LORRAINE HUNT LIEBERSON

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    It’s remarkable and touching how people are reacting to the death Monday of mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. How many other classical singers today would inspire such a mixture of admiration, respect, and deep affection? She was a superb artist, excelling equally in vocal technique, communicative expression, taste, and musical courage, and as far as I know she never, ever indulged in diva behavior. By all accounts she was a decent, likable person, an impression I certainly got when I interviewed her a few years ago. She died at age 52 of causes that have not been officially announced; the widespread assumption inolves breast cancer, for which she was treated a few years ago, but one rumor has it that she succumbed to metastatic liver cancer. Tributes are proliferating; I’ll point you to two: Patty Mitchell fondly remembers working with her way back when, and Craig Smith provides a nice assessment of her more recent work in the Free New Mexican. For a more comprehensive list, go here and scroll down the right-hand column.

DECLARATIONS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A few stray thoughts on Independence Day:
    » American composers have rarely been able to transform patriotic texts into lyrics that flow as beautifully when sung as they do when spoken. Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom (text by Thomas Jefferson) is something of an anomaly in that it handles the prose source quite musically. But David Diamond’s This Sacred Ground makes that most graceful of speeches, the Gettysberg Address, sound clumsy. And Howard Hanson doesn’t do much better with the poetry of Walt Whitman in his Song of Democracy. These composers are in good company; Handel and Stravinsky never quite got the hang of setting English idiomatically, either. (It counts as Americana rather than patriotism, but however gorgeous Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 may be, even it can’t quite match the musicality of James Agee’s original prose.)
    » Could someone please devise a Fourth of July orchestra concert that does not involve Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture? The piece has no relevance whatsoever to the holiday or any aspect of American history; it simply goes well with fireworks.
    » An angry listener once called to demand that we take A Prairie Home Companion off the air because host Garrison Keillor is “un-American.” It seems to me that the people who are quick to brand others as “un-American” are the citizens with the least understanding of what it truly means to be an American. Hint: It has little or nothing to do with patriotism, which, as you know, Dr. Johnson identified as “the last refuge of scoundrels.”
    » The State of Arizona requires its employees to sign a loyalty oath. What is this McCarthyite relic supposed to accomplish? Loyal Arizonans will resent that their government doesn’t trust them; the disloyal can simply lie.
    » Why do we make such a fuss over Independence Day, anyway? Any surly teenager can declare independence from his or her parents. The real test is coming up with a plan for life, and sticking to it, adapting the plan to unexpected developments through the years. Our great national holiday ought to be September 17: Constitution Day.

INCIVILITY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Perhaps it’s merely coincidental, but shortly after my intemperate post on radio consultants appeared, another blogger declared at her site, “Writing about an organization you work for in a negative way (I’m not talking anonymous blogs; those are another story all together and I'm not going into that for now) seems somewhat foolish.” I agree, and just in case there’s any misunderstanding, I wasn’t complaining about foolishness at KUAT radio, even though KUAZ did switch from jazz to news/talk a few years ago. There were very good reasons for that—like an absolute lack of jazz listeners in the daytime, no matter what the station did to appeal to them—so this was not a case of an idiot station manager kowtowing to doctrinaire consultants. For an example of that, I direct you to Washington, D.C., where there are two public radio stations broadcasting a nearly identical schedule of NPR news and talk programming.
    Immoderate remarks are nearly obligatory in the blogosphere, but I don’t understand why people believe they’ll get far in real life with incivility. My wife and my university professor friends often complain about surly, aggressively ignorant students; do these kids really expect good grades for being needlessly combative, and for openly resisting the education their parents are paying for? There’s a long, honorable tradition of intellectual contests between professors and students, but there’s nothing honorable about being lazy and spiteful and proudly stupid.
    Then there are people who demand customer service in the most obnoxious manner possible. As the Webmaster of Fanfare magazine, every day I get e-mails from subscribers requesting their passwords, or asking help with some aspect of the Web site (usually the subscription process) that has them befuddled. Most are polite, or at least neutral; some are clearly frustrated when they can’t make PayPal work, but they remain civil in their communication. Every once in a while, though, I hear from a real jerk. Here’s a mild example:

    I have never set up an account on line with Fanfare I know this because I subscribed the last time for 3-5 years (I cannot remember which) and paid by check. Until I received you card this week reminding me to renew, I was unaware that you had a web site. SO the [name withheld] you have registered already is obviously a different [name withheld] so what do I do now except:
    1. Stop subscribing
    2. Mail a check
    3. or...you tell me, I have wasted too much time on this lousy website already just trying to renew my magazine for one year.

