Kozhamiktar Tuva: Voices from the Center of Asia (Smithsonian CD SF 40017)
Get Happy (ARLEN/KOEHLER) Performer: The Original Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker The Complete Pacific Jazz & Capitol Recordings (Mosaic MD3 102)
Tidbit Time
Bangers & Mash (LEE/KRETZMER) Performer: Peter Sellers & Sophia Loren A Celebration of Sellers (EMI 7243 8 27784 2)
North Fork Wolves (WINTER) Performer: Paul Winter Prayer for the Wild Things (Living Music LD 0028)
Right now, it's time on WFMT for Schickele Mix with Peter Schickele. You ready, Peter?
You seem to be a bit conflicted, Peter, what do you say?
Part of me says yes, and the other part says no, but it's time, so 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 it may be true that the best things in life are free, but the merely good things usually aren't. So we are more than grateful for the fact 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 from this visionary radio station, if that's not a contradiction in terms, where I am provided with a parking space, a studio, and enough rope to hang myself, and whence the results of my contrary activities are distributed to the four corners by P.R.I., Public Radio International.
[music excerpt: Berlin/Herbert & Dorothy Fields, “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Anything You Can Do” (1957 NBC Live Recording)]
Have you ever known a couple like that? You know, who obviously love each other, but fight all the time? Two of my strongest memories of being a young teenager involve my parents, who certainly didn't fight all the time, and it wasn't a matter of anything you can do I can do better, but they would get into these big shouting arguments about politics or whatever when other people were around.
I mean, like when company was over, and I really found it embarrassing. On the other hand, I also remember family hugs when all four of us would get in a football huddle with our dog Ricky hopping around and wagging his tail in the middle. You know, come to think of it, for a bunch of basically northern types, it was a rather southern blend of arguments and hugs. William Blake would have approved.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night. Blake thought you should let the tiger out of your tank. You shouldn't allow negative thoughts to fester until they become sludge in your system. Don't try to fit in. Vive la différence. In fact, he went so far as to say that opposition is true friendship. And that's the name of today's show. We're going to be listening to some antiphonal music, using the word antiphonal with various degrees of literalness.
Antiphonal, of course, comes from the Greek ante and phon. Antiphon was a cantankerous old Spartan lady who enjoyed pitting one person against the other, preferably until they were yelling at each other, because she felt that things were more lively when there was a bit of friction in the air. Because of her, ante has come to mean against and phon to mean sound, although in music the against part of the term usually means opposing in a spatial and or temporal sense, rather than in the sense of having contrary objectives.
On the contrary, antiphonal music is often echo music, in which two or more groups are placed at a significant remove from one another, but are about as friendly as you can get in terms of what they play or sing, since one group usually repeats what another has just presented, either literally or more or less. Let's start out with some of that music. These aren't echo pieces in the sense of works that reproduce the sound of natural echo. We deal with those on another edition of the show.
These are pieces that feature noticeably separated groups, more noticeable if you're listening in stereo than in mono to be sure, and the music is made up mostly of statements and imitative responses. The size of the groups within each piece is pretty much the same. So I call this the separate but equal antiphonal suite. It has three movements and lasts about seven minutes. I'll see you then.
[music: Trad., "Dimitro, sino Dimitro" (A Harvest, a Shepherd, a Bride: Village Music of Bulgaria)]
[music: Gabrieli, Canzon septimi toni No. 2 (Music of Gabrieli); Empire Brass]
[music excerpt: Monteverdi, Vespro della Beata Vergine, “Gloria Patri et Filio”; Nigel Robson/Mark Tucker/London Oratory Junior Choir/John Eliot Gardiner]
The Separate But Equal Antiphonal Suite. We began with some Bulgarian music, Dimitro, sino Dimitro. That was the Smolyan Folk Ensemble with Atanas Kapitanov as the director. And apparently that is a chain dance. In other words, the people get in a long line as they dance and then the head of the line sings one verse and the tail of the line sings the next verse.
So you get an antiphony head to tail there. Then we had Giovanni Gabrieli, the Canzon septimi toni No. 2 from the Sacred Symphonies. And that was the Empire Brass and Friends. This is music that was originally written for the San Marco Cathedral in Venice, a huge cathedral with four different organs in it, a lot of antiphonal music, and of course a tremendous reverberation sound.
And as a matter of fact, the last piece in the suite, that beautiful, beautiful Gloria, is from Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine. That was the Gloria Patri et Filio, and that was Nigel Robson, Mark Tucker, the London Oratory Junior Choir was conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.
