Musician Barry Brake writes to us from San Antonio, Texas:

“Just this year, Texas Public Radio’s KPAC San Antonio has started a new classical show, 1–3pm weekdays, called Classical Connections, that features music and musicians from San Antonio, the Hill Country, and Texas, as well as standard fare from our massive classical library. Visiting musicians, local stars, up-and-comers, directors, and composers drop by to talk. Often there are live on-air performances. We’d love to be listed on your page! Thanks for doing what you do . . . “

So I popped into the Classical Connections site and instantly I was enjoying this fantastic piece by Ethan Wickman to celebrate San Antonio’s Tricentennial. It is performed by the SOLI Chamber Ensemble.

Have a listen:

Other shows focus on the interplay between San Antonio musicians and the city’s museums and a piece composed in memory of the San Antonio Symphony’s principal flutist, who died at the young age of 51.

Texas, it should be noted, is an astoundingly wonderful place for classical music. Truckloads of people play it brilliantly at very affordable ticket prices, up and down the state. Everybody (or at least lots of people) knows that it is where Van Cliburn helped thaw the Cold War by winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958.

Many less people know that San Antonio is where the brilliant pianist and pedagogue Lucy Hickenlooper (who changed her name to Olga Samaroff) was born and raised. Samaroff famously married the conductor Leopold Stokowski and basically managed his career through the 19-tens and teens. Eventually she got sick of Stokowski’s adultery and dumped the guy in 1923. Samaroff was the first American pianist to perform all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, but after an arm injury she turned to teaching. Ensconced at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, she cranked out the next generation of wunderkinds, including William Kapel, Eugene List, Rosalyn Tureck, and Alexis Weissenberg (whose compositional arrangements of the songs of Charles Trenet I heard the other night played at the San Francisco Symphony).

If you want to know more about Samaroff, you’ve got to watch my friend Wendy Slick’s wonderful documentary about her life. Plus, here is a website dedicated to her work and recordings.

The post When it comes to classical music (and classical radio), don’t mess with (San Antonio) Texas appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Variety has a wonderful profile of Los Angeles radio pioneer Saul Levine, age 92, who launched his first classical music station KBCA-FM almost 60 years ago. Author Roy Trakin obviously had fun writing the piece:

Like Daniel-Day Lewis in “There Must Be Blood,” Levine bulldozed the land atop Mt. Wilson –which he leased from the U.S. Forest Service for $350 a year — driving the tractor himself. He acquired a transmitter from a defunct Michigan station for $1,500, had an antenna crafted out of a lead pipe, and bartered commercial time on the yet-to-air station for a $300 flag pole so they could broadcast. He even built a makeshift studio on the site itself, where an eccentric Seven-Day Adventist-turned-engineer who literally lived off the land kept the station on for as close to around the clock as humanly possible.

Since then Levine has operated classical, jazz, and even country music stations. I am most familiar with his K-MOZART outlet, available at FM 105.1, via HD, and online. He predicts that terrestrial radio will last another “15 to 20 years.”

“It’s free, it’s local, it’s live,” Levine told Variety, “and it’s the only medium that deals with your community.”

Levine’s Mt. Wilson Broadcasters company is a not infrequent correspondent with the Federal Communications Commission. In this 2017 broadside, he urged the FCC not to accept proposals that would lead to further consolidation on the AM/FM bands, referring specifically to recommendations coming from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

Levine writes:

“Separate and apart from failing to provide documentation in support of the alleged adverse impact on competition, the NAB filings ignore the multiple ‘downsides’ resulting from group owner consolidation,

1. less diversity of viewpoint ownership (evidenced by substantially fewer radio owners- the 39% decline in radio ownership between 1996 and 2006), which will be further reduced if caps are eliminated, increased or maintained at the existing limits;

2. less meaningful localism (evidenced by out-of-market centrally located studios serving distant designated areas, Appendix III, Mt. Wilson Addendum);

3. less competition between group owners and independent radio owners (evidenced by the decline in radio ownership). While the number of stations remain relatively constant, the number of radio owners consistently is reduced – the ultimate result, less competition, less diversity;

4. additional layoffs resulting from consolidation.”

When not giving the FCC a piece of his mind, Levine has been dating via match.com, according to the Variety article. “There was one I liked, but she turned out to be a little meshugge,” he told Trakin. “She was attractive and intelligent, but she’s converted to Hinduism and wanted me to also. Then I found out she was spiking my meals with herbs. She kept telling me Big Pharma’s killing us, but if it weren’t for Big Pharma, we wouldn’t be here at all.” Whatever is keeping Saul here, it deserves our thanks.

The post Saul Levine, radio pioneer, still advocating for independent media appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Soprano Nadine Sierra has produced a beautiful new album titled “There’s a Place for Us.” The signature song comes from the musical West Side Story. But the message is definitely Sierra’s. “No matter what happens in this world,” she says in an interview about the album, “no matter what kind of negative messages are being sent by certain people, eventually if we all stick together  . . . we can find a place for all of us to live freely, happily, and with ample love.”

Here is her rendition of the West Side Story song “Somewhere.” Quite beautiful.

I am increasingly confident that there is a place for everyone, especially on the radio. The other day in response to Jennifer’s annual Alice’s Restaurant radio survey we received a response from Al Gordon of WJPR (1640) in New Jersey. The station broadcasts a hybrid format: “Jewish all day and oldies all night.”

“I play Arlo every Thanksgiving on my station at Midnight, 4AM and noon,” Gordon wrote to us.

Here is the WJPR schedule from Monday through Thursday.

12 Midnight   Overnight oldies/Babalu
5AM              Daf Yomi/Rabbi Elefant
6AM              Gordon-in-the-Morning
10AM            Midday Music/Chaya
2PM              Afternoon Music/Chaim
6PM              Silent Mike
7PM              Talkline Communications Network Proramming
Tuesday        Rabbi Yaakov Spivak
Wednesday  Silk Road To Jerusalem with Chief Bucharian Rabbi Yitzchak Yehoshua

8PM             Talkline/Zev Brenner
9PM              Oldies/Babalu

The post There’s a place for us (and it includes Jewish music + oldies) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

My friend Sherry Gendelman, who hosts a popular Sunday morning classical music show on KPFA in Berkeley, started her program last week with a piece for violin and orchestra. No sooner did the performance begin than the phones started ringing. ‘What is this?’ six listeners in a row immediately demanded.

“I woke up to this magical music. It was so lovely,” one caller exclaimed.  “Thank you so much.”

I am not surprised at the reaction. Sherry started her lineup with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ radiant tone poem The Lark Ascending: A Romance for Violin and Orchestra. Marked “Andante Sostenuto” in the orchestral score, the composition begins with a violin cadenza that invokes the scene of a beautiful bird stretching her wings in a garden. It’s always a hit with listeners.

Sunday morning is the perfect time for a community radio stations to host classical music. While we are on the subject, I can’t wait for KSQD-FM (aka “The Squid”) in nearby Santa Cruz to start broadcasting. A big chunk of the classical music group associated with now sadly defunct KUSP-FM will be hosting programs on the weekends. Check the end of this post for more details.

Here are three more pieces that I think very successfully open a Sunday morning classical music program.

The overture to Russlan and Ludmilla by Mikhail Glinka. Some Russian composers, like Dimitri Shostakovich, specialize in dark sarcastic music; others, like Borodin, exude optimism. This Glinka piece, the opening to his rarely performed opera, definitely falls into the optimism category. In contrast to the Vaughn Williams score, it will roust up your listeners and inspire them to accomplish Great Things. While I was a kid growing up in New York City, the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History started its shows with Russlan. There is just something cheerfully cosmic about the piece.

Bela Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, second movement, “Adagio religioso.” Bartok wrote this composition at the very end of his days. One of his students finished the piece after he died in 1945. The hauntingly beautiful slow movement begins with a homage to a Beethoven string quartet, then features orchestral imitations of the birds the composer heard from his hospital bed. It is a musical essay that invites us to meditate and be grateful for our lives.

PS: Yes, I believe in playing single movements of symphonies on radios shows. I know. Blasphemy.

Alan Hovhaness, Symphony Number 2, “Mysterious Mountain,” first movement.  Hovhaness composed this work in 1955 at the request of the conductor Leopold Stokowski. The rhythmically complex first movement begins with a gorgeous prayer intoned by strings, followed by celesta and harp episodes, then a beautiful oboe solo, then back to the prayer. It is perfect for Sunday morning.

Meanwhile the staff of KSQD-FM continues to fundraise and tackle obstacles in pursuit of a broadcasting date. You can read about some of the hairy details here, but I think a comment from one of the project’s movers and shakers, Rachel Goodman, summarizes the situation: “There’s a lot of legal twists and turns, and huge bureaucracies involved. It’s like pushing a boulder up a hill, and then you run into a bigger boulder.”

In any event, when it all comes through, there will be lots of interesting music on the weekends. Former KUSP-FM host Joe Truskot sent me an email the other day with details on some of the plans:

“My fellow hosts and I are very happy to bring locally produced, classical music shows back to the communities of the Monterey Bay. All four of us (Nicholas Mitchell, Jim Emdy, Chris Smith and me) were part of the KUSP classical music programs and are passionate about music.

It will be a different listening audience and will require some programming changes. I was a sub for all the classical music programs on KUSP so I understand the various niches that we occupied, but we were all evening shows devoted to particular genres. My show was 20-21, music of the 20th century and today.

My new show “Music of the Masters” won’t have those restrictions but it will have to jive with what listeners are doing on Saturday mornings. I find it exciting to match music with a “rise and shine” attitude. I’ll also have to keep an eye out for news, traffic, times, and weather. As far as selections, I’m amassing a large collection of works which will capture attention immediately. It’s been fun to go back to my college days (when I really got hooked on classical music and classical music radio) and recall which pieces grabbed a hold of me and wouldn’t let go: Tchaikovsky “Capriccio Italien,” Ravel “La Valse,” Liszt’s “Liebestraum,” Glinka’s Overture to “Russlan and Ludmilla,” Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz” and on and on and on.

One other goal of mine is to create programs which offer large orchestral works, chamber ensembles, lieder, choral works, and music from dance, opera, movies, and video games. I love themed programs and being challenged to assemble selections that fit the theme – all with the purpose of listeners enjoying the show and staying tuned in. For example, FRESH WATER MUSIC featuring Liadov’s “The Enchanted Lake,” Ferdé Grofé’s “Niagara Suite,” Smetana’s “The Moldau,” Schubert’s and Barber’s “Music to be Performed on Water,” Druckman’s “Reflections on the Nature of Water,” and, of course, excerpts from Handel’s Water Music.”

If you want to help make this happen sooner rather than later, The Squid is still in fund-raising mode. More information on the project as I get it.

The post Four great pieces for a Sunday AM classical music community radio show appeared first on Radio Survivor.

If you Googled anything over the last twelve hours or so, you learned that today is American conductor Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday. Classical radio station WQXR-FM in New York City has a wonderful memorial to Bernstein, reminding us of his work as a civil rights activist during the 1960s and 1970s, and his advocacy of jazz and popular music.

It should also be mentioned that over the course of his career, Leonard Bernstein was relentlessly watched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You can inform yourself about this by visiting the FBI’s own archive of its famous probes. “Bernstein (1918-1990) was composer, conductor, and pianist who was investigated by the FBI for his ties to communist organizations,” the site notes. “These files range from 1949 to 1963.” Actually, they continue through 1974.

As noted, in 1949 the Bureau began surveillance of Bernstein and his activities. A memorandum to its director J. Edgar Hoover noted his alleged involvement with groups like the Civil Rights Congress and National Negro Congress. The Communist Party launched the latter organization  to build coalitions of black and white workers and intellectuals. “Leonard Bernstein has been connected, affiliated, or in some manner associated with the following organizations,” the memo observes (see the screenshot from the file below). The vaguely worded comment even drew skepticism from an FBI functionary who later reviewed it. “This phraseology means nothing . . . ” someone wrote at the bottom of the document.

A snippet of Leonard Bernstein’s FBI file.

That did not stop the Bureau from staying on Bernstein’s tail, publishing a lengthy internal expose of Bernstein’s political activities from 1945 through 1949. These included involvement with anti-fascist, pro-civil rights, and free speech groups associated with the Communist Party during those years. Mostly Bernstein’s name appeared on various endorsement lists, the report notes, or he attended a testimonial dinner for some civil rights activist, or he consented to dedicate a performance to “free Spain,” or he participated in a National Negro Congress talent contest. The FBI even took an interest in Bernstein’s two month stay in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1950.

