when it comes to building chords, traditional harmony is based on triads. That's two superimposed thirds.
And you can generate a triad on each one of the seven tones of the diatonic, the C major scale. I'll just make brackets here with little prongy lines coming down to the notes.
Now, I'll have to extend the scale a little bit up here, farther for these higher triads. Okay, now look at that. You can see how the seven triads interlock in their use of the notes of the scale. We've
got three major triads, these three here, and three minor triads, this and that, and one diminished triad, the one on B. Okay, now, if we add another superimposed third to each triad, we'll get seventh chords. I'll just extend these brackets here, and they're called seventh chords because the highest note is a seventh above the lowest one.
Oh, rats, I started out too close to the top of the board. I'm going to have to just squeeze it. Okay, well, anyway, the most often used seventh chord is the one on G, the dominant seventh chord, but you've got some kind of a seventh chord on each scale step.
That A doesn't show up very well there in the top chord, I mean on the wooden frame, but anyway, you can do an awful lot of harmonizing using just those chords, which consist entirely of notes in the C major scale.
Let me play you the beginning of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. There are a couple of non-scale tones melodically speaking, and I really mean just a couple, but otherwise the first 48 seconds of the symphony could be played entirely on the white keys of the piano, and the harmonies are all based on some of the chords you see right here.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 41 in C (K 551); Academy of Ancient Music/Marriner]
Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Raw with the opening of, a little joke there, the same Academy of St. Martin in the Field, you know that, with the opening of Mozart's
Jupiter Symphony. Now, let's compare the chordal possibilities of the major scale and that excerpt we just heard doesn't even begin to use all the chords we've constructed here let's compare them with the possibilities in the pentatonic scale Now, the five tones of the pentatonic scale correspond to five of the seven tones of the major scale. So, what I'll just do here is erase... Where is that thing? There was an eraser on this shelf when I... Wait a minute. There it is. There it is. Hold on just a second. It must have fallen off when I wheeled the thing over here. Okay. Now, I'm going to erase the two notes that are not common to both scales.
This one, the F and the B. So, what does that leave us in terms of triads and seventh chords? Just look at the brackets. Right. It's very clear, isn't it? Almost all of those brackets have a line coming down to one of the notes that have been erased. We've still got the triad on C, but the next one is out. No F.
No F, so is the next one, no B, the next one too, no F, and the next one, no B. We do have the A minor triad, but no B diminished, because we don't have either F or B. So, instead of seven different triads, we've got two, one major and one minor. And the seventh chord situation is even worse, right?
Right. Only one seventh chord. That's the A minor seventh. Now that's not much to work with, especially since in traditional harmony the three most important triads are C, F, and G and we don't have two of those. So, to get back to our opening question, how does one harmonize a pentatonic melody using the procedures of traditional European harmony but staying within the limits of the pentatonic scale?
The answer is, one doesn't. One takes another approach, if one knows what's good for one. Here's a common Asian approach. There's a bunch of people in this ensemble, and quite a bit of rhythmic commotion. But if you listen carefully, you'll notice that there's no harmony at all. Everybody's playing the melody.
[music excerpt: Trad., "Tsagaan Sar" (Pan Glossary #1); Melodies of the Steppes]
Part of White Moon, a central Mongolian song performed by the ensemble Melodies of the Steppes, a very appropriate name for an ensemble playing on a program illustrating scales. Here's another approach. Use drums to accompany the song. Since they usually don't have a definite pitch, you, or rather one, doesn't have to worry about harmony.
[music excerpt: Trad., "Cree War Song"; Indian Music of the Canadian Plains]
A Cree war song from Central Canada. That was in English, by the way. And here's yet another effective technique for accompanying pentatonic songs. A single note, that is, a drone.
