KING (FM)

[Laurence Glavin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Strassberg" 
To: "Laurence Glavin" , "Boston Radio Interest" 
Subject: KING (FM)
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 08:12:04 -0400


>Mr Gavin,

Gavin went out of business.


> in many hours of listening to KING, I didn't notice much
>difference between it and WCRB (FM). I heard NO vocal selections on KING. I
>DID notice one complete symphony (Schubert's second). The music on KING was
>very pleasant, but then, so is the music on WCRB.

>--
>Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg@att.net
>Fax 707-215-6367

Well, you're in no position to perform an INTELLIGENT overview of KING's 
playlist, so I did it for you and in a single week of programming
(Monday August 8th thru yesterday, the 13th, KING-FM's superiority 
over the current WCRB is abundantly manifest.  First, as to vocal 
music, KING broadcast a complete opera Saturday night (in season it 
picks up The Met) and therefore gets an oak leaf cluster with
brass figligee for that alone.  But also Aug 10th, they aired Berlioz'
"Te Deum" a choral piece, and on August 11th, Carl Orff's "Carmina
Burana", which if you're not familiar with it, is an enormously
popular vocal-choral piece that's a bedrock work of the 20th Century
(critics of Orff for his "ties" to the Nazi Party to the contrary
notwithstanding) and not avant-garde in any sense. (It's been 
used in TV commercials ever since it entered the public domain, and
part of it is used in Sean Hannity's radio show opening.)  But to
give a further overview of the nature and variety of KING's schedule,
here by date, are a few highlights of pieces WCRB hasn't aired outside
of Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcasts since Mario Mazza arrived:

8/7: pieces by Bartok, Khachaturian, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (aka
the American Chopin...maybe this was the pleasant music you heard),
Roy Harris, and some Sibelius other than "Finlandia".
8/8: pieces by Shostakovich,  de Falla (so mainstream his
portrait appears on Spain's currency), Howard Hanson,
Nielsen (there is no composer named Arbitron), and Villa Lobos.
A nice touch...rather than over play Debussy's piano piece 
"Clair de lune"  KING played the entire "Suite Bergamasque" of
which it is a part...WGBH does that often.
8/9: pieces by Samual Barber (not the "Adagio for Strings"),
Benjamin Britten, Ernst von Dohnanyi, Kodaly, 
Somerville, Mass.-born Alan Hovhaness (his breathtakingly
beautiful  "Magic Mountain Symphony), oh and Roy Harris again
(during this span, KING didn't play enough Copland IMO).
8/10: this date's playlist included a work by a living
American composer, John Calvin Adams, a piece by Ernest Chausson
and a complete concerto by Glazounov, who is usually represented
on WCRB by excerpts from his ballets).
8/11: this was a Saturday, so there was the aforementioned 
opera and get this:  a piece by that ultra-extreme bete noir
of 20th-Century composition Anton Webern!  Yikes,
Calm down..like Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night" and
Berg's Violon Concerto, it was an accessible mainstream 
early piece call "The Summer Wind"  (hey didn't the old
WJIB-FM play that all the time? Wrong "Summer Wind")
8:/13  a Sunday, lots of really core pieces but played in full
including a Beethoven String Quartet from his late period 
(no not after he died).  
 This was a sampling of the fare in a seven-day period that 
included many more mainstream 20th-Century compositions,
and if I did it again this week, a few missing figures like 
Stravinsky, Hindemith, William
Walton, William Schuman (no relation to German composer
Robert Schumann) and the more significant pieces by Copland 
would appear.  Dan, stick to what you know....technical radio stuff..
in this arena, you're the proverbial ghoti out of H2O.





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