iPod's organization with Classical Music

I bought myself an iPod NANO to play around with. It's my 3rd MP3 player after buying an Arcos 'Jukebox' 20 M player and a little Creative Lab's 512 Mb portable. I've had the Archos for several years and it's traveled well, though it's filled now. I use the Creative mostly when I bike or ski. It's light and portable and 512MB is enough to hold the entire Robert Greenburg lectures on the Symphony.

In both of these cases, I was able to take and construct m3u files containing the playlist order of the music and point them to the appropriate mp3 files, organized heirarchically on the player drive. One or two clicks and I'm off into my own world of music. No need for the FM radio, since most portable radios don't pick up the signal well enough to enjoy. Up in the mountains, forget classical music.

So I assumed the use of the iPod would be similar. Map the iPod directories, copy in the m3u and mp3s and keep Apple and me happy. It doesn't seem to work that way. I asked the young fellow at the Apple store and he said 'no problem'. Clearly he was not up-to-snuff, or else I didn't frame my question properly. Anyway, I'm on a quest to make it all work. Apparently m3u's from some Window's applications can be imported, but it sure isn't clear yet to me.

Silly little snippets

On KVOD, the Denver, Colorado classical music radio station, their format is to play a piece, name the piece that's just been played, play a snippet, have a station announcement, play a snippet, then announce and play the next piece. Perhaps it's me, but those snippets -- short, 5-12 second clips extracted from some light classical piece somewhere -- are annoying.

Image the setting. You are listening to some intense piece of chamber music, say a late Beethoven quartet and it reaches its climactic ending. The announcer says the piece, then the music moment is broken with this piece of twaddle which breaks the spell. Silence is better.

I'm not sure why they do it other than the use up some seconds to balance out their timing or some such. But it's annoying

Number Nine - the big loser

After a break of more than a month, I'm back with my constant complaint about long music. Poor old Beethoven. If he had only known to shorten his 9th. Had he, it would be played more. It's now after election day and yet KVOD, in Denver, has only broadcast the 9th 3 times this year. Just Three!
Here are the numbers:

Symphony No 1: 25 times

Symphony No 2: 25 times

Symphony No 3: 18 times

Symphony No 4: 19 times

Symphony No 5: 24 times

Symphony No 6: 24 times

Symphony No 7: 23 times

Symphony No 8: 24 times

Symphony No 9: 3 times

Doesn't that seem odd?

ClassicalFM

ClassicalFM

Not what they are know for:

Okay, I suspect I'm reaching for it here, but suppose the world knew John Lennon only as "a victim of an assassin". If you look for information about him, all you would find about him is the date of death, the location, the assassin, the assassin's punishment, etc. Nothing about what he did prior to the bullet.

Now image the same thing about a composer. You want to hear music by him, but what do you get?

Take poor old Vincenzo Bellini! I noticed that someone checked on his broadcasts on the 8 major FM classical music stations I monitor. I looked too and discovered that his most popular piece is the Oboe Concerto in E flat. So old Mr. Bellini is an oboe composer. Great! Now I do seem to remember that he wrote something called "Norma". And "La Sonnambla". And "il Puritani" and "il Pirati". They must be small pieces for woodwinds or something. Were he still alive, I suspect he would be shut himself into a closet and say "I give up! My music isn't appreciated in this silly century!"

Opera isn't an art form on the commercial FM radio stations anymore -- they take too long.

What about opera?

In most of my posts, I complain about the lack of broadcasts of lengthier works. Mahler, Bruckner, Beetoven's Ninth, "Symphony Fantastique" just aren't broadcast over the FM stations I've been monitoring. Well opera falls into the "don't bother with it" syndrome --- except for the live from the Metropolitan opera on Saturdays during the Met's season.

My local station KVOD, when it was a commercial station, would broadcast "Sunday night at the opera" around 8 pm each Sunday. With some good commentary, often with comments from the local Opera Colorado performers and officials, you could depend on listening to an entire opera.

KVOD was tranformed from a commercial station to part of a public radio duo. KVOD broadcast classical music 24 hours each day, with an "In-depth News" talk radio on KCFR with "All Things Considered" and similar programs. With this switch, opera was deep-sixed. The Sunday program disappeared, the local support of Opera Colorado diminished and opera lovers were sent to their CD collections.

