BBC Radio 3 - how do you spell schadenfreude?

'According to official listening figures released yesterday ... BBC Radio 3, controversially overhauled last year to loud complaints from some listeners, saw its share of listening slump to a record low. The classical music, arts and culture station sank to its lowest share of listening, 0.9%, and saw weekly reach fall to 1.795m, a drop of 155,000 on the previous quarter and just above its all-time worst figure of 1.78m.

The shakeup in November 2006 saw Performance on 3 moved to 7pm, Late Junction moved to a late night slot and controller Roger Wright having to deny charges that he had reduced the amount of live music. Wright, who also took charge of the Proms last year, argued at the time that while there was less "live as live" performance, there was more "as live" recorded pieces and that listeners tended not to differentiate. A Radio 3 spokesman said it was "disappointing to see that classical music listening figures are down generally".'

There can be little surprise about today's Guardian report on RAJAR audience data for quarter ending March 2008 from which the quote above is taken. And it is typically disingeneous of the BBC to use the excuse that "classical music listening figures are down generally." Time and time again I have reported here how intelligent, imaginative and challenging programmes - the very qualities dumbed-out of today's Radio 3 - have boosted classical music audiences.

On Sunday May 4 you can listen to In Memory of the Six Million on Future Radio at 5.00pm (repeat at 00.50am on May 5) featuring this music:

Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen, realisation for string septet played by supplemented Brandis Quartet

Benjamin Frankel - Violin Concerto ‘In Memory of the Six Million’ played by Ulf Hoelscher with Queensland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Werner Andreas Albert.

Or listen to BBC 'Radio 2.5's' week long Composer of the Week featuring music by Noel Coward and Warsaw Concerto composer Richard Addinsell.

On May 17-18 you can wallow in Radio 3's wall-to-wall Chopin Experience, or reflect on Future Radio's Inner Cities webcast and anticipate their upcoming complete webcasts of Kaikhosru Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum and of a lilas, an authentic Morrocan gnawa trance ritual in a world premiere broadcast.

BBC Radio 3 has a lot in common with today's big banks. They both blame market conditions for problems that are, in fact, caused by their own incompetence. And like banks the management rewards for failure at the BBC are not very different to those for success.
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No classical - no radio

A familiar theme appears in Toronto's Globe and Mail - 'I am almost too depressed about the planned "overhaul" of CBC's Radio 2 to even write about it. What's the point? We've all seen the writing on the wall for some time now, and resistance is futile: The CBC no longer feels there is any point to devoting an entire radio station to the more musically and intellectually complex style of music colloquially, though entirely inappropriately, known as "classical" (more on that tendentious terminology in a moment), because, according to its mysterious studies, no one is interested in that any more.

So, come September, there will only be "classical" music (God, I hate that term!) at midday on weekdays; the rest of the air time will be taken up with light pop and jazz. Yes, that's right, explicitly light: In an interview with The Globe and Mail last week, the executive director of radio explained that the station will be playing even more Joni Mitchell and Diana Krall. The executives have also proudly expressed their interest in playing more middle-of-the-road pop such as Feist and Serena Ryder. Yes, they are proud, proud to be brave purveyors of Serena Ryder and Diana Krall, the very best culture our country has to offer.

In other words, Radio 2 will become essentially an easy-listening station. It will play, aside from four hours a day when everybody is at work, the kind of verse-chorus-verse popular music that is likely to win awards at industry-created ceremonies - the Junos, the Grammys, the Smushies, the Great Mall Music Prize.

Sometimes there will be jazz; I'm guessing it will continue to be the Holiday Inn lounge jazz they already so adore. It's also pretty safe to say there will be no underground pop music, nothing noisy or electronic - unless they keep Laurie Brown's The Signal (surely they must, they must at least keep The Signal?) - and of course that will be only late at night so it doesn't disturb the imagined audience, an audience of the mousiest, nicest, middlest of middle Canadians.

Notice how the CBC has already won half the public-relations battle through its choice of language. It is wise, if it wants to dismiss exciting and abstract music that doesn't have a 4/4 beat, to call such music "classical." That word instantly relegates it to the past. "Classical" connotes that which is established, respected, stuffy - another word for "old favourites."

"Classical" is wholly inadequate in describing an intellectual tradition that has always thrived on innovation, on radical new interpretations, on defiance of previous traditions, indeed, of iconoclasm. When Arthur Honegger sat down to write Pacific 231, when Olivier Messiaen began Quartet for the End of Time, when Edgard Varèse ordered his orchestra to play along to tape recordings from sawmills, do you think they wanted to write something "classical?"

