And you're listening to PRI Programs on KSUI, 91.7 FM, Classical Radio, KSUI in Iowa City. 6 o'clock is the time. Coming your way next, Peter Schickele and Schickele Mix. Peter, are you ready to go? And I do believe he is. I cannot tell a lie, so I won't answer that. 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's always good to know that your bills are paid. Ours 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 last, but not in the least least, from this brave radio station, where I am provided with a studio and enough rope to hang my ideas out to dry before they are borne aloft by the distributive winds of PRI, Public Radio International.
You know, I don't want to complain about the studio they give me here, it's a great place and I'm glad to be able to use it, but there is one thing about it and that's that you can't turn the phone off. And you regular listeners know that it does sometimes make for interruptions. Last week, my friend Laurie called up practically at the top of the show, and, well, we ended up gabbing for the better part of an hour. But just in case the station manager is listening, I'd like to point out, sir, that it was her nickel.
Laurie is a very good amateur pianist. She studied at a conservatory and she loves playing, but, well, she took everything they told her at school as gospel. And, I mean, she's a terrific person. She's one of my oldest friends, but there is something of the Puritan in her. And when you combine that with where she studied, not many people have heard of her school. It's in San Gabriel, California. It's called the General George S. Patton Conservatory of Music, and they have a very strict approach to musical interpretation, to put it mildly.
Anyway, Laurie's met this guy, he's a violist and she really likes him, but they've played music together and she worries that his rather romantic playing style is a sign of terminal decadence, or at least mental fungus. And I've tried to convince her that there are times when it's okay for string players to be a little loose with intonation. And there are times when sliding from one note to another can be effective and affecting.
There are times when having some roughness in your tone is emotionally appropriate. And another thing... That's right, I have more to say on this subject, even if Laurie isn't listening. Actually, I've tried to call her a couple of times this week, but she's never home, which I take to be a good sign. But let's talk about ensemble. In school, if you play in a group or sing in a chorus, they're always drilling you about being together.
I remember a conductor who in rehearsals wouldn't go beyond the first measure until everyone came in together, even if it took 20 starts. Now that's fine. Ensemble is important. And it can even be thrilling to hear really tight ensemble work from a large aggregation. I'm not saying that groups should turn their collective backs on the exhilarating sting of synchronicity. We're not the police, and sometimes following the letter of the law is not the most expressive way to go.
Listen to this recording of Mischa Elman, one of the great violinists of the first half of the 20th century. This is just two people, violin and piano, but if you listen carefully, and by the way, on this program, if you want to extract the absolutely maximum amount of hard-won wisdom from the observations of your omniscient intellectual guide and companion, you sometimes have to not listen for enjoyment.
You have to focus very narrowly on the matter at hand. If you want to enjoy music, you can go somewhere else. There are plenty of places you can go to enjoy music. Gin mills, football fields, elevators. But anyway, in this excerpt, if you listen very carefully, you'll notice that the violin and the piano are almost never together. It's not so obvious at first, but a little bit into the song, the violin and the piano are changing notes every beat, sort of like a hymn.
And on practically every note, the violin comes in ahead of the piano.
[music excerpt: Mendelssohn, "O For the Wings of a Dove"; Mischa Elman]
Part of a transcription of a Mendelssohn song, O For the Wings of a Dove, played by Mischa Elman and Marcel van Gool. So why does Elman keep jumping the gun on the pianist? Is the pianist coming in late all the time? Are they incapable of getting it together? Of course not. Mischa could play exactly together with Marcel if he wanted to. But there are two reasons he doesn't want to.
One of them has to do with being a prima donna, or, if you prefer, a primo donno. I went to a concert of Elman's once when I was a teenager in Fargo. I can't pretend to remember it in detail, but I do remember that Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata was on the program.
The slow movement of that piece is a theme in variations, and the first variation is very definitely in the pianist's hands. All the violinist has is little repeated note figures that are incontestably accompanimental. Here's a bit of it played by Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug.
Now, Pinchas Zukerman acknowledges that his part is accompanimental and plays it lightly and in the background. But not Mischa Elman, no way Jose. His supposedly accompanimental repeated note figures were right out in front, loud and clear, and he was emoting, grimacing, and sighing and bobbing around as if he were playing the cadenza of a romantic violin concerto.
Similarly, starting a supposedly synchronous note a fraction of a second before the pianist quite literally keeps you out in front. It keeps the spotlight on you, and that's something that Elman knew a lot about. But it isn't the only reason he shunned precision when it came to ensemble. Elman was a romantic violinist through and through, and to a real romantic, tidiness is a sin.
Now nobody, even in today's comparatively straitlaced classical music world, plays a piece exactly as it appears on the page with respect to tempo, dynamics, and ensemble. But players in the 19th century Romantic tradition were especially free of restraint. They wanted to project a sense of unfettered emotion and precise coordination smacked of fetters.
This was true even when only a single performer was involved. Here are two performances of the same Chopin prelude, both by very able pianists. Listen very carefully to the coordination between each pianist's right hand and left hand. For most of this piece, every note in the melody begins on paper simultaneously with an accompaniment note in the left hand. And the first pianist we'll hear sticks pretty closely to that.
But the second pianist hardly ever begins notes simultaneously in both hands. It's not that he couldn't play them together, it's just that doing so would have been against his religion, which was romanticism.
[music excerpt: Chopin, 24 Preludes, Opus 28, No. 4 (Bolet at Carnegie Hall); Jorge Bolet]
Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, Opus 28, No. 4, played first by Grigory Sokolov and then by Jorge Bolet. But not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, as it were, is small potatoes compared to what romantic conductors used to do. They would make large cuts in pieces, they would reorchestrate passages, and even rewrite notes.
But they're all pikers, in the cavalier treatment of the printed page department, compared to pop, folk, and jazz musicians. In the non-classical world, most performers wouldn't be caught dead doing a song exactly as it's written, nor would the song's composer expect them to do so. Pop songs are generally notated in one of two ways. The composer, or someone working for him, writes the song down in a very simple, straightforward way, or if a singer-songwriter has recorded a song, somebody might be hired to write the song down as performed.
In either case, it's assumed that another artist will take considerable liberties, especially in terms of rhythm. It took me, as a classically trained musician, quite a long time to learn to relax about notating my non-classical songs. I have to admit that they're not covered by other artists very often, but when they are, there's no reason they should be sung exactly as I sing them.
You know, I've had occasion to be in a certain hotel in a nearby town several times recently to, uh, well, the reason's not important, but the last time I was there, I snuck a little tape recorder into the cocktail lounge, because they have someone there who has got to be the dweebiest pianist in the history of piano-dom.
The sign at the entrance to the lounge says, The Piano Stylings of Mr. S. And I have to figure that the S stands for square. In fact, they should write his initial with a little 2 above it and to the right of it. I'm going to play you his rendition of Fool's Rush In. Now, I have the sheet music for Fool's Rush In, and he plays it exactly as written.
He doesn't swing any of the eighth notes, and the last notes of the phrases fall right on the downbeats as written. Then I'll play Frank Sinatra's version of the song. Now here again, you've got to listen very narrowly. Listen carefully to the bass, which plays mostly on the strong beats, and Sinatra's voice. Unlike Elman, Frank is usually behind the beat. The album is called Nice and Easy, after all.
And on the last notes of phrases, he'll sometimes be almost two beats late. In fact, on the first time through the song before the instrumental interlude, the only time he lands on the downbeat right with the orchestra is on the very last note. Pretty satisfying, actually. And notice that in the interlude, the flute and celesta play the melody very straight, like Mr. Square Squared, really, but here it has the effect of contrasting nicely with the singer's very free rendition, Fools rush in, not once, but twice.
