Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio 
Spring 2002

      Savannah is a delightful small port city about seventeen miles from the Atlantic. Its population is about 250,000 except for St Patrick’s Day, when that number doubles. The city is home to the third-oldest Jewish congregation in the U.S., as well as being the city where John Wesley, later founder of Methodism, served as Anglican minister for a year and a half and assembled the first Anglican hymnal in the U.S.
      The Hyatt Regency is a pretty nice hotel with a very good kitchen, located on the Savannah River and on the edge of the Savannah historical district (and across the street from the Moon River micro brewery). If you’ve ever wanted she-crab soup, this is a great place to try it.
      It was wonderful to sit in the dining hall and watch passers-by ambling along the riverfront stop and look in at the audience sitting in rapt attention to, say, Albert Wong, a twelve-year-old master of both the stage and the piano. The musical performances were among the best we have had—a moving reading by baritone David Arnold of some of Scott McClain’s Scripture Songs, for example, and an impassioned performance by violinist Gregory Fulkerson of the Bach Chaconne. And what a performance we heard by pianist André-Michel Schub in magnificent Christ Church! Richard Glazier treated us to some gorgeous piano reductions of popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century. And when on the last evening CBC Records and CBC Radio presented the Finjan Klezmer Ensemble, people walking along the Savannah River got to watch and even applaud(!) a line dance formed spontaneously by AMPPRini themselves! And there were more as well; each day’s music brought a great deal of enjoyment, tears, and smiles. To summarize the presentations briefly:
      Day 0: 2/13/02. Registration, check-in, opening reception. Guitarists John Williams and John Etheridge played some excerpts of a CD of African-influenced music to be released later in 2002. The occasion provided a great chance to try the wares of the Moon River brewery mentioned above.
       Day 1: 2/14/02. Keynote speaker Leon Botstein spoke on the topic “Artistic Advocacy: Challenges and Opportunities.” Botstein is the music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and a man with well-thought-out views.
      He pointed out that the term “classical music” is a product of the twentieth century, conceived by those who hate all other music, attempting to denigrate those forms that do not live up to their demands. This is a case where the genre must be rescued from its defenders. What is usually called “classical” music is basically long-form and instrumental—and it was never conceived to survive in a marketplace situation. It was profitable at two periods, the late nineteenth century when the piano and the widespread availability of sheet music made it possible to bring it home for the first time, and again in the 1950s and afterward, when there was money to be made in LPs and CDs.
      But ever greater efficiency in achieving return on investment is required in the business world, and the symphony orchestra, the ballet, and the opera do not obey such laws. It would cost $300 thousand to put Mahler’s Eighth on stage for one night. That simply won’t compete in the marketplace.
      This “classical” music never did have a great audience—in fact, in absolute terms, more people hear classic music today than ever before. It simply isn’t dying. What has happened is that we have adopted the value set of our enemies, in Botstein’s opinion.
      He feels that classical music can be compared to religion. You visit your house of spirituality to escape the quotidian and in a search for authenticity. A similar return to “reality” and “connectedness” is ongoing in religious practice today. Reform Judaism is looking back to its roots, Anglicans are turning back to High Church ritual. It is a connectedness with life that carries meaning in music. This differs from the visual arts, which are more like commodity trading, where you purchase in the hope of accrual of value.
      We live in a state of declining musical literacy. When violin and voice were the instruments found in homes, one needed the ability to produce a pitch. When the home instrument became the piano, one could learn simply to play by numbers; you didn’t have to be able to produce the right note, you just needed to recognize when you had played the wrong one. Similarly, Mozart’s audiences got the “musical joke” the first time round.
      Today, with the many recordings available, how many times have we heard the Brahms symphonies? There are vinyl collectors who annotate the fact that a certain conductor slows down remarkably in measure 43 as compared to another conductor. But Brahms was 23 years old when he first heard a professional performance of the Beethoven Ninth.