Clearly masters like Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccinni -- you know who I mean, are only worthy of fragments from their works. Sad, sad, sad.

"Fantastique" slights

Berlioz's Symphony "Fantastique" is another one of the longer pieces in the standard classical repetoire. It's a fairly long symphony, typically lasting nearly 58 minutes. It has 5 movements, "Reveries", "A Ball", "Scenes in the Country", "March to the Scaffold" and "Dreams of a Witches Sabbath". It's one of the early examples of program music, where the composer intends the listener to "hear" the story. Berlioz wrote his own program for it, leaving his audience the hints about his own passions. See
http://www.hberlioz.com/Scores/sfantastique.htm for more details.

Why bother to look at this? Well, it's another example of where the classical broadcasters are chopping up a masterpiece to fit their own time schedules. Sure it's long, but it's worth it and it's a grand listening experience. I just heard two performances by the Colorado Music Festival orchestra under Michael Christie. It involved a large orchestra, 100+ musicians, with 2 tympany and 2 bass drums. So what does the poor FM radio listener get to here for this work? Very little.

Here is a table showing broadcast this year. There are two columns about broadcasts, the first showing the number of complete performances and the second broadcasts of an individual movement.

Station	Full	Partial
KUSC Los Angeles	2	1
CL24 Minnesota	0	11
KCME Colorado Springs, CO	5	4
KING Seattle, WA	4	2
WBMH Birminham, AL	3	0
WGUC Cincinatti, OH	2	12
WQXR New York, NY	5	17
KVOD Denver, CO	2	1

Sad isn't it! Why can't these stations leave art alone? If a composer wants to compose 5 movements, then play 5 movements. And it if is a masterpiece like "Fantastique" let us hear it occasionally, not just a few times each year.

Poor Bruckner

I guess Bruckner is just out of favor on the FM band now. KVOD in Denver, in all of 2006 through July 27th, has only broadcast 11 of his 150 or so compositions. KVOD broadcast his Symphony #4 and the String Quintet in F twice, but only once for the Symphonies #8 and #6 , the "Te Deum", Masses #2 and #3, Psalm 150, the Intermezzo, his "Ave Maria" and "Os justi".

Ravel, on the other hand, has had 32 of his 85 compositions broadcast in the same time period on KVOD, with 9 pieces broadcast more than 15 times. That's during nearly 5000 hours of time on the air.

Some other composers of note: Bach had roughly 267 compositions for 916 broadcasts, Mozart 306 for 1179 and Beethoven 153 for 295 broadcast. One of my favorites, Richard Wagner had 32 compositions broadcast 238 times. However, not one complete opera of hist was broadcast to-date in 2006. Wagner apparently was only a composer of excerpts.

I'm getting to the point that I only listen to KVOD while I'm driving in the car.

Sleepy time composers

I guess I'm not surprised that when some stations broadcast symphonies by Mahler and Bruckner, they tend to broadcast in the late hours. The symphonies are long........, so I guess they can be used to put some people to sleep. Why enjoy music, after all, when you can sleep.

Here's a table of when symphonies were broadcast on Denver's All-Classical 24 Hour KVOD
station. Each number represents the number of symphonies broadcast from January 1, 2003
through the end of June, 2006.

Time	Mahler	Bruckner
12 AM	1
1 AM	15	9
2 AM	31	18
3 AM
4 AM	1
5 AM
6 AM
7 AM
8 AM
9 AM
10 AM
11 AM		1
12 PM	3	1
1 PM
2 PM	5	2
3 PM
4 PM
5 PM		1
6 PM
7 PM	18	1
8 PM	6	6
9 PM	32	21
10 PM		2
11 PM		2

This is pretty much what one would expect, I guess. Perhaps it's too bad I always
fall asleep before midnight.

Denver says goodbye to the late Romantics

KVOD, "The Voice of Classical Music in Colorado", seems to shunning the late Romantic symphonists, particularly Mahler and Bruckner.

I'm sure one of their music programmers must have thought at some time "Couldn't these guys write shorter stuff?" Well, they didn't, so they don't get programmed much any more.

