NPR REINVENTS ITSELF

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

NPR once had the connotation of being a bit stodgy at times, but the network seems to understand the future of journalism is the present.

A few years back, NPR took the gamble on feeding some of its programming on Sirius satellite radio (now also heard on XM) and now it is expanding its online division at npr.org.

A recent article in American Journalism Review details the changes NPR is making, finally realizing the radio-only business model just doesn't cut it anymore (sorry to my AZPM bosses). NPR already is offering much of its content online, but is still protecting stations by not posting full content from it's flagship shows like Morning Edition and All Things Considered and not even posting segments until after they've aired on local stations.

AJR has the following to say:

This year and next, NPR is tackling an ambitious and comprehensive plan to transform itself into a multimedia force: The organization is asking all of its journalists to rethink their storytelling and audience interaction. Most news organizations are at least paying lip service to this multiplatform goal, but NPR is putting its money (and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's) where its mouth is: The foundation gave NPR $1.5 million to train its 450 editorial employees in digital storytelling skills and to pay for substitutes to fill in for them while they learn. NPR is putting an additional $1 million into the training. What's more, NPR News has nearly doubled its digital staffers to 30 in the past year. The hires include two videographers. NPR aims to overhaul its Web site by early next year; it is expanding the offerings on its year-old mobile site; and in the last three months, it launched a suite of social media tools and an open application programming interface that allows independent Web publishers to use NPR content on their own sites.

Read the entire article

OBAMA/NIELSEN

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

This week’s New Yorker cover by Bob Staake is especially striking for the way it blends several common images into an immediately recognizable message, even if that message is a bit hard to articulate. Bear with me, because this post will really be about music, but first look at the image:

That glowing building, of course, is the Lincoln Memorial, which all Americans should be able to identify even without seeing the sculpture of Lincoln inside (which you can’t, really, in this illustration). Overhead, the O in “New Yorker” has been transformed into a softly glowing moon, but it also evokes the O that Barack Obama used as his logo during the presidential campaign:

The implied message: The long night in America for people of African ancestry has nearly ended, a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.

This got me to thinking about how difficult it can be to craft a message like this through music. You’d think it would be easy; Bob Staake, for his illustration, selects, organizes and layers various symbolic images to create an implicit message, and the same technique should be available to composers through the manipulation of melodies. But it rarely works out that way.

When the technique has been attempted at all, it’s usually merely an act of placing two pre-existing themes in direct opposition to simulate warring nations: think of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, with its conflicting French and English military tunes, or Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Of course, Charles Ives was a master of musical collage, but when he piled half a dozen popular American songs and marches upon each other in different meters, tempi and dynamics, he was simply evoking, say, the sounds in a park at night, with music drifting in from various locations. Ives was composing musical landscapes, not really telling a coherent story or making a philosophical point.

Film composers do this routinely, of course, establishing themes to represent specific characters or places or even issues, then manipulating them to underline the complexities of the scene at hand. But right now I’m more interested in concert-hall composers who can’t lean on the crutch of cinematic visuals.

The obvious place for a working-out of symbolic musical themes is the development section of a symphony, sonata or chamber work. Generally, the composer has laid out two or more distinct themes, and then rips them apart and knocks pieces of them against each other before putting things back in order for a recapitulation of the themes more or less in their original form. But this is a very abstract process. Composers may try to create a more concrete message by appropriating melodies that people know from other contexts, but somehow this usually sounds hokey. And if the composers use wholly original material, the themes really have no meaning for listeners beyond the context of the work at hand.

Yet one big exception came immediately to my mind, and you can probably think of a few others. The first movement of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5 does exactly what Bob Staake does on that New Yorker cover, but with entirely original motifs. Think about the climax in the development of the symphony’s first movement, a grand conflict between three distinctive motifs: an oppressive snare drum motto, a nattering and strident woodwind figure, and a broad, noble hymn. Nielsen wrote this shortly after World War I, and although he did not attach specific meaning to each theme, it’s difficult not to hear this as an explicit war symphony, in which the better angels of our nature (the hymn theme) overcome the destructive forces (which have been overcome, but not eliminated; the snare drum withdraws into the distance at the end, never fully surrendering).

So I’d say that the Nielsen Fifth is a fairly good analog for what’s going on with that New Yorker cover. Do you have other ideas?

ALT WEEKLIES THRIVE EVEN WITHOUT ME

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

Hi! Remember me? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice I was gone. I took a long weekend to spirit my wife away to California to visit friends and guzzle Napa Valley wine. Now I’m back and settled in, but because I was away I didn’t contribute anything to the latest Tucson Weekly, so I won’t even post a link to that publication because why would you want to read it if I’m not in it?