[music excerpt: Trad. arr. Primrose/Pincock, "Cumha ruairidh mhoir" (’S tu nam chuimhne); Christine Primrose]
Dougie Pincock playing bagpipes, a lament from a Christine Primrose album. Well, I think by now it's obvious that I have implicitly put the cart before the horse. The Central Mongolians and the Native North Americans and the Scottish Piper we've just heard, they weren't using those various accompaniment techniques in order to avoid the triad problem or the lack of triad problem. They were treating the melodies as they've always been treated.
That is, not from a harmonic standpoint.
Most pentatonic melodies don't have the obvious harmonic implications that most modern major and minor melodies have. Now I have a theory and it is mine. Well, I'm not a musical anthropologist so I guess I should call it a hunch as in the unified field hunch or the hunch of relativity. I have a hunch and it is mine that many if not most purely pentatonic melodies or basic melodic patterns are either very old, predating the development of traditional European harmony, or they come from areas that had or have not been influenced by European style music.
Here are two pieces of art music, as opposed to folk music, by modern, classically trained composers. Both pieces are completely pentatonic, which is fairly unusual, but neither one of them is at all harmonic in its approach, that is, you're not tempted to analyze them in terms of chords. Whether it's an accompanying part or an out front line, everything is melodic.
Melody rules. I call this suitelet All in the Five-Tone Family, and I'll be back in about seven minutes.
[music: Harrison, Suite for Violin, Piano & Small Orchestra, 2nd. Gamelan; Lucy Stoltzman, violin/Keith Jarrett, piano/orchestra conducted by Robert Hughes]
[music: Lansky, "Pine Ridge" (Folk Images); Paul Lansky]
All in the Five-Tone Family. Two pieces there. The first one was the second gamelan from the Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra by Lou Harrison. That was played by Lucy Stoltzman, Keith Jarrett, and a small ensemble conducted by Robert Hughes.
Then the second piece was called Pine Ridge from an album called Folk Images by Paul Lansky and that piece was performed on a 1981 IBM mainframe using linear predictive coding to model the violin playing of Cyrus Stevens.
What is interesting, those of you, if there's some of you out there listening who after you got done with your toilet training went on to ear training, you may have noticed that it sounds sometimes like there's an A major triad at some of those cadences. Now an A major triad has a C sharp in it which is not in the pentatonic scale that the whole piece is in. As a matter of fact, the rest of the piece is so consistently white key that I contacted the composer and asked him about that because I had a suspicion that the C sharp is actually an overtone and it was not played at all. And he confirmed that suspicion. The C-sharp is not written in the music. It's not played by anybody. It's simply there because it's an overtone of lower notes.
Peter Schickele is the name and Schickele Mix is the game from PRI, Public Radio International. Today's show is called Gin and Pentatonic. We're talking about how to accompany melodies based on the most common five note scale.
One of the characteristics of pentatonic scales is that they contain no, quote, you know, I'm doing that little thing with my fingers again, quote, sharp, unquote, intervals. No, what should we call them? Jagged or harsh or highly unstable or naughty intervals. See, looking at the scale I wrote on the blackboard here, it's obvious that since I erased the F here and the B, there are no longer any minor seconds or tritones So the intervals that are left are all mellifluous.
If I play the notes of a major scale simultaneously, it sounds like a crunchy cluster.
But if I play a pentatonic scale all at once, hey, sounds like a chord out of a French piece and we all know what the French are interested in, I mean besides wine. I mentioned before that the black keys of the piano keyboard constitute a pentatonic scale. Let me really swing around to the authentic instrument here. And if you use only the black keys,
[music: keyboard demonstration, improvising on the black keys]
why, just about anything you play sounds fine.
It's very nice, actually. In fact, it's kind of hard to stop.
Hey, listen, the program will take care of itself.
What, me worry?
[sung: a few lines of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Coconut Grove"]
You know, I never noticed before that that Lovin' Spoonful tune is pentatonic. Great song. I wonder where my old bong is.
Well, I guess I better get with the program here. Get with the program!
