Well, Professor Schickele, we're ready to go with Schickele Mix, if you're ready to go. The buzz around the station is that I am. 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. But when it comes to radio, you can't taste the honey if you ain't got the money. So I'm glad to report that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this on-the-go radio station, a veritable hive of activity that lets me hover around long enough to produce these globules of sweet-tasting yet educational nectar, which globules are then borne aloft and distributed far and wide by PRI, Public Radio International.
Well, there's nothing like a little contest to liven up the everyday conduct of business.
When I was a kid, you'd sometimes see a store window with a huge jar displayed, and the jar was filled with jelly beans, for instance, and the contest was to guess how many jelly beans were in the jar, and the person whose guess was closest got a prize, you know, depending on what kind of store it was, like a gallon of Butterbrickle ice cream, or a set of six dress patterns, or a crank-type hand drill with a hollowed-out place in the handle to store the extra bits.
Anyway, obviously a contest like that isn't very suitable for radio, because you can't see the jar, you know. So here's what I've come up with. What I want you to do is guess which insect is most often represented in the Schickele Mix record collection. Now, I'm using the term record loosely here. I mean recordings. And I would say, oh, my guess would be that we've got about 2500 CDs in the studio, and maybe a thousand LPs and probably about a hundred forty-fives of course a few of those are extended play and well let's forget about these 78s and cylinders so out of about 3,600 recordings how many pieces are inspired by insects or rather what I'm really asking is which insect is most often the subject of a piece and I'm using the word insect loosely too you know little flying things and creepy crawly things in general members of the phylum bugs.
You don't have to try to guess how many songs or pieces there are about any given insect. Just which one comes up most often. Okay, okay, here we go. Hello, you're on the air, sort of. That's right, and what's your guess? No, I'm afraid that's not a... As a matter of fact, I can't think of a single song about tsetse flies. But I'm sure there are some. They just don't happen to be a staple of my particular collection. Sorry, but thanks for calling.
Okay, we're rolling here. Hello? Hi Fern, what's your guess? Fid? What is a fid? A fid isn't an insect. Isn't a fid a tapered wooden pin used to separate the strands of a rope? Oh, aphid! I'm sorry for it. Sure, of course it is. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting guess, Fern, but I'm afraid I didn't run across an awful lot of aphid pieces. I guess the collection just isn't strong on aphidiana. Mea culpa, I'm sure, but, uh, well, I guess that's the way the cauliflower crumbles.
Bye. And you're talking to the eponymous host of Schickele Mix. My name is Schickele. What's yours? Pieri? What's your first name, Mr. Pieri? Oh, you're not gonna tell me. You only use your first initial. Okay, Mr. A. Pieri, what's your guess?
That is absolutely correct, Mr. Pieri. The Bee, The Humble Bumblebee. As the poet says, where the bee sucks, there suck I. And that's absolutely true, by the way. I really suck when it comes to taking care of flowers. Congratulations, Mr. Pieri. Yeah, you're right. I did drop a few hints there at the beginning of the show, but you were the first one to pick up on them.
So now you are the proud winner of four jars of honey and we're not talking your everyday clover honey here Mr. Pieri. This is exotic stuff. You'll be getting one jar each of lotus honey, venus flytrap honey, kudzu honey, and poison ivy honey. So just give your name and address to the receptionist when I hang up and then tell your honey to get out the bread and butter. Bye now and enjoy.
Okay, I'm glad we finally got a winner here so we can get on to the music. Here are three pieces in the key of B. Get it? No, I shouldn't kid around here. These are three perfectly serious pieces. The first one is imitative, the other two use the B fancifully in the lyrics. I'll see you in about eleven and a half minutes.
[music: Rimsky-Korsakov, "Flight of the Bumblebee"; London Symphony Orchestra/Rabinowitz]
[music excerpt: Arlen/Arlen & Capote, "House of Flowers," "A Sleepin' Bee" (American Musical Theater); Diahann Carroll, Ada Moore, Dolores Harper & Enid Mosier]
Cast (recorded): But how does a lady know if she's really in love? A lady just does. She's got a feeling. A sort of squirm. Like little fish was swimming in your veins. Well, I never felt none of them little fish. That's why I went to see the hungan today. Why can't you stay away from that voodoo man? Well, at least he told me something useful when I asked him: Ain't there a sign, some magic sign, that can tell a lady for sure if she's in love?