But even this conversation is pointless; it isn't even happening. It belongs to another world. I feel, when talking about these things, like a visitor to an isolated country where everybody believes the Earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese: No one is going to listen to me because every single one of my premises, my fundamental assumptions, is different from theirs.

I assume, for example, that the point of having a government-funded radio station is not to garner the largest possible audience; if that were the goal, and that goal were attained, such a station would be commercially viable and no longer in need of government support. I also assume that art and intellectual inquiry can sometimes be challenging and demanding of intense concentration, and that they are naturally not always going to attract lucrative audiences, and that this does not make them any less valuable, which is why governments in enlightened countries support them and provide access to them.

I guess I assume, too, something even more fundamental and even more fundamentally unpopular, which is that not all art is of equal value. Art that does not tend to follow strict generic conventions (such as, for example, the verse-chorus-verse structure of 90 per cent of pop music) is deserving of extra attention. Art unbound by formula tends to indicate the area where the best, the most original talents are working.

And this is not, I assure you, about the past; it is about the future. Art unbound by formula - music that does not have to accompany words, for example - is the art that will be remembered by cultural historians and will come to define our era.

A country with no public forum for such art, with nowhere for the less privileged to gain access to it and to intelligent analysis of it, is an unsophisticated one.

And furthermore, a radio station that is indistinguishable from commercial stations - other than by its fanatical niceness - will have no reason to receive government support. Why not just shut it down already?' - byline Russell Smith

And CBC did so many great things.
Header image is CBC Radio 2 website. With thanks to Canadian reader David Cavlovic for the heads-up. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

An Overgrown Path just got longer

Due largely to requests from transatlantic listeners Future Radio's new schedule includes a repeat of my Overgrown Path programme at 12.50am UK time on Monday mornings. This translates approximately to Sunday afternoon and evening on the North American East and West Coasts, find the exact time locally here and connect to the audio stream here.

The repeats start today (Feb 3) with a programme of early and contemporary music from the Santiago Pilgrimage. Do catch the excerpts from Jody Talbot's new Path of Miracles if you can, they are well worth hearing. More details here.

It may be a small step, but this repeat is recognition that classical music is far from dead, and that adventuous programming produces results. Thank you Overgrown Path readers and listeners for making this possible.

Overgrown Path forward programme schedule - all works are played complete:
* Feb 10 - John Cage Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra and Frescobaldi Canzoni
* Feb 17 - Vaughan Willimas Symphony No 8 (part of a cycle of all his symphonies in 2008) and Thomas Tallis' choral music
* Feb 24 - Elliott Carter Pastoral for Clarinet and Piano and Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, and J.S. Bach Trio Sonatas transcribed by Robert King
* March 2 - Michael Tippett Second Symphony (composer conducting) and Corelli Concerti Grossi No 8, 'Christmas Concerto'
* March 9 - Lou Harrison Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra (new recording) and early music from the eastern Sephardic communities, plus a Ghanaian circumcision dance!
* March 16 - Angela Hewitt plays Messiaen and Bach.

Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm every Sunday and 12.50am every Monday UK time in real time here (convert to local time zones here). Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

What exactly is live music?

"Way more than 50% of our output is live music ..." claims BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright in a revealing article about a new jazz radio station in today's Guardian.

But Radio 3's definition of live is slightly different to yours and mine. As I reported here in February 2007 virtually all evening concerts on Radio 3, except the Proms, are pre-recorded. But the BBC counts these recordings as 'live' performances, and the text streamed with their FM broadcasts describes them as 'live concert recordings'.

In a wonderful example of BBC corporate-crapola Radio 3 defines 'live' as any music recorded with an audience present. Which has important implications both for musicians who earn their living from live music making, as these recorded 'live' performances can be repeated, and for audiences, who may find real concerts with living breathing musicians disappearing.

If Roger Wright turned up at a concert hall for a 'live concert', and found a pre-recorded performance being played through speakers wouldn't he feel cheated? It's not a stupid question - that's what is actually happening in my header photo. Read about it here.
Header photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

What a Karajan at the BBC

Apologies to readers, who like me, tuned in vain to BBC Radio 4 at 7.15pm this evening to hear the 'reassessment' of Herbert von Karajan's life and work that I mentioned in one of today's post.

