Ready am I? Yes. Here's the theme.
Well, hello there. I'm Peter Sickley, and this is Sickley 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 good it is to acknowledge that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by this anything-but-backwards radio station where these moments of musicological magic are born and then born aloft for distribution by PRI, Public Radio International.
Really faithful listeners to this program are unique in more ways than one. In the first place, they're faithful listeners to this program,
and secondly, they're among the few people in the world who can practically whistle, or at least recognize, or anyway, have the faith to listen to this program.
They have a feeling that maybe they've heard the opening of Webern's Variations for Piano. That's because every time I want to illustrate music going backwards, I play the first 11 seconds of that piece.
Why do I always use that example? Because it's one of the few examples in which you can actually perceive the music going backwards. It's only eight notes before it turns around.
Of all the conceptions, organizational techniques used by composers retrograde is one of the most
esoteric because it's one of the hardest to discern in fact in a piece of any length it's often almost impossible to discern one of the main reasons for this
is that the rhythm doesn't stay the same if I sing a melody upside down that is every time the original melody goes up I go down the same interval and vice versa
there's a good chance you'll recognize it because at least the rhythm stays the
same if I go you probably know that that's an upside-down villain or if I
sing
you probably recognize that as Beethoven's fifth as sung by a bat who's
still in bed but if I sing and then sing it backwards forget it that
distinctive rhythm has become
completely unrecognizable that's not only true of music by the way when my brother and I were in our teens we got one of those newfangled things called
tape recorders and one of the discoveries we made with it was that English played backwards sounds sort of like Swedish and you can't understand it
it looks nice if it they don't like it zero or eat it here for us because the modern this is the
What is that movie? It's called Top Secret or something like that. I think that's it, Top Secret. It's a spoof of World War II spy movies. And they're behind enemy lines in Europe or something.
And somebody says, there's a bookstore near here run by a Swede. And he's on our side. Let's go and talk to him. And for the whole scene in the bookstore, the dialogue is obviously English being played backwards.
And, of course, it doesn't matter. You can't understand it. It's very funny. Here's that snippet of backwards English again, followed by the same thing forwards.
Hello there. I'm Peter Sickley, and this is Sickley Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, If it's a music, it's a music. If it sounds good, it is good.
And today's show is called Forth and Back. And before we get into strict, literal retrograde motion, I'd like to point out that the general idea of a mirror-like form,
of ending the way you began with something else in between, is an old one in Western music. One of the most common, simple musical forms is ABA.
Say your opening material is fast and dramatic and in a minor key. Then in the middle section, you go into the major, and it's softer and more lyrical.
The third section returns to the material of the opening with a modified ending. This is sometimes called song form.
Rückblick, Looking Back, by Schubert, performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel. Now, in a minuet and trio, you've got a large ABA form, a big mirror.
Minuet, trio, minuet repeated. But in this one coming up, the composer takes it a step further and uses strict retrograde.
The minuet has two sections, both repeated, AABB, but the B section is the A section backwards, literally.
It's as if you were to play the A section and then hold the music up to a mirror and play the reflection. Before we hear the whole movement, let me isolate the first turnaround for you, just to make it easier to hear.
The form is A. A. B. B. I'll just play the inner A. B. You can hear the music come to a semi-resting place and then turn around and go right back to the beginning.
Now, I'm not saying that everybody in Haydn's audience noticed that. His patron was named Esterhazy, and her husband, Seymour Hazy, was usually around, too.
And I can imagine them dozing off a bit and not picking up on the use of retrograde motion. But it is possible in this piece, if you concentrate, to hear the music going backwards.
I played you the turnaround in the minuet. The same thing happens in the trio, after which the minuet is played again, this time backwards.
The third movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 47 in G major, played by the Hanover Band, with Roy Goodman conducting from the harpsichord.
Oh, brother.
Hello? Hello? That's right. I said that after the trio, the minuet was played again, but backwards. And you're saying it wasn't played backwards. It was simply repeated.
It was the same as it was in the beginning. I caught you. Man, did I ever catch you. Same difference.
Since the second half of the minuet is the reverse of the first half, it sounds the same backwards or forwards. Well, you don't have to get huffy. I mean, we're both right.
She does not. She never even owned a pair of army boots. Yeah, well, he hung up. Man, he has some nerve.
I mean, where does he get off talking to me like that? I'm Peter Sickley, the host of Sickley Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's program is called Forth and Back. We're talking about retrograde motion.
