I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here before, but I am obsessed with This American Life. If Ira Glass called tomorrow to ask if I’d be the show’s unpaid intern, I would be on a bus before the line went dead.
But seriously, what I love about this show, and what I want to learn to do better in my own media production, is how well they bring stories about the most average of people to bold, colorful life. (Their TV series was also great, but somehow their approach comes across even more vividly in the audio-only format.) Even when a particular episode sounds like it won’t make an impression on me at all, it usually does anyway. Often it connects even more fiercely. For instance, I have listened to Sarah Vowell’s contribution to episode 81: Guns (aired 10/24/1997) about four times now. You can check out her section, “NRA vs NEA,” here. Just fast forward to the 4:08 mark if you want to get right to it. It runs about eleven minutes.
I was thinking again about the way TAL illuminates stories because I was at a concert last night and the program was hard and high. Kaija Saariaho, Jason Eckardt, Pierre Boulez. But part of what made this night work was that the performers were making some pretty fast connections with the crowd, saying just a few things about why they cared about these sounds and so, by extension, why we should. We were prepared for the music, but we also got this great glimpse into how they had prepared the music in the weeks and months prior to that moment and what made them tick as people. In particular, Katayoon Hodjati, a flute player who can’t clock much over 5 ft. tall, stood between two huge pieces of poster board that were propped up on music stands and told us how Brian Ferneyhough’s Casandra’s Dream Song had turned into a kind of nightmare for her. For a while, she could only bear to deal with the music a line at a time and carried pieces of the carved up score around with her. When she worried that she wouldn’t be able to read the music under the stage lights, she went to Kinkos and blew the pages up–they were huge–so she was sure not to miss the details.
Then she played, and for a little while at least, it felt like we were really sharing in the dream with her. It’s likely as close as I will ever come to perfecting a Ferneyhough piece, and it made for an extra thrilling ride. But I’ve been wondering since how Ira Glass would have illuminated this story of solo musician, new music, difficulty, and fear. What would he have asked, and what would he take away? I have some reading to do.