Two recent articles about radio and music got my juices flowing: one was a post last week at “Inside Music Media” called Drinking Radio’s Kool-Aid by Jerry Del Colliano, whose understanding of the radio industry is both insightful and cynical. He was quoting David Rehr, CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, who said,
…being local, in and of itself, is not what defines radio’s value… It’s the accessibility and the connection with radio personalities. And it’s being everywhere and available to everyone. A radio is not a jukebox. If you’re listening to radio, you want to hear a human voice sharing that same moment in time that you are. There is power in that personal bond. A CD doesn’t have that connection. An iPod doesn’t have that. No, our model is not broken.
Jerry’s response?
WHAT? This is outrageous. If there is anything about radio that is compelling it is that radio is a local medium. It’s defined by being a local medium. Even the NAB refers to terrestrial radio as local radio. If you take local out of radio you have — well, the Internet. The world wide web. That’s not radio’s strength.
Hold that thought.
The other article that got to me was in The New York Times on April 17th. The author, Michael Kimmelman, wrote about Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov:
He’s a star on this side of the Atlantic [in Europe]. In America his name will draw blank stares. In this day and age, how can that be? … Classical music is supposedly universal…That Mr. Sokolov, whose talent is beyond dispute, disproves this notion should remind us not only of our persistent parochialism but also of our delusions about technology. The Web, on which he can be found on YouTube, giving astonishing performances, clearly doesn’t substitute for hearing him live. Neither do discs, which, as a perfectionist, he stopped issuing in 1995 (this partly explains his American situation).
I remember a couple of years ago at NPR, we were airing performances from several of the summer music festivals, and it got to be downright funny, because each festival sent us music by the same artists. It was a group of New York artists traveling from festival to festival. The local color from each of those venues got lost completely.
So what do we want from our classical music radio? Local stuff? Or maybe national shows that air on 250 stations – the classical equivalent of consolidation?
Of course you want to know about local concerts. There’s no question that the local station has to serve the local music community. And of course you want to hear the best artists in the world. The local station is responsible for keeping track of who they are.
But local, shmocal. National? Phooey. Classical music is much bigger than either one. We have a thousand years of music, played by artists from all over the western world, and now even more from Asia, South America, and Australia.
Yet on classical radio stations we end up playing the safe pieces, the big names, the familiar chestnuts, the Mozart/Haydn wallpaper. Classical music is soothing for the drive home. It’s unobtrusive for the office.
If we creative types in classical music can’t make radio interesting and broadminded, who can?
I want to hear Grigory Sokolov play on my local station, even if they have to get a live performance from the European broadcasting Union. I want the people in Manchester, England to hear the Seattle Symphony. I want to hear an Arabic orchestra where everybody on stage plays the same melody – with astonishing ornaments — and there’s no harmony. I want to hear the West-East Divan Orchestra and the Mahler Youth Orchestra and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra – three groups of young people who are reinvigorating the classical orchestra world. I want to hear Chris Brubeck’s “mash-up” concerto “Interplay” that uses solo violinists from three traditions: classical, Celtic, and jazz . I want to hear Red Priest play Vivaldi, not those generic orchestras that sound like sewing machines.
If classical radio peters out, it won’t be because there’s not great stuff out there. It’ll be because we’re failing to play it on the radio.
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Great stuff Marty, I think some of the same conversations have been going on in the orchestra world to one extent or another. Specifically, why have a local orchestra if you can just truck in a bigger budget groups several times a year?
Ultimately, I think there’s value in local that simply can’t be replaced but there’s nothing wrong with bringing in other groups. The Nashville Symphony is in the beginning stages of becoming an indispensable local resource and they deliberately bring in larger budget orchestras to perform in their new venue so the local audience can begin to develop a frame of reference toward where they can grow. It’s a win-win: I suppose you can think of it as “local” using “national” to their own advantage and vice versa.