Repertoire Tips for Classical Music Radio Stations

Repertoire Tips for Classical Music Radio Stations

Alonso Delarte

Published by Alonso Delarte at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Alonso Delarte

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Forgotten Gems from Famous Composers

What Else Did the One-Hit Wonders Write?

Little-Known Masters

Local Composers

About the Author

Repertoire Tips for Classical Music Radio Stations

Introduction

It doesn't matter what your favorite genre of music is, you probably know what songs or tracks are played over and over again on certain radio stations. Around the turn of the millennium, you may have gotten sick of hearing the man who wanted a little bit of Erica by his side (and not the whole woman, for some strange reason). Or the girl who proclaimed to know what boys want and what boys like (why, her, of course). And even if you liked certain TV shows, it probably got tiresome to hear the woman who didn't want to wait for her life to be over, or the man who declared no one would bend or break him because he's got faith of the heart.

But the repertoire for those popular genres is generally limited, spanning at most four or five decades. With classical music, you have four or five centuries' worth of music to choose from. And yet, it sometimes seems like there is a small subset of classical music that classical stations generally limit themselves to: the greatest hits of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky; the overtures of the most popular operas, maybe a few film cues.

I do of course know that classical is a convenient label that goes beyond the strict definition of Classical to also encompass the Baroque (such as Bach), the Romantic (such as Tchaikovsky) and the first half of the 20th Century (such as Vaughan Williams). More adventurous stations might also dare play music from the medieval era, the late 20th Century and maybe even from this century. One advantage of music prior to the 20th Century is that no royalties for the composers need be paid.

I have not set out to write a book about the business of music, but the impact of business on repertoire formation needs to be considered, at least briefly. We are moving away from the economy of mass production and towards the economy of the replicator. As fantastical and magical as that device depicted in science fiction fantasies such as Star Trek: The Next Generation might seem, real technologies like 3D printers suggest that if the replicator does not become a reality, it won't be for lack of trying.

Consider a candy company, for example, that might make a million rabbit-shaped chocolates but zero lobster-shaped chocolates. Why not? They would probably need to make at least a thousand lobster-shaped chocolates to justify the effort and expense of resetting the machinery. And then would there be enough customers to buy up a thousand lobster-shaped chocolates?

But once we are fully in the economy of the replicator, a candy company's ability to manufacture a million of the same candy will be irrelevant. They will instead be expected to provide a million combinations of shapes and flavors: one customer wants a mongoose-shaped milk chocolate while another for some reason wants a dozen dark chocolate tetrahedrons; both customers will be satisfied. Of course there will also be customers who want candy made the old-fashioned way.

For music, thanks to technologies such as the CD-R, the Internet and the iPod, the economy of the replicator is a reality. Will anyone want to download a Vivaldi Four Seasons album if they already have one? However, classical FM radio stations will continue to be relevant in this era of YouTube and the podcast, but at the same time they will have to keep in mind the realities of the replicator economy.

Notice for example that both Sirius and XM Radio offer three different classical channels, with the same descriptions for each: Opera/Classical Vocals, Classical Pops and Traditional Classical. Presumably, the place for the Pachelbel Canon in D major (that piece they often play at weddings) would be the Traditional Classical station; that piece should come up on that station from time to time. But it should not come up every week, much less every day or every hour. Nor does it have to.

The classical repertoire might as well be infinite. Naturally, this presents somewhat of a barrier of entry for those interested in classical who don't know where to start. So what winds up happening with the famous composers is that neophytes gravitate towards the best-known works. Under the economy of the assembly line, it made sense to make thousands of copies of recordings of these best known works.

But now with the economy of the replicator, more knowledgeable listeners want more than just the same parade of worn-out hits, and even for the neophytes the thrill of discovering the original context of a well-known melody might wear off if they're not presented with fresher music.

By no means am I suggesting that each piece of music should be played just once on your station and then never again. Some degree of repetition is necessary. What must be avoided is the auto-complete syndrome: that as soon as your announcer says the name of the composer, the listeners already know exactly which piece is going to be played.

Nor am I suggesting that the warhorses of the repertoire should no longer be played. Does your station have a request show? Something tells me that there will always be someone who requests the Pachelbel Canon in D major, no matter how much or how little your station schedules that particular piece. One thing I am suggesting, though, to do instead of those giveaways for the nth caller, is to give a prize to someone who calls in the most interesting request (the music has to exist, and be available on a commercial recording, of course).

