Thursday, September 25, 2003
WFMU DJ Fabio Roberti called today to ask me to do a fill-in (Thurs. Oct. 16, noon-three). Seeing I wasn't on the new schedule, he also asked if I'd signed up for a shift. I said I have a lot of classical music to listen to & I intend to spend my music hours for the next few months listening to it. Seems that everytime the Program Slot Preferences Forms are due, I'm having a crisis of one sort or another Perhaps I unconsciously time these problems to coincide with shift changes. Only the overnight 2-6am slots interest me now. But whenever I do a fill-in, I'm reminded of how much a regular show interferes with how I enjoy listening to music now, & how it changed those listening routines for 18 years. So much music gathered dust on my record shelves as vinyl was replaced by compact discs. Up until 1981, I'd been methodically exploring classical & jazz. But when one is responsible for a weekly free form program, one is always looking to the next show, trying to find offbeat recordings to feed into the DJ machine, wading through hundreds of new CDs of every imaginable kind of music every week, dozens of them worthy of airplay, many with cuts just too long to consider playing. I always resisted the impulse to narrow my tastes, which usually results in a more reliable radio audience & a lot less auditioning.
It took nearly two years, from 1999 into 2001, for me to relax back into sane listening patterns. After all, I could listen to entire Mahler symphonies & complete jazz albums. I could move into genres that are more or less discouraged at WFMU; opera, religious choral works, complete concerti, chamber music, lieder. I no longer had to concern myself with searching out amusing or strange novelties at flea markets - records that make up a significant portion of my home library. I didn't have to scramble for anecdotes. I do not often create free form sets at home. Just as it was liberating to do free form radio, to create sets that flowed one way or another partly by design & partly by improvisation, so it's been equally liberating after all those years not to do free form radio.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
It took nearly two years, from 1999 into 2001, for me to relax back into sane listening patterns. After all, I could listen to entire Mahler symphonies & complete jazz albums. I could move into genres that are more or less discouraged at WFMU; opera, religious choral works, complete concerti, chamber music, lieder. I no longer had to concern myself with searching out amusing or strange novelties at flea markets - records that make up a significant portion of my home library. I didn't have to scramble for anecdotes. I do not often create free form sets at home. Just as it was liberating to do free form radio, to create sets that flowed one way or another partly by design & partly by improvisation, so it's been equally liberating after all those years not to do free form radio.
