God willing and the creek don't rise. 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 this would be a very good time to mention 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, as well as from this ever-loving radio station right here, where I am put up and put up with until I come up with something fit to be broadcast and fit to be tied, if I may be permitted a metaphor, up in ribbons and distributed hither and yon by PRI, Public Radio International.
I can't remember if I've told you this before, stop me if I have, but I used to play bassoon in the Central High School band of Fargo, North Dakota. First bassoon, I'll have you know. In fact, I hate to boast, but I played first and only bassoon for much of my tenure at Central High. I must admit, though, that it wasn't the most exciting musical experience of my life. Because in high school band arrangements, everything the bassoons play is doubled by the saxophones or horns.
The best days were when the regular band teacher was sick and we had a substitute. Since he didn't know us, this was an ideal opportunity for some of us to play instruments we didn't play. And I usually picked up a trombone. The basic concept of the trombone is so simple. You lower the slide and it lowers the note. You know, up until the invention of valves, which was in the 19th century, the trombone was the only brass instrument that could play the full chromatic scale without resorting to quite literally underhanded tricks such as those employed by horn players.
Because of its unique construction, it is the only standard wind instrument that takes naturally to the technique of glissando, sliding from one note to the next. Now composers wrote trombone music for centuries without, as far as I know, taking advantage of this ability.
It was probably only done as a party trick, you know, by sack-butt players with lampshades on their heads, but during the last hundred years, it has become something like women smoking cigars that is done quite openly, public opinion be damned.
It is often used for humorous effect. When Bartok wanted to express his reaction to hearing Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony for the first time, he first quoted the symphony in the clarinet, then laughed derisively in the trumpets, and then offered a carefully worded comment via the trombone.
[music excerpt: Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra; Los Angeles Philharmonic/Previn]
That was a bit of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. But I think it was the brash approach of early jazz that made sliding around on the trombone a standard technique rather than an occasional novelty. Although I do believe that this next selection, which features the trombone section, qualifies as what they call a novelty number.
[music: Fillmore/Short, "Lassus Trombone" (Exciting Sounds of the NORAD Cavalcade of Music); NORAD Cavalcade of Music]
This is Lassus Trombone by Fillmore. I don't know why it's called Lassus Trombone, and I don't know if Fillmore also wrote a piece called Palestrina Trumpet or Gesualdo Tuba, but it was performed on an old... I have no idea how it came by this. It's an old LP entitled Exciting Sounds of the NORAD Cavalcade of Music.
That was the NORAD Pops Concert Band, under the direction of Major Victor J. Molzer. NORAD is either an abbreviation for North American Air Defense Command or it's part of a dictum no longer followed by the New Yorker. Neither cartoon nor ad shall seriously impede the flow of editorial content. Anyway, the word glissando is often used to indicate sliding over a fairly large interval, but it doesn't have to be restricted to that sense.
I would call, as in,
[sung: Schickele sings the notes of a half-step slide]
you could call that a half-step glissando. Now here are three instruments of the guitar family that characteristically move much or even most of the time by glissando. When you play the pedal steel guitar and the Hawaiian guitar you pluck the strings with the fingers of your right hand as usual either directly or with picks but you do not stop the strings that is pressed down on them with the fingers of your left hand. Your left hand holds a metal bar which you slide around on the strings to change notes or chords. The pedal steel guitar is that whiny instrument you hear in country songs.
This is the musical embodiment of heartbreak. It is misery made audible. In my younger years, when I thought that hearts didn't belong on sleeves, I couldn't stand that sound. But now I love it, at least in the hands of a tasteful player. In fact, one of the things I love now about the pedal steel is that I've seen it played quite a bit, and the guys who play it, there they are, making these weepy, crying-in-your-beer sounds, and they're always the most unemotional guys in the room.
They look like a CPA going over the accounts of the First Congregational Church. Here's a pair of songs, one with pedal steel and one with Hawaiian guitar, separated by a piece featuring a one-of-a-kind instrument made by the composer of the piece. I call this suite When in Doubt, Slide, and I'll see you in a little over six minutes.
[music: Nelson, "Funny How Time Slips Away" (Classic Country Music, Volume III); Willie Nelson]
[music excerpt: Partch, "And On the Seventh Day Petals Fell In Petaluma"; Gate 5 Ensemble of Sausalito/Partch]
When in Doubt, Slide. Willie Nelson sang Funny How Time Slips Away, and then we heard part of And On the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma by Harry Partch, played by the Gate 5 Ensemble of Sausalito under the direction of the composer. Partch was a maverick who made his own instruments, often using things like surplus airplane fuel tanks, Pyrex chemical jars, and artillery shell casings.
