Nutcracking

So this morning WPSU advertised that it was going to play Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite later in the day. Anyone who listens to classical music has heard this piece in the last weeks.
At what audience is the advertisement aimed? At those listeners who have not heard the Nutcracker all year and now finally get there opportunity? Are there people who regularly listen to NPR news and yet lack the Nutcracker?

Or is the radio station advertising the obvious? Something akin to a classic rock station advertising that they are going to play Springsteen's "Santa Claus is coming to town." We know they will. We drive around town with the expectation that at some point the Boss will ask Clarence whether he has been good this year. Christmas music just happens, maybe it is a guilty pleasure, maybe it is a mind-numbing torture—both perhaps, but what shocks is that WPSU has no better idea of what to advertise other than the obvious, The Nutcracker at Christmas—yes, anything else.

Is there no other Classical Christmas music? Haven't composers for centuries written music for this most sacred Christian holiday? Why not turn to something we have not all heard for the billionth time? Sure throw in the Nutcracker once or twice—the gods of mass marketing must be respected--but please try a little harder to find some interesting Christmas music.

Yes, I am grinching about the local radio station, but this kind of mediocrity is hardly confined to the WPSU. It is part of broader tendency to think that stating the obvious is good enough, that you don't need to try harder to be smart.

WPSU Fund Drive

The most fearsome plague has descended upon us: another public radio fund drive. But this time don't just cave in. Don’t let the guilt trip take a bite our of you, don't automatically surrender to the threat that if you don't pay up, all you will have left is Rush Limbaugh and Christian rock on the dial.

Put your diva on, get a little radical—tell the whiners what you think, really think of their performance, all year round. How many times have you said you cannot stand one more "This I believe" segment. The national broadcast gave it up months ago, but here in Happy Valley we continue to be smothered with sentimental clichés.

Are you worried that Christine Allen's voice is not squeaky enough? You want to hear a women with an even higher pitch? One that will send dogs howling?

Do you think the folk show should be even goofier?

You want to hear more experimental jazz but not at ten in the morning, but perhaps at night after a whiskey?

Tell the programmers. They will trot out endless testimonials about how important NPR is, yet nary a voice mentioning how easily they cave in to perceived right-wing criticism. Sometimes the cosmopolitanism is unbelievably bland. To say nothing of the classical music selections organized around the birthdays of famous composers. Perhaps you have heard that Mozart overture 10,000 times already and you would not mind something else.

We live in a small town, there aren't that many people writing checks, you can have some influence. Maybe add a little heft to this tepid public radio station called WPSU.

Mozart wants you. . .

John Rounder writes:

Help, It’s Bach week here in the thawing hinterlands. A week of snippets and bits, but not a single cantata in its entirety. The public radio station has a new fund raising campaign running, as well, and they are running ads with nasal English conductors foisting their mother country accent us, urging us to send in money because after all Mozart was a genius, whose music never ceases to astonish us. Having an Englishman Peter Cushin or Christopher Lee sell high culture is a lovely American tradition. Check out this classic ad for classical music “So many of the melodies of popular songs were actually written by the great masters.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBhGjo9TuAc

Why not have someone in a Viennese accent tell us that Mozart wants you to contribute to public radio? Would that leave the wrong impression?

High-Pitched Locals

Can a blog be local, if that locality is something smaller than, say, Brooklyn, which has more than a few online writers dedicated to its peculiarities? Does the internet, like all media, concern itself primarily with its own terms? Can you step out of its flow to discuss the office building across from the old Lowes to an audience that will respond to the point as more than just a bit of local color? Of course, there are media whose transmitters are focused on smaller realms.

They have their very local inflections. Take the local public radio station.

Nothing says Central Pennsylvania so much as the high-pitched female voices on the Classical music show. While Haydn and Debussy are commonly introduced by baritone men with snobby pronunciation, around here you hear voices on the verge of hysteria as they try to sound harmless, as if listeners were nervous dogs or frightened babies craving reassurance.

One pundit suggests that it is the inflection of Amish speech that gives Central PA its soprano tendencies. Or do these siren DJs reflect the nervous cultural politics of a Classical music station in the rural isolation of a partying college town, uninterested in the dead musicians from before 1966.

I have met kindergarten teachers with more gravitas than the local announcers. Yet these voices have a regional texture, that is distinctly different the clichéd dialects and twangs that defiantly mark north and south, city and country.

These ear-shattering, local radio personalities harmonize with the general tendency to make culture cute. Beethoven’s music is presented with cupcakes and clapping. “We’re celebrating Mozart week today and for the rest of the month.” Again the grating kindergarten pedagogy.

The question remains dear internet friends: can this blog address these tones, without becoming hopeless out of sync with its own medium, with becoming unpleasantly local?