This is Northeast Public Radio, WAMC-FM, 90.3 Albany, WAMK, 90.9 Kingston, WOSR, 91.7 Middletown, WCEL, 91.9 Plattsburgh, WCAN, 93.3 Canajoharie, WANC, 103.9 Ticonderoga, WAMQ, 105.1 Great Barrington, WAMC-AM, 1400 Albany, 88.9 Oneonta, 93.1 Troy, 107.7 Newburgh, 91.9 Southington, and online at wamc.org.
If it sounds ready, it is ready. Whatever that means. Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley 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 here's some good news. 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 here radio station, which gives me this here studio space. And what gets concocted here then gets distributed by this here outfit, PRI, Public Radio International.
Now before we get going today, the nature of today's show makes it necessary for us to have a special announcement by our staff announcer.
Warning! The following program contains sound effects that may be considered disconcerting. For their own good. Listener discretion is advised.
Boy, for a staff announcer, you have a pretty bad voice. That's because I have a staff infection. Oh, I see. Well, take care of yourself.
Yes, folks, today's show is about sound effects. More specifically, sound effects and music.
We've talked on other editions of Shickley Mix about program music, pieces that are meant to tell or illustrate a story, and we've talked about the fact that very often,
perhaps usually, if you don't know the story before you hear the piece, you won't be able to figure it out from the music of course I'm talking about non-vocal music here. from the music alone.
Well, even with sound effects, context is very important, like for instance, what is this sound?
That is the sound of coffee percolating. Now, how many of you guessed that? Correctly? Raise your hands. I don't see anything. hands raised which just goes to prove my point here's another illustration and
this one is a contest folks with a terrific prize donated by Jim and Judy LeVart of the LeVart travel agency their motto is we don't get you there and then
forget you folks you don't want a beautiful vacation ruined by a poorly planned trip home so travel LeVart it's the same coming and going and are you
ready for this the prize they have donated is an all expenses paid two weeks stay at the just this side of Paradise motel in Acapulco Mexico this
luxury accommodation is just a few short leagues from the beach and your prize includes a complimentary my tie and after-dinner mints at a special reduced
price so here's all you have to do folks figure out what well-known story is being illustrated by the sounds you're about to hear you'll get two chances
chances. First, I'll play a piece of program music based on the story, and then you'll hear the story told in sound effects. Okay, have you got your ears plugged in and your gray matter in
gear? Here's the program music. And here's the same story told in sound effects. Okay, now the
first person to call in with the correct answer wins that vacation for two in Acapulco. And the
special number to call is... Excuse me. Hello? Oh, hello, sir. No, I'm glad you're listening.
Some station managers don't even bother to... Yes? Well, yes, Jack and Jill is the correct answer.
But sir, you're not going to be accepting the prize, are you? I mean, you're an employee of the station, and we were discussing the show before I went on the...
What? Well, yes. I mean, no. I mean, you're the boss. I mean, you're boss with me, sir. I'm mister.
And, uh, well, okay. All right, folks, the prize has already been won by the person who just called.
And, you know, I was thinking, as the sound effects version was being played, what would it be like to hear the music and the sound effects simultaneously? I think I can,
too, then. Let me try punching it up here. Okay, now, remember, the story is Jack and Jill went up
the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.
Here we go. That's pretty neat, huh? The story of Jack and Jill told in music and sound effects.
And sound effects in music is what we're interested in today. We'll start off with two pieces that are the same. Well, technically speaking, I guess it's a wind instrument. It's a sound associated
with urban life, but the composer of the first piece isn't particularly interested in that aspect. He simply regards it as a unique instrument with a tone, color, and way of moving that is
incapable of being duplicated by any ordinary orchestral instrument. In the second piece, however, the extra musical associations of the instrument are definitely being taken into consideration.
I can't even think of her name, but it's funny now and then how my thoughts go flashing back again
to my old flame. I've met so many who had fascinating ways of fascinating gaze in their eyes.
Some who took me up to the skies,
but their attempts at love were only imitations of my old flame.
I can't even think of her name, but I'll never be the same until I discover what became of my old flame.
My old flame.
