Helen Keller, Beethoven Fan?

Astonishing post in the San Francisco Classical Voice about a 1924 letter that blind, deaf, and mute Helen Keller wrote to the New York Symphony (the rival of the New York Philharmonic before they eventually merged in 1928), recounting the experience of tuning in to a  broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the radio:

Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm.

 

What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still.

 

Really? Congrats to San Francisco Classical Voice Writer Janos Gereben for this bit of sleuthing – the letter was apparently in the Helen Keller Archives of the American Federation of the Blind.  But I’m rather surprised that this story has never come up before – and the skeptic in me wonders is Ms. Keller did not indulge in a bit of a creative flight of fancy.  I don’t tend to think of a 1920s-era radio as capable of “surround sound,” but it sure is fascinating notion to imagine that someone who was doubtless as hypersensitive to vibrations as Helen Keller could actually pick out and detect a symphony that way.   Can anyone corroborate this?

Storytelling: “129 Cars”

I’m reminded of Ernie Boch: “Ask for the keys, it’s yawh cah!”

From time to time I like to share pieces of audio or video production that I think is especially fine or noteworthy.  For me, it usually boils down to storytelling, hence the slug.

As someone with a family background in the car business, I found this episode of This American Life to be especially good, particularly since it’s a subject and personality area that does not turn up often in pubradio land.  It’s called “129 Cars,”  and somehow it seemed just right to be listening to it on a Saturday afternoon driving from one vast parking lot to the next in a pre-Christmas shopping frenzy…

This American LIfe: 129 Cars

November Numerology: JFK and the meaning of 11/22

November Numerology: JFK and the meaning of 11/22

Think piece I wrote for WCRB Classical New England for this rather remarkable day on the calendar…

Avant Gershwin

WASHINGTON – The reason I’m posting from downtown D.C. this morning has to do with the lady on the left — jazz vocalist Patti Austin, who helped to usher in the New Year with a dynamic all-Gershwin concert at the Kennedy Center last night. Patti’s two-set show, backed by a crackerjack octet (piano, guitar, bass, drums, sax, trumpet, ‘bone) was part of Toast of the Nation, NPR’s annual all-night New Year’s Eve jazz party. Yr Hmble Srvnt was on hand to produce the show for the net.

In my previous life coordinating this production was Tension City; the logistics of pulling off six live shows through multiple timezones is only dizzying when it’s not downright frightening. By comparison, spending a day backstage at the KenCen with old friends and terrific musiciains, old pros all, was pure pleasure.

That’s not to say there weren’t the usual hiccups and anxieties that arise anytime you’re producing live radio. To be sure, there were. But it was all redeemed by the music on stage: some really interesting arrangements of Gershwin standards, mostly drawn from Austin’s recent CD called Avant-Gershwin. The disc has been getting a lot of buzz — a pair of Grammy nominations, and USA Today critic Elyse Gardner even had it down as her Top Album of the Year, edging out Junior Senior and Springsteen’s Magic. — and if we didn’t get the memo, Patti was there to remind us. (As a veteran showbiz producer, she’s not the type to let these PR moments pass…..)

But the praise is hard-won and well-deserved. Her voice was in top form, and the arrangements by Michael Abene are clever, quirky, and swing. You can check out a couple of the CD cuts (recorded with the excellent WDR Big Band) here. The Kennedy Center show was the first time that Austin has taken the show on the road with a pared-down octet, and the results were pretty impressive, particularly for the second set that we broadcast live to the nation. Though I have to say that my lasting memory was a haunting version of But Not For Me, featuring just Patti and pianist Mike Ricchiutti.

But don’t take my word for it: check out the whole concert on the new NPR Music site.

Update 1/2/2008: Critic Mike Joyce talks about Patti’s “Star Jones Moment” in his review of the concert in today’s Washpost. You can read the review here.

The Rest of the Toast

WASHINGTON – Don’t want to sign off from D.C. without tipping the hat to the other performers I heard playing on New Year’s Eve, sitting in the back as a guest in NPR’s Studio 4A control room. Among the memories:

*Forget Auld Lang Syne…the Trio Da Paz, (joined by the redoubtable pianist Kenny Barron) playing at the Jazz Standard in New York, welcomed the New Year at Midnight (on the East Coast, anyway) with a performance of the Antonio Carlos Jobim standard Chega de Saudade, featuring vocalist Maucha Adnet.

*Nachito Herrera (see earlier post) and the Steele Family Singers doing a Cuban-tinged tribute to Earth, Wind & Fire at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant in Minneapolis.

*And an absolutely cookin’ set from the Convergence Sextet, led by trumpeter Greg Gisbert, at the great jazz club Dazzle in Denver. (This one was also recorded and broadcast in 5.1 Surround Sound, something we also did to ring in 2005.)

Unfortunately, for this jet-lagged traveler, (48 hours removed from the departure gate at Heathrow Airport), the blowout wrap-up show featuring the Count Basie Orchestra and vocalist Ledisi at the new Yoshi’s in San Francisco will have to be an online experience…way past my bedtime at that point.

Arcane Radio Trivia

Yes, the techno-electro-tainment world is spinning faster and faster – witness iPhones, HSDPA, (Huh? you don’t know the acronym for High-Speed Downlink Packet? Read Jeremy Wagstaff’s amusing column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal), and the cool new T-Mobile service that lets you toggle between Wi-Fi and cell connectivity (e.g., free calls from hotspots!). But radio still makes my heart skip a beat – especially when a find a blog as delightful as Arcane Radio Trivia – which delivers on its promised premise:

There are 14,000 licensed radio stations in America. about 16% of those are non-commercial. That 16% squeezes in more variety than life itself. I am obsessed. I can admit that now.

And in just a few minutes of wandering the site I learned about radio roots of the great bass singer (and voice of Tony the Tiger) Thurl Ravenscroft; the longest-running R & B show in America (The Group Harmony Review on WFUV, and that the great bluesman Elmore James was promoted from the radio-repair bench to rhythm guitar in Lillian McMurry’s radio shop/record label empire in Holson, Mississippi. Okay, the spelling and grammar make me cringe from time to time, but I can admit it, too – go to work for a ten-watt radio station and you’re hooked for life. Now added to the RoeDeo BlogRoll, so you can get your daily fix, too…

Praise for George: Gone, or HiDing?

All right, this blog hasn’t been around all that long, but it’s already outlasted a radio format here in the RoeDeo listening area: George 104, which came – and went – in just over two months. (76 days, to be exact – from January 22 to April 7, 2007) George, (as noted earlier in this space) was the hastily-assembled pop/rock/dance oldies format that was thrown up after owner Bonneville engineered a novel play with public broadcaster WETA: Bonneville dumped DC classical icon WGMS, WETA switched (back) to all-classical, and for good measure picked up WGMS’s Program Director (Jim Allison), its extensive record library, and even its call letters – (now used by WETA’s repeater station in Hagerstown, MD). Of course, George was a pretty low-overhead operation, (“a CD player in the back room” according to some grumblings), and pledged to go ad-free for its first 104 days in a bid to build audience. It didn’t even get that far.

So wha’happen? Turns out George isn’t completely gone – it’s now available as an HD – only channel, (103.5 – 2), next door to Bonneville’s perennial ratings champ WTOP with perhaps with lamest web site in the business. George was cleared out to make way for Praise 104.1– a new gospel format from Radio One, who are now “renting” the frequency from Bonneville. Believe it or not, it’s the first Gospel FM station in the DC area, which must be some kind of first. So perhaps that will bring a little stability to a frequency that has gone through FOUR format changes and call letters in a year’s time. Ahhh, radio…a nice stable industry.

