Shickley Mix is next. Are you ready, Peter?
I'm on top of it. Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley 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 was a lot of people singing rounds. wasn't unimaginable at all
brian's now that i think so here we are part of a problem the lovely it is so far so bottoms up
down every class within which we find out that distinctly and hope and beauty beyond the the other side or is that
And then, ah, the reason I think you should just ask, drink and re-bun. Are you so fresh now that you're new together?
Are you so ill that we are birds of a feather?
And drink wine, drink wine, And drink wine, and drink wine, Are you so fresh now that you're new together?
Are you so ill that we are birds of a feather? And then, ah, the reason I think you should just ask, drink and re-bun.
Are you so fresh now that you're new together? Are you so ill that we are birds of a feather? And drink wine, drink wine,
And drink wine, and drink wine,
Are you so fresh now that you're new together? And drink wine, drink wine,
And drink wine, drink wine,
And drink wine, and drink wine, And drink wine, and drink wine.
Are you so fresh now that you're new together?
Are you so ill that we are birds of a feather?
And drink wine, drink wine,
And drink wine, and drink wine,
And drink wine, drink wine, And drink wine, and drink wine...
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 Isselhafter 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 until 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 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.
It keeps going. It 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.
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.
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 canons.
This is a very 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.
All right. 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 think. 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 Michaela Comberti.
I love that name, Michaela. 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 Eben, and Howard Klug on various sizes of clarinets.
Hey, I shouldn't make fun of them because the piece they played was the Zieg from Dances for Three by Peter Schickely. And I know him. He's the host of Schickely 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.
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 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.
And here's that theme accompanied by a clone of itself about 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 and in tune.
The opening of Bach's Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, performed by Neville Mariner 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 sickly mix.
So I have with me here in the studio right now the King's Singers, Chanticleer, and all the men who are here today. 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.
Chanticleer, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Chanticleer, ooh, ooh, ooh. Chanticleer, ooh, ooh, ooh. Chanticleer, ooh, ooh, ooh. Chanticleer, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Boy, 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.
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? Okay. Okay. Okay. So, one of 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. 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, which 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 Nurett Tillis and Edmund Nieman, 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.
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 pitch. 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 a part of. It's the introduction to Act Two.
Act Two Act Two Act Two Act Two Act Two Act Two Act Two
Act Two Act Two
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 Liebestraun.
as a as a
as a
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... The second is... The third is... The fourth...
The fifth is the same, but placed differently, rhythmically. And then the sixth is a long-held C. 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.
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 Sickley,
the host of Sickley Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. Close encounters of the canonic kind.
We're 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 music, and Schoenberg's own 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. First, I'll repeat a three-note figure.
. . . Then I'll superimpose over that those same three notes, but followed by a rest.
. . .
So that's a four-unit figure. Then I'll do the same figure followed by two rests.
. . .
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 three, four, and five have in common is sixty.
So they're going to start in unison for the first three notes, these three parts. They're going to divulge and have some very attractive little noodling there. And then after sixty notes, they're going to be in unison again.
So here's our little process piece.
. . .
Okay, we wrote a piece of music. Let's call that EDC. Maybe that's a woman. EDC. Anyway. Here's a complete Steve Rice 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.
Russ Hartenberger and Steve Rice 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.
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! 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 Oapoha from Bora Bora, Jojo Johnson from New York, New York,
and all the way from Baden-Baden, Germany, Peter Peter Kurbesfressen.
Okay, let's do it.
And here's how we do it. We've got our five staff pianos. Betty, Lizzie, 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 Dion 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. Hey, we're having fun!
Okay, pianists, let's hear our auto-camouflaged theme.
That's it.
String that out for a couple of hours, and you've got yourself a decent beat. All righty, then. Let's start with you, Didi. What do you think? Uh, do the steward knees 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? The Old DeJoy 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?
Is that the, um, the Structure 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 call 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.
Aha! Aha! Aha!
Are you slapping your foreheads or what? Sorry, Dee Dee, 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 Rice's octet, by the way. Okay, here's a very nice processy 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.
That was Mary Ellen Child's Oa-Poa-Poca.
The title gradually fills in the letters, just as the piece did notes. Oa-Poa-Poca. That was played by Guy Klusivsek.
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. We won't be able to hear all of it. 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.
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.
And that's Sickly 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 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'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 Sickly Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Sickly Mix. Care of Public Radio International,
100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
PRI, Public Radio International.