And now, Shickley Mix. Ready, Mr. Shickley? Well, why wouldn't I be? 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 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 radio station, which is reckless enough to allow me to make the program here, but wise enough to get it out of here as soon as possible and let it be distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
And just when you thought it was safe to slump back down on the couch, here we go with another...
Marches on the March.
Another installment in Shickley Mix's ongoing...
In-depth survey of every March ever written.
That wonderful, obsessive, nagging, in-your-face march is by Charles Ives. It's called Jip the Blood or Hurst, which is worst.
Jip the Blood was the nickname for one Harry Horowitz during whose murder trial in 1912 Ives sketched the piece, which the composer later described as just a joke, a musical cartoon.
The ragtime-y piano part represents the murderer, apparently, and the tootie is, quote, the whole band paid by Hurst, same bunk again.
When you read what Ives wrote over the original sketch, the piece really feels like one of those absolutely vitriolic political cartoons of the day. Here's what he wrote.
Jip, a prominent criminalist, legally gets the gallows. Hurst, another prominent criminal, not legally gets the money. Jip has to use his wits to live. Hurst, never.
One million dollars from Mama. Hurst sells half-truth and colors the news, a lower form of dishonesty than forging a check. Jip get the law, but no law for Hurst.
Hurst makes his business pay by making jips. He sells sensational bunk to the soft-eared and soft-headed, and headlines and pictures that develop an interest in criminal life
among the weak-brained and defectives. An old-fashioned western horse thief is a respectable man compared to Hurst. When the American people put Hurst with the horse thief on the rope,
American history will have another landmark to go with Bunker Hill, and perhaps a new song to go with the battle cry of freedom. Now remember, folks, that was written by a man who was not only a composer,
he also was, or was to become, one of the most prominent insurance company executives in the country. Eat your heart out, Orson Welles. The Citizen Kane Mutiny. By the way,
the piece was performed by the Ensemble Moderne under Ingo Metzmacher. If you've ever wondered how a New York baseball team gets put together, now you know.
It's done by somebody named Metzmacher. The Ives is an example of a piece that is definitely March-like, but if you actually tried to use it for a spit and polish parade,
you'd run the risk of having the paraders get out of sync during those ragged beat-confounding piano passages. A marching march has to take care of business, first and foremost.
Most important, the beat has to be clear at all times. And a corollary to that is that a march can get comparatively soft, but it can't get too soft, or the marchers won't be able to hear the beat.
and it helps if the melodies are clear and not too complicated and it also helps if the formal divisions are clear and quite regular with a lot of
repetition of sections there are many concert marches or March like pieces that don't have to worry about taking care of all that business they can act
like marching marches when it pleases them but then they can wander off in all sorts of arty directions without worrying about causing major traffic jams or as musicians call it when they're not together with each other
train wrecks of course some people like Ives loved the train wrecks he loved hearing two or three different marching bands playing different marches at the
same time you could say that much of his composing career was spent trying to figure out how to notate train wrecks but of course if you write a piece
imitating that sound that phenomenon you're writing a concert piece not a marching piece take the business of introductions for instance and please a marching march
usually gets right down to business in this rather well-known example the intro
lasts about four seconds after which were into the first tune the opening of
John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever performed by an outfit that I understand has won a Grammy for the longest name of a non-german musical ensemble the United States Air Force tactical
Air Command band Langley Air Force Base Virginia they were under the direction of Major Lowell E Graham a pitifully short name for a very nice gentleman with whom I've had the pleasure of working
ok now listen to the opening of this march like concert piece it's almost half a minute before a real melody appears and even then it isn't a
full-blown theme the main tune of the movement doesn't pull itself together until a minute and forty five seconds into the piece That's a long time in music.
Ricardo Muti conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.
March-like in character, but definitely a symphonic concert piece, not a marching march. I don't know what it is about that tune.
I've never liked it. I long ago got over my aversion to Tchaikovsky in general, but I still find that theme annoying for some reason. I don't know why.
Well, as one of my brother's friends said, this was when they were teenagers, and my brother had complained about how Heifetz played some violin piece. His friend said, yeah, well, I'd like to see you do better.
Today we're going to hear some non-marching marches, concert pieces that, like the Tchaikovsky, have a marchy feel, steady, welded,
well-defined beat, often supporting melodies that use rhythms associated with marches, like dotted rhythms, which means long-short.
But these pieces don't have any practical duties to perform, so they don't have to be consistent.
