Playing by the Rules

Schickele Mix Episode #169

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1999-06-23
“Peter, are you ready?”
Hey, I'm supposed to be ready, I'm ready.

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[This is a machine-generated transcript, cleaned up and formatted as HTML. You can download the original as an .srt file.]

Schickele Mix is next. Are you ready, Peter?
Hey, I'm supposed to be ready. I'm ready. Here's the theme.
[No speech for 14s.]
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. As a rule, our bills are paid by this terrific radio station where I'm provided with this small, yet modest studio space. As a rule, our program is distributed to the four corners by PRI, Public Radio International.
And, as a rule, there were certain things that classical European composers just wouldn't do. I mean, they weren't that kind of girl and don't you forget it, Buster. And one of the things they wouldn't do, even if they had fallen on hard times, was to write parallel fifths. Parallel fifths occur when two parts are at the interval of a fifth from each other.
One, two, three, four, five. That's a fifth.
And then they both move the same distance in the same direction.
Here they both move up one step, resulting in consecutive or parallel fifths.
Now, when you play them alone like that, they have a hollow sound that we Westerners tend to associate with Chinese music.
But, even if the other parts in the texture
disguise that hollowness, even then, it was a definite no-no to write parallel fifths among your law-abiding late Renaissance Baroque classical and early romantic composers.
I mean, European composers went out of their way to avoid writing parallel fifths for about 400 years. Say, 1500 to 1900, something like that. Now, that's a pretty powerful taboo.
I've mentioned on other shows that musical rules are descriptive, not proscriptive. That is, they simply describe what composers of a given period happened to do. But there are some rules that were thought of as rules at the time, and that were almost always observed by even the most adventuresome composers.
Here's a nice anecdote about Beethoven, and I am quoting it verbatim.
You know, the romantic picture of Beethoven makes him out to be so monumental and Zeus-like. You think of him as sort of a mobile Mount Everest. You never think of him simply taking a walk with a friend. This is from the
memoirs of Ferdinand Ries, a sophisticated musician who knew Beethoven well.
Once, while out walking with him, I mentioned two perfect fifths, which stand out by their beauty of sound in one of his earlier violin quartets in C minor.
Beethoven did not know of them, and insisted it was wrong to call them fifths. Since he was in the habit of always carrying music paper about him, I asked for some, and sent down the passage in all four parts. Then, when he saw I was right,
he said, Well, and who has forbidden them? Since I did not know how to take his question, he repeated it several times
until, much astonished, I replied, It is one of the fundamental rules. Again, he repeated his question, whereupon I said, Marburg, Kernberger, Fuchs, etc., etc., all the theoreticians.
And so I allow them, was his answer. Now, the significance of that story is not only that old Ludwig obviously had a lot of attitude when it came to authority, but also that the rule against parallel fifths was so regularly observed that on the rare occasions it was flaunted, the flaunting was noticed and remarked upon.
Now, speaking of flaunting, I got curious about that word, and I looked it up, and it says, I'm not going to read the meanings, but in usage it says, Although transitive sense to a flaunt undoubtedly arose
from confusion with flout, so I looked up that flout, and it says, Probably from Middle English flouten, to play the flute.
I mean, how about that? What does treating with contentious disregard have to do with playing the flute? Well, now you know what flautists really are. You know, the old musicians saying, what's the difference between a flutist and a flautist? A flautist earns more money. Anyway, I hope that henceforth you will treat flautists accordingly.
Speaking of flutes and of rules, I read a good story somewhere about Quants, who was a composer and a flutist, who worked for King Frederick the Great, who also was a composer and a flutist. Quants was his teacher. So, one evening they're playing through a new piece by King Fred, and at one point there's an infelicitous passage.
The king had committed a compositional gaffe. Maybe it was parallel fifths. And Quants, he just coughed.
He wasn't about to criticize the king in front of other people. He just coughed, and the king later went back and revised that spot.
Maybe it wasn't parallel fifths. Maybe the royal boo-boo was parallel octaves, equally frowned upon, which is actually perhaps easier to understand than the outlawing of parallel fifths. Basically, it's the same deal. Parallel octaves occur when two voices, and I mean voices here as independent parts in the texture, not necessarily singers, two voices are an octave apart,
and they move the same distance in the same direction,
creating consecutive octaves.