And that is one of the most beautiful uses of echo and spatial separation that I've ever heard. You know, as a matter of fact, I was thinking about this during the Gabrieli. Even with stereo, if you record in a very live situation, the sound bounces around so much that I don't get that much feeling of left and right anyway. Maybe with earphones you would. I think that if you really want to get that sense of spatial separation.
Probably the way to do it is the way they did it in the Monteverdi. In other words, near and far from the mics, rather than left and right. By the way, I want to get your opinion on something. I have an old LP, here it is, an old mono LP of Gabrieli's music, and in the liner notes, here it says, the three pieces on the second side are played by two separate choirs of brass instruments to create the desired three-dimensional echo effect, the groups making the recording were placed at opposite ends of the studio, more than 100 feet apart, with the conductor standing midway between them.
This duplicated, in effect, the two music lofts on opposite sides of the nave in the Cathedral San Marco, where Gabrieli composed the pieces, and where they received their first performance. This novel recording technique makes it possible for the listener to imagine aurally the authentic circumstances of antiphony. These canzonas are most valid when the music is heard coming from two different directions. Now, just a minute, am I missing something here?
Or is it not true that on a mono recording it won't make any difference if the groups are right next to each other or 100 feet apart, right? I mean as long as the mic is equidistant from both groups, I don't see that it's going to make any difference. But you know, I'm not a sound engineer or anything, I'm just a composer. And everybody knows that... Excuse me. Hello? Yeah?
Okay. Well I suppose you're right, yeah. Since it takes the sound longer to travel the 100 feet between the two groups, the coordination might be affected. Although I must say, I should think it would be Maybe for the worse, you know, less coordinated.
Okay, well thanks for your input, bye. I'm not sure you could really hear the difference between... Oh, man.
[sound: phone rings]
Maybe I shouldn't have asked for it. Hello? How do you do?
Okay.
Okay, now wait a minute. Back up there. Let me get this straight. If you've got a single ensemble with a microphone in front of it, yeah, the sound from the ensemble shift very slightly counterclockwise because of the rotation of the earth, yeah well in the northern hemisphere yeah, but if you've got two ensembles Okay, what you're saying is that you've now got two counterclockwise currents of sound going and that creates a more complicated, what did you say your degree was in? Visual Acoustics, that's what I thought you said. I've never heard of that.
Well, it's a very interesting theory, think, sure, Peter Schickele, Schickele, no, there's no middle name there, the whole thing is my last name, Schickele, no, no relation to Robert E. Lee, at least as far as I know, okay, you must have just tuned in, the name's Peter Schickele, the show's Schickele Mix, and it's from PRI, Public Radio International.
No, no, I understand that. I can see that if one of the musical groups was 50 feet north of the equator, and the other group was 50 feet south of the equator, because of the Earth's rotation, the Gabrieli would sound louder if heard from the west than from the east. But I really don't have time to pursue this, okay? So, bye. Take care. Yes, well, opposition is true friendship.
We're discussing antiphonal music, but we are no longer discussing the recording of antiphonal music. Not all antiphonal music is echo music, but here's an antiphonal piece that is based on the expectation that it's an echo piece. It is assumed that the brasses in the balcony are going to echo what the woodwinds on the stage play.
Now sometimes when you get musicians spread very far apart, it's hard for them to keep together rhythmically because of the time it takes sound to travel. In this case, however, the problem is not one of acoustics, it's one of attitude. And I do mean attitude.
[music: P. D. Q. Bach, Echo Sonata (A Portrait of P. D. Q. Bach)]
The echo sonata for two unfriendly groups of instruments by P. D. Q. Bach, played by six musicians who usually behave like the grown-ups they putatively are, or were when this recording was made. John Solum on flute, Leonard Arner oboe, Loren Glickman bassoon, Theodore Weiss trumpet, William Brown French horn, and Neil deBiasse trombone.
That was the complete rendition of the work from the Portrait of P. D. Q. Bach album, not the abortive rendition unfortunately preserved on Report from Hoople, P. D. Q. Bach on the Air. I'll tell you a story about that piece. When I used to be touring with P. D. Q. Bach, the Echo Sonata was on one of our touring programs. And, you know, humor doesn't exist in a vacuum. It can be affected by what goes on in the world.
At the end of that piece, the way it's done in concert, it's set up so you're obviously expecting the brasses to play the last chord, but they don't. They won't. The woodwinds look up in the balcony. Silence. They keep looking up. Finally Bill Walters, if you've ever seen a PDQ Bach program, he was the assistant, the sort of stage manager, straight man, he would come out and look up in the balcony. He'd confer with me, then finally he would go off stage and come back with a toy gun, a toy rifle, and he would put it up to his shoulder and point it up at the group in the balcony, and then they would play the last chord. But you know, after the late 60s and early 70s, after the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and then the two attempts on the life of Gerald Ford, it just didn't seem so funny pointing a gun at somebody anymore to get him to do something. So we changed it to where Bill would jump off the stage and start walking purposefully up the aisle, rolling up his sleeves, and then the brasses would play the last chord.
