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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
I'm making dumb beginner's mistakes this week. Because I didn't program one of the CD players the way I usually do just now, the disc kept playing after it should have been history, letting my golden voice have the airwaves to itself. Yesterday, when changing my mind about where to slip in a little bit of fill music, I wound up not setting up the discs in my customary sequence, and consequently played a couple of seconds of the wrong piece before switching to the music I'd actually announced.
Lack of focus, I guess, and it's probably going to get worse as the week drags on. Yesterday I had to record an interview with a member of the Tokyo Quartet during my air shift, then zipped out to the Tucson Weekly to take over while the top editor is on vacation. After that, I managed to get home long enough to shave before heading out again to teach an Elderhostel class on chamber music with UA professor Jay Rosenblatt. Today, from KUAT I go again to the Weekly, take time out for a doctor's appointment I scheduled six months ago, go back to the Weekly to put it to bed, then head downtown to give the pre-concert talk for tonight's Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival performance. Tomorrow, after KUAT, it's Part 2 of the Elderhostel class in the afternoon, then another pre-concert talk in the evening. Things may lighten up a little on Thursday, in the period after I MC the festival's kiddie concert in the morning and before the pilgrimage to the Tucson Symphony concert that night.
Right now, I'm thinking about junking the music schedule, putting on an 80-minute Mahler CD, and taking a little nap. Thinking, not planning.
radio-life,
March 7th 2006 at 7:13 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
One of the most striking aspects of violinist Benny Kim is his socks. Although he eschews the traditional musician's formal tails, he does stick to sober black and white wear in concert. But he also seems to have taken the advice of men's fashion maven Alan Flusser: If a gentleman wishes to make a personal statement even in the most formal setting, the best place to do it is in that dull little expanse at the ankle.
During yesterday's opening Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival concert, Benny clearly was wearing some riotously colorful socks, but not enough material was showing to make the pattern clear. After the concert, at a dinner for musicians and board members, my wife asked Benny to show her his socks. By then, he wasn't wearing any hosiery at all, but he admitted that for the day's concert he had chosen a Scooby-Doo motif. "Wednesday night," he promised, "it'll be the Tasmanian Devil!"
quodlibet,
March 6th 2006 at 9:03 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
In case you haven’t heard the underwriting spots that air every two or three hours, the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival gets rolling again this Sunday. I have a vested interest in its success, because I’m the vice-president of the organization that presents it. Lots of interesting elements this year, including the first Tucson appearances in some time of the Tokyo String Quartet, a brand-new work by the suddenly prominent composer Jennifer Higdon, a pipa player, recent music by Philip Glass (if the publisher, G.Schirmer, ever gets around to sending the score, which is six weeks late), and the delightful Mendelssohn Octet as the grand finale. I’ll be giving a talk in the hall 30 minutes before the start of each performance. I hope to see you there!
tucson-arts,
March 3rd 2006 at 6:46 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
Failing to have contributed anything to the latest Tucson Weekly, I point you instead to some Super Audio Compact Disc reviews of mine in the current issue of Fanfare. Poke around in the online archive now, before access becomes restricted to subscribers around the end of the month.
In this issue, I find favor with an SACD reissue of Paul Paray’s old Detroit Symphony recording of the Symphonie fantastique. It’s characteristic of the conductor: “Paray’s readings were usually a little breathless but unfailingly exciting, and speed did not come at the expense of phrasing, articulation, or pointed rhythm.” Also superb is Colin Davis’s new LSO Má Vlast, which “flows forward in a well paced, carefully balanced, beautifully played, pointedly phrased, altogether first-rate performance.”
Rather less to my liking are a surround-sound version of one of the big Shostakovich symphonies, and several audiophile organ discs. I say of Mark Wigglesworth’s Shostakovich Eighth, “This is a good performance, if rather English in certain respects not to the score’s best advantage.” Then there’s a Franck organ disc: “Roberta Gary plays Franck like a church organist rather than a concert artist. I don’t intend this to suggest any feebleness or lack of imagination; Franck himself, of course, was a church organist. What I mean is that this veteran organ professor at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music favors rather broad tempos, the better to emphasize the music’s harmonic atmosphere.” It’s perfectly fine, if you like that approach. I’m not so sure about Robert Clark’s two-disc Bach survey: “Robert Clark, organ professor at the University of Michigan 1964–1981 and then director of the organ program at Arizona State University until his retirement in 1998, is certainly no stranger to Bach. ... He is clearly capable of blending scholarship with musicality, yet on these two discs ... he often seems unduly cautious.” And given the competition, I think Christian Schmitt’s selection of Handel organ concertos is beside the point: “I wish Schmitt would cut loose a bit more; although his playing is up-to-date in terms of performance practice, it’s old-fashioned in its hushed respect for the score.”
Follow the links to read the complete reviews.
Classical Music,
March 2nd 2006 at 7:36 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
According to a little blurb in the Boston Globe (which I found via ArtsJournal.com), National Public Radio’s central directory of podcast versions of its programs has station managers quaking in their tasseled loafers: “Local [public radio] stations worry that contributions from listeners will dry up if their programming is distributed through NPR's uber-guide, NPR Podcast Directory.”
