SAME OLD TUNE

posted by James Reel

    Early Monday morning, the KUAT-FM music library database somehow got corrupted, and Steve Hahn, our music director, couldn’t print out any schedules until our computer guru cleansed the database of its impurities. So yesterday Steve scrounged up a printed music schedule from last November and had us use it again. That should explain to the two or three of you who follow our listings online or in the little printed thingy you get in the mail why what you heard didn’t correspond to what you read.
    This morning, as I drove to the studio, I contemplated scrapping whatever recycled schedule I might find today and playing one of the longer Mahler symphonies instead. But the computer guru had come through, Steve was able to generate a fresh schedule, and you were spared the Mahlerian excesses.
    There have been many long, dreary periods in KUAT-FM’s history when the music schedules were recycled as standard operating procedure. Ed Kupperstein initiated that practice when he was the music director in the 1970s. I think Kup produced about two months of completely fresh schedules when he first got the job, and then merely photocopied the old typed sheets, dropping in two or three new recordings each shift by slopping Wite-Out over an old entry and scratching in the new info by hand. Needless to say, after a couple of years the photocopies of photocopies were harder to read than hundred-year-old gravestones, and the programming was similarly hard, dry, featureless and boring.
    When I succeeded Kup as music director, I programmed every day fresh, but my own successor, Richard Hetland, no doubt with the blessings of Kup (who had moved up the management ladder), resumed the recycling practice. When I returned to announcing here a couple of years ago, I noticed with alarm that Richard’s successor, Steve, was also into reruns. He felt a bit helpless, treading water during a very long transition from one computer system to another. The repetition is what finally drove morning announcer Wayne Angerame away screaming, opening the morning slot for me. When the new computer system was finally in place—about a month after Wayne’s escape—Steve began generating a fresh schedule every day.
    Steve maintains that listeners aren’t likely to notice repetition, and boredom is a problem limited to the announcers, not the audience. I disagree. Back when I was driving from home to the Arizona Daily Star at the same time every day—this was during the Richard Hetland era—I knew that about every two months, at exactly the same time, I’d hear exactly the same recording of the same Schubert symphony, or the same Sharon Isbin recording of the same Leo Brower guitar piece. And, at exactly that time, I’d turn off the radio in exasperation. In broadcasting, consistency is good, but predictability is an audience-killer.