Schickele Mix is next. Are you ready, Peter? I'm on top of it. 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 our bills are paid by this good radio station, where I'm provided with this studio space of goodly proportions. The program is distributed to the four corners by PRI, Public Radio International.
When was the last time you went into a bar and there, over in the corner, was a bunch of people singing rounds? Hey, if that's ever happened to you, I'd love to know the name of the bar. In this country, in these times, it's almost unimaginable, except maybe in a college town. But in Purcell's time, and in Mozart's time, it wasn't unimaginable at all!
[music: Mozart, "O, du eselhafter martin" (Rounds Galore ... and More)]
Jan Meyer, Evie Mayer, Murray Spiegel, and Saul Weber, singing a Mozart drinking round. They sing it in an English version. I think the original German is O, du eselhafter martin. That's from a CD called Rounds Galore, which was not actually recorded in a bar.
Now that round has a long melody. Just to sing the melody through once takes about a minute, which means the second voice doesn't come in till about 15 seconds after the first. It's eight measures. So the repetition is spread out, and in this case, the result sounds as if it could almost be a quartet from one of Mozart's operas.
Now, if you greatly reduce the amount of time separating the entry of each voice, say, to two seconds, the imitation feels much more insistent. It's consistent. It has a sort of obsessive quality to it. Everything you hear, you're going to hear again, immediately.
The Men of the Chorus Vienensis, singing Gaiety and Levity by that party animal Wolfgang Mozart. That kind of piece is called a canon. The name has nothing to do with armaments or deep valleys in Mexico. Canon is Latin for rule or law, and in music, it's used for an imitative piece or passage in which the imitation is strict. A round is a particular kind of canon, a circular canon that keeps going back to the beginning.
It's a good technique for social singing, because everybody just has to learn one melody, and then when you sing it with staggered entrances, voila, you've got a multi-voiced contrapuntal composition. Here's a canon I composed on the spot, sitting around a campfire with some friends, somewhere outside of Aspen, Colorado. It must have been the summer of 1959.
I must admit, I didn't spend a whole lot of time on the lyrics, but they do fit the music. The parts come in very fast here, every two notes, so you really get the feeling of each part chasing after the previous one.
[music: Schickele, "Ding, Dong"; Peter Schickele]
Ah, what a night! That was a canon by yours truly. I think I decided to call it Ding Dong. Here's another piece with a very close canonic passage for two trumpets. You hear it at the beginning and then again later on, and it's really obvious that the second trumpet is right on the heels of the first.
[music excerpt: Stravinsky, "Agon" (Stravinsky in America); London Symphony Orchestra/Tilson Thomas]
A section from Stravinsky's Agon, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Great perky little trumpet parts there. The fugue is another imitative form, but it's not usually canonic. The imitation isn't that strict. But the word fugue has a connotation of chasing, and it's even more appropriate to close canons than it is to fugues.
Here are three pieces featuring continuous, close, two-part, canonic writing, by which I mean that the second part comes in with the same notes as, and very soon after, the first part. In the first and third pieces, there's a free bass part that doesn't participate in the canonic process. The imitation between the two upper parts in the third piece is so close that the effect is almost giddy.
We'll call this suite, Cut to the Chase, and I'll be back in three and a half minutes.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, “A Musical Offering,” Canon for two violins at the unison; Daniel Stepner & Linda Quan]
[music: Telemann, Canonic Duo No. 1 in G, Allegro; Simon Standage & Micaela Comberti]
[music excerpt: Schickele, “Dances for Three,” Gigue; Trio Indiana]
Cut to the Chase. First we heard a canon for two violins at the unison from the Musical Offering by Johann Sebastian Bach. The theme, by Frederick the Great, on which the whole Musical Offering is based, is on the bottom there in the viola da gamba. And Bach wrote two canonic parts to go over it. The second piece was a canonic duo in G major by Telemann, a contemporary of Bach, a more successful contemporary, I might add.
Bach only got the job in Leipzig because Telemann didn't take it. As a matter of fact, Bach was third on the list. They offered the job for... There goes the irrelevancy alarm. I don't think it's irrelevant to know the details of a composer's life...
Oh, all right! That was played by the violinists Simon Standage and Micaela Comberti. I love that name, Micaela. It reminds me of the fact that I should go on and identify the third piece in the suite, which was played by the Trio Indiana.
Now there's an exotic name. James Campbell, Eli Eban and Howard Klug on various sizes of clarinets. Hey, I shouldn't make fun of them because the piece they played was the gigue from Dances for Three by Peter Schickele. And I know him. He's the host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Close Encounters of the Canonic Kind, and we're talking about the giddy, almost kaleidoscopic effect that close imitation at the same pitch can produce. One of the best examples is the opening of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. The theme goes like this. I recorded this earlier at home, I'll tell you why later, but here's how it goes.
