My, That’s an Odd Meter!

Schickele Mix Episode #125

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1996-10-16
“Peter, are you ready?”
Funny you should ask that - because I am.

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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.]

This is IPR Music Radio. I'm Bruce Van Buskirk, your host for Afternoon Classics. Thanks for joining me this Tuesday afternoon here on WIAA Interlochen, 88.7 FM and WICV East Jordan Charlevoix, 100.9 FM, a broadcast service of the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Lots of great music still to come on Schickele Mix from the top and performance today here on IPR Music Radio.
[No speech for 15s.]
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. And that's all well and good, but how about the bills?
Well, the good news is that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. And by the National Endowment for the Arts and Sciences.
And also from this fine radio station, where I can have anything I want. At least, I think that's what they mean when they say, boy, are you going to get it. Anyway, after all is said and done, the result is lofted into the ether by PRI, Public Radio International. My piano teacher, when I was a teenager in Fargo, North Dakota, was a wonderful woman named Virginia Jensen. She figured out pretty early on that I was more interested in music than in practicing. The fact that she noticed that and went with it probably didn't help my piano playing much, but it certainly broadened my horizons as a composer. Musically, I was not an early bloomer. Well, you could say that I was a prodigy, if you could say that Attila the Hun was a pacifist. Hey, until I was 12 years old, my only interest in music was imitating Spike Jones. And I never developed any real facility at the piano, because when it came to practicing, I was a walking, or rather a sitting, cliché. I couldn't wait to get out and play softball. But when Virginia, I guess I must have called her Mrs. Jensen then, when she gave me pieces that turned me on by turning me loose in brand new pastures, I spent more time at the piano. Some of the things I remember working on were Bear Dance by Bartok, some of the Prokofiev Vision Fugitive, parts of Mio's The Household Muse, William Schumann's... three score set, and the Little Suite by Roy Harris.
Now I must admit, you don't have to spread this around, you know, let's just keep it entre-nou. But I will confess that I had a bit of a crush on my piano teacher. She was beautiful. I mean, she wasn't exactly a babe. How could she be? She was my mother's age. In fact, they were friends. But she was beautiful. And she was smart. And she was mischievous.
And I can't pretend that I wasn't pretty pleased when she said that she was very impressed at how well I played the third movement of the Harris. You see, the meter, the time signature of that movement, is a bit unusual. At least for then and there. Let's face it, in Fargo around 1950, you didn't hear an awful lot of music in seven-eight time.
[No speech for 29s.]
Richard Zimdars performing Children at Play, the third movement of Roy Harris' Little Suite. Now, that's not a hard piece to play, in fact, it's pretty easy, as long as you're not thrown by odd meters. Seven-eight time means that there are seven-eighth notes in each measure, or the equivalent thereof. Now, seven is a prime number. It can't be divided evenly by anything but one. So what that means is, here, let me swing around to the authentic instrument. Let's see, I'll set it on good piano. Oh, that's right. There are several of them.
Okay, I'll choose the Black & Decker Concert Grand. Now, here's the repeated figure in the left hand that recurs throughout most of the Roy Harris piece.
Now, let me play that a little bit more slowly.
The notes fall into three groups. Two, plus two, plus three.
So you could say that each measure has three large beats, as opposed to the eighth note pulse. But the beats are uneven. The third is one-and-a-half times as long as each of the first two.
One, two, three. One, two, three. Okay, let me swing back here.
Now, let's compare that with four-four time, which is, not without reason, often called common time. Four-four time has eight-eighth notes to the bar.
I'm going to do a little Bobby McFerrin here and use my body. But if you drink decaf coffee, you can't tell the difference. You can't tap your foot that fast. So you tap on every other note.
One, two, three, four, one, two. So the beats are all the same length. But with seven-eight time, if you tap the groupings, which in this piece are two plus two plus three,
you get the beats are uneven.
