Question: “Ouf!  Let me out!  I must have air.  It’s incredible!  Marvelous!  It has so upset and bewildered me that when I wanted to put on my hat, I couldn’t find my head…One ought not to write music like that.”   That is a quote from a student of Jean-François Le Seur, Hector Berlioz who took his teacher to one of the first performances of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Paris.  This opera composer and famous teacher was so stirred by the piece, it led him to make that comment to Berlioz.  What was Berlioz response?

Answer: “Calm yourself—it will not be done often.”

Question: A couple of days ago, I mentioned again that it was not against the law to copy music from other composers…and as a matter of fact, if not done too much was considered a compliment to the composer from whom something was taken.  This piece ended up in the catalogue of another composer.  Who was he?

Answer: Alessandro Marcello was a rich man and that impeded composing.  The rich looked at someone in the arts as beneath them, so sometimes, Marcello was forced to use the pseudonym “Eterio Stinfalico” so as to not get ribbed from fellow well-heeled.  But Johann Sebastian Bach knew better when arranging the middle movement (‘Adagio’) for keyboard.  He gave the credit to Marcello, but it did became a stand-alone piece of Bach’s and even given its own BWV number by Wolfgang Schmieder.

Question: In the last six days, we have celebrated the births of two great composers.  Who were they?

Answer: Wolfgang Mozart was born on January 27^th, 1756, and Franz Schubert on January 31^st, 1797.

Antonin Dvorák was son of the village butcher in a small town in Bohemia. He was supposed to take over the family business but when he was sent off to school at age 11, he showed a lot more promise as a violist.

I think he looks more like the guy behind the counter in a butcher shop than a violist – or composer. This is in no way a negative comment on his appearance, it’s just that he was a tough-lookin’ guy who made a livin’ the hard way.

Bach at the keyboard

In Leipzig Bach was perpetually overworked, so it’s no surprise that he borrowed the French overture of his fourth orchestral suite to open the cantata he composed for the first feast day of Christmas in 1725. (I wonder how many of his church listeners would also have been regulars at Zimmermann’s Coffee House, where his collegium performed such instrumental works as the suites.) He could hardly have made a better choice to begin this festive, celebratory cantata (Schmieder catalog number 110).

I can’t take credit for the following notes; they’re from a lecture which the director of today’s performance, Helmut Rilling, gave at concerts in the late 1990s, when the recording was made. They’re reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.

This cantata was written for the first day of Christmas 1725. Bach calls for a large orchestra to match the festive nature of the holiday: two oboes, two flutes, three trumpets and timpani. Appropriately, the work also begins on a festive note. However, the cantata has a theme related to the miracle of the Son of God coming into the world.

Movement 1: The musical construction (long-held notes in the bass, rhythmically active middle voices, ascending melodic lines in the melody instruments) gives occasion to consider this verity. It is divided into three parts and marked by dotted rhythms. Here Bach chose the form of the French overture. This kind of music was intended to be played in Versailles, when the king entered the theater – for does not a king enter the world on Christmas, as well? At the same time, Bach falls back on an older piece, an orchestral suite (BWV 1069), to whose middle section Bach adds a choral setting. The voices enter one after the other and signify the “laughter” mentioned in the title. The inventive alternation of wind and string instruments which serves the purpose of differentiation in the orchestral suite is overlaid in the cantata by the choir (“Der Herr hat Großes an uns getan”). Even though this may conceal the architecture somewhat, it gives the movement additional intensity and luster.

Movement 2: This tenor aria specifies the time of the celebration, which is “today” (“anitzt”). Musically, thoughts and the senses are also set in motion toward heaven, “himmelan.” Bach gives emphasis to the contemplation of God’s deeds, the image of Christ as man and man as the child of heaven by contrasting the “earthly” bassoon with the high “heavenly” tenor voice.

Movement 3: In the course of a recitative expressing affirmation, Bach illustrates the majesty of God while the strings tell us that the Lord’s magnificence is thus and shall ever remain so.

Movement 4: Together with the oboe d’amore, the alto voice protests against this certainty. Bach interprets “Daß du sein Heil so schmerzlich suchst” (“That you seek his salvation so painfully”) as indicating the way to the cross. The text, and thus Bach, as well, finds two answers to the related question of the essence of humankind: worm, hell and Satan are presented in dissonances and difficult rhythms, the Son and Heir born of love in playful, cheerful sounds. The canon between the oboe and the alto suggests that the way taken by the Son of God should also be a model for humans, the children of God, to follow.

Movement 5: Here for the first time there appears a passage from the Christmas Gospel, the “gloria in excelsis Deo” sung by the angels on the fields. Bach puts this to a dance setting in which the oboes provide the pastoral ambiance while the voices sing a dialogue in the form of a canon. For the words “peace on Earth,” Bach finds quite a different kind of music, one that expresses collective beseeching and apprehension. Finally, Bach draws a parallel to the first movement by having the laughter marking the day of the joyful celebration stand for good will to men.