[music: Schickele singing the theme of Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, taped at home]
But Bach doesn't present it that simply. He has half the violas play that melody on the beat, and then the other half come in with the same melody just two notes later. That's, that's much less than a second; it's about a third of a second later. To demonstrate that all by itself, you know, without the accompaniment, What I did was, I recorded myself singing the theme, and then I made a copy of the tape.
And then, with the copy, I took a razor blade and slit the entire length of the tape about a quarter of the way down from the upper edge. That isn't easy with a cassette, you know. And then I moved the bottom half of the tape over about five-eighths of an inch, and scotch-taped it back together. So, just to remind you, here's how that theme goes.
[music: Schickele singing the theme of Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, taped at home (again)]
And here's that theme, accompanied by a clone of itself, about a third of a second later.
[music: the same tape, accompanied by a copy of itself a third of a second later]
Well, I've got a bit of a cold, you know? Oh, all right. Let's hear it on professionally played instruments.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 (BWV 1051); Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
The opening of Bach's 6th Brandenburg Concerto performed by Neville Marriner conducting the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. The imitation in that section doesn't remain completely strict throughout, but pretty nearly so. But you can get even closer than that, note-wise speaking. I've written a three-part canon in which the second part comes in one note after the first, and likewise the third part after the second.
Now here the tempo is slow, so instead of having a rather giddy effect, it sort of feels as if it's unfolding, or turning around on itself underwater. And boy, am I excited about hearing it, because you know, I never spare any expense when it comes to Schickele Mix. So I have with me here in the studio right now the King's Singers, Chanticleer, and all the men from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Thanks for dropping by, fellas, and I really appreciate your patience. I know it's a little crowded in here. Okay, why don't we sing it through in unison first. And let's see. King's Singers, if you would please sing Ah, and Chanticleer, you guys can go with Ooh, And gentlemen of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, since there are so many of you, I'll give you the softest sound. You can hum the melody.
I'm going to set the authentic instrument to an organ stop here and turn the old echo up here, make it sound like we're in the Mormon Tabernacle. Okay, here we go, in unison.
[music: Schickele, "One Beat Away" (in unison); Peter Schickele]
You guys are real pros. I'm really impressed at how when you come on my program and sing my music, you go out of your way to sound like me. That's a real tribute, and I'm honored by it, I assure you. Okay, let's do it as a canon now. Chanticleer, you come in one note after the King's Singers, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, you folks start one note after Chanticleer. Here we go.
[music: Schickele, "One Beat Away" (as a canon); Peter Schickele]
I call that canon one beat away. And I really want to thank you all for taking the trouble to stop by. If you'll just wait a moment here, you can leave during the next recording. It won't be long. Now, so far, the temporal relationship between or among the voices in the canons we've heard have remained constant. If they began two beats apart, they remain two beats apart. But what if you could have a metamorphosis canon, temporally speaking?
What if the two parts started at the same time, but one got a bit ahead of the other, and kept doing that until the two parts were a beat apart, and then continued the process? That's what happens in our next piece. And one of the things that's amazing about it is that when the two parts are just slightly out of sync, just beginning to pull apart, it sounds as if somebody's turning up the reverb, because that's what reverb is. It's echo, the same sound image recurring slightly later. But eventually, these two voices get far enough apart so that it sounds like counterpoint.
Now, unfortunately, as happens with many so-called minimalist pieces on this show, I can't play all of it. It's over 20 minutes long. But I'll play a couple of minutes of it, This is enough to give you an idea of what an extraordinary experience it is to hear a two-part canon with a very gradually shifting temporal relationship.
That's the beginning of Piano Phase by Steve Reich, played by duo pianists Nurit Tilles and Edmund Niemann, known collectively as Double Edge. The great thing about a lot of minimalist pieces, if you can let yourself get into it, is all these little patterns that spring up that are not what the musicians are playing. They're resultant patterns that come from between the notes.
Reich began doing this phasing technique with tape loops, and especially with sampling technology the way it is now, you can do amazing rhythmical things with anything that can be recorded.
[music excerpt: Reich, “City Life,” “It’s been a honeymoon - Can’t take no mo’”; The Steve Reich Ensemble]
And that was the beginning of the third section of City Life, again by Steve Reich, It's Been a Honeymoon, Can't Take No More, the Steve Reich Ensemble conducted by Bradley Lubman. One of the things that's fascinating about the way Steve Reich loops those voices is that when people speak, you don't think of their speech as having pitches, and yet our speech does have pitches, it's just that they change so constantly that you don't notice it.
