Some Mother’s Day Thoughts

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Authormarty72x72 Mother’s Day is not just a Hallmark holiday. As a mother, I can tell you it’s about wanting your kids to be safe — not fighting in Iraq, for instance. You want them to be educated, and happy, and kind to others. Honest and fair in their dealings. You want to protect them from liars and charlatans. You want them to have discernment and not fall for the crap that passes as popular culture.

And you want them to appreciate the the transformative nature of great music, something that is easy for our generation but a lot harder for young people in today’s cultural climate.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was quoted as saying

The decline of arts education in the U.S. and the paucity of international cultural exchanges will take decades to repair.

You can see a copy of the article here.

I confess to a little bit of hero worship of Dana Gioia. Here is a man who grew up as an immigrant in L.A., the first one in his family to go to college. He didn’t fit the usual demographic of a cultural consumer, but he defied the stereotypes and developed a mad passion for the arts.

In his speech at the Stanford University commencement last June, Gioia pointed out that we’ve become passive consumers of culture instead of active participants. And he blames it partly on a decline in arts education:

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training. I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available to the new generation of Americans….The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

The whole speech is worth reading. Click here for a copy.

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Station profile: Classical WETA 90.9 FM, Washington, D.C. (continued)

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Authormike72x72_3 Second of two posts

After WETA-FM became the sole classical radio outlet serving Washington, D.C. — you can catch up on the back story here — the benefits of claiming the city’s classical franchise were immediate. In the first Arbitron ratings book after the switch, WETA’s market share jumped to a 4.9 — more than double its 2.1 prior to the change. That took WETA from 17th among the market’s radio stations to fifth.

The station went on to average a 4.5 share last year and had a successful fundraising drive in February. “Public service is being transacted here,” says General Manager Dan DeVany, “because people are listening.”

WETA aims to present a mix of classical music that appeals to a broad audience — “anywhere from those who would be considered aficionados of classical music to those who enjoy it but don’t necessarily know much about it,” says DeVany. “Being broad-based in our appeal has certainly been an effort on our part, and it’s paid off.” The station couldn’t sound like the old commercial WGMS-FM “even if we wanted to,” DeVany says, because the lack of 20 minutes of ads an hour offers more programming freedom.

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Is Radio in a Coma? Nah, It’s Just Resting.

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Authormarty72x72 Is the country ready for change? Is the radio world ready for change? Some interesting posts this past week (all of which I, a middle-aged woman read online) bear on the future of classical music radio.

First is a post by Todd Feinburg, who despite his inane political blather has made some intelligent observations about the current dilemma radio finds itself in. He says radio is in a coma. In an article titled Is Radio Headed For Extinction? Feinburg writes

The radio industry is in shock. An absolute coma.

Radio sees the enemy bearing down and closing in, but it doesn’t know how to respond. It’s frozen in place, unable to move. No defense is being offered, no counter attack.

The foe that has radio folks terrified is the Internet. New technologies are encroaching on radio’s traditional domain with the same speed that the auto and airline industries once pounded the railroads into near extinction. And radio is mimicking the railroad industry’s response to its death knell — whether from arrogance, fear, or institutional inertia, radio is failing to see that it must embrace the future rather than resist it or run from it…

The radio industry needs to learn that it’s in the audio distribution business…But the fear that radio feels over the encroachment, and the revenues lost to the Internet, are causing radio to pull back rather than to be aggressive. In the short term, this means tighter budgets and fewer jobs. This is exactly the wrong response, of course.

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Younger listeners and classical; new home for CBC Orchestra?

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Authormike72x72_3 A writer in Oklahoma State University’s student newspaper gives a thumbs-up to the format change at KOSU-FM in Stillwater, Okla., which recently cut back on classical and added more news and talk. The author writes, “The new music programming is also exciting. On Friday and Saturday nights, instead of tuning in to hear classical music, listeners may find jazz, blues, bluegrass and Celtic music greeting them.”

Though just one voice, this editorial does point to another concern among station programmers in public radio — appealing to younger listeners. At public radio conferences I’ve attended, getting younger listeners to tune in (and in public radio, “younger” means “under 40”) is generally talked about as a Good Thing. Some argue that if public radio doesn’t start cultivating a younger audience, its current listeners will keep aging with no one lined up to replace them. But no one quite knows how to go about doing it, and there’s no tried-and-true approach. Some shows such as This American Life have succeeded in generating buzz among young folks, but no one’s suggesting that stations switch to host line-ups of Ira Glass clones 24/7.

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