And I thought it might be interesting to try to write something that works forwards and backwards, not only musically, but also in the text. Now, that's a tall order.
I'm a fan of palindromes. I mean, I'm no virtuoso or anything. In fact, it was my son, not I, who noticed that a Toyota is a palindrome.
And I don't care for those very long ones that don't even approximately observe light.
I like short, pithy ones that are self-evident, like the Chinese waiter and the customer.
Wanton? Not now. Or the mother of a Hawaiian singer trying to get him to take a nap. Oh, nod, Don Ho.
Or the conversation between an American border guard and a Mexican border guard about the role of the military in the war. Or the roving habits of the American writer Runyon. Is Damon a nomad? Si.
But using whole words as your units is actually trickier. So here's what I've written. It's an old man, weary and aching from travel, talking to his son.
I started out very simply. One, two, three, four. Son, I am sore. Backwards. That's sore, am I, son.
Four, three, two, one. A simple scale, even rhythm. Now, let's vary the rhythm a bit. Yes, sore I am.
Backwards. That turns into a question and answer. Am I sore? Yes. Okay. Now we'll add some rests. Which means that the retrograde.
Will sound quite different. The old man is anxious to return home. Boy, oh, boy, oh, we go home, boy, oh.
Which becomes, oh, boy, home go we. Oh, boy, oh, boy. And then we come to the turnaround. The center phrase.
Which works out nicely with its retrograde in terms of the words. Birds sing, where is home. Backwards. Home is where birds sing.
Now, put them all together. And I think that some people might notice that this is a musical palindrome. Mainly because of two things. The words and that ascending scale at the beginning.
Which will, of course, be descending at the end. This turned out to be such an important composition, in my humble opinion. That I didn't want to just sing it myself.
In fact, I got together some of the very best American and English singers. And we recorded it at Westminster Abbey over there in London, England. This piece will be part of an ambitious mass I'm working on.
You know, they've done folk masses and jazz masses. Somebody even wrote a polka mass. I'm not kidding. But I thought it was time for someone to write a pop art mass.
It's going to be called Misa in Tempore Ande. Mass in a Time of Warhol. And this section is Unus Duo. It's a hymn for the second Sunday after Labor Day.
One, two, three, four. Son, I am sore. Yes, sore I am.
Boy, oh, boy, oh. We go home, boy, oh. Bird singing, where is home? Home is where birds sing.
Oh, boy, home go we. Oh, boy, oh, boy. Am I sore?
Yes, sore am I, son. Four, three, two, one.
Unus Duo. Hymn for the second Sunday after Labor Day. Written by, well, modesty forbids. And sung by the Hilliard Anonymous Choir.
The King's Ensemble Four Singers. I think it's important to say here that retrograde motion is used comparatively rarely, except in 12-tone music.
And that composers who use this rather arcane device don't necessarily expect audiences to realize what's going on. I think Haydn did in that minuet. He set it up so carefully.
But it's not the only device that a composer might simply use for his own sake. As an organizational tool. Ensuring a certain unity.
Even if the reason for that unity isn't consciously perceived by listeners. Paul Hindemith, who was a German composer but spent time in this country during the Second World War.
And I grew up saying his name with the American pronunciation. Anyway, he wrote a large piano work called Ludus Tonalis, Tonal Games. It's over an hour long.
And it has an extensive prelude and also postlude. And the postlude is a retrograde inversion of the prelude. It's the prelude backwards and upside down.
If you took the music of the prelude and turned it upside down on the piano and then played what you saw, you'd have the postlude. A very sophisticated listener might notice some similarities between the pieces.
But it would be a gargantuanly sophisticated listener who guessed that there's a strict relationship. Especially since the two pieces occur almost an hour apart from each other.
But there's also a two and a half minute fugue in Ludus Tonalis whose second half is a retrograde of the first.
Since most of us can't remember the beginning of even a two and a half minute piece well enough to compare it to the end.
I think the key to perceiving wholesale retrograde, if you're interested in doing that, is the turnaround point. In this fugue, there's a cadence on A. And then three free sort of filler notes.
And then you hear the A chord again as it begins the backwards journey. Here's the turnaround point.
Okay, that's the turnaround point. Now here's the whole fugue. By the way, even if you could remember the beginning to compare it to the ending, you'd be confused. Because Hindemith takes a liberty.
It's a fugue, which means that the three voices enter one after another. But he composes new notes for the second and third. And then the third voices at the end, instead of letting them drop out so that the texture remains full.
Nice piece. Although I think it might have been nicer if he had let the voices drop out one by one at the end. Ah, there's nothing like backseat composing.
Or is it Monday morning composing? Anyway, that was Hindemith, the fugue in F from Ludus Tonalis. And that was Siegfried Mauser on piano. Mauser.
Looks like that would be mouser in English. A mouser used to be a cat who was good at rodent control. But now it could be a computer operator. Hey, enough of this idle mouse musing.
It's time to get really fancy now. This next piece is a retrograde canon. It's a two-part piece that can be completely expressed with only one line of music.
The way Bach wrote it, there's a clef and a key signature of three flats in it. It starts at the beginning, on the left, as usual, you know.
And then at the end of the single musical line, on the right, there's a clef facing backwards and three flats facing backwards,
indicating that the players should start at opposite ends and proceed in opposite directions. In this case, both parts are performed by one player, who, however, has two hands and a harpsichord.
It's actually rather difficult to hear the turnaround point in this piece, so I'll indicate it with a touch of my magic wand. What's easy to hear, though, is that one part starts,
loom, boom, boom, boom, so you know that the other part is going to end, loom, boom, boom, boom.
Now that's just the first half of the cut on this CD. The second half is a repeat, the same thing played again, with a bit of a retard at the end.
Or is it a repeat? Maybe it's the first half, but the second half played backwards. That's what it is. As with that Haydn minuet, it doesn't really matter what you call it. Musically, it'll be the same.
To prove it, here's the first half of that cut, followed by the same thing, literally backwards.
The thing that makes that sound especially weird, backwards, is that the harpsichord is a decaying note instrument.
Once the string is plucked, the tone does a diminuendo. You don't really think about that while you're listening, especially in faster music. But every single note on a harpsichord, unless it's very short, is noticeably decaying.
So when you reverse the tape and play it backwards, every single note has a crescendo. Loom, loom, loom, loom, loom.
That was Chiyoko Arita playing part of Bach's musical offering, the two-part Crab Canon, so-called because people used to think that crabs walked backwards. Okay.
Now we're going to upload this. Up the ante again, intellectually wise speaking. Here's a retrograde inversion canon. The word canon, by the way, has nothing to do with artillery.
It's the Latin for rule or law and refers to the relationship governing the counterpoint.
In this case, the rule is that the two performers start simultaneously at opposite ends of the music and upside down to each other. Now the way it's done here, the two singers here are holding the music between them,
as if it were on a table between them, so they're singing upside down and backwards in relation to each other, but they're reading from the same music. There are lyrics above and below the single line of music.
We'll hear each singer sing his part separately and then the two together. It's called The Brothers Joad.
A banker named Mr. Joad Saw his brother John an actor Coming down the road
When they met he just kept walking on Never even slowed Pompous old Mr. Joad
Joad
Walking along
He just kept walking by Thinking I'm an artist
He's a money-grubbing toad
Snobby young Mr. Joad Joad
A banker named Mr. Joad
Saw his brother John an actor Coming down the road He just kept walking on Never even slowed
Pompous old Mr. Joad Mr. Joad
The Brothers Joad, sung by David Duesing and the composer, Retep Elikhix.
Did you ever do that when you were a kid? Spell your name backwards and think it was so cool? Because with most of us, our names backwards look like they're part of some language you've never heard of, which is what's cool about it.
Of course, some of us chicken out. About a century ago, Samuel Butler wrote a novel called Erewhon. I think it's a utopian novel, or maybe an anti-utopian novel.
But anyway, Erewhon is nowhere spelled backwards, except that he kept the W-H in the original order, so it wouldn't look so weird. Actually, some names seem reasonable backwards.
And I don't mean palindromic names like Eve and Bob and Otto. If you see a reference to a production company called Harpo, don't assume it has anything to do with the Marx Brothers.
If what I've heard is true, it was set up by a more recent entertainer whose first name is Harpo spelled backwards. And at least once on Shickley Mix, we've heard the Peruvian singer Ima Sumac.
YMA? S-U-M-A-C. There used to be a rumor going around that her real name was Amy Kamis, and she came from Brooklyn.