      Because of this proliferation of recorded repertoire, Botstein recommends that radio move more toward live performances. Today’s technically perfect, over-edited recordings simply ask that a performer “try something different” this time as he records the same work for the 83rd time. But to hear a live performance of a work is a revelation. Because the instrumental medium is intentionally non-visual, the listener creates the event. Music is connected to life and to identity, not to numbers and theory. Every listener creates his own view, it isn’t in the notes to be read back.
      Keep in perspective, Botstein says, that more people attend a single Met performance than buy an opera recording in any one year. The presentation of music must be historically valid and related to life. You may not want to hear the same recordings when you’re 65 that you did when you were 25.
      “Get out of the ‘masterpiece syndrome’,” he advises, you can’t show just one room of a museum. What pieces was Mozart listening to? How did several composers respond to a particular event, such as the Vietnam War or World War I? Music must be reinvented by each generation; the range of recordings currently available simply gives radio the opportunity to extend the repertoire instead of falling back on the favorites.
      After a short break, Botstein was joined by moderator Bob Goldfarb, music critic David Patrick Stearns, and NPR’s Mark Mobley for a panel discussion of these ideas. Stearns commented that the CD boom of the 1980s is a driving force behind the return to the live performance, because those performances were so caught up in the homogenized perfection of the medium as to become hum-drum. Botstein continued the thought by saying that in the next few years, the CD distribution system we now know will cease to exist; the labels will go to a produce-on-demand system; and local performers and orchestras will issue their own labels. “Listen less to the habits—shape them; don’t study the market, make the market.”
      Marcia Alvar, president of the PRPD, introduced us to an ongoing study under the title “Defining Public Radio’s Core Values.” According to the PRPD’s Audience 98, listeners seemed to prefer network content to local, so the task becomes to define the perceived differences and to see whether they can be translated as well to the local level.
      The results are available on the PRPD web site, prpd.org; they are extensive and not easy to summarize. The audience perceives as central to the national programs an attention to mind and intellect, an interest in heart and spirit, and a devotion to the craft of meaningful audio production. Listeners do not want to see national programming dropped from the local airways, but they don’t want to see the local side eliminated either. “The listeners see the world as an interconnected web of causal relationships.” You can’t have one without the other.
      Interestingly, stations whose core listeners (solid listeners-supporters) identified the station as having high local content were those with decreasing listenership.
      The study is ongoing. To date, it has been conducted on the national level only on the national top grossers, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Marketplace, Car Talk, Fresh Air, A Prairie Home Companion, and Talk of the Nation. Since there has been no research to date on classical music programming, that is PRPD’s next goal.
      After lunch, AMPPR took a look at itself. Beverley Ervine, Bob Goldfarb and Hal Prentice approached the topic “AMPPR Strategic Planning Session: What Is Our Future?” The CPB says classical music is one of the cornerstone formats for public radio, but how many classical programmers see AMPPR as their professional organization? What is AMPPR’s message anyway? Should it look into greater visibility, greater outreach to other public radio organizations? 
      Some concern was expressed that the PRPD, largely perceived as being news-oriented, was going to be doing research on listener values for music programming. Shouldn’t that be something in AMPPR’s purview? What about announcing models and styles? They are basically the same today as twenty years ago. Should AMPPR look into updating them? Disagreements were minor, even when it was pointed out that if AMPPR is to grow, its current yearly meeting and volunteer board won’t suffice; new dues must be assessed to meet new goals. Some staff positions would possibly need to become paid and permanent.
      In the course of these discussions it was brought up that there are currently talks that may lead to a World Music Symposium in Amsterdam in November 2003—the first time there would be a summit meeting between European and American producers. An article on the Strategic Planning session by Bob Goldfarb is included in this issue.
      Day 2: 2/15/02. Christopher O’Riley, host of From the Top, addressed the topic “New Audiences for Us.” He pointed out that “classical” or “art” music is transplanted but thriving in this country, and many performers strive to come to America. These young people never had to be told why they should like this kind of music.
      From the Top presents teenagers playing the music they love. “If a fourteen-year-old is playing it, how intimidating could it be?” Letting someone hear someone else her own age playing music her friends might not find cool helps to break down barriers.
