Pick-Up Shticks

Schickele Mix Episode #143

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Official description
a program about pick-up notes
Premiere
1997-05-28
“Peter, are you ready?”
Is that a trick question?

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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.]

Well, 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 I'm glad to say 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 from this here radio station, within whose walls I crank out these carefully crafted modules of musical matter, which matter is then converted into energy and beamed far and wide by PRI, Public Radio International.
I had a girlfriend in college who knew that one of my very favorite pieces is the Brahms
Clarinet or Viola Sonata No. 2 in E-flat.
I got to know it first as a viola piece.
Here's how it begins.
It's such a beautiful melody, and I love the way it just starts without any introduction, as if you had stepped into a flowing stream.
Now Sarah used to like to get my goat by singing the tune with three extra notes.
She added three notes before the downbeat, as if the piece started like this.
It's a small but significant change.
It makes the beginning of the piece sort of tacky, which Sarah knew, of course. I mean, that's why she did it.
It's called pushing buttons.
But it was all in good fun.
I mean, eventually we broke up, but it wasn't because of that.
What she was doing was adding three pickups to the melody. Pickups are notes at the beginning of a phrase that come before a strong beat.
So how do you know where the strong beats are?
Well, if you're marching, you know because it's when your left foot comes down.
But it's not too cool to march up and down the aisles of Carnegie Hall during a Chopin nocturne, so there are other ways of feeling the strong beats.
Here's a piece whose melody begins with a two-note pickup.
And you know when the strong beat occurs, because that's when the rest of the orchestra comes in, and the basses play on every strong beat thereafter, and the harmonies change on strong beats, and... Well, that's enough right there, isn't it?
I mean, what do you want, a smithy hitting an anvil on every strong beat?
This piece is in 3-4 time, and the opening phrases are four measures long, which means that there are four strong beats to each phrase.
And each one of the first five phrases has a two-note pickup.
One of the things that melodies often do, certainly not always, but very often, is to have the note on the initial strong beat be longer than the pickup note or notes.
This is called an agogic accent.
And I'll go over that for the sake of those of you who haven't been keeping notes during
the last 142 shows.
An agogic accent has nothing to do with playing a note louder, punching it. It refers to the natural emphasis that occurs when a note is longer than the note or notes that precede it. Here, for instance, is a melody that has no harmony changes, in fact, it has no accompaniment at all, nothing to define the meter except rhythm and melodic patterns.
Each phrase has a two-note pickup, and the third note of each phrase, the one on the
strong beat, is always longer than the pickups.
Okay, it's time to start the featured feature on today's show, Pickups on Parade.
We're going to give you an opportunity to concentrate on this musical device, and we'll
start with one-note pickups.
Many melodies are predominantly isorhythmic, that is, the same rhythmic pattern is used in all or most of the phrases, which means, in this case, that virtually all the phrases in the three songs we're about to hear have one pickup note.
See you in about four-and-a-half.
I know a dark secluded place, a place where no one knows your face, a glass of wine, a last embrace, it's called Hernando's Hideaway, Ole, all you see are silhouettes, and all you hear are castanets, and no one cares how late it gets, not at Hernando's Hideaway,
Ole.
Die launischen Forelle Vorüber mir einfeiern.
Ich stand an der Gestade Und sah in süßer Ruhe
Des muttern Fischleins Wane Im klaren Lichtlein zu.
Ein Fische wird geruhte, Wo an dem Oberstand, Und saß mit kalten Blute, Wie sich das Fischlein warnt.
Solang dem Wasser helle, Sodass sich nücht gebricht, So hängt er die Forelle Mit seiner Hand genickt.
Doch endlich ward dem Dübel Die Zeit klar.
Our Love Affair
Our love affair Was meant to be
It's me for you, dear And you for me We'll fuss, we'll quarrel And tears start to brew But after the tears Our love will smile through
I'm sure that I Could never hide
The thrill I get When you're by my side And when we're older We'll proudly declare
Wasn't ours a lovely love affair?
I'm sure that I Could never hide
The thrill I get When you're by my side And when we're older We'll proudly declare
Wasn't ours a lovely love affair?
Three songs featuring one-note pickups. Johnny Ray sang part of Hernando's Hideaway, Felicity Lott did Schubert's The Trout, and Rosemary Clooney sang about our love affair, which I really wish she wouldn't do in public. I'm a married man.
Speaking of that, you know, my wife is a poet, and while a lot of people think of poetry as a very esoteric thing, except maybe for cowboy poetry, and in certain circles a lot of thought goes into figuring out how to bring poetry to a wider audience. So, you know that famous Robert Frost poem called
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening?
