Coming up this next hour, it's Schickele Mix right here on your Classic Choice 89.7 FM KACU. You are listening to member supported 89.7 KACU FM Abilene. This hour of Schickele Mix provided by special friends of KACU. Does a rabbit have ears? 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 it is our good fortune 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 this enlightened and very well insulated radio station whose caring and devoted staff lets me out between programs and makes sure that those programs get distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
The reason I mentioned the fact that this station is very well insulated in terms of sound is that well, today's show is about animals, and I guess word of that got out. I don't know how. I'm always working on the program right up till the very last minute. But anyway, I got a fax from an animal rights organization called, let's see, it's a Mankind Against Nefarious, Unscrupulous and Reprehensible Exploitation, and it says that the members of MANURE are going to picket the station today to protest my doing a show on animals. So I called them up and I said, in the first place, who put the bee in your bonnet about this, and what's your beef anyway? Obviously something's got your goat here. Tell me what's bugging you. I said, I guarantee you no animals will be harmed in the making of this program. Well, it turns out that because of my reputation, they assume that I'm going to make fun of animals. Can you believe that?
Apparently, one of the members of MANURE heard me on a radio talk show, and I was talking about one of my favorite movies, Beat the Devil, with Humphrey Bogart, and Gina Lollobrigida, and Peter Lorre, and Robert Morley, and Jennifer Jones. Anyway, do you know what a lemur is? It's a furry, monkey-like animal with big round buggy eyes that lives in Madagascar. So anyway, I said that the lemur is an animal that was discovered by a casting agent who couldn't afford Peter Lorre.
I mean, it was just a silly offhand remark, but apparently this animal rights activist thought that I was making fun of an endangered species. Hey, I thought I was making fun of Peter Lorre. So, I don't know if they'll show up or not, but like I say, this building is very soundproof, so it shouldn't get in the way of what is, after all, a highly educational program. A program that, through music, promotes a healthy respect for all forms of life.
Okay, on other editions of this show, we've talked about program music. Specifically, music that tries literally to imitate the sounds of animals or other sounds that are not usually thought of as musical. The trouble is, it's pretty hard to do with most sounds. So, if you haven't been told, you don't know what's being imitated. Here are three very explicit sound pictures from a 17th century piece.
We'll hear a bit of introductory music and then see if you can guess what the first one is.
[music excerpt: Farina, "Capriccio stravagante", introduction and hens; Monica Huggett/European Community Baroque Orchestra]
Okay, that was hens. A pretty good imitation of hens scratching. Or clucking. See, there you go. Is it scratching or clucking? Anyway, it's quite hen-like. Alright, now what's this?
And there we had a little outburst of dogs barking, one of the not-so-subtle and certainly not very well integrated examples of tone painting in Carlo Farina's Capriccio Stravagante, published in 1626, and performed for us by Monica Huggett and the European Community Baroque Orchestra. Now three centuries later, almost to the year, another Italian composer had a revolutionary idea.
Instead of doing a poor imitation of a nightingale on the violin, why not use the new technology of recording to, in effect, actually have a nightingale in the orchestra? This was 1924, so there were no digital samplers or anything. They had a phonograph, probably back in the percussion section, and one of the percussionists would put the needle on the record at the appropriate moment.
This raises profound musical and philosophical questions, which we'll touch upon after we've heard the music. Here's a section from that groundbreaking piece, followed by a second work that, at the end of it, employs a recording of another animal to heighten, quite effectively, I think, the build-up to a climax.
By the way, notice in the first piece that instruments in the orchestra imitate birds before the real thing is heard. I call this suitelet The Real Thing.
[music excerpt: Respighi, “The Pines of Rome,” “The Pines of Janiculum”; Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra/Dorati]
First we heard the end of the third movement of The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi with Antal Dorati conducting the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, as it was called back in 1960. The second piece was Street Stuff by Darol Anger, performed by the Turtle Island String Quartet, and an unidentified dog. So what do you think? Grove's dictionary says, The climax of this trend, and in a sense the reductio ad absurdum of program music, is found in Respighi's The Pines of Rome, where the problem of imitating the nightingale is solved by simply using a recording of an actual nightingale's song.
