2020-10-04
Lose the playlist
"Turn your radio on... and listen to the music in the air..." -- Alfred Brumley
OK, now I am going to show my age. I love radio. Always have, always will. No small amount of music that is now important to me I heard for the first time over the airwaves in Boston and Brussels when I was younger.
I will never forget the Easter Sunday morning decades ago when I was working in the office of a private school where I was music department head (imagine! me working on an Easter Sunday morning at anything except a church!). It was that day that Robert J. Lurtsema, a public radio titan in Boston if there ever was one, broadcast a performance of the Mahler "Resurrection" symphony. I was floored. I had never heard anything like it. I had grown up a pianist, studied two different times at New England Conservatory, played chamber music as an undergrad and studied harmony with Elliot Forbes. But the work of Gustav Mahler had simply not crossed my radar.
In hindsight, I am not sure how much work I got done that Easter Sunday morning. But it was a chance encounter via the radio airwaves that I "met" for the first time a composer whom I have grown to love deeply. And this element of chance, what the French call "l'insolite", the unexpected, is precisely why I love radio. By and large, one does not know what comes next on the radio; this element of random introductions to new auditory experiences is fantastic. What better way is there to keep broadening your musical horizons? Sure, you will want to change channels (or, now, click away) if you are really not interested in what has come up. By and large, however, it is a <very> good thing to encounter music you would not normally go out of your way to hear.
I have had many "discussions" with younger musicians on this topic. In the era of playlists, where technology makes it entirely possible to insulate oneself against the intrusion of the "unexpected" when listening to live streams or to Web services, a distressingly small number of users choose the "random" option when constructing their listening strategy. Like our politics, which have become increasingly inbred because of the social media echo chambers we have constructed, young musicians build lists and too often just stay within those boundaries. They feel they are being adventurous when they switch artists within a style! Meanwhile, I think back to what was available forty years ago on our local airwaves... rock, folk, British Isles, jazz, more jazz, classical, medieval and Renaissance, world music. Part of the richness had to do with living in a university town, but still...
So I encourage everyone to put the playlists aside from time to time, turn on your device, go to a music source, and let the human (or the algorithm) on the other end of your connection make the choices. (If it is an algorithm, see if you can get it to mix things up!) Enjoy the fact that you have no control, and you probably will not recognize what is coming at you. But you will discover new horizons, of that I am sure; you might even encounter a musical intellect that sought to contain "all of existence" in nine-plus musical essays.
If you have more questions about this topic, don't hesitate to contact me and we can chat.
K
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