Well, for tidbit time today, I'd like to play a musical setting of that poem, a setting that I think could make it accessible to a much wider audience.
Here it is.
[No speech for 12s.]
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though
He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow
Ole, my little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year, ole
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind, of easy wind And downy flake, oh
The woods are lovely, dark and deep But I have promises to keep And miles to go before I sleep And miles to go before I sleep, ole
Robert Frost's classic poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, is based on music written about three decades after the poem was written. The accompaniment was played by George Wright, although he didn't know he'd be accompanying me when he made the recording back in the 1950s.
A terrific theater organist, by the way, and I recommend the album if you're into theater organs.
George Wright plays Lerner and Lowe, My Fair Lady.
Boston Skyline is the label.
Oh, rats. Excuse me. Mr. Frost, I thought you were dead.
I mean, dead but not forgotten. Oh, well, it was just in the spirit of fun, you know.
Well, actually, you know, it wasn't even my idea, you know.
I mean, actually, I was remiss if I gave the impression that I thought that idea up, because, actually, it was my good friend Mikhail Horowitz.
He's an excellent poet and a very funny guy.
He calls himself a stand-up poet, and it was his idea to sing the poem to the music of Hernando's Hideaway. I just, you know, I just borrowed the idea for this program. And, say, would you like his telephone number?
I'd be glad to give it to you.
Oh, well, yeah, I suppose you can.
Uh-huh. Well, okay.
And, oh, by the way, I'm a big fan of yours, Mr. Frost, and I was even back when you were alive.
You know, Kennedy's inauguration, and, oh, and I just love trees.
I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
Huh. He hung up.
Well, I guess we really ought to get back to pick-ups on parade here. We're up to two now. Here are four examples in which virtually every phrase has two pick-ups. I'll be back in five and a half minutes.
[No speech for 336s.]
Two note pickups.
I just noticed that that suite was the three Bs
Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, with Frank Sinatra thrown in for good measure.
We heard Nathaniel Rosen playing part of the bourrée from Bach's third unaccompanied cello suite in C major. Then came the chairman of the board singing Five Minutes More, then part of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth, and finally the vegan lead, the lullaby by Brahms that has become like a folk song to a large part of the world. By the way, that was Norrington and the London Classical Players with the Beethoven and Anna-Sophie von Otter singing the Brahms with Bengt Forsberg on the piano.
One of the people listening to the whole suite was Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're in the midst of our Pickups on Parade feature here, and we're up to three, phrases with three pickup notes, including in the middle one of this trio of pieces what may be the three most famous pickup notes in the world.
I'll be back in four.
[No speech for 287s.]
Three-note pickups.
Jerry Mulligan played Barry Sachs on his arrangement of Macon Whoopie with Chet Baker on trumpet,
Norrington again with Beethoven's Fifth, and those three pickup notes absolutely permeate that whole first movement, even in the accompaniment parts.
Then finally, we heard the F major fugue from PDQ Bach's
The Short-Tempered Clavier,
the subtitle is Preludes and Fugues in All the Major and Minor Keys Except for the Really Hard Ones, performed by Christopher O'Reilly.
Okay, don't try to stop me now.
We're up to four. Count them. Four pickup notes.
We've got three pieces, and don't be thrown off by the very first phrase you hear with its three-note pickup, not to mention its rather noisy audience. It immediately settles in to what may be the most famous four pickup notes in the world.
Hasta la vista.
[No speech for 54s.]
Treat me like a fool
Treat me mean and cruel
But love me
Bring my faithful heart Tear it all apart But love me
Won't you love me
Believe her whoever goes
Darling, I'll be oh so lonely
I'll be sad and blue
Crying over you
Dear me
I would beg and steal
Just to feel
Your heart
Feeding close to mine
Darling, wherever you ever go
Darling, I'll be oh so lonely
I'll be sad and blue
Crying over you
Dear me
I would beg and steal
Just to feel
Your heart
Feeding close to mine
Wherever you ever go
Darling, I'll be oh so lonely
Begging on my knees All I ask is please
Love me, oh yeah
Okay, four-note pickups.
Johann Strauss, Jr. on the beautiful blue Danube. I don't know who was playing because I took it off a CD called
The Idiot's Guide to Classical Music. Must have been compiled by Dostoevsky.
Anyway, it tells you the movies you might have heard each theme in but not who's playing it.
Then the Eastman Wind Ensemble
under Donald Hunsberger with part of Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever.
I know that was a little frustrating. Sorry about that.
But that's the only section that has four-note pickups.
And finally Elvis singing Love Me. Elvis Presley, not Costello.
Okay, we're going to get a little bit less exhaustive here.