RETURN OF THE SUCCUBI

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    The latest steaming pile of manure from the public radio system’s Radio Research Consortium is a series of cowpie reports collectively called Audience 2010, masterminded by audience researchers George Bailey (of Walrus Research) and David Giovannoni. The first thing you have to remember is that these guys and their employees are consultants, not radio practitioners, and consultants are usually people who have failed to succeed in a particular field (or have no experience in it), and now teach the techniques of failure to gullible, insecure professionals.
    Giovannoni, you may recall, is the man who has dedicated his life to making public radio sound more like commercial radio, shifting its mission away from serving unserved audiences toward padding the ratings books with listeners, simply to build the potential base of donors. Problem is, listeners don’t become donors unless they believe in what they’re listening to, and the techniques advocated by Giovannoni and company don’t create an audience of true believers. Despite his protests to the contrary, Giovannoni has spent the last several years belittling music programming and advocating the establishment of all-news/talk formats in public radio, which means that instead of doing something different, stations that follow his advice are now merely adding to the talk radio babble. Not much is setting these public radio stations apart from their commercial competitors now, except that unlike rabid right-wing talk radio hosts, NPR reporters drone, and have no audible commitment to what they’re doing.
    So now Bailey and Giovannoni announce that, after many, many hours of “research” and focus groups, they have discovered that public radio’s audience is declining because stations are “losing loyalty.” Well, surprise, surprise, surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say before he became Giovannoni’s intellectual model. When public radio stations start doing essentially the same thing commercial stations do, why should listeners remain loyal?
    In an interview in Current, Bailey and Giovannoni talk all around the issues, but explain absolutely nothing. The first sign that these are the wrong men for the job—as if Giovannoni’s inadequacy and hidden agendas weren’t evident as long ago as the late 1980s—is Giovannoni’s answer to the question, “How big a deal is this decline?”
    Says Giovannoni, “Each public broadcaster has to answer that question for him or her self. How much money do you need to run your station next year? That’s how big a deal it is. How long can you afford to subsidize your new national program? That’s how big a deal it is. How long can you stand to become increasingly less important to the American public? That’s how big a deal it is.”
    Then there’s this remark from Bailey: “In all my time working with public radio, I’ve always found people start to pay attention when there are financial consequences. And we set that up in the very first report—there’s going to be a gap between the station’s potential revenue from listeners and increasing expenses.”
    Their first priority: raising money. For Giovannoni and his acolytes, that’s the foundation of everything. Stations need lots and lots of listeners, so there will be a bigger pool of contributors to support programming that will lure lots and lots of listeners. If you don’t attract a substantial audience, you are “increasingly less important to the American public.” Just look at the numbers—they tell the whole story.
    Well, maybe that kind of thinking will get you through Statistics 101, but it can’t help you conceptualize and operate a vital resource like a public radio station. Using paint-by-numbers kits won’t make you a Rembrandt.
    When the interviewer for Current tries to ask if there might ever be important programming that needs to be aired even though it could lose the mass audience, the smug consultants merely laugh at him. In their simplistic formula, programming proves its quality by attracting a large audience. These guys simply cannot comprehend arguments to the contrary, because all they understand is statistics, not content, not mission, not interests that do not conform to what the masses will settle for.
    These men selectively use statistics to make assertions that conform to their mass-market perspective, and dismiss objections to their shoddy thinking because the objections aren’t supported by their interpretation of the numbers. Giovannoni is proud of his research methodology, but his thinking methodology has always been inadequate and circular. It’s appalling that station managers have ever taken him seriously.
    Go read the article for yourself, but don’t expect to glean any facts from it. The article is accompanied by unlabeled, meaningless graphs and much bluster from the consultants, but not a shred of real analysis—mainly because the consultants admit they couldn’t detect any clear patterns in their research. “You’re in trouble, and it’s up to each station manager to figure out why,” they tell us. What the hell are these guys getting paid for? They must be driven out before they complete the destruction of public radio that Giovannoni and Tom Church began 20 years ago. It’s too bad Giovannoni doesn’t have a heart we could drive a stake through.

THE BUZZ AT GASLIGHT

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Gaslight Theatre has revived one of its better, funnier, more coherent shows, and it makes for a fun night out:

    Holy leotard, Batman! Those evil geniuses at the Gaslight Theatre have taken your life's work and turned it into a musical parody called Gnatman! But even though the faithful Gaslight audience is cheering gnats instead of bats, the guano is still hitting the fan.
    I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course. Gaslight Theatre makes a point of never, ever aspiring to high art, and if you enter the house expecting to be enveloped by the sophisticated wit of G.B. Shaw, you will surely leave feeling that you need to scrape something off your shoe. But it's funny when somebody—somebody other than you—steps in something icky. So if Gnatman! is just a bit of a mess, it's a rollicking mess, one of Gaslight's most enjoyable shows in a long time.

CULTURE ON PHOENIX RADIO

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Here's a news item of interest to folks in Phoenix, rather than Tucson, but what I find unusual is that the program in question airs on the city's liberal talk-radio station rather than its classical-music outlet:

NEW WEEKLY RADIO SHOW ABOUT PHOENIX ARTS ON 1480AM
Ken LaFave, Cathy Droz to co-host on AirAmerica
June 29, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    “Two on the Aisle,” a weekly, one-hour radio show about the arts in Phoenix, will debut Sunday, Aug. 6, 2006, on AirAmerica Phoenix, 1480AM. The show, co-hosted by Ken LaFave and Cathy Droz, will air each Sunday at 7 p.m.

   LaFave and Droz will discuss music, theater, dance (and sometimes visual arts) events in the greater Phoenix area. LaFave, longtime former music and dance critic for The Arizona Republic, and currently a columnist for The Desert Advocate, will interview the actors, musicians, dancers, directors and  philanthropists who make the arts a thrilling component of life in Phoenix.

   “Two on the Aisle” is supported in part by Arizona State University Public Events.