Lorin Levee, the wonderful principal clarinetist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has died at age 61 of a blood disorder. A very sad day. Scanning the Dial shares in sending condolences to his family and to his orchestra colleagues.
Colorado Public Radio has officially purchased classical KVOD, although CPR has been operating the station under an LMA since 2008. The purchase price was $8.364 million.
It doesn’t play in Peoria! Pjstar.com reports that HD Radio is going nowhere, which we all knew. Despite that, many stations dump their classical broadcasting onto HD channels and pretend that people will still be able to listen.
If you’ve been paying attention, you know about the young composer Mason Bates. Kevin Berger writes in the NY Times that Bates is “hailed as one of the young saviors of classical music, thanks to his gift for rinsing the gray out of traditional forms with the searing beats of electronica. ” Bates recognizes the power of radio waves in his latest work for the San Francisco Symphony:
“Mass Transmission” is based on radio-wave communications in the 1920s between parents in the Netherlands and their children on Java. Children were sent to the island (now part of Indonesia) to work for the colonial Dutch government. The piece, scored for chorus, organ and electronics (including samples of Indonesian gamelan music), opens with the wistful voice of a woman recalling her first communications with her daughter. The ethereal music contrasts the human voice with the cold mists of electronic static. An organ traverses the two like a Bach toccata.
30-year classical radio veteran Karl Scroggin is retiring from KUIS at the University of Illinois in Springfield. Karl, we wish you well.
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