The Empire Strikes Back

The latest positioning tag line from The Globe (the new “Green” radio format in DC I wrote about a while back) is a little closer to the mark: “Corporately Owned, Listener Monkeyed-Around With.” Bad grammar aside, I’d argue that at least half that statement is factual – and it’s the corporate owners who have been doing the messing around recently – with three big news items in the last three days that suggest that the Old Order is not going to gently into the good night.

First was, the $12.5 million – in the words of FCC Commish Ken Adelstein “The largest collective fine in the history of American Broadcasting” that the Globe’s “good guy” owners CBS Radio (along with their friends Entercom, Clear Channel and Citadel Broadcasting) ponied up to the FCC to make the payola charges go away. Not that they actually admitted to it or anything. Sample grab from the Washington Post story:

Andy Levin, Clear Channel’s executive vice president, said in a statement that his company has “devoted tremendous resources” to preventing payola at its stations. “While no violations were found,” he said, “we are pleased to announce that Clear Channel has agreed to settle this longstanding payola investigation with the FCC. We believe it is time to close the door on this ongoing inquiry and move forward.”

The other three companies declined comment or did not respond to requests for interviews.

Aside from paying the fines to the FCC, the four companies have agreed to give about 4,000 hours of air time to small record companies and local artists. “This is a new opportunity for fresher, newer artists to be heard on the radio,” Adelstein said.

Right. Clear Channel pays $3.5 million to the Feds because they are doing their part to ease the budget deficit. And just where do you suppose those 4,000 hours of air time are going to fall? Sometime between midnight and six, do you suppose?

So, taking Mr. Levin’s advice, let’s “move forward:” Second was the Copyright Royalty Board ruling on Internet radio, which is similarly mind-boggling. Today’s Wall Street Journal has the most comprehensive story in the mainstream press about what this obscure Congressionally-charted agency has wrought: nothing less than a protectionist nod to those “good guys” in the above paragraph. You can read the entire report here. And it whacks public radio’s Internet music activities as well, which previously had been negotiated under a separate deal. Great. Take one of the few areas of growth and innovation in the broadcasting biz and make sure you suffocate ’em. THAT’ll show ’em! THAT’ll keep people tuned to my Clear Channel station! You need to be a subscriber to read beyond the opening grafs; here are a couple of key lines from the rest (hey, I bought my copy in the newsstand!)

…The board’s new rates appear to be those sought by the largest industry group, the Recording Industry Association of America. But the Internet radio broadcasters say the rates hit one of the few bright spots in the moribund music busienss and thus end up shooting the labels in the foot.

The new schedule highlights an inequality that has rankled many online entrepreneurs for years. Regular radio stations don’t pay any royalities to song performers for their over-the-airwaves broadcasts, although they do pay royalities to composers and songwriters. “It’s flat out unfair,” says Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Washington-based Digital Media Association.

How unfair? Under the old system, most Internet broadcasters could be a percentage of revenue – about 12% – to a copyright collection agency called SoundExchange. But no more. In it place: a new system where each station pays .0762 per listener, per song (retroactive to 2006) – a rate that will double in the next three years. Kurt Hanson’s Radio and Internet Newsletter has become sort of the “Central Command” for the Internet broadcasters up in arms about the ruling – and he says the new royalty schedule will mean his payments for his Accuradio service will balloon from $50,000 per year to about $600,000. Check out Bill Goldsmith’s blog at Radio Paradise for a reasoned, if impassioned view of what this means for the immediate future of his excellent service. Sample Grab:

The performance royalty rates released by the Copyright Board on March 1, 2007 are not just extreme, not just burdensome. They are a death sentence for all US-based independent webcasters like Radio Paradise, SOMA-FM, Digitally Imported, and many others…

Let’s reassess that reasoning in the light of 21st-century reality. Is there, in truth, a fundamental difference in the experience of an online listener to Radio Paradise and someone who was listening to identical programming on an FM station? Every one of our listeners – indeed, anyone who has ever clicked on a webcast as background music while working – knows the answer to that question. No! There is no difference whatsoever. Radio is radio, whether it comes in digital or analog form.

Just to underscore Goldsmith’s point, there are 50 million listeners in the US to online radio services (WSJ figures); 14 million to satellite radio. And is this happening because the publishing industry is broke? That brings us to news item number three: ASCAP Reports Record Revenue, Royalties in 2006. Yes, that’s right – record revenues. Highlights:
Overall revenue: $785 million – up 5 percent
Overall royalty payments: $680 milllion – up 5.3 percent
Payments by radio: $22 million – up 11 percent

And the kicker, courtesy of Digital Music News:

Meanwhile, ASCAP also gained $13.8 million from internet-based and wireless licensing agreements, a gain of 70 percent. The group is planning aggressive moves ahead, including a recent push to extract performance royalties from paid downloads. Predictably, that has drawn the ire of online music providers, represented by trade body DiMA.

Remember, that 70 per cent gain from internet and wireless providers came before the new Copyright rates were announced. Clearly the old system wasn’t working, eh?

Last word (for today at least) that wraps all three of these subjects together goes to Jerry Del Colliano’s Inside Music Media:

Hypocrisy #5 :

If everyone was so concerned with fresh music, new artists and the health of indie labels, they’d be fighting the new Internet royalty rates that threaten to impede the growth of Internet radio by charging small operators more money than they can afford to play the music.

Who is kidding whom? 8,400 half-hours when no listeners are listening to terrestrial radio or building Internet radio as the lifeline for music diversity.

Does anyone question the pervasiveness of the Internet?

Is it that hard to believe the Internet will be on everyone’s mobile devices once WiFi becomes universal?

If you’re with me so far, can you see the hypocrisy of letting four serial offenders of music diversity off the hook for chump change and a kiss on the backside while the big crybabies in the music industry try to get blood out of the one stone that will outlive them — Internet radio.

The Globe, By George!

Cruising around the DC radio dial after a few days away to discover another shakeup on the radio dial…WARW, the longtime “classic rock” station has become The Globe, a station blending “world class rock” with an environmental message. The format flip happened on Friday (2/2) at noon, same day, of course, as the U.N. Report on Climate Change was released. Since then, the station has played a slightly tweaked version (read: more stuff from the 90’s) of its classic-rock format, and ditched the deejays in favor of left-leaning eco-and-call-to-action messages (soundbites of Al Gore, bromides to save energy, and even an anti-focus group rant!). The deeejays are supposed to be back within a few days, as well as presumably a better-developed website – right now, all you get on their site is the option to listen to their stream, IM or E-mail “the studio,” and a read of The Globe’s 12-Point Mission Statement [Number 10: “WE WON’T INSULT YOUR INTELLIGENCE – The Globe will have commercials (got bills of our own to pay) but we will try to keep them to a minimum and present them in a way that respects our listeners and our advertisers.”]. There’s even talk that the station will bring back the call letters WHFS, recalling the glory years of the once-legendary “alternative” station in the DC – Baltimore area. (Corporate parent CBS radio still owns those call letters.)

The RoeDeo Reaction? Fascinating, but preposterous. Very nice of them to tell us that flourescents save 70% more energy that incandescents, that we all can make a difference, and that they are now “partially operating on alternative fuels.” (Where? Are they lighting candles in the control room?). And the playlist is at least veering more towards the sound of excellent non-commercial stations like WXPN in Philly or WTMD in Towson (Baltimore), MD. But this is a station, as noted above, that’s owned by CBS. It’s all thoroughly unconvincing, and to my mind, creepily artificial. Maybe it’ll be better once the live air staffers return, and the sound becomes less canned and calculated. We’ll see.