By 1953 Bernstein’s passport had been revoked, forcing him to submit an affidavit assuring the government that he had never been a member of the CP. The FBI noted this action in a 1953 memo titled “Security Matter, Fraud Against Government.” But Bernstein’s assertion was true. In fact, the conductor had given his name and energies to many non-communist front groups, from Planned Parenthood to the United Jewish Appeal. Eventually he won his passport back, and became the music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

My favorite portion of Bernstein’s FBI file is a letter that the Bureau obtained in which the Shell Oil Company, then a prominent educational television sponsor, came to his defense. Some anti-communist zealot had written to Shell objecting to his work. In 1963 one H.F. Brown of Shell’s public relations department responded:

“We feel that we are doing a very real service to the young people of this country in sponsoring on television from New York the Young People’s Concerts under the direction of Mr. Bernstein, who in our opinion is not only a gifted conductor but one of the great teachers of our day.

We appreciate your concern and your very honest reasons for writing us. We would, however, like to suggest that in this instance you are being misguided by incorrect information.

The final concert in this year’s Young People’s Concert will be telecast in your area on March 8th. We do hope you will tune in.”

Bernstein’s FBI file concludes with his brief support of the Black Panther Party in 1970 and association with the anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan. The dossier ends as it begins, with a lengthy timeline of his life’s political work, going all the way back the 1940s. “This summary has been prepared for use at the seat of government and is not suitable for dissemination,” the FBI document warns.

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What killed smooth jazz radio? Why aren’t there any commercial classical stations any longer? And, why do radio stations have a “format” to begin with? Matthew Lasar joins us to explore these questions about the fundamental organizing principle of most music radio.

Matthew is a co-founder of Radio Survivor and the author of three important books on radio, including Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network and Radio 2.0.

Show Notes:

• Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music, by Eric Weisbard
• Matthew likes: KKUP, KZSC, Second Inversion Radio, WQXR New Sounds (formerly Q2)
• Hybrid Highbrow: New music for Paddle to the Sea + nobody told me that smooth jazz died
• Hybrid Highbrow: Somebody stop killing jazz radio please
• OMG a radio station actually keeps its classical format after protests

The post Podcast #150 – Sympathy for Kenny G appeared first on Radio Survivor.

One of my favorite classical radio stations is making a meal over measures that one of my favorite conductors is taking to combat coughing in the music hall. San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas now gives away cough drops at concerts. Or at least MTT did so at a recent Chicago Symphony event in which the proverbial throat frogs got unusually jumpy during several quiet pieces. These included a Stravinsky elegy for President John F. Kennedy and an early movement of a Mahler symphony.

The Maestro described the drastic step he took in a recent interview with Elliott Forrest at WQXR-FM in New York City:

“As it happens, just as I had walked on the stage before the Mahler piece I had seen that there was a big box filled with cough drops which is there for members of the orchestra to use it they need it,” Thomas explained.

“So that was in my mind and I thought, it is going to be a problem later in the piece, so maybe I can do something that will be helpful. So I said to the concert master, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.’ I walked off the stage and got two very big handfuls of these cough drops. I came back and said something to the audience like ‘I just happen to have a bunch of cough drops . . . ‘”

Full disclosure: my wife Sharon and I attended an MTT concert last year at the San Francisco Symphony. Thomas came on stage to make some preparatory remarks about a new composition commissioned by the organization. I started coughing just a little towards the end of his talk. We were sitting in the front left of the hall. As the conductor made his exit, it sure looked like he was giving me the hairy eyeball. Back then I thought that maybe I was being a bit paranoid. Not now. Happily Sharon had a cough drop handy and saved me from a celebrity beating.

This is all well and good. Who am I to argue with famous musicians handing out pharynx calming sweets to subscription audiences? But I hope that this doesn’t mean that classical radio deejays will stop playing records in which audience members cough. That would entail, for example, banning one of my favorite live Vladimir Horowitz  performances, that of him playing his heart out to Robert Schumann’s beautiful piano suite “Kinderszenen” (Scenes from Childhood).

Listen to this Youtube of the rendition, which is queued up to a section in which Horowitz concludes the most beloved episode of the piece, titled “Traumerei” (Reverie), and begins playing the next section, “Am Kamin” (At the Fireside).

As you can hear, several patrons in the back of the hall cut loose with a barrage of coughing that they simply cannot control. Yet Horowitz continues his marvelous, poetic playing as if recording in an air tight studio. Attention all classical radio presenters: don’t deny your listeners these wonderful slices of musical life because of a few tickled throats!

The post Attention all classical radio stations: humans cough, deal with it appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On Wednesday, into my classical/radio newsfeed fell this notification about Minnesota Classical Radio (MPR)’s playlist for May 23, 2018. Through the day you get the usual stuff: Schubert, Elgar, Vivaldi. Then the 10 PM hour arrives, and  . . . KABOING:

Refuge
Baljinder Sekhon
Robert McCormick
McCormick Percussion Group

Gumboots
David Bruce
Carducci Quartet
Julian Bliss, clarinet

Aguas da Amazonia: Amazon River
Philip Glass
Third Coast Percussion

Nihavent Semai
Sokratis Sinopoulos
Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello

Electric Counterpoint: 3rd movement
Steve Reich
Kasia Kadlubowska, percussion

Interestingly, the Federal Communications Commission’s safe harbor hour also begins at 10 pm. That’s when broadcasters can air “indecent” and “profane” material through 6 am. And, apparently, that’s also when Minnesota classical radio lovers can listen to Steven Reich and Philip Glass.

Speaking of the opposite of profanity, yes, I watched and listened to cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason wow the guests at the Royal Wedding with his moving performances of pieces by Fauré, Schubert, and a beautiful work generally attributed to Theresia von Paradis, Sicilienne.

What is it that makes cellos the perfect musical instrument for wedding celebrations? I just asked my wife, Sharon Wood, and she suggested that the lower range mellowness of the cello (as opposed to the violin) sets a nice tone for these events. There’s also an intimate physicality to the cello that other instruments, including the piano, lack.

Believe it or not, there’s a wonderful wedding/cello scene in an otherwise profane movie: The Hangover, Part II.

This performance of a Bach Cello Suite at Stu’s wedding celebration in Thailand really sets up the arc of the film: a  protagonist’s desire for a normal life, punctuated by occasional classy moments like this one, followed by the endless cavalcade of chaos that we expect of the Hangover comedy franchise. We seem to be getting that everywhere else these days as well. Good thing that cellos are still around.

The post Minnesota’s classical safe harbor hour; cellos and weddings (sacred and profane) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I must tell you that I was shocked to read this story. After protests, a radio station has decided to keep its classical music format. In Provo, Utah, no less.

BYU Broadcasting has announced that it will buy an FM signal that will allow it to broadcast a bunch of educational content it planned to stuff into Classical 89/KBYU-FM, presumably obliterating the latter’s popular classical music offerings. You can read the narcoleptic coma inducing deets about the deal here. The bottom line is that the outfit will purchase another radio outlet and to that signal will stream BYU, aka Brigham Young University, fare. This move will save Classical 89/KBYU’s classical schedule.

The Salt Lake Tribune‘s Scott D. Pierce has a nice piece on the protests on behalf of Classical 89. “My wife loves it,” one fan exclaimed at a meeting. “She says, when we leave the home, ’Leave it on, because the plants love it, too’.”

To which I usually say ‘yeah yeah, good luck with this.’ Most radio station managements almost never renege on a format change after they announce it. Protests be damned. “We have to be realistic,” they always declare, stone faced, at The Big Meeting. “Times have changed. Plus: blah blah blah and here’s a lawyer and engineer to explain why you are screwed.”

I’ve even mapped out the process as the Five Stages of Format Change Grief.

But this time they actually listened to the listeners. I’ll be damned.

And not only that, but Colorado Public Radio is expanding its signal to reach northward along the Front Range. It appears that the operation will consolidate two towers into one more reliable transmitter on Lookout Mountain.

These excellent developments deprive me of my usual grumpiness about the state of classical music radio, but I think that I can live with that.

The post OMG a radio station actually keeps its classical format after protests appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The New York Times has published a nice essay urging people to get over their fear of classical music and just enjoy the genre. The piece does not say anything that doesn’t get said once every five years or so in some prominent venue. But it does say it well. Miles Hoffman notes the existence of the “Classical Music Insecurity Complex,” in which people disqualify themselves from even admitting whether they like a composition or not, for fear that they lack the education to do so.

The article drew a supportive letter from classical radio host Sam Goodyear:

As a musician, a music teacher and an announcer of classical music on the radio, I often get the apologetic “I don’t know anything about music” confession along with the perceived shame in such an admission. I like to point out that Handel didn’t write for musicians any more than Shakespeare wrote for playwrights or actors, or teams in the National Football League play for football players.

If their audiences were that limited, concert halls and theaters and stadiums would be nearly empty. In all cases, the aim is bringing pleasure and excitement to people, and opening doors to exploration and discovery into the bargain.

I wonder how many more centuries this dilemma will last. It really does feel like some kind of eternal condition that will never go away. Hoffman places some of the blame on stuffy complicated lectures presented before concerts and incomprehensible program notes. I think it’s got a lot to do with how isolated classical music has become. It mostly gets played in classical music halls and on classical music radio stations and rarely anywhere else. Even radio stations that play both classical music and jazz rarely play them together in the program or set. There is this overwhelming sense of separateness to classical music, resulting in the same serial discussion about how to get people to listen to it happening decade after decade after decade . . .

The post Classical music, fear, and the radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am listening to South Dakota Public Broadcasting interview Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall. Judging from the author’s tone, the book decidedly focuses on the decline aspect of the story.

“What we take for granted today,” Horowitz tells his radio interviewer David Gier,  “that the market dictates celebrity programming, or getting a celebrity pianist, or getting a well known piece, was really unknown before the First World War. It is just not how it was done.”

“The box office was not a consideration,” Horowitz declares, speaking of those times.

What I find striking is how different Horowitz’s observations are from those of at least one other historian of classical music. I quote from Lawrence Levine’s book Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America:

” . . . three of the most popular European visitors to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century—Viennese ballerina Fanny Elssler, the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, and the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind—with many less well-known foreign stars, symbolized the best of European culture without an aura of exclusivity. Bull would gladly play ‘Yankee Doodle,’ ‘The Arkansas Traveller,’ or ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in the midst of his dazzling solos; Lind regularly mixed Swedish folk songs and such popular American songs as ‘Home Sweet Home’ with her operatic arias; Ellsler combined classical ballet with English hornpipes and Spanish folk dances [Levine, 108].”

I see an eye for the market in this paragraph, not to mention for celebrity performers. Why this divergence in how historians have viewed the classical music past? I suspect that a lot of it depends on when you think that classical music in America begins. Judging from the interview, Horowitz’s timeline seems to start after the American Civil War. Levine goes back to the 1820s and 1830s.

Still, I would not be surprised if, during the years prior to the Great War, Horowitz found classical orchestras, newly funded by Gilded Age magnates, thumbing their noses at popular tastes and going in their own highbrow directions (see long symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler, for starters). And it would also make sense that during the lean Great Depression years ticket sales suddenly mattered again. What I suspect, however, is that Horowitz’s Golden Age was always an anomalous period in the history of what we call classical music. The challenge today is to acknowledge public tastes in the concert hall and the classical radio playlist, without allowing them to ossify the program down to two dozen warhorses.

Here’s the interview link for downloading. Enjoy.

The post Do we really know the history of classical music in America? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman was a brilliant black/gay composer whose lamentably short life is explored on WBUR’s Here and Now. His music was beautiful, but its presentation was not for the faint of heart. I hear Bach’s C-minor Passacaglia in Eastman’s controversially titled work, “Evil Nigger.”

You listen and decide for yourself.

According to interviewed historian Tiona Nekkia McClodden, the Black Student Union of Northwestern University tried to organize a protest against a performance of the work. To address the crisis, Eastman preceded the composition with an introduction that explained “his conceptual framework behind the actual piece, in dealing with labor, capitalism in this country and black bodies.”

Eastman died homeless in 1990 at the age of 49. Listening to this interview and exposition of his opus, I feel a deep sense of loss, but also gratitude to the scholars recovering his legacy.

