THE PETER PRINCIPLE IN ACTION

posted by James Reel

As of today, I am officially Arizona Public Media’s Classical Music Director. That means I’m basically getting a title, an office and a raise for doing just a little more than the work I’ve been doing for the past several months, when our music coordinator (that was the title of a job that no longer exists) was laid off.

So besides being on the air live from 6 a.m. to noon and recorded from 4 to 7 p.m. on weekdays, and continuing to host the recorded Community Concerts series aired Thursday nights at 9 and Sunday afternoons at 3, I’m also the sole person (since the recent departure of Bill Luckhardt) to evaluate CDs for the library, catalog them, and schedule the music using a program called Music Master. In theory, you press a button and Music Master does all the programming for you, but it is hardly that simple.

First, you have to tell the software how you want it to do things. First, each item in the database has been assigned to a specific category—“gems” for small, popular pieces; “core chamber and solo”; “uncategorized long” (the home of Glazunov symphonies, for example; and so forth. Then, a grid has been established for each hour of the day. For example, the grid that’s used at 6 a.m. on Mondays and Fridays, 7 a.m. on Tuesdays and 8 a.m. on Thursdays starts with a “gem,” moves on to a core medium-length work, continues with a “hit melody” (like a gem, only a little longer), shifts to an uncategorized short piece, and ends with something from the Classical era. When I press the magic button, Music Master is supposed to plug an appropriate piece into each of those positions, following a certain set of complicated rules.

I didn’t like a lot of the rules that were in place, because they resulted in certain obscure pieces getting programmed a lot more often than many more popular items; furthermore, some compositions found their way onto the schedule again and again, while certain others rarely or never got scheduled. In the past few years, for example, Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto went four or five months between airings, while the First Brandenburg was on every month.

Also, Music Master frequently couldn’t find a piece to fit a certain slot, because it would have to break too many rules, and also because it was programmed to give up after sifting through only half the items in many of the categories. So Bill and I would have to go in and edit the schedules, filling the blanks, moving inappropriate things out of the early hours, and so on.

Last week, I spent a lot of my time adjusting the grids, tweaking the rules, liberalizing some restrictions and tightening others, moving pieces from one category to another, even creating an entirely new category and plugging it into the grid.

If all goes well when I launch the scheduler for January (we’re already programmed through the end of December), a better variety of pieces will fill the schedule, and I’ll have to to a lot less editing. On the other hand, Music Master may just give up in despair and leave most of the dirty work to me. We’ll see. As for you, I doubt that you’ll notice significant differences, other than perhaps the overture to Paderewski’s obscure opera Manru will no longer be played more often than Dukas’ popular The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I’ll let you know how it’s going about a month from now.