      Present the music without condescension, and express your enthusiasm for the work, O’Riley says. He reiterated the importance of the live performance and reminded us that the exclusivity and exclusion of the so-called “classical audience” work to the disadvantage of us all.
      One of the main tenets of From the Top, and a basic idea behind his readines to produce a show anywhere in the U.S., is his belief that “There’s great music teaching in every town in the country, not just in the big cities.”
      In a session called “A Broadcaster’s Writing Toolbox,” media writing coach and independent radio producer Kate Long said that everything we do on-air involves writing, whether we actually commit it to paper or just keep it in our heads until we speak it. With enough material to fill an all-day workshop, Long gave us an outline of the tools she uses to encourage good writing. Here are some of her tips:
      “Hey, Barb.” Think of a plain-spoken person you like; tell the story to that person.
      “Have several short samples of great writing at your desk. Before you write, read a sample of something in a voice you like.” This is especially important if the material you are using comes from a bureaucrat or from some kind of technical source, such as the liner notes of classical music CDs.
      Use concrete images; avoid abstractions.
      She offered some devices to help the writer think clearly about the story, devices to make the people involved in the story concrete, and to move the story through time and space.
      Finally, she illustrated the techniques she offered by recreating the process of writing a song inspired by Robert McNamara’s appearance on a TV program as he talked about his new book. Then she sang “McNamara’s Tear,” a moving close to an interesting session.
      Afternoon concurrent sessions were on “Airchecks” and on “Music and Words.” The second was presented by Leslie Warshaw and John Solins of WGBH, and described a classroom radio project that WGBH has built over the past couple years. The idea is to visit elementary and middle schools for the purpose of outreach for the station and education for the children. Like many school districts, the Boston area has schools where arts education is virtually nonexistent and schools where it may be considered merely adequate. Bringing any kind of musical awareness to the pupils will be a plus, and getting the music teacher and classroom teacher together develops a kind of symbiosis.
      The program begins with getting the kids to do active listening, to hear the sounds around them; it progresses to consider music alone, words alone, and the two together. Working with a topic already covered by the classroom teacher that year, a topic is found around which the pupils build their own pieces. Teachers like this approach because it means both reinforcement of a topic and little extra work for them. Warshaw, an ex-teacher, has prepared teacher materials for the topics tried so far. When the work is ready, Solins sends in a WGBH crew to tape it. They then do final minor editing and present all the participants with a cassette of the finished job.
      In other words, WGBH does a workshop with the teachers, then backs off, and finally returns for the recording session. So far, the results have been so favorable that everyone who has done it once has done it again.
      Both presenters would be willing to work with local stations to give them ideas on how they might develop a similar program.
      Linguist Robert Fradkin later presented the topic “Phonics International: How to Tell Szell from Szeryng, Schubert from Ibert, Zoltan from Zauberflöte.”
      The concurrent session was “Rock, Roots and the Rest: A Panel Discussion on Public Radio’s ‘Other’ Formats,” hosted by Jon Kauffmann-Kennel of WGCS of Goshen, Indiana. The panel consisted of Margaret Weissman, producer of e-town; Chris Heim, music director of WBEZ, Chicago; Dan Hirschi, program director of WETS in Johnson City, Tennessee; and David Gordon, station manager of WNCW in Spindale, North Carolina.
      All these stations seem to be breaking stereotypes. Gordon, for example, despite being located “fifty miles from everywhere” in North Carolina, has repeaters that bring WNCW a weekly cume of 100,000. Sensitive to his audience, he runs six hours of bluegrass weekly; and finding that his listeners tune in for the music, he dropped All Things Considered a couple years ago and is about to discontinue carriage of Morning Edition.
      Hirschi is at East Tennessee State University. WETS offers Americana, classical music, and NPR news. Both the other formats outpoll the classical listenership. The station tilts toward local interests, of course—bluegrass, Celtic, Appalachian. The university even offers a bluegrass performance curriculum!
      Heim says WBEZ’s mix is NPR news and information during the day, with jazz from eight p.m. until four a.m. The overnights bring in dollars just about as strongly as the daytimes, and she mentioned a case she had just become aware of in the last couple days where a mid-day jazz program on another station out-performed Morning Edition in fundraising. She feels that just as there is a “classical announcer style,” there is a stereotypical “jazz style” that should be broken.
