Some U.S. classical radio stations promote live performances, sponsor occasional talks or find other ways to get out in their communities, promoting local arts while elevating their profiles in the process. But I’m willing to wager that even the most active station would look like a hopeless underachiever next to Australia’s 4MBS Classic FM.
4MBS stages a dizzying array of musical and cultural events in its hometown of Brisbane, throughout Australia and even on the high seas — concerts, plays, contests, cruises, lectures, classes and more. These activities make 4MBS much more than just a radio station. In fact, General Manager Gary Thorpe credits 4MBS’s growth over the past 15 years to its efforts to engage audiences in so many different ways. The station boasts an annual income on par with that of classical stations in Sydney and Melbourne, homes to many more people than Brisbane.
“We want to show people that the radio station is just the start of the process of connecting with the community,” he wrote in an e-mail. “There are so many other relevant and meaningful things we can do to enhance their lives and the 4MBS experience — broaden their horizons within the classics.”
Other broadcasters have taken note. In 2004, 4MBS became the only classical station in Australia to win the Community Radio Station of the Year award from the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia.
Here are some of the activities for which 4MBS is known.
- Three annual music festivals. Its Festival of Classics, now in its 15th year, is Australia’s largest classical music festival, Thorpe says, and entails 25 concerts spanning three weeks each May. This year’s highlighted the works of Beethoven and drew 10,000 people to performances of all nine of the composer’s symphonies, as well as many other events.
The other festivals are Cathedrals Week, a choral festival staged in Brisbane’s cathedrals, and Shakespeare on Oxford, an event devoted to the Bard’s work with classical music woven into the performances.
- 4MBS holds summer and winter schools in its performance studios, some for children, others for adults. The classes, recitals and workshops focus on music education and appreciation, and often highlight the composers featured in each year’s Festivals of Classics. 4MBS also holds music appreciation sessions online and in libraries.
- Local, national and international concert tours, including an annual Classics Concert Cruise to sites such as the Great Barrier Reef or the South Pacific. The 10- to 13-day cruises feature daily concerts, talks and quizzes. Next year’s is headed to the South Pacific islands with musicians from the Queensland Orchestra. A theater cruise, also scheduled for next year, will feature classic plays staged in the ship’s theater.
- 4MBS has formed a theater company, the 4MBS Classic Players, formed of a director-in-residence and about 20 professional actors who perform Shakespeare and other classic works. The plays incorporate classical music as well.
- Activities for young performers, competitions for music students, and awards for Young Performer of the Year and Music Teacher of the Year.
- When I first e-mailed Thorpe to ask for an interview, he wrote back, “I’m heading out now to deliver some radios to aged care facilities for a new radio service we’ve started for socially isolated people.” Yes, 4MBS has also started Silver Memories, a stream of nostalgia music from the 1920s to the 1950s tailored to listeners in nursing homes and elsewhere. Support from foundations and Brisbane councillors funded the purchase of hundreds of radios that pick up the subcarrier frequency, which 4MBS then distributes to listeners.
Is that all 4MBS does, you might ask? No, it’s not. The station also runs a ticketing service for small performing ensembles, and has started a concertgoers’ group for singles. And there are probably some other ventures Thorpe didn’t even mention.
This is all done by a station with just six full-time staff and three part-timers (but, it should be noted, 300 volunteers). 4MBS’s annual budget is a bit shy of $1 million in Australian dollars (now roughly equivalent to the U.S. dollar). The station earns money from grants, raffles, record sales, listener donations and other sources. Some of the activities listed above turn a profit, such as the festivals, cruises and ticketing service. Others do not, but Thorpe says profit is not the sole motivation. The station wants to offer experiences that its listeners will find nowhere else.
“For example, we did Act 1 of Tosca in a cathedral with full symphony orchestra, great singers, choir, costumes, etc., culminating with a grand procession down the aisle — fantastic impact, people are still talking about it,” Thorpe wrote. “One patron said, ‘Only at the 4MBS Festival do we get such wonderful experiences.’ That’s what we aim for — staying in people’s memory and heart through a shared experience.”
“It is important to do all this because no one else seems to be doing it,” he says.
Thorpe has some advice for stations seeking to follow 4MBS’s example and become community institutions. They must have committed staffs and boards, and think long-term. It has taken 15 years for 4MBS to build up its Festival of Classics to the size of this year’s. Start with small projects and reach out to local musicians and other music organizations.