Now, the rationale in this case is quite clear. Traditional harmony and counterpoint are often taught as separate disciplines, but they're really just different aspects of the same thing.
Even in the quintessential example of harmonic writing, a Protestant church hymn, in which all four parts, soprano, alto, tenor, bass, have the same or virtually the same rhythm, melodically they're regarded as four independent melodies. Each part, if sung separately, should sound like a reasonable, not necessarily a fascinating, but a reasonable melody.
And the craft lies in creating a beautiful succession of chords by combining four independent melodies.
But, if two of the melodies are doing the same thing,
the alto goes G-F,
and the tenor goes G-F at the same time, then, for that moment, there are not two melodies, they're one melody, doubled up at the octave. In terms of counterpoint, you've gone from a four-part texture to a three-part texture. You've wasted an opportunity for contrapuntal interest, for melodic interplay.
There's a Mozart piano sonata in B-flat that I've been playing since college days, and part of the first movement goes like this.
[No speech for 15s.]
Okay, that's as much as we need, which is just as well, because that's where the fast notes come in.
What we've got here is a three-part texture. We've got the melody,
and then we've got the bass line.
Put those together.
And then, in the middle, you've got the do-ee, do-ee, do-ee part.
So, let me play all three of those together, and very slowly.
[No speech for 16s.]
Hear that? Parallel octaves. Everything was independent until then, and all of a sudden,
I can't help it. This has bothered me for almost 50 years now.
I mean, it bothered me then. It bothers me now. You know, I even looked up an authentic edition of Mozart's sonatas to make sure that's what he really wrote,
but I guess he didn't care.
Now, I certainly don't go poring over scores, looking for parallel octaves in the inner parts or anything, but when it's prominent and compromises the independence of the voices, I tend to notice it. Sorry, I can't help it. Like, I was listening to a CD that a friend gave me for Christmas. It's a nice little novelty album called A Toolbox Christmas.
[No speech for 17s.]
Okay, now let me just play the outside voices, the melody and the bass line here.
[No speech for 16s.]
Now, it's right here.
Hear that? Hear that?
You see, the bass line and the melody line are the same there. Up till there, it's been a beautiful counterpoint between the melody and the bass, very independent, but all of a sudden, they're in the same notes.
Listen to it again, just in the original. See if you can spot that.
You know, it's the lack of counterpoint, the lack of consistency in terms of independence.
By the way, Toolbox Christmas, I know it sounds pretty weird.
It is pretty weird, but it's a very tastefully done album, very clever arrangements. Now, I'm not complaining about parallel octaves when they're consistent, when they're not pretending to be two different parts.
For instance, at the beginning of Mozart's 40th Symphony.
[No speech for 29s.]
Okay, now in that opening, the first violins are playing the melody here. And the second violins are playing it here.
So together, they sound...
That's one melody, contrapuntally speaking, one part, in which octaves are used as an instrumental color.
It got sort of overused in the 19th century, perhaps, but it's a beautiful color, violins and octaves. In 18th century orchestral music, the cellos and basses are almost always in octaves. That's not parallel octaves. That's just a different color for the melody. Then there's the sort of hybrid texture in between parallel and independent that I've always loved. You hear it in traditional Asian music a lot, but this piece is from medieval Europe. The basic melody is on the bottom, and the recorder is playing above it, following the tune, but adding all sorts of embellishment notes, so it's the same but different.
But it's consistently the same but different.
[No speech for 36s.]
The Istanbul palamento. That's a medieval piece.
Here's a beautiful romantic example of the same idea. About nine seconds into this excerpt, the violins start following the melody in the cellos below, but with a slightly different rhythm.
It's sort of like water at the edge of a lake, lapping on the melody.
[No speech for 39s.]
From the second movement of Brahms' Third Symphony. Now I should mention that the principle of avoiding parallel octaves in a contrapuntal texture, where the parts are otherwise independent, is not a principle that has always been with us.
This is a lovely motet by Adam de la Hall, a trouvert who lived in the second half of the 13th century.
[No speech for 107s.]
The early music concert of London under the direction of David Monroe, performing Adam de la Hall's J'a bien à mame parler. So the piece begins like this.
And there they are, right there, parallel octaves.
That's funny. Those are exactly the same pitches as the Toolbox Christmas.
I want a sales song. How about that?
