# Fixing classical radio



## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

It's actually too late by a long shot, but . . .

Back in the Dark Ages -- before Internet, before cable TV, even before NPR -- I was the head of the classical dept. for a college radio station serving what was then an isolated, rural area. I never officially codified them, but I developed a bunch of rules that I passed on to my announcers, that a lot of music stations could still learn from to create a better product:

-- Program for your entire audience. That means covering multiple genres, nationalities, and time periods within any given show. If that means playing works you don’t know, all the better – you’ll learn something.

-- Develop your ear. There are works for which one hearing in a lifetime is enough. There’s too much music to reprogram the bad stuff. 

-- No excerpts . Except for, say, the occasional operatic aria or scene, or a ballet suite, play a work in its entirety or not at all (unless it’s something that’s meant to be broken up – see “Art of the Fugue” below).

-- If you have what seems to be a great programming idea, vet it first. For instance, if you decide, over time, to play all 40 Mozart symphonies, be prepared to discover that 25 of them are barely worth the time it takes to listen to them. Or if you play the entire Art of the Fugue, the sound you hear will be radios clicking off all across the county.

-- Pay no attention to the clock. As long as the program begins and ends on time and you say a Station ID between every work, put together programs that make internal sense, not ones that have to fill hour-long swatches. (To this day I can always tell a work that was programmed specifically to fill a gap leading up to the top-of-the-hour station break. Slavonic Dances are ideal for this purpose.)

-- Ignore composers’ birthdays. The greats get played often enough not to need celebrating. And it does the minor ones a disservice if, say, the only time you ever play a work by Miaskovsky is on his birthday.

-- It’s tempting, when you discover a new composer, to go on a kick. Don’t.

-- Don’t pontificate about the relative value of particular performances/interpretations. There are all kinds of tastes, and no two classical music people can ever agree on anything.

I'm sure there are others. But those come to mind quickly.

george


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Those sound like great rules. If you can't make everybody happy, at least try to make them equally unhappy! BTW my local station programmed a Slavonic Dance last night to get to the hour mark. In their defense, it was to fill out the time allotted for a live local concert, so they couldn't be sure of the timing.

A funny story. A DJ said the reason they never played 4'33" was because their equipment would detect a "dead air" fault and kick up a ruckus. I'd never thought of that.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

GGluek said:


> -- Ignore composers' birthdays. The greats get played often enough not to need celebrating. And it does the minor ones a disservice if, say, the only time you ever play a work by Miaskovsky is on his birthday.
> 
> george


There is a point to that, but then again, it's better to play a composer once a year than _never _a year. People discovering a composer through their birthday is just one of many ways to share rare or unusual music. Once a year might turn to 3 times a year, and so forth. I've never heard Myaskovsky on any public radio station in my area before.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

GGluek said:


> ...
> -- Program for your entire audience. That means covering multiple genres, nationalities, and time periods within any given show. If that means playing works you don't know, all the better - you'll learn something.
> 
> ...


On that note, I heard Hovhaness' Symphony #2 "Mysterious Mountain" for the first time on a drive-time radio program. Also, it was the entire work (about 20 minutes) not a snippet. So it did three things - fit into the format of drive time but also push it a bit (eg. not to heavy going music, but not just the usual Mozart slow movement or dreamy Impressionist piece and so on that is cliche in such a program), introduce a composer who is not that well known, and also play an entire work and give justice to it.

The other thing, or rule, I'd add is for a presenter not to diss the piece they are about to play. The only time I remember hearing a work by Edgard Varese on radio was preceded by the presenter saying something like "this will be wierd, folks" and after the piece his tone was pretty derisive. There is I guess a need for the presenter to be a real person with some sort of opinion, not a cardboard cut out, but getting too pesonal (esp. negative) I think is a no-no. Just let the listeners listen and form their own opinions.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Our local classical station is public radio and they lost me as an audience when they started having segments on country music. However brief and on the weekend, that is unacceptable to me. My support and funds will not go to that. I think radio and broadcasting in general is obsolete anyway.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

^ The radio is mostly what I listen to in the car... although I also enjoy just motoring and enjoying silence. I've got enough musical input at home


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## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

I think the problem is that you're not the programme director. Those guidelines sound great to me.

I'd also suggest to keep a record of when a piece was last played. Too many are played too often.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

There's a great show on CBC radio 2 where they invite professional musicians to sit in the booth and play pretty much whatever they want and talk about it. They'll often have some pretty interesting insights into even very familiar pieces, and you'll get a lot of stuff that a DJ probably wouldn't have thought to programme. I remeber they had a countertenor on a few weeks ago playing a lot of stuff from his repertoire. Probably not something I'd go out and buy a boxed set of, but pretty interesting nonetheless.

Only problem is that now I know tht Angela Hewitt listens to the cheesiest Italian pop music imaginable on her days off.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

> -- Pay no attention to the clock. As long as the program begins and ends on time and you say a Station ID between every work, put together programs that make internal sense, not ones that have to fill hour-long swatches. (To this day I can always tell a work that was programmed specifically to fill a gap leading up to the top-of-the-hour station break. Slavonic Dances are ideal for this purpose.)


It's probably hard to avoid this. They do need to do the station IDs and, for my local station at least, fit in the NPR new breaks at the top of the hour.

I always thought, in the US at least, they had to ID themselves as close to the top of the hour as possible. Wikipedia says "Hourly, as close to the hour as feasible, at a natural break in program offerings."

Sometimes they do quick weather/traffic at regular times, and I'm guessing a lot of listeners like it that way.


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## micfuh (Dec 17, 2013)

Our Classical radio station in Toronto once play a movement from Joseph Haydn's symphony. On another occasion they played all of Mahler's second symphony in 6 minutes. They said of the fourth movement "You have just heard Mahler's second symphony". The same was said of Beethoven's Pastoral, only this time it was clocked in under 10 minutes. Listeners of this station are still looking for Von Karajan's recordings of happy Gregorian chants. Between snippets of mindless Strauss waltzes and bombastic Sousa marches, they broadcast endless commercials of million dollar homes for the gullible nouveau riche. Is this the future of classical music on the radio?


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

I prefer to listen to classical music by intention rather than happenstance, particularly these days in the US when it's rare and difficult to find an extended period of time the station wants to play anything other than the umpteenth replaying of Karajan's Beethoven's 9th at dinner time that matches up with an extended period of time and consciousness I have selected for said listening.

The time I listen to radio, therefore, is mostly in the morning, to wake up.

I have one proviso that I would dearly like to stretch across time and space for all morning classical radio shows: PLEASE: no "oom-pah" music, or circus tunes. All too often the programming degenerates into either that (I guess the announcer considers it rousing? Add an "arbeit macht frei" sign at the top of the hour if you think that's necessary), or into this or that really overplayed Gershwin or Copland or Barber or what-have-you recognizable tune.

It's all just one stop short of a perpetuation of the Lawrence Welk Show. UGH. And it perpetuates the -- hopefully -- myth that the only people who listen to classical music are old people who can't tune in to the Lawrence Welk show any more.

More Stockhausen less Jonny Strauss, please, pretty please. It's hard enough to get up to go to work without feeling your radio announcer is an escaped Auschwitz commandante with a secret plan to resurrect Adolf's ghost by playing oom-pah music in the morning.


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## BillT (Nov 3, 2013)

I have a long commute and so I got SiriusXM radio. They have three channels, one for Classical "pops", one for opera, and one for full-length works. I usually listen to the "pops" one, which often presents movements from a symphony, or shorter pieces.

The two things I detest are 1) commercials, and 2) inappropriate segues. Sometimes they will finish a lovely movement, quiet and peaceful at the end, and immediately segue to a loud brash piece or (worse yet) a commercial. OUCH!

But wait! I hear you saying that XM is commercial-free -- YES, except for commercials about XM! Sometimes they are "how great is it to be listenting to XM"-type commercials, and sometimes it is "please buy another receiver" type commercials. But they are all commercials in my book, and thety happen OFTEN. I feel like I am already paying them, so SHUT UP ABOUT IT. 

Those are the reasons why I will drop them like a hot potato when my commute drops off.

- Bill


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Couac Addict said:


> I think the problem is that you're not the programme director. Those guidelines sound great to me.
> 
> I'd also suggest to keep a record of when a piece was last played. Too many are played too often.


I also did institute a system of keeping track of when pieces were played and a minimum time before they could be repeated.


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## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

GGluek said:


> I also did institute a system of keeping track oClf when pieces were played and a minimum time before they could be repeated.


All we need now is the _Classical Radio Manifesto_


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## spradlig (Jul 25, 2012)

I used to DJ a classical show at my college radio station. The DJ booth had a red light bulb that would go off whenever there was "dead air". Since classical music generally has a wider dynamic range than popular music (pop/rock music is generally played at a consistently loud volume), this would happen fairly often when I was the DJ. When the guy in charge of the station was around during my program, he would freak out whenever this happened. This was really annoying. I didn't bother trying to explain why I couldn't help it - the guy probably wouldn't have understood.



KenOC said:


> Those sound like great rules. If you can't make everybody happy, at least try to make them equally unhappy! BTW my local station programmed a Slavonic Dance last night to get to the hour mark. In their defense, it was to fill out the time allotted for a live local concert, so they couldn't be sure of the timing.
> 
> A funny story. A DJ said the reason they never played 4'33" was because their equipment would detect a "dead air" fault and kick up a ruckus. I'd never thought of that.