Oh man, gotta take care of business here.
Maybe I'll just keep playing while I talk. Where was I? Oh yeah, okay, what this no note sounds like a wrong note characteristic means is that a lot of meandering, bland, aimless, new agey music has been written using the pentatonic scale.
Get with the program! It's a radio program!
Oh, brother! I've got to get out of this.
Maybe if I can reach the volume control with my foot.
All right. There we go.
Look at that. I'm still playing even though there's no sound. Okay, enough.
Man, that pentatonic scale is powerful stuff. I mean, that's some heavy sh**. It seems innocuous, but you...
You know, I still don't have it together. I'm going to turn the volume back up here.
[music: demonstration: Schickele hits all the black keys at once]
There, that's better. Cleared a few cobwebs away. What I was trying to get into was that there is at least one situation in which the no note sounds like a wrong note characteristic of the pentatonic scale can be put to good use. My wife's a poet and she often teaches residencies in public schools, elementary and high schools, getting kids to write poetry. And what she, and I guess a lot of other teachers, have found is that the first thing you do What you need to do is get rid of the idea of rhyme, not because rhymed poetry is bad, but because writing a good rhymed poem is quite difficult.
What happens with amateur poets is that the mechanics of rhyme become more important than telling the truth. Better to let the kids write completely free verse or use some other organizing principle, like acrostic poems, in which you choose a word and write it out vertically at the left-hand margin, and then you can use each letter of the word as the first letter of that line in the poem. Ask for rhyme and you get greeting cards. Give the students free rein and you get personal poems, poems that are sometimes absolutely amazing in their honesty and imagery. There's a similar situation in music. Teaching music to young kids, there is nothing, folks, nothing, that takes the place of personal involvement of actually making music. But your average three to seven-year-old tyke, I'm not talking about prodigies here, your average youngster, as they hate to be called, has neither the experience nor even the muscle coordination to make pleasing music on a violin or a clarinet, at least not without a long period of drudgery and delayed gratification.
The German composer Carl Orff and some colleagues developed a system of musical training, musical involvement really, that makes a lot of sense to me. For beginners, kids who are just starting out, they designed a set of easy-to-play instruments like xylophones that only have the notes of a pentatonic scale. This means that there are fewer notes for the kids to keep track of, and it also means that when you get the kids improvising, which they are encouraged to do early on, they're never going to hit a note that sounds like a real clunker.
In these three examples, some of the kids are playing ostinati, short repeated figures like bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup, while one child improvises a melody.
[music excerpt: Orff, "Music for Children"; Instrumental ensemble directed by Carl Orff]
Our Tidbit Time today was three instrumental improvisations played by young English children under the tutelage of Carl Orff, Gunild Keetman, and Walter Jelinek. You may have noticed that the actual melodies that the kids made up only used three notes, so they really didn't have too much to worry about.
Now, so far, nothing we've heard has been harmonically oriented. If you really want to harmonize pentatonic melodies, have a sense of chord progression, what most people do is forget about the pentatonic scale when it comes to the accompaniments. Remember when I changed an A major [sic] scale on the blackboard to a pentatonic scale by erasing the two notes right here, the F and the B?
Well, most harmonizations of pentatonic melodies make use of those notes in the accompaniment, and often use other colorful in-between or chromatic notes as well. These next three numbers all have pentatonic melodies. The accompaniment to the first one is mostly not chordal, but it is non-pentatonic. The second tune is harmonized in a strictly chordal fashion, but here again the accompaniment uses more than five tones of the scale.
The last one starts out completely pentatonic, but then the harmonies get more complicated with lots of chromatic notes thrown in. The Mixed Marriage Suite No. 1 lasts about seven and a half minutes. I'll see you then.