The managers fret that if NPR or individual producers put their programs online for you to download, free, whenever you want, you won't have any reason to tune in to the radio stations. And they’re right, if their stations are merely conduits for network and syndicated shows.
Radio consultant Paul Marszalek, in an article for the public broadcasting trade magazine Current, has done a good job of beginning to sort through the many issues related to offering on-demand podcasts of broadcast programs. Rather than repeat his work, I urge you to read what he has to say. His most provocative idea: “Stations could drive membership and revenue by making podcasts available as a free benefit to members while requiring small on-demand payments or subscription fees from nonmembers.”
He may be right, but my initial reaction is negative. Public broadcasting has always been dedicated to providing open access, to everyone, of high-quality programming. I’d think that access should remain open (meaning free) as new technologies evolve, including podcasting. Marszalek might point out that the programming will remain free on the broadcast stations; only the ultra-convenient podcast versions would be offered as premiums. It might not be too difficult to persuade me that this is a good idea.
Ultimately, of course, the only thing that will keep local stations on the air is local programming, geared specifically to the local audience. That includes music programming selected especially for community tastes and lifestyles, and news and talk shows that focus on community issues.
The KUAT and KUAZ stations are gradually getting into podcasting, although you have to go digging through our Web sites to figure that out. I’ll make it easy for you: Go here to find a year’s worth of KUAZ’s local public affairs program, Arizona Spotlight, hosted by Julie Bierach.
radio-life,
March 1st 2006 at 6:59 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
Being a classical radio announcer—a “Bach jock,” as astronomer Bill Hartmann calls me—is physically solitary, but it’s not exactly a lonely job. We get phone calls.
Most calls come from listeners who half-caught the title of something they liked and want more information … a spelling of a tricky foreign name, or specifics on the CD and where to buy it.
Some calls come from “regulars,” listeners who ring us up from time to time with a question or comment and want to chat for a couple of minutes. They become the telephone equivalent of pen pals, people we almost never meet but who become familiar to us through brief but repeated contact. Some “regulars” call all the announcers; others are more selective, avoiding announcers who’ve been curt if the call came at a bad time. (The worst time being during a short piece, or just before we’re about to go on the air.)
A couple of our “regulars” are predictible. One guy calls, usually on the weekend, to gripe about the obscure music. There’s a woman who used to ring us up to correct the pronunciation of languages from an obscure corner of Europe; she doesn’t mess with me, but I gather that she became so pesky that she drove one of our weekend announcers to, shall we say, strong words.
Speaking of “strong words,” we get surprisingly few obscene phone calls. I say “surprisingly few” not because I desperately wish there were more, but media people are easy targets for anonymous hostility and we seem not to get our fair share. The exceptions come as little shocks. One morning in the 1980s, announcer Nancy Fahringer shuffled into my office looking a little dazed, reporting that a man with a Southern accent had just growled into the phone, “F you, b*.” Except he didn’t speak in asterisks. Early one evening a few years earlier, a woman called me with some detailed physiological questions. I hope I answered to her satisfaction. Not obscene but still falling into the crank category was a call I got on my very first shift, Christmas Eve 1976. At about 10:45 that night, a young-sounding woman rang me up with great concern: “My father just lit a fire in the fireplace. Don’t you think that will keep Santa Claus from coming down the chimney?” I assured her, “Don’t worry. Santa wears an asbestos suit.”
The advent of Caller ID has probably caused most ordinary cranks to think twice about making calls that can be traced back to them. Some people, though, are too unbalanced to care. A few are troublesome only insofar as they take up our time. Many years ago, there was a woman who would call and chat on and on about family gossip that wasn’t actually very interesting. She was obviously lonely, so most of us would listen to her patiently, at least for a few minutes. Others, though, are simply looney. Twenty to 25 years ago we’d hear periodically from a woman who ended every call with the plea, “If you see my son, please tell him to come home.” Rumor had it that the son, an adult, had simply broken off contact with his mother, but then someone heard that he’d committed suicide, which increased our sympathy for the woman, even when she called after a news report on solar energy and declared, “I want equal time—I am the moon!” For a while we were broadcasting concerts by the U.S. Coast Guard Band, and something about that set her off; we heard that Coast Guard Intelligence was investigating her for sending what was interpreted as a threatening telegram to the bandmaster.
We try to be nice even to the lunatics, but there are limits. Yesterday, one person with a persecution complex called me four times in close succession, always within seconds of the end of a piece of music, and became incensed when I had to break away from her harangue to do my job on the air. At the end of her third call I suggested that she take her medication and call back when she felt better. She called back right away to declare that she didn’t take medication because it didn’t do any good and how dare I etc. Finally I told her not to call anymore and hung up on her. Whereupon she called our unfortunate station manager with an even longer harangue, after which said station manager came into the studio and gently suggested that I terminate such calls with more “values-neutral” language. He then returned to his office, muttering something about swallowing live frogs first thing in the morning.
Ah, radio … if only it were a one-way communication medium.
radio-life,
February 28th 2006 at 7:46 —
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