In other news, congratulations to Music From Other Minds, which marked its 500th broadcast last month. MFOM is where you go to hear the likes of Edgar Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, and Luciano Berio, among other delightfully hard ass modernists. If you want to hear a lovely composition by William Grant Still, check out last week’s the Piano radio show on KPFA. Much Bach on the program, concluding with Still’s African Symphony.

The post Julius Eastman we hardly knew you appeared first on Radio Survivor.

DJ McSchmormac at his disks

I have started something called the “Hybrid Highbrow Network.” It is at this point mostly only a figment of my imagination, a matrix of people who don’t know they’re in the matrix  but who mix classical, jazz, showtunes, world music and whatever into whatever comes out the other end, radio-wise. Undaunted by the fictional nature of my project (so far), I recently put out a call to various likeminded friends, eg., “what are you doing these days?”  DJ McSchmormac, who does the Grammophoney Baloney show at KPOO-FM in San Francisco, replied with the following:

You’ll be sorry you asked – on Monday I only played three classical things – Stravinsky on piano with Samuel Dushkin on violin performing part of Duo Concertante – some Beethoven piano sonata by A. Schnabel, and because it was Martin Luther King Day – Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, done by a Japanese orchestra from the 1930s.

Did I tell you about this amazing feature that’s been part of the program for quite some while? It’s called “Three From Thirty Three at Three Thirty Three.” That’s where I play three recordings from the year 1933 when it’s 3:33 pm.

Anyway.
Here’s a recent development – I picked up a nice reissue of Billie Holiday the complete Commodore Masters – when she wanted to record Strange Fruit in 1939 – Columbia didn’t want her to record it on their label so they put her contract on temporary hiatus (the guy that wrote Strange Fruit adopted Julius & Ethel Rosenberg’s kids) she released 16 tracks on the Commodore label – those are the masters, one session has an unusually small accompanying ensemble of just piano, bass & drums.

Anyway – I was listening to these and thinking “this is all great top notch stuff” and decided the best approach would to play the whole thing in chronological order, but subject to the three-hourly limit on songs by the same artists and/or from the same release – which happens to be three or four in this case – but I went with three instead of four because that’s what KPOO thinks it is – so over the course of 6 weeks I played three different Billie Holiday tracks from the Commodore Masters each week – so I had people saying they were enjoying the serialized Billie Holiday, and when it was over they said they missed it, so I decided to take a serialized approach to more stuff, I want it to be stuff I’ve never played on the program before, and stuff that’s worth playing, I think it’s beneficial to the listener because they’re hearing me play something new, and I think it MIGHT be beneficial to me – insofar as maybe I don’t have to put as much mental energy into compiling a playlist – but it’s possible I might end up having to put MORE mental energy into the selections, to find stuff that’s compatible with the serialized selections.

I’m aiming to have up to 8 different releases in serial form all at the same time – this will constitute about half of the entire playlist, the other half of the playlist will be stuff to thread the serialized selections together. I don’t want to do more than 8 becuase then there’s no room left for my mixing skills, and I might as well just be Pandora or Spotify at that stage.

At the moment I’ve started serializing Sister Rosetta Tharpe starting from her 1944 session with the Sam Price Trio – these sessions in particular show why she’s a rock & roll pioneer and why her recent induction into the R&R Hall of Fame was so long overdue.

Also I’ve started serialzing some late 1929-1930 recordings of Henry Red Allen & His New York Orchestra – remastered by the legendary John R.T. Davies.

From now until the end of February I’m concentrating on African American artists, I’ll be adding Clifford Hayes, CHick Webb, John Kirby Sextet, James P. Johnson, I’m not sure what else.

After February, some of the classical serialized selections I’m planning include the complete Bartok Quartets by the Julliard Quartet from 1950, the 1930s solo piano recordings of Charles Ives, Emmanuel Feuermann, Manuel DeFalla, Igor & Soulima Stravinsky, Schubert Quartets, a whole lot of different things.

Enjoyed your Bartok podcast.
C

The post On the year 1933 when it’s 3:33 pm . . . appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The fourth installment of my Hybrid Highbrow podcast gets at a musical phenomenon that I have wanted to explore for a while: the affinity that the jazz world has for the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. In pursuit of this nexus, I’m serving up some  wonderful tracks by Richie Beirach, Tabula Rasa, Oliver Haynes, the Peter Sarik Trio, and others.

If you don’t know much about Bartók, he was born in 1881 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. He grew up with two loves: one for his native Hungary, the other for the study of classical piano and composition. Bartók unified these passions by integrating eastern and central European folk music into his works, which are full with modernist influences: especially those of the French composer Claude Debussy. This is why Bartók’s rich, intense music sounds both folksy and cosmopolitan at the same time.  It is also infused with wonderful indigenous melodies that sometimes have a bit of a blues sound to them.

No surprise then that jazz composers love Bela Bartok. Listen for yourself  . . . and enjoy!

Link to the Mixcloud podcast.

The post Hybrid Highbrow podcast #4: Why jazz loves Béla Bartók appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I enjoy one of the best driving commutes of anyone I know. I drive from San Francisco, California down the Highway One to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I teach. Usually I drive down the coast on Mondays, and back up on Thursdays. This week I downloaded King-FM’s  application onto my iPhone and took the Monday trip accompanied by classical station’s excellent Second Inversion channel.

Me in the car looking at the coast while listening to Cage.

It was hard to take notes while I drove and listened, so I don’t remember all the pieces. But it was heavenly getting close to Pacifica and Half Moon Bay while listening to John Cage’s beautiful piano work In a Landscape. This is one of Cage’s very listenable compositions, just perfect for motoring down the HWY1 and sneaking peaks at the water, when possible. Finally I just parked at a spot around Montara to the listen to the rendition the end.

Second Inversion defines itself as a project “dedicated to rethinking classical music.” It is “built on a foundation of classical music with intent to explore the vast range of music in and beyond the genre.” You can get a sense of the stream’s priorities on its on demand Soundcloud channel. Listening to the top choices, I sort of feel like I’m in a very gentle jazz/fusion Schoenberg-land, or someplace like that. It’s quite perfect for motoring up and down the northern/central Pacific. You should try it if you can.

The post Down the Highway One with Second Inversion radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Coming out from a long Radio Survivor posting hiatus (apologies) and rummaging around for some good classical sounds, I have chanced on Sangeet – Classical Music from the Indian sub-continent, over at wonderful WPRB in Princeton, New Jersey. This morning (Saturday, November 18) the show gave its listeners a generous hit of the incomparable Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, whose voice and style just blow me away.

The languorousness of the sounds, the exquisitely long lead-in notes, I listen to this stuff and feel like the protagonist in Satyajit Ray’s 1958 classic, The Music Room; except of course I am the not the bankrupt lord of a fading Bengali princely estate, much as I might feel that way on occasion.

If you are looking for more of that extended, sensual sound, KPFA’s Sunday classical show piano ran a great performance of the “Tranquilisssimo” of Henryk Goreki’s Third Symphony, the vocal solo sung by Dawn Upshaw, who I suddenly realized I don’t hear enough about these days. Anyway, that edition of the show is probably available for another week, so give it a listen while you can.

The post More Indian sub-continent classical music, please appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I was listening to KPFA’s Sunday morning classical music show yesterday, and suddenly they played Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat and I thought: maybe there are two kinds of Stravinsky for two kinds of public radio stations. For the big grand classical music stations like WQXR-FM in New York City, the pre-World War I ballets with their huge gorgeous sounds are best. But for community stations like KPFA, the more chamber-music oriented pieces that Stravinsky wrote from 1918 onward seem more appropriate. I’m talking about stuff like the Histoire and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments; that sort of stripped down fare that the big mainstream classical signals never play. In fact, I vaguely remember that a billion years ago KPFA did a birthday celebration of itself that started with Stravinsky’s “Happy Birthday” Greeting Prelude.

Meanwhile thank you City Editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for bringing John Cain, legendary jazz programmer of KABF-FM, to my attention via Twitter:

Meet John Cain of KABF. The profile by @SheaStewart https://t.co/RMYG8DK1P9@mediageek @MatthewLasar @SpinningIndie #DemGaz #communityradio

— Danny Shameer (@dshameer) August 6, 2017

“THE ARTIST — LIVING OR DEAD — I WOULD MOST LIKE TO SEE PERFORM IS John Coltrane,” Cain discloses in his Gazette profile. “I guess because when I really grew up and discovered [jazz], I seemed closer to him than [Charlie Parker].” Reading this, I feel like I’m back to the two Stravinskys issue again. Parker definitely has that angular, stripped down feeling, while Coltrane is the big lush ballet guy, especially in renditions like My Favorite Things. Interesting that Cain would see the two artists as either/or choices.

I am working on my fourth Hybrid Highbrow podcast, which will focus on jazz renditions of the work of Bela Bartok. I had no idea that there were so many jazz homages to Bartok. I’ll have to choose three or four, which will be tough.

The post Is post-World War I Stravinsky better for community radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

My friend Sherry Gendelman played one of Maurizio Pollini’s recordings the other day on her Piano radio show on KPFA in Berkeley. It was Pollini’s version of the Chopin Preludes and reminded me of when he came to New York City in 1979 and played Carnegie Hall. This was a huge deal since he was already so famous and all. Since I worked at a then popular record store, somebody gave me a ticket and I went. As I recall, Pollini served up the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy and I thought he was quite spectacular. But others around me insisted that while he was a great technician, his style lacked feeling, and I, being 19 or so, agreed with them since they looked like they knew what they were talking about. After all, what did I know? 

Now, listening to Sherry’s show, I have to say that the playing sounds quite beautiful. Here’s a YouTube of his album. You decide.

Last week I spent a little time with one of Marvin Rosen’s early music specials at KPRB at Princeton, New Jersey. I kept listening to Biagio Marini’s Sonata a tre over and over on the mp3, performed by Christopher Hogwood and The Academy of Ancient Music. It has that wonderful, sad, baroque busy-busy-busy sound that I love. You should download the show while you can.

My latest Hybrid Highbrow podcast did fairly well. It focused on classical tangos and got a significant number of listens on Mixcloud. I’m going on a trip to Turkey this week and will visit a radio station there. When I return, I’ll write up the tour. Then I hope to do a show on jazz interpretations of Bartok. After that I’ll throw together something about Gamelan Music and the classical tradition, which means of course that I will play some Lou Harrison. Here’s a really nice video of pianist and radio host Sarah Cahill taking you through Harrison’s Piano Concerto, which has gamelan all over it. Enjoy!

The post KPFA Pollini; WPRB Sonata a Tre; Cahill on Lou Harrison concerto appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The maiden episode focuses on the similarities between two early 20th-century “talking machine” singers: blues shouter Mamie Smith and opera star Enrico Caruso. Both sang in the middle ranges, alto and tenor, rather than the high or low registers. This made them perfect for acoustic recording. Both also knew how to project their voices over a small ensemble of musicians crowded next to a big old recording horn. Both sang about the same subject: the frustrations of love. And both produced some of the earliest hit records.

What is hybrid highbrow? It is a formats that eschews formats, that wants to understand how classical music collaborates or co-exists with other genres: jazz, folk, blues, and Broadway among them. For a long time I looked for a show or radio station that focused on this on a regular basis. Finally, the other day I decided that I’d just do it myself. To my amazement, as of this posting, episode number 1 is #6 on the Mixcloud blues show chart!

Hybrid Highbrow podcast #2 will celebrate a musical form called the “arabesque.”  This kind piece riffs on a quickly rising and falling melodic pattern. It was championed by composers like Debussy and Schumann. But the concept was also served up by stride and jazz musicians like Willie “The Lion” Smith and Charlie Parker.

Any feedback on the production of the podcast would be welcome. I recorded it on a Mac with Audacity and I think my levels were a bit hot. Hopefully my tech chops will improve with subsequent episodes. Thanks to Paul Riismandel for encouraging me to do this.

The post In which I launch the Hybrid Highbrow podcast . . . appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Many wonderful music programs come out of radio station WPRB-FM of Princeton, New Jersey. Marvin Rosen’s program Classical Discoveries ranks high among these offerings. He’s been celebrating new music and living composers over the airwaves since 1997, and on May 29 will note the show’s 20th birthday.

“Classical Discoveries would not be possible anywhere else but here on WPRB,” Rosen proudly states on his web site. “The station does not have a ‘black list’ of forbidden works, and no one is afraid that some music director at the top of the corporate ladder with one strike of a pen will remove 99% of a proposed playlist and replace it with old warhorses and pretty music.”

This is really a great thing, and so is all the wonderful audio and written content that Rosen generously posts: recordings of his piano performances, his radio shows, his playlists, his lectures, his championing of the music of Alan Hovhaness and other post-World War II composers. I’ve been a fan of Classical Discoveries for a long time.

Rosen traces his roots to the great classical music Renaissance that took place in New York City in the 1960s, inspired by the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (“there will never be anyone like him again,” he writes) and WQXR-FM.

“As you know, I am a happy community DJ who would rather do this as a volunteer and not be paid, than told what I can or can’t do on other stations,” Marvin wrote to me several weeks ago. I am looking forward to hearing how he celebrates his 20th year as a great classical radio deejay.

The post Happy 20th birthday to Classical Discoveries appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Composer Kevin Volans gave a talk at Ireland’s Contemporary Music Center the other month. During the speech Volans ID’d the United Kingdom’s Classic FM radio service as a key moment in Good Culture’s never ending declension narrative.

First came The Three Tenors (gah), and if that wasn’t enough:

“Then came Classic FM in 1992, set up by an entrepreneurial group to provide a stream of popular classics. Its success was rapidly followed by many others, like South Africa’s Classic FM, which now has slots devoted to wine and lifestyle thus endorsing ‘classical’ music as an adjunct to an upmarket lifestyle, like a sauna, a massage and pedicure, maybe. And because of their computerised playlist, all the short movements of symphonies for example, are given preference – so you may hear endless repeats of the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Eroica, but never the great first or last movements! What a nightmare.”

Like lots of other people who blog about classical radio, I agree with Volans’ basic lament: that services like Classic FM have converted the whole Common Practice period of classical music into a vast easy listening stream. I am not sure, however, that the target was ever the “upmarket” consumer so much as the stressed out white collar cubicle dweller. I also find less nightmarish the endless repeats of the Eroica Scherzo. My scary dream would be endless repeats of some of the contemporary composers that Volans quotes or extols, such as Morton Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen (his teacher).

But Volans makes an important point about one impact that the lineup of media forces have had on new classical compositions. They’re much shorter:

“The norm nowadays is to produce little pieces of under 10 minutes, very often under 5 minutes. This is another byproduct of the so-called music industry. The most obvious difference between ‘serious’ music and ‘popular’ music has always been duration. ‘Serious’ music composers always wrote works on average of over 20 minutes. This requires a more complex and taxing technical ability than writing 5 minutes. Writing a 5 minute piece is frankly, a piece of cake. The difference between writing that or a work of 90 minutes is like the difference between designing a 2 bedroom cottage or a 60 storey skyscraper.”

Furthermore:

” . . . now we find even the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) calling for orchestral scores of less than 15 minutes! Do they realise that almost no major piece of the 20th Century would qualify? This is like an international art fair asking for work no larger than 1 metre by 1 metre. Where did this idea come from? Three guesses.”

I’ll say this for Classic FM; the presenters throw in a vocal piece every now and then, which most classical deejays in the USA never do. In any event, whether I agree with everything Volans says, he’s a wonderful composer. Here’s a piece of his. Enjoy.

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“Welcome welcome welcome . . . this is the classical King-FM fantasy concert,” the podcast entry begins. “The concert that never happened, but we wish it did, so we made it so.”

Fictional or not, I am enjoying this Seattle public classical radio station’s “fantasy concerts.” Produced by King-FM 98.1 FM, they billboard Seattle area musicians exclusively.

Here’s the rundown for the latest episode, which focuses on the composer Maurice Ravel:

Ravel: Jeux d’eau
Giesa Dutra, piano
Fauré: Violin Sonata No.1 in A, Op.13: I. Allegro molto
Bronwyn James, violin; Angela Draghicescu, piano
Gershwin: Three Piano Preludes: Prelude No.2
Peter Mack, piano
Ravel: Violin Sonata No.2 in G, M.77: II. Blues. Moderato
Maria Larionoff, violin; Robin McCabe, piano
Ravel: Miroirs: II. Oiseaux Tristes
Millicent McFall, piano

The podcast presenter (Bryan Lowe) provides some really nice background on Ravel’s life and perspective, then gets into the music. You can get the series via King FM smartphone application. I downloaded it onto my Android phone and it works quite well.

The post King-FM fantasy classical concerts: worth a download appeared first on Radio Survivor.

My favorite classical radio station has released thirty Vimeos of the semi-finalists for its “classical moonlighters” competition. I wrote about this when WQXR in New York City first announced the contest last year. These folks have posted vids of themselves playing various masterpieces and they’ve made it to first cut. The final finalists in this event will perform before judges and a live audience at The Greene Space. The top prize is private coaching with a major artist, then a performance at the Lincoln Center Rubenstein Atrium.

Holy smokes; these people elevate the concept of “amateur” to the nth degree. Here are some of the videos. First, Yiran Wang playing the fourth movement of Chopin’s B minor piano sonata:

Next, this video doesn’t identify the name and composer of the concerto, but whatever it is, flautist David Valderrama plays it to the hilt:

And here’s a lovely Valentine’s Day rendition of “O mio babbino caro,” from Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi. Thank you Karmyn Cobb:

If you want to vote in this contest, you can and lots of people already have. It appears that the software collects votes as Facebook likes. Voting ends a minute before midnight on March 20.

Huge kudos to ‘QXR for this contest. This is exactly what radio stations should be doing: helping people in their community help themselves, especially musicians. Good luck to all the performers.

The post WQXR unveils “classical moonlighter” semi-finalists (and they’re really good) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Minnesota Public Radio has asked its listeners to pick their top five classical choral pieces. I love this for two reasons. First, it’s a refreshing alternative to those dreary top 100 classical piece lists in which every year the polled pick almost exactly the same compositions they chose in previous years. Second, it encourages classical compositions that emphasize the human voice, an instrument woefully neglected on the playlists of many classical radio stations.

An excerpt from the MPR/VocalEssence choral music poll.

MPR has partnered with VocalEssence, a Twin Cities musical outfit, to run the contest. Participants get a pretty long list of choral pieces from which to pick. I sympathize with the probable reasons for the pre-selected checklist. Unlike the symphonic repertory, there aren’t too many choral warhorses. So without any guidance, MPR/VocalEssence could wind up with a wide range of picks and no clear winners.

The downside, of course, is that lots of choral stuff I like isn’t on the list. The checklist is all pretty much requiems, oratorios, and cantatas and such, but nothing from symphonies or operas. The good news is that means that the contest won’t wind up inevitably giving the choral movement of Beethoven’s 9th a prize (it consistently wins top billing at WQXR’s top 100 composer contest). The less good news is that some of my favorite choral pieces aren’t on the roster. This includes the choral love of my life, the funeral scene from Porgy and Bess.

And maybe next year they’ll consider including Ruth Crawford Seeger’s hauntingly beautiful ensemble piece Three Chants to an Unkind God.

Still, all-in-all, this choral poll is a great thing. Speaking of 20th-century composers, WQXR’s Q2 channel ran an interesting query of its listeners late last year, asking them for the best pieces of the last two decades. Here are the top ten hits:

10. Meredith Monk – Songs of Ascension (2011)
9. Georg Friedrich Haas – In Vain (2000)
8. Thomas Ades – Asyla (1999)
7. John Adams – Dharma at Big Sur (2006)
6. Donnacha Dennehy – Gra agus Bas (2011)
5. David Lang – little match girl passion (2008)
4. Anna Thorvaldsdottir – In the Light of Air (2014)
3. Andrew Norman – Play (2013)
2. John Luther Adams – Become Ocean (2014)
1. Caroline Shaw – Partita for 8 Voices (2012)

Come to think of it, the top pick could be a contender in the Minnesota choral poll. Here’s a YouTube of the Passacaglia section from Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, performed by the Roomful of Teeth ensemble.

The post Minnesota and New York radio get creative with classical music polls appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am digging several just beginning and just concluding local ensemble / amateur contests being run by classical public signals WQXR-FM in New York City and KDFC-FM in San Francisco.

KDFC-FM has just finished its Local Vocals High School Choir sing-off, and the prize goes to the Monte Vista High School Chamber Singers from Danville in Contra Costa County. I have to say, they deserve the award. Pretty beautiful singing:

I wish the blog post or YouTube description filled out a few more details about what they’re performing. Apparently it is some treatment of Pange Lingua, a Latin hymn penned by Thomas Aquinas back the thirteenth century. Anyway, good job to the composer as well, whoever she or he may be.

The Monte Vista choir is now off to claim its prize: an appearance at the NPR’s youth talent feature From The Top when the show comes to San Jose State in February.

Meanwhile WQXR has launched a Classical Moonlighter’s Competition. Basically you submit a video of your amateur performance by February 15. There are three age categories: 13-18, 19-34 and 35+. ‘QXR plans to post the entries and “fans and artists will be able to vote for their favorite acts.” I am not sure if this explains how the winners will be decided. In any event in May the finalists will compete at the Greene Space in New York City and the top category winners will receive some celebrity coaching and more performance opportunities.

Cool stuff. I’ll post the videos here if I can when they go up.

The post West / east coast classical radio stations sponsor amateur contests appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’ve added some more programmers to my community based classical radio show list: James Irsay and Sarah Cahill, both classical pianists.

Irsay has a show on Pacifica station WBAI in New York City. He’s been around the station off and on in one capacity or another for quite a while. Back in the 1970s he hosted a program called Irsay in the Afternoon. A somewhat typical installment of the show focused on the performances of Raymond Lewenthal (see WBAI folio circa 1976), who rocked NYC with his wonderful renditions of Liszt in the mid-1960s. Here’s a YouTube of an Irsay interview with the young Joseph Villa, performing live in ‘BAI’s studios in 1972.

I was a devoted listener to WBAI back the 1970s. It’s been a while, but I am pretty sure I heard Irsay perform Schumann’s Toccata for piano at one of the station’s “free music stores,” popular during those years. This was an act of courage. The Toccata is not only very difficult, it is totally exhausting to perform.

Anyway, if you want to hear James play the piece (quite beautifully), it’s up on the Piano Society’s website as a free download. Nice to have added him to the list.

Meanwhile it was great to hear Sarah Cahill the other day here in San Francisco. My wife Sharon Wood and I went to see her earlier this month at the Old First Presbyterian Church, where she performed with violinist Stuart Canin. They did a marvelous rendition of Stravinsky’s Duo Concertant, which has this amazing Gigue that just goes on and on and stays fun through the whole thing.

The program for the concert mentioned that Canin performed for President Harry Truman at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 (he is 89). So I want back stage after the performance. “Gosh,” I asked Canin in my best fanboy voice, “what was that like?” Canin described it in great detail (he’s also told the story to NPR). He’d been deployed to the German front, but the war ended, so he wound up entertaining the troops. The next thing he knew he was serenading Truman, Churchill and Stalin at the gathering that resolved to divide Germany into four occupation zones. At some point Truman, who played piano, took Canin and his fellow musicians aside. ‘Maybe the country would have been better off if I’d become a band leader rather than President of the United States,’ Canin told us he whispered to them.

Sarah Cahill, of course, has a wonderful classical music show on San Francisco public radio station KALW-FM. Here’s a YouTube of her performing a beautiful contemporary piano work, Sparkina and Her Kittens, by Christine Southworth.

The post Classical radio list: James Irsay and Sarah Cahill appeared first on Radio Survivor.

[motherboard.vice.com]

I am relying on you Radio Survivor readers to tell me about locally based classical radio programs that I can add to the list. I want it to get bigger and bigger, add a twitter list, and encourage discussion about how to build audience for community based classical radio. If you’ve got a locally oriented classical program on some station, or a podcast, or an online show of some sort (or are a fan of one), please write it up our classical radio forum discussion pages. Even if your show only plays classical music some of the time, I want to mention it.

The post Community based classical radio: a list appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The cause of classical radio may be waning for some, but not for Brenda Barnes, President of Classical California, which runs classical public radio stations KUSC-FM in Southern California and KDFC-FM in San Francisco. Writing in Current, Barnes takes exception to non-commercial radio blogger Ken Mills’ warning that classical radio has reached an ominous “tipping point,” in the wake of Houston Public Media dumping its classical station KHUA, which it gobbled up from Rice University five years ago. On top of that a Miami public radio station is also throwing in the towel, classical music-wise.