They can sometimes vary the speed of the beat. They can have sections where the beat is not especially well-defined, that is not easy to hear. Or maybe the beat even disappears completely sometimes.
And they can afford to blur. But they can also blur the formal distinctions as well, instead of having a series of clear-cut sections that are usually repeated, as marching marches do.
And by the way, I'm talking about the Euro-American tradition here, of course, not all marches everywhere. And finally, these concert pieces can allow themselves to get developmental,
rather than simply present a series of tunes. Let me talk about that a minute. Your average march has a brief introduction, which leads to the first melody.
After that melody is finished, it gets repeated, and then we go to another melody.
Then that melody is repeated, after which we go to a third melody, often in a different key. Be kind to your web-footed friends
For a duck may be somebody's mother So what we've got is a parade of melodies. In concert music, on the other hand, especially instrumental music,
you tend to encounter a lot of what is called development. Instead of a new melody, you get a section that works over some small portion of a previously presented melody.
Sort of like a dog working over a bone or worrying his blanket. Here's the melody that opens the last movement of Mozart's 40th Symphony.
Now, here's a whole section, about a minute and a quarter long, based almost entirely on the first seven notes of that melody.
That was Machaerus and the Prague Chamber Orchestra. So, to review. Actual marches, marching marches, are mostly a string of melodies,
whereas concert music, symphonies, string quartets, sonatas, feature a lot of development. If you have trouble remembering that, I mean, which goes with which,
I'll let you in on an easy little mnemonic device for it. Just think of the year 2150, which is easy to remember,
because it'll be the millennium, the 1000th anniversary of Erik the Saint becoming King of Sweden. So, 2150 in Roman numerals is M-M-C-D.
And M-M-C-D could stand for March Melody Concert Development. All right? That's okay, don't mention it. Now, here's a pair of concert pieces.
The first has a tempo indication of moderato quasi-marcha, and the second is actually called a march, but they're pretty rarefied. You wouldn't want to put a couple of hundred marines out on the field
and expect them to stay together with this music. The first work starts off quite solidly, but by the time the second one's over,
you will have heard all sorts of effete, panty-waist, tree-hugging, impressionistic developmentalism. And these pieces were written before they let women in the army.
The two Ds, Dvorak and Debussy. That sweetlet began with the first movement of Dvorak's serenade in D minor for winds, cello, and bass,
with Stephen Richmond conducting Harmony Ensemble New York. Then we heard the Marche Écossaise, Scottish March, by Debussy,
and that was the Orchestre National de l'Ort F, under Jean Martinon. You know, I was thinking, I was thinking, I was thinking, I was thinking, I was thinking, that when I was going through the melodies in Stars and Stripes Forever,
the section that I stopped just before does sort of sound like a development section. It doesn't develop anything we've heard before in the Marche, but the way it repeats short phrases at different scale steps,
rather than presenting another tidy melody, definitely has a developmental sound. Here it is. We'll start with the Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends part, the main trio theme before it.
A quasi-developmental type section from Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, played by Lowell E. Graham and the, let's see, yeah, I think we have time for this name,
the United States Air Force Tactical Air Command Band, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. So what have we learned from this melody development consideration?
We've learned that you should take everything you hear with a grain of salt. For instance, if someone tells you that, my name is Peter Jennings, and the name of this show is Bowling for Dollars,
and it's distributed by Allied Van Lines, don't believe them. The truth of the matter is that my name is Peter Schickely,
the show is called Schickely Mix, and it's distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
March music and concert pieces is sort of like the life of a guy who's had a vasectomy, or a gal who's had her tubes tied. All of the fun and none of the responsibility. Here's another pair of songs.
These are pieces that struck their stuff, each in its way, but could never keep a battalion together. The first one was written for a stage production in which a soldier does indeed march to it.
This he can do because the situation is so intimate. The beat is kept up throughout, but the melodic material is so fragmentary
and often fights the beat so strenuously that a large number of soldiers would surely come a cropper. The second piece is called March, but it's full of characteristics that would get its composer,
whom we'll hear playing it, kicked out of a military academy in no time flat. The beat is unsteady in the beginning and disappears altogether towards the end.
The formal divisions are not always immediately apparent. A lot of it sounds more like development than exposition. And on top of all that, it's not uplifting. Now I like this piece,
but it has a sort of crabbed, convoluted, crusty quality that it's hard to imagine inspiring troops to get up and rush towards the enemy, except perhaps to get away from the music.
Here are two chamber music marches.
Down a hot and dusty road
Traps a soldier with his load
Marching home Marching on his way
He's been marching all the day
Happy now he's home to stay
Stravinsky and Bartok. Part of the soldier's tale. Christopher Lee was narrating. I used to see him in horror films down on 42nd Street when I was a student. He was a terrific Count Dracula.
That was Lionel Friend conducting members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. And then Bartok playing number 147 of his microcosmos. It's simply called March.
Now we come to two pieces that nobody would simply call March. Each of these is a movement from a major symphony, and there is no pretense of being consistently march-like.
It's true that the loud sections in the first work might have almost terrified some of its first hearers, since the bass drum and cymbals were not a standard part of the orchestra then.
But these sections alternate with passages of such delicacy that you could perhaps imagine mice marching to them, but not Hessians or Huns.
The effect of the whole movement, it seems to me, is more cheerful than triumphant. The second piece has a harder edge, but it too strays a long way from the high-stepping march music
with which it starts, if indeed you want to think of it as a march. I'll see you in about 11 minutes.
¶¶
Haydn and Stravinsky. Sir Charles Macharis led the Orchestra of St. Luke's in the second movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 100, the so-called military,
so-called, of course, because of that movement. Then we heard the third movement of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen.
That piece dates from 1945, and I've known it since about 1950. My brother and I used parts of it in the taped scores we used to put together for the eight-millimeter movies we made.
I can't remember if I thought of the beginning of that last movement specifically as a march, but it was a march back then. And the reason I wonder is that years later I found out that one of the images Stravinsky had in his mind
while he was working on it was newsreel footage of Nazi soldiers doing their goose-step marching, although it was in connection with the premiere of this piece
that Stravinsky said that music expresses nothing. Well, let's not get into that. That's a big, slippery subject, and we'd deal with it on another show. You know, I'm trying to remember
which eight-millimeter movie my brother and I used that music for. It may have been the one based on a story by O. Henry called The Cop and the Anthem. My brother directed and narrated it,
and I played the lead. I can still see the advertising poster we drew for it, starring Peter Schickely, future host of Schickely Mix,
from PRI, Public Radio International. Today's program is called Symphonic March Music, all the fun and none of the responsibility.
We're dealing with pieces that are indebted to, but are not slaves to, actual marching marches. In the next piece we're going to hear, the marches are definitely marches.
In fact, several real marches are quoted. But the way they're used... What is that? Do you hear music? You know, I've heard it before.
I've always thought that this studio was pretty well sound insulated, but I certainly hear music from out on the street. Sounds like a parade. I'm telling you, that band is loud.
Excuse me, folks. I'm going to go over to the window and see what's going on. I'll probably have to open it and really stick my head out, because there's sort of a ledge out there.
Yes, it is a parade. Hey, I know that band. That's the United States Air Force Tactical Air Command Band, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia.
And there's Lowell Graham!
Hey, Lowell! Lowell! Up here! Hi!
Well, of course, he can't really wave, you know, but I think he saw me. How about that? But aside from the band, the marches are in civilian clothing.
Oh!
Oh, okay. I think I know what this is about. They're carrying signs. You know, the north end of town is trying to get a mall built up there.
That part of town's been hard hit economically, and they want the city government to let them have a mall built. And it's going to be a theme mall called Knights of the Round Table.
And they also want City Hall to help them attract visitors from all the organizations that have knights.
You know, the Knights of Columbus, the Knights of Pythias, and those creative anachronism societies where guys dress up as knights.
If they can get knights from all over the country to visit the mall for the opening, it ought to get things off to a good start. So that's why they've got those two big banners out there.
One says, what we need is, and the other says, a mall and the knight visitors. You know, I'm really impressed that they could get such a top-notch band to come here.
Anyway, I was saying that in this next piece, even though it uses actual marches, the way they're used would make a marching band, even a really good one,
like the United States Air Force Tactical Air Command Band Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, look like a bunch of staggering drunks. And the more they tried to follow the music, the worse they'd look.
These are marching marches not for marching, but the way they're used makes for rousing listening.
Marches on the march.
And that's Sickly Mix for this week.
We just heard David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra playing the second movement, Putman's Camp, Reading, Virginia, of Charles Ives' Three Places in New England.
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 Records, the Department of Arts and Sciences, and from this radio station and its 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 139. And this is Peter Sickley 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 Sickley Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickley Mix.
Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.
PRI, Public Radio International.