NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO ARTS AND PERFORMANCE PROGRAMS By Frederica Kushner Definition and Scope For those who may be more familiar with commercial than with non-commercial radio and television, it may help to know that National Public Radio (NPR) is a non­ commercial radio network funded in major part through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and through its member stations. NPR is not the direct recipient of government funds. Its staff are not government employees. NPR produces programming of its own and also uses programming supplied by member stations; by other non­ commercial networks outside the U.S., such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC); by independent producers, and occasionally by commercial networks. The NPR offices and studios are located on M Street in Washington, D.C. Programming is distributed via satellite. The radio programs included in the following listing are "arts and performance." These programs were produced or distributed by the Arts Programming Department of NPR. The majority of the other programming produced by NPR comes from the News and Information Department. The names of the departments may change from time to time, but there always has been a dichotomy between news and arts programs. This introduction is not the proper place for a detailed history of National Public Radio, thus further explanation of the structure of the network can be dispensed with here. What does interest us are the varied types of programming under the arts and performance umbrella. They include jazz festivals recorded live, orchestra concerts from Europe as well as the U.S., drama of all sorts, folk music concerts, bluegrass, chamber music, radio game shows, interviews with authors and composers, choral music, programs illustrating the history of jazz, of popular music, of gospel music, and much, much more. With the exception of the historical retrospective programs, all the music programming is non-commercial, which means that most of it has not been published. The programs housed at the Library of Congress (LC) cover the period from when NPR began broadcasting in 1971 through the end of 1985. NPR considered that it had storage space for five years of broadcasts at the 1976 rate of production. In addition, it is a given that the older a tape is, the less likely it is to be needed again (with some exceptions), and five years was just right, especially for news programming (presidential elections being in a four-year cycle). So, five years it was. The NPR Program Library's shelving order, by date of broadcast (release), helped greatly in determining which tapes were to go and which were to stay. This helps to explain why there may be only one or two programs of what is obviously a much longer series. The remaining programs in that series will doubtless arrive in the shipment of programming from 1986. 2 ARSC Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1 National Public Radio Samples from the Listing NPR has always broadcast a wide variety of arts programming, but the five top categories are classical music, jazz and popular music, folk/ethnic/bluegrass music, drama, and arts information. Classical music at NPR has been under the guidance of three people: Robert Bailey, Fred Calland, and Andy Trudeau. Although their names may not appear in the citations, one or the other of them has been involved with almost every classical music program released by NPR, with the exception of the Program Service (which is not discussed here). They are producers, and their knowledge and expertise is essential to the high quality of the classical music programming. American orchestras which have been broadcast with the NPR systems cue include the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Pittsburgh Symphony. Most major European orchestras have been broadcast on International Concert Hall through an arrangement with the European Broadcast Union (EBU). Opera from many houses in the U.S. as well as in Europe is a staple, primarily through World of Opera. Chamber music is presented on Recital Hall and St. Paul Sunday Morning, and on the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Composers discuss their works and illustrate with musical examples on Composers Forum. Jazz and popular music are well represented by a number of programs, both recorded live and retrospective. Jazz Alive was for several years the premiere vehicle for jazz, being a presentation of live concerts, including up-and-coming as well as established groups and soloists. The program was produced by Tim Owens and its host was the jazz pianist Billy Taylor. Its yearly schedule included a live New Year's Eve broadcast which originated on the East Coast and moved west through the time zones, ending, after seven or eight hours, on the West Coast. Jazz Alive eventually was replaced by American Jazz Radio Festival. Jazz Revisited and Ben Sidran's Sidran on Record provide a retrospective glimpse of America's rich history of jazz. And Alec Wilder and Marian McPartland presented a combination of interview and performance on American Popular Song with Alec Wilder and Friends and Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, both provided by the South Carolina Educational Radio Network (SCERN). Folk, bluegrass, and ethnic music programs were one of NPR's more popular types of programming for many years. Steve Rathe was the producer of many of these offerings. His production Folk Festival U.S.A. is to folk and bluegrass what Jazz Alive is to jazz, a compendium of the best performers of all styles combined with the excitement and spontaneity generated by the festival setting. Folk Music and Bernstein is the retrospec­ tive point of view of the subject. Our Front Porch, a folk/bluegrass radio show in an auditorium setting, is the replacement brought forward when the folk music mania died down somewhat and Folk Festival U.S.A. became too expensive to produce. Radio drama is an art form all its own, and NPR has made significant contributions through its Earplay and NPR Playhouse series. Earplay was first, beginning in 1979 with programs from radio station WHA and the BBC, among many others. Then came Playhouse, beginning in 1981 and overlapping Earplay for about a year. Playhouse usually divides itself into individual series of about 12 or 13 episodes each. Star Wars and Don Quixote I & II are superb adaptations. Cabinet of Dr. Fritz and Price of Silence are original scripts. The programs come from a wide variety of sources, including BBC, ZBS, National Radio Theatre of Chicago, WHA, WGBH, and individual producers Leo Lee, Joe Frank, Himan Brown, and Erik Bauersfeld. Writers represented include Mamet, Stoppard, Fugard, Bradbury, Tolkein, and Sam Shepard, among many others. Arts information programming has always been an important part of NPR's production. Modular Arts Service, Five Minute Arts Package, and Arts Information ARSC Journal, Spring 1992 3 National Public Radio Package provided member stations with plenty of short reports for broadcast whenever they chose during the broadcast day. Voices in the Wind, produced by Robert Montiegel, Bob Malesky, and Jay Kernis, and The Sunday Show, produced by Rosemary Tobin and Debra Lamberton, supplied the arts magazine approach. The latter is five hours long and constructed to be used in segments ranging from a half hour in length on. It includes excerpts from concerts and recitals as well as interviews and reports. Explanation of Source and Meaning of Information The information in this listing is taken primarily from cataloging done by NPR Program Library staff on NPR's in-house computer system. Most of the information is available in the Library of Congress on microfiche indexes printed from the computer data. One might ask: "Ifit is available on microfiche, then why go to the trouble of writing it out in this format?" There are two reasons for this listing. One is that all of NPR's programming is included on the microfiche. Since the bulk of LC holdings is the arts and performance programs, the presence of all the other citations in the microfiche indexes can be very confusing. The other reason is that much of the information in the indexes is in coded form, i.e., producer Jeth Mill is Ml, and the arts information program Voices in the Wind, whose title could be construed to indicate it is a program about environmen­ tal activism, is coded PACVW, the P being the "arts" give-away in many cases, but the A or the C providing the clue when the Pis missing. In addition, names are accompanied by "role" codes. "f' is an author or composer. "4" is being interviewed. "5" is doing the interviewing, while"@" is the person being discussed, and "C" is playing the clarinet. The NPR microfiche, while providing an invaluable index to a most extraordinary output of radio programming, is not easy to interpret. To be sure, there is some help in code lists provided by NPR along with the microfiche, but much coding is not included, and much is difficult to find on the lists. The citations in this listing include, in most cases, only a small amount of the information available in the microfiche indexes. Most of the information was obtained from the microfiche Series Title Index and from the tape boxes themselves. The index ends in December 1983, so information about 1984 and 1985 came directly from the boxes. Otherwise, the tape boxes were consulted only when questions arose about the validity of codes or when codes were missing. This listing could be used to great advantage in conjunction with the NPR microfiche Names file. The format of the citations is as follows: program program or series title type& ""mbornfprograms I/"''' I "''"' titlo timing American Jazz Radio Festival.