[motherboard.vice.com]

Barnes cites statistics showing that since around three years ago, 31 classical radio stations across the country have enjoyed a slowly growing 1.6 percent audience share, plus actual growth in listeners. As for those two troubled radio stations, they borrowed too much money and relied too much on the syndicated service Classical 24, she notes, “making scant use of local hosts and local programming.”

Amen to all that, although those aren’t the only stations frontloading Classical 24. Check out Nashville’s WFCL, streaming over the ghost of that city’s once vibrant Vanderbilt U. student radio station. It’s still pretty heavily dependent on that kind of syndication on the evenings and weekends.

The other problem is that turning the frown upside down on 1.6 percent audience share requires gliding past the fact that the number puts Classical Music at the near bottom of Nielsen’s hierarchy of formats. In 2013 Nielsen gave classical a 1.4 percentage share. In contrast, Country Music enjoyed a 14.8 percent share. Classical sits way down there with “Hot Adult Contemporary” (basically listen to “Drops of Jupiter” 500 times and you’ve got the idea) and “Oldies.”

What’s going to rescue classical music from the Codgers in Heat demographic tier? My own take as a classical music lover is that classical can no longer stand alone as a radio format. It’s got to be mixed in and integrated with other traditions like Jazz, World music, and various song genres. I would hope that this country’s network of locally oriented community radio stations and hybrid public/community stations would take on that task. But for the most part they don’t.

Most community radio stations play hardly any classical music any more. Same for lots of college stations. Some of them have one or two classical music shows, at best. The San Francisco Bay Area has some notable classical music deejays. My friend Sherry Gendelman produces Larry Bensky’s excellent Sunday show on KPFA in Berkeley. There is the incomparable Sarah Cahill on KALW in San Francisco. KUSP in Santa Cruz has some great classical programs, although it’s unclear how long they’re going to last given the station’s troubles.

But I know of no real community based classical radio station in the United States, one that foregrounds local content over the warhorses and syndicated stuff. As for the rest, most have abandoned classical music or shunted it off to the margins of their schedules. This complaint, however, leads me to a research project I’ve been intending to take on for some time: cataloging all community classical radio shows in North America (or at least as many as possible). If you’ve gotten this far in my post, would you mind listing your favorite locally oriented classical radio show in the comments section? This can include shows that play just some classical music. If you add a bunch of hyperlinks, your comment will end up in our moderation queue, but I’ll get it posted as soon as I can. Thanks!

The post Can community radio save classical radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Houston Public Media announced yesterday that it plans to sell off its KUHA 91.7 FM license (aka Classical 91.7) and will move its classical music programming to HD radio (via 88.7 FM HD2). Radio Survivor readers may recall that the license for 91.7 FM was previously held by Rice University and was the former home to college radio station KTRU-FM. Back in 2010 it was announced that the license would be sold to University of Houston (which runs Houston Public Media), which planned to use 91.7 FM in order to divide its talk and classical public radio programming across two frequencies.

Despite high profile protests, legal filings, and petitions to the FCC, the $9.5 million deal went through in April, 2011, allowing Houston Public Media to have a dedicated classical station.

Rice’s student radio station KTRU has continued as an online/ 90.1 FM HD2 station. Earlier this year, Rice University was also awarded a construction permit in order to build a new low power FM (LPFM) radio station, which KTRU hopes to get on the air by the end of the year on 96.1 FM. According to an announcement on the KTRU website in February, 2015, “KTRU, Rice University’s student-run radio station, will use this permit to broadcast a signal from atop Rice Stadium, at 96.1 MHz. The construction of the transmitter is being funded from the proceeds of the 91.7 sale in 2010.”

In recent years there were rumblings that University of Houston’s classical station KUHA was struggling. We reported back in 2013 that local hosts were eliminated and replaced with syndicated programming.

According to a post by Houston Public Media,

General Manager Lisa Shumate told University of Houston officials she wants to sell the frequency and transmitter for the station. No layoffs are planned. Since the classical music station is licensed to the University of Houston, the UH Board of Regents has final say over any changes. Full-time classical programming will be available on 88.7 HD 2, online streaming at Houstonpublicmedia.org, free applications like iHeartRadio and TuneIn, and via television at TV 8.5.

‘We are making this change in recognition of the growing popularity, superior broadcast quality and greater efficiency of digital broadcasting,’ Shumate said in a statement. ‘Placing our focus on HD radio and digital streaming for our classical music programming enables us to make the best use of technology and resources to continue providing the music and arts and culture content that our listeners enjoy.’

The University of Houston Administrative and Finance Committee made the recommendation to the full board of regents, which is expected to approve the plan during its meeting on Thursday.

KUHA 91.7 FM was purchased from Rice University for $9.5 million in 2010. Most of the classical music and arts programming produced by Houston Public Media moved to the new station, along with live broadcasts with the Houston Symphony, the Houston Grand Opera and local performing artists and groups. KUHF then adopted a 24-hour all news and information format.”

This has to be bittersweet news for KTRU fans and supporters who fought so hard to try to keep the license only to see it up for sale 5 years later. There’s no word yet on if there are any interested buyers for the 50,000 watt license.

Other College Radio Headlines

U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects IBS’ Challenges to Copyright Royalty Board Webcasting Rates (Radio Survivor)

The skinny on the recent decision over royalty rates for student stations that webcast

Radio Survivor Podcast #11: National Radio Day, Princeton Review Rankings, and More (Radio Survivor)

In this week’s podcast I go into further detail about the U.S. Court of Appeals decision regarding copyright royalty rates for student webcasters. I also fully dissect the recent Princeton Review list of the “best” (really “most popular”) college radio stations, walking listeners through the survey methodology, explaining what the list really means.

Radio Punks: The Student Radio Story Documentary Covers History of Student Radio in New Zealand

I would love to see this documentary. Stuff describes it as a “fascinating chunk of New Zealand social history,” which shows how vital pre-Internet student media was, saying, “It’s hard to realise now – in these electronically-connected days – that student newspapers and student radio were the only links available to the young.” View some highlights from the documentary here and read another review here. Also take a look at another New Zealand station’s website, where there is a 40 part audio documentary about bFM’s station history!

New Documentary Looks at Influential College Radio Hip Hop Show (The Chicago Defender)

According to the Chicago Defender, the new film Stretch & Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives “looks at the eight years the two DJs spent on the airwaves at WKCR 89.9 FM, or 89 Tec 9 as some fans may remember. The show came to earn a special place in hip-hop history…”

Radio Host will Talk about Her Student Days (Sunderland Echo)

Former student radio DJ (and recent graduate) in the UK spoke about her transition to commercial radio

CBI Begins to Announce Finalists for its Student Production Awards

Check back on the CBI website for updates. Winners will be announced at CBI’s convention in October.

Remembering Pump up the Volume: Pirate radio as Inspiration for Future College Radio DJs and Podcasters (A.V. Club)

A.V. Club’s loving ode to the classic pirate radio flick Pump up the Volume is full of great college radio anecdotes as well as reflections on how a teen pirate radio DJ is akin to today’s podcaster.

Big Band Radio Show Moves to College Radio Station (Tulsa World)

Interestingly, the Tulsa Community College station, The Grid, had to make some adjustments as its DJs don’t use records or CDs.

Behind the Scenes at Rat and Roach-Infested WBAR

This short video from earlier this year really gets at the sad conditions at some college radio stations, with anecdotes about vermin and roaches in WBAR‘s basement digs. I visited the station in 2009 and remember hearing similar stories even back then! It’s unfortunate, as WBAR is an extremely popular student activity at Barnard College.

We cover the culture of college radio every Friday in our College Radio Watch feature. If you have college radio news to share, please drop us a note at EDITORS at RADIOSURVIVOR dot COM.

The post College Radio Watch: University of Houston to Sell Former KTRU Frequency + More News appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A somewhat discouraging report, classical music-wise, from the United Kingdom’s broadcast regulator, titled “Public Service Broadcasting in the Internet Age.” It concludes that since the government lifted requirements on content, public media spending on the arts and classical music has dropped by 25 percent.

Still “there continues to be strong classical music provision on radio,” the survey released by Ofcom notes.

The report defines “PSB” (public service broadcasting) as “the provision of TV programmes dealing with a wide range of subjects, of a high standard and catering for as many different audiences as possible.” The content should be “for the public benefit, rather than for purely commercial purposes.” I am not sure why the document focuses on radio only in passing. In any event, it cites “minimal provision” in arts and classical music genres following the removal of content quotas in 2003:

“Provision has all but ceased of religion and ethics (£13m, down 26%) and formal education (£7m, down 77%) . . . . We note that this is happening at a time when matters of religious belief are prominent in public debate.”

The decline is more striking when you go back to 1998. Then investment for arts and classical music stood at £60.9m, so the drop stands at 32 percent since 2014. This means that radio is more important than ever for UK classical music lovers.

Here in the United States, a resident of Palm Beach county Florida has posted an op-ed in the Palm Beach Daily News lamenting the sale of his area’s classical radio station to a Christian rock outlet. The Educational Media Foundation has bought the Florida NPR/classical operation, along with signals in Naples and Miami. The seller is American Public Media.

“Our economy lives, in part, by the arts: The Cultural Council reports that there are 5,438 arts-related businesses that employ 16,066 people here in our county,” Dr. John Strasswimmer writes. “APM’s financial gamble will leave our community permanently without public radio for the first time since 1969.”

WPBI’s website says the station will work with its new owner to “temporarily” provide public radio news programming via an HD channel and on the web:

“The decision to sell our stations in South Florida is painful and deeply disappointing for everyone involved. With your help, we’ve been working to build Classical South Florida for nearly eight years. Despite our best efforts and significant investments, and your Membership gifts, we’ve not succeeded in providing the distinctive value that will earn the support needed to sustain this service.”

The post UK classical public radio strong despite decline on TV; South Florida classical radio in trouble appeared first on Radio Survivor.

There’s an old saying in and around community radio stations: “We do meetings.” That’s definitely the situation over at KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz, California, which has been holding a variety of public, Community Advisory Board, official Board, and who knows whatever other kind of gatherings over its uncertain future. Station management, declaring the signal over its head in debt, pretty much poised itself some weeks ago to sell the whole shebang to the Classical Public Radio Network, but appears to have backed off from that idea. Now they’ve has thrown out a host of alternative proposals with tree names: Pine, Maple, Plum, Fig, Walnut, Elm, Spruce, Cedar, Poplar, and Chestnut. These horticulturally tagged plans range from new/public affairs oriented schedules to all music operations. Some propose selling the 88.9 FM license. Others don’t. Lots of people have posted comments under the various trees. It looks like KUSP’s board will make a decision in early July, so get your input in sooner rather than later if you care to.

I thought I’d weigh in on this matter myself, not that I have much standing around the issue. After all, I’m just me, but I do live in Santa Cruz part time, and do listen to and write about radio a lot. So I vote for a modified version of Plum, aka K-PLUM, which posits KUSP as an all-music outlet. My version of Plum would set up KUSP as a hybrid classical radio station which would celebrate “classical” music in a very broadly construed sense. I call this format “Hybrid Highbrow.”

Before I go there, I’m going to go a little further out on a limb and confess to a tree scenario that I probably would not want to listen to. That would be “Spruce,” aka “Locally produced music, news and public affairs programming, as well as pre-produced national programs not duplicating those on other nearby stations.” I sympathize with where this is coming from, but reading through the laundry list of local non-profits, media groups, schools (“and more”) that would somehow serve up content through the day, I already see the checkerboard schedule of volunteer topical shows that I will probably tune into, say, “Gosh, I’m so glad they’re talking about that,” and tune out of in around five minutes.

But I would like to listen to a radio station that streams consistently excellent music and that exudes a clear musical identity. One problem with this is that the Santa Cruz area already has some fine public and semi-public music radio stations, most notably the University’s KZSC-FM, KPIG-FM, and community station KKUP-FM in Cupertino. The market is very competitive.

What Santa Cruz doesn’t have is a decent radio station for classical and related forms of music (I know, KAZU-FM has an HD classical stream, but you know what I mean). I would have liked the Classical Public Radio Network idea, except KDFC in San Francisco is a bore: nice deejays, but it’s basically a non-local easy listening medium/light classics station. To be fair, it’s difficult to program a really good classical music radio station any more. You’ve got to be operating in a great big place like New York, Los Angeles, or Minneapolis/St. Paul—some region that has enough listeners to support a sophisticated schedule. So when I think about the kind of classical radio station I’d like to listen to, it by necessity includes other genres as well. I call this imaginary format “Hybrid Highbrow.”

