In addition to the universal language, they speak some English on CPRN: pianists Shaham and Andsnes, conductor Conlon and guitarist Isbin. (Shaham photo: J. Henry Fair.)

Interviews add artist voices to the classical music day

Originally published in Current, Jan. 22, 2007
Commentary by Scott Henderson

One year and 150 interviews ago we began an initiative to bring the voices of classical artists and professionals into Classical Public Radio Network. Our goal was to develop an alternative way to present music by letting the musicians themselves speak about their lives and their work.

We believed listeners would highly value first-person artists’ perspectives and distinguish it from our usual announcer-with-disc presentation, while helping to move radio closer to the heart of the classical music world.

Thanks to our CPB-funded Classical Advocates project, composers, performers, conductors and other music professionals can now be heard throughout the day on CPRN, talking about their art and their lives as only they can. After a year, it’s still too early to label the project a clear-cut success, but the indicators are very positive.

Listeners appreciate the chance to peer through this new window into the artistic process, as evidenced by their questions and comments. CPRN has served public radio stations for eight years but our unbranded service was relatively unknown in the classical music world a year ago. Now we field daily inquiries and interview requests from recording labels and artists’ managers. We’re continually engaged in very rich, mutually beneficial relationships with some of the world’s great artists and arts organizations.

Our learning curve was steep, requiring commitment and follow-through from every department and every individual at CPRN to get us this far. It took a lot of trial and some error to extract air-worthy material from dozens of relatively short interviews.

If you are thinking of reaching out to international artists or even your local music pantheon, I offer our hard-learned Top 20 tips:

1. Think small. Core values of the classical audience, as well as good radio practices, recognize that listeners come to classical radio first to hear the music—and learn something about it. All of CPRN’s talk, especially artists’ comments, is highly distilled. We still have only 2 to 4 minutes of talk in an hour—but now the announcers share that time with artists.

2. Think big. An objective of our project was to have an impact on listeners. We wanted to leave no doubt in their minds that we’re presenting classical music in a different way, that artists were speaking for themselves about their work, and that classical music is a powerful, living art form. That meant adding artists’ voices several times in every daypart, in both features and regular disc presentation.

3. Plan ahead. Way ahead. A highly valuable part of the process was setting a major thematic highlight for each month: American music around the 4th of July, for instance, and a week celebrating the 21st Century Orchestra for the start of the concert season in September. We set Discovering Mendelssohn for November; Sound Investments, a week of recent CD releases, in December; and so on. This structure suggested a dozen things to talk about with artists.

4. Create regular shows and features. Our daily “Buried Treasures” feature offers lesser-known works. The noontime “Daily Special” is built around themes such as sibling composers, art-inspired music or composers’ letters. These shows and others give us reasons to ask artists about their experiences, their passions or guilty pleasures.

5. Vary your formats to keep the sound fresh for listeners. Use short (:20-:45) interview clips (sound bites) to introduce recordings. Weave several clips with music for a short (2:00-3:00) feature before a recording. Create a conversation between the announcer and the artist. Groups clips with several works for an extended (5:00-15:00) feature. Use clips and music through the week to create a thematic series. Bring back an artist periodically to make him a “regular” on a show or even to host her own weekly feature.

6. Go for the best. We began by talking with a handful of artists at the top of their professions: conductor James Conlon; guitarist Sharon Isbin, Carnegie Hall artistic advisor Ara Guzelimian, pianists Orli Shaham and Leif Ove Andsnes, Los Angeles Philharmonic executive director Deborah Borda, composer John Corigliano and several others. Next, we evaluated interview opportunities by the quality of the artists’ recordings, what we could learn about their unique stories, and the likelihood that we could get a good interview.

We discovered a gold mine in non-performers, such as Toby Faber, author of Stradivari’s Genius. We used his comments to illuminate recordings made with the violin maker’s legendary instruments. We have since interviewed, among others, author R. Larry Todd (Mendelssohn: A Life in Music); musicologists Tom Riis and Elaine Sisman; instrument technician Ron Coners; orchestra administrators Jeremy Geffen (New York Philharmonic), Anne Parson (Detroit Symphony Orchestra) and Brent Assink (San Francisco Symphony); and music commentator Allan Kozinn (New York Times).

7. Build relationships. If we had known what a rich network of recording labels, managers, ensembles, press agents, and artists we would build, we would have initially set up a system to handle the new relationships.

Cultivate them like major donors. Try to fulfill their desires for publicity or self-expression, but set strong journalistic standards that keep you in control. Make no promises you can’t fulfill. Treat artists well, feed information to their agents, call on them often and you will have friends for life.

8. Know your artist. This was a hard lesson to learn. Some are not comfortable talking about themselves. Some have such strong accents that no amount of paraphrasing by the announcer will make them intelligible. Most of all, we found we must do research so we could ask provocative questions and get heartfelt responses. We learned this lesson in March after dozens of artists rehashed bland remarks along the lines of “Mozart was amazing.” We learned to focus interview questions on the artists’ specialties and to follow their lead when a topic excites them.

