Los Angeles Times 11/7/04

Left to their own devices

by Chris Pasles

Classical radio didn't satisfy Robin Cox and Kyle Gann, so they carved out a niche for new American composers at their Web stations.

One station plays nothing but recordings of Schubert's "Ave Maria." There are about 300 of them. Another plays only flute music. A third is devoted to "demented" opera scenes — "the sort of musical and dramatic experience that sends you out of the theater reeling and dazed," announces the producer of La Cieca's Opera House. He promises "opera as blood sport." Welcome to Internet radio.

Since President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, thousands of Internet radio stations have sprung up around the U.S. No one knows the total number, but many are devoted to — how to put it? — specific interests. Moreover, these stations are only part of an enormous field that includes the BBC — which three years ago shifted its shortwave transmissions headed for the U.S. and Canada to an online service — as well as numerous European and Asian websites. But there's no reason to look down on the small guys.

No less an organization than the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, or ASCAP, considers them sufficiently important that in 1999 it created the Deems Taylor Internet Award. This year's prize went to two stations devoted to new American music: Iridian Radio (www.iridianradio.com), produced by Santa Barbara-based composer and violinist Robin Cox, who also has his Robin Cox Ensemble; and PostClassic Radio (www.live365.com/states/kylegann), produced by Kyle Gann, a composer, Bard College professor and new music critic for the Village Voice. Although the award is not much in financial terms — Cox and Gann split $500 — it signals the tip of an increasingly imposing iceberg. "The Internet as a communicative force is becoming more and more important, and it brings music from around the world, not just America," says Frances Richard, director of concert music at ASCAP in New York. "It's a logical extension of the Deems Taylor Awards" — named after the composer and critic who served as the organization's president from 1942 to 1948.

Indeed, the Internet links this year's winners in more ways than one: New Yorker Gann was inspired by Southern Californian Cox. "I got the idea from Iridian Radio," Gann said by telephone, discussing the genesis of his station. "I didn't know anything about Internet radio, didn't even know it existed. Well, that's not quite true. I had tuned in to Air America, Al Franken's station. "But I didn't know there were stations you could run yourself out there. I didn't know there were any websites making that service available." Cox, for his part, said from his Santa Barbara studio that "when Kyle put up his own station and said I inspired him to do it, I thought I had died and gone to FM heaven. My activity spiked." For Cox, the reason to start a station was simple: He couldn't find the music he wanted to hear on the radio. "For all the possibilities that the Internet may provide, what was actually out there was still very much what you would hear over the airwaves much of the time," he said. "The best you could hope for was a John Adams piece squashed between early 20th century works. "I'm putting what I consider the essentials out there. It's been a good exercise going through all the music I love and picking out the desert island discs I feel most strongly about."Cox plays music by not only Adams but the Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson. He bills it as "music that's smart but still warm to the ears," and he has a playlist of more than 100 pieces. For Gann, the issue is more serious. "When I was younger, classical radio was the way I discovered a lot of new music," he said. "It was extremely important. Today, you can't turn on the radio and hear any of this stuff." What he and Cox do, he said, "points out the utter emptiness of most radio and most classical radio. Certainly, it points out how much better a job can be done on anything when commercial considerations are taken out of the picture." Long Beach composer Carolyn Bremer agrees. She considers both stations "extraordinarily important because they are giving voice to a niche in music that generally requires a lot of work to find. If this multiplied, it would be the best thing that ever happened." Said New York composer Noah Creshevsky: "Ideally, you will come into your home and listen to whatever you want. Internet radio is a step toward typing into your computer what it is you want to hear and hearing it." Gann described his station as broadcasting "weirdly beautiful new music from composers who've left the classical world far behind." He has a 17-hour playlist that loops and includes works by John Cage, Terry Riley, Christopher Rouse and a host of composers who are fairly obscure even to many music lovers. "When I write about music people don't hear, people think I'm nuts," he said. "I've always needed a way not only to tell people about the music but to play it so they could hear it. Otherwise, there's no way of checking on the truth of what I'm saying. "I do tend to stay away from stuff that I like that is really thorny and dramatic but which, I think, comes off better in concert than in recording. There's a difference in aesthetics there. A piece that's fabulous in concert I might not want to listen to through speakers at home."

