ARTICLE ONE

posted by James Reel

    The announcers at C24 out of Minnesota (a service known to you as Music Through the Night) are generally quite fine, but some of their tics and habits annoy me to no end. Case in point: As I was driving in this morning, John Zech introduced “the Overture in the Italian Style by Schubert.” Well, Schubert wrote two overtures in the Italian style, so you can’t describe this one as “the.”
    The current philosophy of classical announcing holds that you should keep technical trivia (keys, opus numbers and so forth) to a minimum so you don’t intimidate or confuse listeners, but calling one of several similar pieces “the” is a confusion and a serious disservice to listeners. What if somebody liked this Schubert piece and wanted to buy a recording? The overtures aren’t often recorded together, so the innocent buyer looking for “the” Overture in the Italian Style has a fifty-fifty chance of spending money on the wrong piece.
    Related rule of thumb: Never use “the” in conjunction with anything by Vivaldi. Whatever it is, he probably wrote 10 more in the same key.