Writing in Classical Music: The Listener's Companion, Davis writes that he and other classical radio DJs are often told not too new, not too old, not too vocal, not too heavy. Given the breadth of the classical repertoire, it is actually quite easy to obey this dictum while at the same time wandering far away from the overplayed staples.

In compiling these tips, I am assuming that your classical station plays commercials, and must therefore not go more than 20 minutes without a commercial break, at least during peak listening hours. (I remember sometimes the old WQRS would play an entire Bruckner Symphony at night).

Besides my own compact disc collection, the Naxos Music Library and Amazon.com were immensely helpful in compiling this book. The IMSLP was also of great help. For the most part I won't be recommending any specific recording of a given piece, though there is some really good obscure stuff that has been recorded only once if at all.

This book is organized into four sections, with the composers in each section except the last arranged alphabetically. In the first section, I aim to uncover lesser known works by famous composers. In the second section, I investigate the entire oeuvre of some one-hit wonders and present some other works people might even grow to like more than the one hit. In the third section, I present only two or three works by some rather obscure composers I really enjoy and which I think your listeners might, too. The fourth section, on local composers, is of necessity rather short; most likely you don't live in metro Detroit, but at least I hope that what I write about metro Detroit composers encourages you to seek out the composers in your city or town.

Notice that I'm careful not to use the term minor composer, which of course has nothing to do with a propensity to write music in minor keys. The distinction between major and minor composers is too ill-defined and arbitrary, and rarely has anything to do with the actual technical merit of the musical compositions.

Consider for example those scientists who were also composers. Why is Alexander Borodin a major composer but Sir William Herschel a minor one? Is it because Borodin wrote better music than Herschel? Or is it because Borodin's music is played much more often in concert that his scientific achievements pale in comparison to Herschel's, while Herschel's scientific achievements have consigned his music to obscurity?

You can't really measure the quality of music objectively. Maybe we can agree that one composer is much better at counterpoint and orchestration than another, but that does not automatically mean that the composer who is better at counterpoint and orchestration is much better overall than the other.

How many concert performances and recordings are there of one composer's work? That is something that can give us a good, hard number that we can say is greater than, less than or equal to the number of concert performances and recordings of another composer's oeuvre. But these things fluctuate.

By the measure of concert performances, we might conclude that at the end of the 18th Century, Antonio Salieri was a much greater composer than Johann Sebastian Bach (the measure of recordings, at least in the modern sense, was not available at the time). Salieri's music was getting played a lot more back then, while Bach was forgotten to almost everyone except a few composers.

We might also come to the absurd conclusion that although Salieri was greater than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the time of the latter's death, Mozart has somehow become a better composer after his death (Salieri lived for a few more decades, but retired as the truly great opera composers were often able to do). This conclusion is all the more absurd when you consider that so many people confuse Salieri's music for Mozart.

If we wish to be fair to these composers and judge each of their compositions solely on the merits of each individual composition (even if those merits be philosophical rather than technical), we must not let ourselves be distracted by the vagaries of passing fame. There may be discoveries that challenge minor assumptions about the way a particular score has been read and interpreted in the decades since the composer wrote it and today, but for the most part, the essence of a musical composition remains immutable through the centuries.

I had thought about doing a chapter on flavors of the month like wunderkind Jay Greenberg but decided not to. Even for an e-book, the information would be outdated too quickly. All I will say about Greenberg for now is that perhaps with maturity he will write some music worth hearing more than once (I hope that does not sound like sour grapes from an older composer yet to have any success).

A point that I wish to emphasize is that there is nothing in the general repertoire formation process to guarantee the best music gets the concert and recording frequency it deserves. Maybe composers like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky have achieved lasting fame. The idea that their music could ever fall out of favor in the future seems rather preposterous. And yet today Robert Schumann would be surprised to learn that composers like Ludwig Spohr are sometimes but a footnote in biographies of composers like Beethoven.

And even for those composers lucky enough to get some kind of hold on the standard repertoire, the music they themselves consider to be their best may be ignored by performers and listeners. There are of course composers who think that whatever they're working on at the moment is their best composition ever. But circumstances that may or may not have anything to do with the musical attributes of a particular composition can cause that music to be under-appreciated or altogether ignored by the public.

Many great composers have been left out, arbitrarily, it might seem. If there is one which you think a future edition of this book