Movement 6: Now is the time to wake up! – as signaled by the trumpet, followed by the instruments and voices. In the orchestra, the trumpet, violin and oboe play each other “Freudenlieder.” Here too, though, there are “andachtsvolle Saiten,” where the wind instruments are silent, and a shadow in B minor falls upon the D major harmonies. Virtuoso passages in the strings strike up the “Freudenlieder” once more at the end. At the command “singt!”, the response turns out to be a simple chorale – Bach wants the entire congregation, including the less sophisticated, to join in singing the concluding “Halleluiah.”

SUNG TEXTS

Further reading:

Cantata 110 at Bach Cantatas website

A good friend of mine sent me this just the other day, and I liked it so much, I wanted to share it with you. It’ll help you get in the mood for the season.

Video Clip

On November 30^th, Apollo’s Fire finished up a European tour that included Madrid, Spain; two locations in the Netherlands; and London. I had a chance to talk with Jeannette Sorrell in St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights to ask a few questions about the tour.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

PS: As I headed into the church, I was walking across the parking lot. An old rusty Chrysler minivan with a slight exhaust leak pulled up and the person inside said Hello. It was Maestra Sorrell. I’ve always known that Jeannette Sorrell is devoted to her art. But as a "car guy," what she drives told me how devoted she is.

Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was the son of a wealthy paper maker, and never really had to work.
As a result, he was maybe the only Baroque composer who never tried to obtain a job as a church or court director. That does not mean he did not work. He composed around about fifty operas, and a fair amount of orchestra pieces.

Albinoni as a Bigwig

As was often the case in portraits, especially from that time period, there were hints as to who the person was and what he or she did. You can see that he is holding music in his hands, but the immense wig on his head is supposed to tell us a lot more. Being a musician could be an iffy thing to anyone of nobility; not of the highest standards. So, Mr. Albinoni wore the wig to let you know his rank in society. It is from those times and that hair piece that we learn that a ‘bigwig’ was a grand poobah.

The World Doctors’ Orchestra is an ensemble comprising about 100 full-time international medical professionals who are also part-time musical amateurs. It was founded in 2007 by Stefan Willich, who conducts the orchestra.

They recently performed their second public concert. It was a benefit for the Hugo Tempelman Foundation, which operates the only hospital serving 160,000 residents of Elandsdoorn Township in South Africa, and The Free Medical Clinic of Greater Cleveland.

If you missed the Severance Hall concert, the live audio on Digital WKSU 3, the streaming video at wksu.org, and the delayed broadcast concert on WKSU, you can still view archival video, subscribe to an audio podcast, or download audio recordings of portions of their concert, at this page on wksu.org.

Musical instruments that play themselves are far from new. The barrel organ dates back to the 9th century; a 16th century example is still in use today. Mozart and Haydn composed music especially for the Viennese flute-clock, a mechanized organ favored from about 1720. The music box is a relative latecomer; it dates from the very last years of the 18th century.

What is unusual, though, is machinery that plays an existing instrument. One of the rare examples is the Vorsetzer, developed in the early 20th century. It was a piano player, rather than a player piano. It recorded not the sound of the piano, but rather the movements of the keys and pedals when a virtuoso played the instrument. The reproducing apparatus (the Vorsetzer; literally, "sitter-before") was rolled up to a piano, and it reproduced the actions of the pianist. Assuming a playback piano more or less equivalent to the recording instrument, the result was a performance that (in theory at least) sounded as if the virtuoso were playing for you in your own living room.

While one could certainly argue whether any machine can adequately reproduce the touch of a human pianist, a wind or string instrument is yet another matter.

You might say that musician and instrument are closely coupled. The wind player’s body is literally part of the instrument, the mouth and windpipe acting as a resonating cavity. The shape of the mouth and lips interacts with a flute’s lip plate or embouchure hole, a trumpet’s mouthpiece, or the reed of a clarinet, oboe, or bassoon. In a way, playing a wind instrument has a lot in common with singing — it involves the entire performer, body and mind.

Here we have a machine that holds and plays a clarinet.

But it does not sing.

Understand, I’m not dismissing this accomplishment. Any student who has struggled with a clarinet embouchure will tell you that machinery able to coax a more or less stable tone from a clarinet, be it carbon-based or silicon-based, is a long way from trivial. Even with modern computer control, the device demonstrated below is no mean feat.

Remarkable as it may be, it has a long way to go before the results can be called musical. Over 100 years later, this gadget doesn’t approach the Vorsetzer’s ability to preserve the performer’s interpretive skill and musicanship — at least not yet. Although my left brain is impressed with the technology, my right brain thinks it would rather hear a beginning student play Go Tell Aunt Rhody.