More seriously, I ran across an interview with Dan Savage, the editorial of an alt weekly in Seattle and the author of the notorious sex-advice column “Savage Love,” which is carried by many alt weeklies, including Tucson’s. Most of the interview concerns his work as a sex columnist, and you should not click on that link if you are proudly prudish. But toward the end, Savage offers some provocative commentary on the advantages of alt weeklies over mainstream dailies. Here’s the essential stuff, but be forewarned that he uses the f-word:

I think alt-weeklies have more and more of a role to play—particularly as dailies continue to try and swim around with an anvil under each arm. One anvil is objectivity and the other is "family newspaper." Alt-weeklies have the luxury of publishing writing by adults, to adults, and for adults. And that's a real advantage. It's a style advantage, it's an attitudinal advantage, and it's also an urban advantage. … Alt-weeklies are really just about advocacy journalism and truth-telling, and they engage in arguments and throw bombs in the way that daily papers can't allow themselves to. I mean, daily newspapers all need to put "fuck" in a headline above the fold one day—it'll solve all their problems. That's my prescription. And then in one fell swoop they'll get rid of all those 80-year-old subscribers who won't let them drop "Blondie." Catering to the 80-year-olds? Where's that getting newspapers? Making sure there's nothing in your paper that's inappropriate for an eighty-year-old to read?

WEBSITE PLANNING

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

Now that our in-depth election coverage is now an outdated item, the web team (of which I am a part) is working on filling the various AZPM sites with new content.

Admittedly, the election coverage was fairly easy, as there was always something to write about or segments to post. Now comes the lull. It's not that we're short on content, but deciding what to highlight always presents a challenge. We don't just want to be a repeat outlet of our TV station.

A new edition to the AZPM family already has its own page. Have you even heard of PBS World yet? If you don't have cable or digital TV, you can't see it yet, but check out the site and see what you're missing. It sounds interesting, although I've never seen it, except in the lobby at work (with no sound).

It is my understanding that we are working with Cox and Comcast to get the network on the their lineups.

So, what would you like to see on the website? We really don't know if you don't contact us. Use the link below to offer any ideas you may have...not that I'm guaranteeing anything.

TAKE OUT THE TRASH

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

No, this has nothing to do with politics, it's just a simple reminder that trash pickup days are changing this week.

I've already blogged about this in the past, so just refer to that post.

THE LOST AND THE DEAD

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

In the latest Tucson Weekly, I review very good productions of newish plays with local connections. First, what you might call a “found” work:

Two years ago, after viewing a video of a New York production of the musical stage work _Lost_, I peered into my crystal ball and declared, "Arizona Onstage Productions could surely do a brilliant job with the material." (See "Finding 'Lost,' Nov. 9, 2006.) I was right. The company has mounted a heartfelt production of this dark fairy tale, scored by former Tucsonan Jessica Grace Wing. In her 20s, Wing moved to New York, where she directed short films and wrote off-Broadway theater scores. In 2003, barely into her 30s, she succumbed to colon cancer, but not before completing _Lost_; she worked on it until literally hours before she died. Less than a month later, _Lost_ was mounted in New York to highly favorable reviews, but it seems that it had not been performed in the intervening five years. The available libretto and lyrics didn't reflect changes made for the New York International Fringe Festival production, and the orchestration, which Wing didn't have time to complete to her satisfaction, needed work. Arizona Onstage's Kevin Johnson and his team fashioned a new edition, polishing the orchestration until the afternoon of last week's Tucson opening. Now the work is in shape to travel from one company to another, and it certainly deserves to.

You can read the full review here, and then proceed to my evaluation of a new play by Tucsonan Gavin Kayner:

Are we defined by our stories, or by our actions? That's a question posed by a character in the new Gavin Kayner play _Noche de los Muertos_, set toward the end of the Mexican revolutionary period. The storytellers are adherents to the Catholic church; the men and women of action are the secularists behind the revolution. Which of those two forces, incompatible when pushed to their heights of fervor, would set the course for 20th-century Mexico? _Noche de los Muertos_ is the latest offering from Beowulf Alley Theatre Company, and it opened just in time for the Day of the Dead, a time to honor one's ancestors, who are said to visit the altars we prepare and nibble on the snacks we leave, although, unlike Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, they leave nothing in return; having given life to us some decades before seems a sufficient enough gesture. _Noche_ is set on the Day of the Dead in 1927 in the town of Magdalena, not far south of Nogales. A young schoolteacher and her entourage have arrived to take over public education from the local priest, one of only about 40 in Mexico who have not yet been killed or driven from their posts by the post-revolutionary government and its supporters. But Catholic partisanship remains strong in rural areas and frontier towns like Magdalena, and the priest refuses to give up his post. In his opinion, and that of supporters like the woman who runs the local cantina, it's the teacher who must be driven out.

Learn how Kayner develops his themes and what the Beowulf Alley team does with them here.