      All three of the stations have performance studios and use them for at least some live broadcasting. They all stress the need to program for listeners and to keep in mind that this is radio; a core listener knows what he likes and wants to hear it now, but that just isn’t possible all the time: You can break stereotypes, but not rules.
      2/16/02: Day 3 was a day for technology, both direct and philosophical.
 Bob Michaels of Arbitron led off with an introduction to the Portable People Meter. This is a concept that has been in tests since 1992 and should be available in the top 100 DMAs by 2008. Michaels understands the product and approached it in terms that marketers and engineers and the people who’ll be the test targets can understand. This is a dynamic real-world paradigm shift. The imprecision of the classic Arbitron listener diary is history.
      Here is a box the size of a pager. You wear it all day. While you wear it, it senses that it is in use and keeps its green light on—and as long as the green light is on, you are earning money. Simple enough? At the end of the day, you plug it in to its base station to recharge and to download its data through household wiring into its data collection box. In other words, when you get the package from Arbitron, all you have to do is plug the base station and the data collection box each into a power outlet and plug the PPM into the base station to charge it.
      From there on, just pick up the PPM in the morning and plug it back in at night. All the data it collects during the day goes automatically to Arbitron when the data collection box dials in around three in the morning.
      At all times, worn or not, cradled or not, the PPM is listening for station-imposed codes. It has a possible resolution of four seconds, though it isn’t currently implemented. Data reported to the stations show discrete minute-by-minute listening behavior.
      The PPM is always listening for the loudest signal, in the car, in the doctor’s office, even at home with TV, CD, and radio all blaring. Portable device? There’s a Y-jack that sends part of the information to the PPM, the rest to the headphones. Time-shifted? The timestamp of the PPM will show one value, the station encoding another, and the shift is automatically reported.
      Station commitment is the installation of an encoder box. Can the listener hear the codes? No, no longer. The technology is well refined from when it began and uses “psycho-acoustic masking,” a military-grade technology licensed from Martin-Marietta. 
      Data are reported nightly and are ready for analysis the following morning. When did the listener tune out? Did she go to another radio station? To TV? To cable? To a video game? Or just turn off the radio? How many people were listening yesterday when my spot aired? It’s an astonishingly simple idea, now in refinement stages and coming soon to a DMA near you.
      Data consultant Skip Pizzi presented two sessions, “The New Media Landscape” and “The Future of Public Radio.” His understanding of the media—radio, TV, cable, satellite services, internet radio—is possibly unsurpassed, and his knowledge extends from the marketing choices that management might have to make to resetting the demods and splicing the tape. 
      Pizzi remarked that “we ride a horse that’s riding a different horse”: Commercial and public radio both share the same spectrum but really do have different needs.
      The outlook for IBOC (In-Band On-Channel digital distribution for AM and FM terrestrial radio, pronounced EYE-bock) is clouded. The system was designed by the managers of U.S. commercial radio, then built to those requirements by engineers. The system proposed for this country is incompatible with those almost anywhere else in the world.
      It would bring major improvement to the quality of AM terrestrial broadcasts, but FM’s primary gain would be a noticeable reduction in multipath distortion, which causes the clicks and pops heard when listening to FM while driving. In addition, the design is such that it would preclude using the current analog signal for a different program stream from that of the new digital signal.
      Historically, major growth in an industry has occurred when there was proliferation of programming. A qualitative change has seldom spurred growth to the same degree as has a quantitative change. (Consider the changes that occurred when cable went from merely bringing a better picture on the local channels to bringing in additional program sources.) And that possibility has been designed out of IBOC.
      On the other hand, XM and Sirius satellite radio offer that variety, literally hundreds of channels. There are still many questions to be answered about both systems, but they offer a new flexibility and quantitative increase in choice, precisely what has driven markets in the past and what IBOC does not allow.
      Internet radio, like satellite radio, brings flexibility. With broadband connections, the quality is quite good. Subscription sources are beginning to appear. Due to high incremental cost per additional listener and arcane court rulings in regard to royalty payments, shared content with broadcast radio is becoming rarer. Most internet radio is becoming internet-only.