I picked up information on the programme from today's Guardian radio listings which highlighted the Karajan programme. This information would have been supplied by the BBC publicity department. As programmes sometimes change I went to Radio 4's webpage. This clearly says:

19:15 Front Row 23 January 2008
Arts news and reviews with Mark Lawson, including a reassessment of the life and work of Herbert von Karajan as the centenary of the maestro's birth approaches.

Just to make sure doubly-sure I googled 'BBC Radio 4 Karajan' and found another page on the BBC website which confirmed that the programme was being aired today at 7.15pm. So I linked to it.

At 7.15 there was no Karajan feature, no explanation, and no apology. Like so many things the BBC does today, totally hopeless.

In the old days at least we made our mistakes with style.
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If I had a hammer ...

Is there too much hammering of the BBC On An Overgrown Path?

A reader in an interesting position inside the walls doesn't seem to think so.

Neither do posters on the BBC Radio 3 messageboard.

Now find the hidden hammers here and here.
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The art of the animateur

I am a great fan of the late John Drummond, and have quoted him, here, many times. But, I blame Drummond for the present decline in presentation standards on BBC Radio 3. In 1987, when he became controller of the network, Drummond changed the role of the presentation team from 'neutral' announcers to presenters who, in his own words, could "communicate enthusiasm and knowledge".

Drummond's change was well intentioned, but terribly misguided. It has been responsible for a disastrous sequence of presenters from Paul 'music for lovers' Gambaccini in the 1990s to Petroc Trelawny and his colleagues today, whose idea of communicating enthusiasm and knowledge is to regurgitate half-digested chunks from a children's encyclopedia of music. The disease isn't just confined to the radio. BBC TV's Classical Star, which is fronted by Radio 3 presenters Charles Hazlewood and Chi-chi Nwanoku, has been described by an eminent musician as 'an obscene pantomime that plays games with the feelings of young, talented and vulnerable people'.

What John Drummond failed to see was that presenters who can communicate enthusiasm and knowledge for classical music without turning it into 'an obscene pantomine' can't be trained. They are born with the skill, and they are very few and far between. 'Presenter' is an inadequate and devalued word for describing such a rare person. Instead I suggest the French word 'animateur' - someone who really brings their subject to life.

Radio 3 should abandon its present crop of 'classical jocks'. It should return to an enthusiastic but neutral presentation style. It should learn from Radio 4, which has avoided the 'chummy' presenter trap, and by so doing has retained its integrity, and its audience. Radio 3 should allow the music to speak for itself. Which is something it has forgotten how to do. And it should search for a few great animateurs to bring classical music back to life, both on radio and television.


The BBC need look no further than their own archives to identify the DNA of a great animateur. David Munrow's Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years in the 1970s. Munrow (above) delivered enthusiasm and knowlege in huge quantities without compromising scholarship or integrity. Pied Piper brought early music to life for a generation, and I, and many others, are indebted to him for that. Munrow also branched out into television with his very successful Ancestral Voices programme, and he started to develop a career as a conductor. Munrow did so much as an animateur of classical music, and he promised so much more. Alas, he took his own life in 1976, aged just thirty-three.

Television was the medium of choice of another great animateur, André Previn, whose BBC TV programmes reached millions without sinking to the depths of Classical Star. The photo below shows Previn with Carlo Maria Giulini on the set of the television programme 'Who needs a conductor?' Previn also animated classical music in the States with his 'Previn and the Pittsburgh' TV series.


Leopold Stokowski pioneered the role of the animateur in the States, and he worked his magic in the days before television dictated the media agenda. Disney's full length 1940 feature film Fantasia brought classical music to life for millions, and is still regarded today as pivotal in introducing a new audience to serious music. Fantasia was Stokowski's brainchild, and he appeared on screen in a sequence which is seen being filmed in the photo below. (Picture credit Disney Productions).


When television replaced the movies as the entertainment medium of choice Leonard Bernstein took over from Stokowski' as animateur par excellence. Bernstein's famous Young Person's Concerts attracted huge television audiences for an extraordinarily wide range of repertoire, with his broadcast on Christmas Day 1967 reaching an astonishing twenty-seven million viewers.