Which means you can't just set your toe to tapping evenly and stay with the music. Which is why musicians, unless they're from Bulgaria or Greece, really have to concentrate. They have to stay on their toes, their tapping toes, when performing music like this. There's an old musician's joke. Hey, who says seven-eight is hard to count? It's easy. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Now, when I referred to seven-eight as an odd meter, I meant it in more ways than one. Not only is seven an odd number, but because of that, meters like five-eight and seven-eight have uneven larger beats if you subdivide the measure. You can't subdivide the measure evenly.
And that feels odd to most people, unless they're from Bulgaria or Greece. And because of that, such meters are statistically odd.
Worldwide, they occur much less frequently than duple and triple time. Three, by the way, is in a category by itself. It is an odd number, of course. But two and three are the basic building blocks of metrical organization. You can't subdivide either one of them into groups without getting at least one group of one. And one isn't a group.
I know it sounds like we're talking about atomic physics here, but take my word for it. In metrical music with a feeling of pulse, it's very hard to imagine situations in which a single pulse doesn't feel like it's part of a group of two or three.
So for the purposes of this program, when I say odd meters, I mean meters in which the number of pulses is an odd number higher than three.
By the way, before we go on, I'd like to give you a little bit of advice. Here again, this is just between you and me in the lamppost. But if you can possibly help it, don't develop a crush on your piano teacher. It'll only lead to grief. As I mentioned, Virginia Jensen was a friend of the family. And many years later, when I was not on the piano, not only grown up, but also becoming a fairly well-known musician, I was visiting her. And the subject of the Roy Harris piece came up, and I said that I still remembered that third movement, and I played it. And you know what she said?
She said that she thought I played it better when I was a teenager. I'm telling you, that hurt. I mean, do you think she could have been right? I very much doubt it. You know what I think? I think that she had higher expectations of an adult than of a teenager. You know what I mean? I'm sure I played it just as well.
Hey, also, by the time of that visit, like I said, I was getting to be a little famous, and I think she may have just had a bit of a chip on her shoulder. Well, anyway, let's get back to odd meters here. We're not going to be talking about quintuple meters at this point, because we deal with them on another... Besides, I hadn't played the Harris for years when I visited her, whereas when I was studying the piece as a teenager, I was playing it every day. I think you have to take that into account. Man, I'd like to hear her play a piece she'd hardly touched for 20 years or whatever it was.
Well, sorry about that. What I was going to say was that I couldn't think of a single standard pop song in quintuple time, but Paul Desmond's Take Five comes close. It's certainly a jazz standard. And similarly, I can only think of one tune in 7-4 that you might be able to call a standard. Actually, it's not all in 7-4, but it mostly is. It's from a musical, and it has words, but it, too, is best known as an instrumental melody, as it appears in the overture. The tempo here is a bit slower. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six. So you can tap your foot to it.
[No speech for 54s.]
From the Overture to Candide by Leonard Bernstein. Original cast album. Pretty fast, huh? And even though the tempo is slower, so you can tap each pulse, you'll notice that the grouping... One, two, one, two, one, two, three. One, two, one, two, one, two, three. The grouping is two plus two plus three, the same as in the Roy Harris piece.
You know, she had quit teaching by then, so her piano probably wasn't as in good shape, either. That can make a big difference, you know. Especially in a fast piece like that.
Hey, I'm sorry to keep harping on that thing. Let's get on to the first suite here in this program. Here are four pieces in septuple time, if there is such a word, and I've arranged them in the order of increasing speed.
The tempo of the first number is about... One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six...
And by the time you get to the last piece, it's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three... In some of the trade magazines, a bullet by a title means that the song is on its way up the charts and fast. So I call this suite Seven with a Bullet. If you're still tapping your foot to the pulse eight minutes from now, you need to talk to your doctor about Prozac.
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Seven with a Bullet.
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We heard pieces by Ibert, Moondog, Don Ellis, and Bartok. The first one, the very North African sounding one, was from Escale, or Ports of Call, by Jacques Ibert. That was the second movement marked Tunis-Nephtha. I think he actually heard that oboe theme in Nephtha.
