posted by James Reel
The latest issue of Fanfare includes, among many other things, my review of a new Chandos recording of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 2, which earned its composer the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. It’s a 2000 expansion of Corigliano’s 1996 String Quartet, a version that takes full advantage of string-orchestra sonorities and never hints at its chamber-music origins. The symphony is coupled with a compelling suite for violin and orchestra from Corigliano’s score for The Red Violin, and you can read my full review here.
Classical Music,
August 30th 2005 at 8:26 —
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posted by James Reel
In October, we’ll broadcast a 13-week series drawn from the 2004-2005 Arizona Friends of Chamber Music season. Not only am I the vice-president of that organization, but I’m also the producer and host of the radio series. Recently I’ve been writing and recording the scripts for the shows, and that requires a completely different mindset from the writing I do every day for print and Web sites.
When you write for speakers rather than readers, the first thing you need to to is keep the sentences pretty short, so the speaker doesn’t run out of breath or have to pause awkwardly in the middle of some thought. (A script sentence shouldn’t get any longer than that last sentence, and those particular 40 words can be sustained only because of the two commas providing natural breath pauses.) Then, you have to remember that sentence structures and turns of phrase that look sophisticated and elegant on the page may become hopelessly clumsy when spoken. Back in the mid 1980s, I visited KUSC in Los Angeles during a conference of radio music directors, and met Gail Eichenthal, the host of the Los Angeles Philharmonic broadcasts. What I remember best about that encounter is that Eichenthal vowed to make her own scripts simpler and more natural sounding. No more starting sentences with clauses like, “Born in 1756, Mozart …” That’s not how people talk, and if we say things like that on the air we’ll sound stilted and phony. (I did notice, though, that over the next several months Eichenthal was still starting sentences that way. “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley,” as I would probably not try to say on the radio, let alone in person.)
You’ll notice that a lot of us suddenly sound stilted and phony when we read underwriting announcements, which are written by people who don’t have to deliver them on the air, and consequently stuff them with long sentences as well as sentence fragments and oddly placed modifying phrases and clauses. If you don’t have to read copy out loud, repeatedly, you just don’t think about these things. But we have to think about them if we’re going to sit here and impersonate normal folks.
It’s been a long time since classical radio announcers practiced the old-school, black-tie formality of 1940s and ’50s figures like Ben Grauer (who was actually one of the less tight-sphinctered announcers of his day). Now we’re supposed to imagine ourselves to be ordinary people speaking enthusiastically, knowledgeably (but never condescendingly) and directly to one listener at a time. “Ordinary,” “enthusiastically” and “knowledgeably” require varying degrees of imagination depending on who’s on the air, but it’s something to strive for—precisely so we don’t sound like we’re striving for anything, just relaxing and sharing music with a friend.
radio-life,
August 30th 2005 at 7:58 —
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