WNYC is a media sponsor of the 30th anniversary of Harlem Week, a month of events celebrating the culture and history of Harlem. Information and a complete schedule available at HarlemDiscover.com. It's 67 degrees with cloudy skies in Central Park. This is New York Public Radio, WNYC New York and WNYC.org. News and talk all day, classical music all night. Schickele Music, Schickele Mix is next.
I would be lying if I said I weren't. 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. And how good it is to report 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 also, from this, I know I'm biased, but this terrific radio station, which gives me what I need to do what I do, and when I've done it, what I've done is done up in waveform and distributed far and wide by PRI, Public Radio International.
Back around 1960, when the French New Wave Cinema was in full bloom, my brother and I enjoyed taking sides when it came to Truffaut and Godard. We both saw everything that both directors did, but I tended towards the more personal humanist Truffaut, while my brother would defend the more radically innovative and political Godard. I remember a letter my brother sent me once that said, As I am your true friend, I will tell you your Truffaut. There is a Godard.
Actually, in the long run, I was selective about both of them. When Truffaut films were bad, they were oddly flat and uninvolving. But when Godard's films were bad, they were infuriating. They really drove you up against the wall. I got that in before the irrelevancy alarm went off. Anyway, I recently saw one of my favorite Godard movies, Masculine Feminine, and it stood up beautifully.
There's a great scene in which the girl, who's trying to make it as a pop singer, is recording her next single.
The instrumental tracks have already been done and she's singing in this big studio all alone with headphones on and the scene cuts back and forth between her in the studio where all you hear is her pipey little voice and the control room where you hear all the instruments and all the echo they've put on her voice and it sounds like Cecil B. DeMille. Bob Dylan once said if you stop smoking you can sound like Caruso but using an echo chamber doesn't hurt either.
There's a famous story, stop me if you've heard it, about the old Hollywood composer Dimitri Tyomkin getting an Oscar and in his acceptance speech he said, I'd like to thank everybody who made this possible, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Debussy. Wouldn't it be great, just once, to see a singer accept a Grammy with that much candor?
And the winner in the Best Female Vocalist category, Pretentious Pop Division, is Tina Piccolavoce for As Big As All Outdoors.
[music excerpt: Boublil/Schonberg, “Les Misérables,” Overture; Original Broadway Cast Recording]
First, I'd like to thank my mother for having me, and my father for marrying her anyway, and I'd like to thank my producer, Joe. But most of all, I'd like to thank the Tone Buster D35 XL Digital Reverb Unit in our studio for making me sound as big as all outdoors. Thank you! God bless! Thank you!
Yes, echo is a singer's best friend. Actually, there are two very different kinds of echo. One is where there's one or more distinct sonic images coming back at you, like when you stand at the edge of a canyon and shout hello and you hear the reflection a few moments later. The other is where the reflecting surfaces are such that they bounce the sound all over the place, creating hundreds of weak echoes that cancel each other out in terms of recognizable reflections.
Now if I had my way, we would distinguish between those two kinds by calling the first echo and the second reverb. In other words, this is echo, this is echo, this is echo, this is echo, this is echo. Whereas, on the other hand, this is reverb. But, of course, nobody asks me. And you get into trouble right away with the term echo chamber, which, according to my highly sensible nomenclature, is used to produce reverb. By the way, we tend to think of the echo chamber as being an invention of the modern recording era.
But in point of fact, almost a millennium ago, Europeans were building incredibly expensive echo chambers. But they weren't called echo chambers then, they were called cathedrals. Listen to these two renditions of Plain Chant, the first recorded in a quite dry acoustic, and the second in the Cathedral of Paris, also known as Notre Dame. They are both examples of monody, there's only one musical line. But in the second number, It sometimes sounds as if there's harmony, because the previous note is still reverberating so loudly.
[music excerpt: "Office of Second Vespers, Nativity of Our Lord" (Recordings for Norton Anthology of Western Music); Cantores Yalenses/Wright]
[music excerpt: "Mass for the Nativity of the Virgin, Communion"; Ensemble Organum/Pérès]
We heard from the office of Second Vespers the Nativity of Our Lord sung by Cantores Yalenses, as they call themselves. Their parents probably just called them the Yale Singers. Anyway, Craig Wright is their director. And then that beautifully ornamented chant from the 13th century School of Notre Dame was from the Communion, Beata Viscere Mariae Virginis, sung by the Ensemble Organum, under the direction of Marcel Pérès.