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## spradlig (Jul 25, 2012)

I used to subscribe to Sirius XM and I liked them pretty well. I dropped them to save a little money after I got an IPod and an IPhone that I could use to play vpr.net and other free classical stations in my car. I also got Pandora, which is not as good as Sirius XM for classical, but not bad, and was cheaper at the time. I have heard that Sirius XM's stock price has plummeted, so I suspect many people have done something similar.

I must warn you: if you cancel Sirius XM, GET SOMETHING IN WRITING. They may send you bills long after you have cancelled your service. This is what they did to me. I have Googled this and many others have complained about being harrassed by them. People have complained to some states' attorneys general about their marketing and billing practices.

After I cancelled, Sirius XM sent me several offers in the mail offering a year or so of service for a ridiculously low rate. This may have been a teaser rate or permanent, but I don't care. After getting so many bogus "bills" from them many months after cancelling, I refuse to do business with them, period.



BillT said:


> I have a long commute and so I got SiriusXM radio. They have three channels, one for Classical "pops", one for opera, and one for full-length works. I usually listen to the "pops" one, which often presents movements from a symphony, or shorter pieces.
> 
> The two things I detest are 1) commercials, and 2) inappropriate segues. Sometimes they will finish a lovely movement, quiet and peaceful at the end, and immediately segue to a loud brash piece or (worse yet) a commercial. OUCH!
> 
> ...


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

No symphonies greater than 60 minutes were played?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

spradlig said:


> I must warn you: if you cancel Sirius XM, GET SOMETHING IN WRITING. They may send you bills long after you have cancelled your service.


I have heard of this, but I was only subject to endless e-mails and "special offers" to renew. Plus a phone call or two. I finally had to consign them to the junk mail folder. That said, I always enjoyed their programming, which was quite adventurous, while I subscribed.

BTW AOL used to be famous for being difficult to cancel. In one well-publicized case, the account holder had died. His daughter contacted AOL repeatedly, but they insisted that the deceased would have to contact them himself! Haven't heard anything like that recently...


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

No, we just blew right through the top of the hour.


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## Silkenblack (Apr 12, 2013)

Imagine that big company who owns the radio. The company boss has hired a new force to fix the declining advertising revenue on an ever-scattering audience space.

This new guy does have ideas. Working towards the brand. And he has laid his eyes to the classical program – "old world selections from bygone times". He´s going to cook that duck pond a little.

The Fix is on:

"No boring pieces here. The listener has to be able to detect a distinctive channel sound from now on. At the end of the day we are all sellers. We must see results showing at the next quarter. Next time there will be no next time!"


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

When I was growing up in the 60's in NYC, I could hear taped broadcast concerts of the Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra and New York Philharmonic every week.

We had a terrific classical station, WNCN, 104.3 FM and then one morning I woke up to "Roll Over Beethoven!" as the station sold out to be just another hard rock station. This was almost as bad as the Dodgers deserting my home town of Brooklyn for LA.

Unless you live in Chicago and especially Boston, you've probably seen similar examples of commercial classical radio stations going out of business.

I will never pay for satellite radio. I have an extensive CD collection and am content to choose among them for my listening pleasure.


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## spradlig (Jul 25, 2012)

@GGluek : I used to DJ at my college radio station and the FCC rule we had to follow was that we had to ID the station as close to the top of the hour as possible, but we did _not_ have to employ this rule as a consideration in deciding what pieces to play. At least at the time, it was not against the law to start playing Brahms's 2d Piano Concerto at 1:45 because it was over fifteen minutes long. In that event the DJ should have ID'ed the station at 1:45 since the concerto is over half an hour long (the alternative would be ID'ing the station well after 2:15).

That was a long time ago, but I doubt that it's changed.



GGluek said:


> No, we just blew right through the top of the hour.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

You're right. My rule was program however you want to fill the 2 or 3-hour show, but give an ID between every piece. Worked for me and by my interpretation followed FCC regs.


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## Katie (Dec 13, 2013)

I think the question is largely moot in this age of manifestly affordable and highly portable music. I have absolutely no urge to acquiesce to another's playlist and my need for a sense of community is better fulfilled online. The exception would be a hip, intelligent, well-informed host who conducted an informative radio or podcast on composers, pieces, conductors, and performers...otherwise, I'll select my own listening agenda/K


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Katie said:


> I think the question is largely moot in this age of manifestly affordable and highly portable music. I have absolutely no urge to acquiesce to another's playlist and my need for a sense of community is better fulfilled online. The exception would be a hip, intelligent, well-informed host who conducted an informative radio or podcast on composers, pieces, conductors, and performers...otherwise, I'll select my own listening agenda/K


No problem with that, but radio is still the easiest way for a novice to expose himself to a wide variety of music without having to figure out what he wants to listen to ahead of time.


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