KNOW-IT-ALMOST

posted by James Reel

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.

HOLIDAY ENTERTAINMENT

posted by James Reel

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.

SICK SIGNAL

posted by James Reel

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.

CHOPIN FOR NON-DUMMIES

posted by James Reel

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.

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.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LIONA BOYD?

posted by James Reel

The Canadian guitarist Liona Boyd was hot stuff, in more ways than one, back in the 1980s, but perhaps she suffered from over-exposure (quite literally, in the case of the translucent toga she wore on one album cover). Gradually she drifted out of the public consciousness, and stopped performing altogether in 2003. Partly that was due to an incurable case of focal dystonia, and partly it was caused by issues in her private life. Well, she’s back, but not as a classical guitarist; she has reinvented herself as a singer-songwriter. You can read all about her here. We have exactly one old Liona Boyd CD in the KUAT-FM library, which we sample with some regularity, but it doesn’t sound like we’ll be adding her new work to the classical collection.