I have in front of me the programme for the November 2 1963 telecast of a Young Person's Concert - Moussorgsky Prelude to "Khovantchina", Randall Thompson Scherzo from Symphony No. 2, Walter Piston Suite from "The Incredible Flautist", and Brahms Academic Festival Overture. Contrast that with this perceptive comment from fellow blogger Jessica Duchen about BBC TV's Classical Star - 'The most depressing thing about the programme is the way that the music itself is sidelined and chopped up. Evidently our friends at the Beeb don't think that viewers can cope with a whole movement of Mendelssohn.' My header photo shows Bernstein with members of the audience after a Young Person's Concert, and they don't seem at all phased by a whole movement of Randall Thompson. Lenny was a true animateur if ever there was one.

Glenn Gould was also both a great musician and a great animateur, and I have already written about his love affair with the microphone. His radio programme The Art of Glenn Gould ran for forty-eight weeks in the mid 1960s in Canada, and covered everything from the Moog synthesizer to Mozart, and in 1974 he produced a ten week series on Schoenberg. In the late 1960s he turned to television, starting with a series of four Conversations with Glenn Gould in a co-production with the BBC. His television work became as arcane as his radio documentaries, with the hour long The Well-Tempered Listener creating a complex visual montage of Bach's music. Gould's main succeses were in the technically more flexible medium of television. In 1970, in a neat tribute from one great animateur to another, Gould produced the acclaimed Stokowski: A Portrait for Radio. The photo below shows him at work in the recording studio.

Sadly one match of animateurs that seemed to be made in heaven didn't work out for Gould. In April 1962 he played the Brahms' D-minor concerto with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Conductor and soloist disagreed over Gould's spectacularly slow tempi, prompting Bernstein to deliver an apparently critical pre-performance talk. The two animateurs never performed together again, although this was due as much to Gould's self-imposed exile from the concert hall as to any long-term animosity between the two flamboyant musicians.


Last week I told the story of Radio 3 presenter Sarah Walker, who was caught out (in more ways than one I suspect) when a helpful CD player added a fifth movement to Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Ms. Walker's CV tells us that in 1995 she completed a PhD in English experimental music. That's the problem. She, and her fellow BBC presenters may have the right qualifications on paper. But, in practice, they fail dismally; both as neutral announcers in the manner of the great Cormac Rigby, and as animateurs in the manner of David Munrow. It's not me that's saying it. It is the audience statistics.

The composer Jonathan Harvey knows a thing or two about experimental English music. He has worked at IRCAM and written a study of the music of Stockhausen. His Mortuos plango, vivos voco for eight channel tape was created at IRCAM, and uses computers to manipulate the sound of the great bell at Winchester Cathedral. It is one of the masterpieces of electronic music, and in the notes for it the composer writes:

In entering the rather intimidating world of the machine I was determined not to produce a dehumanised work if I could help it, and so kept fairly closely to the world of the original sounds. The territory that the new computer technology opens up is unprecedently vast: one is humbly aware that it will only be conquered by the penetration of the human spirit, however beguiling the exhibits of technical wizardry; and that penetration will be neither rapid nor easy.

We're all trying to be too clever. We've forgotten the importance of the human spirit, except when we are trampling it underfoot on BBC TV's Classical Star. We've missed the point that digital technologies, new books, internet radio and blogs alone are never going to attract a new mass audience for classical music. But great animateurs can.

The good news is that the art of the animateur is not dead. The opening of this autumn's Lincoln Centre season in New York was transmitted live on network television. The TV presenter was that indominatable human spirit Itzhak Perlman (photo below, credit Allegro films), and his words about the telecast are a lesson for all of us.

"Television was how I came to the States (to appear on the Ed Sullivan show - Pliable) and I've always felt very comfortable doing it. Of course, there are battles. Television will always err on the side of making something not quite as classy as it could be. I try to put my foot down because people in the mass media often don't give audiences credit. To bring a large audience to a piece of serious music and make it accessible does not mean reducing it in any way. And I've learned that if something is good, even if it is a little difficult, people will get that it is good."

Writing in the Cambridge Review in October 1957 Peter Laslett, founder of the Open University, described the BBC Third Programme as "a sevice which is literally the envy of the world". Fifty years later the service is in danger of becoming the laughing stock of the world. It doesn't need rocket science, or expensive technology, to reverse the decline. It just needs John Drummonds ill-judged presentation changes to be reversed. And it needs the BBC to remember the words of that great animateur Itzhak Perlman - "If something is good, even if it is a little difficult, people will get that it is good."