He divided the octave into 43 notes instead of the Western European 12 that most of us use. I'm not sure what the slidey instrument we heard was, but that's from a CRI CD called The Music of Harry Partch, and if you want to check him out, you pretty much have to do it via recordings, since the literally unique nature of his instruments means that live performances are hard to come by.
And then the last number was Little Pad by the Beach Boys. You know, you're never gonna believe this, but that was recorded in the sixties. That's right, back there when men were allowed to giggle, and although boots were made for walking, grass was not made for walking on. Those guys sound like they were, and they probably were, way up there past the stratocumulus layer.
I'll bet if you had asked Brian Wilson in the middle of that session what his name was, he would have said, hey man, no sweat, I'm Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix from P.R.I., Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Mondo Glissando. We're talking about slipping and sliding as a method of musical movement.
And our next suite features three instruments that have no choice about how to get around. Unless they separate notes with a rest, that is, stop playing for a moment, the only way these instruments can go from one note to another is with a glissando. In the animal kingdom of instruments, these are the snakes. But don't worry, they're not dangerous. The first, very brief excerpt features a slide whistle, which is sort of a flute version of the trombone. It's often used for sound effects, but here it does a poignant imitation of a bird call.
The second number is perhaps the most famous solo ever written for the bicycle siren. A siren attached to the rear wheel of a bicycle, the wheel is on a brace that lifts it off the floor, so the faster the player pedals, the higher the note. The third and final selection features a pioneering electronic instrument called the theremin. There is no keyboard or fingerboard or valves or anything like that on a theremin.
The performer determines the pitch by moving her right hand in the air closer to or farther from a vertical antenna and the volume by moving her left hand in relation to a horizontal loop antenna. It sounds like a sort of an eerie female voice, and its best-known use was in the score for the Hitchcock movie Spellbound.
So, there are several ways to go from one note to another, and sliding is one of those ways, which is why I call this suite Slip Sliding: A Way. A way... a way... a way. A way is two words, right? I mean, it's like slip, sliding, colon, a way, as in one of several ways, see what I mean?
Well, I guess that's why Paul Simon gets to make movies, and all I get to do is a measly radio show. I'll be back in four minutes.
[music excerpt: Ravel, "L'Enfant et les Sortilèges"; Orchestre National de la R. T. F./Maazel]
[music excerpt: P. D. Q. Bach, "Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle & Balloons (S. 66)"; Royal P. D. Q. Bach Festival Orchestra/Mester]
[music: Ravel, "Pièce en forme de Habanera"; Clara Rockmore, theremin]
Slip Sliding: A Way. I think it's a great title, actually. But maybe it's not really perfect for radio. I mean, because the punctuation is actually such an important component. Oh, all right, all right. Can't really argue with the irrelevancy alarm on that one. Back to the suite. First we heard an excerpt from Ravel's opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, The Child and the Sorceress.
That was from the beginning of the garden scene, with the slide whistle doing a bird call.
Then the second number was the second movement of P. D. Q. Bach's pervertimento for bagpipes, bicycle, and balloons. Although in that movement, which is marked Adagio Sereno, we hear only the bicycle and string orchestra, which was, by the way, the Royal P. D. Q. Bach Festival Orchestra under the baton of George Mester. The bicycle soloist was your humble host, and that's from the recent compilation The Dreaded P. D. Q. Bach Collection, Volume 1.
And finally, we heard another work by Ravel, the pièce en forme de habanera, which my French friend Jules Jean-Jacques tells me means piece in the form of a habanera. It was performed by Clara Rockmore on the theremin, which is not what Ravel wrote it for, accompanied by her sister, Nadia Reisenberg, on piano. And it's from a CD called The Art of the Theremin on Delos.
The theremin was invented in 1920, but it never became widely used, partly because it's terribly difficult to play well. In fact, what you're trying to do most of the time is minimize the glissando effect. And also, let's face it, its tonal range, and I'm talking about the quality of the tone here, is very limited. It's like the celesta, or celeste, which is very effective in the dance of the sugarplum fairies.
But, well, even if it had been invented a century earlier, I think it's highly unlikely that Beethoven would have written 32 celesta sonatas. Now when I was talking about the trombone, I said it was the only standard wind instrument that takes naturally to the glissando technique, because of the fact that most pitch changes are accomplished by means of the slide, as opposed to the valves on other brass instruments and the finger holes on woodwind instruments.
