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 P.R.I., 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 number two in E flat. I got to know it first as a viola piece. Here's how it begins.
[music excerpt: Brahms, Sonata for Viola & Piano No. 2, Opus 120; Lars Anders Tomter, viola/Leif Ove Andsnes, piano]
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.
[music: Brahms, Viola Sonata No. 2, opening, doctored with three notes added before the downbeat]
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 pick-up, 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 three-four 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.
[music excerpt: Tchaikovsky, Serenade for Strings in C, Opus 48; Berlin Philharmonic/Bychkov]
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.
[music: Trad., "Taps"; Ceremonial Music]
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.
[music: Freed/Edens, "Our Love Affair"; Rosemary Clooney]
Three songs featuring one-note pickups. Johnny Ray sang part of Hernando's Hideaway. Felicity Lott did Schubert's The Trout. 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.
[music: Robert Frost and Adler/Ross, “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” set to “Hernando’s Hideaway”; George Wright]
Robert Frost's classic poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, set to 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 Loewe, My Fair Lady. Boston Skyline is the label.
[sound: phone rings]
Oh, rats. Excuse me. Hello? 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. 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, 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 pickups on parade here. We're up to two now. Here are four examples in which virtually every phrase has two pickups. I'll be back in five and a half minutes.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Suite for Violoncello Solo No. 3 in C (BWV 1009), Bourrée I; Nathaniel Rosen]
[music excerpt: Cahn/Styne, "Five Minutes More"; Frank Sinatra]
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67, 2nd mvt.; London Classical Players/Norrington]
[music: Brahms, “Wiegenlied,” Opus 49, No. 4; Anne Sofie Von Otter]
Two-note pickups. I just noticed that that suite was the three B's Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Frank Sinatra. We heard Nathaniel Rosen playing part of the bourree 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 Wiegenlied, 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 Anne Sofie 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 pick-up notes, including, in the middle one of this trio of pieces, what may be the three most famous pick-up notes in the world. I'll be back in four.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67, 1st mvt.; London Classical Players/Norrington]
[music excerpt: P. D. Q. Bach, "The Short-Tempered Clavier"; Christopher O'Riley]
Three-note pickups. Gerry Mulligan played bari sax on his arrangement of Makin' Whoopee with Chet Baker on trumpet, Norrington again with Beethoven's fifth. And those three pick-up notes absolutely permeate that whole first movement, even in the accompaniment parts. Then finally we heard the F major fugue from P.D.Q. 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'Riley.
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!
[music excerpt: Strauss, "Blue Danube"; The Idiot's Guide to Classical Music]
[music: Leiber/Stoller, "Love Me" (The Top Ten Hits); Elvis Presley]
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.
[music: Erwin, "I Kiss Your Hand, Madame"; Peter Schickele]
Peter Schickele (recorded): Thank you, thank you.
[No speech for 72 s.]
Peter Schickele (recorded): Thank you. I love you. I love you a lot. Thank you.
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 pick-ups. 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 pick-ups. This is about as far as we're going to go, pick-up-wise speaking.
[music: Coslow/Johnston, "Cocktails for Two" (The Spike Jones Anthology); Spike Jones]
Six- and seven-note pickups. From Franz Lehár's operetta Frasquita, Nicolai Gedda sang Schatz, ich bitt' dich, komm heut' Nacht, then Gerry Mulligan again with Frenesi, and finally a bit of the classic Spike Jones 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.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Isn't that nice?
They're completely different.
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.
[music: Introduction to “Softly As I Leave You” (Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits); Frank Sinatra]
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 three-four time, but very fast. It can be as fast as, well, like the Ninth Symphony.
[sung: Schickele sings the opening of the scherzo, counting one-two-three]
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.
[music]
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?
Woman: Jennifer.
I'm Peter Schickele. I have a program called Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Pick-Up Shticks. 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 5th 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 5th would sound like with the upbeats circled.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67, opening with the upbeats removed; Gewandhausorchester Leipzig/Konwitschny]
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, um, 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.
[music: Schubert, “An die Musik” (D 547); Janet Baker]
[music: Sebastian, "You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice" (Daydream); The Lovin' Spoonful]
We began with another Gerry 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 An die Musik with Geoffrey Parsons at the piano, and finally The Lovin' 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 Cahn and Jule Styne and Walter Donaldson and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, well, I met one of them once, and R. Erwin and somebody Dominguez and Sam Coslow 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 Gerry Mulligan version, and now, this one hasn't been re-released, as far as I know, on CD, so I gotta 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.
[music: Rodgers/Hart, "My Funny Valentine"; Gerry Mulligan Quartet]
And 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, Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Now, I've heard other versions with singers who start right on it.
[sung: Schickele hums the opening of the tune, starting on the downbeat]
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 a saxophonist who sometimes is after the beat and sometimes on the beat with this melody. Here is My Funny Valentine.
[music: Rodgers/Hart, "My Funny Valentine"; Bill Clinton Jam Session]
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 Konopásek on baritone saxophone, Unidentified on flugelhorn, and I must say that's the best I've ever heard him play, Stanislav Mácha on piano, Robert Balzar on bass, and Pavel Zibril on drums. Recorded live at the Reduta Jazz Club, Prague, the Czech Republic, January 11th, 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.
[music]
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.