Marches Are Your Friends

Schickele Mix Episode #141

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1997-05-14
“Peter, are you ready?”
Hey, no prob.

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Transcript

[This is a machine-generated transcript, cleaned up and formatted as HTML. You can download the original as an .srt file.]

And now, Schickele Mix.
Oh, uh, Mr. Schickele, can I borrow your Ferrari while you do your show?
Hey, no prob. Here's the theme.
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 as luck would have it, 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 right here, right here where I'm sitting, to whom I am indebted every bit as much as I am to the people who
distribute the show, PRI, Public Radio International.
And before we get going here, folks, I'd like to share something with you.
And let me just say, for the sake of the irrelevancy alarm up there, in case it starts getting trigger happy, that although this doesn't have anything directly to do with music, it does have to do with my standing as a scholar, so it is relevant to the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to announce that I have had a paper accepted by the Journal of the Modern Language Association, which, by the way, is an extremely prestigious publication, because I think I have traced the origin of a common term in our language, a term the previous research on which has been, it is my contention, seriously flawed.
Some of you may remember that on another edition of this program, I said that the year 1150 was an easy year to remember, because it was the year that Eric the Saint became King of
Sweden.
Well, that got me curious about what else happened in 1150.
So I looked it up in a great book I have called The Timetables of History.
And it turns out that not only did Albert the Bear inherit Brandenburg in 1150, paving the way for six of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but it was also the year
that Paris University was founded.
Now everybody knows that college students tend not to be as interested in personal cleanliness as real adults are.
You know, they leave their clothes piled up in the corner for weeks at a time and don't
bathe very often.
Of course, in the Middle Ages, nobody bathed very often by modern standards, but students must have been especially grungy and aromatic in those days. So if you encountered a student, you knew that you were probably in for an unpleasant
olfactory experience.
So but after 1150, when Paris University was founded, you had all these students walking around in sweatshirts that said P.U. on them.
So if you met a student...
What?
Hey, hey, this is about a paper I wrote that I have been invite... I am not answering that phone.
Forget it. Listen, there is nothing wrong with me reporting. Go ahead. I'm not answering it.
OK, folks, let's get on with it here.
Here we go once again with...
Marches on the march.
Regular installment and shickly mixes ongoing.
In-depth survey of every march ever written.
Brother, this is a great station, but the working conditions leave something to be desired.
I should belong to a union, that's what. But as usual, what I do falls between the cracks.
I mean, there's a jurisdictional problem here.
Should I be in the AFAMP, the American Federation of Absent-Minded Professors, or just sign up right here at the station with CORD, the Congress of Radio Drudges? I must say, I'm not in a very cooperative mood today.
Maybe I'll start my own union called ME1, Me First.
Or if I were a king, I could call myself Me the First.
Oh, all right, all right.
I guess that's not only irrelevant, it's also unfair to my parents, sort of, in a way. Speaking of which, both of my parents were born before the First World War. And in those days, at least in this country, band music was the music of the people.
Some folks had the money and the inclination to go to symphony orchestra concerts, but
everybody heard bands.
And just as jazz musicians sometimes throw a fleeting quote of a well-known song into their improvised solos—it often has the effect of a musical wink, I feel—march composers used to refer to songs in a way that they knew would delight their audiences. It's an acknowledgment of a communal bond.
Here are four marches, spanning the better part of a century, at least. Each one of them has a section that brings a smile to the listener's mind, as he or she thinks, hey, I know that song, which is what the suite is called.
I'll see you in about nine-and-a-half minutes.
[No speech for 544s.]
Hey, I know that song.
First we heard the classic march, National Emblem, by Edwin Eugene Bagley, known to his friends as E.E. Bagley.
Now a march has to do what a march has to do, and when it quotes the Star-Spangled Banner, this march does the march-ly thing by changing the national anthem from triple time to duple time. Military marches in triple time are not unheard of, but I don't know of any written within the last couple of centuries.
That was Frederick Fennell conducting the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra.
Next we heard a little piece called July, from a larger work entitled Brass Calendar, by a composer who's a relative of mine, actually.
He's my uncle's nephew.
His name is Peter Schickele, and in this piece, Yankee Doodle starts out as a sort of a countermelody and then takes over completely.
That was played by the Chestnut Brass Company, and quite well, too, I thought. The third movement of our suite was named after the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. John Philip Sousa based the trio on Auld Lang Syne, which was apparently associated with that Boston outfit. That was Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble. And then the last thing we heard was called, appropriately enough, Au Près de Ma Blonde.
It was written by someone named Mougeot and played by, let's see, either Musique des Gardiens de la Paix de Paris under Désir Dondin, or Musique Militaire de Paris under Roger Defoy.
Oh, excuse me.
You can't tell from the booklet in this CD.
Actually, it's not even a booklet.
