Programming – September to December 2021

 

I hope you are having a good summer, and that your area is slowly moving away from COVID-19 Public Health measures. Here in Ottawa, after well over 18 months of pandemic measures, more than 78% of eligible  adults are fully vaccinated, and we are soon approaching what we can all say are near-normal activities.

On our music platforms, we are soon entering the third year of daily podcasts on For Your Listening Pleasure. Year Two will come to a close on August 31^st with the 365^th montage in our series we began way back in April 2011. The theme for that podcast is a harbinger of the coming year of daily programming starting September 1^st.

222 Days of Binging

We spent the last year reissuing all of our montages (thus 365 all together), which marked the ten years of our blogging and music sharing activities. Overshadowed in a way was the ten-year anniversary of our other platforms, notably our presence on TalkClassical (The Tuesday Blog) and OperaLively (Once or Twice a Fortnight).

In the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time rummaging through our music archives for these two platforms in particular, and (to nobody’s surprise) we have more than enough material shared on TC and OL over 10 years to justify spending some time revisiting them. I challenged myself to come up with programming solely fed by these shares – complete operas from OTF “Classic”, shares from our many Tuesday series (Once Upon the Internet, Cover2Cover, Vinyl’s Revenge) and a hodge-podge of playlists we cobbled together over the years

I came up with programming for 222 consecutive days – which will cover the remainder of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 – to address this challenge. Following our typical two-week frequency of new Friday montages, we will intersperse Friday shares that will respect that challenge – more on that below.

Programming Highlights

Here are some of the highlights (and programming tactics) that merit your attention:

Opera Content – I intend to provide complete operas every other weekend moving forward. Operas may, sometimes, give way to lyrical programs, but the intention here is to showcase our OL content.

Collections – Under our Cover2Cover and Vinyl’s Revenge series, I have planned to share some “collections” – the first three are the complete Paganini violin concertos (in September), the complete Gershwin works for orchestra and piano and orchestra (in October) and the complete Beethoven Piano Trios (in November). The music shares justify more than one “daily spot” on our binge calendar. In some cases, I plan to use a Friday slot (and montage) to deploy some of that content.

A La Carte – Our mission will shift somewhat from the business of “content creation” to that of “content curation” and in that vein, there are some parts of our music share collection that may get “extended” (in the case of playlists that are shorter in duration than 60 minutes) or “broken up” (for rather large shares). The A La Carte series will revisit some of these long or short shares and repackage them with additional material. I have some A La Carte shares planned for Tuesdays, others as Friday montages. I intend to go back to some of the original TC and OL commentary and provide updates where appropriate.

Tuesday Themes Revisited – Finally, as a way of ensuring all our Friday montages meet “the spirit” of the 222 day binge challenge, some Friday montages will revisit some past Tuesday (or OTF Classic) themes. Examples include “Rachmaninov the Pianist” and “Remembering Bob Kerr”, which we proposed on the Tuesday Blog in the early days of that series.

In December, when I tease 2022, I’ll provide more insight into how we intend to complete the “binge challenge”, other programming tactics I plan to use to finish our survey of past TC and OL material, as well as reintroduce ITYWLTMT montages (old and new) into the FYLP programming calendar.

In closing, please let me know what you think of our programming through Twitter (@itywltmt), our Facebook page or by posting comments on the platforms themselves. Your comments are valuable and always appreciated!

Your friendly Music Curator

Pierre

Here’s the programming calendar for the upcoming four months: