Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up on “Applause,” a man who celebrates the art of the Cleveland school.

We meet a collector with a passion for the art of sheet music.

And a band of young musicians.

Takes the outdoor stage at the Tri-C Jazz Fest.

Hello, and welcome back to another round of “Applause” Im Ideastream Public Medias, Kabir Bhatia.

And we're about to get schooled on the Cleveland School.

It was loosely affiliated with what we now call the Cleveland Institute of Art.

But in the early 20th century, these Northeast Ohio artists made an indelible mark on the Land.

One art collector has made it his mission to spotlight this arts community.

Known simply as the Cleveland School.

I just can't imagine doing anything else.

Ever since I was a child, I was inspired by art.

I was collector as a young man, and I took art history, studio courses.

My studio art courses, I was asked not to come back.

I was so terrible.

Started with an antique store on Coventry.

I moved to Santa Monica and then came back here to Larchmere started an auction house where Loganberry Books is now.

Then we moved to West 6th Street WOLFS evolved from an auction house into the gallery that it is today.

We do focus on the Cleveland School.

This is the Rocky River bridge.

Isn't that great?

The Cleveland School is a really significant group of American artists who started working in Cleveland during the early 20th century.

Began around 1908, 1910, lasted at least until the 1950s, and many people think it continued beyond.

It's confusing to people.

You think that, well, is it a school?

Is it a style?

The Cleveland School of Art was founded in the 1880s.

Many of the artists of the Cleveland School, the group of artists, were either teachers or students the educational institution.

The Cleveland School, as a group of modernist artists, probably got the name just from locality.

So there isn't a direct relationship between the name of educational institution and these modernist artists that formed in early 20th century.

The Cleveland School is an umbrella, under which many artists with many different styles for many, many years, they flourished in Cleveland.

And why?

Because at the turn of the last century, the lithography and printing business here in Cleveland, Otis Lithograph, people came from not only all over the country, but from all over the world, artists came to work in the lithography and the printing business here.

And the legacy is all of the artists that came and all the artwork that was done here.

And many artists who were part of the Cleveland School were professional lithographers, and it supported the lives of many artists in this area.

William Sommer was a terrific designer and artist at Otis Lithograph.

Cleveland was humming with art at the turn of the last century the pre-World War II period.

They're doing movie posters, advertising for theater, and when some of these performers would come to Cleveland, they would insist he would make their advertising.

They worked into Bavarian limestones, and they would use the stones to create silent movie posters, entertainment posters.

William Sommer just had a reputation for basically being a genius.

He spent his life supporting himself as a professional lithographer, but he also did a lot of independent work, and he gathered around him groups of other modernists who formed this important movement located in Ohio in the early 20th century.

If you can imagine a jazz musician working on a canvas with incredible ability to reproduce, to draft anything that he wishes with great emotion, the color, the line, it's just amazing.

One of the most important things about William Sommer is that he spent almost all of his professional career in Ohio, either working in Lakewood or working in Brandywine.

And he never really left, although he had many opportunities to do so.

He's really an interpreter of the Ohio landscape, but he sees it through the lens of advanced European modernism.

Brandywine is 20 miles or so south of here.

He found himself a nice, remote place.

He was comfortable, and most importantly, he could paint undisturbed.

It was accessible by the inter-urban train that went from Cleveland to Akron.

And anyway, this place in Brandywine had a farmhouse and a deserted school that he converted into a studio.

And it became a really important meeting place for people like Hart Crane, the great poet.

They came to Brandywine.

Charles Burchfield came to Brandywine.

So this was a kind of locus of modernist activity in Cleveland during the teens and twenties.

Well, the subjects are, it's funny, they're somewhat mundane until he begins to handle them.

The still lifes with flowers, cows in the field, chickens, the barn next door, the neighbor children.

But by the time he's executed his composition, it comes alive.

He would listen to the sound of wind, try to paint that, and try to make relationships between colors in the landscape musical notes and harmonies.