Just one example of five-note pickups but it is a perfect example.
The song has ten phrases and every one starts with a five-note pickup.
It's an old song that you don't hear much anymore.
All I could find was this live recording in which the audience is even noisier than they were on the blue Danube.
Thank you, thank you.
In dreams I kiss your hand, madame
Your dating fingertips
And while in slumberland, madame I'm begging for your lips I haven't any right, madame
To do the things I do Just when I hold you tight, madame You vanish in the night, madame In dreams I kiss your hand, madame
And pray my dreams come true
Thank you, thank you.
I love you.
I love you a lot.
You know, it's a funny thing about crooners in the second half of the 20th century. They used to have just regular names but in the last few decades
Tom Jones named himself after a novel by Fielding Engelbert Humperdinck after the composer of Hansel and Gretel and now this guy, whom we just heard singing
I kiss your hand, madame.
He calls himself Jean-Paul Sartre.
Well, anyway, the song might as well have been composed
specifically to illustrate five-note pickups.
But all good things must come to an end and I'm afraid we've come to the end of Pickups on Parade.
Our last little suite has three excerpts featuring six- and seven-note pickups not consistently, but mostly.
The first number contains beautiful six-note pickups.
The middle number begins with seven but the phrases in the central section have six and the last number, if you can concentrate on the melody
has four phrases with very tasty seven-note pickups.
This is about as far as we're going to go, pickup-wise speaking.
[No speech for 26s.]
Führer, stell dich ein beim Ampelschein
Wenn der Sekt im Glase sprüht
Und die Zigarette glüht Fühlst du, kleine Maus, dich wie zu Haus Schatz, ich bitt dich, komm heut Nacht
Alles, was dir Freude macht, geb ich gerne dir
Ach, komm zu mir
Fünf Minuten nach halb neun Werd ich an der Türe sein
Niemand wird dich sehen
Beim Kommen und beim Gehen
Kein Glück gewinnt so viel noch nie
[No speech for 18s.]
Fünf Minuten nach halb neun Werd ich an der Türe sein
Niemand wird dich sehen
In some secluded rendezvous
That overlooks the avenue
With someone sharing a delightful chat With some vat of cocktails for two
As we enjoy a cigarette
To some exquisite chansonette
Two hands are sure to slyly meet beneath
A serviette with cocktails for two My head may go reeling
But my heart will be obedient
With intoxicating kisses for the principal ingredient Most any afternoon at five
We'll be so glad we're both alive Then maybe fortune will complete
The plan that all began with cocktails for two
Six and seven note pickups
From Franz Lehar's operetta Fraschita Nikolaj Gedda sang Schatz, ich bit dich, komm heut Nacht
Then Jerry Mulligan again with Frenesy
And finally a bit of the classic Spike Jonze version
of Cocktails for Two.
You know, it's too bad that that's such a topical song.
It celebrated the end of Prohibition because it's really a nice melody and it's all in the pickups.
La-da-da-da-dee-dee-da-dee
Isn't that nice?
La-da-da-da-dee-dee-da-dee
Now completely different.
La-da-da-da-dee-dee-da-dee
Well, we're going to hang it up at seven.
If you have too many pickups,
you run the risk of starting before the previous strong beat and then they wouldn't sound like pickups.
Well, if they're very fast, you can have an almost uncountable number of pickups,
as in this time-honored intro formula.
If you recognize that, you're really a Sinatra fan. Now sometimes a note can look in the printed music as if it's on a strong beat because it's on the downbeat, but it's not really.
Like Beethoven's Scherzos are usually in 3-4 time, but very fast.
It can be as fast as, well, like the Ninth Symphony.
Ya-ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3.
So in a case like that, instead of having two or three or four beats to a measure, each measure is a single beat.
So you can talk about strong measures and weak measures. So a group of three notes may, technically speaking, start on a downbeat, the first beat of a bar, but if it's a weak bar,
they'll still sound like pickups.
In a situation like that, the whole first bar sounds like a pickup bar. Here's another example of something that sounds like a pickup bar.
Hi, how's it going?
What's your name?
Jennifer.
I'm Peter Schickele.
I have a program called Schickele Mix
from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Pickup Schticks.
We're talking about melodic phrases that begin before the strong beat.
Pieces that start right out with upbeats are often tricky to conduct, at least for your less experienced maestros, and the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth is a notorious sand trap for intrepid tyros.
There's a nice old musician's joke about the aging Broadway conductor
with unfulfilled symphonic aspirations, and the musicians among whom this joke circulated knew that on Broadway, where you make constant changes during rehearsals,
the way you indicated that something should be deleted
was to circle it.