Now read how John Drummond and Leonard Bernstein just didn't hit it off.
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How to make your mistakes with style

Yesterday's Mendelssohn problems on BBC Radio 3 chimed beautifully with the following story. It is told by the late and great Cormac Rigby, and is about Radio 3 presenter Tom Crowe, who made his many mistakes with great style.

The best of all Tom Crowe stories is that wonderful moment when, on a Morning Concert, somebody had mistimed the final record, which I think was the Hebrides overture, and it over-ran its slot, and they weren't fast enough to suppress the Greenwich Time Signal at nine o'clock. And so the closing bars of the music and the Time Signal coincided, and there was a sort of shocked silence from Tom, and then he came on the air and said: 'Radio 3. The time is nine o'clock, and I do hope that the Mendelssohn didn't interfere with your enjoyment of the pips.'

From a book with a title says it all, The Envy of the World, Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 (Phoenix ISBN 073802503) by another much lamented broadcaster Humphrey Carpenter. Quite appropriately the book is out of print.

My photo shows the Green Continuity Suite in Bush House where I made my mistakes in the early 1970s. You can see Leevers-Rich Mk2 tape machines with remote starts on the desk. More memories from then in The Year Is '72.
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BBC Radio 3 - a right Puck up

A dummies guide to bad radio presentation on BBC Radio 3 this morning. At 10.20am presenter Sarah Walker introduced Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony with a typically arch pseudo-musicological analysis. She then played the four movements of the symphony.

At the end of the final movement the Decca CD (466990 Maag, LSO) was left playing without interruption, and returned to the first track, the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. This was played all the way through, including several jumps in the CD tracking which went unnoticed.

The comedy ended with Sarah Walker back announcing the whole sequence, and disingenuously blaming the Puck up on "technical difficulties". Sarah, a bad workperson always blames their tools.

More BBC Radio 3 rude mechanicals here and here.
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The sound of silence

Tip to contemporary composers. If you want your music broadcast beware of the sound of silence. I've been running into problems with extended low level passages on my Future Radio programme. The culprit is the station's silence detector which monitors the studio output. If it senses silence the smart circuitry assumes there is a fault somewhere between studio and the transmitter/web stream, and reroutes the output to a secondary distribution circuit. This then drops the internet stream, and if the silence continues the whole process repeats itself in a loop. In a word - problems.

The silence detector is standard issue in the new breed of automated radio stations which operate with minimal staffing. While I was presenting my programme last week I was the only person in the studio complex, and the previous programme was pre-recorded and played by automation. And this kind of automation will become the norm as the long tail of radio grows longer.

The silence detector thresholds are variables set by the station staff. The team at Future Radio have tweaked the settings to a generous 30 second threshold. But even with this I was very surprised to find it kicking in last week in the not very silent Duruflé Requiem, despite judicous manual compression. The real problem is that the technology that runs these stations is specified for heavily compressed rock music, and contemporary music is way outside the standard deviations. I'm trying not to let this problem influence future programmes. But I have put Paul Hillier's new Stimmung on hold until I'm satisfied it won't be censored by the silence police.

Tomorrow's programme comprises forgotten cello concertos from the baroque composer Leonardo Leo and the late-romantic Gerald Finzi. The graphic plot of the two recordings (from BIS and Chandos respectively) shows very different energy levels. The Leo should be fine, but the Finzi, with its beautiful thirteen minute Andante quieto movement, is likely to cause problems. These will be compounded by the programme being pre-recorded, as I will be listening to some reassuringly quiet live music at Snape while the programme is on-air. The Snape concert has Masaaki Suzuki conducting the Academy of Ancient Music in Handel and Bach (Lauchzet Gott in allen Landen). Thank heavens that the Maltings doesn't have a silence detector.

So apologies if the audio stream plays up on tomorrow's Overgrown Path radio programme. And if you are a contemporary composer, not too much Andante quieto please. Or, perhaps, you should just follow a very good example, and ignore the dictats of technology.

* Listen to the Finzi and Leo cello concertos, uninterrupted I hope, via the audio stream here on Sunday Oct 28 at 5.00pm UK time. Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM.

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Give me digital - but not BBC Radio 3

Technology is changing the way we listen to radio, but classical network BBC Radio 3 is struggling in the brave new digital world. 15% of all radio listening in the UK is now via a digital platform according to research for the quarter ending September 2007 released yesterday by RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Limited). The data also shows that digital listening showed a big increase over the previous quarter, and that 1.6% of all radio listening is now via the internet.