Both Cox's and Gann's stations operate 24/7, provide links to other stations that listeners might want to sample, and have links for purchasing recordings. And as it turns out, almost anyone can follow the pair's lead. All you need is a personal computer and a streaming-radio-station service provider such as Live365, which carries Cox's and Gann's stations as well as thousands of others. Streaming radio is different from downloading or copying music, which involves huge legal issues. "We're completely legal," said Raghav Gupta, chief operating officer of Live365, a privately held Bay Area-based firm. "What the Digital Millennium Copyright Act essentially does is create this mandatory or statutory license to webcast," he said. "It says, in effect, 'As long as you follow certain rules — you're not obscene, profane or illegal and pay royalties — you can do this.' "We pay the record labels and ASCAP and BMI [Broadcast Music Inc.] and so on. That's why people are attracted to us. We're a one-stop shop. All they have to do is provide the music and the programming. We take care of all the back end — streaming and royalties and licenses."
No one need worry about being squeezed out of the field, either. "That's the beauty of the Internet," Gupta said. "You've got this unlimited spectrum. It's not limited by the spectrum of the FM band. You can have very niche-oriented stations devoted to Zen soundtracks in movies, ragtime, sci-fi action and movie scores, and opera, of course." Internet radio is also low-maintenance. One person can easily set up a station. "I had it up and running within a couple of days," Cox said of his station. "I've been adding to it ever since. This doesn't take a lot of money or time." Gann also took only a few days to set up his station, but he wishes Live365 was a little more classical-music friendly. "I'm listed as 'classical, experimental and college,' " he said. "Those are shots in the dark. They don't have 'post-classical,' which I wish they did, or 'avant-garde' or 'new music.' They're very geared — like the rest of the world — to pop music." While the numbers are modest by some standards, people are tuning in. Cox's station has logged almost 1,000 hours of listening a month. "That's about 30 hours per day," he said. "This did catch me off guard — how quickly it took off and how much fun it's been." Gann has registered more than 1,800 hours since launching his station Sept. 4. "I've had 3,198 hits," he said. "That's something like 50 a day. The average listening time is 34 minutes. That's better than I had expected."

No one is getting rich through these stations, however. Even Live365, which survived a rough period during the dot-com meltdown in 2001, is only "now close to being profitable," according to Gupta. The company makes its money through subscription fees, broadcaster fees and advertising. "There is some turnover in stations," Gupta said. "Typically, it's either people that maybe can't find an audience or spend the time or, for whatever reason, they lose interest. "But stations that find their audience and are unique are very stable. "Once people find their audience — and it might be a small one — it's hard to turn your station off. You want to keep them happy." The number of listeners is definitely growing. The latest study by ratings service Arbitron estimates that 13% of all Americans, or 30 million people, listen to Internet broadcasts weekly, up from 8% in 2001. Stations often overlap in offering the same kind of music, but this doesn't bother Gupta. "We're a platform for people to do what they want to do," he said. "We let the listeners and the system work out who gets an audience and who doesn't. It depends on how they program and how they market it. We provide the tools and advice on how to do it, but we don't do it. We try to exert little editorial control." How large is the audience for the "Ave Maria"-only station? "Probably not huge compared to Howard Stern's," said Gupta. "But we know he's a very happy broadcaster."

 

Santa Barbara News Press 12/1/04

Truly Public Radio

By Tom Jacobs

The radio can be a frustrating little device. In this era of homogenization and corporate monopolies, discerning listeners can flip from station to station without finding music they really want to hear. What's an art-music aficionado -- or, for that matter, a polka partisan or a fado fanatic -- to do? Actually, there's a surprisingly simple solution: Start your own Internet radio station. "I think most people have no idea how doable this is," said Santa Barbara composer Robin Cox, founder of Iridian Radio. "It doesn't require an esoteric set of skills. All you need is a very average computer, an Internet connection and 30 or 40 bucks a month." At 5 p.m. today in New York City's Lincoln Center, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers will honor Mr. Cox's efforts by presenting him a Deems Taylor Award. (He will be one of two local recipients: UCSB musicologist Michael Beckerman will be honored for his book "New Worlds of Dvorak.")