That was Jean Martinon conducting the Orchestre National de l'ORTF. Then came a lovely round by Moondog called My Tiny Butterfly, performed by the composer's daughter, June Harden, plus some instrumentalists. Varying divisions of the measure in that one. Number three was Don Ellis and his band doing Tears of Joy.
You know, in some of the early examples of jazz in odd meters, the tune might be in five or seven, but as soon as the improvising started, it would slip into good old straight 4-4 time.
But Don Ellis and his guys on this album, also called Tears of Joy, they're right there with it, all the way. Then came Bela Bartok playing his Microcosmos No. 149, dance in Bulgarian Rhythm No. 2. You think that's fast. Just wait. You ain't heard nothing yet. My name is Peter Schickele, and the show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called My, That's an Odd Meter, and right now we're talking about music in seven. I think I already told you this story on some other show, but hey, what are friends for, right? Radio station WDAY in Fargo, late 1940s, my brother and I are hanging out just to be around the band, live musicians in those days. And they've had a contest, and the winner is a young guy from some little farm town who plays electric guitar, and he's really good. And Frank Scott has made an arrangement of Lover that goes about like... .
And they're rehearsing it, and the kid's guitar is smoking. And after they've run the chart down, Scott sticks his head out of the control room and says, okay, let's take it up to tempo. And that's what we're going to do now. We're going to take it up so far that if you had one of those old-fashioned, pyramid-shaped pendulum metronomes, you couldn't get the weight low enough to check out this tempo.
I made some cracks earlier about Bulgaria and Greece. They aren't the only places in the world in which odd meters flourish. But Bulgaria has got to be one of the regions with the most seismic activity, metrically speaking, and the highest readings on the Richter Tempo Scale. The number that we're about to hear starts out faster than the bar talk that ended the last suite. It's already virtually impossible to count the pulses out loud. You just can't say the words that fast. And then they pick it up.
Frank Scott must have stuck his head out of the control room because they pushed the tempo up to a point where the dancers' feet must never touch the ground. Hey, guys, Frank was kidding. It's a joke. Too late. Pegasus is out of the barn.
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Okay, got to wring my shirt out here a little. An ecstatic slice of Balkan delirium by Ivo Popasov and his orchestra, the king of Bulgarian wedding bands.
That was the fast section from Ivo's Rusinitsi, which is a dance in 7-8 time. The division, as in certain pieces by Roy Harris, is 2 plus 2 plus 3. But if you could keep track of that throughout, you're a better Balkan than I am. The notes go by faster than a bat out of hell in the first place, and then they put ornamentation on them. There are several sections in the middle there where the band just plays two large beats per measure. .
It almost sounds like long, short, long, short in 3-4 time. You know, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, or counting eighths. 1-2-1-2, 1-2-1-2, 1-2-1-2, 1-2-1-2. But not quite.
It's just a little askew. A very important little askew. And that's because they're still in 7-8 time. 3-4 has 6 eighths per bar, but 7-8, of course, has 7.
And the first beat, what I'm calling a beat, since the pulse is too fast to beat, the first beat is 4 eighths long, and the second is 3 eighths long. I have to slow this down to count it.
1-2-3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3. It is so close to 3-4. 1-2-1-2, 1-2-1-2, 1-2-1-2.
It ain't 3-4. According to my stopwatch calculations, at Ivo's tempo, the second note is about 75 hundredths of a second longer than it would be in 3-4 time.
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Now Bartok, who came from that same part of the world, he was Hungarian, he uses this kind of rhythm. Comparatively long notes in a very fast odd tempo, so it almost sounds like an even tempo, but not quite.
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That was part of the trio of the scherzo of Bartok's 5th string quartet, played by the Takács Quartet. My name, on the other hand, is Peter Schickele, and that of the program is Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. My, that's an odd meter. We've been talking so far about music in 7, which in my limited experience, is most often, but certainly not always, divided 2 plus 2 plus 3. Now let's take a look at music in 9. 9-8 is the most common of the meters involving 9 pulses. The thing about 9 is, it's an odd number, alright, but it's not a prime number. It is, of course, divisible by 3, which means that you can have
3 large even beats of 3 pulses each. 1-2-3-2-2-3-3-2-3 1-2-3-2-2-3-3-2-3 Here's one of the most famous examples of what we might call traditional 9-8 time.
