THIS IS A RECORDING

posted by James Reel

    We have a shortage of relief announcers here at KUAT-FM, or at least a shortage of relief announcers willing to work on holidays, when we full-timers could actually use some relief. Hey, my first two shifts as a relief announcer here in 1976 were Christmas Eve and Christmas afternoon; that’s the sort of scheduling you sign up for when you’re a fill-in employee. But these days we just can’t seem to find qualified people who’ll take the undesirable shifts. So afternoon guy David Harrington and I are putting in some extra hours over the Thanksgiving break, in exchange for either money or comp time to be taken at a later date.
    Unlike David, I managed to get Thanksgiving Day itself off, but I agreed, besides working today, which is a university holiday, to come in Sunday morning as well. Then I had a brilliant idea: Why not record the entire shift ahead of time, and have it played back automatically, the way we do the concert programs in the evening? All the music and my announcements will be stored in hour-long chunks on a computer hard drive, and the computer will be programmed to play the various elements back on a particular schedule. I had to take a crash course in modern computerized audio editing—I haven’t done this sort of thing since the days of razor blades and splicing tape—but the process isn’t difficult, once you get the blasted permissions to save the blasted files where they belong. Ah, computer security; access would probably have been easier if I were a hacker rather than a staffer.
    Anyway, if you hear me when you wake up on Sunday morning, don’t panic and think that it’s Monday already. And don’t bother to call me here at KUAT, because I won’t be here, even though my voice will be. If you have a question about the music, wait until the next guy comes in at 11. Enjoy the weekend; I plan to.

DEAD IN THE WATER

posted by James Reel

    In the latest issue of the Tucson Weekly, I pass judgment on Live Theatre Workshop’s production of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Nile:

    Christie seems to be a reliable money-maker for Live Theatre Workshop, and if the company is dusting off one of her quaint mysteries yet again, that's just fine if it will set LTW up financially to do something chancier later this season, notably Toni Press-Coffman's Holy Spirit on Grand Avenue. But here we are, at the moment, with Dame Agatha and her ship of fools, and it's worth boarding the old boat even though director Delani Cody makes a couple of serious miscalculations in the second half.
    The basic problem: How seriously are we to take Agatha Christie these days? She did have the good sense to work some humor into her characters, but she also fell back onto a number of unintentionally melodramatic little mystery conventions that seemed silly and predictable even as she was helping to invent them. So when a company like Live Theatre Workshop mounts a 60-year-old play like Murder on the Nile, should it be played straight, or should it be sent up?

    Chuck Graham in the Citizen was kinder to the show than I am; Kathy Allen in the Star absolutely panned it. I’m in the middle, more or less, but if I were to lean more acutely in direction or the other, it would be toward Kathy’s side. You can read my complete review here.

DENK DONE IT

posted by James Reel

    Film noir meets OJ pseudo-confession in pianist Jeremy Denk’s latest post, wherin he relates his role in the death of Classical Music. It all starts with Denk mulling over the past in a seedy bar:

You see, Classical Music was my childhood sweetheart. Even in the sixth grade, when I was King of the Nerds, we would dine on cafeteria pizza and tater tots and talk of Opus Numbers. We would go to the Multiplex and sniff at John Williams and hold hands across dimly lit tables at 2 am at the Village Inn and stay up all night inventing Developments and Recapping with green chile and eggs in the morning. Classical Music was more than love. She was a sea in which my life was drowned. But: not even a glance. Classical brushed right by. I got up to say hello, but... Jazz grabbed my shoulder. "Don't do it man." His voice was a gravelly flatted seventh. "It's gone, just let it go. I hear Classical's got somethin' goin' with World Music, and it's pretty intense."

    Follow the story to its conclusion, and you’ll learn the one think Schenkerian analysis is good for. Read the whole thing here.