So he's always looking for a deeper reality than what he's seeing or seeing with the eye.

He would have the music blasting as best he could and working outside and chickens at his feet.

That's what made him really happy.

William Sommer never really achieved the degree of recognition that he deserved.

And that's largely because he was determined to stay in Ohio and he was never ever interested in promoting himself in publicity.

Remember he was self-sufficient economically because he had a good job.

He was really a great lithographer and earned a good living doing that.

He didn't need money and he didn't care about money.

This is, look at this beautiful oil.

This is done, it was done in Rocky River.

We're knee deep in William Sommer works right now and nothing could be more gratifying.

When you put a frame on it, it becomes a completely different ball game.

I'm loyal to the quality of these individuals who really created an amazing artistic happening here in this city.

And many people just don't know much about it.

People respond to the Cleveland School.

People in this industry, they know that it's a very high quality and very diverse.

I'm very proud to be from Cleveland and to be able to represent the Cleveland School.

William Sommer, Visionary Modernist, is on view at WOLFS Gallery in Beachwood through August 15th.

Now, back at the turn of the 21st century, if you wanted to hear your favorite song, you can just download it illegally.

But at the turn of the 20th century, you needed to buy the sheet music and then find someone who could decipher the song's notes and lyrics so you could enjoy the music.

Daniel Goldmark, director of popular music studies at Case Western Reserve University, has a passion for collecting historic sheet music from and about Northeast Ohio.

Nowadays, if we want a song, we go online and we can buy it through whatever online source we might use, and we typically buy one song at a time.

Well, 120 years ago, when sheet music is the big thing, that was the way you did things as well.

You weren't buying a whole bunch of music all by one performer or one writer.

You were buying one song at a time.

And if you're looking for songs and you're living in Cleveland at the turn of the century, could go to a bunch of different places.

You could come here to the arcade because you had music stores and even music publishers based here, and you could go straight in by what the latest songs were, maybe go look for something from their older catalog, something you'd heard before and like, oh, you have a copy of that song, and you could find just about anything.

So in the late 19th century, the popular music industry was basically based in New York City, and the area was referred to as Tin Pan Alley.

This is on 28th Street around Broadway, and this is around where all the theaters were based before they started moving up toward Times Square.

Now in Cleveland, a lot of the big publishers were actually based here at the arcade.

And if you think about the arcades proximity to Playhouse Square, it makes perfect sense because you had a lot of shows coming into Cleveland.

You had shows starting here in Cleveland, and those shows would need music, and so they would come to the publishers, ask for songs, the songs would be written, and they would put them right into the shows.

And that's the thing about shows back then.

This is before Broadway gets really big.

It's before “Oklahoma” and “Showboat” and before the songs are so identified with a particular show.

The turn of the 20th century, if a song wasn't good, they'd chuck it out and you could write a new song next week.

They weren't looking at them as great art.

It was a product.

It was something they were selling to the public, something that was going to get people into the theaters and hopefully into the stores to buy more and more music.

Oh, Nora Lee, my Nora Lee.

Your name is the sweetest music to me.

And siren song holds me completely.

Birds in the trees sing their songs more sweetly, just for Nora Lee.

Sheet music is certainly not a new invention in the late 19th century.

It's been around for a long time, but there are a couple advances in technology that help the music industry explode by the late 1890s.

And one of those, of course, is our advances in printing technology.

Printing things in four color, meaning you have the full spectrum of the rainbow, advances in lithography.

So you have really clear definition of images and layers upon layers upon layers.

That became a real boon to the printing industry, a lot of which was based in Cleveland.

Music publishers at the time would basically glom onto any topic they could that they thought might sell.

So when the ragtime craze happens, everybody writes a rag on every theme from famous names to animals, fruits and vegetables, lobster rag, fruit and vegetable rag, pickled beets rag, you name it.

So every time something happens, the industry kind of contracts and tries to figure out which of those is going to be a hit.

And usually they weren't.

Usually they're just trying to jump on the bandwagon.

Cleveland, I'm strong for you.

You also have publishers of course, are going to try and have songs about local interests, current events, even local boosterism.

So there's all kinds of songs about Cleveland, for instance, saying how wonderful place Cleveland is, or saying how wonderful place Ohio is.

The Ohio Centennial, the Cleveland Industrial Exposition in the 19 aughts the Great Lakes Exposition in the late 1930s.

All of these needed songs.

They wanted songs.

People bought the songs for these.

And it's just an impossible number to try and wrap your mind around how many songs are out there.

And so few of these songs actually became hits.

And that's what's fascinating about them, is we get this entire history of the life of a city.

Cleveland or Detroit or New York or Chicago, wherever you want to look.

You can really see what was going on in the people's minds at the time by looking at the kinds of songs that are being published.

When I'm blue and broken hearted or the times I have parted, I know I'll be welcome down in Cleveland probably the most famous music publisher to ever come out of Cleveland was Sam Fox Music were actually based directly above where I'm standing.

On the third floor in the arcade.

Sam Fox sold, but also started writing a few songs of his own, and within a couple of years, he borrowed a couple hundred dollars and started his own music publishing company, again based right here at the arcade.

So very quickly he kind of starts to corner the market on this kind of music.

And he gets makes a name for himself, not just in Cleveland, but throughout the entire music publishing industry.

I'm going back to Cleveland now to Cleveland, Ohio, where I get three square meals a day and money for the show The sad thing about the art for sheet music covers is that a lot of these are unsigned, or even the ones that are signed.

We know very, very little about the people who created them because these were craftspeople, just like people who made furniture or built cars or had any other kind of 9 to 5 job.

Nobody could have imagined that, you know, basically a century later, folks like me would be asking, oh, who is this person who did this amazing cover?

Or better yet, who is this person who did 300 covers over a period of several years with such great, breadth and, you know, a skill I want to know about them.

And unfortunately, there's such little information about these folks.

So that's one of the great mysteries, about the music.

And it's also one of the great joys, because every time you find a new piece.

Oh, wow.

Another little piece of the puzzle slides into place.

You know, the 10% of music that was published in Cleveland that made it to the rest of the United States.

There's that other 90% that's in people's attics and basements and in thrift stores and on, you know, eBay and other places just waiting to be found.

And so I started just collecting.

Any time I would run into someone, I would say, you know, if you have any sheet music in the basement, if you know someone who's getting rid of it, please don't let them trash it.

Come find me.

I'll take it off your hands even.

Even if I have to, you know, find a home for it.

Because it's not what I'm looking for.

I'm more interested in seeing the stuff not be destroyed.

Dedicated to school children of Cleveland.

This was Minnie the elephant, I think.

I know it was the first elephant to the Cleveland Zoo, but they got her in the in the aughts.

The children of Cleveland named her.

That's why it's dedicated to them, because they picked the name for the new the new zoo elephant.

Every little town in Cleveland has someone who had a song in their heart that they just had to get out, and so they went to their local printer, and the printer found an image, and they printed up the music for them, and maybe they printed 100 copies, maybe they printed 500, and maybe I have the only one.

Maybe they're sitting in someone's basement somewhere.

I think ultimately what I want to do is be able to tell a story of how popular music was a part of life in Cleveland, particularly before rock and roll.

And visually, it's so rich.

I, I'm really looking forward to having the chance to help fill in this gap of what a strong part Cleveland had in the music industry and shaping musical tastes in the United States during the late 19th.

And, you know, through the 20th century.

There's a common thread linking Abercrombie and Fitch, Express and Victoria's Secret.

These companies are all located near our state capitol.

This next artist got her start working in Columbus's fashion industry.

And now she's stepping out with her own designs.

My passion for fashion goes all the way back to elementary school.

I would carry around a composition notebook and I would use that as my sketchbook, and I would have these ideas that have these challenges, like, I'm going to make a collection based on the alphabet.

So one time I literally did that, like I drew the alphabet out Abcdefg, and then I drew a figure behind each letter and say, can I turn this a into a dress?