Ernest Newman said, Realism of this sort is a trifle too crude to blend with the music. But since the advent of the tape recorder, we've gotten used to very high fidelity and easy manipulation, and also, especially in non-classical music, to pieces that are created for recordings. I don't think anybody worries about the philosophical implications of the presence of these animals.
They're part of something that resembles a radio drama more than a symphony concert.
[music excerpt: Lennon/McCARTNEY, "Good Morning" (St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band); The Beatles]
Good morning. Good morning. Fancy meeting you here. Don't you remember we were on a committee together exploring the philosophical implications of using recorded animal sounds in musical compositions? Right, my name's Peter Schickele, and smile, you're on Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. No animals were harmed in the making of this program. That's both a fact and the title of today's show.
Before we go on, I'd like to tell a story about the Pines of Rome. I was very glad to be able to use a recording of Dorati and the Minneapolis, because when I lived in Fargo, North Dakota around 1950, The only time we got to hear a live symphony orchestra was once a year when the Minneapolis Orchestra came through. I think we were usually the last date on their tour or something. I can remember one year one of the brass section was pretty drunk. It was pretty obvious from the way he played.
But the most memorable concert was one that was over the river in Moorhead there and they built out the stage because of the size of the orchestra.
So, some of us were sitting way up in the balcony where we were right over the bass section, we could actually see the conductor's face, and it was Dorati, and they were doing The Pines of Rome, and a minute or two before the nightingale was to come in, there was this sort of flash, and some sparks came down, a little bit of smoke, and it was very obvious that the percussion player had turned on the phonograph and blown a fuse somewhere, and everybody started getting the gig I mean, whole solos were missing because the player was doubled over in laughter and then Dorati started getting the giggles and then he would sort of look up into the balcony and see us seeing him you know so then he'd get very serious but a minute later he was he was having trouble again it was it was a riotous scene and then of course when it came time for the place where the nightingale was supposed to sing the ever trustworthy leader of the orchestra the concertmaster played some nightingale stuff on his violin Okay, switch ahead a few years later, my family has moved to Rome, Italy, and Dorati is conducting The Pines of Rome in an outdoor concert at the Baths of Caracalla.
And we're in the audience, and in the last movement, the Appian Way, where the Roman legions are marching along and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it grows for the whole movement. In the middle of the movement, the Trastevere section of Rome, right behind this open amphitheater, started having its annual fireworks display.
So the music got bigger and the fireworks got bigger and you could see Dorati, even from the back, you could see him seething. We went backstage afterwards and introduced ourselves and reminded him of the concert in Moorhead, Minnesota, which he had not forgotten. And I guess I was just never destined to hear Dorati do that piece without mishap. But let's get back to our philosophical implications here.
Even though composers for centuries have devised ever more sophisticated ways of imitating animals with instruments, does that mean that the real thing is better? Just because painters from the Middle Ages on struggled with the problem of how to represent flowing or splashing water, does that mean a photograph would be better? Certainly not. The stylization is part of what we value, not part of, it is what we value in paintings.
In Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, the bird music in the solo violins is delightful precisely because it isn't natural bird song, with its seemingly random and fragmented qualities. It's as if you had birds imitating violins, as if you could train birds to operate within the logic of Baroque music. Imposing the ordered ideas of human art on birdsong doesn't necessarily make it more beautiful, but it makes it different. Listening to it is a very different experience.
In my first string quartet, I used the song of a thrush I heard in the woods. I notated that song for the first violin as accurately as I could. But would I rather have an actual thrush singing there?
Uh, well, I don't think so. Although I must say, if I answered the doorbell and it was a thrush asking for an audition, I wouldn't slam the door in his face. Okay, here's an interesting comparison- [sound: phone rings] Rats, excuse me. Hello? Oh, hello, sir. Oh, they have. How many demonstrators are there?
Okay, well, let me get this next suitelet on and then I'll come down and talk to them for a couple of minutes. Okay, bye. Well, those animal rights activists are picketing the station, so let me get this suitelet up and running and then I'll go down and see if I can straighten things out a bit. Here's an interesting comparison between imitation and the real thing.
In the first piece, a symphony orchestra imitates the sound of a flock of sheep, whereas the second selection uses the actual voices of sheep. In other words, the first piece is music imitating sheep, and the second is sheep imitating music. We'll call this suitelet Sheep Music.