[music]
[music: Bloom/Mercer, "Fools Rush In" (Nice ’n’ Easy); Frank Sinatra]
Fools, as you may have gathered, rush in. First we heard one of the piano stylings of piano stylist Mr. S., currently in residence at the, well he's a cocktail pianist, and then Frank Sinatra, backed by the conductor and arranger Nelson Riddle. What's the difference between a headline about gullible investors and a headline about the and a headline about the only person ever to take advantage of Joseph Stalin? Well, one says, fools rush in, and the other says, fools Russian. Yeah, I did. I made that up myself. There's a lot more where that came from, too. Here's my card. I'm Peter Schickele, and this show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
When Mr. Wrong is Mr. Right, Part 2. We're talking about admonitions that should be taken with a grain of salt when it comes to musical training. And here's a guy who is so put off by excessive precision in ensembles that he calls his composition slop.
[music: Mingus, "Slop" (Mingus Dynasty); Charles Mingus]
Charles Mingus. The tune is called Slop from the Mingus Dynasty album. The West Point marching band it ain't, but right on it is. Now, here's another example of creative sloppiness. This is a chart I did for a Joan Baez album called Baptism. She's reading a cool but compassionate poem about blood. And to go with it, I wrote a slow-moving, unaccompanied melody that is played in unison but eventually over five octaves by a string orchestra.
At a certain point I stopped conducting, and I had told the players that when I did that, they should gradually get out of sync. Some started playing a bit faster and some a bit slower, and they kept playing on their own, disregarding everybody else, until I cut them off at the end. It's an effect that would have been virtually impossible, and certainly unnecessarily complicated, to achieve with precise notation.
[music: Schickele, "Song In the Blood" (Baptism); Joan Baez]
Joan Baez (recorded): There are great puddles of blood on the world. Where's it all going, all this spilled blood? Is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk? Funny kind of drunkography, then, so wise, so monotonous. No, the earth doesn't get drunk. The earth doesn't turn askew. It pushes its little car regularly, its four seasons: rain, snow, hail, fair weather.
Joan Baez (recorded): Never is it drunk. It's with difficulty it permits itself from time to time an unhappy little volcano. It turns, the earth. It turns with its trees, its gardens, its houses. It turns with its great pools of blood, and all living things turn with it and bleed. It doesn't give a damn, the earth. It turns, and all living things set up a howl. It doesn't give a damn.
Joan Baez (recorded): It turns. It doesn't stop turning. And the blood doesn't stop running. Where's it going, all this spilled blood? Murder's blood, war's blood, misery's blood, and the blood of men tortured in prisons, and the blood of children calmly tortured by their papa and their mom, and the blood of men whose heads bleed in padded cells, and the roofer's blood when the roofer slips and falls from the roof, and the blood that comes and flows in great gushes with the newborn, with the new baby. The mother cries, the baby cries, the blood flows, the earth turns, the earth doesn't stop turning, the blood doesn't stop flowing. Where's it going, all this spilled blood? Blood of the blackjacked, of the humiliated, the blood of the wounded, of suicides, of firing squad victims, of the condemned, and the blood of those that die just like that, by accident. In the street a living being goes by with all his blood inside. Suddenly there he is, dead, and all his blood outside. And other living beings make the blood disappear. They carry the body away, but it's stubborn, the blood, and there where the dead one was, much later, all black, a little blood still stretches. Coagulated blood, life's rust, body's rust, blood curdled like milk, like milk when it turns, when it turns like the earth, like the earth that turns with its milk, with its cows, with its living, with its dead, the earth that turns with its trees, with its living beings, its houses, the earth that turns with marriages, burials, shells, regiments, the earth that turns and turns and turns with its great streams of blood.
[No speech for 63 s.]
Joan Baez, reading Song in the Blood by Jacques Prévert, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, To music written by a composer whom I knew quite well almost three decades ago but haven't seen since, the 33-year-old Peter Schickele.
Okay, let's leave the subject of ensemble and look at wrong notes, or rather listen to them, or rather listen to some right notes that could be looked at or listened to as wrong. Now, not only do copyists make mistakes, but so do composers, and you have to correct those mistakes when you find them. I'm a lousy proofreader myself, and even my published music has its share of boo-boos, so-called because there are ghosts who sneak in and change the notes from what you wanted.
But history is full of examples of composers writing pieces that caused some listeners to say, this can't be what you meant. Here's the beginning of Mozart's String Quartet in C, K465. This passage may not sound unsettling to ears that have heard Mahler and Monk and Messiaen, but it was so far out in 1785 that when the quartet was published, some purchasers sent the parts back, saying that there were too many mistakes in them.