The number of adults who claim to have listened to the radio via a mobile phone also showed a marked increase, up to 9.2% in the last quarter. Unsurprisingly radio listening via mobile phone was most common in the younger age groups, with 23% of 15 to 24 year olds listening this way. 2.8 million adults used their mp3 player to listen to radio podcasts in the last quarter, up from 1.97 million in Q3 2006. Listening to digital only services (radio stations which are only available on a digital platform) also increased, up from 4.8 million listeners in Q3, 2006 to 6.2 million in Q3, 2007.

Analysis of radio audiences showed that both BBC Radio 3 and the commercial station Classic FM gained audience in the quarter ended September 2007, up to 1.938m and 5.844m respectively. But these figures are not as good news as they may seem at first glance. This quarter is historically strong for classical listening, with Radio 3 reaching an audience of 2.214m in the same quarter in 2003. The quarter ending September covers the BBC Proms season when the network benefits from huge amounts of free promotion, with virtually every programme in the schedules devoted to plugging the Proms. Charging the monetary value of that on-air advertising back to the Radio 3 cost centre using John Birt's 'internal market' formula would be a very interesting exercise.

Despite the massive 'Proms effect' Radio 3 only increased listener share from 1.10% to 1.20% from Q2 to Q3, whereas Classic FM, without the cross-benefit of the 'world's biggest music festival', increased listening share from 4.00% to 4.30%. The classical audience are not particularly heavy listeners either. Average hours per listener of 6.30 for Radio 3 and 7.30 for Classic FM compared with 10.20 for the the BBC's rock network Radio 1, and 12.30 hours for the talk based Radio 4.

Surprisingly the average hours per listener for Radio 3 did not increase in the last quarter despite the 'Proms effect', and actually showed a significant drop from 6.90 hours in the same quarter the previous year. Sadly this data simply confirms what has already been said here; the Radio 3 schedule changes are missing both the popular and serious music audiences, and the network is increasingly vulnerable to the long tail of internet radio and applications like the Radeo internet player.

RAJAR website is here, and the data tables are here.
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Building communities of new listeners

Email received from the developers of the Radeo internet player (above) in response to my post The day the music died:

Thanks Bob! A large part of our motivation to create Radeo comes from the belief that there a many important and significant audiences that are not being served by traditional radio. Terrestrial radio, due to costs and the requirement of geographic audience density, are economically driven to serve the mass market. But there are large audiences, geographically dispersed, that are looking for "more". Perhaps more focused on a style of music, perhaps more musically challenging pieces -- the personal motivations will vary.

We hope that Radeo can play a role in aiding the individual find and listen to radio that is meaningful to him/her. We also believe that a part of the historical success of conventional radio is that it gives shape and definition to "communities" of listeners -- that the radio listening experience, while an individual experience, is also an important link for listeners to a larger group that they identify with. Radio, in a very real sense, has always been a key component of social networks.

We hope that Radeo can help create and support new forms of communities or social networks around radio/audio content. Personally, we're not into the social networking in the style of MySpace with its millions of personal pages and probably 100's of millions of uninteresting stream-of-consciousness messages.

We value that which has historically always been of value -- quality content, matched to (and shaping) personal interests via thoughtful and informed "programmers". While Radeo will not get into the "programming" of specific content inside a stream, we are exploring ways that we might add more capabilities for "meta programming" that link/gather/repackage streams to help listeners find stations and listener communities that enhance their listening experience.

Best regards, Paul Cosway



Now click on the image above and listen to Bayern 4 and other fine classical stations while you read about those moments that are rare in radio.
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Secret symphonies on internet radio

My Overgrown Path radio programme on Future Radio on Sunday Oct 14 at 5.00pm UK time features two secret symphonies which are rarely heard either in the concert hall or in broadcasts. Fashion is as important as merit in contemporary music today. Which probably explains why the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich and Henryk Górecki are heard so often, and why those of Malcolm Arnold and Paul Creston languish in obscurity.

Sir Malcolm Arnold (above) is, by far, the better known of the two composers. His film music, English Dances, and Guitar Concerto have already featured on my radio programme. But his gritty and uncompromising symphonies stay resolutely out of fashion, and out of performance, despite their considerable merit.

Arnold’s Eighth Symphony dates from 1978 when it was written to a commission from an American Foundation, and was given its first performance in the States by the Albany Symphony Orchestra. The critic John Amis described the symphony as the composer’s masterpiece. The three movements are pure Arnold with an Irish marching tune in the first, an elegiac slow movement, and an ambiguous finale.