[No speech for 56 s.]
Cast (recorded): Maybe so, but the hungan told me there's only one real sign. And what's that, Violet? It's a bee. A bee?
Cast (recorded): What you give the hungan for this information? My gold bracelet. But it was worth it to know that all a lady has to do is catch a bee and hold him in your hand, and if it don't sting you, if it don't fly away,
[music: Wilbye, "Sweet honey sucking bees" (Draw On, Sweet Night); The Hilliard Ensemble]
I call that suite Be Serious. That's B-E-E, Serious. A little joke there, even though the pieces were not jokey at all. Just introducing a bit of cognitive dissonance between title and content. What I'm going for here is a sort of a Brechtian distance...
[sound: irrelevancy alarm]
Oh, okay, okay, okay. The irrelevancy alarm has saved you from an explanation of my artistic and educational procedures. The Be Serious suite began with what has to be the most famous insect piece in our culture, the Flight of the Bumblebee, which is from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Tsar Saltan. How could I not include that? The London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Harry Rabinowitz.
The middle piece was A Sleepin' Bee from the musical House of Flowers by Harold Arlen and Truman Capote. The principal singer was Diahann Carroll with Ada Moore, Dolores Harper, and Enid Mosier. And the conductor was Jerry Arlen. And last, that Sweet as Honey Madrigal was by John Wilbye. Sweet honey-sucking bees, why do you still surfeit on roses, pinks, and violets, As if the choicest nectar lay in them Wherewith you store your curious cabinets Ah, make your flight to Melisuavia's lips There you may revel in Ambrosian cheer Where smiling roses and sweet lilies sit Keeping their springtide graces all the year Yet sweet take heed All sweets are hard to get Sting not her soft lips O beware of that For if one flaming dart come from her eye Was never dart so sharp And then you die Nice twist in the second part there You know, it occurs to me that, poetically speaking, the bee is the animal kingdom equivalent of the rose, combining the highly desirable and the potentially injurious.
That was performed by the Hilliard Ensemble and listened to by, among others, Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. The Bee's Knees To make a bee line, I've got a bee in my bonnet, and what it is is none of your beeswax.
To be or not to be? We be talking bee today, no doubt about it. You know, to be or not to be? That would be good for making a rebus. You know, one of those riddles where pictures represent words? You'd have a number two, and then a picture of a bumblebee, and then a picture of some ore, you know, like iron ore. Oh, okay, okay, that's a little tricky, I admit, to draw iron ore so it's recognizable. Anyway, then comes knot, you have a shoelace with a knot in it, and then another number 2, and another bumblebee.
To be or not to be. Oh man, I should draw that up and submit it to Mensa. I'll bet somebody there could figure it out. Anyway, we've heard three serious evocations of apiarian ardor, some beautiful, delightful pieces. But let's face it, there is something funny about the name bee. I mean it just invites word play.
See, it's almost impossible not to make fun of A-B. Or, to change the word order of that sentence, it's almost impossible not to make fun of A-B. See? Get it? A-B-C. Well, here are some pieces that examine the lighter side of Bs. All of the four items in this suite are songs, and I want to say just a few words about the text of the second one, which is an Elizabethan poem called The Bee.
The poet sometimes uses the words flea and bird, but he's using those words very loosely. He's referring to the bee at all times. At one point he says, beware my leather flea flap. And I assume that a leather flea flap is like a fly swatter. And then what comes next is my favorite spot because there are certain slang words that you think must be fairly recent, right? But think again.
The poet says, Beware my leather flea flap, for it shall beat thy little bum, proving once again that language changes, but not always as rapidly as you might think. Bees are fascinating insects. Of course, they have a very highly organized society, and individuals are always wondering whether or not to buck authority. Yes, to question or not to question. That is the bee.
I overheard a phrase the other day. I didn't know if it referred to a certain actress' pet or to a certain kind of contest run by British conservatives. All I heard was something about a Tory spelling bee.
And what about the guy who thought he had killed off all the members of the rock group, the police? And when he saw one of them alive, he said, Sting, where is thy death?
