by Daniel Hathaway
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA POWER OF MUSIC VIDEOS:
A series of videos to be released weekly over social media for the next 7-10 weeks finds Assistant Concertmaster Jessica Lee and her colleagues fanning out through the community to play in various businesses in Greater Cleveland, “to bring these places back into people’s lives while we are less able to visit and enjoy them.” The series is part of the Music Medicine Initiative: The Power of Music for Health and Well-Being, a community collaboration between The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Clinic’s Art + Design Institute.
In the first video, released on Monday, Lee joins Yun-Ting Lee, Wesley Collins, and Dane Johansen at Luna Bakery in Cleveland Heights for the third movement of Debussy’s String Quartet.
BW ROCK OPERA FEATURED IN AMERICAN THEATRE:
Not one to be deterred by a mere pandemic, Baldwin Wallace Musical Theatre Director Victoria Bussert forged ahead with plans to produce Spring Awakening last week.
“What would a pandemic-era production look like, and how would people see it? How could you perform group numbers when unmasked group singing is verboten? What about kissing? And most importantly, how would you keep everyone safe?” Read the article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On November 24, 1868, American composer and pianist Scott Joplin was born near Marshall, Texas. Most famous for single-handedly inventing ragtime — a syncopated American genre revived by William Bolcom and William Albright, who introduced the young musicologist Joshua Rifin to Joplin’s music in 1968, and further popularized in the movie The Sting — Joplin wrote two operas as well. The materials for A Guest of Honor have been lost, probably seized by a rooming house owner in lieu of rent during a tour in 1904, but Treemonisha enjoyed a full production by Houston Grand Opera in May, 1975. Watch a video (with subtitles in Portuguese!) here.
Back to ragtime: Joplin made seven pianola rolls in 1916 including his most famous piece, the Maple Leaf Rag. In 1970, Rifkin’s Nonesuch recording of Joplin piano rags was the label’s first to sell a million copies.
Also born on November 24 (in 1934), Russian composer Alfred Schnittke adopted what he called his polystylistic technique in works like his remarkable Concerto Grosso No. 1, performed live in Moscow in 2004 by Gidon Kremer, Tatiana Grindenko and Kremerata Baltica.
On November 24, 1940, American jazz composer Wendell Logan was born in Thompson, Georgia. He joined the Oberlin Conservatory Faculty and founded the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble in 1973, later developing a jazz curriculum for the school, which adopted admission standards for jazz students in 1991. Watch a shaky cell phone video of Logan speaking at the dedication of the Kohl Jazz Studies Building in 2010 (he died later that year).
And listen to a February, 1991 recording of Logan’s Roots, Branches, Shapes and Shades (of Green), commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, composed for pianist Neal Creque, and first performed under the direction of Edwin London in February, 1991.
Finally, multi-genre double bass phenomenon and composer Edgar Meyer was born on this date in 1960. ChamferFest Cleveland violinist David Bowlin and bassist Nathan Farrington performed the third movement of his Concerto Duo at The Wine Spot in June, 2014. Watch here.