I have written about this before. Hybrid Highbrow borrows its philosophy from Matthew Arnold’s old definition of culture: “the best that has been thought and known in the world.” Arnold’s protocol emphasized “perfection.” I’m not that picky. But I like the basic Arnoldian concept, hence my Hybrid Highbrow station has five radio food groups:

• Classical music (Palestrina to Phillip Glass, plus opera)
• Jazz (real jazz, not the “smooth” version; Coltrane yes; Kenny G no)
• American song (Cole Porter, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Sinatra, etc)
• “World” classical music (I know, the “world” tag is problematic, but you know, classical national and regional traditions like Oud, Gamelan, Chinese Opera, Kyoto, and Sitar).
• Spoken word (fiction, poetry, and plays, plus cultural reviews).

This is what I want to hear on K-PLUM. I want to hear it all day long: “classical” music, broadly construed. I want to hear it with deejays and curation and lots of connectivity to the local Santa Cruz/Monterey cultural scene. Happily, a big piece of KUSP already delivers this sort of fare. The station already runs great classical, Jazz, and “global” music shows. So it’s a matter of expanding that segment and bolstering it with a coherent philosophy.

There are at least two challenges for this proposal, three actually. The first is that KDFC runs a repeater signal near Santa Cruz that would compete with my Hybrid Highbrow format (I’m less worried about overlap with KKUP). The second is that I suspect that K-PLUM would still need some news/headlines service to retain audience. The third is that, unlike the Plum modeled outlined by KUSP, my version would definitely have to hold onto 88.9 FM, so the question of how to finance this transition without a license sale looms large.

So in the end maybe KUSP won’t do this and will do Spruce or something like it instead, which is fine. But I’d really like somebody to do Hybrid Highbrow at some point. Maybe I’ll just have to do it myself in my non-existent free time.

But here’s my last bit of free advice. Which ever type of forest growth KUSP moves toward, it must do so with a clear leadership that is empowered to make decisions, to create new structures, rapidly respond to problems, and yes, make mistakes. As risky as the moment is, there is no effective alternative to this approach. All others will flounder at best, if not fail.

The post K-PLUM: the case for KUSP as a hybrid classical radio station appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that public radio station KUSP has taken a major step towards selling its license. On Monday KUSP’s board, staff, and volunteers approved a letter of intent to offer it to the Classical Public Radio Network for $1 million. CPRN owns classical radio station KDFC in San Francisco and is headquartered at the University of Southern California. The foundation has a history of interest in the South Bay and currently broadcasts to the area from 104.9 FM.

This move would stave off bankruptcy for KUSP, according to the article. The station faces over $700,000 in unpaid bills to NPR and debts. It is unclear, however, whether the offer will be accepted. Other possibilities still include partnerships with KCRW in Santa Monica or nearby KAZU in Seaside.

I have always experienced KUSP as an interesting hybrid between a public radio station that offers syndicated NPR content and a community station focused on airing local programs. From what I’ve read, it appears that the impulse to move in both directions, combined with competition from KAZU and the recession of 2008/9, led to the present situation. More on the station’s history here.

The post Santa Cruz’s KUSP votes to sell license appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am trying to wrap my brain around the latest American Public Media venture: YourClassical.org. The press release we received for this “Classical Lifestyle” online radio service boasts the following channels:

• Relax: Classical music to help you keep calm and carry on. Perfect for yoga, meditation or a frustrating commute.
• Energy: Lively classical masterworks that will get the heart pumping on the treadmill or while mopping the kitchen floor.
• Lullabies: Lovely and tranquil tunes to hush babies and tame toddlers.
• Wedding: Traditional favorites to less well-known music for ceremonies and romantic dinners for two.
• Movies: Sounds from yesterday’s and today’s silver screen.
• Choral: The genre’s best masterpieces from the Renaissance to today.
• Radio: 24 x 7, live and hosted classical music.

I was feeling a bit toddleresque, so I tuned into the “Lullabies” channel, and there was that overplayed standby, Pachelbel’s Canon. Next I opted for the “Energy” stream, and sure as taxes there was the Scherzo from Litolff’s famously bouncy Concerto Symphonique #4 (trust me, you’ve heard it; it’s the only piece the poor guy is remembered for). Finally I figured what the hell, let’s check out the “Relax” channel. Shocker: first thing I got was Satie’s Gymonopedie No. 1.

Sigh; it’s an exercise in futility at this point, but I suppose I should refer you to composer Patrick Castillo’s excellent essay titled “Beethoven didn’t write the Eroica Symphony for your yoga class.” To wit:

“When we engender, particularly among newcomers to the art form, the expectation that classical music be relaxing, what chance do Schulhoff, Shostakovich, and Messiaen stand? Or, for that matter, what chance do Haydn and Beethoven stand to really penetrate the listener’s senses, when all she’s after is some white noise while doing her taxes?”

Amen Patrick, but apparently it’s too late. The masters of public media are totally determined to convert classical music into background streams for pec workouts, wedding receptions, and Excel chart sessions. But here’s the bad news for conventional classical public FM radio stations that have bought into this strategy whole hog. Services like YourClassical.org are slowly but surely going to take a big chunk of your EZ listening audience away. At that point, you’ll have to come up with some kind of strategy for being interesting again. So why put this challenge off until later? As they say during station marathons: act now!

The post Teething to Telemann? Welcome to “Classical Lifestyle” radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy 2015! As we start the year, it’s a good time to reflect on the biggest radio stories of 2014 and also to make our predictions for 2015. Over the past few weeks we’ve shared our thoughts on the state of college radio, low power FM (LPFM), radio in academia, and podcasting in 2014, as well as some lists of our favorite radio moments of the year. Here’s our recap.

The most-read stories on Radio Survivor this year covered a wide range of topics, including Internet radio, jazz radio, Alice’s Restaurant, podcasting, Deezer, the Super Bowl on the radio and the Princeton Review list of popular college radio stations.

The top two stories of the year were My Chromecast is an Internet Radio and Thanksgiving 2014 Brings Another Chance to Hear Alice’s Restaurant. You can see how 2014 compared with other years (2011 was a doozy) by taking a look at our Year in Review archives.

Our reflections on 2014:

2014 – The Year in Podcasting

2014: The Year that College Radio Embraced LPFM

2014 – A Pivotal Year for LPFM

Radio Survivor Academic Series 2014 Year in Review

Plus some 2014 list-making:

10 Fascinating Things Spotted at College Radio Stations in 2014

Top 100 Composer Lists: And the Point is…?

Radio Survivor’s Top Podcasts of 2014

2014 Radio Survivor Holiday Gift Guides

And, finally, some predictions for 2015:

Opportunities Abound for Podcasting in 2015

The post Radio Survivor’s 2014 Year in Review appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Classical public radio station WQXR in New York City has released its annual New Year’s top 100 composition list—the results of a listener poll of favorite pieces. The results bear an uncanny resemblance to, well, last year’s WQXR top 100 list. Here are the top dozen of this year and 2013:

Of the first eight items for 2013, seven appeared in both 2013 and 2014. Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies showed up in exactly the same place. I could probably have written the top 25 for WQXR myself, saving everyone the time and trouble. Brahms’ German Requiem, Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third Piano Concertos, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Copland’s Appalachian Spring—they always rank high on these taxonomies because classical radio stations play them all the time.

So given the predictability level, what’s the point of this sort of poll? I don’t want to give QXR too much grief here. After all, the station runs a terrific contemporary music substation called Q2, and its top composition list for this year is a lot more interesting. But even Q2’s top ten includes the Gershwin Rhapsody and Appalachian Spring.

I think that it is time for some creative thinking about classical radio polls. In the past I’ve suggested that classical stations scotch the top 100 composition poll and replace it with a top 100 performers poll. Here are some other possibilities:

• The 25 worst classical compositions of all time. Let’s make this a pre-1915 list so nobody’s feelings get hurt (apologies to you spiritual types; I’m assuming that dead composers don’t have feelings).
• The 100 best classical recordings (Rolling Stone does this with rock; why can’t QXR do it with classical?).
• The 20 weirdest classical pieces (Satie’s Vexations!).
• The top 50 best forgotten or neglected composers (go Henry Litolff! Ignaz Moscheles! Xaver Scharwenka!).

Anyway, you get the idea. Admittedly, some of these polls might need to be launched in November or even October to get some momentum going. Any other possibilities I’ve missed?

The post Top 100 composer lists: and the point is . . . ? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

New Years is approaching, which means that it is time for classical radio stations to run top 100  composer polls for their listeners, then play the results in an on-air marathon.  Last year New York classical station WQXR-FM queried the faithful and got a fairly predictable list of warhorses. The number one pick was Beethoven’s Ninth “Choral” Symphony; number two was Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony; number four was Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, followed by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Numbers seven and eight were Beethoven’s Sixth “Pastoral” and Third “Eroica” Symphony.

Do you detect a pattern here? The good news is that ‘QXR’s Q2 “living composers” channel also runs a top 100 marathon, this one for composers who have produced masterpieces over the last 100 years; that is to say, music composed after January 1, 1915. This excludes a lot of well known classics that we may assume to be modern, including many of the works of Debussy, all three of Stravinsky’s most famous ballets, and  most everything by Scriabin. I’ll bet that Q2 gets a lot of suggestions that listeners assume were written over the last 100 years, but were in fact written earlier.

Speaking of living people, why not also run a top 100 classical music performers list? As I’ve written before, classical radio needs to become less about passive emphasis on composers, and more about active emphasis on performers. They, after all, are the ones who keep the music alive.

Maybe this sort of poll is already out there, somewhere. I can’t find one myself. If you know about one, let me know.

The post Will we ever see a classical radio top 100 performer’s list? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

WQXR-FM’s Meet the Composer podcast is now around half a year old, and it has already become a wonderful resource. I just finished listening to the latest episode, focusing on the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter. “As a composer, [Balter] writes an almost unthinkable amount of music, and not all of it works,” observes MTC host and violist Nadia Sirota. “He gives himself the right to fail.”

“I’m always writing something,” Balter notes in an interview. “There’s not a moment when I don’t have a double bar in my life. . . . I allow myself a lot of room for failure, and I think that failure is a great thing. Failure sometimes teaches much much more than something that just works from the beginning.”

This humble truism should not obscure the fact that MTC succeeds—specifically in alerting me to the existence of exciting new classical music and the musicians who produce it. For example, I did not know that Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy was writing an opera on the Irish famine titled The Great Famine. The podcast has excerpts from the work-in-progress, and it is quite beautiful. Other composer profiles: Caroline Shaw, Andrew Norman, and John Luther Adams. I particularly recommend the “Frank Zappa as Gateway Drug,” episode.

Here is to MTC’s next six months—and well beyond. It is worth noting that SoundCloud has a lot of new music too, if you know where to look or who to look for. For example, Dennehy has a nice excerpt from another of his pieces over there, As An Nós. And Shaw has her own SoundCloud page too. The streaming service recently cut a deal with Warner to license music, which will presumably keep the lawyers from the door, at least for a little while longer.

On Friday, SoundCloud posted a blog entry pretty much comparing its existence to the removal of the Berlin Wall—the event’s 25th anniversary celebrated on Sunday. “SoundCloud celebrates the tearing down of walls anywhere, and audio everywhere,” the company titled its post. So are the big labels, like, the Stasi? Just asking.

Meanwhile the rest of the civilized world is debating Taylor Swift’s decision to withdraw her catalogue from Spotify, she complaining of declining album sales. Last week Adele’s manager Jonathan Dickens told her and everyone else to get real, streaming is the future, “whether people like it or not.” Swift’s stuff is still all over YouTube, Dickens noted, where artists often make even less.

Speaking of YouTube, some of its more eccentric Griots are posting commentaries on the Swift v. Spotify case. I particularly recommend Adam Rants’ rant on the subject, followed by this Zennie62 meditation, and Joe Garland, who produced his vlog on the subject while driving. For a more informed discussion, I suggest sticking around for this TheLipTV conversation.

It is unclear what impact Swift’s cry of pain from on high will actually have. Most musicians don’t enjoy the luxury of packing up their marbles and leaving. Down go old walls; up go new ones.

Our Monday InternetDJ post covers all subjects related to online radio, however you want to understand them (or however we understand them, for that matter).

The post WQXR’s Meet the Composer podcast: the first six months appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A group of protesters unfurled a banner in the auditorium for Brown, and began singing the labor song “Which Side Are You On?”

