Writes blogger Pliable of "On and Overgrown Path," "It is my hope that in 2010 we will again start to measure classical music by its ability to sway, to inspire, to change and to comfort, as well as by its audience size." Indeed. See his full post here.
This Sunday, I'll be giving the pre-performance talk for Chamber Music Plus' presentation "A Stopped Clock: From Brahms To Bloomsbury." The subject will be English composer, conductor and women's rights activist Ethel Smyth, about whom I know about two minutes of material that will have to be spun out to fill a 20-minute chat. I'd better start hitting the books.
The talk begins at 2:30 this Sunday at the Berger Performing Arts Center; the performance, featuring Broadway actress Jenny Sterlin and new Tucson Symphony concertmaster Aaron Boyd, starts at 3. Even if you don't care about my talk, you'd better get there early, because most of the audience does, and the parking lot is small.
No blog posts in about two weeks ... sorry for that. It's been busy around here, getting a big batch of new releases cataloged before generating the January schedules, and putting together several special programs for Christmas Day in addition to the usual Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concerts each week. Whew! You can find a rundown of all our KUAT-FM holiday programming here.
In lieu of posting something original right now--I'm still trying to fix some database management issues that cropped up when I cranked out the January schedule, and investigating why the computer wants to play Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony every eight days--here's a repost of something from a few years ago, a coyote Christmas carol I wrote to be sung to the tune of "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen":
God bless you, hairy cattlemen,
And hirsute shepherds, too.
More meager would our mealtime be
Without the likes of you,
Who've introduced into our realm
That tempting baa and moo.
Oh, thank goodness for human fools who keep
Cattle and sheep.
All we ask is:
Please don't shoot us from your Jeep.
For the past couple of days, sometimes it’s sounded like a lot of CDs have been mistracking—“skipping”—as have, strangely, our spoken announcements. The problem, as it turns out, has nothing to do with bad CDs, stuttering announcers or anything else originating in the control room. It’s about a malfunction along the path the signal takes from the studio to the transmitter.
Our studio is on the University of Arizona campus. Our transmitter is several miles away, atop Mt. Bigelow in the Catalinas. In olden times, to get the audio out of the control room and up to a transmitter some distance away, radio stations had to use telephone lines—the frequency range was slightly better than the lines that fed into your home phone, but not much, and that’s why the audio quality on CD reissues of some old radio broadcasts (like those of Pierre Monteux with the San Francisco Symphony) is so poor, even by the standards of the 1940s and ’50s. In the 1970s, most of those phone lines were replaced by satellite transmission for national and international coverage, and microwave transmitters/receivers at the local level. Yes, microwaves, the same technology that helps you reheat your coffee in the morning. Now, these are signals that are beamed from one specific point to another (the studio to the transmitter site), and you cannot pick them up on your radio. Once the signal gets out of our signal and is delivered by microwave to the transmitter, then it’s transformed into a different kind of radio wave that’s beamed out in a wide pattern from an antenna atop the transmitter tower, and that’s something you can pick up on your home or car radio.
It’s nice to have a transmitter on a mountaintop, because that means broad coverage in the valley below. But it’s not so nice in the summer, when lightning strikes frequently knock the signal out, and it’s especially troublesome in the winter, when ice builds up on the antenna. If the ice gets too thick, the transmitter will automatically lower its output power to compensate for reflected power under the ice. That means a weaker signal to you.
And there’s another problem: When ice builds up, our microwave studio-transmitter link is, in the official phrase, “susceptible to interruptions.” In other words, it cuts out or sounds like hell—as you’ve heard over the past couple of days. The engineers seem to have things under control at the moment, but Mt. Bigelow is a lot colder and wetter than down here where we live. Expect more trouble over the next three months.
Of course, you can avoid all this by listening to us online.
Pianist Jeremy Denk has been an even more negligent blogger than I have recently, but he’s back now with a very nice appreciation of Chopin as a composer of much more than pretty background music for people uninterested in close listening. Read it here.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
