You may have read that Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier was written for a keyboard instrument in equal temperament. Well, not exactly. This Introduction to Historical Tunings explains what temperament is, how to categorize Bach’s WTC, and what Bach was trying to say musically.

Robert Schuman’s Violin Concerto in d does not have an Opus number…it has instead ‘WoO 23′. That simply means ‘Without Opus’. The reason it did get assigned one was that, frankly, the people who knew him best and saw his behavior at the time he was composing it were afraid the public might somehow discover a side that they did not want. They though that his deteriorating mental health went through the sound of the piece. And so, it was kept hidden for more than 80 years.

Schumann started on it on September 11, 1853 and was finished with it in 22 days. The whole thing was on paper in just three weeks. But I should add an asterisk there because of what happened before he was totally finished. A young man named Johannes Brahms showed up on October 1st. Schumann had barely started the 3rd movement. There was something about that first meeting (that has been mentioned many times as one of the most important in Classical Music history). After that first night, though Robert Schumann composed this violin concerto for his old friend, Joseph Joachim, there was something about his new friend that motivated him to compose virtually the entire third movement in just three days!

The concert in which it was to premiere was later that month. Joachim did play the Schumann Fantasie in C major, Op. 131, but he did no play the concerto, and never would. But he held onto the manuscript the rest of his life. Schumann tried to kill himself 5 months later and ended up in a sanatorium. What happened only added to Joachim’s suspicions that a very different man had composed the piece than the one he knew. So, he began a quiet campaign to make sure the piece would stay unperformed. He went to Schumann’s widow Clara, and even to his new friend Brahms to get them to agree that the piece would stay out of the public’s hands, hopefully forever. Interesting though, if Joachim felt so strongly that way, why didn’t he destroy it? It his will, he stipulated that it would not be destroyed and end up in the Prussian State Library in Berlin, it would not be performed for anther hundred years after the composer’s death…which would have made it 1956.

But, in March 1933, during a spiritualist séance in London with two of Joachim’s grandnieces, at least one claimed to have heard the spirit-voice of Robert Schumann requesting that they pull out the script and perform it. It took a while to find it and then four years later, it just so happened that Yehudi Menuhin was given the music as was asked for his opinion of it. Menuhin dropped everything he was doing and began to get ready for the premiere.

However, one of the grand nieces of Joachim, who had a reputation as a decent violinist claimed that the ‘spiritualist’ told her she should be the one to premiere it. And then the German government (i.e. The Nazi’s) got involved and said that it had to be a German to perform it. So, on November 26, 1937, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a relatively unknown (German) violinist, it was premiered. But about a week later, it was Menuhin who gave the second performance (with a in the piano version), but it was at Carnegie Hall. The niece gave it the third performance.

I’m leading somewhere with all of this. Okay, Robert Schuman was definitely not doing well mentally by the time he composed his violin concerto. He had always been haunted by the fact that his mother had lost her sanity and committed suicide. And now that he had had to fight the onset of syphilis, he knew that often the greatest devastation from it was insanity. So, as so many people did in those days, for it he took mercury. It causes insanity.

We must remember that in those days, people wanted to hide anyone with mental illness…almost to the point of making it look as though mental illness did not exist. So was Joseph Joachim correct in convincing Clara Schumann that her husband’s illness showed up too much in this piece?

There is no doubt that the beginning opens with an intensity rarely heard, and if we were aware of what was going on in his mind, then we could understand a bit more what he was trying to say. But why should we blow off a potential masterpiece just because were too afraid of ‘going inside’ the piece, to let it take you away. We won’t get insanity by listening to it. Actually, because of the intensity in which he composed it, we might be allowed to experience more the art of it (the music as pure art). Schumann, more than just about anyone in his trade, looked at music as art, long before he was a composer of it, he was serious observer of it (including being a well-respected critic and publisher of a highly touted music magazine. Okay, should we not look at a later Van Gogh because we might see insanity?

Was Joachim right? Or should the man, Schumann, be known for everything he was?

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.

The long-term plans of the Cleveland Orchestra include a longer relationship with Music Director Franz Welser Most.

The orchestra announced today that the Austrian conductor will be on the podium at Severance Hall through its centennial season.

Welser Most became the Cleveland Orchestra’s seventh music director in 2002 . The following year his initial five-year contract was extended to 2012. The contract announced today extends through the 2017-2018 season.

Cleveland Orchestra Public Relations Director Ana Papakhian says the announcement came in a private meeting today at Severance Hall:

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.