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Friday, 29 October 2004
Classical Music Initiative Workshop
St. Paul, Minnesota
 (Lauren Rico & Glenn Zucman)
I spent almost all of last week traveling to and attending the Classical Music Initiative Workshop at Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. They've got a big NEA grant to "ignite the next generation of classical music listeners." The first big news is that the weather in St. Paul was beautiful, whereas it poured in LA - up to ten inches of rain in some areas they tell me... I wouldn't know... I wasn't here!
The CMI is a multi-pronged effort to help classical music thrive in the new media age/world. They're working to understand contemporary and future listeners, listening, and media and coupling those efforts with a production fund for new radio and new media projects and workshops like this one.
They brought in 13 intrepid producers from across the map:
Sarah Cahill, KALW, Berkeley, CA
Aaron Cohen, WNYC, NY, NY
Susan Fitzgerald, KTOO, Juneau, AK
David Ford, WFDD, Winston Salem, NC
Jennifer Foster, WDAV, Davidson, NC
James Jacobs, WNYE, Brooklyn, NY
Brian McCreath, WGBH, Boston, MA
Tim McDonnell, KBAQ, Phoenix, AZ
Lauren Rico, MPR, St. Paul, MN
Suzanne Schaffer, MPR, St. Paul, MN
Kathryn Slusher, MPR, St. Paul, MN
Alicia Zuckerman, WNYC, NY, NY
Glenn Zucman, KBCH, Long Beach, CA
(No doubt Alicia and I had the same last name... once upon a time...)
(a piece of the roof of the MPR building, a church, and
in between them, the big hole where they're constructing
the MPR expansion. Please to notice the ginormous
crane that lifts stuff over the church steeple.)
In a whirlwind two-and-a-half days they poured over 9 presenters and lots of receptions, concert recordings, lunches, dinners etc. There was barely time to squeeze in a $36 bottle of wine at the nearby late-nite trattoria. To say nothing of even later-nite a capella performances in parking structures.
Without dissin the 7 MPR folks who gave great talks, the hilite had to be the two keynote speakers, Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout and MIT Media Lab composer Tod Machover. Teachout seems to get the new media landscape. He thinks the news on classical is tough but that there are new ways to do things and that different isn't necessarily worse. Hmm... I thought different was always better!?
(Aaron Cohen, Mary Lee,
Lauren Dee, Tim McDonnell)
Teachout sees classical radio breaking into three pieces, Terrestrial (traditional) Radio, Web Radio, and Satellite Radio. It seems to me that the three merge somewhere not all that far downstream. The thing about "not all that far downstream," is that in terms of the lifecycle of a species or a planet, 5 or 50 or 500 years is pretty much all the same. In terms of a single human career, the difference between coming in 5 years and coming in 50 is sorta huge. So web radio seems to really be reaching out to offices and homes, but at least as an LA commuter, when web radio merges with satellite and goes mobile to my car radio / PDA radio / watch radio / brain implant radio... then we'll really have something!
On the video side where these sorts of developments came, in part, earlier, the "500 channels and nothing on" phenomenon is sort of interesting. The prime broadcast airwaves, in order to have ultra-mass appeal have, for me, no appeal. Anyway, so radio disaggregates and we get, we think, lots of great niches where one hopefully finds a way to feed a family and create compelling audio.
(Suzanne Schaffer, et al)
Teachout sez that we're in the "post-common-culture era." And that we "no longer have an agency for creating a star system." Yes, he's right, the collective "Walter Cronkite moment" is over. I'm amazed at just how many things some folks can care passionately about even while so many others don't care at all and/or are totally ignorant of said thing.
AND YET... from Princess Di to Britney it seems that we're all about mass-culture. All about it in ways deeper than the collective Cronkite moment ever wrangled. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi details in his book Linked: the New Science of Networks, things do not equilibrate to the homogenous, to the uniform. Things move toward the heterogenous realm of chunkified relationships. So, once again, plurality and a sort of elitism play out across the mediascape and across cyberspace and whether they play out in my career lifetime or someone else's... hmm...
Among the many other themes Teachout touched on, he noted that we producers should all have blogs. WHICH... is why I'm writing this now! Unlike Teachout's and so many others, I can't imagine that this blog will post six entries a day... it'll be a lot more like one a week. Still, it'll be a nice space to work through an idea or two and to look at Strange Angels interviews/programs coming up this week or that we've recorded for future broadcast. Plus, there'll finally be a reason to snap a photo or two of the wonderful guests and locations I've had the pleasure of doing extended sit-down interviews with and at... from the revolving bar atop the Bonaventure hotel to Santa Monica Beach.
Teachout sez that if your blog averages 50k hits/day you can make a living at it. I'm pretty clear that neither this blog nor anything else on this website is ever gettin' 50k hits. Still, my portrait of Misty May did get 30k hits during the Olympics - ha!
The other keynote speaker was composer Tod Machover of the MIT Media Lab. I met the Media Lab's Joe Paradiso at Siggraph 2004 this summer, and Machover is another amazing hybridic juggernaut. Of all the compelling things he and his folks do, the one that amazes me the most is they way they - seemingly almost effortlessly!! - bridge the hi-cult low-cult divide. Warhol, of course, bridged it decades ago, but in a banal nihilistic way. Machover seems to do in a limitless possibilities sort of way... the way maybe we used to think back on September tenth.
I'll never forget one weekend a few years back: I went to contemporary choreographer Terri Lewis' concert on Saturday night and a high school production of Oklahoma on Sunday afternoon. Terri was working new ideas and presenting them to a half empty house. The high school production was quite literally the most painfully bad production I've ever seen and it played to an enormous auditorium filled to standing room only. When the curtain came down on this monstrosity there was a standing ovation as loud and - oy - as heartfelt, as I've ever heard. In the end it seemed that having a relative or friend or neighbor on the stage trumped everything else.
With Toy Smphony, Hyperscore, Hyperinstruments, Music Shapers, Beat Bugs and more, Machover and Co. are putting real music in the hands of children. So we get the production of interesting timbres, the investigation of meaningful pattern and variation, AND the whole family can come to the concert and see My Kid AND the Symphony! Brilliant.
When I spoke with computer scientist Andrew Glassner this summer he spoke passionately about "doodling" and how he sees that as the goal of all interfaces. "When I have 14 tails, I'm not going to want to control them with a 'pop-up-window.'" It seems to me that in Hyperscore, where you "draw" (doodle) musical forms with a pen, the Media Lab group is striving for Glassner's ideal.
Machover had lots of other ideas on music, technology and radio. When I asked him about the hi-tech wonderland and sustainability he mentioned a proposal to Beijing to create a $50 laptop. Don't miss his website.
Mary Lee and Lauren Dee and Co. from MPR organized this whole confab. The other presenters deserve detailed treatment, but for now I'll just mention the topics:
Don Lee - Style & Substance: Writing for Radio
Chris Kohtz - Radio Distribution
Brian Newhouse - Staying Curious: The Unexpected Interview
Tom Voegeli - Finding the Creative Difference
John Pearson - The Web Producer is Your Friend
Mitzi Gramling - Media Rights
Julia Schrenkler & Preston Wright - Getting the Audience to Play with You
We also sat in on a St. Paul Sunday recording session with the Borromeo String Quartet
Anyway, during the aforementioned $36 bottle of wine (which, just in case you're really bad at arithmetic, equals eighteen bottles of Trader Joe's "art opening wine") Tim McDonnell from KBAQ in Phoenix tells us the best joke:
So, this accountant, this fashion designer, and this radio producer all happen to be attending trade conferences in St. Paul the same week. And Friday night they all head over to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport for flights to their respective homes. Well, they get through airport security pretty quickly and each has some time to kill. Independently each decides to go the the in-terminal Good Earth Restaurant for a little healthy vegan fare. Sadly, not one of the three can actually find the in-terminal Good Earth and each winds up at the fish taco bar near the gate where they'll catch their flight.
So the three wind up meeting each other and a conversation ensues and eventually the topic turns to whether it's better to have a wife or a mistress. Well, the accountant, being the orderly, fastidious type says that a wife is much better. Everything's above board, you know what to expect, no surprises, roles are defined, it's the way to go. But then the fashion designer says "no-no-no, sorry Paco" (even though the accountant's name is Patrick) a mistress is much better! There's always mystery, danger, excitement, a mistress is just too fabulous to live without. Finally the radio producer chimes in and offers that really, it's best to have a wife and a mistress: that way your mistress will think you're with your wife; your wife will think you're with your mistress; and you can be in the basement playing with ProTools.
In the span of a few short days many ideas were explored and many new friendships begun; tragically, in the whole whirlwind of activity that was the CMI Workshop, I never did have a chance to experience the spectacle of... ahem... "singing..." waitresses delivering crepes to a hungry world... that is Pannekoeken... maybe next time...
-- Glenn Zucman, Rosemead, CA
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