Valves and finger holes tend to produce very distinct, very well-defined and virtually instantaneous pitch changes. And the same is true of putting down or picking up fingers on the fingerboard of a string instrument. But that doesn't mean you can't slide on other instruments. It just takes a special technique. On string instruments, you slide one left-hand finger up or down the fingerboard rather than changing fingers or strings. For instance, on bass guitar,
[music: Porter, Intro to "It's All Right With Me" (Everything's Rosie!); Rosemary Clooney]
Those were from Bartok's fourth and fifth string quartets. Here's a pair of trumpet slides called half-valve glisses. You press the valves only halfway down, which puts you in a sort of a never-never land, pitch-wise speaking, and then you make the glissando with your lips.
[music: Coslow/Johnston, Intro to "My Old Flame" (Everything's Rosie!); Rosemary Clooney]
And here's probably the most famous glissando by an ordinarily non-glissando-type instrument.
[music: Gershwin, "Rhapsody in Blue" (opening)]
Most clarinetists have a special reed that they use for the beginning of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a soft reed that enables them to bend the pitch as they simultaneously open the finger holes as snakily as possible. And then, of course, you can always change the pitch gradually by playing games with your tape recorder.
The Beach Boys, She's Goin' Bald, which, like Little Pad, is from the Smiley Smile album. Now, with the piano and the harp, glissando has a slightly different meaning. Keyboard instruments, and also members of the harp and zither families, have one string, or set of strings, per note. So if, for instance, you take the index finger of your right hand, no, I suggest holding it fingernail down, that's right, and run it quickly up the white keys of the piano, what you get has a glissando like feeling, feels good doesn't it, but you are not getting an actual continuum, a gradual unsegmented rise in vibrations per second as you would with a slide whistle, what you're getting is seven distinct notes per octave in rapid succession, it's a C major scale, that's all, so why is it called a glissando, simply because you're using one finger, and can therefore play it faster than would be physically possible with traditional fingering.
In fact, on the piano you can only do two glisses, or glissandi if you want to be uptown about it, the white keys, which are the notes of a C major scale, and the black keys, which form a pentatonic scale. Pentatonic glisses are especially popular on the harp. This next suite features piano glisses in the first number and harp glisses in the last.
The middle section is from another Partch piece, and he gets a wonderfully weird effect with one of his harp or zither-like instruments. Since he uses 43 tones to the octave instead of the usual 12, a glissando on this instrument is made up of separate, distinct notes, but they're so close together in pitch that they almost sound like a continuum.
Virtual glissandos. In fact, that's a good name for this suite. But we'll show how educated we are by calling it Virtual Glissandi. I'll slip back in about six minutes.
There's the very old recording alert. So I guess I should mention that the first number is off of an old 45 RPM record with one of those little plastic gizmos in the center. Not that that affects the fidelity.
[music: Taylor/Mohr/Harrelson, "I Think I Need to Pray"; Jerry Lee Lewis]
[music excerpt: Partch, "Windsong"; Harry Partch]
[music excerpt: Trad. arr. Xiao-jie Zhang, "Chou & Drum Playing at Sunset" (The Trouble With Angels); HarpFusion]
Virtual Glissandi. We began with Jerry Lee Lewis singing I Think I Need to Pray.
Then came a section of Harry Partch's Windsong, with the composer overdubbing all the parts himself, and finally an excerpt, the last part, of a piece called Chou and Drum Playing at Sunset, traditional Chinese, arranged by Xiao-jie Zhang, and performed by a group from the University of Arizona called HarpFusion, which consists of ten, count them, ten harps. The CD is called The Trouble with Angels.
What I love about the Jerry Lee Lewis number is that those piano glisses don't really belong in a devotional song like that at all. But the gliss is so much his signature schtick that he's got to throw them in anyway. It's sort of like my signature schtick. I can't go for more than 15 or 20 minutes without saying, I'm Peter Schickele and the program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Mondo Glissando, a bizarre world of slithering pitch, where you never know when the ride is over, until it's over. Okay, what do trombonists and singers have in common? Two things at least. They don't get no respect from real musicians, and they both play glissando instruments.
That's right, the human voice is a glissando instrument. Vocal cords don't have frets on them. Tenors don't have valves, at least not on the outside. There are no fingerings for singers. They slide from one note to the next, and a large part of their training consists of learning how to minimize the slide, that is, to change the tension of the vocal cords as instantaneously as possible, and to back off on the breathing during the change.
One advantage singers have over theremin players is words. A consonant on the beginning of a syllable does wonders in covering up pitch changes, which is why you notice sliding more on
[sung: "alleluia," sliding between the notes]
than you do on, oh,
[sung: a line of the Jester's song "A Private Buffoon" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard]
Enough of me. Here's a very nicely sung bit of chant.
