Take the Q2 Listener Survey
Everyone’s favorite online contemporary classical station, Q2 (part of the WNYC family), needs your help. They would like for Q2 listeners to take a survey to help them gather information that will shape the station’s future programming.
Want more vocal music? Less crossover? Or more programs featuring Olivia Giovetti? Q2 wants to hear all about it!
I highly doubt the samples were meant to be a “representative sampling of contemporary music” but rather a few strands that could be specifically successful in the medium of radio – which is after all, a medium that people use, in the vast majority, while doing other things. I highly doubt most would want to turn on the radio and be greeted by the thorniest and loudest of today’s serialist music even though some might consider that an essential facet of contemporary classical music. It also seems contradictory to call the last excerpt an “everything else” category when you cite that both samples were from the middle of the last century and could be construed as a phase in late modernism.
As a recently departed once said, the message is the medium, and radio can only do so much in attempting to best represent the diversity of contemporary classical music. Nonetheless, I think we all realize that this experiment in new-music radio must succeed, otherwise we’re back to the white-washed monotony of most every other classical radio station and people reared on the classics will not even find the means to, from a point of comfort and accessibility, transition to the more complex of today’s concert music. Radio is a portal, not an end in and of itself.
I was quite struck, and not in a good way, by the (lack of) diversity in the listening examples, which I have to assume were designed to be a representative sample of contemporary music… one piece of mainstream peppy brightly colored American more or less atonal chamber music, a bunch of pop-influenced things (from Glass to what are essentially elaborately arranged pop songs), and the “everything else” category was given over to a Ligeti mechanical organ piece and a small chunk of Messiaen, both from the middle of the last century.
Is that what they really think?
The survey was well conceived, asked the right questions. After the survey I told them to completely follow my instructions .
That survey is 26 miles long!