“I would imagine this is Ferguson-related,” Crane told his radio listeners. As the demonstrators peacefully filed out of the auditorium, he noted someone, presumably an audience member, say “Now for some real music.”

“But I think that was also some real music we heard, from passionate people in the audience,” Crane added.

The post St. Louis public radio covers Ferguson protest before Brahms appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“We’ll be on the air in no time, though we can’t give you the exact timeline,” Kelly noted. “Definitely within the 18 months that have been granted by the FCC, and probably much sooner than that.”

The Stranger wants to know if there will be changes. “Yes,” Kelly says. “There will be some things that will have to change with what we are doing—our current DJs are used to broadcasting online (with few rules) and will now have to abide by FCC regulations. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do 19 hours of Erik Satie’s Vexations, or burp symphonies, or hosting live hip-hop cyphers to make clam chowder and invite strangers from off the street to jump on the mic.”

It should be noted that Hollow Earth actually did Vexations four years ago. This was no small accomplishment. As The New Yorker noted last year, the piece has only a half sheet of notation, but Satie recommended that it be played, yes way, eight hundred and forty times. That meant that it did not receive a debut until 1963. And guess who did the premiere? You got it: John Cage:

“No one knew what exactly would occur, which is part of what enticed Cage, who had a lust for unknown outcomes. The performance commenced at 6 P.M. that Monday and continued to the following day’s lunch hour. Cage played in twenty-minute shifts with a group of eleven pianists he dubbed “The Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team.” They included the dancer Viola Farber; John Cale, soon to be a co-founder of the Velvet Underground; and the experimental composers David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and David Del Tredici. To complete the full eight hundred and forty repetitions of “Vexations” took eighteen hours and forty minutes. The New York Times sent its own relay team of critics to cover the event in its entirety, while the Guinness Book of World Records dispatched an official to certify this as “The Longest Piano Piece in History.” In the aftermath, some onlookers were bemused; others were agitated. Cage was elated. “I had changed and the world had changed,” he later said.”

There is a YouTube rendition of the epic. I cannot vouch for it. But here it is:

In other community radio news, Sonicbid has an interesting piece on getting your music on community radio stations, and it lists the top ten community radio stations in the United States as follows:

KCSB 91.9 FM Santa Barbara, CA
KMUD 91.1 FM Redway/Garberville, CA
KBOO 90.7FM Portland, OR
KBCS 91.3 FM Seattle, WA
WORT 89.9 FM Madison, WI
KKFI 90.1 FM Kansas City, MO
WRFU 104.5 FM Urbana-Champaign, IL (Hosts of this year’s Grassroots Radio Conference, an annual gathering of community radio stations)
WFMU 91.1 FM Jersey City, NJ
KGNU 88.5 FM Denver, CO
KAOS 89.3 FM Olympia, WA

I am not arguing with this list, but it would be interesting to know how it was compiled.

The post So when is *your* radio station going to perform Erik Satie’s Vexations? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“Quite often it is the kids will come home and introduce classical music to their parents,” Finch noted. “It is something the parents would never think of listening to.” The latter fear that the genre is elitist and focus instead on popular formats, Finch thinks. She recommends keeping the dial tuned to BBC Radio 3 (it should be noted that BBC 2 has a nice classical list for youth).

There’s a lot of cool stuff happening everywhere in classical radio. When I was in Hawaii over the summer I was blown away by the quality of Hawaii Public Radio’s classical content: local, original, live, interesting, fun. Meanwhile NPR Classical is going out of its way to tweet recommendations for albums. And do you know about the Alexander Street Library free Classical Download of the Week?

I have some random thoughts on classical radio becoming even cooler. First, let’s see less passive emphasis on famous composers and more active focus on performers. There are so many dynamic musicians out there like Lang Lang and Valentina Lisitsa. WQXR’s Q2 channel is good at this. Let’s see more focus on people who make the music come alive through their personalities as well as their virtuousity.

Second, we need better classical music social networking applications. SoundCloud could make a huge difference, but its algorithm for classical music is a jumbled mess. Imagine how many more classics lovers there would be if SoundCloud’s classical channel cascaded hours of indie artists playing their hearts out.

Third, why aren’t there more Asian-Americans deejaying at United States based classical radio stations? I take piano lessons at a local community music center in my city, and it’s obvious that classical music has a huge Asian-American constituency. Why aren’t more of their voices on the host end of the radio?

Fourth, keep it hybrid, as per Sir-Mix-A-Lot with the Seattle Symphony!

Finally, two recommended thou-shalt-nots. Number one: let’s stop talking about how people have to be “educated” to appreciate classical music. Imagine we are having a conversation and you say that you don’t like carrots. “Well,” I reply, “we have to educate you to feel otherwise.” The suggestion implies that you lack some sort of knowledge, but that this deficit can be corrected by a formal or semi-formal process. The whole matter is starting to feel very boring and a bit condescending, about the way people feel when they hear that they need to be “educated” to appreciate classical music.

The bottom line is that classical music exists in a huge market of competing genres, many of equal sophistication and depth. The problem isn’t that the public lacks education, it is that the advocates of classical music have always relied on this stance as a substitute for creative thinking about how to win audiences.

Number two: hands off college radio please. The cause of classical music is not served by cannibalizing community based college radio signals. Coolness is all about making your own scene, not stealing someone else’s. In the immortal words of Ludwig van Beethoven: “Only the pure of heart can make good soup.”

The post Six ways to make classical radio cool again appeared first on Radio Survivor.

SoundCloud has a variety of “Explore” channels. These are basically very long playlists of whatever has been recently posted. They include Folk, Rock, Deep House, Trip Hop, and a bunch of other genres about which I know nothing. The service also has a “classical” channel. The problem is that most of the content on the classical channel isn’t really classical.

Take the first piece I hear when I access the channel: “Precious Little” by Hiatus. It has classical elements: a piano, some digital orchestral background sounds. But it’s really an ambient piece. In fact it isn’t even tagged “classical.” It’s tagged “#Ambient.” Next comes “RIP Christie,” a digital elegy with those nice backwards jump cut sounding sounds you hear in Hip Hop. It’s pretty. It’s tagged “#sad.” It does sound sad. But it doesn’t sound classical.

I keep going and going down the playlist and finally I get to something classical, a lovely rendition of Iranian-American composer Shardad Rohani’s beautiful Persian Garden for violin and orchestra. This is followed by Danny L. Harle’s engaging piece Soar Away for piano, clarinet, violin, cello, and percussion.

But before that I had to encounter a mashup of ZZ Top’s hit song “Sharp Dressed Man” which is tagged “#classic rock” and “hip hop” and “mashup.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I love ZZ Top. I just don’t want to hear the band when I access a channel titled “classical.”

So how can I get an actual classical stream on SoundCloud? If I do a search modified for playlists with the tag “#classical,” that gets me a lot more of what I want. This works less well with a search modified for tracks. If you think movie soundtracks count as classical music, you’ll love the search modified for “groups” (I don’t want to get into an argument about this).

But thus far I’m finding it very difficult to easily pick up a SoundCloud stream that focuses on what musicologists call the Common Practice period of classical music and the centuries before and after. Any suggestions welcome.

The post How to get a SoundCloud classical channel that doesn’t suck appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Rough notes post here: some brainy podcasts that come to mind . . .

The New Yorker podcast: Listen to John Cheever fiction read out loud, a reflection on the life of Nina Simone, a summary of the faceoff between feminism and transgenderism, and ongoing meditations about Ferguson, Iraq, and Gaza.

The MIT courseware podcast. Stem cell concepts. The Early Universe. Finance Theory. Origami and Geometric Folding Basics. You name it (or have never heard of it), MIT has it.

The Jazz Corner podcast. Interviews with the world’s top jazz musicians. Oscar Hernandez on Latin jazz. Rudresh Mahanthappa on India influenced saxophone jazz. Gregory Porter on socially conscious jazz lyrics. Cutting edge stuff on a perenially cutting edge genre.

The China in Africa podcast. Yes, you read that correctly. China and Ethiopia. China and South Africa. Does Al Jazeera get China in Africa right? You’ll never think the same way about China or Africa again.

The Classical-Music.com podcast. Classical recordings circa 1917. Handel’s favorite charitable cause: helping abandoned children. The personal life of Gesualdo. Awesome stuff and tons of it.

The New York Museum of Modern Art podcast. Doesn’t seem like MOMA has kept up with these since last October, but still an awesome list of talks on everyone from Motherwell to Oldenburg.

These are some highbrow podcasts. Feel free to suggest yours below . . .

The post Highbrow podcasts: a short list appeared first on Radio Survivor.

If you are a classical music lover, 8tracks.com offers many great playlists. They are perfect for inspiration and/or background for study. Here are some recommendations:

evening: an excellent piano oriented mix. Lots of Chopin and French impressionist music. It is 47 minutes long and has eleven tracks, including a nice improvisation on Satie’s Gynopedie.

The Violin: this 8track list centers itself around the violin tunes Sherlock Holmes presumably played as he pondered his cases. Bach, Paganini, Vivaldi, wonderful stuff. Nine tracks; fifty minutes.

Music for Plants: lots of beautiful string ensemble content here, including a nice oboe concerto, a piano version of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (tracklist here).

Almost a lullaby: A top flight classical playlist mix that includes Edward McDowell’s rarely played piano piece To a Wild Rose and Chopin’s wonderful B flat minor Nocturne. Eight tracks; 26 minutes.

Mot just walzes. Lovely waltzes: Blue Danube; Under Paris Skies; Shostakovich’s Jazz Waltz. Great pieces. They’ll make you happy. 17 tracks; almost one hour and twenty minutes.

Forgotten Kingdom is a soundtrack oriented classical playlist (tracklist here). I’m still looking for a word to characterize this kind of music: rich orchestral, but not traditionally classical. Anyway, the tunes are excellent and that’s what counts. 50 tracks; around two and a half hours.

Off to war. A war movie soundtrack oriented list. Great soundtracks such as John Williams’ The Journey to Himmel Street and a semi-orchestral rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

At the ballet. Yup, ballet music: Brahms; Saint Saens; Tchaikovsky. One hour and ten minutes; 16 tracks.

There are also my lists: a classical piano mix, which includes performances by me, and The Beautiful Time, which foregrounds late 19th and early 20th-century masterpieces. Enjoy . . .

Meanwhile I was skulking around plug.dj rooms again, trying to figure out from which countries the most popular rooms originate. Then I started having trouble getting into the site, although I did get into one:

Herdyn: The administrators of this room hail from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It describes itself as “only for Fans of eSuba Herdyn,” but I managed to slip in and enjoy the music. “Herdyn” I presume is Pavel “Herdyn” Mikeš, celebrity streamer and double champion on the League of Legends gaming site. He is an “elo top laner” (whatever that means; help me out here). eSuba means “play with soul.”

More room national origins when I can lurk some more.

In Spotify news, here’s a Spotify application called Outside Hacks that makes Outside Lands festival recommendations for you based on whatever you are listening to on Spotify. Headliners for the August 8-10 event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park will include Kanye West, Tom Petty, the Arctic Monkeys, and about one hundred other groups, as far as I can count.

Finally, stock market watchers continue to pair Amazon and Pandora Media together, and the stocks of both companies continue to decline. “Shares of Pandora Media fell more than 10% on Friday on news of another profitless quarter,”reports Time. Ten percent for Amazon too, after it disclosed bigger than anticipated losses. “Potential profits just won’t cut it anymore in this market. Take note, Twitter,” the article notes. Does this mean more and more social music apps being absorbed by the big computer, ISPs, and search engine companies? I hope not, but . . .

We cover social music sharing communities  every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

The post 8tracks: ten fine classical music mixes appeared first on Radio Survivor.

• John Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 (1st movement)
• Britten: “Storm” Interlude from Peter Grimes
• Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt
• Handel: Zadok the Priest
• Holst: Mars from The Planets
• Anna Meredith: Connect It
• Mozart: Horn Concerto No. 4 (3rd movement)
• Mussorgsky: A Night on the Bare Mountain
• Stravinsky: The Firebird suite (1911) (Finale)

I’m especially excited about the Adams piece, which I’m sure lots of children will love. Here’s also hoping that United States classical radio stations will pick up on this list, or invent their own.

The post The Beeb’s top ten classical list for kids appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Here’s this week’s classical radio news. It starts dour but gets better, so please keep reading.