Aaron Copland never called Rodeo ‘Ro-DAY-oh’, as nearly all Classical announcers do (including Yours Truly). He simply called it ‘ROH-dee-oh’, just like the people who go to them. None of this nose-in-the-air as you go strutting down the famous shopping drive in L.A., but plain folks enjoying some distinctly Western-American Cowboy culture.

Why is it that sometimes when Classical music announcers and even aficionados grab hold of something that is down-to-earth like Rodeo from Aaron Copland, do they have to try to raise it from the rest of society, as though now only certain people are allowed to enjoy it? Hmmm.

Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Most recently sat down with WKSU’s David Roden to discuss the upcoming Blossom season and next weekend’s Severance Hall production of Dvorak’s opera, Rusalka. Look for more on Blossom later – in the meantime, here is Roden’s interview on Rusalka in 6 parts.

I’ve had symphonies leave me just about breathless, but this is the first one that’s threatened to make me dizzy.

Ferdinand Ries was one of Beethoven’s students. Though he’s not too well known in the States, he’s a minor favorite in some of the German-speaking nations. An ad agency, Euro RSCG Zürich, produced this as a promotional piece for the Zürich Chamber Orchestra, using the music and the score from Ries’s second symphony in a surprising and creative way. (Hint: watch the note values as they go by.)

Zurich Chamber Orchestra Rides the Rails

Ever try to catch the title of a piece of music you enjoy hearing on WKSU, and miss it entirely? That’s why WKSU publishes its music lists on this website, and has for many years. We’re also available via phone or email to provide real human help.

Yet some of our listeners still say they have trouble finding the CDs we play.

The problem is that what we play isn’t always readily available. We’ve been collecting CDs at WKSU since the CD was introduced in 1984, and we now have somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 in the library. I’d guess that a good half to three-quarters of them are out of print. But there’s fine music on those CDs, so we’re not about to stop playing them!

Some of these orphan recordings have been reissued under new catalog numbers, but there’s no published cross-reference which links old CD catalog numbers with new ones. Other recordings have simply vanished from the catalog altogether, sometimes lost forever but for the efforts of used and cutout recording dealers.

Even when we’re able to identify the CD and find a current manufacturer, that may not help if the listener can’t find a place to buy it. Mall CD shops seldom stock anything beyond the most popular recordings of the most basic repertoire — if indeed they have any classical music. Increasingly, I’ve steered listeners seeking CDs toward the Internet retailers, which are often better able to special-order classical CDs than local stores.

One of the handful I consistently recommend is Arkivmusic.

Understand, they’re far from perfect.

• Their website is fairly easy to comprehend, but it’s missing something I consider absolutely basic — a search function. You have to locate everything in a tedious drilldown.
• Unlike most online vendors, they seldom let you listen before buying. Only recently have Arkivmusic finally started providing sample audio clips, and they still don’t have them for every track.
• Their prices are far from the lowest.

But a couple of positives have kept Arkivmusic in the running, at least for me.

For one thing, it’s actually run by classical people. With some of the large online CD vendors, classical music seems almost an afterthought — even though classical CD sales remain surprisingly strong while pop CD sales are in a steep decline. One other major Internet vendor’s classical search barely works, for example.

I also don’t know of another major vendor which actually brings back out of print classical recordings. A couple years ago, Arkivmusic began licensing major-label recordings that had been deleted from the catalog. They offer them on CD-Rs — in plain English, burned CDs. The company produces them on demand, meaning that when you order one, they make one for you and mail it. The artwork varies from nothing more than a card with the movement titles to, in some cases, duplicates of the originals. They now reissue about 100 late and lamented CDs per week, and have a total of over 5,000 such rescued titles listed on their website.

Eric and Jon Feidner founded Arkivmusic in 2002, entirely with private financing. This allowed them to remain independent and follow their own musical instincts. But pop music distribution is increasingly handled through Internet downloads, and the Feidners expect classical music to eventually go that way too. How could they finance the costs of developing such a system?

This week, the answer arrived. Arkivmusic has been bought out. Not by Amazon, though you might have expected that; but by Steinway and Sons, the piano manufacturer. Steinway made an inital US$3 million payment, and will invest a further US$1.5 million over the next 3 years.

The radical difference in their businesses — Steinway and Arkivmusic pretty much intersect only on the words "classical music" — means it’s unlikely that there will be any merging of operations. However, perhaps we’ll soon see a growing catalog of reissued piano recordings on the Arkivmusic website — featuring Steinway artists, of course. We’ll have to see whether that new priority will slow down their reissues of recordings by the likes of Antal Dorati and Les Arts Florissants.

If you’ve been listening to classical music for long enough — meaning, say, 50 years or so — you probably remember when albums looked like this. If you haven’t, here’s a bit of history from the days when the classical music divisions were considered the prestigious side of the business — and when "media corporations" and "content providers" were just called record companies.

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