The award commends Mr. Cox for his commitment to new music, which is a relative rarity at most over-the-air radio stations. To serve as a genuine alternative, his station -- which can be found at www.iridianradio.com -- is devoted to serious music written over the last 20 years. "The oldest thing on there, I think, is a Steve Reich composition from the 1970s," he said. Other composers represented on his 11 hours of programming (which repeats on a continual loop and can be heard 24/7) include John Adams, Tom Waits, Tan Dun, Terry Riley and Frank Zappa. "I included Phillip Glass and Laurie Anderson because I know (those names) draw people," he said. "They help define the station. (My attitude is) if you know these people, I believe you're inclined to enjoy these other things you didn't know existed." Mr. Cox initially envisioned such a station four or five years ago, when he read about live365.com, which allows individuals to get a station running simply and inexpensively. (Independent webcasters pay a monthly fee to the service, which covers all royalties as well as service fees.)

"While I was intrigued by it, it was clear that it wasn't time yet," he said. "This summer, I decided to revisit it. I found that, with high-speed Internet connections, it's now quite possible to listen to music over the Internet. It's not quite CD quality, but it's acceptable." Chamber music, he discovered, sounds terrific; orchestral music, less so. With that in mind, Mr. Cox combed through his personal CD collection and cobbled together a playlist, concentrating mainly on performances by smaller ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet. To ensure variety, he kept most selections short -- typically four or five minutes. "I didn't have to work very hard at the playlist," he said. "There are (stylistic) connections between these pieces of music. Kyle Gann (who runs a similar Internet station) calls it post-classical music -- a name I am warming up to. Whatever you want to call it, there is something aesthetic tying this stuff together." Mr. Cox assumed it would take people quite awhile to discover his station, which started streaming Aug. 1. He was wrong. "I'm averaging 1,200 hours of listening per month," he said, clearly pleased by this response. "The average time someone is signed on is around 45 minutes. About two-thirds of the listeners are from the United States, and (largely) from the places you'd expect: New York, San Francisco, L.A. But I've also had people from Omaha, Neb." Listeners have also logged in from more than 40 foreign countries, including China, South Korea and even Iran. (Who knew there were Laurie Anderson fans in the Axis of Evil?) "What has driven the listenership has been weblogs," Mr. Cox said. "A blog I had never heard of, called News Today, posted something, and I had 167 hours of listening that day. I get 10 hours a day of listening from Germany, and I know it's because two blogs in Germany, a couple of days apart, made mention of it. "Iridian Radio's listenership spikes in the late morning and early afternoon, local time -- a period when white-collar workers on both the East and West Coasts are in their offices. That has led Mr. Cox to surmise that most of his listeners are logging in at work and listening in their cubicles. "I haven't gotten a lot of e-mails, but in those I get, the people tell me they had no idea this music existed," he said. "That's what I want. I'm not programming for the 'in' crowd."

Changing the playlist couldn't be simpler; all Mr. Cox needs is his laptop and an Internet connection. He can literally program his station from Starbucks. But so far, he has resisted the temptation to tinker incessantly with his lineup. "I'm always nervous that I'm not changing it often enough, but I'm also nervous to change what seems to be working," he said. "I tweak it once or twice a week, by adding or subtracting (tracks). Now I'm at the point where I need to seek out more music, to keep it fresh. "I will have to keep shifting it around; once someone feels they have heard all there is to hear on it, they won't come back. But so far, that doesn't seem to be the case.

The station is not a money-making operation, and Mr. Cox isn't sure it could be. He could include advertising on his site, but that would require (a) finding people willing to advertise, and (b) paying a higher fee, because for-profit stations pay royalties a different rate. While Mr. Cox has no interest in exploring that avenue, he does see the site as a marketing tool. Once an hour or so, he plays a cut by his own Robin Cox Ensemble, often featuring one of his own compositions. As with every other cut he plays, information on the piece pops up on the screens while people listen, and a link is provided for those who are curious enough to buy the CD. Mr. Cox has noticed only a small uptick in sales to date. But in the long run, this exposure will increase awareness of his ensemble, which performs around 20 concerts each year, mainly on the West Coast. And in a wider sense, the fear so many people have of contemporary classical music (largely a negative reaction to the atonal music of the 1950s and '60s) will only dissipate if they have opportunities to actually hear what is being written now. "Mozart was quoted as saying the best music speaks both to the man on the street with no musical training and the erudite, elitist listener in the concert hall," Mr. Cox said. "I've always liked that."