As I say, humor does not exist in a vacuum. I used to find a brassiere in the piano, too. Some women talked me out of that. Very big women. Anyway, let's get on to our second suite. As I said before, not all antiphonal music is echo music, as we are about to hear. In these pieces, the answering groups don't imitate the material of the statement groups. In fact, the whole statement-answer thing gives way, in the later pieces, to a feeling of general irregular alternation, rather than the feeling of paired phrases you tend to get in echo music.
Spatial separation isn't as important here. Instead, there's a very noticeable difference in the size of the two groups. A large group is contrasted with a very small group. Four people in the second and third pieces, only one in the first. So this is the David and Goliath antiphonal suite. It too has three movements. I'll be back in about nine and a half minutes.
[music: "Leader-Chorus Song" (Music in the World of Islam: The Human Voice)]
[music: Mozart, Serenade in D (K. 239), 3rd Mvt.; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
[music: Tyers, "Panama" (Sorta Dixie); Billy May & His Orchestra]
The David and Goliath Antiphonal Suite. A small group or even one person opposed to a large group. We began with a cut from one of my favorite LPs. This was a leader and chorus song sung by a group of Gadabursi Somali who roam the Ogaden desert on the borders of Ethiopia and Somalia with their herds of camels and goats, searching for water and pasturage. There's no title for that song listed here.
That's from an album called Music in the World of Islam. And then we heard the third movement of Mozart's Serenata Nocturna, the serenade in D, Köchel No. 239. And that pits a larger orchestra against a quartet of strings, two violins, viola, and string bass. Why not cello? Probably because the soloists stood up.
And then finally from another one of my favorite LPs, Billy May & His Orchestra. The album is called Sorta Dixie and that tune was called Panama and that pits a small Dixieland group of clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and tenor sax against a big band making an awful lot of noise. By the way, you know, you regular listeners have perhaps heard an edition of Schickele Mix called We Never Make Mistakes, where I talk about the things that have gotten out and gotten past the proof listeners and proofreaders. Listen to this place. In that Mozart we just heard, there's one thing where the orchestra goes, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
It happens several times, and the timpani is always in there. Listen, here's the way it goes.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Serenade in D (K. 239), 3rd Mvt., refrain with timpani; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
The timpani goes, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Okay, now listen to that same refrain later in the piece. Are my ears on backwards or does the timpani forget to come in on the first three notes and join after the first three notes?
[music excerpt: Mozart, Serenade in D (K. 239), 3rd Mvt., the refrain later in the piece; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
He does not come in. And he's supposed to be in. I looked it up and that is not how Mozart wrote it. If only I were as good a proofreader and prooflistener for my own music as I am for other people's. My own music, even published stuff, has mistakes in it. It's really annoying.
And who am I? I'm glad you asked. That's who. Little joke there. No, but if you're hearing this program in stereo and haven't already done so, now's the time to put those headphones on.
This is going to be so cool. Listen to this. I'm going to just get a little reverb on here. Okay, here we go. Who am I? My name is Peter Schickele, and the program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about antiphonal music today. Actually, the concept of antiphony goes back to very early times in human history. Which is no surprise, really, since we hear other animals engaging in antiphony all the time. Birds, dogs, crickets, cows. The line between conversation and antiphonal chant is probably, like most boundaries, not a line at all, but a continuum.
Speaking of early, P. D. Q. Bach wrote a piece of music to be played during his patron's first meal of the day. It's called Breakfast Antiphanies. But don't worry, it hasn't been recorded. So we'll have to make do with some Johann Sebastian Bach. Our last suite features three examples of extreme antiphony in terms of musical material, although not in terms of spatial separation or size of forces.
Except for occasional slight, and I mean like one-note overlaps, the opposing elements in these pieces are never heard simultaneously. And, with a couple of brief exceptions, they never share material. In the first piece, one choir sings the phrases of a Lutheran chorale, which are separated by completely separate bits of commentary, prayer really, sung by the other choir.
The second number, a song about an impending wedding, features simple alternation between men and women. And in the third piece, we're going to hear the whole thing, but the antiphonal section that we're particularly concerned with occurs towards the end of the piece, when for quite a while, three of the ensemble members systematically, at regular and brief intervals, exchange turns in the spotlight, answering each other, but almost never echoing each other in any way.
If you have a sibling, there was probably a time in your childhood when the fighting got so annoying that your parents drew an imaginary line down the middle of the back seat of the car and you got into trouble if you crossed it. I mean, even with just one teeny little finger. Well, in these pieces, it's as if the opposing sides of the antiphony are saying, stay on your own side of the line.
Don't touch me. So I call this the Noli Me Tangere Antiphonal Suite. It lasts about 11 minutes.
[music: J. S. Bach, Motet No. 1: “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied” (BWV 225), “Wie sich ein Vater erbarmet”; Cambridge Singers/Rutter]
[music: "Kozhamiktar" (Tuva: Voices from the Center of Asia)]
[music: Arlen/Koehler, "Get Happy" (The Complete Pacific Jazz & Capitol Recordings); The Original Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker]
The Noli Me Tangere Antiphonal Suite. Bach, a group from Tuva, and Gerry Mulligan. We began from an album called A Banquet of Voices, The Cambridge Singers, directed by John Rutter, doing the second section from Bach's motet, Singet dem Herrn.
And that second section is that Lutheran chorale I mentioned. The choir, too, is singing, "Like as a father bendeth in pity o'er his infant race, so God the Lord befriendeth the meek and lowly heirs of grace." And in between the phrases, that goes on, the choir sings, as I said, it's more like a prayer, "Almighty God, preserve us still, teach us to heed thy sovereign will, in all we do, direct us," etc.
A very beautiful cantata [sic] and very beautifully sung. And then we had a group from Tuva, Voices from the Center of Asia, a Smithsonian album. And this was an antiphonal song, sung obviously by a group of men and a group of women. I want to read the lyrics here because it's pretty far from my experience here. The men sing, "Strength decides the fate of one-year-old and two-year-old foals.
Thought decides the decorations on the bride's ribbons." And then the women respond, "Whether or not the dawn comes, the cloudy morning stands. Whether to take me or not take me to wed, my friend can't make up his mind." The men sing, "Strength decides the fate of one-year-old and two-year-old foals. Let intentions decide the decorations on the bride's attire." And the women sing, "Whether the sun rises or not, somewhere it is getting hot. Whether or not my friend appears, the bride price will be bid up, won't it?"
It's a different world, alright. And then finally, Gerry Mulligan Quartet, playing Get Happy. That's Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax, Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass, and Chico Hamilton on drums.
And that technique of switching every four bars in jazz is called trading fours. It almost always happens after the main solos are over and before you play the tune again for the last time. And, okay, so I lied a little bit, folks, when I said that there was no simultaneous stuff going on here. Obviously the drums play not only during the drum solo, but also they, the drums, accompany the other people playing, but there's a big A big difference between the solo playing and the just keeping time.
And even Gerry Mulligan sometimes plays some accompanimental stuff, but it's very much of an antiphonal thing. Trumpet, drums, bari, drums, trumpet, drums, bari, drums. And that's actually one of the longest examples of trading fours that I've heard. And I do believe we've got time for a tidbit here. I pointed out earlier that conversation is a form of antiphony.
Well today's Tidbit Time is a highly stylized conversation. We started the program with Mary Martin and John Raitt bickering in Annie Get Your Gun. Here's another example of opposites attracting.
[music: Lee/Kretzmer, "Bangers & Mash" (A Celebration of Sellers); Peter Sellers & Sophia Loren]
Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren (recorded): 1943, Allied forces land in Italy. There's a smashing looking bird over there, Bert. I think she's showing up there. Well, why don't you chat her up then? Right. Buongiorno, signorina, there. Here, are you married? [mock Italian] There you are. Can't have a fair answer than that, can you?
[No speech for 51 s.]
Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren (recorded): What are you laughing at now? Listen, please. Joe? Yes? Why don't you belt up, or I'll give you a punch up the throat. Now she's-a tells-a me. Ha! Mamma mia.
Opposition is true friendship. Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren singing Bangers and Mash. Bangers are sausages, by the way. And of course M*A*S*H is an old TV program. Ok, let's go out with a beautiful antiphonal surprise. Here's Paul Winter playing his soprano sax on a rainy night in a forest in Glacier National Park, not knowing he would be answered by a chorus.
[music: Winter, "North Fork Wolves" (Prayer for the Wild Things); Paul Winter]
And Paul Winter and a large pack of wolves bring Schickele Mix to an end 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. 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 129. 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: Winter, "North Fork Wolves" (Prayer for the Wild Things); Paul Winter]
If you'd like a copy of the playlist that Peter Schickele 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. Again, this is program number 129.