[music: Trad. arr. Primrose/Morton, "La dhomh ’s mi ’m beinn a ’cheathaich" (’S tu nam chuimhne); Christine Primrose]
[music: Trad., "Molih ta, majcho i molih" (A Harvest, a Shepherd, a Bride: Village Music of Bulgaria); Smolyan Folk Ensemble]
[music: Ravel, “Ma mère l’oye,” 3rd. Mvt.; Louis Lortie & Helene Mercier]
The Mixed Marriage Suite No. 1 began with Christine Primrose. The song was One Day on the Misty Mountain. Fortunately, I don't have to try to pronounce that in Gaelic. And that was Christine Primrose singing, also with Alison Kinnaird. And let's see, on the mouth organ, that was Duncan McGillivray.
And then we had Village Music of Bulgaria. That was Molih ta, the Smolyan Folk Ensemble. And then finally, the Maurice Ravel composition, Mother Goose Suite, also known as an orchestral piece but originally written for piano four hands, played here by Louis Lortie and Helene Mercier. That was the third movement, Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes, which means Laideronnette, Impératrice of the Pagodas.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, that is one of the top three pieces for piano four hands. I'd love to be able to play it, but I'm just good old two-handed Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio Entertainment [sic].
International. In our culture, at least, you don't hear much purely five-tone music, which is why this program is called Gin and Pentatonic. Especially in accompaniments, other notes, other things get thrown in to expand the harmonic possibilities. Now you may have noticed in that... Hello?
Oh, hello, sir. Oh, you mean the blackboard. Yes, I do have it here in the studio. I didn't think any...
Well, I'm using it to illustrate certain points... Yes, on my radio show. What do you mean, illustrate to whom? Naturally, to my... It helps me organize... It's for my own sake, actually. It helps me organize my thoughts and... Yes, sir. Can you wait just a few minutes? I'm about to play some music and as soon as I get the first album on, I'll bring the blackboard back to the conference room, okay? Thank you, sir. Goodbye. I was afraid of that. Man, they haven't used that conference room for two weeks and then...
Anyway, as I was saying, you may have noticed in that last suite that the more the accompaniment strays from pentatonic tones, the less pentatonic the melody sounds. Here are three more pieces with pentatonic tunes and non-pentatonic accompaniments, and I'd like you to notice the difference between the outer two numbers and the middle one. Although the accompaniment in the middle one is not consistently pentatonic, it's pretty close.
Only one extra note is used in each section, and pretty sparingly at that. But the accompaniments in the first and third numbers make no pretense to pentatonicity. I don't know if there was such a word, but there is now. And in fact, I can imagine a musician who knows all about five-note scales hearing this third number and not noticing that the melody is pentatonic. Here's the Mixed Marriage Suite No. 2.
Just a second here. I don't use the old 78 player very often. Okay, I'll be back in about nine and a half minutes.
[music: "It’s a Good Day"; Peggy Lee with the Dave Barbour Orchestra]
[music: Goffin/King (Screen Gems-EMI Music), "Oh, No, Not My Baby" (Winter Light); Linda Ronstadt]
The Mixed Marriage Suite No. 2 began with Peggy Lee singing It's a Good Day. Peggy Lee of course comes from North Dakota and sang at WDAY in Fargo, the radio station I used to hang out at. And that song, It's a Good Day, was still the theme song for the morning show when I used to go in there just to be around some live musicians. Now Peggy Lee bends a few notes and adds a few embellishments, but it's a pentatonic tune.
Then next came the last movement of the String Quartet No. 1, American Dreams, by the well-known radio personality, Peter Schickele. That was performed by the Audubon Quartet. And then finally, Linda Ronstadt singing Oh No, Not My Baby. We've gotta leave now, but I'd like to go out with some more of that Orff stuff. Those kids have a lot of fun with those pentatonic instruments.
[music excerpt: Orff, "Music for Children"; Instrumental ensemble directed by Carl Orff]
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. 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 117. 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.
[music excerpt: Orff, "Music for Children"; Instrumental ensemble directed by Carl Orff]
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.