New prez at VPR, and other odds and ends

:: Robin Fenn was named president of Vermont Public Radio, which runs a network of classical stations throughout the state as well as news/talk outlets. Fenn has worked at the station for 20 years and most recently served as v.p. of development. She replaces Mark Vogelzang, who left VPR to work with a nationwide fundraising effort for public radio. More in the Burlington Free Press. CORRECTION (added 3/11/09): As you’ll see if you read the article, Robin Fenn is now Robin Turnau.

:: I got a kick out of this article about a shopping mall in Yellowknife, Canada, which falls into the “Is it real, or is it The Onion?” file. The Northern News Service reports that most people are glad the mall has stopped playing classical music on speakers at its entrances. The tactic was intended to keep people from hanging around outside the mall.

“That music was annoying,” says a guy quoted in the article. “If you want to hear classical music, you go to the opera.”

This reminds me of the practice of blaring music at people holed up in compounds in an effort to drive them out. Usually hard rock is deployed, if I recall correctly, but has classical music ever been used?

:: Greg Sandow wrote a few posts lately about how Twitter might be used in concert halls. His latest post, “Silent listening”, also includes some interesting musing about Western norms of enjoying and observing music in performance.

Our kind of silent listening goes back, I think, to a long-established trope of western philosophy, in which the mind is hugely favored over the body. The mind is rational, responsible; the body is childish, dangerous, and primitive. So we sit in silence when we listen to profound music (or music that’s thought to be profound).

But is this what we still have to believe, now that we have a multicultural society? Other cultures see the world quite differently, and give the body equal weight. So what would happen if we listened to classical music with our bodies — and with our feelings visible, for all to see — instead of mainly with our minds? Maybe we’d listen better, as I’ve been saying.

The whole post and the comments that follow are quite thought-provoking — definitely worth a read. And the discussion brought to mind our articles about WGBH staging a performance within Second Life. I heard from one classical music impresario within Second Life that concertgoers in the virtual world especially enjoy the ability to chat with each other during the performance. (They also like to express their enjoyment of the music in unconventional ways — such as floating up to the ceiling!) So Second Life may be a place to look as Sandow and others consider ways to reinvent live performances.

Last week the PBS blog Mediashift looked at how media companies are continuing to use Second Life. Mark Glaser mentioned a review of the WGBH project written by producer Gary Mott — it’s here as a PDF. I have yet to read it, but it should be worth checking out.