Colorado Public Radio has officially purchased classical KVOD, although CPR has been operating the station under an LMA since 2008.  The purchase price was $8.364 million.

It doesn’t play in Peoria!  Pjstar.com reports that HD Radio is going nowhere, which we all knew.  Despite that, many stations dump their classical broadcasting onto HD channels and pretend that people will still be able to listen.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know about the young composer Mason Bates.  Kevin Berger writes in the NY Times that Bates is “hailed as one of the young saviors of classical music, thanks to his gift for rinsing the gray out of traditional forms with the searing beats of electronica. ”  Bates recognizes the power of radio waves in his latest work for the San Francisco Symphony:

“Mass Transmission” is based on radio-wave communications in the 1920s between parents in the Netherlands and their children on Java. Children were sent to the island (now part of Indonesia) to work for the colonial Dutch government. The piece, scored for chorus, organ and electronics (including samples of Indonesian gamelan music), opens with the wistful voice of a woman recalling her first communications with her daughter. The ethereal music contrasts the human voice with the cold mists of electronic static. An organ traverses the two like a Bach toccata.

30-year classical radio veteran Karl Scroggin is retiring from KUIS at the University of Illinois in Springfield.   Karl, we wish you well.

Every Allen afficionado will recognize the filmmaker’s extensive use of old jazz standards and classical composers and he revealed that his love of music came from growing up with the radio playing constantly.

“When I grew up radio was all we had,” Allen said. “And you turned it on, or at least in my family you did, when you woke up in the morning and when I was getting dressed the radio was constantly going. You heard sensational music… Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, [George] Gershwin, Cole Porter, [and] Rodgers and Hart inundated the household all the time.” Cavett replied by saying he felt deprived growing up in Nebraska, “We had “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and the “Too Fat Polka” sung by [radio personality] Arthur Godfrey.”

They may have had different musical upbringings but the two were on the same page when it came to the old serials and radio shows, with Cavett saying, “Radio gave you imagination.”

I bet you have plenty of radio reminiscences of your own.  What was it that made you love radio so much?

We even have more classical music on the radio now. In addition to the music programming on WNPR in Hartford, WSHU in Fairfield has spread its signal eastward, WMNR in Monroe has beefed up its broadcast area, and a commercial classical station, WCRI, popped up in Westerly. You can now channel-surf as you drive, something unheard of not long ago.

It’s starting to feel like the best of times here.

You can read the post on theday.com.  Mr. Moore expresses beautifully something that’s been percolating in my head for a while.  He goes through all the amazing musical offerings in eastern Connecticut, including

…chamber music series in five separate towns, three resident opera companies along the shoreline and even a burgeoning community orchestra in New London in addition to the venerable Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra.

Plus lots of new music by young composers, community choirs, music on college campuses, and more.

It’s worth reading and thinking about, especially in the light of the ubiquitous financial struggles going on throughout the arts world.  All the gloomy reports about audiences and donations dwindling belie the reality that there are more musical options available to us than ever before.  Symphony audiences may be down, but people are not consuming less music.  We can get a huge variety on our iPods, our computers, and on the radio.  I can go to an early music concert, a symphony concert, and a chorus concert all in one weekend, plus there’s late night music everywhere in Seattle.  We have so much music here I can’t get to a fraction of it.  All genres, all price ranges, all sorts of venues.

It’s easy to grumble about your local classical station, but honestly, you have hundreds of choices online or even on your smartphone — not just stations, but whole shows from music festivals and orchestras, YouTube, tracks on artists’ websites, downloads for pennies.  We have more choices than anytime in history.  You can live in the deep forest, out on the ocean, in the tiniest town on the way to nowhere, and you can still get lots and lots of great music.

Not to mention the quality of what young musicians are doing these days.  Not only is their virtuosity astonishing but they are innovative and energetic, and they are creating new audiences themselves, without our help.  Milton Moore mentions the quartet Brooklyn Rider in his article.  I just heard them in Seattle and they reinterpreted Beethoven in a way that made me hear it as though it was composed yesterday.  Brilliant.

We also have the opportunity to reach every possible audience demographic in so many different ways.  Mr. Moore is right.  It’s not the worst of times.

Now Global Gathering‘s loyal audience is fighting back with a petition to save the show.  You can read more here.

Ordinarily, I would applaud the addition of more classical programming, but having been on the receiving end of an attempt to cancel a show that was saved by the listeners, I can sympathize.  A loyal audience is not something you should take lightly.

General Manager Harry Kozlowski says this is the first step toward a bigger goal.

When we formed Highland in 2000, that was our mission: not only to bring back classical music in Concord, but to build a statewide network.

New Hampshire Public Radio, NHPR stopped airing classical music in 2000, so this is a chance for them to redeem themselves with the classical audience, and WCNH will gain help with fundraising expertise and facilities.

You can read more and listen here.