73: Comedy Tonight

The death of an icon and an improbable album

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. Here’s your hint: One of his associates described him as “a remarkably small man, very thin and pale, with a profusion of fine, fair hair of which he was rather vain.” No Googling!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 72
Janacek, Suite for String Orchestra

Thank god for Joey’s clue, or there would have been precious little in the way of success here, but I’m going to count this as a win because I was able to suss it out, but only by reasoning my way there. This is a super cool piece though, and I’m glad to have had a chance to delve into it.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

RIPDQ

Pour one out for the great Peter Schickele who died last week at the age of 88. Quoth the New York Times:

Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.

For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.

Leaping from Mr. Schickele’s pen in P.D.Q.’s name were compositions like the “No-No Nonette,” the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” the “Unbegun” Symphony and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons.”

With these and myriad other works, Mr. Schickele, who billed himself as P.D.Q.’s “discoverer,” gleefully punctured the reverent pomposity that can attend classical-music culture.

It was P.D.Q., after all, whose work won four Grammy Awards to Mr. Schickele’s one. It was P.D.Q. who packed some of New York’s foremost concert halls for decades of annual Christmastime concerts. And it was P.D.Q. who, unbidden, could rear his head insidiously at performances of Mr. Schickele’s serious music, with audience members who had come expecting belly laughs sometimes walking out in bewilderment.

I (Will) will admit that I don’t think I’d ever listened to any of Peter Schikele’s non-PDQ Bach music until this week, when I got curious following his death. It’s quite good! Nicely wrought mid-20th century tonal American modernism.

As for his humor, it’s definitely of its time, place, and society, but I enjoyed some of it when I was a kid, and watching that CBS Sunday Morning clip I genuinely laughed a couple times. Seemed like a great guy who delighted many hundreds of people with his art. Who can ask for a life better spent than that?

Album Release

Almost exactly one year after the death of my (Will’s) former teacher Easley Blackwood, Cedille Records has released an album that is so improbable in its conception that it’s mere existence is a thing of wonder: an acoustic version of Blackwood’s “Microtonal Études for Electronic Media.”

Allow me to explain: in the 1970’s, Easley embarked on a project to study the tonal properties of tuning systems wherein the octave is equally subdivided into scales that have more than the 12 chromatic notes normally used in Western music. So just imagine that instead of 12 notes, you divide the octave into 14 notes — each half step is going to be just a little bit smaller than it would be in 12 notes.

The question was: could you make recognizable chords and scales in these systems? As a means of answering the question, Easley wrote 12 études, each featuring a different tuning system.

At the time, the only way to realize his creations was with an arduous process of multi-tracking using a programmable electronic keyboard. The results have a cheesy retro sound, but the music is striking, and it’s far and away the project Easley is best known for. (In a way, he’s like PDQ Bach for hardcore theory nerds: all they care about his his insane theoretical stuff, not his “serious music.”)

But now, someone has come along and rendered this music for acoustic instruments. The identity of that someone is what makes this project all the weirder: it’s Ed Sheeran’s older brother. Matthew Sheeran spent his lockdown transcribing Easley’s original manuscripts — which used notational conventions that he had to invent from scratch — to regular 12-note music that could be played by human beings.

He then recorded the music with the players, instrument by instrument, but that’s not even the crazy thing. What’s truly insane is that he then spent several months retuning every single recorded note using, for lack of a better term, “autotune” software.

Up until now, the essay that I wrote (the one linked above) is the only public memorial for Easley, and in fact, it’s partially how this project came to fruition: Matthew found it, emailed me, told me about his project, and asked if I had any ideas. I reached out to Jim Ginsburg, the founder/CEO of Cedille (and, in another improbable twist, RBG’s son) and suggested he should release the album. I am so happy it’s all come together. It’s an appropriately bizarre and bizarrely appropriate tribute to a musician who deserves a bit of remembrance. 

Tone Praise

Pérotin, Viderunt omnes

This is a bit of a follow-up to last week’s edition about Gregorian chant, early notation, and that book I read. I remember taking Early Music history in college and finding it mildly boring (in spite of a highly entertaining professor, who will be remembered by Listener Jeremy) and barely being able to distinguish between music written centuries apart.

Since then, my interest in really old music has deepened considerably, but let me tell you, even if you now are like I was in college, you should give this track a listen. The music is so bubbly and it truly could be a 21st-century choral composition. It’s incredible stuff and it was written nearly a thousand years ago — a thousand years ago.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)