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.

More from Flickr.

I was just reading about the Estonian conductor, Kristjan Järvi, yet another baton-wielding member of that intensely musical family. In a recent piece for The Australian, Matthew Westwood writes of Järvi’s crusade to bring more improvisation to the concert hall. "It is really important to make the performers feel that they have freedom, that they can express music rather than just play the notes," Järvi says.

Järvi’s spot on when he points out that this was expected of musicians from the medieval to the classical eras. One look at a Perotin motet or the figured bass of a Bach sonata will tell you that there are lots of blanks to fill in.

And in a sense, as Järvi suggests, realizing a figured bass IS something like playing jazz. The notes on the page are a skeleton; it’s up to the performer to give it flesh. This is also true, though to a lesser degree, in the other parts of Baroque music. It’s the performers’ prerogative (or obligation) to stamp them with a bit of style.

The question of just what that style should be is one that the historically informed performance movement (HIP - read about it here and here) has tried to answer. One of HIP’s elements is an effort to teach performers the interpretive language of early music, so they naturally play it the way a musician of the period would have. Comparing this with jazz practices will be left as an exercise for the reader.

But Järvi doesn’t seem to be that interested in Baroque and Classical-period music. Rather, he seems keen to let folk influences and improvisatory elements have sway in more recent works. "Whether it’s Sibelius, the Nordic composers or Piazzolla and Ginastera, I really love the national flavour when it comes out in the music of serious orchestral composers," he says.

I may be missing something, but it seems to me that this is at least as much the conductor’s responsibility as the orchestra members’. There’s a good reason that collectors treasure Karel Ancerl’s 1963 reading of Smetana’s Ma Vlast, for example. How much of that is Ancerl’s view and how much his players’? You could make a pretty good case, I think, that performers’ personal interpretation is more appropriate in solo and chamber music than it is in orchestral music.

What’s more, national flavor isn’t static. Folk and popular music performing traditions are contantly evolving. If the musicians apply a Finnish "national flavour" to a Sibelius symphony, should it be the “national flavour” of Sibelius’s time, or of ours?

Finally, how far should we take this bus? Will future generations react to Järvi’s "tweaking" of the standard repertoire the way our generation has reacted to the interpretive excesses of the early 20th century performers and conductors?

Stay tuned. It’ll be intriguing to see Järvi run with this ball.

The Miami Herald’s Lawence Johnson reports here that Christoph von Dohnanyi, music director of The Cleveland Orchestra for 18 years from 1984, will sweep through Miami on his farewell tour with The Philharmonia.

Dohnanyi rightly receives his due in Johnson’s piece: “… in many ways, the corporate tonal refinement and tightly disciplined ensemble are the legacy of the 78-year-old intellectual maestro who led the orchestra for almost two decades.”

Music Director Franz Welser-Moest inherited an orchestra at the peak of its game. We can - and should - thank Christoph von Dohnanyi for that. Let no one ever diminish the sheen of his legacy.

Yet it’s important to remember the deep origins of the Cleveland sound - notably, the chamber music precision and ensemble that are this orchestra’s hallmarks. Ironically, one could argue that we have one of history’s most nefarious dictators to thank for it. Had it not been for Adolph Hitler’s insanity and the nightmare of World War II, George Szell might not have emigrated to the US, or taken the helm of an orchestra in Cleveland, Ohio.

Franz Welser-Moest is building his own rewarding Cleveland musical legacy, just as Christoph von Dohnanyi did. For that we can be deeply grateful. But even though most of the musicians are now too young to have played under George Szell, his voice still sings softly from every chair on the Severance Hall stage. Northeast Ohio’s music lovers will never forget him, this Vienna-raised maestro who got the world talking about the unbeatable band in Cleveland.

It is difficult for a modern musician, trained to play what is before his eyes, to realize that the author [composer] did not intend his text [notes] to be followed.

Ivan Hewett wrote recently in the Telegraph (UK) that “the worlds of classical and folk music could meet and mingle.”

Could?! They’ve been doing precisely that on WKSU for years - and that’s just another chapter in a long and deeply respectful association.

From at least Renaissance times, “art” music has drawn inspiration from folk music.