[music excerpt: Strauss, “Don Quixote,” Opus 35, Variation II; The Met Orchestra/Levine]
[music: Fassert, "Barbara Ann"; Barnyard Beat]
Okay, our suitelet. Excuse me, I'm a little out of breath here. I just got back up here. The suitelet was called Sheep Music, and it began with an excerpt from Don Quixote by Richard Strauss, the variation in which the knight of the doleful countenance meets up with a flock of sheep that he takes to be the armies of the Emperor. James Levine conducting the Met Orchestra. And then, in what could fairly be called a change of pace, Barbara Ann, performed by Ewe 2.
That's E-W-E-2. Got a little pun there.
[sung: a snatch of "Barbara Ann"]
Well, I won't try to compete. That's from an album called Barnyard Beat. And that album, I'm sure, makes use of the new sampling technology, which enables you to record any sound and then transpose it to any pitch you want. So you could, it wouldn't have much variety, but you could record one sheep bleat and then use it for every note in the song. Ewe 2. I'm sure they thought of calling that group The Bleatles, but...
So I went down and talked to the people from that animal rights organization, Mankind Against Nefarious, Unscrupulous, and Reprehensible Exploitation. They're picketing the station because they think I'm going to make fun of animals. I must say that the members of MANURE are not the hippest protestors I've ever seen. There's only six or seven of them and, well, like one of the things they're chanting is, hey, hey, Mr. S, how would you like to be made fun of all the time?
But anyway, I assured them of my great respect for all our friends on the lower branches of the evolutionary tree, and I promised them that I would never take part in another goldfish eating contest. The truth of the matter is I don't even like fish or seafood. So anyway, I hope they decamp soon. They said they'd think about it and they're going to monitor the rest of the show. Fair enough.
So let's go on here now to hear a pair of very nice pieces that use animal sounds, sounds made by those noble creatures called animals, as a continuous background. In the first one, which is actually a transition passage in a larger work, the jungle sounds appear to be quite random at first, but as the piece goes on, the noises are revealed to be in a recurring pattern, like a loop.
In the second work, a colony of birds acts as a constant backdrop, the scenery against which the scene is played. Two examples of animal ambience.
[music excerpt: DePAUW, "Purlieu" (Monkey Village); Benjamin Grant DePauw]
[music excerpt: Rautavaara, Cantus Arcticus, “Melancholy”; Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra/Pommer]
First we heard a cut called Purlieu from an album called Monkey Village by Benjamin Grant DePauw. Then came the middle movement of Cantus Arcticus by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. It's subtitled Concerto for Birds, but that seems to me a misleading title since the birds, especially in this movement, act more like the accompaniment than the soloists. So what do you think about the birds?
I'm not quite sure what I think. It would certainly be very different without them, there's no doubt about that. Unlike Respighi's 1924 audience would, we, or at least many of us, probably experience this piece in a rather cinematic way. I find that even if I'm not seeing actual images, I have the feeling of a wordless movie set in an arctic landscape and the orchestra music is the movie score. But that may just be me.
Me? I'm Peter Schickele, and the show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. No animals were harmed in the making of this show, nor will they ever be, no siree. We're talking about animals in music since the development of sound recording. And looking at the old Schickele Mix hourglass, I'll be darned if it isn't Tidbit Time.
There's a thriving industry now that consists of taking recordings of natural sounds and overlaying them onto pieces of music. It's the old more is more principle, I guess. In this striking example, the trumpeting sounds you hear are made by bull elk during the mating season. I've heard that sound in the wild, and it's pretty amazing. But in the long run, it didn't sound like this.
[music: Mussorgsky, "Night on Bald Mountain"; Classical Nature]
Today's tidbit was from a CD called Classical Nature: Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, or about a third of it anyway, played by an unidentified orchestra situated in the midst of a herd of elk during a thunderstorm. I wonder if the orchestra got hazard pay. You could certainly call that a rain date. Okay, now I have a confession to make. I sort of like that particular cut. I mean, you sort of get the feeling that the Mussorgsky piece passes over you like the thunderstorm.
A few miles east, they're just hearing the beginning of it right now. My purist friends are going to be upset, but I- [sound: phone rings] Excuse me. Hello? Hello? Well, it isn't the first time, and it probably won't be the last. Thanks for nothing.