But if you loop a little section like that, you realize it's a particular note, and then another particular note. And what Steve Reich does there is to have the instruments start doubling some of the notes from the little speech samples. You know, talking about sampling, I just can't resist this. While doing research on this show, I listened to part of a contemporary opera, of which this is the introduction to Act II.
[music excerpt: Moran, "The Manson Family," "Rape Music" (The Manson Family - an Opera)]
As soon as I heard that I pricked up my ears and went to my Spike Jones record collection. Here's part of that opera introduction again, followed by the last part of Spike Jones' version of Liebestraum.
[music excerpt: Moran, "The Manson Family," "Rape Music" (The Manson Family - an Opera) (again)]
[music: Liszt arr. Jones/Porter, "Liebestraum" (Spike Jones Is Murdering the Classics); Spike Jones]
Recording: A bunch of the boys were whooping it up.
Part of John Moran's opera, The Manson Family, followed by Spike Jones' Liebestraum. Hey, Alban Berg quoted Bach. Anyway, it's beside the point of today's show. Here's another extension of the Canonic Principle. This is from Terry Riley's seminal 1964 piece, In C, which is usually thought of as the birth of minimalism.
Aside from the steady string of high C's played on the piano, the score consists of 53 separate musical fragments, each containing from 1 to 25 notes. The score is actually printed in this old LP here. The first fragment is
[music: keyboard demonstration]
The second is
[music: keyboard demonstration]
The third is
[music: keyboard demonstration]
The fourth
[music: keyboard demonstration]
The fifth is the same, but placed differently rhythmically.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
And then the sixth is a long held C.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
And then, as I say, there are a whole bunch more of those. Now the players, and their number and instruments are left unspecified, play each figure as many times as they want, and then proceed to the next, whenever they want, until everybody gets to the 53rd figure. Performances usually last from 40 to 90 minutes, but Leonard Slatkin tells of one in San Francisco that went on for two days.
So, it's a canon, in the sense that all the parts play the same material, but in terms of the temporal relationships, it's, well, very 60s, very anti-authoritarian.
[music: Riley, "In C" (Terry Riley in C)]
The beginning of In C by Terry Riley, the old LP recording with Terry Riley, and members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. I don't remember what year this LP came out, but it does say stereo can also be played on mono equipment. You know what they say, if you remember the 60s, you weren't there.
I do, however, remember my name, which is Peter Schickele, the host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Close Encounters of the Canonic Kind. We are exploring different ways of having everybody play the same material, but at different times. The minimalist term for canon is process. They both mean rule or law, after all. In a process piece, you set up a procedure and then let it play through according to what you set up. It tends, to be sure, to be much more reductive than traditional canons, but the concept is similar. Make a rule, follow it through.
The details of the organizational principles employed by most followers of Schoenberg's 12-tone school of composition are indiscernible to most, if not all, listeners. The process composer sets up a simple procedure and finds the realization of it exhilarating. Part of the exhilaration often comes from fast, blood-roiling tempos. Here, I'm going to write a little process piece, just for you.
I'll repeat a three-note figure, then
[music: keyboard demonstration]
I'll superimpose over that those same three notes but followed by a rest.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
So that's a four-unit figure. Then I'll do the same figure followed by two rests.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
So we've got a three-unit figure, a four-unit figure, and a five-unit figure. Now, when it comes to multiples, the lowest number that 3, 4, and 5 have in common is 60. So, they're going to start in unison for the first three notes, these three parts. They're going to divulge [sic] and have some very attractive little noodling there. And then, after 60 notes, they're going to be in unison again. So, here's our little process piece.
[music: keyboard demonstration, the three-part process piece]
Okay, we wrote a piece of music. Let's call that EDC. Maybe that's a woman. Edie C. Anyway, here's a complete Steve Reich piece for a change. It consists simply of two people clapping their hands. They start clapping the same pattern together, and one of them continues that pattern throughout the four and a half minute piece. The other claps the same pattern, but periodically jumps ahead a beat, producing a surprising variety of rhythmic counterpoint.
This jumping-ahead-a-beat continues until the two performers are in rhythmic unison again. That's it. That's the piece. And it's very lively.
[music: Reich, “Clapping Music” (1972); Russ Hartenberger & Steve Reich]
Russ Hartenberger & Steve Reich, performing the latter's Clapping Music. It's a terrific piece in live performance. There's something about watching the concentration of the two musicians that's contagious.