Ah, it stopped fooling around. Now, Adam de la Hall, when it came to parallel octaves, he really didn't care. Now, you could argue that de la Hall's voices are more independent than Bach's, because they're free to create parallel octaves or not.
Voice B is not prevented from going to a certain note, just because it would cause parallel octaves with voice A.
But hey, we're getting very philosophical here. You know, true independence would mean writing parts without any regard to each other whatsoever, and then just throwing them together and seeing how they sound, or hearing how they look, or smelling how they feel, whatever.
Whatever you can think of, it was probably done in the 20th century, the century in which chance took a stance and pulled down all our pants. But I must say, I'm a child of my training when it comes to parallel octaves.
In the context of independent parts, I don't like to commit, as it were, parallel octaves at random. Which brings me to a true and painful confession.
Here's a piece I wrote in college as an exercise in Handalian style.
[No speech for 84s.]
Now, I'm not in the habit of publishing my school exercises,
but more than 40 years after I wrote it, I still have a soft spot in my heart for that one, and a bunch of people have used it in their wedding ceremonies, and some of those marriages have even remained intact.
So I finally had it published recently, simply titled Ceremonial March, and I hope it continues to contribute to happy occasions over the years. But there is a deep, dark secret attached to the piece.
In the third measure here, let me play it without the middle voice.
Parallel octaves, parallel octaves!
Now, I don't know if I noticed that when I wrote the piece or soon thereafter, but it's been nagging at me on and off for lo these many years.
When I prepared the piece for publication, I even tried to think of a way to change it, but I couldn't come up with anything that didn't call attention to itself, that didn't disturb the serenity of the passage, and I sort of feel like it does have a certain serenity.
So I let it stand.
As a composer, I like the heart and the head to agree on things, but when they don't, the head loses out. What the hay? Mozart wrote parallel octaves, and he was Mozart.
I'm just Peter Schickele, the host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Playing by the Rules.
Now, when I said at the top of the show that the rule against parallel fifths
was so regularly observed that when it wasn't, people noticed, I didn't mean that everybody noticed.
I'm not saying that your average Yosef blow sitting on a stool in the corner bar,
I'm not saying he noticed.
And yourself, what do you got to say for yourself?
Have you ever noticed the parallel fifths in Beethoven's C minor quartet? I have.
Okay, yourself, that's it for you tonight. No, what I'm saying is that connoisseurs noticed.
Most people couldn't care less, except that good composers sound better than bad composers, even if you don't know why. Well, how about you? Are you a connoisseur?
Here's your chance to find out as we present another Schickele Mix special. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us here in Studio P as we get ready to play, well, excuse me, the game of the rules and those who break them.
It's our job to see that they get caught. Our show is sponsored by the Downtown Burbank, the bank that has what it takes to take what you have. Remember, the folks at the Burbank won't leave you out in the cold.
Okay, are we ready to kick some coda?
All right.
All right, today's subject is parallel fifths.
Now, we're talking about musical fifths here, not the other kind.
[No speech for 12s.]
You know what they say, he who laughs longest, laughs last, and therefore best. Okay, it's time to introduce our contestants, and as I say each of your names, contestants, please push the button on your individualized signal console there so the folks at home will know who's whom.
On my far left, we have a gentleman who is a sophomore at Always High,
Mr. Dennis Dweeb.
In the middle, from Our Lady of Merciless Teasing, Miss Wilma Wallflower.
And finally, a post-graduate student at the School of Hard Knocks, Mr. Murphy McNerde.
Yes, sir, what a lineup.
The best, or at least the brightest. And now, quiet everybody, here's our first musical excerpt. Contestants, when you hear the parallel fifths, let us hear from you.
Here it comes.
Woo hoo, Wilma Wallflower, you nailed that one.
Parallel fifths between the first violins and the bass line in Mozart's Don Giovanni.
Herbert, will you play that for us on the, whatever that thing is in front of you?
Yeah, sounds very obvious with just those two parts, doesn't it?
But with everything together, it's a different story. Let's hear it again, the way that naughty Wolfgang wrote it.
Here it comes.
Oh, the fifths add to the sighing quality, I think, right? I've got to hand it to you, Wilma, you've got x-ray ears.
I could just hear Mozart now saying, well, excuse me.
So that's 2,500 points for Wilma, and here comes our next excerpt.
Prick up your ears, folks, this is a toughie.
