Ten Ideas for Classical Radio Program Directors

1. Get rough and ready. Major networks have million-dollar rigs to cover breaking news. But they're also using audience-submitted video (done with cheap camcorders, cell phones, etc) for immediacy and intimacy. For classical music there's usually nothing "urgent" to air, but stations shouldn't feel pressured to play only the "24-karat, Herbert von Karajan" recordings. Play a snippet from Youtube. Play historical recordings. If you're listening to the webstream you will not be able to tell the difference. If you're listening on a Marantz tube stereo, with Monster audio cables and $1000 Polk speakers, you'll still appreciate the novelty of a rough recording, warts and all, that puts you right there, in the center of it. Think of it as embedded reporting: from the front lines of classical performance.
2. Pimp the tip jar. Set up a Paypal (or related) service, whereby a $5 donation to the station entitles the donor a free "request" of ten minutes (or fewer) length. Mention the listener's name on-air and let her get a kick out of it.
3. Recession coupons. In a similar vein, hand out "free request" coupons to prospective listeners. Hand out cheap, easy-to-copy CDs of a few classical music favorites to prospective listeners on the street. Or throw around a few free mp3s online. The cost of creating these is more than offset by the listeners it will recruit, and the attention it will garner. It's time to dig deeper for new listeners.
4. Access more airspace. Reach out to local businesses to create a "performance partnership." Ask cafes and restaurants to air your programming. Any place where customers spend time reading, emailing, or conversing is an ideal venue for attracting new listeners. Better still: furnish a select number of cafes with complimentary HD radios, play your HD stream, and announce the fact with a sign on the door. This is an untapped market: convincing public spaces to do away with satellite radio (with a monthly fee) and instead carry your station.
5. Get creative and quirky. Offer web-only classical performances, ones that don't snugly fit within the parameters of a strictly "classical" station. Maybe an encore performance of a Radiohead song that Christopher O'Reily did, or a funny little number that Gil Shaham used to warm up before an in-studio performance. These are the quirky moments that humanize musicians and bring novices into the fold, and they are not tough to find. Offer photos and other performance mementos to color the experience. Do quick, unscripted interviews and other things not typical to terrestrial broadcast.
6. Become notorious. The web makes anonymity impossible. The disembodied radio voices must now become fully-fledged personalities. Daily web posts, twitters, photos, and video help flesh out the personality. Classical musicians have become superstars; why shouldn't hosts get the same recognition (and adoration)? Anything that adds character and dimension will make it easier for listeners to describe (and recommend!) you to their friends.
7. Let the flagship put up its flag. There is not, to my knowledge, a single site that aggregates the news and events in the classical music world into a single stream. Myriad sites have already done this for news reporting, but not for classical music. Do a daily news search for classical music (very easy with Google and RSS feeds). Add web commentary from trusted voices. Turn curious web viewers into listeners, and turn listeners into readers. Become the voice, the converstation starter, of classical music.
8. Keep moving, keep talking. I love hearing an announcer's thoughts about a piece. I loving hearing an announcer talk about a piece. I love hearing announcers talk. It's a classical music station, but sometimes a five-sentence setup does more for my enjoyment than five years of music history, theory, and ear-training.
9. Some masterpieces are better in pieces. Don't feel pressured to play an entire Mahler symphony, especially if the Adagio is all it takes to get our rocks off. Let it be a teaser. The Doors released a three-minute versison of "Light My Fire" in 1967, but guess what version the fans were after when they went to the record store, dollar bills wadded in their fists?
10. Birth of the Cool. Go after that intangible coolness. Did The Onion just parody the "lip-synched" performance at the inauguration? Link out to it. Is Pitchfork profiling the new Mark O'Connor record? Mention it on your site. Ties between classical stations and websites that skew younger offer a chance to make a new audience aware of what goes on within the (sometimes unfortunately) walled garden of classical music.

Sure Shot

This summer I was fortunate enough to intern for the NPR show On Point at WBUR in Boston for three months. Before heading East I'd done the sort of behind-the-scenes radio schlepping that makes all live productions possible, but On Point was a welcome challenge and a chance to hone audio editing, interview, and editorial skills while working with some great people. I loved having the three months to get to know the show and the city. (I wish the same could be said for my apartment, which was a colossal failure. Here's a tip: if you're renting a place sight-unseen, and have a chance to talk openly with the shady landlord's son before you move there, ask the following questions with no punches pulled: 1. do you have bedbugs? 2. do you have cockroaches? 3. do you have mice? 4. does the apartment have the most eye-twitchingly evil fluorescent lighting ever conceived? 5. are you really planning to stop by at random intervals to throw darts and rifle through our things? really?)

Anyway, through some magical facebooking that involved hounding mystery financiers/film partners I was able to book Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, and through an even dumber and blinder luck he decided to stop in and do an in-studio. His film company, it turns out, was releasing a basketball doc about Harlem's Rucker Park, called "Gunnin' for that #1 Spot." I watched Gunnin' a couple times, cut tape from its soundtrack (50, The Game, NWA, Jay-Z, lot of 80s hip hop, and the obligatory Beastie Boys homage) and assembled playlist for a live 2-way between Adam Yauch and Tom Ashbrook. Sweet. I have to own up to some excited/covert texting while Adam & Tom did their thing behind the glass...

The reason I mention this is because On Point is spinning an encore presentation of that show tomorrow, Monday, at 9am CST (hi mom) and 10am EST. It's a chance to hear Tom Ashbrook change, effortlessly and chameleon-like, into a hip hop maven, and at the very least hear a great line-up of Beastie tracks (aw shucks). Ch-check it.

"I Will Forever Remain Faithful"

David Ramsey's smokin' piece about teaching, New Orleans, and Lil Wayne:

On New Orleans radio, it seems like nearly every song features Lil Wayne. My kids sang his songs in class, in the hallways, before school, after school. I had a student who would rap a Lil Wayne line if he didn’t know the answer to a question.

An eighth grader wrote his Persuasive Essay on the topic “Lil Wayne is the best rapper alive.” Main ideas for three body paragraphs: Wayne has the most tracks and most hits, best metaphors and similes, competition is fake.

(h/t your monkey called)

Bringing back the student section

In possibly the least-surprising news of the week, the NYTimes has announced that college radio is still a vital musical force. Despite a mass listener exodus to Last.fm, Pandora, Gnutella, Limewire, and similar web music services, college stations still manage to rope 'em into sticking around:

The 700 or so college stations around North America have persevered alongside [the internet], settling into a role as the slower but more loyal foil to the fickle blogosphere. And thanks to the continued passion of their personnel, the stations remain surprisingly successful at promotion, according to many in the music industry, playing a bigger part in breaking new acts than is usually acknowledged.

It's not a stretch to say that college stations are a good deal for record companies: they can mail along CDs and mp3s, and get listeners turned on to new tracks by some hapless stoner. As a longtime employee of KRUI-FM - "employee" wrongly implies anyone's paid for this work - I jumped at the chance to preview new tracks, but it was even better to have access to a daunting back-catalogue of music, and musical minds. (Although our music director's weekly station news dispatch began, "Hello, fellow tastemakers," saccharine proof that at least a few people were getting off on this indie/college/alternative cheerleading scheme.)

The financial arrangements being what they are, the knife's edge of college radio remains its weirdness, its multitude of aficionados who'd tell people about their new favorite record whether anyone listened or not. From this fertile soil springs a radio genius not easily forgotten, one that "mainstream" stations would do well to imitate. My all-time favorite radio music show remains KRUI-FM's "Nocturnal Emissions," a black- and death-metal show on Thursday nights that proved, if nothing else, that ordinary citizens and satanists could listen to bands like Malevolent Creation, and provide one another with excellent company.

The real story, of course, was not the playlist, with its mandatory installments of Iron Maiden - easily replicable on iTunes or Last.fm - but the banter between songs: the back-and-forth of two kids passionately devoted to breakneck double-bass, screechy guitars, and throaty bass singing. Amid all the mishaps, track miscues, accidental profanity, and inside jokes, there's a couple DJs and a clan of listeners, all on the cusp of ..... um....hold on, let me hit that....

...ohhh yeah. On the cusp of something great. What beats out mainstream radio? The old college try, the warts-and-all, fail-prone hosts eking through with terrible witticisms and mind-bending playlists. In the era of reality television - to borrow a cliche phrase - it's surprising more people aren't tuning in to at least hear someone fall flat on his face, and at most enjoy terrific entertainment. Three cheers.

One more kind thought

I've finished my fourth run through Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. I'm a medium-slow reader who gets through books once, maybe, if all cylinders are firing, so TDB is my special exception. On the Road is the Kerouac tour-de-force, but Dharma has something about it that I alluded to in my last post: kindness, cheer, and (not so much in the last post) humility, and it's the essential Kerouac statement.

Whereas On the Road is shrouded in myth and propped up by rumors of its invention - written in a single burst! in three days! on a Benzedrine bender! - Dharma is the humble companion piece. This makes a certain amount of sense: by the time of its writing, Kerouac had become immersed in Buddhist thought (if not in strict Buddhist practice) and espoused a kind of humility that OTR might be missing. In On the Road we get a narrator obsessed with cars, speed, jazz, kicks, drugs, and sex. Dharma Bums certainly has helpings of each, but there's also a narrator pushing back against all that.

Dharma's Ray Smith is a narrator more concerned with simplicity and minimalism, if they can be teased apart, and while Dharma features the same hitch-hiking and bus-riding that marks much of On the Road, Smith spends more time walking than riding in cars. You get the idea, too, that if Smith came across Sal Paradise - On the Road's narrator - he would after a time tire of the speed-addled traveling obsessive. There's still motion in Dharma but at a completely different pace: a plodding, thoughtful ambulation, checked by the heft of an overfull rucksack. Dharma takes place on walks and hikes, while On the Road is almost exclusively within the steel domain of the automobile.

Or maybe this is just splitting hairs. Both feature what can only be referred to as singular heroes, or hero archetypes: Dean Moriarty plays the invincible Neal Cassady, the lionized continental chauffeur of Sal Paradise; Dharma Bums has poet Gary Snyder cast as Japhy Ryder, a hearty Northwest logger. And to look at it this way, both books out of necessity must be constructed differently. Each hero is a social atavism with boundless energy, and at times you can almost hear Kerouac huffing and puffing, trying to keep up. But whereas Moriarty is "all gas, no brakes," Ryder is reflective, obtuse, and at times, reclusive. To write around each requires very different books.

So I'm torn about drawing any firm conclusions, but content to keep both to leaf through. As travel diaries, both Dharma and Road remain good company to chip away at or bulldoze through. There's enough heat, kicks, and composure to hold you at a given moment, and that's all I ask. So for now, onward.