9. Tie everything to music. We use every artist voice to lead in to a piece of music. Every one. The artist may comment on the score, a performance technique, an experience, a childhood memory or a favorite baklava recipe, but it’s chosen to make the next piece of music more interesting. Our best segments may be those that weave musical examples into commentary, so the artists’ words leap to life in music.

10. Structure your interview for success. We call it a “surgical interview.” Determine exactly what you want to get from the artist, inform the artist of your methodology, write your key questions and followups. Include housekeeping questions to gather comments for promos, fundraising, composer birthdays or other isolated uses. These are purposeful but raw interviews that you won’t want to offer unabridged on your website; they would require a round of intensive editing for that purpose.

11. Train your interviewers. Several CPRN announcers and producers conduct these interviews each week, and stringers do others. All follow a checklist of procedures starting with preparation and research stage. They are instructed to keep their questions, comments and reactions clear of the guest’s words unless we’re aiming for a conversational interview. Though our announcers know a great deal about music, we remind them to act as curious laymen during interviews and to keep the musical terminology understandable to all listeners. While an announcer is interviewing, a producer is there to coach and coordinate.

12. Prepare your artist. We try to tell the artist as much about our process as we can, because it is different from the extended, conversational interviews they may be used to. In an e-mail, we tell them how the interview will be conducted and how we will use it in programming. Often, we suggest topics and ask for their comments on our music selections. We tell the artist exactly how much time we need—usually 20 minutes or less.

13. Record for success. We record interviews on two channels so we can easily isolate the subject from the interviewer. To maintain sound quality, we conduct most interviews via ISDN and do the rest in person. Phone interviews are limited to features that are proud of the phone, such as our weekly question-and-answer feature Dial-a-Musician, hosted by pianist Orli Shaham, and segments that benefit from the phone’s immediacy, enabling an artist to comment on something that happened yesterday.

14. Let some artists run with it. Some enjoy creating something of their own for broadcast. We gave guitarist Sharon Isbin a tiny digital recorder for her tour of Italy so she could send us audio postcards. Impresario Dick Waller carries a recorder with him to capture music anecdotes told by performing friends. Artistic advisor Ara Guzelimian runs upstairs to his ISDN studio at Carnegie Hall to record guest spots on Buried Treasures.

15. Production is king. A producer with a great ear (and ProTools) can turn a 20-minute interview into five pithy remarks, a promo and a short feature, if not more. And she’ll usually have ideas about how she’d script them into a break. We create an ambiance by combining the artist’s voice with music, natural sound or other effects.

16. Announcers need to learn how to use other voices. Producers of NPR-style news programs know how to get into and out of voice clips. Study these masters and train your announcers in script writing. We see the artist’s voice as the diamond that fits perfectly into the announcer’s setting. Set-up phrases like “we caught up with Renee Fleming offstage at the Aspen Music Festival” provide a time and place for the interview and confirm that we talked with Fleming.

17. Repetition is a good thing. We rotate a good artist clip through many dayparts, often for months, showing different facets in each context. In our digital audio storage system, we link them with pieces, composers or ensembles and schedule them much as we place our music. You can repackage features as podcasts, gather Beethoven clips for his birthday or use brief clips to tease ahead to a longer feature. Reuse again and again.

18. Survival of the fittest. Evaluate clips regularly to weed out the weakest as stronger ones come along. Retire some temporarily before bringing them back for a period.

19. Be prepared to archive your audio—big time. We multiply hundreds of raw interviews by the number of excerpted clips and again by the numbers of alternate edits and alternate announcer settings. Imagine that someday you’ll badly want a pianist’s remarks about Ravel’s Concerto in G. You’ll need systematic procedures for editing, storing, file-naming and transcription procedures, as well as lists of when each clip has aired. Orderliness pays off when you need to purge certain clips, such as the ones we recorded with the famous musician couple just before their famous divorce.

20. Protect your audio and your artists. Artists need to trust that you will present them in the best light possible and protect their images. This means the audio must stay in your control, unless the artist expressly permits distribution to other broadcasters. If you want to share with other stations or producers, get the artists’ consent.

We try to integrate these elements into a 24/7 format, but I believe this presentational style can work on any scale.
I hope you’ve found some ideas and perhaps a shortcut or two among these tips to help you make the most of opportunities.

Scott Henderson is executive director of the Classical Public Radio Network, a nonprofit joint venture of KUSC in Los Angeles and Colorado Public Radio in Denver founded in 1998. E-mail: .

The 24-hour satellite network is distributed by NPR to 61 public radio stations. CPB, which helped launch the network with a startup grant, gave the network additional funding last year for the Classical Advocates project.

CPRN Senior Features Producer Lauralyn Hogan contributed to this article. “Lauralyn’s experiences as a musician, video and radio producer, and her fearlessness in the face of an overwhelming objective, helped assure steady progress for Classical Advocates,” says Henderson.

Web page posted Feb. 13, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee