And now, Shickley Mix. Ready, Mr. Shickley? Have I ever not been ready? Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all music are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.
And thank goodness 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 commendable radio station, which gives me room to ruminate, the results of which rumination are distributed hither and yon by PRI, Public Radio International.
All right, boys and girls, let's talk about cadences. A cadence is a melodic and or harmonic progression that produces in the listener a sense of completion.
Now, melodic means like, twinkle, twinkle, little star, and harmonic means like chords, like the kind of pants your daddy wears on weekends.
The cadence is your friend, boys and girls. Without cadences, you might not know when the music people have finished playing the song,
which, believe me, has happened to audiences many, many times in the 20th century. It can be quite aggravating. Can you say aggravating? Now, what we like most about,
cadences, girls and boys, notice I put girls first that time, what we like most about cadences is this, there are all different kinds of cadence, like flavors of ice cream,
and the composer gets to decide which kind of cadence, um, which kind of cadence to use and when to use it, and also whether to mix up different kinds,
uh,
boys and girls, girls and boys, well, what can you do? Hey, I got to admit if I had a choice between listening to music theory and visiting the ice cream truck,
I would definitely choose caramel swirl with chocolate sprinkles. But of course, being the grown-up, I don't get to go to the truck. I have to stay and do this dumb program.
And I guess it's about time I did this dumb program. Okay, here I am doing this dumb program. In the 18th century, most recitatives and cantatas and operas and oratorios ended with a cadence.
And what the keyboard player was reading from was the bass line, which had chord symbols added to indicate the harmony.
And he had quite a bit of leeway as to what he played with his right hand as long as it fit the harmony. Here, let me swing over to the authentic instrument here.
Okay, now, uh, since we're dealing with an 18th century piece here, I'm going to set it to harpsichord. That's pretty good on harpsichord. Okay, now, here's what the written part has.
And he can do what he wants with the right hand as long as it's those two chords, but he might play them or he might do it an octave higher or he might go
or he might go So the keyboard player is allowed a certain amount of freedom, but he is expected to exercise a certain amount of restraint.
Unlike this harpsichord. And, lo, she found herself within a market.
And all around her, fish were dying.
And yet their stench did live on.
A recitative from the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn by P.D.Q. Bach. John Ferranti was the bargain counter tenor and Leonid Hambro, the unstoppable harpsichordist.
I played that off of the dreaded P.D.Q. Bach collection, the boxed set of the first five Vanguard albums, which includes some brand new material, folks,
because of recent advances in scholarship and also because of the fact that that way you have to buy it even if you already have the individual.
What we just heard was from the very first public P.D.Q. Bach concert back in April 1965 in New York City's Town Hall.
Victor Borga was playing nightly in one of the Broadway houses at that time, and Leonid Hambro was his straight man in that show. And we indulged in a little in-joke for the people who knew that.
Lee wasn't needed in Borga's show until the second act, so we put Iphigenia on the first half of our program, and after the piece was over, we took our bows and went on to play it again.
We went off stage, and when we came back on stage for a second bow, Lee had his overcoat on. He took a bow, walked to the front of the apron, jumped down off the stage, and walked up the aisle right out of the theater and over to his other gig.
But he did a fine job in Iphigenia of turning a cadence into a cadenza. A cadenza is simply a place for the soloist to show off, which is why today's show, which is about cadenzas,
is called If You've Got It Baby, Flawless.
A cadenza usually happens around a cadence, and in fact, both the words cadence and cadenza come from the same Latin word.
And, you know, I used to know what that Latin word meant, but I can't remember. So, dictionary, dictionary, where are you?
Oh, brother, the dictionary is on the very top shelf of the bookcase. Excuse me. Excuse me, folks. I'm going to have to stand on the chair to get this thing here.
Uh-oh.
I hate it when that happens. Oh, man, I'll have to clean this up later. Okay, well, here's the dictionary.
Cadence. Okay, here we go. From the Latin cadere, to fall. Oh, okay.
I guess I'll be able to remember that from now on. In the old days, apparently, the melody would usually descend before the end of a section. That's where falling comes in. Okay.
Well, at least I'm glad it's books and not CDs. Or LPs. Now, before the 19th century, cadenzas were usually, but not always, improvised.
Performers wanted to show off what they could do, both as technicians and improvising composers. Any professional soloist was expected to be able to improvise.
By the 20th century, that ability was largely extinct in classical music, except among organists.
Today, even if pianists play their own cadenzas for Mozart concertos, they're likely to have worked them out and practiced them beforehand, to have composed them in the usual sense of the term, rather than to have improvised them on the spot.
This partly has to do with the disappearance of a common practice. In the 18th century, it was a common practice. In the 18th century, there were certain procedures in composition that everybody pretty much accepted. Now there's a whole, whole bunch of different styles.
But even in the 18th century, composers occasionally wrote cadenzas out, sometimes for the sake of amateurs who might not be adept at improvising,
and sometimes, perhaps, just to preserve what they themselves might do. Whatever the reason, we're glad they did, aren't we? Yes, we are, because in those days, most good composers were virtuosos.
And those cadenzas give us at least a glimpse of what they sounded like when they were pouring it on.
Here's an account by an amateur musician and lawyer who visited Vivaldi in February of 1715.
He said, towards the end, Vivaldi played a solo accompaniment splendidly,
appending a fantasy, by which he meant cadenza, which really terrified me, for such has not been nor ever can be played.
He came with his fingers within a mere grass stalk's breadth from the bridge, so that the bow had no room. That meant he played very, very high on the fingerboard.
And this on all four strings, with imitations and at an incredible speed.
And here's the first movement of one of Vivaldi's violin concertos with a cadenza that has survived in his own hand.
.
. .
The opening movement of a violin concerto in D by Antonio Vivaldi, the Red Priest. That's not an oxymoron. He was ordained, and he was called that because of his red hair,
not because he was a communist. The concerto was subtitled, or perhaps nicknamed, Il Grosso Mogul, which I guess could be translated, The Big Shot. That was Monica
Huggett with the European Community Baroque Orchestra. One of the reasons composers started indicating places for cadenzas was to discourage performers from inserting them at will.
Singers especially were notorious for launching into cadenzas at the drop of a hat. One per aria was not enough. Here's a comment from the beginning of the 18th century.
Every air has three cadences that are all three final. General. Generally speaking, the study of the singers of the present times consists in terminating the
cadence of the first part with an overflowing of passages and divisions at pleasure, and the orchestra waits. In that of the second, the dose is increased, and the orchestra grows tired.
But on the last cadence, the throat is set going like a weathercock in a whirlwind, and the orchestra yawns. And if you think that Leonid Hambro's cadenza in the PDQ Bach
piece was long, listen to this. In 1815, at the Milan Opera House, a singer named Gaetano Crivelli
embellished two words, Felice ognora, for 25 minutes. I'll bet that's longer than Johnny
Hodge's famous solo at the Newport Jazz Festival. Well, 1815 in Milan, I guess those were the days of servants and extended families. You didn't have to worry about getting the babysitter,
home in time. I used to babysit, but now I have a radio program. The name's Peter Shickley, and the program's name is Shickley Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
If you've got it, baby, flaunt it. The story of cadenzas. I mentioned before that in the Baroque era, a keyboard accompanist was usually reading from
a figured bass, a bass line with chord symbols. What he played with his right hand was up to him, as long as it expressed the harmonies indicated by the chord symbols. In this excerpt from the Second Brandenburg
Concerto, the broken D minor triad and everything else the right hand plays was not written out by Bach. It was made up by the harpsichordist or someone else, based on Bach's harmonic outline.
At another performance, even that same harpsichordist might do it differently. He might play that chord up an octave. He might play it repeatedly rather than holding it. He might use a different configuration of the chord. He might play it repeatedly rather than holding it. He might
make up a counter melody. In fact, he would not be breaking any of the rules of the proper
realization of figured bass if he played this with his right hand. But he would be guilty,
I think most juries would agree, of inappropriateness, of adhering to the letter of the law,
but not to its spirit. Similarly, if you go to a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major, you have a constitutional rule that says, if you play this with your right hand, you will not be breaking any of the rules of the proper realization of figured bass.
If you hear this.
Okay, that supposed cadenza for Mozart's 11th Piano Concerto was from Memphis Stomp,
part of Dave Grusin's terrific piano score for the movie The Firm. Great piano music, but not appropriate for that concerto. But the word appropriate puts us,
solidly and painfully, on the horns of a dilemma. Mozart's concertos are two centuries old.
Modern performers of those concertos have four choices. A. Use only Mozart's own cadenzas. B.
Use cadenzas written by other, possibly great musicians, whose style, however, doesn't match
Mozart's. C. Use cadenzas written by others, but in the style of Mozart. Or D. Improvise and let the chips fall where they may.
There are problems with all four choices. A. Has a triple whammy of obstacles. 1. Mozart didn't write cadenzas for all his concertos.
2. He presumably wowed his audiences with his cadenzas, but they hadn't heard the music of Chopin, or Liszt, or Ravel, or Rachmaninoff, or Tatum, or Peterson. History has raised
the ante wow-wise. And 3. You eliminate the possibility of the excitement of improvisation. Subtitles by the Amara.org community
The problem with cadenzas in the style of Mozart is simply that nobody has ever written great music in the style of another composer. That leaves cadenzas, either written or improvised, that veer off into other styles.
The problem there is our old bugaboo appropriateness. Does the shoe fit? Are we delighted, or are we, when we shouldn't be, amused? Well, what do you think?
Here are the ends of the first movements of three Mozart piano concertos. The first cadenza is by Mozart himself.
The second is by Beethoven, barely a generation later, but already a very different kettle of fish. And the last is by Arthur Schnabel, known as a pianist but also a composer during the first half of the 20th century.
A lot of stylistic water has flowed under the bridge.
Okay, first we heard Mozart's last concerto, No. 27 in B-flat, with Murray Pariah playing Mozart's cadenza. He was also conducting from the piano.
Then came Schnabel playing the concerto No. 20 in D minor with Beethoven's cadenza. Walter Suskind was conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Same forces in the concerto No. 24 in C minor, but here Schnabel played his own superheated, terminally chromatic cadenza. Let me read you part of Suskind's recollection of that session.
It's interesting not only in terms of Schnabel's cadenza, but also in terms of the personal dynamics of English orchestras.
This is the second session for the C minor concerto, and Suskind says, The problem here was Schnabel's own cadenza, which seemed, as we would say today, very far out and rather harshly modern in relation to the Mozart score.
No. 30 in B-flat, with Murray Pariah playing Mozart's cadenza. moments in the cadenza, someone in the orchestra sniggered. Schnabel was furious, and he spent
several minutes justifying his cadenza. Certainly it's not in Mozart's style, he said, but nobody laughed yesterday when I played Beethoven's cadenzas, and his, for his time, are as far
removed from Mozart's own style as mine are for my time. He was not going to be discouraged by this supercilious reaction, and the session continued without a hitch. To my mind, on
rehearing this cadenza later, I am not at all offended by the apparent dichotomy in styles. In the second session for the C minor, there was some unexpected drama when one of the woodwinds
played an inaccurate note in the second movement. Schnabel shot up from the piano and called out in the direction of the offending instrument, woodwind, you're playing out of tune. Someone in the section
shouted back, Schnabel, you're playing wrong notes. I was horrified. I saw the whole project being washed out. Somewhat to my surprise, I was not able to hear the second movement. I was not able to
surprise. The next voice I heard was my own. I tapped my baton on the stand and called out, Suskind, you're giving wrong beats. The laughter that followed resolved the tension to which the
heat had no doubt contributed, and we were able to resume on course. And this is interesting, considering the sort of cheekiness of the orchestra. At the end of the final session,
the entire orchestra stood and gave Schnabel a hearty and prolonged ovation, a gesture I have never seen equaled in a recording studio.
