RADIO DIVERSITY

posted by James Reel

    Larry Harnisch, the Arizona Daily Star’s classical-music critic back in the early 1980s (who now works for a certain more serious paper covering Los Angeles), has this riff on my post about radio consultants who promulgate a generic sound across the country:

    Bravo ... I think Internet radio is a wonderful thing because it allows—in fact requires—classical stations around the world to compete on an equal footing and to distinguish themselves from one another. A listener can easily switch from one city's classical station to another with no loss in audio quality. From my point of view, it's a great option.
    [I] hate a certain overnight announcer (not on KUAT) who laughs at all her own jokes and has horrible faux foreign pronounciation. The ditsoid female announcer in question is Nimet Habachy, who works the overnight shift on WQXR. She is almost as annoying as empty-headed gab queen Bonnie Grice (formerly of KUSC and now at WDUQ), if such a thing is humanly possible.

    My own feeling is that people are tuning in to hear the music, not me. Announcers are necessary unless we're just presenting aural wallpaper, but really, who at 7:15 a.m. is really paying attention to anything I have to say? If I can do a sufficiently informative break in only 20 seconds, so much the better.

HOW TO KILL AN AMERICAN ORCHESTRA

posted by James Reel

    David Stabler in the Portland Oregonian promotes the utterly wrong-headed notion that the way to lure audiences back to spottily attended orchestra concerts is to stop being innovative, which is supposedly what caused the reactionaries to flee, and bring back the overpriced big-name soloists and paint-by-numbers 3B programming from which people were already drifing away. Worse, Stabler proposes that the Oregon Symphony and conductor Carlos Kalmar should run the audience-development effort like a political campaign:

What Kalmar should do at this point is pretend he's running for political office. Go on the stump. Energize his base. Win back alienated audiences. Convince apathetic citizens that something exciting and provocative might surprise them at the next concert.

    Sounds like a good idea at first (but what’s “exciting and provocative” about the same old celebrity soloists, and sight-reading Beethoven symphonies?). But read his elaboration on this call for action: “What the Oregon Symphony needs is a cutting-edge campaign, led by an ace political strategist. Think James Carville or Karl Rove for the Mozart set.” Stabler is advocating exactly the same lowest-common-denominator audience research that caused the Clinton administration to stall out, and the same practices by which today’s politicians carefully craft their “message” to tell people what they want to hear, whereupon they do something quite different once they’re elected.
    Perhaps the only way to win back the traditional audience is to engage a string of celebrity soloists to play the “Emperor” Concerto in ways that are completely indistinguishable from one another. If so, then it’s time to replace that audience.
    More sensible is this column by William Littler of the Toronto Star:

    Perhaps unfairly, Virgil Thomson used to characterize the standard symphonic repertoire as The Fifty Pieces. Although the active list may be longer now, mainstream musical organizations in general and symphony orchestras in particular still prefer—allegedly for box office reasons—to comfort their listeners with the familiar rather than challenge them with the new. …
    Does constant repetition of the acknowledged masterpieces have to crowd out the works of lesser composers with interesting things to say? Repetition tends to stifle curiosity and it is curiosity that needs to be encouraged in the listening public if our concert halls are to be more than museums to past greatness.

    Read the rest here.