Take Telemann, for example. He used to lurk in the shadowy corners of the country inns, nursing his ale and stealing ideas from the fiddlers. “One could learn enough from them in a week to last a lifetime,” he said.

Centuries before, Renaissance composers had used pop tunes - sometimes bawdy ones! - as cantus firmi of masses. Heading the other way on the timeline, although the themes Beethoven used in his symphonies are original, he arranged groups of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh songs for soloist, chorus, and chamber ensemble.

This piece, Mikhail Glinka’s Kamarinskaya, was based on Russian folk tunes (a dance and a wedding song). It was a manifesto of sorts, a guidepost for the Russian musical nationalism that later took hold in the works of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others. Tchakovsky called Kamarinskaya the acorn from which the mighty oak of Russian music grew. That oak was rooted in Russian folk music.

Antonin Dvorak loved his homeland and its music, but during his stateside stint, he absorbed spirituals and Native American themes. Their rhythms and melodic contours added local color to his American Quartet and Suite, and to the famed New World Symphony. Back home, Smetana infused his Czech dances with the rhythms of - guess what.

Stravinsky thought this little motif was a folksong, but it turned out to be a French popular tune, and he got into legal hot water for quoting it in his ballet Petroushka. In the end, he had to pay for the rights.

Bela Bartok hauled an early recording phonograph out to the countryside to take down folksongs as they were actually sung. He did so mostly to document Hungary’s musical heritage before it faded away. However, he also folded many of the dances and songs into his rollicking (and sometimes rather pungent) piano works. If you got far enough in your piano lessons, maybe you played some of them.

Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Grainger all dug deeply into Cecil Sharp’s folksong collections, among others. Copland evoked the echoes of the US West’s singing cowboys even if he didn’t quote them. From France, Ravel and Milhaud caught the spirit of jazz. I could go on for pages, but you get the idea.

Musical ideas also flowed the other way. Early- to mid-20th century American popular song composers unabashedly reaped inspiration and themes from classical music.

The musical Kismet, for example, was practically pure Borodin. Robert Wright and George Forrest lifted the melody of this selection, He’s In Love, straight out of the Polovtsian Dances. (On a new Telarc CD, Leonard Slatkin translates Kismet’s borrowed themes into an orchestral suite - harvesting the harvest, as it were.)

More recently, Paul Simon got his American Tune from Bach’s St Matthew Passion; Bach in turn had borrowed it from a Lutheran chorale.

At least three popular songs have been derived from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto - Buddy Kaye’s Full Moon and Empty Arms, Eric Carmen’s All By Myself, and Muse’s Space Dementia. Wikipedia lists no fewer than nineteen rock and pop tunes based on Johann Pachelbel’s Canon. This should come as no surprise: if you want to make your tune successful, it helps to start with a successful tune.

Make that twenty. A couple of years ago the South Korean pop group Redsox also borrowed the Canon, nearly note for note, giving it a title which translates as Sweet Dream (MV). Johann’s not around to make a fuss. I’m not at all sure he would, even if he were.

So while such ideas as contemporary music festivals with Alpine themes may be somewhat new, the fundamental notion of merging classical and folk music is not.

At WKSU folk and classical music share a CD library - and once in a while, we even share CDs, composers, and musicians. Jim Blum plays some of the same Renaissance pieces and some of the same early music ensembles that we do. He also includes folk-flavored versions of classical pieces, especially shorter ones, from time to time. Bach a la Bela Fleck, anyone?

From the other side of the wall between the Folk and Classical offices, we play quite a few folk-inspired works beyond the usual Vaughan Williams Folk Song Suite and Bartok’s Roumanian Folk Dances.

William Grant Still’s Miniatures (the clip is an excerpt from his adaptation of I Ride an Old Paint) and Robert Beaser’s Mountain Songs bring us home to American folk music.

Our classical programs also sometimes include works that most people would consider 100% classical, yet they’re signed by musicians most people would call folk composers. They range from Turlough O’Carolan to Edgar Meyer. We don’t make a huge deal of this. If it’s good enough for us to play, the music is its own justification.

Hewitt writes of “folk musicians ‘aspiring up’” and “classical composers delving down.” Here at WKSU, there’s no up or down involved. Folk and classical music live right across from one another. We don’t sweat the difference. It’s all just good music.