The neglect of Arnold's symphonies is underlined by the fact that the 1991 world premiere recording of Malcolm Arnold’s Eighth Symphony is no longer available. But I will be playing it on Sunday, with that great champion of British music Vernon Handley conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.


After Britain’s Malcolm Arnold I am presenting music by America’s Paul Creston (above). Born in New York City in 1906, Creston was the son of a Sicilian house-painter. His musical abilities emerged at a young age, and he studied with the composer Henry Cowell, and received two Guggenheim Scholarships.

In the 1950s and early 1960s Paul Creston’s music was widely performed in America, and he achieved considerable success composing for television. But in the late 60s both the style of Creston’s music, and his right-wing political beliefs fell out of favour, and his compositions are rarely heard today.

I am trying to rectify that by webcasting his Second Symphony which dates from 1944. This is a work of considerable merit. In fact Grammy winning conductor John McLaughlin Williams has gone on record as describing this as the greatest ever American symphony.

That is considerable praise, and you can judge for yourself when I play a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine conducted by Theodor Kuchar. Paul Creston’s Second Symphony has two movements, the first is titled Introduction and Song, the second Interlude and Dance.

Click on the image below to listen to the secret symphonies in real time at 5.00pm UK time on Sunday Oct 14.



Listen to the Future Radio audio stream here. Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The Pilgrim's Progress on internet radio

My two photos were taken at the sessions in November 1970 and January 1971 for Sir Adrian Boult's classic EMI recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams morality The Pilgrims Progress, which is based on John Bunyan's allegory of the same name. The recording was made in the Kingsway Hall, and Sir Adrian can be seen conducting the soloists, and London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir above.

The lower photo was taken in the control room during a playback, and shows from left to right, Ursula Vaughan Williams, Christopher Bishop (producer), Sir Adrian Boult, John Noble (The Pilgrim), Ian Partridge, Gloria Jennings, Christopher Parker (balance engineer), in front John Alldis (chorus master) and Sheila Armstrong. Photo credits Godfrey McDominic/EMI.


The theme of my Overgrown Path radio programme at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday (Oct 7) will be Pilgrims of the Soul, and I will be playing the Prologue and Act 1 of this recording of The Pilgrim's Progress in the second part of the programme. (Which means two Pliable will be taking part, with the singing role taken by the tenor Wynford Evans). Act 1 contains several of the themes that Vaughan Williams used in his Fifth Symphony, including the Romanza that begins the symphony's lyrical slow movement.

Preceeding The Pilgrim's Progress will be a sequence from the concert of medieval and traditional pilgrim songs by Sarband and the Osnabrück Youth Choir that I featured here recently. This should be a fascinating programme. The music I'll be playing is below. More details at the foot of the post, or listen in real-time only by clicking on this image:



From Pilgrims of the Soul - Jaro 4248-2

Dum pater familias Codex Calixtinus
Laudemus virginem Llibre Vermell de Montserrat
Salve virgo regia (instrumental) Codex Ripoll (Paris, BN lat. 5312)
Splendens ceptigera Llibre Vernell

Ya rai'i z-ziba Traditional: Al-Andalus
Salve Regina Codex Las Huelgas

Nani nani Traditional Sephardic
O successores fortissimi leonis Hildegard von Bingen - 21' 55"

From The Pilgrim's Progress by Ralph Vaughan Williams - EMI CMS 7642122

Prologue
Act 1 - Scene 1: The Pilgrim Meets Evangelist
Scene 2 - The House Beautiful - 26' 44"

More on The Pilgrim's Progress here.
Listen to the Future Radio audio stream here. Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The day the music died

For four weeks in France my appetite for music was met by France Musique, a wide ranging selection of CDs and books (see above), and much fine live music.

When I drove off the cross-channel ferry last Monday I retuned the car radio to BBC Radio 3. Within an hour the presenter had plugged the BBC's New Generation Artist Scheme so many times that I concluded she was earning a bonus for every mention. Between the plugs there was much other useful information, such as "the violinist was born in 1983, which means she is now 24". And later in the afternoon Sean Rafferty fawned over every act a desperate record company or concert agent sent along to the In Tune studio.

