Essential Classics - The Continuing Debate

[salymap]

and bring back the rucksack !!

Caliban, you don't cycle through London wearing headphones do you? Wow!

[Nick Armstrong]

Caliban, you don't cycle through London wearing headphones do you? Wow!

I do, yes saly - have done for 10 - 12 years. I'm lucky most of the journey is through parks, but even when in traffic I listen though not at a level which prevents me hearing. In fact near buses for instance I can't hear the music often, they're not wrap around headphones, just the little foam ones that came with the phone.

[Panjandrum]

You'd be surprised how well a decent pair of headphones actually filter out extraneous ambient noise (e.g. wind, abuse from passing motorists) while allowing one to hear important sounds such as the approach of an internal combustion engine, while still being able to enjoy a symphony orchestra in full cry
. Provided one maintains a constant line in traffic, and makes eye contact with other road users, one really has little to worry one on a bike.

[french frank]

Joking apart it seems to be no coincidence that this has occurred after the end of classical music on Radio 2 .

It seems to be not so much R2 listeners being tempted over to R3 as being forced over, faute de mieux.

The tale they tell that they want Radio 3's 'intelligent, thought-provoking' programmes to be shared with a wider audience is clearly balderdash. If that were the case, there would be no need to remove the Radio 3 programmes first and replace them with special programmes for new listeners. That's not sharing the programmes with listeners, it's depriving listeners.

And look at R3's so-called 'specialist' programmes: much as The Early Music Show has its devotees and is indeed among the best R3 offers at present, I personally preferred Spirit of the Age and Music Restored, the immediate predecessors. I preferred Paul Guinery's Choirworks to Aled Jones and The Choir. Discovering Music was thoroughly mucked up when it became Charles Hazlewood Discovering Music. Look what's happened to the specialist jazz programming: slightly depleted and most of it up in the graveyard slots.

I think the popularisation probably started with the assault on the specialist programmes. The latest changes are the culmination: it's exactly what RadioCentre accuses the BBC of: ratings by day, reputation by night - certainly the case during the week.

[Nick Armstrong]

You'd be surprised how well a decent pair of headphones actually filter out extraneous ambient noise (e.g. wind, abuse from passing motorists) while allowing one to hear important sounds such as the approach of an internal combustion engine, while still being able to enjoy a symphony orchestra in full cry
. Provided one maintains a constant line in traffic, and makes eye contact with other road users, one really has little to worry one on a bike.

Yes Pan, I think you're right. I tend to ride on the basis that everyone out there, at the wheel or on foot (or on other cycles - often the most dangerous of all) actively wants to kill me - so I try and ride in a way which makes sure that at all stages I am out of reach of the most homicidal thing they could possibly do. Turning right, I tend to indicate using a pointed finger directed accusatorily at whoever happens to be in my eye line. The subtitle would (I hope) be "Don't you flaming dare!"....

Fingers crossed.... Here I go again

[french frank]

Fingers crossed.... Here I go again

You mean you're actually on your bike now, while you're posting messages? :-O

[Nick Armstrong]

No, trying to close the computer to set out !!!!!

[Don Petter]

I tend to ride on the basis that everyone out there, at the wheel or on foot (or on other cycles - often the most dangerous of all) actively wants to kill me

"All the infections that the sun sucks up", as you have so aptly put it?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

ff

Look what's happened to the specialist jazz programming: slightly depleted and most of it up in the graveyard slots.

excuse me ma'am but i beg to differ, R3 jazz programmes have been seriously depleted if you take the demise of Jazz Legends and the excellent Jazz File into account .... these were programmes, like Jazz Library [budget cut] where knowledge and thought were not merely evident but deployed to effect .... now we have Requests, celebrity columnist style presentations and good ol' fashioned record pushing as our main fare ... jazz broadcasting has been eviscerated on R3 ....why? because he can get away with it

[french frank]

ff

excuse me ma'am but i beg to differ, R3 jazz programmes have been seriously depleted if you take the demise of Jazz Legends and the excellent Jazz File into account .... these were programmes, like Jazz Library [budget cut] where knowledge and thought were not merely evident but deployed to effect .... now we have Requests, celebrity columnist style presentations and good ol' fashioned record pushing as our main fare ... jazz broadcasting has been eviscerated on R3 ....why? because he can get away with it

I won't disagree with you, Mr Jazbo. Though Jazz Legends was replaced by Jazz Library (a bit of a gain? ), and the 30 minutes of Jazz File was replaced by a 30-minute extension to Jazz Line-Up. The loss of the Jazz Library repeat and cut in its new programmes has, I think, been countered by an extra 15 minutes somewhere?

But I'm very willing to concede that jazz has been given an unacceptable knock, starting back in 2007. I agree with RadioCentre that the programmes that are seen as 'distinctive' and specialist should be given a higher profile and be more integrated into the Radio 3 schedule. And that includes the speech programmes ...

[Is that better? ]

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i believe Legends and Library were both in existence and the one did not replace so much as survive the other .... it is not the quantity at issue but the ripping out of the quality ...

[french frank]

I've just received an email from someone: "11.27am - and Rob's announced, 'Dorothy has just texted in to say that she thinks that [Bruckner's Ninth'] was absolutely wonderful'. "

(That would be the 'Finale' of Bruckner's 9th, I presume, what R3 now thinks of as 'a longer work'.)

[Nick Armstrong]

Sorry ff but the only reaction to that has to be:



Trouble is, the 'email/text Petroc/Sarah/Rob' formula throws up countless examples of equally inane stuff.

[Ferretfancy]

On Wednesday morning we got Brahms's Schickalslied, Mozart's Prague and Schubert's String Quartet D 887. Yesterday it was Nielsen's 2nd and Beethoven's Op.111 with Arrau,and this morning we heard Weber's Konzertstucke, Berwald's 1st Symphony, and a newly revised version of Bruckner's 9th.
I'm beginning to suspect that some of our stated misgivings about the relentless trivia may have been heard, at least by some of the suits.
Of course. it doesn't do to be too optimistic.

[aeolium]

I have seen playlist items in EC which individually I might have been inclined to listen to, such as the Schubert D887. However there is still the problem of the 'packaging' in which this programme is wrapped, the trivia, the emails/texts, and the prospect of having to wade through this rubbish to get to something worth hearing is for me a major deterrent. Also the concept of 'Essential Classics' is something which I really don't think should be promoted by R3 - it is much too close to what is constantly promoted on CFM, and R3 should not be taking that as a model. What it means is that the same kind of music is heard over and over again, and I want to hear classical music off the beaten track. If not on R3, then where?