The first few times I heard plain chant was on records, and I thought it was pretty boring. Then later I realized that there were two reasons for that. What I had heard was dryly recorded and dryly performed. That music positively blossoms in a large stone church.
Now that was just seven singers. Here's a whole chorus and orchestra in another of Europe's great cathedrals, and therefore great echo chambers, San Marco in Venice. Listen to the ends of the sections when everything stops and the last chords continue to dance like angels in the air.
[music excerpt: Monteverdi, Vespro della Beata Vergine, “Deus in adiutorium, Domine ad adiuvandum”; Nigel Robson/Monteverdi Choir/English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner]
The opening section of Monteverdi's Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. Deus in adiutorium, O God, turn to me in my adversity. John Eliot Gardiner was conducting the Monteverdi Choir, the London Oratory Junior Choir, His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts, and the English Baroque Soloists. Fantastic piece! Now, I want to thank my friend Rex LeVang for turning me on to a connection I never knew about. I refer, of course, to the Monteverdi-Mantovani connection. Let me read you a couple of paragraphs From the liner notes to an album of the music of Ronald Binge, a composer who also arranged for Mantovani.
In 1951, Harry Sarton of Decca Recording Company gave Ronald Binge a free hand to write for a Mantovani session, Mantovani himself being on tour with the Victoria Palace Crazy Gang show. Mantovani was a violinist. As a matter of fact, Binge and Mantovani met in the pit.
Binge devised quite a new orchestral setup, using only a few wind instruments, but a large string section. With this, he created the cascading strings effect, soon to become world famous as the Mantovani sound. The germ of this idea came from an unlikely source. Ronald Binge loved classical music, and was much attracted to the music of Monteverdi.
He was intrigued by the rich intermingling of sounds that occur naturally when music is performed in a great cathedral such as St. Mark's, Venice. Binge had for some time mused over the possibilities of doing something of the same in popular music. Not that cathedral-like reverberation wasn't already part of the recording scene in the use by studios of various electrophonic devices, usually called echo chambers.
The trouble is, reverberation chambers are indiscriminate in their effect, over-applied, and the magic soon palls, and what enhances melody can spell death to rhythm and harmonic clarity. Ronnie decided to dispense with artificial devices and simulate the reverberation effect within the orchestra itself. This could be then used selectively when and where it would be at its most effective.
Reverberation is simulated by dividing the violins into several parts, each allotted a different melody note in turn which they sustain and let die away until called upon to move elsewhere. Using studio ambience, normal for his basic, lush scoring for the orchestra as a whole, he used his simulated reverberation to highlight those sections of melody where it would be most effective.
[music: Kern/Hammerstein, "All the Things You Are" (Gems Forever); Mantovani & His Orchestra]
The Magic of Mantovani and His Cascading Strings, a Technique of Selective Simulated Reverberation, developed in 1951, by the way, well before the advent of multitrack recording.
Henny, come on, not now. Look, I'll tell you when, okay? I'm sorry, folks. Henny Youngman is out in the hall, can you believe that? He's determined to come on the show and do his shtick. And I mean, he's very funny. I mean, you can't help but laugh at those dumb jokes. But I keep telling him that this is a music show, not a comedy show. And he keeps saying, so who are you? Are you the Pope or something that you can determine what goes out over the airways?
And I say, no, I'm Peter Schickele, and the show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. We're talking about echo today, with an emphasis on the indistinct, generalized kind of echo, which is why the program is called The Reverbing of America. Reverb in moderation is the kind of echo that makes you feel as if you're wearing a big, warm, floppy sweater.
Now you may not have a digital recording studio in your home. You may not even have a cassette machine. But it's a pretty good bet that you have an echo chamber. And it's also a pretty good bet that you've used it to enhance your voice.
[music excerpt: Trad., "Katy Cline"; The Red Fox Chasers]
But the trouble with bathrooms is that they're usually pretty small. You'd have a lot of trouble fitting even a trio into my bathroom, and if one of them's a piano, forget it. But somebody had a brilliant idea. Now, I can't attest to the authenticity of this factoid, but according to the story I heard from a studio guy, it was somebody who was producing a recording for the Harmonicats in 1947, who figured, alright, so I can't put the whole group in the bathroom, but here's what I can do, I can feed the music into a speaker in the bathroom, and then put a microphone in there with it to record what comes out of the speaker as it bounces around the tiled walls.
So, in one fell swoop, with a mic and a speaker and a few feet of audio cable, the Harmonicats got the same kind of swimming echo that Monteverdi had, but they got it without having to rent St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice. Hey listen, why have this kind of a harmonica sound,
[music]
when you could have this kind of harmonica sound?
[music: Fisher/Bryan, "Peg O’ My Heart" (Times to Remember); Harmonicats]
The sound of roller skating rinks. Jerry Murad and the Harmonicats. There are only three harmonicas there, including a bass harmonica, playing Peg of My Heart in 1947 during a musician's strike, by the way, according to a reference book I was checking. It says the reason they could do it was that the harmonica was not considered a musical instrument. I am not making that up. Here's another musical legend I've heard. Once again, I don't know if it's true.
But the story is that for Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, they put the drum set at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Well, whatever they did, and that would be a very 60s thing to do, they did get a huge reverb time on the drums. Each hit has a tail like a comet. Listen carefully. The drums are mixed very low at first,
but by the end, they sound like cannon shots.
[music excerpt: Simon, "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" (Bridge Over Troubled Waters); Simon & Garfunkel]
The end of Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel. I can just hear the elevator operator, basement, menswear, household items, and Hal Blaine playing drums. By the way, there were also normally recorded drums in there, in addition to the elevator shaft ones. Now this was the late 1960s, the era of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, which was music recorded and re-recorded through speakers until it sounds as if you're standing in the middle of heavy surf.
This was the era of distortion is good, which is still with us in certain circles. And if I sound snippy about that, I don't mean to. Recording the distorted sound of an overloaded speaker is philosophically no different from putting a mute in a trumpet. And by the way, even if those stories of recording or re-recording in bathrooms and elevator shafts aren't true, and I'm inclined to believe that they are, The general principle was very much in use.
When I was recording with Vanguard in the late 60s and early 70s, they had a completely bare room in the basement, below the regular studio, with speakers at one end and mics at the other. It was no different from the Harmonicats bathroom, except that the results were used more sparingly. They would mix the echoed sound in with the direct feed to create as little or much reverb as they wanted. And I suppose the decor was different too.
Also, various companies developed ways of sending sound through a steel plate or a spring so that reverb could be simulated with even less space. And now, with digital technology, what it once took several acres of prime Venetian real estate to accomplish can now be accomplished with a computer card you could put in your shirt pocket. Although doing that wouldn't enhance your singing. In addition to enhancement, echo is used to create distance.
The more you lower the volume and increase the reverb, the farther away something sounds. Now this is interesting because that relationship is often but not always true in nature. The volume part of course is, but if the terrain is flat like where I grew up in North Dakota, the outside is quite dead acoustically.
If a coyote calls out in the middle of a flat prairie, there's nothing for the sound to bounce off of except the ground he's sitting on, so you won't get any of that evocative echo or even much reverb. Here however are three examples of evocative reverb. I call this suite, Three Examples of Evocative Reverb. Okay give me a break, alright? This is show number 130, how many beautifully clever titles do you think there are in the world anyway?
Three examples of evocative reverb. Not an evocative, nor a reverberant suite title to be sure, but exemplary nonetheless. First we heard Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin, with a McFerrin number called Coyote. If Yo-Yo was indeed playing on that cut, he certainly didn't have a lot to do, but I think he was probably playing double stops down low there, low sustained tones.
Then came Kurt Hertha, singing Das Alpenlied, the Alpen song, and finally a piece of computer generated music called Finding Voice by Laurie Spiegel. In addition to the feeling of reverb in that last one, there's an irregularly pulsating effect on those tones that suggests water to me. Water in a cave. See? Even composers of abstract music who have radio programs on which they talk about how unreliable putting images to music is, even they put images to music.
It's from a good album by Laurie Spiegel called Unseen Worlds, which I guess means that images are particularly inappropriate. Ah, don't worry about it. I don't. Besides, when you come right down to it... Henny, not now! Man, he's persistent. Henny Youngman's still out in the hall, folks, waiting to do his thing. I'm gonna try to put him off till the very end of the show. There's a coffee machine out there. He should be fine. And how about me? Am I Am I fine? No, I used to know a guy named Al Fine, but I'm Peter Schickele, and the program is Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
The Reverbing of America. A gratuitous and dishonest title, since not everything we're hearing is American, but I couldn't resist it. And it's Tidbit Time at the old echo chamber. Today's tidbit, I feel quite confident in stating, was recorded in a typically dry recording studio. In this case, reverb was added to the speaking voice to make it sound as if the speaker were in a church.
[music: Lennon/McCARTNEY, "Help!" (A Celebration of Sellers); Peter Sellers]
Peter Sellers (recorded): When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I am not so self-assured. Now I find I've changed my mind, I've opened up the door. Help me, help, for I'm feeling down. Help me get my feet on the ground.
And now my life has changed in oh so many ways. My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
Every now and then I feel so insecure. I know that I just need you like I've never done before. Help us if you can, we are feeling down, and we do appreciate your being round. So help us get our feet back on the ground, won't you? Please? Please help us? Please?
The church beadle will pass among you, and no foreign coins, please.
[No speech for 21 s.]
Peter Sellers, sermonizing on the subject of help. Speaking of speaking, I heard about a caper that was supposed to have taken place at Swarthmore before I was a student there. Somebody had been invited to give a lecture at the college, and some students at the radio station wired the mic up so that it fed his speech back to him a fraction of a second later. Is that possible? I know that a mic can act as a speaker and vice versa.
And anyway, I know how incredibly disconcerting it is. Because I've played in a few auditoriums where, especially without an audience at rehearsal, the sound slaps back in a very distinct echo, and it takes all the concentration you can muster to keep going. I can't tell you how discombobulating it is. Which I guess that Swarthmore speaker found out the hard way. And remember, the audience can't hear the echo.
Well, thank you very much.
It's a great pleasure to be here at Swarthmore College. That seething hotbed of Quakerism. And can somebody... Never mind. And so what I have... Can somebody fix this? There's some kind of... I just can't concentrate. I can't concentrate on what I'm saying. You know, this is driving me insane. I'm going to...
Well, I don't know if he really ripped the microphone off the stand, but maybe. Anyway, that same kind of sort of snap echo has been used by singers to create a disjointed effect, as if someone were standing right behind them and singing just a little bit behind, not quite keeping up. Here are two examples of liberal use of echo reverb.
[music: Davis/Vincent, "Be-bop-a-lula" (Rock ’N’ Roll); John Lennon]
[music: Axton/Durden/Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel" (Collectors Series); Stan Freberg]
Stan Freberg (recorded): Could I have a little more echo on my voice?
Recording: That's got it.
[No speech for 74 s.]
Recording: That's good, that's good, that's close enough for jazz.
Recording: So that's too much echo.
John Lennon singing Be-Bop-A-Lula and Stan Freberg's version of Heartbreak Hotel.
Now, the fact that Freberg parodied Presley's use of echo must mean that it was unusually heavy for its time, right? It was sort of outrageous how much echo he used, right? Well, listen to a bit of the original. In the light of what's gone on in the echo department since the middle 50s, Elvis sounds positively tame.
[music: Axton, "Heartbreak Hotel" (The Top Ten Hits); Elvis Presley]
What a great song. Sung by the king before he became the court jester. You know, I was thinking about the Freberg and also that Swarthmore story. They make me think that you could probably use Echo as a weapon. I'm gonna set this up here and Henny Youngman is bound to come in again because the hour's almost up here. And I'll be ready. So, getting back to Elvis.
It seems to me that no matter what you might have thought of him... Okay, Henny, come on in. It's all yours.
[music excerpt: Youngman, "Hooked on Henny" (Tales from the Rhino)]
Henny Youngman (recorded): Take my wife, please. Take my wife, please.
Here goes.
Henny Youngman (recorded): Take my wife, please. Please, please, please. Take my wife, please. Please, please, please.
Well, that is a very interesting thing to know about. I wonder if it would work with moles. Do moles make any sound? My friend Sally is having a terrible problem with moles in her garden. I wonder if you could use echo on them. Well, we began the program with one of the greatest echo chambers ever built by humans, Notre Dame. Let's end with one of God's greatest echo chambers, a canyon called Gates of the Mountains on the Missouri River in Montana.
This is Paul Winter playing his soprano sax on the river, which is also the name he gives to the piece.
[music: Winter, "On the River" (Prayer for the Wild Things); Paul Winter]
Paul Winter, On the River. I said we were going to end with that but we have a little bit of time left. So let's keep the mood calm and do another cut from that Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin album. This is the Rachmaninoff Vocalise.
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. 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 130. 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 163 s.]
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.