Here's some data:

Symphonies Broadcast by	2004	2005	1st half 2006	Projection for end of 2006
Mahler	44	26	6	12
Bruckner	25	14	3	6

It sure looks pretty bad for those fan's of these two late 19th century giants. It's particularly bad for Mahler given the great success of the Boulder Mahler Festival.

I should note that some other stations aren't this bad. New York's WQXR looks on track with Mahler with about 32-34 broadcasts of his symphonies, somewhat less for Bruckner. KING out of Seattle looks like it might broadcast more Mahler in 2006 than 2005, similarly with Bruckner.

I guess it's just too bad, but "Quality must be quick!".

Oh, it should also be remembered that KVOD broadcast 24 hours a day. Still not enough time for long symphonies from the masters.

A Symphony coincidence.

Yesterday, for the second time in 2006 KVOD played a symphony "Il Comista" in C by the composer Johann Vanhal. Frankly I had never heard of him. WikiPedia has a brief article about him. He wrote 73 symphonies and some were compared favorably with Haydn. What brought Herr Vanhal to mind is that he is one of the four composers touched on by Robert Greenberg in his Symphonies lectures as one of the "Classical Masters". I just listened to this lecture today, hence the coincidence.

Vanhal isn't played much on any of stations, with only 110 discrete broadcasts since about October of 2003. He seems to be a favorite of CL24, the Minneapolis PBS station, though. However, they seem to feel that only certain movements of his "Symphony" are worth playing. I noticed that they give no number to his symphony, but with 73 under his belt it might make a difference. So here is a minor composer, considered a "Classical Master" by a major musical lecturer, who only gets fragments of his works broadcast. CL24's tastes tend toward the really short, so let's only listen to certain movements of a piece of art, rather than the whole thing. It's like the Louvre covering all but the smile on the Mona Lisa -- why would you want to look at the rest anyway?

Quality must be quick, again.

So much for long symphonies

Continuing with long symphonies not being broadcast on FM anymore.

KVOD in Denver broadcast Mahler Symphony #3 7 times in 2004, twice in 2003 and not at all by this time in 2006. Why? Probably because it's about 94 minutes long. It doesn't matter that it's a wonderful symphony that deserves a listening public, it's just too long.

KVOD is a publicly supported FM station that fund-raises a few times each year. It doesn't have advertisements, but has constant fillers of 10-20 second musical snippets and or station announcements. Yet, it still seems to feel that the audience isn't mature enough to listen to anything substantial or of any length. Three of top 4 most frequently broadcast pieces are by Ravel, "Allborada del gracioso" (#1), "Le Tombeau de Couperin" (#2) and "La Valse" (#4). Vaughn-Williams "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" is # 3. All fine pieces but not really substantial. It seems that classical music broadcasting continues a slide from quality to mediocrity.

Time over quality

I've always view Beethoven as arguably the greatest symphonist. Yes, Mozart was a wonder, Brahms unbeatable, Mahler incomparable, Shostakovich profound, etc, etc. But Beethoven! What can one say?

Now you would think that his symphonies would be broadcast a lot on the radio and you would be right. However, when it comes time to see what Beethoven symphonies get broadcast, things change.

Symphony No 1 in C, opus 21 was written in 1800 and is a nice, pleasant work that marked Beethoven as a symphonist. His Opus 125 Symphony #9 in d, the famous "Choral", was written between 1822 and 1824 is a masterpiece. It's mature Beethoven and it was earthshaking. Years ago the New York radio station WQXR would end the year with a count-down of the "top 100". The last piece, the "number one piece" would be broadcast to end just at midnight in New York. It was always Beethoven's 9th.

Today, however, the 9th isn't broadcast much. Using data from my www.classicalfmradio.org's 'Interesting report on broadcast symphonies', one finds that by mid-June 2006, the 9th symphony has been broadcast on the Denver station KVOD only 3 times in all of 2006, while the nice little symphony #1 has been broadcast 15 times. WQXR in New York has 8 broadcasts for #1 and 3 for #9 and KING in Seattle has 7 broadcasts for #1 and also 3 for #9.

Why the disparity. The "Choral" was what was performed with the wall fell in Berlin! It's almost
featured time and time again. Yet, classical FM radio stations don't seem to think the 9th is worth broadcasting. I'm guessing, but I think they think it's TOO LONG. Serious music, to be broadcast to the obviously impatient listening audience, must be short.

Quality must be quick!