[music excerpt: Mozart, String Quartet in C (K 465), “Dissonance”; Emerson String Quartet]
The Emerson Quartet, with the beginning of Mozart's C major quartet, Köchel No. 465. Because of that opening, the quartet has acquired the nickname Dissonant or Dissonances. These nicknames. I don't know why the next one Mozart wrote isn't called String Quartet No. 20 in D major, the Perfectly Fine Sounding. Here's another famous example of Mr. Wrong being Mr. Right. Beethoven's Third Symphony begins like this.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Opus 55; London Classical Players/Norrington]
Just before the recapitulation, as the violins play trembling, unresolved notes, there's a French horn anticipation, a sort of a pre-shadow of that main theme. But what makes it really unusual is that the notes in the theme spell out a chord that's different from the incomplete chord the violins are playing, so that in a sense you've got two different chords going on simultaneously.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Opus 55, first movement, horn entrance before the recapitulation; London Classical Players/Norrington]
Now, one of the critics after the first performance of the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven wrote that the first movement had been marred by the horn coming in early. And it's easy to see why. In fact, it's a perfectly reasonable assumption. Two bars later and the horn would have been right there in unison with the cellos. But it's great the way Beethoven wrote it, oddly enough. Well, here's an example of a right note that's supposed to sound wrong.
Most of us know the sound of string players playing their open strings when they're tuning up. So when Saint-Saëns asks a violin soloist to tune the top string a half step lower than usual, he does it because he wants it to sound wrong, in the sense of macabre. In fact, the interval produced between the two top strings, called a tritone, used to be known as the Devil's Interval.
We'll start with a little hoedown music, so you can get the sound of the usual string tuning in your ears, and then we'll move on to the macabre.
[music excerpt: Saint-Saëns, "Danse Macabre"; Philadelphia Orchestra/Ormandy]
Shiver me timbers. First we heard the opening of Richard Hayman's Pops Hoedown, played by Kunzel in the Cincinnati Pops, and then part of the Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns. That was Ormandy in the Philadelphia, but it doesn't give the name of the violinist. Maybe it's because he or she wasn't gay. See, the record store in my neighborhood doesn't have much in the way of classical music, and the only recording of the danse macabre I could find was in an album called Out Classics II, music by composers who were gay or are assumed by the compilers of the album to have been gay because there's no evidence to the contrary, which is apparently the case with Corelli. Whatever these albums do for the cause of gay pride, they are widely recognized as triumphs of packaging. And during these straitened times in the classical record industry, I think we can look forward to albums like In Classics, music written by composers with concave belly buttons, and Puff Classics, music written by smokers, and Yokel Classics, music written by American composers who did not study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. I'd like to see an album called P.J. Classics, music by composers in their 60s who still eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Because probably the only composer on the album would be Peter Schickele, the host of Schickele Mix, from P.R.I., Public Radio International.
Ok, now it's time to play our quiz game, when Mr. Wrong is Mr. Right. And, uh, I think we've got a contestant on the line here, hello? Hi, what's your name? Ok, Jalinda, here's the deal. I'm gonna play a chord, a single chord, and it may sound wrong to you, but it's exactly what the composer wrote. Now all you have to do, for $1500, is guess what year the chord was written in.
Okay, you ready? Here goes.
[music excerpt: Rebel, "Les Elémens," opening chord; Musica Antiqua Köln/Goebel]
So, Jalinda, what year do you think that chord was written in? Oh, I'm sorry, Jalinda. The correct answer, and it's a very surprising one, is 1737.
That's...well, we do allow a bit of leeway, Jalinda, but 37 BC is really quite far off, I think you'll agree. So better luck next time.
And meanwhile, we'll be sending you your consolation prize, which is a CD of, uh, well, the subtitle is Three Centuries of Neglected Keyboard Masterpieces by Lully, Schobert, and Alkan, but the album is called Ouch Classics, music by composers who died from stabbing themselves in the foot with their own baton, or from eating poisonous mushrooms at a picnic, or from having a bookcase fall over on them. Thanks for being with us, Jalinda.