It's only four pages, you know, one piece of paper.
It's more like a bookletino.
But what a great funky sound. The drums sound like cannons every time they play, and those natural bugles or keyless cornets or whatever they are have such a brash tone and intonation that is guaranteed to keep you awake. I love it.
By the way, my uncle, whose name is Hans Schickele, tells me that his nephew, Peter Schickele, has a radio program called Schickele Mix
from PRI, Public Radio International.
A lot of people love marches, but what do marches think of them? Many marches emphasize the grand and the noble, the high and the mighty, the strong and the macho, and they bring to mind the discipline that is part of military life.
It's hard not to think that there's a bit of S&M going on here.
But other marches want to be your friends, and one of the ways they show their friendliness is by demonstrating that they know some of the same songs that you do, like the Star-Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle, Auld Lang Syne, and Au Près de Ma Blonde.
But those are very well-known tunes, and tunes that we're used to hearing in a variety of arrangements.
Our next example is a more esoteric nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
Here's the beginning of Beethoven's String Quartet, Op. 59 No. 1, followed by a section from the finale of PDQ Bach's Grand Serenade
for an awful lot of winds and percussion.
Here's the beginning of Beethoven's String Quartet, Op. 59 No. 1,
followed by a section from the finale of PDQ Bach's Grand Serenade for an awful lot of winds and percussion.
Beethoven and PDQ Bach, the Cleveland Quartet and the Turtle Mountain Naval Base Tactical Wind Ensemble.
So, was that PDQ Bach's idea of a joke, or was it meant as a tribute to Beethoven? Or was he simply, as usual, stealing a theme from one of his betters? Well, that's a difficult question on two counts. Answering it presupposes that we know what was in PDQ Bach's mind when he wrote the piece, and we have no evidence indicating what that was.
And secondly, it presupposes that PDQ Bach had a mind, and there's no evidence for that either.
I would vote for larceny myself, but modern audiences, or at least the chamber music buffs therein, have indicated by their laughter that it's a joke,
whatever PDQ's intentions were.
And it is funny to hear that melody, which is so serene and quiet in its original setting,
being played full blast by trombones and tubas with an accompaniment that Sousa himself could have written.
So let's say it's a joke.
Okay, well, what about the Nibelungen March by somebody named Sonntag? He did the same thing PDQ Bach did. He took themes from Wagner's grand and high-minded opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelungen, and turned them into standard, run-of-the-mill march tunes.
But as far as I know, this isn't a joke.
Before we hear the march, I'll play you the original versions of the material that Sonntag quotes.
These are called leitmotifs.
I know, leitmotif sounds like an interior decorating term for when you have different kinds of lamps all over the house, but in Wagner it means thematic material that is associated with a particular character or object or quality or whatever. The Ring doesn't seem to have a leitmotif for extreme length, but everything else has one.
Wagner was really into endless melody, and I do mean endless. His music is timeless, which is another word for long. I remember the first time I got a large dose of Wagner.
I didn't actually see a Wagner opera till I got to New York, but when I was a student at Swarthmore College, it must have been around 1956, I went to an all-Wagner concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra. And when I came out of the Academy of Music, I remember thinking, I wonder if Eisenhower is still president.
Anyway, here's Donner.
His name, of course, means thunder. Here's his theme from Das Rheingold.
[No speech for 51s.]
That was Robert Kearns as Donner. Now here's Siegfried's Horn Call from Siegfried.
[No speech for 34s.]
And here's the sword motif as it appears in Das Rheingold.
[No speech for 45s.]
That's Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Wotan.
Next is Siegfried's motif as it occurs in Die Walküre.
[No speech for 21s.]
And that's Crespen as Brunnhilde.
And finally, the theme of Valhalla from Das Rheingold.
[No speech for 29s.]
Josephine Vesey and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
And all of those excerpts were with Herbert von Karajan
and the Berlin Philharmonic.
Okay, now we're all connoisseurs.
Here's the Nebelungen March by Sonntag, whoever he is.
[No speech for 193s.]
The Nebelungen March by Sonntag.
The performance, once again, was by Herbie the Kay and the Berlin Phils. Well, at least now I know what Sonntag's first name was, but I still don't know his dates.
He's not in Grove's or Baker's dictionaries, but while the march was playing, I looked him up in Slonimski's Music Since 1900, which is arranged chronologically, and here's the entry for 8 December 1936. The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda issues a directive limiting all outdoor performances of Gottfried Sonntag's Nebelungen March on motives from Wagner's Ring Cycle only to important meetings under the aegis of the Nazi party.
A supplementary order, signed by Hitler himself on 6 July 1937, made the playing of the march compulsory at all Parteitage, party days. Well, but did Sonntag live during the Nazi era or, like Wagner, before it?
I don't know.
But I think that's about as much research as I'm going to do on the subject.
In fact, I think it's time to lighten up. Here's a set of three very friendly marches.
Nobody would call these puppies pompous.
The first is a breezy number that's almost a spoof of marches, and the second is definitely a parody of a famous march.
The third is a beautifully witty arrangement of a march from the Afro-American tradition. I call this suite Hey, Lighten Up, and we'll meet again in about 6 1⁄2 minutes.
[No speech for 393s.]
Hey, we have lightened up.