The next day the morning presenter helpfully explained to me why I should appreciate Jordi Savall's Bach, while in the evening classical-jock of the week Tom Service started the network's birthday tribute to Sir Colin Davis by leaving studio guest Mitsuko Uchida's microphone closed for the first thirty seconds of her contribution. Then, yesterday, a tribute to record label Lyrita, which promised so much, sounded like a promotional video for a bio-tech company. It came complete with customer endorsements delivered over Stanford's Second Piano Concerto, a work which sounds like film music even when it is not being used as the background for a voice-over.

The patronising presenters could be ignored if they were introducing great radio. But, today's ratings driven Radio 3 has come up with its own inversion of Lord Reith's vision for the BBC, and the network's programmes now, invariably, offer the public 'something worse than it ever thought it wanted'.

This kind of post doesn't make happy reading, or happy writing. But there will not be many more like it, which will please my regular readers at webgw2.thls.bbc.co.uk (British Broadcasting Corporation). After 40 years of almost daily listening I have decided that BBC Radio 3 will no longer be my default radio station. Instead, my default will be Radio 4 and the long tail of internet stations, supplemented by CDs and some much needed silence. Radio 3 will now be a 'destination station', only listened to for worthwhile concerts and programmes such as Iain Burnside's and Michael Berkeley's. Iain's programme today, with his guest, A. C. Grayling, and the Elisabeth Lutyens motet, was an oasis in a desert of mediocrity.

Coincidentally, today is the 40th anniversary of the first day's broadcasting on BBC Radio 3. But for this listener it is the day the music died. There are now much better alternatives. Access one of them by clicking on the image below to to launch the Radeo internet player, and listen to Polski Radio Dwojka.



Now read more about the future of radio.
For the lyrics of American Pie follow this link. Photo taken by me at Le Romarin, Les Gargoris, France, copyright On An Overgrown Path. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Ingratiating schmaltzy and patronising

Tomorrow night West End star Michael Ball sings an evening of show tunes at the BBC Proms. Outgoing Proms director Nicholas Kenyon justified his appearance with these words: 'I think he is one of the great, intelligent singing artists alive today. He deserves a place at the Proms just as much as performers in the great classical tradition. Our job is to cover the whole waterfront.'

Which resonates with a story from 1995, when Nicholas Kenyon was controller of BBC Radio 3. Here is the story from the late Humphrey Carpenter's excellent official history of the network. And the words in the headline are not mine, they come from that very same official history.

Radio 3's new 9-10 am programme would be called Morning Collection, and would be presented by Paul Gambaccini [photo above], the transatlantic-born disc jockey whose 'music for lovers' programme on Classic FM had been a target of some mockery in the statuion's early days ... He would now join Radio 3.

Kenyon emphasised that Gambaccini had worked for BBC Radio 'long before Classic FM was in rompers', and was chosen because 'his connection with film and pop music makes him unintimidating to people who want to try classical music but are unsure about it'. A BBC publicity handout headed From Puccini to Gambaccini stated that Gambaccini's programme would consist of 'classical greats ... from Brahms to Britten, from Strauss to Stravinsky ... Paul brings his relaxed but knowledgeable style to programmes full of complete works by all the major composes ... Morning Collection takes you on a stimulating journey through 500 years of the classics.'

The music critic [and composer] Bayan Northcott noted that Gambaccini's presentation style on Classic FM was characterised by 'refraining from any information commentary or judgement of the slightest musical interest whatever'. After Morning Collection had begun on Radio 3, listeners' reactions to it were aired on Radio 4's Feedback. 'The outrage was instant,' reported the Daily Telegraph.

Comments on [Gambaccini's] velvet voice and sugary commentary ... ranged from 'unctuous', 'totally inane', 'ingratiating', 'schmaltzy', to 'egregious and patronising'. One listener complained that he sounds as if he's selling raspberry ripple'. Another said listening to him was like wallowing in warm blancmange' ...

Kenyon appeared on Feedback and described Gambaccini as 'a knowlegeable and informed presenter of classical music'. He admitted that the programme was 'a big change of culture and it's meant to be, because we're trying to open up a potential new audience to classical music'.

Paul Gambaccini's place on Radio 3 did not last long. In May 1996, after sustained attacks from listeners and critics, he announced that he would not continue to present Morning Collection when his contract expired later in the year. Kenyon said that the programme's format had been welcomed by listeners but its presentation had been criticised strongly.

Bayan Northcott is a respected contemporary composer as well as music critic. Hear his Salve Regina on my Overgrown Path radio programme on September 16 at 5.00pm British Summer Time on Future Radio.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk