My KPFA - A Historical Footnote

Bringing Home the Bacon

From it's beginning, KPFA was prominently associated with the musical avant-garde, but with the advent of the commercial LP and the lengthening of the station's broadcast schedule from the early 1950s, the greater part of its programming came to consist of conventional classical music—not because its founders regarded this as its raison d'etre, but because this required much less advance preparation than producing a live or specially recorded program that might well take ten hours’ work for an hour’s air time. Nevertheless, a lot of thought went into putting together musical sequences that were mutually illuminating. Optimistic Music Directors often programmed as though their audiences were giving as much careful attention to the morning concert as to the six o’clock news.

The station devoted as much time and money as it could to music by contemporary composers. Over the years, KPFA accumulated an enormous archive of historic performances which bore no relationship to the predominantly folk/pop outlet that the station had gradually become, so that when it moved to new quarters, these irreplaceable treasures were in danger of being carted away for landfill. Fortunately Charles Amirkhanian, now heading Other Minds, a global New Music community based in San Francisco, was able to acquire the tapes, give them storage space and begin the Sysiphean task of putting them into digital format and making them available for listening over the internet on radiOM. It was this exciting project that inspired me to attempt something similar on a much smaller scale. This page includes a few music programs from the 60s which I helped to produce and which are too good to die.

CHRISTMAS MUSIC 1958 When I joined the staff of the UC Berkeley Music Library in 1958, I was asked to put together a selection of appropriate music for the University Library’s Christmas party. For a couple of delightful weeks I spent my spare time going through various record collections, including my own, and making a selection of Christmas music, ancient and modern, that avoided the usual war-horses. (Bing Crosby’s lugubrious rendition of Silent Night was conspicuous by its absence.) Four years later when I went to work for KPFA, I made a banded copy with individual timings and put them up as miscellany to fill the odd gaps in the broadcast schedule during the Christmas season. And now they are here to share with the world.

THE UNANSWERED QUESTION: A Study of Richard Strauss' Capriccio. Includes interviews with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Hermann Prey, Sona Cervena and  Thomas Stewart. Conceived and presented by Dale Harris. A professor of history at Stanford, Dale pursued his amateur interest in opera with such avidity that he ended up writing program notes for the Met. This project took me backstage at the SF Opera House, where I was able to determine that in person, the great Madame Schwartzkopf was fully as acidic as her reputation. 26 October 1963   

BUSONI AT CARNEGIE HALL Daniell Revenaugh, Busoni scholar and performer, is interviewed by John Whiting, with excerpts from interviews with Philipp Jarnach and Benvenuto Busoni. 8 December 1965

A PIANO RECITAL BY JÖRG DEMUS Recorded at Hertz Hall, University of California, Berkeley. Commentary by the artist. 25 January 1964

Bela Bartok, Music for two pianos and percussion This is from one of the concerts presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Association at UC Berkeley; it took place in Hertz Hall on December 29, 1960. I was working in the Music Library at the time and recorded several of these concerts for the archives. This remarkable performance was by pianists Bernard Abramowitz and Nathan Schwartz; the percussion part, scored for two players, was performed single-handed by the athletic young Peggy Cunningham, who had a second career later in life as a swimming champion. [At 58, she died instantly in the pool of a heart attack, having just broken her own record ( in more than one sense).] I allow myself to include it here because, after I went to work at KPFA, I lent my copy to the station's music department for broadcast. The recording is almost half a century old, but it still sends shivers down my spine. I am listening to it again as I type. [For the technically minded, it was recorded on a full-track Ampex 601 with an Altec condenser 21D/50A type M20 microphone, on Scotch 111 tape; I kept the master, from which this digital transfer has been made.]

Ralph Kirkpatrick in a recital of modern music for the harpsichord. UC Berkeley, Hertz Hall, 26 Jan 61  Program notes available in jpeg: 001, 002, 003, 004  This was Kirkpatrick's first recital of contemporary harpsichord music in twenty years, and so he asked me to record it for the benefit of the composers. It was eventually broadcast on KPFA. A revealing footnote: At the beginning of his career, the great photographer Ansel Adams almost became a professional pianist. He was a great admirer of Kirkpatrick and asked me to introduce him after the concert. As we were going backstage, Adams confessed that he was nervous at the prospect of meeting such a great celebrity. This, at a time when Adams' name recognition would have been far beyond Kirkpatrick's!

GOLDEN VOICES, by Anthony Boucher. This program was devoted to Vocal Villainies, i.e. performances reaching both the apex of expertise and the nadir of taste. 1964

JAZZ ARCHIVES Phil Elwood presents Meade Lux Lewis at the harpsichord! 1964

HARD RAIN In 1963, The Committee, a San Francisco improvisational group that had splintered off from Second City in Chicago, gave a live performance before an audience in KPFA's recital studio. One of its members gave a spirited rendition of a new song by someone named Bob Dylan, whom none of us in the control room had heard of. It was, we all thought, the funniest thing on the program, and it brought the house down.

 IT'S MORNING IN BERKELEY!   During the years I was working at KPFA, this would have been played approximately 1500 times. It was KPFA's sign-on music, and was already in place when Alan Rich joined the station in the fall of '53, he tells me. I t's the duet for soprano and contralto, "Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten", from J. S. Bach's Cantata No 78, "Jesu, der du meine Seele", sung by the legendary Teresa Stich Randall and Dagmar Hermann, Anton Heiler at the organ, with the Choir and Orchestra of the Bach Guild [a pick-up ensemble drawn from the Vienna State Opera Chorus and Orchestra] under Felix Prohaska, Bach Guild BG537.

WILL OGDON TALKS WITH ALAN RICH, former KPFA music director and, at the time of their conversation, music critic for the New York Times. Alan discusses his daily routine and describes the paper’s status and the ability of its music critics to enhance the reputation and career of performing artists. 1962

JOHN CAGE CONSIDERED: An Introduction  A tentative introduction and preliminary remarks about the music, aesthetics, and phenomenon of John Cage. Recorded in 1965, this program of musical examples is framed by the comments of Charles Shere on the life and music of this most famous of American avant-garde composers. Technical production by John Whiting.

RANDOM RADIO  I have fond memories of controlling one of the radios in a 1959 KPFA broadcast of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No.4 for 12 radios, 24 players and conductor.            

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