How they changed our classical music

Radio broadcasts of classical music have changed, and not at all for the better.  This goes for traditional radio broadcasts as well as podcasts and digital radio streams. And shame on you, Minnesota Public Radio.  I remember when you didn't do that.  Why did you change?  Did your audiences force you?

When was the last time you heard an entire piece?  Not just a movement or a snip of a movement, but an entire piece, the way the piece was supposed so be played?  I mean, how many movements of symphonies or how many opera arias are not part of a larger fabric? You can't appreciate that particular part unless you see the whole fabric. 

We don't sit home and say, "I heard that people really like the middle five minutes of that movie.  Let's go look at that five-minute bit and forget about what came before or what comes after."

Aren't we missing something by doing that?

Or is this one more instance of how our lives have become fragmented?  Tweets here and there.  FB entries three lines long. Blogs as bad as this one? What's it like to carry on a real conversation, a dialog? I don't remember.  Do you?

Playing a single movement of a symphony should be a felony. Not hearing the slow ending of the third movement of Mahler's First Symphony trick us into the crash of the fourth movement? Mahler again:  Not hearing the howl that opens the fourth movement right after the slow fade of the third movement of his Fourth Symphony?  Do you remember the old days when movies were on film and sometimes the film over-heated and the scene on the screen melted then went monochrome brown? That's like hearing one movement, one aria.

Today was awful. I swear.  I actually heard AccuRadio play the third movement (only) of Charles Camille Saint-saens' Symphony No.3, his "Organ Symphony." Well, for crying out loud, they call it the "Organ Symphony," don't they?  But the organ doesn't make an entry until the first beat of the fourth movement!  The blast knocks you out of your chair, by surprise.  We didn't know it was coming, but once it came, we realize that the tricky composer was pushing us along, step by step, but we didn't know where, and then the magician smiles and shows her hand.

And after the Saint-saens blast, we know what follows.  It's the music that we heard in the movie "Babe."  What a march!  What a triumph!  What a crying shame -- a crime, really, not to have heard the build-up.  It's like opening an empty birthday present box, but a thousand times worse.  

It's okay when a movie soundtrack picks out one section of something.  That split serves a higher purpose and may lead us to hear the entire piece.  "Cavalleria Rusticana" and the Godfather. Groucho Marx and "I Pagliacci, I love you very much-ee." Laurel and Hardy, "I dream't I dwelt in Ivory Halls."

But these radio splits hurt.  They hurt badly. You're a baseball fan and they stop the broadcast at the top of the ninth inning?

What did they do to our college(s)?

Have you been back to  your hallowed halls of Ivy?  I followed detour signs and drove over roads without pavement and avoided pits and holes and I found myself at the University of Minnesota, where I went in 1963. This is for U of MN students and for everyone else too.

Do you want to see, in three dimensions, what the passage of nearly five decades can do?  Look around that campus.  Hell, looking for artifacts of our undergrad days there would require an archeological dig.  No kidding.  They've changed every square inch of the place. 

I didn't visit the West Bank and so I don't know if they removed the brass "William Francis Jack Lived Here" plaque from the wall of the former Mayhood Manor, a flop-house on the then-seedy (and still-seedy West Bank.

Warning:  Sexism ahead.  But this is how things were in 1963, when men didn't know any better and women didn't rise up and kick us in tender places.  Did such beautiful babes study there in in 1964, and so many??  If so, why didn't you and I snag more? (No, let's not answer that question).

Naturally, the whole area was dug up.  I've never seen it so bad.  There's no more Washington Avenue for a while.  They've dug it up to put through light rail.  And, of course, to further hinder students, the city and state and university administration have come up with all kinds of street improvement projects, such that getting around is impossible.  You follow a detour sign for 12 turns and then the 13th detour sign disappears -- you are lost in North Minneapolis, behind the garbage burner.

A humbling experience.  Once again, the world takes delight in showing how much it's changed on us, while we are left holding the (empty) bag, while we were chasing after babes who after 1970 refused to be called babes.