Well, I've been kicked out of the AMJ again. It's like a matter of prestige in the profession, you know, to belong to the American musicological junta.
But I always end up getting in trouble. Just like I'm in trouble with the animal rights outfit. Yeah, I wonder if they're gone. Uh, just a minute, folks, excuse me. I'm gonna go over to the window and see if those protesters are gone. I hope they are. Oh, I can't see the front of the building. I'm gonna have to open the window here and stick my head out. Uh-huh, nary a protester. The coast is clear. Okay.
Now, I sat on a bee!
Man, he really got me. Of course, I don't think he's in such great shape himself. Looks like about half of him is left here on my chair. Well, I guess his name's Eric. Eric. Uh, you have to... This is getting tiresome. [sound: phone rings] Hello?
Hey, listen. Okay, so you're right. Eric the half-a-bee over there on the floor has given the lie to the title of today's show. Right, but when you say that an animal was harmed in the making of this show, that's not exactly accurate either. Two animals were harmed, a bee and a radio show host. We're both in bad shape. I'm going to have to do the rest of this program standing up, so give me a break. Man.
Okay, folks.
On several editions of Schickele Mix, we've dealt with sound effects of one sort or another, But we haven't tackled one of the most intriguing questions of all in the academic field of sound effects philosophy. Does a sound effect have to have an objective correlative in reality? Can a sound effect be neither musical nor representative of a physical object or action? Can sound effects be metaphorical?
[recording: Victor Borge, "Phonetic Punctuation"]
Victor Borge (recorded): I'll teach you the system. A period sounds like this.
Here is a dash. An exclamation point is a vertical dash with a period underneath. Here is a comma.
Quotation are two commas. If you happen to be left-handed. Question mark is rather difficult. Finally, the colon. The two little dots. You know, you put them either over or under each other. That is the sound for the colon.
I have a book here, and I'm going to read to you a short story so you can hear how this system really sounds. This book was written by Shakespeare this time.
Johann Sebastian Shakespeare.
This is a pickpocket edition, by the way.
I have a short story right here in the beginning of the book.
Here it is on page two.
In the open window, there suddenly came light.
Beautiful Eleanor sat alone, dreaming of but one thing.
Two years had passed since she met Sir Henry.
She could still remember the unhappy evening when her father had thrown him out.
They had been sitting in the park, and Henry had said, "Darling!
Is this the first time you have loved?" She had answered, "Yes, but it is so wonderful that I hope it will not be the last."
Suddenly she heard a well-known sound.
It was he. In two strides he was near her, embraced, kissed, and caressed her.
"Henry! Henry!"
"What is love?" she asked. He answered, "Well, I couldn't live without..."
She asked, "I'm sorry, where have all your thoughts been this while?" He answered, "With thee, my maiden."
Suddenly he was gone. All she heard was the well-known sound of his departing horse.
Victor Borge with his justly infamous phonetic punctuation routine. Well, we've got a little extra time here, so let's go back to where we started. Let's go back to Respighi and birds. No gizmos this time.
[music excerpt: Respighi, “Gli Uccelli,” “Jean Philippe Rameau: La Gallina”; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra/Wolff]
I'm happy to report that I'm sitting down again. That was Hugh Wolff conducting the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the third movement of Respighi's The Birds. That was The Hen, based on an 18th century piece by Rameau, R-A-M-E-A-U, Rameau. If a male English sheep drinks French bottled water, would it be Rameau?
[sound: the pun punisher, the irrelevancy alarm and the phone, all at once]
Whoa, whoa, everything at once there. Never mind, I'm out of here. Oh man, the pun punisher, the irrelevancy alarm, the phone all at once. That is a first folks, that is a Schickele Mix first. Just when you thought it was safe to sit down. We're going to have Paul Winter take us out here folks, and this is an interesting companion piece to our tidbit.
Because in this case, the musician actually is above Antelope Creek in Yellowstone Park playing antiphonally with the bellowing elk. The cut is called Elk Horns.
[music: Winter, "Elk Horns" (Prayer for the Wild Things); Paul Winter]
And 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. Thank you, members. And not only that, 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 134. 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 195 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.