ONE STEP FORWARD...

posted by James Reel

    A couple of weeks ago, the KUAT engineers installed some new digital transmitter equipment. Very nice, except that now, for technical reasons I won’t go into here, we’re operating on a delay. In other words, what you hear through your speakers is something I did a full eight seconds ago. That shouldn’t make any difference to you, but it can sure foul things up here at the radio-station end.
    This morning, at 06:15:00, I gave the cue to our station manager in one of the studios downstairs to begin the first break in our fall membership campaign. This has always worked in the past, but not this time. The people down in Membership Central are listening to the air signal, not a direct audio feed from my control room. That means John didn’t hear my cue until eight seconds after I actually gave it. Which means we had eight seconds of dead air. Then John started talking, but didn’t hear himself, and figured, perhaps, that I hadn’t brought up his microphone on my control board, or that there was some other problem. So he paused. And then when he heard himself eight seconds after he'd first opened his mouth, he figured out what the problem was and got the break started.
    David Close, the local Morning Edition host next door at KUAZ, was monitoring the snafu, made a couple of phone calls and got a couple of engineers out of bed. We’d be running through several more breaks before anybody could get to our studios, so we needed a quick if temporary fix.
    First idea: I’d use the intercom and tell John when I’d be throwing to him, down to the second. Well, I guess that’s the professional way to do it, adhere to a schedule. But the music doesn’t always precisely fit its confines, so the next idea was for John to use one of the phones in Membership Central, call me here in the studio, and have me put the receiver down on the counter in front of me so he could hear over the phone what I was doing live. Which would’ve been a swell idea had he not kept getting a busy signal when he tried to call me. (I wasn’t using the phone, honest!)
    During the third break, I got a call from an engineer who, without leaving the comfort of his Poet’s Corner home, had by remote control switched some gizmo at the transmitter high atop Mt. Bigelow and eliminated the eight-second delay. Now things are back to normal. Who says classical radio is boring? (Of course, you may think that if this passes for excitement around here, classical radio really is boring.)

FOLLOW THE MONEY

posted by James Reel

    The Washington Post informs us:

    A new report from the National Endowment for the Arts blasts public radio, saying it fails to fulfill its obligation to provide music that commercial stations won't touch. The NEA says public radio—once dominated by classical, jazz and other minority forms of music—is retreating ever further from that mission, choosing to focus on news and talk.
    National Public Radio pleads guilty to using its new resources to build a stronger news operation, but rejects the NEA's notion that public radio is abandoning its cultural mission. Rather, NPR maintains, it plans to use the Web and other emerging technologies to introduce a new generation of listeners to music you can't hear on the radio.

    Well, NPR is simply following the money, in more ways than one. The widow of the founder of McDonald’s bequeathed it a huge chunk of change—200 million served—specifically for news programming. Had some benefactor ponied up a similar amount for music, no doubt NPR’s priorities would be different.
    KUAT-FM dropped its NPR affiliation back in the 1980s, and it’s hardly been missed. The most interesting classical-music programs have for years come from other sources, especially American Public Media. Whatever NPR is planning to do with new technology will be playing catch-up with APR, the BBC and several other content providers around the world.
    If you read down into the Washington Post article, you’ll find this:

    The report says there's no shortage of listeners for classical programming. Classical listeners tend to spend more time listening to their public stations than news listeners devote to their stations, according to a public radio study quoted in the NEA report. But because news listeners tend to give stations larger gifts, many stations have dumped the classics.

    Aha. This is hardly a secret, but it’s something that few public-radio managers care to talk about within earshot of their listeners. Now you know, in case you hadn’t already guessed the truth. You can read the full Washington Post article here. I haven’t been able to find the NEA report itself online.

BACK TO THE BOARDS

posted by James Reel

    It’s Thursday, and you know the drill: Here's your chance to peruse my punditry in the Tucson Weekly. First, there’s a review of a fascinating if flawed show at Beowulf Alley:

    Fiction, indeed, is the title of the Steven Dietz play now onstage at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company. Dietz's work usually winds up at Arizona Theatre Company, where it has always made a mixed impression. His adaptations (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Over the Moon) draw out the more ludicrous and melodramatic elements of the source material, and they almost seem like spoofs, but spoofs without the courage to mock. His original plays (Rocket Man, Private Eyes) are more successful, but Dietz sometimes favors cleverness over content. Make no mistake, Dietz is very clever in terms of theatrical sleight of hand, but too often, he leaves his potentially rich characters straining to break out of his complicated outlines.
    Fiction is one of his most successful efforts yet produced in Tucson, but even in this 2002 work, he sometimes lets his characters down. Michael and Linda are baby boomer intellectuals who revel in their own intelligence, wit, character flaws and cultural prejudices. ("No bond is greater," says one, "than that of ecstatically shared hatreds.") In short, they are great fun to watch, but Dietz--abetted by the otherwise spot-on director Jennifer Bazzell and actors Leanne Whitewolf Charlton and Richard Ragsdale--can't summon the fortitude to make them thoroughly loathsome.

    Also, a preview of something I’ll review next week:

    Give Kevin Johnson a few more years, and he'll likely produce the complete works of William Finn. In the recent past, his Arizona Onstage Productions has presented Finn's musicals Falsettoland and A New Brain. There's plenty more Finn out there, including further Falsettos material and the recent hit The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. But for now, Johnson has something more modest in mind: a mere song cycle, taking as its subjects loss and life thereafter.
    Elegies--Looking Up is the almost oxymoronic title of the set, requiring five singers and a piano but, Johnson promises, no stools and nobody dressed in black, the clichés of similar plotless musical-theater revues.
    "It's a fully staged show," Johnson insists, "a combination of a song cycle and a theater piece. There's not a direct story line, but you get to know the characters in the show, and they end up interacting in the songs."

    And, finally, a review of something I previewed last week:

    Ken Tesoriere would like to introduce us to some women he knows. I'm not sure that he enjoys their company, but they haunt him. They are troubled women all, and perhaps too self-aware for their own good.
    Tesoriere wants us to meet them, but he doesn't necessarily want us to help them. He just craves some company as a psychological voyeur.
    Playwright and director Tesoriere has revived Coyote Ramblers Performing Artists, last seen here in the 1990s, and his first mainstage production upon his return to Tucson is called American Album, Volume One (Women on the Verge). It's an album in the sense that these are living snapshots presented for our inspection with no commentary or context beyond what we can guess from the pictures themselves. They are three short plays, each about a woman with deep, deep problems.

LISTENING VS. HEARING

posted by James Reel

    Blogger Patricia Mitchell muses on the news item I linked to earlier about how people seem far more willing to listen to classical music in their cars than in the concert hall:

I would like their definition of "listening" because I suspect listening in a car isn't the same as listening at a concert, or at home when one puts in a CD, sits down, and does nothing but listen. I really don't think many people know how to listen these days. But I'm mean that way.

    She has an excellent point. At a classical concert, you’re expected to sit down, shut up, and pay attention, and I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not prepared to do that, you can get your classical kicks in many other ways. No need to turn every concert into a party. But neither can we expect real attentiveness from people who hear music in more casual, distracting settings.
    And that, responding to a little question Patty poses about my post, is why I don’t think it’s an absolutely horrible thing that there’s so little new music on classical radio. Much of it just doesn’t work on the air; a lot of it isn’t even effective on CD if you’re listening at home. Some is quite complex, and some is simply too quiet to muscle its way past the many distractions of home and car. It demands to be heard in concert. On the other hand, there’s a lot of music that’s been composed in the past, say, 20 years or so that would work splendidly on the radio, because it has some sort of immediacy that can grab your attention without the result of that attention being a desire to turn off the radio.
    Still, there are listeners (or should they be called hearers?) out there who complain bitterly when we play anything post-Brahms. Some people even complain about Samuel Barber, who’s almost as Romantic as you can get in a 20th-century idiom, even in his thornier works like his Piano Concerto and Piano Sonata. As Patty, an oboist, might point out, Barber was capable of writing some marvelously romantic melodies, and he assigned some of his greatest effusions for the oboe; consider his School for Scandal Overture, and the slow movements of his Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 1. (If Patty has any objection to Barber’s Piano Concerto, I suspect it’s that the traitor gave the big tune in the slow movement to the flute.)

ORCHESTRA IN A BOX

posted by James Reel

    Via Artsjournal.com, here’s a link to a notice of a Knight Foundation study showing that all the trendoid things orchestras have been doing to lure new audiences are basically worthless. Note this:

    The report, which is based on both the experiences of participating orchestras and audience research in their communities, isn't all negative. It asserts, for example, that nearly 60% of adults said they had some interest in classical music, and nearly a third said it was part of their lives on some regular basis. Of that 60%, however, fewer than 5% actually patronized their local symphonies. (Even fewer, the research shows, buy the tickets, make the decision to attend, or subscribe--but let's not get bleaker than necessary.)
    So how are those interested adults—the broadest target audience—getting their classical music? More than half of them said they listened to it "at least several times a month" on the radio. They also own classical CDs—16, on average. The single most popular venue for listening is the car, then the home. It's not the concert hall.

    That’s good news for those of us in the radio biz. And, I hate to say it, but we could even get along fine if all the orchestras in the world shut down tomorrow. There are literally thousands of superb performances available on compact disc of the standard repertory and far, far beyond. Now, if orchestras did shut down, we’d have no way of playing new orchestal music on the air, but very few stations do that to any significant degree, so I doubt that anyone would notice. Not that I’m saying that’s a good thing; it’s just the way it is.

SUITE SUCCESS

posted by James Reel

    My cover story for the current issue of Strings magazine is all about Bach’s suites for solo cello. I myself don’t have much to say on the subject; I left that to the cellists I interviewed: Yo-Yo Ma, Jian Wang, Maria Kliegel and Suren Bagratuni, with some comments cribbed from Janos Starker’s liner notes for one of his recordings. (He didn’t want to be interviewed about Bach yet again, and told me to lift something he’d already written during the 60-some years he’s been involved with Bach.) The editor said he was quite pleased with the way this piece turned out (even though I delivered it six months late), and no wonder. It’s exactly what he asked me to do in the first place. I put the same set of questions, most of them suggested by the editor, to each of the cellists, extracted the most colorful answers, added a few transitions and a little background information, and there you have it. More like typing than music journalism, really; the interviewees did all the work. You can find out what they have to say about Bach if you follow this link.