In the United Kingdom, a retrenchment plan to pare down 15 percent of BBC radio staff will result in two divisions, administrators say: ‘pop music’ and ‘classical and speech.’ These “hubs” will constitute the framework of BBC radio following 65 immediate job cuts. The long term plan is to remove 200 positions from the service’s workforce of around 1,300 people.

The Guardian has this official quote from BBC Radio Director Helen Boaden: “BBC Radio is the envy of the world,” but “we must also be as small as we can be to meet our savings challenges and increase our agility in the digital world without losing our distinctiveness or damaging relationships with our many audiences. Reducing the division’s headcount by 15% is challenging, but shows just how hard we are working to drive efficiency in everything we do.”

Alas . . . in happier news, BBC Radio 3 is scheduling Brahms for the week of October 6 through 15. The presenters will play lots of his chamber music and the German Requiem, much of it live.

Ever since Brahms became Brahms people have been fighting over him. Was he a backwards looking reactionary who refused to acknowledge the harmonic innovations of Wagner? Or was he forward looking in different and more subtle ways? As for me, I’ve always experienced him as an ideal composer for radio. I don’t really enjoy listening to Brahm in the concert hall. So Brahms Week will be perfect for my purposes.

Sir Mix-A-Lot mixing it up with his Seattle Symphony support team.

Meanwhile Minnesota Public Radio brings to our attention the Seattle Symphony’s recent rendition of rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot’s noted composition “Baby Got Back.” No less than Gabriel Prokofiev, the grandson of composer Sergei Prokofiev, has orchestrated the piece. As per the YouTube video below, Mr. Mix-A-Lot appeared on the stage with around 20 volunteers and everyone seems to have had quite a lot of fun.

I wonder what Brahms or Prokofiev would have thought of this scene? (I’m guessing they would have approved.) As for me, all I can say is, like, gosh.

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This reconfirms my already strong impression that classical music is not a very viable format for commercial radio—at least not the way classical music radio is currently construed. Nielsen’s latest State-of-the-Media survey places classical music almost at the bottom of its top formats for 2013. The genre captures 1.4 percent of total listening, the same share as Oldies and Spanish Contemporary.

Basically if classical radio is going to survive, it will survive as public radio (but by not devouring any more college radio stations, please).

Speaking of classical public radio stations, Northwest Public Radio has a nice list of summer classical music festivals. Enjoy.

The post Vermont loses only commercial classical radio station appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Here’s my review: Zzzzzzzzzz.

Yes, just what the world needs, another classical/public radio clone. You get your predictable playlist during the day, followed by PRI’s Classical 24 syndicated service after six PM. The schedule mentions four local deejays, one of whom is also with Classical 24. You get your Metropolitan Opera Broadcast on Saturday and the New York Philharmonic concerts on Wednesday. Plus you get your NPR in the morning and evening.

That’s about it, as far as I can tell. In other public radio news, This American Life says it’s going to distribute its show via PRX.org instead of PRI.

“All the other things a distributor does – selling underwriting, encouraging stations to put our show on at better times – we’ve hired people to do for us,” Ira Glass notes. ‘Radio – and the technology of moving audio over the Internet – has changed so much that at this point, there’s little a distributor can do for us that we can’t do on our own.”

Apparently Sirius/XM gave them a call: “They asked how much money it would take to get me to quit public radio completely, to abandon terrestrial radio the way Howard Stern did, and play exclusively on Sirius-XM. So flattering! But of course, no chance of that happening. For better or worse, I seem to be a public radio lifer.”

Meanwhile KBOO in Portland, Oregon has announced the premiere of its Steam Radio Syndicate Broadcast: “a 4-hour extravaganza of sounds and stories, all broadcast live from the decks, holds, causeways and crevasses of the 150′ steamship.  Over 50 artists come together to create a live multimedia soundscape with slam-poetry, fiction, music, oral histories and found sound.”

Not sure I get what this is, but maybe that’s the point. In any event, it’s happening on Friday and sounds like fun.

The post It’s official: boring classical public radio format ensconced in Nashville appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“Bailero,” from Chants d’Auvergne. The composer Joseph Canteloube orchestrated these gorgeous folk songs for soprano over many years (from the 1920s through the 1950s). They are in the Occitan language, spoken in parts of France, Italy, Monaco, and Spain. “Bailero” remains the most famous of the Chants. Many sopranos have recorded it, among them Victoria De Los Angeles and Anna Moffo. I prefer Kiri Te Kanewa, who gives a rendition with tenderness and restraint.

Bela Bartok, Piano Concerto Number Three, second movement. The composer wrote this concerto in the last year of his life, 1945. The second movement is aptly titled Adagio Religioso. Bartok was a bit of a sampler. That slow string elegy at the beginning is borrowed from a section of a Beethoven string quartet (“Holy song of Thanksgiving.”) And if the gently frolicking middle section sounds to you like an assortment of birds chatting in a tree, that’s because it was: the forest stood outside of Bartok’s recovery room while he fought Leukemia. The composer listened and took notes.

Ralph Vaughn Williams, The Lark Ascending. United Kingdom classical listeners recently voted this English composer’s exquisite meditation for violin and orchestra their number one favorite composition. Here in the USA it hovers at around number 38. It’s very beautiful, but for some deejays it’s also very long: around 16 minutes. Please play it anyway. Your listeners will always thank you.

“Oh, what a beautiful morning,” from Oklahoma! by Rogers and Hammerstein. As Radio Survivor readers who follow my classical radio posts know, I’m flexible about musical categories. I just love this song with its optimistic words and feeling. ” . . . . oh the sounds of the earth, they’re like music . . . ” And guess who does a great rendition: Hugh Jackman, yes, The Wolverine. Enjoy!

The opening “Preludium” from Paul Hindemith’s Ludis Tonalis (Play of Tones). Hindemith wrote this amazing suite of preludes, interludes, and fugues in 1942. The Preludium has a marvelous soaring mood that will wake your audience up. Interspersed through the piece are touching sections like this Pastorale, perfect for morning pensiveness. Many pianists have performed this work, and who can argue with Sviatoslav Richter? But I still favor the rendition of one its earliest exponents: Jane Carlson.

Have a favorite classical radio morning piece? Please let me know.

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The Adland Commercial Archive blog explains:

“In Guatemala, when a person passes away, you express condolences in obituaries over the TV, newspaper and on the radio. So Faro opted for a mass media campaign announcing that Ludwig van Beethoven would die for the second time, unless the people of Guatemala tune in to 104.5 FM.”

The announcement went as so: “Radio Faro Cultural mourns deeply that Mr. Ludwig von Beethoven is going to pass away for a second time. We pray to save his music from death and invite you to tune into 104.5 FM.” In other words (to put it more crudely): ‘support our station or Beethoven croaks once more, this time over Guatemala’s airwaves.’

This apparently moved Guatemala’s Minister of Culture to find the funds to save the station. “We are forgetting this kind of music,” Carlos Batzin concurred in this video on the Radio Faro ad campaign.

It’s a fun clip. Odd that it starts with Pachelbel’s Canon and Albinoni’s Adagio, but one cannot live with Beethoven alone, I guess.

The post Guatemala almost buries Beethoven again; saves classical radio station appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Kerry Andrew of the UK Guardian dissents:

“So what does it say about us as a nation? That we like the cosy, armchair favourites? That we all want to go for a cream tea after a day tilling the fields? Perhaps, but if listeners are making ‘safe’ choices it is because programmers are too. This is, after all, a Classic FM poll – hardly the forum for playing Stockhausen’s pioneering electronic works or Renaissance composer Gesualdo’s astringent microtonal nuances on a regular basis. If the poll had been conducted with listeners to BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction or the broad-ranging classical website Sinfini the results would have undoubtedly been different.”

I hear you Kerry, but speaking personally, if American classical audiences made The Lark Ascending their number one pick, I’d be ecstatic. Over at WQXR in New York City it’s Beethoven, Beethoven, Beethoven, and Beethoven (duh duh duh duuuhhhhhh . . . ).

For those of you who have never heard The Lark, here it is. Enjoy.

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I’m rummaging around the indie artist site Bandcamp to see if there are any good classical tracks, and there most certainly are:

You have absolutely got to listen to Sly 5th Avenue do a saxophone/violin meditation on a Bach theme. It’s gorgeous. And while we are on that composer, Pianobeat has a really nice album which features an elegant keyboard performance of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire. Dominick Francken has a very soulful rendition of the Prelude from the First Violin Suite. And Dadalus Uggla has an interesting improvisation on the keys B-A-C-H.

And that’s just stuff about Bach I found via Bandcamp’s search engine—there are tons of other composers on the site. Another way to explore Bandcamp is via its “discover” page, which has a classical category. This delivers more complicated results, because you get a lot of content that tags itself “classical,” as in “classic” this or that genre. Still, quite beautiful things come your way, among them a lovely waltz by Christopher Ferreria and an amazing cello ensemble piece by Zoe Keating. If you keep following the thread, you will eventually run into common practice period classical content, such as this elegant performance of Rachmaninoff’s F-Minor Etude by Beste Aydin.

You can also just browse by the tag “classical.” The problem with Bandcamp, from my perspective, is that it is a bit complicated to get started with as a playlist aspiring fan. When I go to the fan signup page, it explains how to get a fan account: “Easy: buy something, support an artist, and we’ll invite you.” So I bought something (the Aydin album) and had to go through a whole I-do-not-want-to-use-Pay-Pal-so-what-do-I-do-now thing. The email receipt indeed included an invite to join and I did. But the way to develop a feed is to follow other fans, and I can’t figure out how to search for fans with tastes similar to mine.

The great virtue of Bandcamp system is that it nudges you to buy content, which is good for artists. But its initial complexity is perhaps one reason why more people listen to SoundCloud (although to be fair, lots more people listen to SoundCloud than many other music sharing applications).

Speaking of which, SoundCloud classical has some awesome stuff coming down the queue (as usual). Here are some classical SoundCloud feed makers to keep an ear out for:

• Ahmed Gado of Mansoura, Egypt. Honestly, I don’t know who is this guy is, but his playlist is just a heavenly cascade of Egyptian classical content: orchestral, Oud, keyboard, old stuff, new stuff. You’ve got to get this Gado dude on your mobile list; he’s awesome.
• Deryn Cullen’s The Cello Companion. A wonderful mix of original compositions for cello, lovely soundtracky stuff, and beautiful renditions of the classics via cellist Deryn and her husband Dan, operating out of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
• City Slang. Really hauntingly sweet music from this hallowed indie record label in Berlin. A brainchild of Christof Ellinghaus, CS became a conduit for US bands looking for audiences in Europe (see The Lemonheads, Ya Lo Tengo, The Flaming Lips).”Hell, we don’t know what makes us jump either,” says the label’s About page. But: “It’s got to be good.”

While I’m on a roll, some nice 8tracks.com classical playlists:

• 8tracks user Sumsa’s The Regret of the Fantasie Impromptu. Chopin, Satie, and very listeneable ambient content via Phillip Glass and Ludovico Einaudi.
• MarieDuplessis’ On the Eve of Revolution. Pre-Bolshevik crackdown classical goodies. The list starts with Tchaikovsky’s neglected masterpiece Valse Sentimentale and just gets better.
• allirpe’s Classical Music for Evil Minds. You knew this list was going to start with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, right?

We started with Bach and we are ending with Bach. Keep sending me news about your classical music radio stations and online classical music sharing/streaming pr1ojects. Follow @radiosurvivor and my classical music twitter feed, @hybridhighbrow.

No classical music next week. I’m going to do an update on various online services and their progress. We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature.

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“We play a range of classical and opera music and so far it seems to be working,” he says. CDN decries this “novel” strategy: “Many of today’s youth are turned off by culture that helped define the civilization that enables them to live a carefree life.”

Setting aside the debatable “carefree life” assumptions, this practice has been around for a while. I remember reading news items about it decades ago. And stores do it everywhere. Here’s a whole chain of Virginia gas and convenience joints that stream classical content. Here’s a Central Ohio milk and groceries outlet that does the same. And here’s the big secret: lots of people enjoy not only the new found peace and quiet, but the music as well.

“It’s cut down on a lot of traffic” one Virginian is quoted as saying. “I like it. It’s soothing.”

Speaking personally, I wish there was a McDonald’s in my neck of the woods that played Pagliacci. I’d hang out there. They’ve usually got wireless and the coffee is decent. As long as you don’t actually eat the burgers or fries, you’ll be fine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCduNCQtkcA

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