Okay, so what did you guess on that chord? The thing that makes 1737 such an unlikely answer is that the chord is really sort of a tone cluster. It has all seven notes of the D minor scale in it. And tone clusters weren't really developed until the 20th century. But in 1737, a French composer named Jean-Féry Rebel wrote a piece called The Elements, and that chord is the beginning of the remarkable first section, which represents chaos.
Let me play it again. I'll let it go on a bit longer this time.
[music excerpt: Rebel, "Les Elémens," opening (again); Musica Antiqua Köln/Goebel]
Okay, once it starts going in unison and you hear the harpsichord there, then it sounds 18th century. But before that, it sounds like movie music, doesn't it? In fact, it makes me want to present one of our exclusive Schickele Mix radio dramas. Now, I never went to sleepaway camp myself, but my friend Bob Lewis did, and he once told me one of the scary campfire stories he remembered from his youth.
So here, with music from Rebel's The Elements, is the world premiere of
[music excerpt: Rebel, "Les Elémens"; Musica Antiqua Köln/Goebel]
The Secret of Morley Mansion.
Trent Cartwell, dashing young man about town, has decided to become a dashing young man about country. For the first time since he purchased it from Silas Morley's estate, he is visiting the crumbling 200-year-old mansion that rises above the mists of Parkway Fen.
I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't have bought this place after all. Everybody says it's haunted. Something about a guy who can turn himself into a snake. I mean, not that I believe in that stuff. What's that? That door's opening. It must just be a draft. No! There's someone behind it!
I am the Viper!
No! Stay where you are! Who are you? I am the Viper! What do you want from me? No! Don't take another step! I own this house! Why are you here?
I am the Viper!
You want your windows viped?
And that was Reinhard Goebel and the Musica Antiqua Köln performing excerpts from Rebel's The Elements. When Wrong Notes Happen to Right People, whatever that means. Back around 1960, when I used to subscribe to Downbeat magazine, there were always letter-to-the-editor fights about the Downbeat jazz poll, especially in the piano category. When Thelonious Monk won, somebody would write in saying, it's about time a pianist won who's not just a technician. And when Oscar Peterson won, somebody would say, finally, the prize goes to someone who can actually play piano. It's lucky for the less partisan among us that one doesn't have to choose between those two giants.
It's true that Peterson's fingers seem virtually incapable of playing a clunker, whereas Monk's playing is full of clunkers. That is, it's full of notes that would be clunkers in anybody else's playing. But Monk built his whole style around right and wrong notes, by which I mean nice notes and not-so-nice notes. He reminds me of the British painter Francis Bacon, who said something like, A mistake is your unconscious speaking.
Monk's style was often an unlikely fusion of smooth, old-fashioned stride piano in the left hand and spiky bebop in the right. But you can feel him straining against the limits of his technique. Peterson, on the other hand, seems to be able to do just about anything he wants. Here's the two of them in no particular order.
[music: Waller/Razaf, "Honeysuckle Rose" (Live at the Blue Note); Oscar Peterson Trio]
Oscar Peterson with Honeysuckle Rose and Thelonious Monk playing Dinah. Like I said, if the- [sound: phone rings] Sorry about this. Hello? Hey Laurie, I'm glad you called. So how are things going with this guy you met, this violist? Oh, that's terrific. Oh yeah? So he's loosening you up a bit as a musician, huh?
Oh, well, I guess that would do it, playing a Bach partita on the piano while you're sitting on his lap. I mean, the angle of your arms to the keyboard is different, and I guess it's a little bit harder to reach the sustaining pedal, which is probably for the... Oh, I see. He does the pedaling. Okay. Sort of like a piano built for two, right? Great. Hey, Laurie, I gotta wrap things up here, but give me a call. You're never home, you know.
Yeah, that's what I figured. Okay, I will. Take care. And take good care of that friend of yours, too. Because you know what happens when a violist dies. They move him back a stand. Okay, bye.
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. Not only that, our program is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. And thanks for your help, Stephanie Wendt. 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 145. 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, MN 55403.