Daily Blague

As long-time readers know, I spent most of my twenties working in classical FM radio, principally as a music director. I selected the music that was played from late morning until midnight. I did so, ideally, sufficiently in advance to allow offset-printed program guides to be produced and mailed to subscribers. But that is another story.

My database was a set of long trays of 3 x 5 inch cards. Each card listed a composition. The cards were arranged by composer, and the composers were arranged by birth date, so that early music was on my left, modern music on my right, and the music that most people want to hear was in the middle. I would pull the cards one by one to build up hours. In those days, federal regulation required station identification on the hour, so the hour was the basic programming unit. Because KLEF was a commercial station, I aimed to program hours of four or five pieces (to allow for breaks) with a play-length of fifty minutes. Staff announcers filled in any remaining air space ad libitum.

Programming music - laying out a sequence of compositions - is an art form in the sense that the Japanese tea ceremony is an art form. It is not so much creative as responsive. To follow a Rossini overture with a Schubert impromptu is to remind the alert listener that the relatively unknown Schubert imitated the wildly popular Rossini on several occasions, and might even be said to have shared something of the Italian composer's sense of humor. Or it might mean nothing; it might simply be pleasant. As a rule, clashes are to be avoided. One doesn't progress from early Mozart to later Ives, because the juxtaposition would be unflattering to both. Schumann followed by Brahms is always satisfying - and there's a danger of overdoing it. Scarlatti followed by Chopin can be clarifying, if you've chosen the right Scarlatti; Chopin assigned Scarlatti to his piano students. The more you listen, the more the connections proliferate.

After six years of programming music for a living, law school looked like a good thing. But I did not put programming behind me. Now I do it just for myself, on a facility that I call "Radio RJ." No broadcasting is involved, but I can be certain that, when I tune in, I won't hear anything that I don't like. Drawing on my sizeable CD library, I have filled over a hundred blank CDs with an ongoing sequence of symphonies, quartets, masses, nocturnes, concertos and even some overtures. I have almost three hundred more to burn, before filling my Sony carrousel to capacity.

Why go to all this trouble? Because it deals with the problem of choice so well. Without having anything particular in mind, I want to hear music. But what? There's so much to choose from! And if I want to hear one Mozart piano concerto, that doesn't mean that I want to hear the other one that's on the same CD. Radio RJ is, for me, a glorious filter. I would say that I've played through the existing circuit twenty-five times in the two years since I last worked on it. (Radio RJ is on only when RJ is actually listening to it.) It will also be, when it's complete, a pretty good record of my musical taste, something that I think would be very hard to infer from my collection itself.

Why did I stop two years ago? It's a long story, one that involves an incompletely backed-up database - an electronic one, this time; an Access file. As my last desktop computer lay dying of spy ware and other intrusions, I madly copied files onto discs. But something miscarried when it came to the Access databases, and in my confusion I didn't realize this until the hard drive had been wiped clean. (Even that didn't save the machine.) The result was that I lost the listings for CDs 70 through 101. Providentially, I had printed complete reports, not only of the sequence itself but of the works listed by composer - an important resource that provides a quick overview for planning new discs. (It tells me - to give a simple example - that Schumann's Piano Concerto appeared five discs ago, so don't burn it onto this one.) So all was not lost.

But, still. The idea of typing in thirty CD's worth of selections killed my appetite. There was also my own little Y2K problem. Unintelligently, I had started the database by listing tracks in four digits: cd/cd.tr/tr. Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 2, for example, starts at 77.02, while the next work, Telemann's Concerto for Trumpet and Oboes (also a chamber work, despite its title) begins at 77.06. (The Brahms is four movements - four tracks - in length.) The number is obviously vital to the undertaking; it's what tells the computer (and me) that the Telemann follows the Brahms instead of preceding it. Just as obviously, when I reached the centennial disc and ran into three digits, I had a problem. Very laboriously, I fixed the problem, prefixing each track listening with a "0." That labor was lost along with the listing of thirty CDs. This will give a better idea of why I just made do with what I'd already recorded by the fall of 2003. Did I mention that I was also chronically ill at the time?

It's only very lately, with my enormously amplified commitment to this site, that I've found the time and energy to forge onward. Because I'm out of practice, I resorted to the expedient of starting out from CD 201, instead of trying to follow the sequence at CD 101. (I'll worry about that later.) So far, I've completed five discs, and the database itself has been completely updated as to track listings, while one third of the missing CDs have been typed from the printouts into the computer. Pretty soon, it'll be good as new.