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Dreamer, out on the sea, mermaids are chanting the wild aureole.
Over the stream let vapors are born, waiting to fade at the bright coming dawn.
Oh, beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart, in as the moon and the stream let and see.
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart, beautiful dreamer, awaken to me.
Beautiful dreamer.
[No speech for 24s.]
That was Sue Harmon, at least if it was a soprano, it's Sue Harmon. If it was a mezzo, it's Nancy Bliss, singing Beautiful Dreamer by Stephen Foster with Luann Neal on harp. The overall group on this LP is the American Music Consort.
I have to say, I'm not a huge Stephen Foster fan, but that is a lovely song. That's one of my favorites. But there's no law. That's the law. It says that you have to divide 9-8 into three equal beats.
You could divide it into, oh, say, four beats. Two plus two plus two plus three.
Gee, I wonder if anybody else has ever thought of that. I'll see you in about eleven and a half minutes.
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We are your family And I come every night Every night
Out of your house
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Oh you are a poor boy Poor boy
And I am a poor child I will kiss you I will kiss you
And I will go to prison
Oh you are a poor boy
Oh you are a poor boy My little boy
You are a poor boy
And I am your slave
Take me to your throne To your throne Your little bed
[No speech for 520s.]
I call that suite A Stitch in Time, and it began with a song called Basarkana, sounds like a town in the Ozarks, sung by Christos Tsitsimakis, and it's from an album called Musical Travel, Greece.
Interesting, the divisions in that one, because it is 2 plus 2 plus 2 plus 3, but the drum accents make it sound like 2-4 plus 5-8. Well, never mind. Take my word for it.
Then we heard Mr. Bartok again, playing his Microcosmos No. 152, Dance in Bulgarian Rhythm No. 5, and finally, the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Blue Rondo a la Turk, Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright, and Joe Morello. Mostly 2 plus 2 plus 2 plus 3, but sometimes 3 plus 3 plus 3. Also, an example of going into straight time for the choruses.
I don't know if I should. You know. I hate to admit it. I mean, I know it's immature and everything, but...
Well, I'm still ticked off about my old piano teacher telling me I played that Harris piece better when I was a teenager than when I saw her, you know, when I visited her later. I mean, I just can't believe she was right about that. In fact, I'll bet I can still play it better than I could when I was 15. And listen, folks, that was 45 years ago. There's life in the old digits yet. And the old gray matter hasn't given up either. The porch light is still on, folks. I was thinking about it during that last suite, and I think I remember the piece pretty well.
And, you know, it's not a good idea to let these things fester and build up inside you until you go out and do something that makes the NRA have to gear up their lobbying machinery again.
So, with your permission, I'm going to swing around to the authentic instrument here. Let's see. It's still on a piano setting. And, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to perform for you the third movement of the Little Suite by Roy Harris. This movement is entitled Children at Play.
Hello. Oh, hi, Fred. Now, don't worry. The mic's not open. In fact, my listeners think I'm playing the piano, but I'm actually just playing a CD I used earlier in the show. But I've got to be quick. What's up?
Okay. Will do. Bye. Okay. Now I'll turn the mic up.
Oh. Hello, everybody. Okay. Well, that was Roy Harris' Little Suite, the third movement.
And it was played for the first time by the composer's wife, Johanna Harris, soon after its composition in 1938.
Oh, yes. That. That movement is called Children at Play. The other movements, which we didn't hear, are called Bells, Sad News.
That's quite bleak, that one. And Slumber. I studied with Roy Harris. 1954.
[No speech for 15s.]
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and from this radio station and its members. 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 program numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 125.
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.
[No speech for 89s.]
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.
Thanks for listening to IPR Music Radio. WIAA Interlochen, 88.7 FM and WICV, East Jordan Charlevoix, 100.9 FM.
A broadcast service of the Interlochen Center for the Arts.