Tag Archives: The College of New Jersey

music stave

The Organ Transplant That Never Happened

So what is a lifelong lover of music to do to proselytize for their passion?

Sometimes having a passion for something is not enough to win over others. I was reminded of this when a friend and fellow music lover recently sent along a link describing a Japanese Kissa, which is a bar serving coffee or drinks where the  main attraction is a first-class audio system playing jazz or classical music. The recordings are usually from a library curated by the owner. And the vibe is to focus on listening rather than socializing.

The idea is wonderful, and reminded me that my first year at Colorado State University where a room in the student center room was set up with the same goal. The space had comfortable couches, a reasonably good stereo system, acoustical separation from the rest of the building, and a free jukebox selector from which anyone could select a range of mostly classical recordings. The point was to quietly listen and read in a space much nicer than any dorm space. Granted, a visitor tended to hear Beethoven’s Fifth too many times; it was the only classical music some students recognized. But for some of us the atmosphere beat the beer halls on College Avenue that we visited too often.

    Listening Room at the University of the South

So what is a lifelong musicophile to do to proselytize to others for this kind of space? Since I became a friend of the Chairperson of the Music Department at my campus, it was only a matter of time until I was advocating for the same kind of room in a new addition to our own student center. I correctly sensed that I needed a professional ally with the credentials to make the pitch. My busy and productive colleague seemed to be the perfect ally. But this lover of opera and musicals was not interested, and began to avoid me. (To be fair, faculty in the performing arts get lots of off-the wall requests.) I also had no other easy pathway to influence campus building plans: a fact that is usually true for the faculty that will have to spend time dealing with the results. A humanities professor trying to persuade a college architect is a David and Goliath kind of thing. I should have enlisted a phalanx of performance majors to make some noise. In the end I never got close to getting our own version of a Kissa. Other campuses have probably been luckier.

I also made a second unsuccessful campaign that also fizzled, but had the right language.  Put simply, I thought we should push for an organ transplant. Many campuses are fortunate to have one of the most complex but also rewarding musical instruments within their performance spaces. The King of Instruments is enormously complex and expensive to maintain. Most contain several thousand parts. Their compensation is that an organ may be the ultimate tools for creating acoustic music. As it happens, many strapped churches are willing to give up their instruments in favor of synths and 50-dollar guitars. There is even a clearing house listing organs ready to be donated and hauled away.

The pipe organ is forever tied to church music and musty hymns. But pipe organs in the hands of a master are awesome. There is even a tradition in English and a few American universities to recruit “organ scholars,” some destined to be future choir directors. In addition, exotic pipe organs in concert spaces are now often considered essential. The repertoire is vast, and can include music such as the score from Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar (2014), which was mostly created by Hans Zimmer on an pipe organ in London. The music soars, with segments of it going viral on  YouTube and TikTok. British organist Anna Lapwood even has groupies growing out of collaborations with Zimmer and Banobo. 

Could I again enlist my wary music colleagues to the cause of an organ transplant for our new concert hall? I naively thought so. The wonderful circular 320-seat space in the Mayo Concert Hall at TCNJ would be perfect for a smaller baroque organ. It could be an acoustical asset set in the gallery at the rear and above the stage. Chamber groups often perform Bach or Handel on these instruments. We just needed to tap into the database of abandoned instruments to find the right one. I envisioned being part of a committee to help arrange a transfer and find the donors needed to pay for installing it.

You probably know where this is going. I was greeted with more stares by the busy music faculty, as if I had just proposed a ukulele major. They were also investing their energies in securing several new concert grand pianos. Those were expensive enough, and a sign the faculty might lock the doors if I showed up again in the Music Building conference room.

I had probably seen too many Andy Hardy movies (“I have an Idea! Let’s put on a show!”).  It was too much to believe I had a chance at saving some unloved instrument rotting away in a church. Then again, I taught Theories of Persuasion to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students over 47 years. Didn’t I have the power to make it happen? But professors often make the mistake of taking their subjects seriously.  And, at best, my attempts were half-hearted.

There’s a lesson in this. We often think it is enough to say what we want, as if our ideas were nuggets of gold free for the taking. But that is a fatal overestimation. What we count as our special insight may be dismissed by others as completely hairbrained. Persuasion benefits from having a target who is already halfway there. Then, the goal is to activate what may be latent but pre-existing interest. I just needed to take the time to find those folks.

