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| 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. | |
| [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 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 fell... | |
| 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 a girl who's trying to make it as a pop singer, and she's singing in 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! | |
| I would describe, well, 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 so happy. | |
| 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. | |
| Getting 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. Think about it. 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 plainchant, 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. | |
| [No speech for 213s.] | |
| First we heard from the office of Second Vespers, the Nativity of Our Lord, sung by Cantores Jelensis, 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 Peres. | |
| The first few times I heard plainchant 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. Here's a whole chorus and orchestra in another of Europe's great cathedrals, 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. | |
| [No speech for 126s.] | |
| The opening section of Monteverdi's Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. Deus in auditorium, O God, turn to me in my adversity. John Eliot Gardner was conducting the Monteverdi Choir, the London Oratory Junior Choir, His Majesty's Sackbutts and Cornets, 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-Montevani 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 Montevani. In 1951, Harry Sartorius, the composer, wrote a piece for the London Oratory Junior Choir. In 1916, the composer, Richard Martin of Decca Recording Company, gave Ronald Binge a free hand to write for a Montevani session, Montevani himself being on tour with the Victoria Palace Crazy Gang show. | |
| Montevani was a violinist. As a matter of fact, Binge and Montevani 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 Montevani 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. | |
| [No speech for 79s.] | |
| Excuse me, the magic of Modavani and his cascading strings. | |
| A technique of selective simulated reverberation. Developed in 1951, by the way, well before the advent of multitrack recording, | |
| [No speech for 13s.] | |
| do is schtick. 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. | |
| Never kiss me, darling. Be mine tonight. | |
| Two more days is now. | |
| 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, all right, 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 sound. | |
| 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... | |
| [No speech for 11s.] | |
| when you could have this kind of Harmonica sound... | |
| [No speech for 132s.] | |
| 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 and 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. | |
| I will lay me down, like a bridge over trouble. I will lay me down. | |
| [No speech for 30s.] | |
| Sail on silver girl, sail on mine. For time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way. | |
| See how they shine. | |
| I'm 50 feet in the air. I'm sailing right behind. He's your life. | |
| [No speech for 36s.] | |
| 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. | |
| 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 it on a speaker. I mean, it's not like I'm 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 Harmonic Cats 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 sounds through a steel plate or a spring so that reverb could be simulated with even less space. And now, with digital technology, what at once took several acres of prime Venetian real estate to accomplish, can now be accomplished through digital technology. | |
| 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, all right? This is show number 130. How many beautifully clever titles do you think there are in the world, anyway? Man, I'll see you in about eight minutes. | |
| [No speech for 181s.] | |
| This song is from the mountains, I've known this song for a long time. | |
| Because it was in all the years of my childhood, the magic sound. | |
| The song of the Alps, melody like from the mountain valley. It sings and sounds like a silver waterfall. The song of the Alps still sounds in me in the farthest valley. | |
| The song of the Alps is music from home. The song of the Alps. | |
| It sings and sounds like the salt of the sea. | |
| The song of the Alps is music from home. | |
| The song of the Alps, melody like from the mountain valley. It sings and sounds like a silver waterfall. | |
| The song of the Alps still sounds in me in the farthest valley. | |
| The song of the Alps is music from home. From home. | |
| The song of the Alps. | |
| [No speech for 155s.] | |
| The song of the Alps. The song of the Alps. The song of the Alps. The song of the Alps. The song of the Alps. evocative reverb. Not an evocative, nor a reverberant sweet 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 World. 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 going to 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 fine? No, I used to know a guy who was a coffee machine. I'm not sure if he's a coffee machine or not. I don't 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. | |
| [No speech for 10s.] | |
| Help, help, I need somebody help Not just anybody, help, you know I need someone, help | |
| When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help, in any way. But now these days are gone. | |
| When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help, in any way. 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. Won't you please help me? | |
| 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 me, help, for I'm feeling down. 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 beetle will pass among you. No foreign coins, please. | |
| We are feeling like as never before. Help me, help, for I'm feeling down. Help me get my feet on the ground. | |
| 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. Can somebody fix this? I can't concentrate. I can't concentrate on what I'm saying. This is driving me insane! I'm gonna... | |
| Well, I don't know if he really ripped the microphone. 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. | |
| Well... If I could do this, she's my favorite. Ba ba doo la cha don't he Iris 어�iente Ba ba doo la she's my favorite. Ba ba doo la cha don't he Iris 어� Innen Ba ba doo she it's-. | |
| If I just stop and let you do it. | |
| She's the queen of all the силruff. | |
| She's the one, she's the one that love is a femme! | |
| [No speech for 40s.] | |
| She's the one with the light She's the one that walks around the stone She's the one that you have to love | |
| She's my baby Baby, baby, baby Baby, baby, baby Baby, baby, baby She's the one that you have to love Let's rock again | |
| [No speech for 24s.] | |
| She's my baby She's my baby Don't need a man | |
| She's my baby | |
| Well, since my baby left me Well, I found a new place to dwell Well, it's dead at the end of a lonely street Perfect content Well, I'll be, I'll be so lonely, baby I'll be so lonely, baby I'll be so lonely, baby I'll be so lonely, baby I'll be so lonely, I could die Could I have a little more echo in my voice? Oh, no, it's always crowded That's got it You still can find some room For broken-out lovers | |
| To cry there in the gloom And be so, and be so lonely, baby And be so lonely, baby And be so lonely, baby Die Now the bell-ops' tears keep flowing The desk-clips dress in black Well, it's been so long | |
| [No speech for 13s.] | |
| Well, if your baby leaves you And you've got a tail to take | |
| Well, you'll take a walk down the street | |
| To the heartbreak hotel Where you'll be I ripped my jeans Where you will be A third pair today You'll be so lovely | |
| You could die | |
| [No speech for 13s.] | |
| That's good, that's good That's close enough for jazz | |
| Oh, love it's always crowded You see You still can find some room For broken-hearted lovers To cry there in the gloom And be yourself And be so lovely | |
| So that's too much Heartbreak hotel Tears keep flowing You'll be so lovely That's too much Turn me off | |
| John Lennon singing Bebopalula And Stan Freeberg The version of Heartbreak Hotel Now, the fact that Freeberg | |
| 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 Well, since my baby left me | |
| Well, I found a new place To dwell | |
| Well, it's down at the end Of Lonely Street That's Heartbreak Hotel Where I'll be I'll be just so lonely, baby | |
| Well, I'm so lonely I'll be just so lonely I could die Oh, love it's always crowded You still can find some room For broken-hearted lovers Heartbreak Hotel What a great song Sung by the king Before he became the court jester You know, I was thinking About the Freeberg | |
| 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 Take my wife, please Take my wife, please Here goes 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 | |
| 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 going Keep the mood calm And do another cut from that | |
| Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin album This is the Rachmaninoff Vocalese | |
| [No speech for 39s.] | |
| 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 by 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 130s.] | |
| 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 | |