Right angled tracks

I was listening to Pandora last night, using it's Quick Mix amalgamation of my play list selections. The apparent legal requirement to play only tracks of unrelated music can lead to horrible results. Pandora selected an orchestral piece by Elliot Carter, an atonal disjointed murky piece of music. Then, without a second's break, an equally dissonant contemporary piece by Gregory Kurtag was next. The mathematical similarity between the two pieces, based on some distance function calculation of music content, was obvious. But the musical clash to the ear was jolting -- I really, really objected to the immediate right angled turn. I wasn't really aware it was Carter and Kurtag, but the abrupt clash forced me to figure it out and to think about it. Yuch! I turned off Pandora.

I switched my "chumby" to listening to WQXR in New York. When I lived in Connecticut it was my favorite station, the "voice of the new york times". listened nightly to good music, played in its entirety with entertaining announcers commenting appropriately. It was a first class operation.

When I first connected to WQXR, Haydn's "Farewell" symphony was about finished. The announcer made a few cute remarks about it and then signed off. And then it was just music -- unannounced music -- complete music -- but unknown music. I guessed (correctly as it turned out) that it was guitar concerto by Rodrigo, but why was nobody saying anything? After about 25 minutes it ended with someone saying "check out our online play list to identify the piece you've just heard". Wonderful. Big media's economic problems manifest themselves on WQXR by eliminating the personal touch. Now, at the stroke of midnight the station seems to go on autopilot, playing music from a play list with occasional recorded fragments telling the listener to go to a web site to check out the play list and figure out what was being played. If that isn't a crock! The city that never sleeps now is entertained by an automaton. So much for the state of classical music on the radio and the Internet.