The DC market has suddenly gotten a whole lot more interesting for us radio junkies, however…I’ve mentioned Dave Hughes’ DCRTV blog (stands for DC Radio and Television) before, and if you like this sort of stuff it makes for pretty entertaining reading. Sample:

OK, maybe The Globe is not real “adult alternative” like what’s heard in other markets and on some non-comm stations. Maybe it’s a bit “harder” and a bit more “commercial.” And, OK, yeah, maybe the “green” sloganeering will grow tiring. Still, it’s a great mix of powerful music that can (and should) only get better. CBS and Michael Hughes have planted the seed for a powerful force in Washington area radio. It’s energizing and thought provoking. Not moldy oldie and turgid, like some some area rockers have become.

Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher had a lengthy take-out in the Sunday Arts section on George 104, the new oldies-plus format adopted by the formerly-classical WGMS:

George is a 44-year-old white guy who lives in the suburbs and likes Foreigner, Journey, Billy Idol, and David Bowie. When George was in high school, he loathed disco and the soft soul sounds of the ’70s”…..

Fisher’s blog on washingtonpost.com also has more background on the the Globe, including some more reactions about eco-awareness become a trend in the radio biz, including this observation from my friend Steve Yasko at WTMD:

“Public radio is the authentic green radio network and not the corporate hacks at CBS.”

As I said, radio in DC has suddenly gotten a whole lot more interesting….

Up Off The Canvas (or, The Other Shoe Drops)

All right, it was a big deal to me, but not many other folks paid much attention to the news that I wrote about on Day One – Bonneville’s “Yankee Swop” of its frequencies with Entercom, meaning a likely sayonara for classically-formatted KDFC in San Francisco. Sure enough, the other shoe dropped today here in DC – as of 8 pm on Monday, Jan. 22, Bonneville’s WGMS (103.9) will move down the dial to WETA (90.9), effectively ending the latter station’s less-than-successful run as a news-and-information station. It’s a complicated deal, all right – the Washington Post reports that no money will change hands, but that WETA will get from Bonneville the WGMS call letters (to be applied to its repeater station in Hagerstown, MD) , 15,000- CD record library, and even its program director, Jim Allison.

But…wait! Bonneville is not selling to Snyder and Red Zebra at all…at 3 PM today they flipped to a Jack-like oldies format called George104. I promised rants in the title: Here are a couple from DCRTV:

“… a pair of rimshot signals (Waldorf and Frederick). “Well, at least it’s low overhead,” a local radio observer tells DCRTV. Pretty much a CD player in the back of the co-owned WTOP newsroom, says another. It’s kind of sad to watch Joel Oxley and Jim Farley slowly lose their minds, says yet another. Of course, it could be an “extended stunt” until Redskins owner Dan Snyder finally decides to sign the papers and buy the station.

Bonneville’s take:

Both sides agreed it made sense for their stations and their listeners. This saves classical music in this market and arguably puts it in a better place than it is now.

– Joel Oxley, Bonneville Senior VP

You bet it does – WGMS enjoyed fairly consistent ratings (hovering between 5th and 11th in the market) until it got shoved off of its longtime frequency of 103.5 one year ago (collateral damage from the “Washington Post Radio” deal) and wound up on the much less attractive spots of 103.9 and 104.1). At 90.9, WETA’s signal is one of the best in the entire DC Metro area, with 75,000 watts and a repeater in Hagerstown, MD (that’s the one that will be re-christened WGMS-FM.

Funny, for all of the talk (and I’m as guilty as anyone) these days about New Media and the levelling of the playing field in the online world, size – and positions – still matters. It was the truly wretched signal of the Redskins’s radio stations (a/k/a Triple X Radio) that got this whole ball rolling in the first place. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of how radio works would have been able to tell you that choosing a 1000-watt station that drops to 250 watts at night to as your metro DC flagship for the Redskins was going to be a trail of tears. You also knew that the stakes were too high here in football-crazed DC for that situation to go on for more than one season. (Ironically, the format change comes one year to the day that Snyder bought his three new toys).

The new “official” ID for the stations will be “Classical WETA 90.9 FM Washington and WGMS 89.1 FM Hagerstown.”