Anyway, just between you and me, Rietep Elichix, backwards, is Peter Shickley, host of Shickley Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
Forth and back. We're listening to pieces that feature retrograde motion. And I was just thinking, here are two phrases that have the same rhythm, but whose pitches are retrogrades of each other.
I've got rhythm, I've got music. See? Retrograde can be fun.
Now we're going to hear one of the earliest and most famous examples of strict backwards motion in Western music.
Most of us could easily hear this piece without realizing that it's a strict retrograde canon. But let me play the first ten seconds of the opening section.
And the last ten seconds.
Now in spite of the fact that your average listener couldn't recognize retrograde motion if it crawled up his leg,
I have a feeling that the original audience for this piece did have some idea of what was going on. Since the text of the rondeau is,
My end is my beginning, and my beginning is my end. And this holds truly. My end is my beginning. My third song, three times only, reverses itself and thus ends.
My end is my beginning. And my beginning is my end.
Ma fin est mon commencement. My end is my beginning. By Guillaume de Marchaux. Who was on the scene during the first 77 years of the 14th century.
That was sung by our good friends, the Hilliard Ensemble. And now we're going to end with a real tour de retrograde force.
An opera in which the plot of the second half is the plot of the first half backwards.
According to the liner notes, the librettist, Marcellus Schiffer, was inspired by a cinematic trick in which, for comic effect, a film sequence is repeated running backwards.
His libretto is a parody of domestic tragedy. Aunt Emma, totally deaf, sits and does her embroidery in the living room of her niece, Helen. Helen's husband, Robert, arrives home unexpectedly.
He becomes suspicious when the maid delivers a letter to Helen, which she says at first is from her dressmaker, but then confesses is actually from her lover.
Enraged, Robert seizes a pistol and shoots Helen. A doctor and nurse arrive on the scene with a list of impressive, but ineffectual, medicines.
A white-bearded sage arrives at the midpoint of the action and observes philosophically that,
seen from a superior standpoint, it does not matter if life runs from the cradle to the grave or from the grave to the cradle. To prove his point, the sage causes the action so far
to proceed in reverse, providing an absurdly impossible happy ending. The opera closes as it began, with deaf Aunt Emma in her chair, oblivious to all that has taken place.
Unfortunately, this recording doesn't seem to include Aunt Emma's sneezes, with which the action of the opera begins and ends. But it's a lively performance.
The name of this one-act sketch with music is There and Back. And here it is, all eleven minutes of it.
There is no great difference exists if I'm not sure if all is fair.
Hin und zurück, there and back, with music by Paul Hindemith.
The singers were Carl Halverson, Jeanne Omerle, Richard Holmes, Robert Osborne, and Austin Wright Moore.
The New York Chamber Ensemble was conducted by Stephen Rogers Radcliffe. Hin, as we see from the title, means there in German.
It also happens to be the first syllable of the composer's name. And the fact that the other two syllables of his name are very similar to damit, meaning with it,
led to a rather unkind joke that his detractors used to pass around. Hindemith, herdemith, wegdemith. There with it, here with it, away with it.
Hey, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen, right? So, if, in general, retrograde motion is so hard to hear, why do composers use it?
Well, I think there are at least three answers to that question. First, they don't. Very often. Second, why not? It beats ice fishing in a blizzard.
And the third answer has to do with the music of the spheres. There have always been composers who feel particularly strongly that the beauty of music is closely related to the beauty of numbers.
And that the fashioning of a musical work that is both emotionally satisfying and numerically pure or elegant in the relationships among its notes, is its own reward.
At its most extreme, this is not a populist attitude. But it's been around a long time and has a deep attraction. It's a beautiful paradoxical concept.
We now know that outer space is silent. But there's something about the motions of heavenly bodies that seems musical. Also, the prevalence of cyclic phenomena in our lives,
seasons, birth and death, hey, even fashions and clothing, makes the principle of hin und zurück, there and back, feel like a basic attribute of life.
And who knows, maybe of all existence. The jury's still out on the Big Bang case, and probably always will be. Well, let's go out with Haydn.
The sneaky guy wrote another reversible minuet in one of his piano sonatas, but guess what? It turns out to be an arrangement of the one in his 47th symphony. What a lazy bum.
Shirley Matthews, playing Haydn's sonata in A major, number 26, brings Sickly Mix to a close 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. 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 156.
And this is Peter Sickly saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You are looking good.
See you next week.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Sickly Mix. That's... S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickly Mix. Care of Public Radio International,
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PRI.