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On the afternoon of June 24, Wisconsin Public Radio will air a new recording of the great composer’s Goldberg Variations. The broadcast presentation wouldn’t be especially unusual, except that listeners who visit a special website, opengoldberg.wpr.org, will be able to view a score of the work as it plays…
John Goberman, who created Live From Lincoln Center more than three decades ago, is departing as executive producer on June 30 after more than 200 live national telecasts.The series continues in its 37th season on PBS this fall.Goberman was cited by Symphony Magazine as one of the 50 most important individuals making a difference in American music. He pioneered the video and audio technology by which concerts, opera, ballets and plays could be telecast during live performances without disruption of performers and audiences. His television work has garnered 13 national Emmy Awards, three Peabody Awards and the first Television Critics Circle Award for Achievement in Music.Goberman also created the concept of “Symphonic Cinema,” in which orchestral scores are performed live to the films for which they were originally commissioned. After departing Lincoln Center Goberman will focus on those events, as well as staging concert galas and video presentations across the country.
Vince Gardino, New York Public Radio’s executive director of underwriting, is departing the station after 14 years to become executive director of the American Classical Orchestra, which performs music from the 17th to 19th centuries using authentic period instruments. His last day with the station is June 8, and he’ll start with the orchestra July 2.For 12 years, Gardino served as chair of the PMDMC Heritage Group, a best-practices working group of corporate support leaders of major market stations. He also was lead negotiator with the Radio Research Consortium for pubradio’s Arbitron contracts, and recently was appointed as the pubradio representative on the Arbitron Radio Advisory Council.”His consistent focus and hands-on style with the clients and sales team helped propel revenue growth through both robust and challenging financial landscapes,” the station said in a statement.
Miami-based Classical South Florida, an affiliate of American Public Media Group, is expanding its service to the state’s western coast with the $4.35 million purchase of WAYJ-FM, a 75,000-watt station that broadcasts to a potential audience of nearly 1 million listeners in Fort Myers and beyond. The purchase, announced Feb. 14, is part of a three-way transaction with seller WAY Media, a religious broadcasting network that’s moving its Christian pop music service and its call letters to 89.5 MHz in Naples, a 100,000-watt station, formerly WSRX-FM. Though the Naples station broadcasts at a higher effective radiated power (ERP), Classical South Florida’s new station has the better signal, with a higher antenna and larger potential audience. It covers a population of 991,520, compared with 340,913, according to Tom Kigin, executive v.p. for Minnesota-based APMG.
Looking to lift up your midday radio audience? Try some uplifting music. That’s a lesson from 10 classical radio stations that have been jiggering their midday playlists with help from a listening study backed by CPB and conducted by the Public Radio Program Directors Association. Eight of the 10 stations saw their midday audiences grow after changing their mixes of music — some grew quite significantly — and the two that lost audience suffered only very small declines. The study began in 2007 when researchers hired by PRPD played 150 half-minute samples of classical pieces for test audiences in four cities.
So what will journalism and, for that matter, all content look like in five years and how will it be delivered? It will all come together on devices resembling the rumored iTablet …
Stations that stream all four movements of the entire symphony could be seen as violating the law’s detailed rules — the “performance complement”—and risking the statutory license for streaming given them by Congress.
Most listeners to classical music radio decide whether or not to listen based primarily on the sound and the emotional impact of the music, not on technical or musicological aspects of the music.
The Midday Classical Music Testing Project, presented by Public Radio Program Directors at its conference in September [2007], is fundamentally flawed in two ways, casting serious doubt that programmers could draw any useful conclusions from it.
In the 1980s, Peter Gelb produced 25 Metropolitan Opera broadcasts for PBS. Now, as the Met’s general manager, he runs the red-carpeted center of the opera world. The first media guy to run the hallowed New York institution has begun an ambitious but carefully modulated makeover of the Met. He’s putting its operas on more media platforms than ever before but using electronic media to reproduce the gilded in-theater experience. He’s bringing in a new breed of directors for fresh staging but relying largely on the beloved music of the past.Hired two years ago, Gelb was off to a running start in August when he took charge.
For lovers of classical music, these are difficult times. Once pubradio’s dominant format, classical music is still widespread on the airwaves. As of fall 2002, 340 public stations aired a “very significant” amount of classical each week, according to a Minnesota Public Radio report on the genre. But news programs from NPR and other sources have been pushing symphonies and operas off stage. News eclipsed classical in 2000 as public radio’s most prevalent format and more and more stations have been shearing hours of the music from their schedules.
To stop a long slide in audience, WETA-FM in Washington, D.C., will adopt an all-news format Feb. 28. With almost unanimous approval from its board of trustees, the station will add news programs from the BBC, NPR and other sources, replacing classical music during middays and evenings, Monday through Friday. Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera and a weekly folk show will be WETA’s last music offerings. Middays will feature NPR’s Day to Day, as well as News and Notes with Ed Gordon, the replacement of Tavis Smiley’s program that is also aimed at black listeners.
As we debate how best to program classical music on public radio, we seem often to take for granted that we face an “either/or” conundrum. We seem to assume that our music can only serve either mission or market, can only please either music lovers or music likers, can only achieve the music’s full artistic potential or build audience. I believe that a “both/and” solution to the puzzle exists at a sweet spot in the middle of these divergent pairs of broadcasting goals, a solution which surpasses mere minimal compromise. Please note that my belief is not based on any kind of argument for or against the inviolable sovereignty of classical music. This will be a radio-based manifesto, not a music-based one.
Not all classical music is created equal. Exactly what is meant by this seemingly heretical statement? Simply, that in the ears of listeners, some classical music is appealing and some is not.