I can't even think of her name. I'll have to look through my collection of human heads,
but it's funny now and then how my thoughts go flashing back again to my old flame.
My old flame.
My new lovers all seem so tame. They won't even let me strangle them.
For I haven't met a girl so magnificent or elegant as my old flame.
I've met so many who had fascinating ways, a fascinating gaze in their eye.
I saw this eye, so I removed the other eye.
That eye that kept winking and blinking at other men.
It was me, I was, it, it was, it, it was. Some who took me up to the skies.
But their attempts at love were only imitations of my old flame.
I, I can't even think of her name.
What, what, what was her name?
Doris, Laura, Chloe, Manny, Moe, Jack.
No. No. No. No. I wouldn't have been Moe.
I can't stand it, I tell you.
This is driving me sane.
She would always treat me mean.
So I poured a can of gasoline and struck a match to my old flame.
Our first sweetlet was called Siren Songs. It began with an historic work.
Ionization by Edgard Varese, almost but not quite the very first piece in the Western music tradition to be composed for percussion alone. The Varese was written in 1931.
Somebody named Amadeo Roldan wrote one a year earlier, but the Varese is the one that's still played regularly. Actually, come to think of it, it's not really for just percussion.
As I said earlier, the siren is actually a wind instrument. The sound producing chambers are activated. The wind is activated by turning a crank, and then the air goes through the chambers.
But the percussion section of the orchestra has long been the home of offbeat sounds, even if they're not, strictly speaking, made by percussion instruments.
Bird calls and train whistles, for instance, and, as we shall hear later, taxi horns. Varese liked the fact that the siren could move in large parabolic shapes without distinct
pitch and rhythmic divisions. It's hard now to realize how revolutionary the idea of an all-percussion piece was in 1930 or 31.
The performers on the Varese were the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of Raymond Desroches. Then we heard Spike Jonze's rendition of My Old Flame, with Paul Freese doing his Peter Lorre imitation,
and an ending that seems inevitable, but also perhaps uncomfortable to some modern sensibilities. Although, man, compared to your... Freddy the 13th-type movies... Well, enough said.
I wonder how they were doing the fire at the end. Sometimes they used to do it by crinkling paper. Well, here's another pair of pieces, excerpts this time, featuring a sound not usually thought of as musical,
in spite of its poetic associations. The sound of wind. In both these pieces, the wind is definitely meant to have extra musical associations.
But this suite-let illustrates one of the major developments in sound design, and the sound effects in the 20th century. In the last decade of the 19th century, when the first piece was written,
the sound of wind was produced by a wind machine, usually a sort of a barrel with some slats missing, mounted as if it were on a spit. A piece of heavy silk or canvas is draped over the barrel,
and when the barrel is turned by the crank, it rubs against the cloth, producing a pretty darn good imitation of wind. This device was used in theaters long before the 19th century, before it showed up in the symphony orchestra.
But the second piece, uh, you know, I really shouldn't call it a piece. The second selection we'll hear has no use for a wind machine.
With modern technology, anything can be recorded and played back with staggering fidelity. Why settle for a cranky barrel when you can have the actual sound of a storm at sea?
Well, I think that the first composer we'll hear from would probably still prefer to use a wind machine. And the second composer? Hey, he wasn't even consulted.
Okay, I call that sweetlet the wind section. And I don't mean the brasses and woodwinds, I mean the wind section. The first excerpt was from an alpine symphony by Richard Strauss,
and I'll bet we all knew that that was a storm. Didn't we? Raindrops, thunder, wind. Andre Previn and the Vienna Philharmonic. And then, from an album called Classical Nature II,
Beethoven's incidental music to a storm at sea, sometimes known as the Symphony No. 5 in C minor. C minor, get it? You know, there are scads of these albums around now.
Great classics fortified with natural sounds. It's sort of like seeing the banquet scene from Macbeth, performed on a beach in Hawaii. It reminds me of Paul Hindemith's statement to the effect
that it seems to be a part of the American psyche to feel that if the Grand Canyon is beautiful and the music of Wagner is beautiful, then watching the Grand Canyon while listening to the music of Wagner
must be twice as beautiful an experience. Well, I guess I shouldn't snicker. I'm not a big fan of outdoor concerts, but I happen to know that at least one of my string quartets has been played in a national concert.