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The Changed Media Landscape for Public Radio

Was I wrong in 2016? What does it mean when virtually every American in the country can listen to any radio station, music streaming or podcast service anywhere at any time?

A forum of public radio executives on The College of New Jersey campus in December of 2016 made it apparent that the medium was generally holding its own. Panelists included the Chairperson of the Board of NPR and news executives from WNYC in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia. Then, audience sizes were larger, contributions from sustaining members were up, and many stations were benefiting from powerful streaming technologies. True, there were hints that storm clouds. The broadcast medium that was at the very center of the American experience during and after World War II was beginning to see more restless audiences and enterprising operators who delivered content digitally, without the need for a broadcast license. We now take for granted that Alexa and Spotify will deliver more customized content at any time, with far less effort from us. In 2016 I didn’t appreciate how this storm might arrive. A post I wrote that year optimistically declared that “Public Radio Thrives.” But even then, WNYC’s Dean Cappello nailed what was changing in this new era of media abundance: “The audience is in charge now.”

Our forum centered National Public Radio, with an astounding 1000 affiliates in every corner of the country. Most nations have somewhat similar non-commercial radio networks, including France 24, Germany’s Deutsche Welle and Britain’s multi-channel BBC. They usually adhere to the broad mainstream of their own societies, usually with a slight tilt toward a more progressive view of politics and human affairs. But all must now contend with other audio sources who can gain access to listeners simply by having a studio and an internet address.

BBC

Add into this vastly enlarged field the fact that “legacy” print and “broadcast” media are in the fifth decade of a disordered contraction. In the U.S. newspapers have declined to the point of disappearing in many cities. Traditional Network television news from ABC, NBC and CBS no longer dominates as they once did. Formerly influential magazines like Time and The Atlantic see their futures mostly in non-print digital forms, while most still covering the national scene, like Slate and The Daily Beast, are struggling to pay their reduced staffs through total or partial paywalls. In terms of access, it is the best of times for a person ready to try their hand in digital journalism. But in terms of making a comfortable and secure living at it, it may be the worst of times.

NPR News logo

Against this background, in some ways NPR looks less robust than it did a half decade ago. It has been under pressure to diversify its staff and audience. And, indeed, there is a greater variety of voices on its air. But as the trade magazine Current noted, “NPR’s newsroom is more diverse than its listener base.” Those listening at least once a week have dropped from 60 million in 2020 to 42 million today. In March, the network laid off close to 10 percent of their staff in an attempt to close a $30 million budget gap.  And recent internal data made available to the New York Times showed that NPR’s audience was 76 percent white, 11.9 percent Latinx, 9.2 percent Black and 5.1 percent Asian.

To be sure, attracting younger and non-white listeners has always been a challenge. It is apparent that social media have swallowed up the attention of younger Americans, mostly for the worse, since much of it’s content is light years away from the public service perspective that has defined public radio.

Even the idea of a radio network has changed. Formerly, a listener that wanted to listen to landmark content like All Things Considered, Fresh Air or Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me needed to tune in to a local station. Now, all of those programs are available as podcasts, frustrating affiliates who traditionally raised money from listeners to those network shows.

If these challenges of streaming, podcasting and America’s declining appetite for straight news were not enough, grumbles about salary discrepancies between the old guard and newer staffers have added tensions. Cultural nerve endings rising from increased awareness of past injustices against women and racial groups, altering what a media organization can program without triggering a backlash. In January of 2021 three high profile hosts and women of color–Noel King, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and Audie Cornish–all left the network, with organizational tensions and unequal pay as reasons. And last month a senior producer made complaints about a “liberal bias” that were picked up by the growing numbers of journalists who follow the media exclusively.

Understandably, in media circles declines in audience numbers are always taken as a bad sign. And yet it is trend not just for NPR, but radio in general, and for theatrical films and publishing as well. The days of legacy sources like city newspapers, national magazines, and massive television audiences are perhaps gone for good. While there are still big media “players,” a period when any single source can function as a big tent matching the reach of, say, CBS News in the 1960s and 70s, seems gone as well. Back then, a program like the CBS Evening News could attract a huge 27 million households. The nation came together for this and the other legacy network programs. But that does not happen any more. We don’t have “mass media” in the ways we used to. And no doubt that will include NPR, which will have to build its audiences from a more fragmented pool of Americans.

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