The fourth installment of my Hybrid Highbrow podcast gets at a musical phenomenon that I have wanted to explore for a while: the affinity that the jazz world has for the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. In pursuit of this nexus, I’m serving up some wonderful tracks by Richie Beirach, Tabula Rasa, Oliver Haynes, the Peter […]
Author Archive | Matthew Lasar
Good Vibrations! a conversation about Açık Radyo of Istanbul, Turkey
The credo of Açık Radyo of Istanbul, Turkey begins as follows: “We have apparently lost our ability to have fun! Radio, TV, newspapers, and the like are all so terribly tedious and boring; mainstream media mainly serving nothing but a magnanimous mediocracy; being full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but a deafening cacophony. Paradoxically, mass […]
Down the Highway One with Second Inversion radio
I enjoy one of the best driving commutes of anyone I know. I drive from San Francisco, California down the Highway One to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I teach. Usually I drive down the coast on Mondays, and back up on Thursdays. This week I downloaded King-FM’s application onto my iPhone […]
More Indian sub-continent classical music, please
Coming out from a long Radio Survivor posting hiatus (apologies) and rummaging around for some good classical sounds, I have chanced on Sangeet – Classical Music from the Indian sub-continent, over at wonderful WPRB in Princeton, New Jersey. This morning (Saturday, November 18) the show gave its listeners a generous hit of the incomparable Ustad […]
KUCR: The Movie
I am so looking forward to the completion of this documentary about KUCR-FM: the radio station of the University of California at Riverside. I have all kinds of fond memories of my stint as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCR back in 2000. The best thing about that gig was getting to know and becoming […]
Is post-World War I Stravinsky better for community radio?
I was listening to KPFA’s Sunday morning classical music show yesterday, and suddenly they played Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat and I thought: maybe there are two kinds of Stravinsky for two kinds of public radio stations. For the big grand classical music stations like WQXR-FM in New York City, the pre-World War I ballets with […]
KPFA Pollini; WPRB Sonata a Tre; Cahill on Lou Harrison concerto
My friend Sherry Gendelman played one of Maurizio Pollini’s recordings the other day on her Piano radio show on KPFA in Berkeley. It was Pollini’s version of the Chopin Preludes and reminded me of when he came to New York City in 1979 and played Carnegie Hall. This was a huge deal since he was […]
Hybrid Highbrow podcast #3: Classical tango!
For my third Hybrid Highbrow podcast I have assembled a collection of tango pieces written by late-19th and early 20th-century classical composers. They include Albéniz, Shostakovich, Milhaud, Mompou, Stravinsky, Satie, and Poulenc. Listening to these wonderful compositions, and reading up on the history of tango, I am struck by the explosive impact that this […]
Message in a bottle, re: KPFA’s cancellation of Richard Dawkins
I had a feeling that this brouhaha over Richard Dawkins at KPFA would happen. My involvement with the station these days is pretty minimal, but a couple of Sundays ago I dropped by as a guest on my friend Sherry Gendelman’s wonderful classical music show Piano. As we entered the Berkeley, California signal’s building entrance, […]
Still time to sign up for DIY FM radio summer camp
If you’ve been telling yourself since forever that you want to learn the deets on building a low power FM broadcast system, here’s your chance. Free Radio Berkeley is running a four day DIY workshop on the subject, to be run out of Rodeo, California on September 1-4. “With an emphasis on direct, hands-on learning, […]