NPR BRACKET MADNESS

posted by James Reel

Since I never developed an interest in following team sports, March Madness and the attendant brackets and office pools are beyond my experience, but there is one bracket scheme I can develop some enthusiasm for. KPCC in Southern California has devised a poll it calls NPR Bracket Madness, pitting public radio programs against each other, some advancing and others falling by the wayside through listener balloting. At this writing they're down to the final eight, with perhaps the most interesting opposition being Talk of the Nation against Fresh Air. You don't have to listen to KPCC to participate; cast your ballot here. I wonder how things would shake out if we pitted classical composers against each other ...

SPRING IS ON THE AIR

posted by James Reel

Our library database holds 171 items associated with the keyword "spring." Of course, some of those are duplicates of popular pieces like Strauss' Voices of Spring and Schumann's "Spring" Symphony, but even so, spring has inspired composers more than any other season. With Wednesday, March 20 bringing with it the new season, we'll devote most of the day on Classical 90.5 to springtime music, beginning appropriately enough with The First Day of Spring by Leroy Anderson, and continuing with seasonal contributions by the likes of Delius, Sibelius, Rachmaninov, Copland, Piazzolla, Grieg, Haydn, Verdi, Respighi, Stravinsky, Vivaldi, and many, many other composers. So many, in fact, that we have an overflow of spring music, and we'll be devoting the first three hours or so of our Thursday schedule to vernal music as well. You can find the complete Wednesday schedule here--scroll down past the KUAZ program grid for the classical music listings--and the Thursday schedule here.

One reason we have "leftover" spring pieces is that on Wednesday we're also dropping into the schedule several short items to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ernesto Nazareth, a composer of many breezy piano pieces in various Latin American styles; think of him as the Brazilian Scott Joplin, and you'll have an idea of what his music is like--not at all ragtime, but piano miniatures in the popular dance styles of the composer's time and place.

By the way, in case you're wondering, we have 145 "summer" pieces in the music library, 66 "autumn" items, and 90 "winter" pieces. If it weren't for all those multiple recordings of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," we'd have far fewer entries under each category.

TWEETS AS THE GERMS OF REVIEWS?

posted by James Reel

Here is an interesting thought piece on the (so far limited) trend of encouraging audience members to tweet during performances. Author Tom Jacobs frames the basic question well: "Who, really, is more engaged? Is it the audience member holding a screen and responding to the action with his thumbs, or the one sitting silently in the dark with her eyes glued to the stage?" If you're not patient enough to read the entire article, I'll reveal that Jacobs finds an expert on each side of the issue, so you'll have to draw your own conclusions.

It occurs to me that tweeting can be rather like what I did during my years as a music and theater critic. Instead of zapping out 140-character observations to a handful of Twitter followers, I would jot down notes that within a few hours I would incorporate into a formal review for publication. Of course there are huge differences, in terms of depth and length, between tweets and reviews, but the common ground is the act of jotting down the note. Some of my colleagues would take page after page of notes; I tended to fill up only whatever white space I could find on the printed program with a few phrases. I would write down some idea as it came to me, so I could get it out of my head and continue to focus on the performance. If I spent too much time trying to come up with some nifty metaphor on the spot, that's what I'd wind up concentrating on, rather than the performers on stage. So note-taking for me was a quick distillation of something I'd noticed through close focus on the performance, and something to which I devoted as little time as possible; the sorting-out would come later, when I'd have more time (and fewer distractions) for reflection and mental organization.

Tweeting during a performance could serve the same function ... or it could be just another way for an individual to center the event on his own shallow moment-to-moment reactions. When you go to a performance, is the occasion about the art, or is it about you? That's a question that can be asked about critics as well as about Twitter users.