Thus the music he programs is innovative yet accessible, and the presentation is simple and direct. "New music is so often presented as, 'This is good for you,' like broccoli," he complained. "When you're telling people they're not going to like something, they're probably not going to like it! I'm trying to give this music to people without that baggage. I let people decide for themselves." Mr. Cox, 38, is a busy guy. Besides writing and performing, he commutes twice a week to teach music theory and composition at Cal State Long Beach. He also teaches music classes for dancers at UCSB, where his wife, Stephanie Nugent, is a teacher and choreographer. Nevertheless, he always finds time for his part-time career as "nanobroadcaster." And he is hardly alone in this pursuit. Founding and programming niche stations "has become the primary avocation for a lot of people," he said. "It's like their sailboat."

 

The Santa Barbara Independent 12/9/04

Beyond the Radio Radar

by Josef Woodard

AIRWAVES GOING CYBER: In an ideal world, one removed from the hyper-market-driven one Americans live in, radio could be a place where culture rules and informs, and commercial messages are minimal. Such dreamers are we. And yet, just as the digital revolution has the music business running scared, the promise of the internet is slowly manifesting in a better "radio" landscape. Clearer and less sullied airspace is now available on satellite radio and even AOL's impressive radio stations, a culturally healthy offering on the menu of that McDonald's-of-cyberspace.

Those with an ingrained fear of commercials or excessive between-song patter, who happily whip checkbooks at pledge-drive time for non-commercial stations, can get a musical fix without being commercially goaded. Of course, Utopia has a price tag, or at least a short shelf life, and the funding of internet radio remains the pressing X-factor. For now, free-sailing cyber skies are the limit.

On a local-gone-global note, Santa Barbara is the home base of an acclaimed internet radio station specializing in accessible new music. Please direct your browser to www.Iridian.com, connected to the umbrella live365.com Web site, a growing family of customized cyber stations. Go through a few setup paces and sink into the non-disruptive sounds of new music that both goes down easy and asks for thinking ears along the way. It's free for basic access, which includes very occasional, annoying urgings to sign for a VIP pass, a small price to pay for music otherwise publicly unexposed.

Iridian is the brainchild of Santa Barbara-based composer/violinist Robin Cox, whose Robin Cox Ensemble performs in town and far beyond. Last week, Cox was feted for his efforts at Lincoln Center with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Cueing off of the inspirations heard in his own music, Cox has programmed music from the rich, and generally easy-to-love world of new music that has grown up out of the '70s Minimalist heyday of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Laurie Anderson.

Suddenly, these and other artists broke the earlier spell of alienation between the worlds of "contemporary music" and the potential audience. Their work spoke to listeners more attuned to grooves, triads, and sparkly irony than to tone rows or other ivory tower tactics. The beat goes on, through John Adams, the Minimalist most concerned with evolving, and groups like the Kronos Quartet and, increasingly, the artists in and around the Bang on a Can (bangonacan.org) organization in New York.
The BOAC mothership expanded from its annual marathon, took its ensemble act on the road, and now has an impressive record label, Cantaloupe. For Xmas kix, check out Cantaloupe's recent seasonal compilation Messiah Remix, in which Handel's classic is systematically, and also lovingly, sliced and diced by the celebrated likes of Tod Machover, John Oswald, Paul Lansky, and Phil Kline and many others. If that sounds like an overly heady rebel gesture, the end result is a surprisingly meditative alt-Christmas album.

One recent morning at Iridian.com we heard music of clarinetist Evan Ziporyn (his Magritte-flavored nod, "This Is Not a Clarinet"), Henryk Gorecki, Tan Dun, a chugging Arnold Dreyblatt piece, and music by Cox's own ensemble, folding neatly into the idealistic programming landscape. Utopia, ahoy.