5,000 points for this puppy.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, nobody, nobody heard that one, and I'm not surprised. That's from Beethoven's string quartet in E flat, Opus 74, and Herbert, would you play just the first violin and cello parts on that?
That is hardly there, isn't it?
Especially since that one violin note is so short.
Well, it may not have bothered anyone here, but it has in the past bothered certain editors enough to make them change one of the notes in the cello part to avoid the parallel fifths.
Well, excuse me.
Okay, Ludwig.
Personally, even though I'm no stickler in the mud, I think the changed cello part is quite plausible for other reasons, too. But hey, what do I know?
I don't even approve of parallel parking. That's right, okay.
Here we go, contestants. This is your last chance, and this one's worth 3,000 points.
Now, Wilma's only got 2,500, so Dennis or Murphy could still win.
Okay, let's roll excerpt number three.
Oh, oh, oh, one, two, three.
Everybody heard it, but Wilma was the first, so she did it, folks.
Yes, she did it.
That's right.
Oh, okay, folks.
Okay, okay, folks, before we announce the prize,
Herbert, will you play that passage from Franck's symphony in D minor? Oh, hello.
Excusez-moi.
Yes, sir, they don't get any paralleler than that.
Okay, Wilma Wallflower, you racked up 5,500 points, which means you've got a gift certificate worth $5.50 at the boutique in the downtown Burbank.
You could get yourself a plastic ATM card holder, or you could be well on your way towards the cost of a downtown Burbank tote bag. Murphy McNer, Dennis Dwee, thanks for joining us.
And you too, everybody out there.
Thanks for playing, well, excuse me.
Be good now and don't do anything I wouldn't do.
Ta-ta, see you on a wanted poster.
Well, I don't know what it says on your wanted poster,
but mine says Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're still playing by the rules here,
and particularly the traditional rule against parallel fifths.
The thing about 17th and 18th century composers is that they avoided parallel fifths, I think, because the interval of the fifth is the most consonant interval next to the octave. So parallel fifths are very close in feeling to parallel octaves. And also, because those guys didn't want to emphasize the interval of the fifth too much, except in certain limited circumstances, which we'll touch on later, they didn't much care for the sound of an open fifth.
That's a fifth.
Now, if I add the third in the middle, it's a triad, the basic building block of Baroque and classical music.
But you rarely hear just the open fifth.
Here's a bit of traditional Bach-like four-part harmony that I wrote. At one point, instead of triads, there's an open fifth, and I think you'll agree that it sticks out.
It sounds unstylistic for the period.
Right in the middle there, stuck out like a sore thumb.
The rarity of open fifths in pre-20th century classical composition was brought home to me a few years ago when I heard a small city orchestra play the Brahms Second Symphony whose ending includes a huge D major triad
blared out by the trombones.
But at this performance the second trombonist, the one with the middle note, either didn't play or accidentally played the same note as one of the other trombonists, so instead of a full triad, we only heard an open fifth.
It sounded like this.
It just doesn't sound like Brahms with that open fifth, aside from the fact that it's being played on the authentic instrument.
But there are several important exceptions to this avoidance of open fifths.
One is when you want to use what was thought of as a rustic sound,
the countryside association of open fifths stemming from the bagpipes,
which were a peasant instrument.
From Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, that was Heifetz playing the solo part.
Another common use of open fifths also had rustic origins. Hunting horns couldn't play all the notes of the scale,
so instead of writing this, which the lower horn couldn't play, composers did this.
That's the open fifth.
This became a very popular pattern.
Part of Beethoven's eighth symphony.
Now composers liked that figure so much that they used it even when writing for instruments that could play all the notes.
Mozart's Divertamento for String Trio.
And finally, there was one place in which open parallel fifths were often heard even though they weren't written, and that was in churches. Organs have a variety of stops or different tonal colors, each emphasizing a different combination of overtones, which are naturally produced tones that are heard in addition to the note played on the keyboard.
And some of these stops accentuate to a quite striking degree the fifth step of the scale of the note.
Bach wrote only one line at the beginning of the D minor toccata.
But what you hear with certain stops is closer to this.
The top note isn't that strong, but it's very strong.
It's actually pretty amazing that composers who would bend over backwards to avoid parallel fifths in their writing would happily use organ stops that turned everything into parallel fifths.
Bach's Divertamento
[No speech for 22s.]
The beginning of Bach's toccata and fugue in D minor, played by André Isoir. Now with this organ registration, it's constant parallel fifths, but it's not like parallel fifths in part writing.
That high overtone is not thought of as a separate voice, it's thought of as a color, just like the consistently parallel octaves in the violins at the beginning of Mozart's 40th symphony that we heard earlier.
And again, as with octaves, things were very different before the high renaissance. There was a time when composers considered the triad too impure to use at the end of a piece.
They would end only with octaves and or open fifths. And works with parallel fifths within the piece were perfectly respectable, nothing that had to be ordered in a plain brown wrapper.
Bach's Divertamento
[No speech for 147s.]
The beginning of Lan Hua Mei, Blue-Blossomed Plum, performed by the Tianjin Buddhist Music Ensemble. I love that music. Fifths are often used in movie scores and other program music to summon up or accompany oriental images. But as I said earlier, fifths are also used to signify exotically old, as in cavemen, or in this instance, ancient Rome.
Bach's Divertamento
[No speech for 21s.]
From Miklos Rosas score for the 1959 movie of Ben Hur, The Parade of the Charioteers.
Now I was listening to some other movie scores and I've got a CD of music from the serials. I'm old enough to remember those one chapter a week movies that came on before the feature. And I'm looking on the back of the CD at the listing for Adventures of Red Ryder.
And cut number five is called Little Beaver.
So who's in that scene? Theodore Cleaver or a furry animal chewing on a tree? Well, about 13 seconds into the cue, the music tells you exactly who Little Beaver is.
[No speech for 23s.]
Bach's Divertamento
Little Beaver, as William Lava's score makes clear by using repeated open fifths, is a kid from an Indian tribe.
He's probably Red Ryder's sidekick.
Now, you know, I'm no expert on traditional native North American music, but I've heard a fair amount of it.
And I love it. And I have never, ever heard any open fifths in it. I mean, nothing even close. But to the movie composer, open fifths used to mean, in this case, primitive. People often describe the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as primordial, as if it's starting out at the beginning of the creation itself. And that feeling is undoubtedly partly due to the bare, stark, open fifth with which the symphony starts.
As a matter of fact, this seems to me to be an extremely rare instance in the classical period of a prominent open fifth that doesn't seem to have any rustic connotation.
No bagpipes or hunting horns here. Just the beginning of time.
[No speech for 35s.]
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony premiered in 1824.
72 years later, Puccini's La Boheme was premiered freely and prominently employing parallel fifths, perhaps helping to suggest the beginning of the day and a freezingly cold day at that.
[No speech for 87s.]
The beginning of the third act of Puccini's La Boheme.
He was criticized, by the way, for those parallel fifths.
Here are some very open fifths. It's an octave and a fifth, actually, that perhaps helped to paint a picture of the vast expanses of the American West. The opening of Billy the Kid by Aaron Copland, one of my favorite pieces.
I have a personal connection to that piece, actually. See, it's music for a ballet about Billy the Kid, and Billy the Kid was born in Brooklyn, and I used to live in Brooklyn.
Small world, huh?
Well, be that as it may, the traditional classical rule against parallel fifths is now as out of date as spittoons, powdered wigs, and shopping in stores. Here's a 20th century classic, and the four notes leading into the tune have to be the most famous parallel fifths in the world.
[No speech for 145s.]
Henry Mancini's theme for the Pink Panther, played by Eric Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.
Remember, the Pink Panther was a movie about a thief, and I think the hollowness of the fifths in those famous three pickup notes or four, if you want to count the downbeat, adds to the sneakiness of the music.
Now, parallelism of any kind is anti-contrapuntal. That is, parallelism diminishes the individuality of the component voices.
By the 20th century, composers felt free to use any chord in parallel fashion, which contributed to, or was the result of, depending on your view of history, the dissolution of traditional harmonic practice. In traditional harmonic practice, each chord has a harmonic function within the key. With parallelism, the chords are simply part of the color of the melodic line. It's a sensuous technique, and it led to some colorful music. We'll go out with Debussy, the Dances for Harp and String Orchestra from 1904. Bernard Heitink conducts the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Vera Baddings on harp.
The harp's very first entrance consists of parallel triads, and similar passages occur throughout the first of the two dances, the sacred dance.
Hey, if you like the chord, why not give it the same freedom a melody has?
[No speech for 209s.]
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.