“Be bold and have a go,” he says.
What do you think — should stations aspire to 4MBS’s example? What community events are most needed, or most doable? If you have any questions for Gary Thorpe, leave them in the comments — maybe he’ll join the conversation. You can learn more at 4MBS’s website.
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Everyone in PubRadio who is involved with Classical Music should read this. I know a fe people and I am going to email them the link.
>>RSM
Thanks, Richard! It struck me that 4MBS’s approach is the kind of thing that could help to guarantee classical radio stations a stronger future. That kind of community involvement is exactly what iPods, satellite radio and CD collections will never be able to deliver. 4MBS is a local and national institution — not just a reliable stream of music at beck and call around the clock.
So, I sent my little message, complete with a description on my latest musical buying craze, and how and why artists must be supported and how the stations need to get out there.
So, I got one reply with effusive thanks. It was from the President of a well known West Coast Classical Music Station that probably does outreach already better than any station I know.
Here is my best personal example of outreach. I live in New Jersey, but my son teaches Law in San Diego. So, a couple of Winters ago, I found myself with the opportunity to have some fun. I was in an outdoor shopping center in La Jolla. I had, for no apparent reason, my laptop and some decent if small speakers. I set up my computer outside where someone allowed me the use of an A/C outlet. I booted up and launched wcny.org, (Syracuse, NY, the Snow Capital). Luckily, Peter and the Wolf was the fare of the moment. So, a couple of mothers with strollers approached me, and asked me what they were hearing. When I told them, they asked for the frequency to tune in in their cars. No, I said, this was from Snowy Syracuse, new York, on the internet. They were blown away. At that time, San Diego had no Classical Music source. Since then, Brenda Barnes, KUSC has leapt into the breach and they were getting CPRN via a Mexican outlet. What happens now, with CPRN gone, I don’t know.
Now, that was outreach. Admittedly, a bizarre tale, but, hey, whatever works. I made it work as one person. Think about what a station can do.
This was a terrific article.
And, by the way, you guys need a real forum. I think you are very important, so I go to this trouble of using the comment RSS feeds, and then getting rid of them when they die out. But, you are worth having a forum and letting people know you are out there. And, don’t think they won’t know. I am in a lot of forums, and my stuff comes up in other people’s searches. So, they find their subject, and they find a forum, and some stick. You are important, but not if you are not read.
Many many thanks for the work you do, focusing on these pressing issues for this culture and the future of serious music in it.
>>RSM
Thanks for the suggestion. Which forums do you use? What do you find personally valuable about them? Maybe Inside the Arts should have an umbrella forum.
Mike, I participate in SillyDog.org, which has Netscape as its core interest, but also Mozilla products, Windows and Mac; Mozillazine, for Firefox and Thunderbird; WinBBS, for all things Windows, Linux and Mac; PCMag and PCWorld forums; worldcommunitygrid.org and boinc.berkeley.edu forums, about public distributed computing, which is participating in scientific research on projects at august institutions around the world. Oh, almost forgot, the French musical group Deep Forest, whose first and eponymous album was featured on Music From the Hearts of Space (PGM 332)has a forum. Gather.com/Innova, which discusses musicians and music produced by Innova (American Composers’ Forum, St Paul, MN). And, of course, the various Microsoft Community forums.
In some cases, the “threads”, each a discussion of a single topic, can run for months.
Forums are the best places to discuss problems or issues among participants in various activities.
In the computer world, if you get an error message and copy it into a search, almost inevitably, you will get hits on various forums and maybe find an answer.
Everything about forums would be good for the discussion of Classical Music and where it is heading, especially in terrestrial and internet radio.
And, hey, thanks for asking. We are doing right now exactly what happens in a forum, but, as much as I value whats happening here, in a real forum, it is a much simpler process. Also, if you look at any of the BOINC or WCG forums, you will see that they too use RSS feeds to let us users know that there are new items. Most forums do not do this, but they have reply notification.
Onward and upward with Music and The Arts.
>>RSM
Mike, you said, “…Maybe Inside the Arts should have an umbrella forum….” So, I absolutely forgot where I got this source, etc.
I think I got you from a link at Current Online. I got Current Online (sadly, no feed; in this day and age, one must elect to go there to see what’s new. I am nudging them to do a feed for all articles). I got Current from Stephen Hill at Hearts of Space, one of the grandest of all PubRadio music services.