It's a natural amphitheater at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And I must say, I would have liked to have been there. Yes, sirree. The composer of that string quartet, by the way, was Peter Schickely,
and the name of the show he does is Schickely Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. Today's show is called SFX 1138, Sound Effects in Music.
Okay, we've been pussyfooting around here. Let's have a real full-fledged suite of pieces that feature sound effects. I want to emphasize that the first selection from a longer work called The Peasant Wedding
was written in the 18th century and is performed here precisely as indicated in the score. Let's call this suite The Hills Are Alive with the Music of Sounds. It has four movements,
and I'll see you in about 13 and a half minutes.
Hey, get on out of the way! What are you trying to do?
Trying to knock the streetcar off the track? You're so dumb, you should belong to the Diff and Dump Society.
I'm sorry, boss, but I got the sidewalk blues.
The Lord remains in our sleeping hearts
We got out of this house of cards Out of the sleeping
We got out of this house of cards Out of the dreaming
We got out of this house of cards Out of the sleeping
We got out of this house of cards
And we know too little, too much And our puzzle eyes have come all apart
So we go back to bed with our sleeping hearts
And we stay asleep in a house of cards
And the hills are alive with the music of sounds.
We began with a piece by Leopold Mozart. It's called the Peasant Wedding. That was the first movement. It's a divertimento in D major.
And the orchestra was the Capella Savaria led by Paul Nemet. And yes, the score really does call for celebratory gunpoint.
And then Jelly Roll Morton, a tune called Sidewalk Blues.
And the dialogue there was Johnny St. Cyr, the banjo player, and Jelly Roll Morton.
A little politically incorrect humor there, but it shows just how close early jazz was to vaudeville. Then we heard the Anvil Chorus from Verdi's Il Trovatore.
That was von Karajan conducting the orchestra and the chorus of La Scala.
That was in terms of the opera sung by a bunch of gypsies up in the mountains industriously working away at the anvils.
And then finally a song called House of Cards by Adrian Belew from his album Mr. Music Head.
I was once called a human music box. I wonder where Herbert is now. I've also been called Peter Schickely.
And this program has been called Schickely Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called SFX 1138. We're talking about sound effects in music. Which reminds me of a very nice story I heard recently from a conductor friend of mine.
He was guest conducting in Russia. I can't remember which city it was. I think either Moscow or St. Petersburg. And naturally they expected him and he wanted to have something American on his program.
But the piece that had been selected, something by Barber, turned out not to be available. They couldn't get it, at least not in time.
So the conductor said to the representative of the orchestra, he said, well maybe you have something else in your music library, some American music.
And they said, yes, we have a music library. And the conductor said, well could I go into it? And, oh no, no, no, you couldn't go into the music library.
But we have a list of what's available in the music library. Oh, said the conductor, fine, well could I see that list? No, no, we can't let you see the list. But we'll read it to you.
Now this just, this brings up images to me. Why would they read him the list but not show it to him? I mean, are there works that they wanted to omit when they were reading it?
I mean, were there works there that they thought might be politically sensitive? Did somebody write a grand oratorio called We've Never Heard of Alger Hiss? Or was it perhaps a matter of western decadence?
An overture to a decadent opera that takes place in a 1920s speakeasy, Boris Goodenough for Jazz?
Or are there the pieces maybe that are blatant plagiarisms of American works, like Cacciatore and Spring? I mean, why wouldn't they let him see the list? Well, whatever reason, they wouldn't.
So they started reading the list and they got to American in Paris by Gershwin. And the conductor said, fine, let's do that. Although, come to think of it, he said, I suppose the taxi horns might be a problem.
Because American in Paris in the percussion section has to have some taxi horns of the kind used by Parisian taxis. Here's the beginning of An American in Paris.
Percussionists like to collect instruments, collect various sound-making things. And an American percussionist would definitely want to have a set of taxi horns for An American in Paris. So the conductor said, I suppose this might be a problem.
But the representative of the Russian orchestra said, no, no, no problem. Tomorrow morning rehearsal, we have taxi horn. So the conductor said, fine.