Hey, is it true that Bea Lillie had hives?
A bee who took steroids and a bee who had vitamins had a fight. The vitamin B won.
Hey, why do you think the bee... I can't stop. I can't stop telling bee jokes. Must... must hit the... hit the start button.
[music: Askey, "The Bee Song"; Arthur Askey]
Arthur Askey (recorded): Hello, playmates. And now, for no reason at all, I'm going to sing you a little song that made me famous. Uh, the song that I made famous. Well, anyway, one of us is very good, and I entitle it, The Bee.
[No speech for 103 s.]
Arthur Askey (recorded): Silly bee song, isn't it?
[music excerpt: Schickele, "Bestiary," "The Bee" (Bestiary/Quartet); Calliope]
[music: Madsen/Greene, "Killer Bees" (Songs for Tomorrow Morning); The Bobs]
The Bobs (recorded): We call them killer bees. The Sandinistas call them their freedom fighters. An evil empire of godless Marxist bugs. How can they be saved?
[No speech for 27 s.]
The Bobs (recorded): Insects don't need green cards. They fly too low to be picked up on radar. How can you just say no to bugs? And as they spread their Marxist pollen from flower to flower, they corrupt our pure, all-American bees.
The Bobs (recorded): Remember that the words of the devil are always dipped in honey.
The Bobs (recorded): July 4th, 1990, when the dreaded bees are due to hit our border, we'll have Cans Across America Insecticide Program, and every able citizen will smoke cigars, and from San Diego to Brownsville, special SWAT teams will stand shoulder to shoulder. Remember, America, these are red bees, all workers, no drones!
[music: Monty Python, "Eric the Half-a-Bee" (The Instant Monty Python CD Collection); Monty Python]
Monty Python (recorded): Are you going to give me a fish license? I promise you that there is no such thing. You don't need one. In that case, give me a bee license. A license for your pet bee? Correct. Called Eric. Eric the Bee? No. No? No. Eric the Half Bee. He had an accident. You're off your chump. Look, if you intend by that utilization of an obscure colloquialism to imply that my sanity is not up to scratch, or indeed to deny the semi-existence of my little chum, Eric the Half Bee, I shall have to ask you to listen to this. Take it away, Eric the Orchestra Leader.
Monty Python (recorded): The end. Cyril Connolly? No, semi-carnally. Oh.
All right, I'm feeling a lot better, thanks. That song cycle was called Be All You Can Be. It opened with The Bee Song sung by Arthur Askey, new to me, who, according to the liner notes, was that much-loved, diminutive, Liverpudlian star of revue, film, and radio.
Next came The Bee, poem by T. Cutwode, 1599, music by the apiarianly inspired, or to put it more succinctly, bemused composer, Peter Schickele. It's part of a longer work called Bestiary, and it was performed by Calliope, singing and playing. The third song was Killer Bees by The Bobs, and last came the Monty Python classic Eric the Half a Bee.
Actually, if you cut a bee in half vertically, you get an E, which is no longer an animal, it's just a letter. Any other animal letters? Yeah, J, you know, blue J. And then of course there's the female sheep. A woman I knew out west once said she'd heard a newscast that warned drivers in the Loveland Pass area to exercise caution because a truck had overturned and there were E-Wees all over the road. Well, most people don't know how to pronounce my name either.
It's Peter Schickele, and the show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. You know, I was thinking about that rebus thing, you know, the puzzle or riddle format that uses pictures to represent words. You could do that with sounds instead of pictures. I'm going to try one out on you. Here's part of a piece by John Field.
[music excerpt: Field, "Nocturne in B Flat"; John O'Conor]
Now the question is, what is the name of that piece? And here are your clues.
[sound: rebus clues]
Got it? The name of the piece is...
[sound: rebus clues (again)]
Pretty nifty, huh? I know a couple of them are a little far-fetched, but I think there's enough there to give you a... Oh, all right. I'm not even going to answer that. I'm just going to tell you. Here's the name of that piece by John Field.
[sound: rebus clues, each one named]
Knock.
Turn.
In.
Bee. Flat. The pianist was John O'Conor. Now we're going to move on with the greatest of E's, which I mean literally. We're keeping the E's, moving from bees to fleas. So since the program deals with the Flea and the Bee and you are listening to me, I'm calling today's show Flea to Bee, You and Me. And to start the Flea phase of this felicitous farrago, I'll read a song lyric from Goethe's Faust.
Once there was a king who had a large flea. He loved it not a little, but as his own son. And so he called his tailor, and the tailor quickly came. Here, make clothes for the squire, and measure him for trousers. Now he was dressed in satin and silk, and wore ribbons and a cross. And he became a minister, and wore a big star. And so his brothers and sisters also became great lords at the court.
And the lords and ladies at court were greatly plagued, and the queen and the lady in waiting were gnawed and bitten, and were not allowed to crack and scratch them away. But we crack and choke them as soon as one bites. Weird poem, strange mixture of whimsy and sadism. Now we're going to hear that same text set by two different composers.
[music: Beethoven, "Song of the Flea"; Louis Berkman/Graham Johnson]
[music: Mussorgsky, "Song of Mephistopheles"; Aage Haugland/Paul Rosenbaum]
The first was by Beethoven, and we heard Louis Berkman singing it, accompanied by Graham Johnson. And the second was by Mussorgsky. It was performed by Aage Haugland and Paul Rosenbaum. The Russian composer, it seems to me, brings out the meanness of the poem even more than the German. Mussorgsky seems to have added those interjections, flea, flea, and those demonic laughs.
I'm telling you, those Russians. You know, the epitome of incongruity would be to be in Russia and see one of those little happy faces printed on something. But it's interesting, fleas seem to be a scourge that is often, if not usually, treated with humor. Maybe it's the irresistible cuteness of the hopping. I've never had fleas, but it must be awful. I did have lice once. Yuck. The very first mattress my wife and I bought came from one of and some of those charity-run second-hand stores, and we decided after that, hey, when it comes to mattresses, it's worth spending the extra dough for something new.
But the thing is, I should think that fleas must itch much worse than lice, but nevertheless, fleas are funny. Lice aren't. Here are two more flea songs. The first is in French, and it goes, A flea I have in my ear, alas, which night and day itches and bites me and drives me mad.
No remedy one can give I run hither and thither Take it out, I beg you O fairest one, help me And when I think to rest my eyes in sleep It comes to sting, to bite, to prick me And to stop my sleeping Now the text is a cry of agony But the music is light and lively Perhaps imitating the hopping of the flea In any case, it has the effect of giving a humorous twist to the lament The second song is in German and it's called The Wives with the Fleas A great battle there was between the housewives and the fleas. It began at daybreak and raged furiously. The Pope, finally intervening, issued a bull obliging the fleas to pay an indemnity to the fair sex. Way to go, Pope. I call this little suitelet You Can Run But You Can't Flee, and it's all of three and a half minutes long.
[music: Le Jeune, "Une puce" (A French Collection); The King's Singers]
[music: Senfl, "Die Weiber mit den Flöhen"; The Boston Camerata/Cohen]
You can run, but you can't flee. The first piece was A Flea by Claude Lejeune, sung by The King's Singers, and the second was The Wives with the Fleas by Ludwig Senfl, performed by The Boston Camerata under Joel Cohen, a Renaissance flea diptych. And now it's Tidbit Time, and we're going to hear that Beethoven Flea song again, but this time orchestrated, orchestrated by none other than Shostakovich.
[music: Beethoven arr. Shostakovich, "The Flea"; Yevgeny Nesterenko/Ensemble conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky]
Our tidbit today brought together three rather great names, Goethe, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. The Flea, the music by Beethoven, arranged one of his last pieces, apparently, by Shostakovich for the singer who sings it here, Yevgeny Nesterenko, and that was an ensemble conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, or something like that.
And I think that's about it for Flea to Bee, You and Me. We started from scratch and now we're ready to buzz off.
I kill myself. Let's go out with Buddy Merrill's version of our opening number. This one is called Busy Bee.
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. Not only that, our program is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. If you're itching to know more about today's selections, 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 152. And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that home is where you can scratch where it itches. And also 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: Rimsky-Korsakov, "Flight of the Bumblebee" (again); London Symphony Orchestra/Rabinowitz]
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.