I am listening to South Dakota Public Broadcasting interview Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall. Judging from the author’s tone, the book decidedly focuses on the decline aspect of the story. “What we take for granted today,” Horowitz tells his radio interviewer David Gier, “that the market […]
Julius Eastman was a brilliant black/gay composer whose lamentably short life is explored on WBUR’s Here and Now. His music was beautiful, but its presentation was not for the faint of heart. I hear Bach’s C-minor Passacaglia in Eastman’s controversially titled work, “Evil Nigger.” You listen and decide for yourself. According to interviewed historian Tiona […]
I have started something called the “Hybrid Highbrow Network.” It is at this point mostly only a figment of my imagination, a matrix of people who don’t know they’re in the matrix but who mix classical, jazz, showtunes, world music and whatever into whatever comes out the other end, radio-wise. Undaunted by the fictional nature […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 #1 is out! Ta daaaaa! The maiden episode focuses on the similarities between two early 20th-century “talking machine” singers: blues shouter Mamie Smith and opera star Enrico Caruso. Both sang in the middle ranges, alto and tenor, rather than the high or low registers. This made them perfect for acoustic recording. Both […]
Many wonderful music programs come out of radio station WPRB-FM of Princeton, New Jersey. Marvin Rosen’s program Classical Discoveries ranks high among these offerings. He’s been celebrating new music and living composers over the airwaves since 1997, and on May 29 will note the show’s 20th birthday. “Classical Discoveries would not be possible anywhere else but here […]