Every musician was so won over by Schnabel's integrity and purposefulness that this outpouring of respect and affection was as inevitable as it was spontaneous.
Now, I know Fellini made a movie about an orchestra rehearsal, but there really should be a TV sitcom about an orchestra. Say, the New York Philharmonic.
The soaring melodies, the counterpoint, the violent contrasts. But after all is said and
done, it's a new day for the orchestra. And it's not just a new day for the orchestra. It's a new day for the orchestra.
the harmony season premiere NYP blue tonight at 8 well back to cadenzas and
the stylistic problems thereof as far as I'm concerned you can't make a rule it's an ad hoc thing I still have trouble with the Schnabel cadenza but maybe it's
just that I don't like the music that much here's a cadenza for the D minor concerto that is certainly not Mozart Ian but I find it exhilarating and
viscerally exciting and in spite of its very different provenance not out of place with its surroundings
the end of the first movement of Mozart's D minor piano concerto with
chick Korea on piano and Bobby McFerrin fronting the st. Paul Chamber Orchestra Korea improvised taking off from the Beethoven cadenza but at least by the time this recording was made it was a success and it was a great success and according to performances it wasiquely the best has ever been made they had
performed it live before this there wasn't much of the Beethoven left except at the end those of you who know the concerto well may have noticed that Korea plays a bit during the final two T without Wolfgang's written permission
but it's something I can imagine Wolfgang doing himself on the spur of the moment hey but what do I know I'm only Peter sickily and the show is sickly mix from PRI public radio international
Sometimes they're written, sometimes they're composed but not written down, at least yet. For an experiment in symphonic jazz in 1924, Paul Whiteman, without consulting George Gershwin,
advertised a new piece by George Gershwin. Fortunately, George Gershwin, even though he was working on a new Broadway show, agreed to come up with a new piece by George Gershwin, and wrote his most popular work, Rhapsody
in Blue, in about six weeks. Ferdie Groffet orchestrated it, and even though the solo piano passages were not necessarily being improvised on the spot, they hadn't been written down yet at the premiere.
I can just see Gershwin telling Whiteman, don't worry, you'll know when to come in.
George Gershwin playing his Rhapsody in Blue via piano rolls, accompanied by the fully live Denver Symphony Pops under Newton Wayland.
If you look on the label of many cadenzas, you'll find bravura listed as the first ingredient. But that's partly because most extensive cadenzas are for fast movements.
In slow movements that do have cadenzas, the lyrical ingredients tend to be more prominent. Here's a long piece, by sickly mixed standards, that has an absolutely mesmerizing cadenza,
played on a trumpet equipped with some electronics that enable it to echo against itself, creating harmonies out of one voice. Talk about ingredients.
George Gershwin's playing, judging from that piano roll, was about 93% caffeine. For this next number, you've got to come down, detox, decompress, expand the Now screen from
a second to a minute. Hey, I'm just blabbing away here to give you time to get from the roaring 20s to the blissed out 60s. Are you loose?
That was Open Beauty,
performed by the Don Ellis Orchestra, with Ellis playing his electronically enhanced trumpet. A beautiful use of electronics to my neo-acoustic pre-digital ears.
And now we're going to go out with a modern virtuoso violinist composer who, I'm told, always improvises his cadenzas. It's no surprise that, like Chick Corea, he comes out of a non-classical tradition,
in this case, that of Nashville. So here is the... Oh. There's the truck again. Here's the cadenza from the first movement of the Fiddle Concerto by Mark O'Connor.
I'm just going to turn this on here and run an errand. Okay, but don't worry, I'll be back in time for the closing credits. Oh, it's Marin Alsop conducting the Concordia Orchestra
and, of course, Mark O'Connor on violin.
Well, they didn't have caramel swirl, but mint chocolate chip is almost as good, especially with sprinkles. That's sickly 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 album numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 132.
And this is Peter Shickley 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.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Shickley Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Shickley Mix. Shickley Mix. Shickley Mix.
100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.
PRI, Public Radio International.