Can I turn B into like some outfit?

So I would just do stuff like that, or I would be like, let me see how many different kinds of pants I can make.

And I would just draw, draw, draw, draw, draw.

I stuck with it.

I knew that that's really what I wanted to do.

Thankfully, I had a supportive mother.

She really saw that interest in me and she had some artistic capabilities herself.

So she really nurtured that in me.

In college, I did internships at that because, you know, Columbus has a lot of fashion companies, a lot of headquarters here.

So I don't know if I mentioned the ones I worked for, but I did work for a long time in the on the corporate side of things.

I was a technical designer for 14 plus years.

So the technical designer is basically the point person between the designer, the merchant and the factory.

And so it was my job to take the designer's creative vision and like their styles that they would create and then turn that into tech packs and patterns and basically an instruction manual to the factory of how to make it.

That gave me a lot of insight into being very detail oriented and also thinking of things more so from like a fit perspective and a pattern perspective.

The whole creative process is extremely rewarding because you're tapping into something.

That's how I feel when I'm making things is like, do I feel like this is right?

Do I feel like this shape is right?

Do I feel like this fabric is right?

Do I feel like this color is right?

If it's not, I'm taking it all back apart and redo.

Like.

Like just like a sculptor or whoever works pottery.

Like, sometimes they're molding it on the wheel and then it's not.

The shape is not how they want it, how they envision it in their mind, you know, and then they will, like, scrap it and do a whole new lump and redo it and after the end, it's like after you feel that satisfaction that, yes, it's perfect.

This is exactly what I want.

That is the reward.

I don't know how to explain it.

I call it downloads.

Like, I'll sometimes I'll even be just like sitting here.

And a lot of times I'm not.

I use this chair to sew in, but a long time I'm sitting on the floor and I'll literally just be like.

With my music.

Lord, I need some idea because I believe you can be.

You can be honest.

Like, I'm not like, oh, like super serious.

Like I just am honest.

I need ideas, I need, revelation.

I need ideas, like.

And then sometimes, like in the middle of me praying, like, I'll just see, like a image in my mind of like a quick flash of like a detail or a quick flash of a silhouette or a quick flash of a dress.

And a lot of times when I'm sitting there on the floor like that, I have a sketchbook with me because I need to hurry up and like, draw it down so I don't forget.

So a lot of times, like in my sketchbooks, I have like partial pieces of things, I just like saw.

And then I make it.

Usually I always have an annual garden, and the colors that I pulled were all from like flowers and greenery and all of that.

Some of these dresses did me months because I knew it was missing something and needed something, you know?

And it's like until you find that and then it's like, like an internal sense of satisfaction.

I use this analogy.

It's like I gave birth, like I it was in me, and it was like growing and I'm nurturing it and I'm thinking on it and I'm pondering on it and I'm.

I'm sketching it and I'm, oh, erase it.

I don't like that.

You know?

But finally, when it's right and it comes forth.

Yes, that's my baby.

On the next “Applause” Explore an eccentric collection of art housed in an historic Cleveland landmark.

And my dream was simply to find a place where I could exhibit it and enjoy it, and have my friends enjoy it.

And then I bought this building.

Enjoy a tour of the art and a performance from a rising star of the cello with ChamberFest Cleveland.

All that and more on the next round of “Applause” Thanks for joining us for this round of “Applause,” my friends.

I'm Ideastreams, Kabir Bhatia sending you on your way with a little traveling music from the Tri-C JazzFest.

Cleveland bassist and composer Eli Leder and his fellow Jazz Fest Academy friends took the stage in 2025 for their rendition of the Miles Davis classic, “Seven Steps to Heaven” Meanwhile, the 2026 Tri-C JazzFest hits Playhouse Square's indoor and outdoor stages June 25th to the 27th.

If you're going, be sure to visit the Idea Center for live interviews with jazz musicians like Ron Carter and Dominick Farinacci Production of “Applause” and Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.