But although the processes may be easy to describe, they're usually not as easy to discern as some composers claim. In that piece, for instance, part of the charm is the variety of resulting patterns, and even a very good musician might not notice that both musicians are clapping the same pattern throughout. The plan may be simple, but it's not necessarily obvious. Which gives me an idea.
[music excerpt: Reich, "Octet"; Chamber ensemble]
Well, hello there, world. Do you know what time it is? It's time for To Say the Least, To Say the Least, To Say the Least, To Say the Least, The Quiz Show for Minimalists. So glad you could join us. I'm Thomas Thomas Thomas, and we've got a great show lined up for you here today. Will you please welcome our three contestants, Didi Opoa from Bora Bora, Jojo Johnson from New York, New York, and all the way from Baden-Baden, Germany, Peter Peter Kürbisfresser.
Okay, let's do it. And here's how we do it. We've got our five staff pianists, Betty, Lizzy, Beth, Bette, and Elle, sitting at their five staff pianos over there. And they're going to play a well-known theme, but each one of them is going to start playing the half-beat after the other, creating a canon so close, well, we're talking the Dionne quintuplets on a Japanese subway here.
Your job, Didi, Jojo, and Peter Peter, is to see if you can recognize the theme in spite of the mellifluous, minimalistic morass caused by our pianists' intentional lack of coordination. This is one time you cannot say, the family that plays together stays together.
[music: keyboard demonstration, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" as a five-part canon]
That's it! String that out for a couple of hours and you've got yourself a decent piece of music. Alrighty then, let's start with you, Didi. What do you think?
Didi: Uh, [unclear] Knee Play from Einstein on the Beach, Philip Glass?
No, no. Now I want to warn you, everybody, this theme is not necessarily from a minimalist work. Okay, Jojo, how about you?
Jojo: The Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Oh, I'm sorry, Jojo. Right key, but not the right piece. Okay, now it's up to you, Peter Peter. What's your guess?
Peter Peter: Isn't that the Structures, Livre 1, for two pianos by Pierre Boulez? I hate to say it. Livre 2?
No, Peter Peter. I'm afraid that it's one, two, three strikes we're out here at the old ball game. So I'm going to ask our pianists to play it again. Or should I say, play it again, Sam?
Oh man, it should be against the law to have this much fun. Okay, Betty, Lizzy, Beth, Bette and Elle are going to play it again, even though not one of them is named Sam. But this time, they'll repeat it and the players will drop out one by one until only Betty is left, by which time everybody will be able to recognize the theme. Okay, pianists, let's crank up that cannon and fire it.
[music: keyboard demonstration, the five-part canon on "Mary Had a Little Lamb," with the parts dropping out one by one]
Are you slapping your foreheads or what? Sorry, Didi, Jojo, and Peter Peter, but thanks for playing. And each one of you will receive, with our compliments, a free CD of the music of Luigi Nono. Meanwhile, folks, please join us again next week for... To Say the Least, To Say the Least, To Say the Least, To Say the Least, The Quiz Show for Minimalists.
That theme music is Steve Reich's Octet, by the way. Okay, here's a very nice process-y piece of quite a different nature. The composer starts with isolated notes and then sort of fills in the spaces to create a very beguiling texture.
[music: Childs, "Oa Poa Polka" (Manhattan Cascade); Guy Klucevsek]
That was Mary Ellen Childs' Oa Poa Polka. The title gradually fills in the letters, just as the piece did notes. That was played by Guy Klucevsek. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing it, he's a terrific accordion player. Well, it's getting to be that time. We're going to go out with another process piece, a piece realized according to a preset plan, but this one is completely different from anything else we've heard.
It's by Brian Eno, and it's called Thursday Afternoon.
Like some of our previous pieces, it features different musical events occurring in cycles of differing lengths, so the way they combine is always different. But, although Eno was blown away, as we used to say, and some of us still do sometimes, by a Philip Glass concert around 1970, this piece has fewer notes in ten minutes than most Philip Glass pieces have in one.
[music excerpt: Eno, "Thursday Afternoon"; Brian Eno]
Brian Eno got interested in ambient music, music that creates an atmosphere, not something you necessarily play close analytical attention to. He did an album called Music for Airports. This music, Thursday Afternoon, was composed for a video made in 1984.
He says about it, "Our background as television viewers has conditioned us to expect that things on screens change dramatically and in a significant temporal sequence, and has therefore reinforced a rigid relationship between viewer and screen. You sit still and it moves.
I am interested in a type of work which does not necessarily suggest this relationship, a more steady-state, image-based work which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting. It sits still and you move."
[No speech for 122 s.]
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by this radio station and its members. 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 167.
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