This is Jockey Bear, Spike Jones, and Billy May. Stephen Richman led Harmony Ensemble New York in that performance of the last movement of Hubert's Suite Symphonique Paris.
Paris is French for Paris. Then came the overture from Spike Jones' version of Bizet's opera Carmen, which uses part of the March of the Toreadors, as arranged by Jay Somers and Eddie Brandt. Then last, from an album called Sorta Dixie, Billy May's brilliant arrangement of South Rampart Street Parade, a march out of the New Orleans tradition.
The piccolo solo was Ted Nash, and the clarinet solo, Matty Matlock.
Did I ever tell you about going around to the stage door during the intermission of a Spike Jones show when I was a kid and seeing him right inside the door but not having the nerve to approach him?
Man, I regret that.
I should have marched right up to him and said, Hello, Mr. Jones, Mr. Lindley Armstrong Jones. My name is Peter Schickele, and someday I'm going to have a radio program called Schickele Mix
from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's program is called Marches Are Your Friends, and our last suite on the show brings together three examples of marching unusualia, as they say in Latin.
On another installment of Marches on the March, I mentioned that a slow march, an entry processional by Rinaldo Hahn, was the only time I'd ever heard swirling harp glissandos in a march. Well, here's an even more unusual example, because the Hahn was for orchestra and, as I said, not an up-tempo marching march.
The first selection in this suite is for regular band, but it includes harp.
I assume they didn't use the harp when they marched. Well, I suppose you could have the harp on a little wagon, you know, the kind of wagon that kids have dragged by the band's mascot, preferably a large dog or maybe a zebra.
But wait a minute, the harpist has to have both feet free to work the pedals, so that's another wagon with a chair on it, and that wagon is pushed by a ram or maybe a baby elephant.
Probably not worth doing. Anyway, this march also has various Turkish-type percussion instruments in it.
Now, I mentioned earlier in the program that there have been some marches, and I don't mean just slow processionals, in triple time, but the middle number in this suite is a march in quintuple time, five beats to the measure. It is, admittedly, a concert piece, not a marching band piece, but I've tried marching to it, and it works just fine.
And speaking of fine, the final piece is... Well, let me just say that it was written by a very famous march composer, not a Hollywood film score writer.
This suite is called Hey, You're Marching Off the Beaten Path, and I'll find my way back to you in about 8 1⁄2 minutes.
[No speech for 488s.]
Hey, You're Marching Off the Beaten Path, and the first stop was a march by Sousa called Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, his only march using a harp. You know, if you put festive garlands up in a room, you say that the room is festooned.
If you blow something up way beyond its normal size, you say it has ballooned. So, if you add a harp to a band, has the band been harpooned? Okay, okay, all right, I promise, I promise that I will...
Okay, I promise, no more. That's it, folks. I'll behave.
I'm not going to answer that.
I'm just going to move along here. The middle piece, that strutting, emphatic, deliberate march, was from a work called What Did You Do Today at Jeffy's House, and was written by a relative of the composer of Brass Calendar, part of which we heard earlier in the show.
It's a complicated family.
This guy is the only sibling of my uncle's oldest nephew's brother, and believe it or not, his name is also Peter Schickele. That movement was called First We Had a Parade, and the performers were Tom Bacon on French horn and Brian Connolly on piano. Then the last piece was another Sousa march called New Mexico, in which the composer endeavored to encapsulate the history of that area in a few choice musical morsels.
Both Sousa marches were done by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble.
And we've got time for one more march here, so this is a march that the music isn't funny in it, but it has a great title and it's a very nice march.
It's from Vaughan Williams' incidental music for The Wasps, the Aristophanes play, and it's called March Past of the Kitchen Utensils.
And according to the booklet, in the original score, March Past of the Kitchen Utensils was called March Past of the Witnesses, a parody of a trial presided over by the Athenian demagogue Cleon, who is induced to satisfy his judicial passion at home by trying the dog accused of stealing some cheese.
The dog, for his part, calls his character witnesses his messmates, the pot, pestle, and water jug. This risible situation is accompanied by a quaint little march, delightfully scored with just a hint of here's a health unto his majesty in its theme.
[No speech for 201s.]
The March Past of the Kitchen Utensils from Vaughn Williams Music for a production of The Wasps by Aristophanes. And it's interesting, that was the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley, and the credits on this album are rather interesting.
Liner notes, John Nicole, producer, Andrew Keener, recording engineer, Mr. Bear.
That's what it says, no first name, just Mr. Bear. So I assume that's Papa Bear, right?
I mean, it can't be Mama Bear, and it wouldn't be Baby Bear.
I mean, they have child labor laws in England, don't they?
Okay, okay.
Hey, I'm out of here. Thanks, folks.
Thanks for joining us for another...
Marches on the March.
And that's Schickele Mix for this week.
The march at the beginning of the show was
Gyp the Blood, or Hearst, which is Worst, by Charles Ives, played by the Ensemble Moderne under Ingo Metzmacher. Right now we're hearing Thunder and Blazes by Fucik, played by the Gürzenich Bassoon Quintet. 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 141.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye 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 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.