Deja vu over and over

Reuters has posted a gallery of best pictures of 2007. Unfortunately, you can't link to individual pics, but I was struck by the compositional similarity of #s 73, 84, and 41 in the list.

Schickele Mix, RIP

"Dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal"

That's the tag line of Schickele Mix, the best, broadest, funniest, and most interesting music education program ever heard. Created and hosted by Peter Schickele (best known for his other entertaining music education creation - P.D.Q. Bach - a fictional composer son of Johannes) Schickele Mix juxtaposed Bach with the Beatles, Elgar with Duke Ellington and the Everly Brothers, Tuvan throat singing with twanging Texas Swing, or Schubert with Spike Jones in "suites" demonstrating the universality of musical techniques and themes. Checkout the playlists and you'll see what I mean. Recent news from the Schickele Mix website...

The program was originally produced with funding provided by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors included the Ford Foundation. Such funding is designed to be gradually replaced by contributions from corporate sponsors, but obtaining sponsorship for the program proved difficult, and ultimately it became impossible to produce new programs after funding ran out in the late 1990’s. Public Radio International continued distributing the program, allowing the episodes to be rebroadcast in order to reach new listeners. Considering that there was only a limited number of programs available to be rebroadcast, PRI kept distributing Schickele Mix for an impressively long time, even as some public radio stations stopped broadcasting the program figuring that after repeating some episodes five times that most of their listeners must have already heard them. It became necessary for PRI to stop distributing the program in June of 2007 after 169 different programs, 12 listener support specials, and 810 weekly broadcasts.

This is a shame, since three and a half years of educational weekly programs could be repeated for new audiences, if not continuously, then with a gap of a couple years until something better comes along. These programs have such rich content, it's a shame future audiences can't be created.

I've got to wonder whether it's not just the 5 cycles of repeated playings (which, by the way, I've never gotten tired of) that's the whole reason for its disappearance from the airways. The program depends on a wide range of recorded music. Perhaps the new proposed performance royalties, or even merely their threat, have managed to claim Schickele Mix as a victim. Many small netcasters, offering the ability to discover new music, have been threatened by these royalties. Even public radio over the web is threatened. With the loss of Schickele Mix, a major source of discovery of "old music" may be gone as well.

As Peter Schickele said at the end of each program, "It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that certain je ne sais quoi." And with the apparent demise of Schickele Mix, we've lost a serious source of that important "je ne sais quoi."

Generalist Extraordinaire

A man of many talents, apparently...