Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio 
Fall 2000 

       “It is next to impossible,” James Galway once said, “to toss a brick into the air in County Galway without it landing on the head of some musician.” Since noon on May 1, 1999, it is now impossible to drive in County Galway, or anywhere else in Ireland for that matter, without classical music landing on you via the airwaves.
        In February, 1997, RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster petitioned the Minister for Arts and Culture for a dedicated music and arts network to serve an unmet need in the Irish radio market. In June, 1998, RTÉ announced that Lyric fm would be based in Limerick and go on the air on May 1, 1999. Previously, classical music was limited to FM3, an evenings-only service sharing a network with the national Irish language service, RnaG.
        When I saw on the web that Lyric fm was starting up, I couldn’t resist sending a tape and resumé to see what happened. I’d read about Ireland’s roaring economy and thought the chance to do the work I do in the land of my ancestors would be an adventure. I was not at all disappointed. On a one-year contract, I got a leave of absence from Minnesota Public Radio and a contract with Lyric fm. 
        By now, you’ve probably read about “The Celtic Tiger,” Ireland’s recent roaring economy. Forget all the tweed caps and thatched roofs and sheep. Sure there are sheep by the herd, but today they’re likely to be grazing in the shadow of a dot-com company or telecom call center, or the Dell computer facility on the outskirts of Limerick. Their workers now commute in appalling traffic, grinding the gears of their new Audis or “Mercs,” gabbing on their mobile phones. 
        About 250,000 of the population (about a 10 percent reach) are tuned to Lyric fm at least once a week. We were told over and over by listeners about our music, “It calms road rage.” Road rage! Whether your images of Ireland come from The Quiet Man, Angela’s Ashes, or William Trevor’s short stories, road rage has never played that big a part. 
        In many ways, Lyric is the first tightly formatted “niche” station in the country. RTÉ, Radio One’s daytime news and current affairs stream, is supplemented with MOR pop; and all of the music stations offer long chunks of big-name, call-in talk. But from 7 am to 7 pm, and most of the rest of the time, Lyric fm is classical. The professional educated commuters are called ABC1s by demographers. They’re Ireland’s counterpart to our public radio audience, and they are listening! We kept getting calls and e-mails from them, and from almost anyone involved in music and arts community too. It’s funny, when I’d hear from and talk to listeners, I felt like I knew them. They are just like the public radio listeners I’ve met and communicated with here for years. They’re curious, educated, well-traveled, and grateful to get something different and good from their radios. 
        I’ve always felt that the dichotomies between audience and mission we set up in this business are largely false. But Lyric has its too: being compared either to highbrow BBC Radio 3, (with its decades of history and budget of over £60 million!) or to the enormously successful commercial model, Classic FM. Much of the time, Lyric falls somewhere comfortably in- between. Daytime consists of an accessible mix of shorter selections, with strong, personable hosts. The Irish love personalities on their radios, and took to my American accent in a warm, welcoming way that will stay with me permanently. (There’s a reason their national tourist office is called the bord fáilte, or “welcome board.”) 
        I know what I’m about to do is a tricky task, but…just what differences in air sound would you find between American public radio and Ireland’s Lyric fm, aside from the three to four minutes of commercials per hour?
       · More talk and features: Mixed into the musical fabric, you would find features ranging from contemplative essays from writers to interviews with artists visiting Ireland. Add three minutes of news from Lyric’s newsroom every hour, and you might get a bit higher talk-to-music ratio than we are used to here. 
       · More vocal music: Lyric fm features star singers singing the big arias, largely at the behest of our UK consultant who came from the popular and successful Classic FM, and because of the taste of Irish audiences, who’ve historically taken to Italian opera. Some of the most popular music shows on RTÉ over the years have featured operatic arias. 
       · More block programming: At Lyric there is still a sense of programs, each with an individual producer. But that paradigm, as they say, is shifting. The Head of the station reminded us continually that Lyric was “one complete program.” While they don’t use jargon like seamlessness or stationality, we were made more and more aware of it.

        While much of our daily output was deliberately appealing, Lyric also very quickly played a vital role in Ireland’s cultural life, with the thoughtful and acclaimed “Artszone” program, a weekly digest of all that's current in the arts world; live concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra; the splendid West Cork Chamber Music Festival; and even a live relay of Pavarotti with the Ulster Orchestra from Stor-mont Castle in Belfast (a venue more known for the sharp tenor of its political debate than for arias by Italian tenors). We quickly became a clearinghouse for arts and concert information and interviews for Irish listeners. But still, it won’t surprise anyone to know that “The Full Score,” a two-hour block of full-length, standard repertoire pieces in late afternoon, enjoyed some of the highest audience ratings of the day. 
        And there you have my attempt to distill the most enjoyable and rewarding professional experience I’ll probably ever have. It is by nature incomplete. 
        So what do I take away from this experience? Aside from the stimulating benefits of living and working in another culture and aside from the energizing experience of working with a talented, young staff on a new project, what I kept coming back to again and again was that there just weren’t too many major differences doing this work here or there. We face the same challenges. We also have the same aims, the pleasant task of playing great music for an appreciative audience. 
        I’ll always treasure a terse, typically Dublin postcard we got after only a few weeks on the air:
                                Sir, Lyric fm is catching on. Travelling 
                                on the 16.48 Bus Eireann from New 
                                Ross to Dublin during the week. 
                                What was the driver tuned into? 
                               ‘Yourself.’ When alighting at Stone 
                                Street, I say to the driver, 
                               ‘Fair play to you.’ 
                                                  Yours, Dubliner 

    Tom Crann is a national classical music host and producer for Minnesota Public Radio, who can be heard occasionally on Classical 24.