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Non-competitive
May. 24th, 2016 10:36 amThis is a completely useless rant, but I'm going to issue it anyway.
Any classical-music lover who listens to the radio knows how much the "non-commercial" classical stations have dumbed down their programming in the last decade or two. This is lamentable, but as long as they're dependent on individual and corporate contributions for their funding it's unlikely to get better.
Still, what WCRB did today strikes me as dishonest on some level. They've instituted something they call the "classical face-off", in which listeners have a window of opportunity to choose between two pieces to be played in an upcoming time slot. (I haven't paid enough attention to know the details of how this works.) Today the choices were between there Dvorak 9th Symphony and the Schubert 9th Symphony.
Now, these are both fine pieces, but any classical-radio listener -- or, indeed, pretty much anybody -- has most likely heard the Dvorak approximately 79 times for every time they've heard the Schubert, and it doesn't take great predictive powers to know who's going to win that one.
The programmers for the stations I used to know and love wouldn't have offered up such a "competition"; if they were trying to choose between those two pieces, they would have said, "Well, everybody knows the Dvorak 9th; let's give them some exposure to this other really great piece that they probably haven't heard as much" (not that the Schubert 9th is exactly obscure, although it's outplayed by the "Unfinished" by about the same margin as above).
Sigh. I wish WHRB's signal were stronger.
Any classical-music lover who listens to the radio knows how much the "non-commercial" classical stations have dumbed down their programming in the last decade or two. This is lamentable, but as long as they're dependent on individual and corporate contributions for their funding it's unlikely to get better.
Still, what WCRB did today strikes me as dishonest on some level. They've instituted something they call the "classical face-off", in which listeners have a window of opportunity to choose between two pieces to be played in an upcoming time slot. (I haven't paid enough attention to know the details of how this works.) Today the choices were between there Dvorak 9th Symphony and the Schubert 9th Symphony.
Now, these are both fine pieces, but any classical-radio listener -- or, indeed, pretty much anybody -- has most likely heard the Dvorak approximately 79 times for every time they've heard the Schubert, and it doesn't take great predictive powers to know who's going to win that one.
The programmers for the stations I used to know and love wouldn't have offered up such a "competition"; if they were trying to choose between those two pieces, they would have said, "Well, everybody knows the Dvorak 9th; let's give them some exposure to this other really great piece that they probably haven't heard as much" (not that the Schubert 9th is exactly obscure, although it's outplayed by the "Unfinished" by about the same margin as above).
Sigh. I wish WHRB's signal were stronger.