That’s the dynamic of how stuff goes on the net these days. People link up to and with other people.
So, I looked at the rest of Inside the Arts. I saw Holly’s blog, but the title does not show up on the feed. Instead, her name is the link, and I already had it.
Yes, definitely Inside the Arts would benefit by having a forum, with each of the sections of blogs as a topic heading. If the experience would follow form, many people would find you by stuff turning up in hits in searches. You can have an RSS feed for the whole forum, giving people the opportunity to then click on what interests them, and, in most forum software, there is an email reply notification utility.
So, the pattern is, I see an item in the forum feed, I respond to it, and then I get notification that someone has responded to my post.
You can only benefit from having a forum.
>>RSM
Thanks again for the ideas. I like the idea of a forum for Inside the Arts, but we would have to find someone to moderate it, and I imagine we are all already pretty busy! Still, maybe it could be done.
That’s funny that you found us through Current. I still write for them fairly often, and I share your feelings about the website. We have been talking about moving Current.org over to a more blog-like format, possibly in Moveable Type, Wordpress or Drupal, but obviously we’re not there yet. There is an RSS feed for the blog on the front page, however. But I agree an RSS feed for the rest of the site would be useful. (I’m a big RSS devotee.)
Setting the record straight on La Jolla in response to Richard’s comment: I just got home from working at SummerFest there. KUSC has a marvelous signal in La Jolla and is broadcasting live-hosted from L.A. The Mexican station is XLNC, and it’s transmitted from over the border, but there’s a studio in the San Diego metro area. It’s a fairly new station and is coming up very nicely.
Also, the wonderful public station KPBS plays classical music in the evenings, overnight, and on the weekends. So, there’s actually a lot of classical music on the radio (R.I.P. CPRN) in La Jolla, not to mention all the unbelievably fabulous live concerts from La Jolla Music Society Summerfest, Mainly Mozart at the Neurosciences Institute, the San Diego Symphony, and so much more.
I don’t understand why La Jolla should be so lucky. They have the world’s best weather, the world’s most beautiful scenery, and lots of spectacular music, but normal people can’t afford to live there. The median house price is $2.7 million!
Marty
marty-
Thanks for your comments about La Jolla. My interest in what I was doing there in that shopping center was not to any discredit of any other functioning station. In fact, at the time that I did this, even though I live in New Jersey, I was a member of KUSC, which Brenda Barnes can verify for you.
My goal was to see what I could accomplish demonstrating the power of the internet for Public Radio. That was why I chose WCNY, Syracuse, NY, of which I was also at that time a member. My home station, WNYC, had left us music listeners high and dry after 9/11, going to all talk during the day. So, we were forced out on our own. Using publicradiofan.com, I found my way to KUSC, WCNY, and WCPE. I joined these three, but kept my membership ar WNYC out of respect for John Schaefer, David Garland, and the rest of the music crew.
With memberships in these three other stations, and, yes, even and especially listening to fund drives, I became convinced of the importance and potential power of the internet for Public Radio. The New York Times, some months ago, said that KCRW’s second largest audience is New York City. I was being entertained and taught from L.A., Syracuse, and Winston-Salem.
In La Jolla that day, I was gleeful that I had actually attracted some folks to come listen to what was happening.
These days, with wnyc2 and the resurgent WNYC-FM Evening Music, I have moved all of those member dollars to WNYC.
And, BTW, I am heavily focused on member dollars. First, I believe that if one is not a member, then one has no privilege to be a critic. If I am anything, I am a critic. Brenda can also confirm that statement. So can John Schaefer and George Preston at WNYC.
Member dollars: it is a whole new world out there for Public Radio, the global village is the potential. The idea is to turn listeners into members. Every station that is important is available through iTunes. But, at iTunes, there is no utility for getting to the web site, so no way to attract listeners to membership. At Shoutcast, on the other hand, there is always a link to the stations’ web sites, so that if a listener wants to get to the web site of a station, there need be no fumbling around or search. So, I have recommended to every station that I know to get it on with Shoutcast.
Being part of the process is what it is all about for me. I want to be part of th4e process. I love Classical Music, I love Public Radio. I want people to spend money to support Public radio (W-N-Y-C = We Need Your Cash). And, I want them to be impelled to support whatever segment of the Classical Music world they choose. I choose to support living composers. But, that is just my personal choice.
Thanks to Inside the Arts for making these blogs available. They are te only place that I hove found these discussions going on.
>>RSM