[music excerpt: Anon., "Offertory: Felix namque"; Anonymous 4]
Now I'm going to put that specimen under the microscope, as it were. If you listen to it at one quarter speed, four times as slow, you can hear how much sliding is going on.
So when I prepared that, I first took it down to half speed and then halved it again to get the one quarter speed. But let me play you the half speed version. It's amazing how much it sounds like the theremin.
So now you know what the Anonymous 4 would sound like if they all had sex change operations. But before we play our singer suite, let me emphasize that sliding audibly from one note to another is not necessarily bad. It can be a very expressive device. String players often do it even when they wouldn't have to. It's called portamento. We go into that more on another show, but right now let's just say that portamento is technically a form of glissando.
But in terms of how the terms are used, portamento is a comparatively subtle device that doesn't call attention to itself. A real glissando says, look ma, no fingering. It really wants you to know it's there. A lot of the stuff we've heard today on this program has been more portamento than glissando, but there's sometimes a fine line between them.
Here are three vocal numbers that use various amounts of sliding around, portamento and glissando, I would call them. Before the very old recording alert goes off, let me say that the first selection was recorded in 1924. Sounds pretty good, all things considered. This suite is called, Don't You Think It's About Time Your Voice Changed?, and it lasts about five and a half minutes.
[music excerpt: Vivanco, "Taita Inty" (Yma Sumac ... Voice of Xtabay); Yma Sumac]
[music excerpt: Ravel, "L'Enfant et les Sortilèges," "Duo miaulé"; Jane Berbié/Camille Maurane/Orchestre National de la R. T. F./Maazel]
I hate to break it off like that. This is where we should be going into the garden scene, with that slide whistle doing the bird calls. But that suite began with "Elle ne croyait pas" from Thomas's Mignon, sung in Italian and gorgeously by Tito Schipa. The sliding is not a habit with him. He only does it where it's effective. It was beautiful. Then came Yma Sumac, the amazing Peruvian singer with a four-octave range.
That was part of a number called Taita Inty, Virgin Sun God. Pretty hokey charts, but she had an amazing voice. And finally, from the Ravel L'Enfant et les Sortilèges again, the Cat Duet, sung by Jane Berbié and Camille Maurane, with Lorin Maazel conducting the Orchestre National de la R.T.F.
[music: P. D. Q. Bach, "Traumarai for Unaccompanied Piano" (P. D. Q. Bach On the Air)]
Recording: Okay, let's see.
Recording: Let's see, I guess about... I guess that's it, right about there.
Recording: Okay, could you start at the beginning again, please? I don't know if that's a, that's a, that's a...
[No speech for 81 s.]
Recording: Don't play with that. Don't play with that.
[No speech for 36 s.]
Recording: Oh, let me get that page down.
[No speech for 47 s.]
Recording: Hey, don't touch. Don't play with that. No.
P.D.Q. Bach's Traumarai, from P.D.Q. Bach on the Air. Now, I had an interesting artistic decision to make on that ending. Of course, if you actually pulled the plug on a tape recorder, it would shut off immediately. It wouldn't do that nice, rather slow glissando. But even if you accept the idea, willing suspension of disbelief, that the tape recorder would run down slowly, like a phonograph turntable, you wouldn't have gotten a tape that sounded like that when you played it back.
The glissando would have gone up, not down. See, when you want to have a slow motion shot in a movie, you run the film through the camera faster than usual, because then when you project it at the regular speed, it's going at a slower rate than it was when you shot it. So if little Herman had pulled the plug out and the tape recorder had slowed down, when you played it back, it would have gone up like this!
But we all agreed that, dramatically speaking, it registers better the way we did it. And you think you've got problems. You know, I can hardly listen to that cut myself, because that baby crying in the background, that's our daughter. You know, now, we didn't hit her or anything, no child abuse here or something, but she woke up from her nap and she started crying, and we didn't go to her until we had finished the cut.
I'm sure if she hasn't already, she's going to be on a psychiatrist's couch sometime talking about that. I don't know, we seem to get along well. We're going to go out with Mischa Elman, one of the great violinists of the first half of this century, playing part of Zigeunerweisen by Sarasate, and this is Carroll Hollister on the piano.
And you'll hear a real combination of all kinds of sliding here, from very subtle portamento to all sorts of wide glissandos, and a particular kind of string glissando where you go, where it's sort of individual notes but sort of not. We'll hear as much of it as we can, but
[music excerpt: Sarasate, “Zigeunerweisen,” Opus 20; Mischa Elman]
Man, I'm still feeling terrible about my daughter. But 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. 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 146.
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.