      The anticipated emancipator for internet radio is wireless transmission. When a single source in the home can fetch the signal off the net and retransmit it to a radio in the bedroom and one in the kitchen and one in the kids’ room, internet radio will be as easy to use as current terrestrial radio.
      Other issues to watch in the new media world include audience migration away from radio to CDs/DVDs, video games, MP3s; and copyright issues (a fee for internet use might supplant the fee for public radio use, for example).
      Those are the basic issues for the new media landscape, and their working-out will bring major changes. For example, once you’re digital, you can do anything, transmitting more than just aural information. The single transmitter per service is an analog concept, and the single service per provider an outdated business model. 

      Pizzi reminded us that radio provides both the service (the data stream, the transmission chain) and the content (news, jazz, classical); in the new world we must learn to separate service and content. Then we can look at new partnerships with other content providers, joint ventures, etc.
      Opportunities abound—there are stations in New York that offer over thirty minutes of commercials per hour, for example. But public radio people must keep alert; the pubradio listener is already accustomed to paying for his habit; satellite services may drain some of our income with their monthly fees. Putting up one channel for vocal, one for chamber, another for symphonic music twenty-four hours a day may not be the best way to program, but it is certainly the way the radio user has been trained to station-hop.
      Don’t forget, the satellite services incorporate an addressable receiver. Even if they later drop the subscription fees that today necessitate that feature and start generating cash by selling commercials, the addressability would allow targeted ads—one set to those whose radios were factory-installed in Mercedes, another to those driving Hondas, for example. Pizzi suggested some issues to monitor.
      First, the satellite services. We don’t know yet whether either or both current services will survive, but they’re not going at it half way. Both have major showcase studio facilities which would be unnecessary if they intended to go jukebox style. For news, both are drawing only from external sources, but in music they are going full-bore for top-flight talent and production.
      They are subsidizing part of the cost of the new digital receivers; but by keeping prices high enough, they give the buyer an incentive not to drop the service: “Well, with $500 in that radio, this $10 a month isn’t all that much.” Will this fee-for-a-free-service mindset that public radio has generated now mean that part of “our” monies will be going to a rival source?
      What about the networks? How will they leapfrog the stations? NPR already has a presence on satellite. And how will that affect their relationship with us?
      In short, satellite radio success could force terrestrial radio changes. And if those changes come into the grating world of commercial radio, that could affect public radio as well, forcing us to make improvements to keep up.
      Second, broadband and wireless. At the moment, broadband for radio distribution applies primarily in the home. In the U.S. (though not so in the rest of the world), radio listening is spread about equally between home, car, and office. With the growth of wireless distribution, these mechanisms may become the sole distribution channel for digital terrestrial radio.
      Third, legacy value. Would it be reasonable for today’s broadcaster to acquire additional spectrum? Probably so, Pizzi feels, particularly if IBOC fails, and particularly for FM.
       Fourth, home networks. A content-aggregation device collects various streams and wirelessly retransmits them, making internet access, audio, and the like as easy as radio is now. That means a change from a market of scarcity to one of Darwinian selection. You could lose listenership, or you could be part of the mix.
      Pizzi stressed that this doesn’t mean simply saying “here’s our URL, and it’s a cool site.” Give the listener a reason to go: pictures and bios of the performers, information on the recording and the work, more information on Berlioz, if it’s his birthday.
      Recommendations: Align with new service providers. Keep an eye open to proposed legislation and influence it. Manage change and change managers; there’s a reason it’s called “new” media, and there’s a reason for the popularity of the cartoon character Dilbert, whose boss “just doesn’t get it.” “We’re the generation that will always speak digital with an accent.” Brands are in, channels out; subscription must be the goal of any niche-caster. Don’t scale back out of pure caution and miss the chance through fear. The question is content: local (owned or rented), national, even filling the space left by commercial radio.

Howard Cornelsen is Operations Manager at KUFH FM in Houston, Texas, and is a regular contributor to Music Notes.