If the conductor said, First trumpet, circle the last two notes, the trumpet player circled them and didn't play them.
You didn't want to scratch them out completely because they might change their minds later and put them back in. So, anyway, this guy has been working in the orchestra pits of Broadway theaters for years,
and one day, finally and suddenly, he gets a chance to conduct the New York Philharmonic.
Don't ask, it's a long story.
So he programs the piece he's always wanted to conduct,
Beethoven's Fifth.
But when he gets up on the podium at the rehearsal,
he's so excited and so intimidated that his beat isn't clear and it's a mess.
Everybody's all over the place,
and he just cannot get them together. Finally, he sighs and says, Okay, circle the upbeats.
This is what the opening of Beethoven's Fifth would sound like with the upbeats circled.
[No speech for 12s.]
Not, I think, what the composer had in mind.
Okay, most melodies either start on the first strong beat or start with pickups to the first strong beat, but there are some tunes that start after the first strong beat. Almost by definition, it's hard to imagine this occurring with an unaccompanied melody.
The accompaniment lays down the first strong beat of the section, and the melody starts afterwards. And I'm not talking about intros here. I'm talking about the beginning of the section with the melody.
I tend to like this kind of melody.
It has the effect, remember when I was talking about strong measures and weak measures? In this situation, the first notes of the melody sort of sound as if they're pickups to the weak measure or pickups to a weak beat.
Our last suite features four songs whose melodies begin after the initial strong beat.
I'll do some counting to point it out, but don't worry, I won't keep it up long.
To start with, I'll count down the last weak measure before the strong downbeat. Sounds more complicated than it is.
And we've had so many excerpts today that I thought it would be nice to hear all three of these in their entirety. I call this suite, You Go Ahead, I'll Catch Up. We'll meet again in about eight minutes.
1-2-3-4-1
[No speech for 459s.]
You go ahead, I'll catch up.
We began with another Jerry Mulligan cut, Bernie's tune, with Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass, and Chico Hamilton on drums.
Then Janet Baker...
Yeah, I wonder if she's related to Chet Baker.
Anyway, Janet Baker sang Schubert's Ande Musique with Jeffrey Parsons at the piano.
And finally, the Love and Spoonful, with John Sebastian's song, You Didn't Have to Be So Nice. Hey, you know, I just realized that
John Sebastian's the only non-classical composer
I've credited on this show, isn't he?
Doesn't seem fair.
Well, that's because I know him. I don't know Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and Arthur Freed and Roger Edens, and Sammy Kahn and Julie Stein, and Walter Donaldson and Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, well, I met one of them once, and R. Irwin and somebody Dominguez, and Sam Costlow and Arthur Johnston and somebody Miller.
You know, actually, pop songs can be tricky, researching a show like this, because different singers sing them so differently.
It's not the way they were written, the way it tends to be with classical songs.
I was thinking of including My Funny Valentine in that last suite of songs that begin after the first strong beat, and that's because I got to know that song from the old Jerry Mulligan version.
And now this one hasn't been re-released, as far as I know, on CD, so I've got to warn you, this is a 10-inch LP here.
We'll hear just a little bit of the beginning of My Funny Valentine, and you'll hear how Chet Baker starts the phrases after the downbeats.
[No speech for 34s.]
Man, I wish I could get that on CD.
Parts of that album, I've played it so much, sound like they were recorded next to a campfire.
Anyway, My Funny Valentine, Jerry Mulligan Quartet.
Now, I've heard other versions with singers who start right on it.
And I'll bet that's the way it's written.
I've never looked up the music, but it doesn't really matter,
because in pop and jazz, you play it the way you want to.
But in any case, it's a beautiful song, and why don't we go out with it?
Here's the saxophonist who sometimes is after the beat and sometimes on the beat with this melody.
Here is My Funny Valentine.
[No speech for 36s.]
My Funny Valentine.
Okay, I agree that tenor sax player is a little bit sharp sometimes,
a little bit out of tune, but I think you've got to cut him a little slack. I think you'll agree when you hear the circumstances.
That tenor saxophone player is President Bill Clinton, and he was on a state journey to Czechoslovakia in 1994, and he visited a jazz club,
and the president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, presented him with a Czech-made saxophone,
and then the president joined the jazz group there
for Summertime and My Funny Valentine.
That's Bill Clinton on tenor saxophone, Jan Kona Pasek on baritone saxophone, Unidentified on flugelhorn,
and I must say that's the best I've ever heard him play,
Stanislav Macha on piano, Robert Balkar on bass, and Pavel Zibril on drums.
Recorded live at the Reduda Jazz Club Prague, the Czech Republic, January 11, 1994.
And that's about it for 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 143.
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.
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.