Next morning at the rehearsal, he gets up on the podium and begins An American in Paris.
Well, I guess my friend managed to keep himself from falling off the podium from laughter.
If so, he's a better man than I am. I would have lost it, man. At least I would have been a foreigner. Otherwise, I'd probably end up conducting the upper tundra philharmonic.
But let's get back to what might be called pure sound effects. Sounds that are not usually thought of as musical, but are used in a purely musical way.
The 12-tone music of Schoenberg and his music for the piano. The musical progeny is based on the concept of a row, a succession of pitches,
that may be used in the original order and in the inversion, that's upside down, and the retrograde, that's backwards, and in the retrograde inversion,
which is, as the rocket scientists among you may have figured out, upside down and backwards. Now I'd like to play you an example of a noise row. And this is an eight-unit noise row.
It's quite rare to have noise rows of that length. Used in a structural manner, I mean. We'll hear the row presented twice in its original order, and then in the retrograde order.
Did I read somewhere, or am I making this up, that there's a disorder called retrolexia, which means, like if you ask a person with retrolexia to spell stun, they'll say N-U-T-S,
which isn't very polite, but they can't help it. Anyway, retrograde statements are not usually easy to hear. But here are a couple of easy-to-spot retrogrades.
The first is from a piano piece based on a tone row, and even the non-rocket scientists among us will be able to hear that the first eight notes are followed by the same eight notes in reverse order.
In the second excerpt, the three statements of the eight-noise row, original, original, and retrograde, are separated by interludes, played by more traditional instruments.
I call this pair of excerpts, forth and back.
We heard the opening of Webern's piano variations,
followed by Franz Liszt's Liebestraum, as performed by Spike Jonze.
And I must say, I find Spike Jonze's use of the retrograde row rather more subtle than Webern's.
I mean, Webern's is so in-your-face, whereas Jonze spreads it out. In other words, he asks the audience to make an effort. He doesn't just feed it to you with a baby spoon.
If Jonze had wanted to pander to the lowest common denominator, as Webern did, if he had wanted to do all the work for his audiences,
so that they could just passively sit there and let the music wash over them like a wave or a breeze or the Schoenberg-Woodwind quintet,
he would have had the retrograde follow the original immediately, as Webern did.
Okay, now actually, there is an interesting connection between the Varese piece, with which we opened the program, and the Spike Jonze excerpt.
And that is, that they are the only pieces we've heard today in which the sound effects are not used to illustrate or indicate some extra musical situation.
In other words, they're not sound effects, they're music. You can imagine Varese saying, I don't consider the siren to be a sound effect. To me, it's a musical instrument.
And Spike Jonze felt the same way about pistols and hiccups. Nevertheless, I think... Sorry. Hello? Oh, hello, sir.
Um, yeah. Yeah, I do have an extra pair of sunglasses. I'll be glad to loan them to you. Sure, what is it? Oh, the title of today's show, SFX 1138. Yeah.
Well, in a movie script, FX means effects. And SFX means sound effects, as opposed to music effects or personal effects.
And the number is just sort of a tribute to George Lucas' first movie, THX 1138. Yeah, I agree. I think he's an excellent director.
I wish he would actually direct more of his movies himself. I mean, the ones he writes and produces. If you're a Lucas fan, sir, did you know that Star Wars was originally called Star War?
It was originally just in the singular. But as he was finishing it up, a really terrible horror flick called Raw Rats was released.
And Lucas realized that if someone whose job it was to put the letters up on the marquee were retrolexic, you know, they'd put up Star War and it would come out Raw Rats.
And everybody would think it's that terrible horror movie. So, yeah, so that's why he changed it. I better go, sir. The show's almost over. Okay, bye.
Well, the sand in the shickly mix hourglass is running out, folks. And I must say, I feel a little wired here, a little keyed up. What with all those car horns and anvils and gunshots.
I need something to relax with. Um, okay, here's an album called Mozart Naturally. Let's check it out.
That feels so good.
And that's Shickly 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.
That's the sound of PRI sending the program up to the satellite. 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 133. 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.
Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
PRI Public Radio International