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Working in Radio in America and Europe (1985)

One of the truths I learned from working in German radio is differences in our pronunciation of people's proper names. In Germany, the tendency is to regard every name as though it were a German name. Thus, Germans speak of the American writers Zoo-zan Zontag or Kurt Funny-gut, or the movie star Rook Hood-zon, or our former secretary of defense as Yay-mes Shlay-zinger, rather than, as we say, James Schlesinger. In America, by contrast, we try to pronounce everybody's name as he or she wants it pronounced. Over the years, there have been three baseball players whose last names were spelled exactly the same way--L, E, F, E, B, V, R, E, which is a French name. You may recollect that the first of these players, Bill, pronounced it as the pure French way--Le Febvre. Two decades ago, a second fellow, first name Jim, who used the same spelling for his surname, pronounced it "Lee fever." A third one, first name Joe, pronounced those same letters "Luh-fay." Our sports announcers scrupulously followed the example of each man's practice in articulating his own name, calling them respectively LeFebvre, Leefever, and Luh-fay. The point of this anecdote is that in America each person is regarded as the ultimate authority on the pronunciation of his or her own name, and radio station announcers won't take that away from you.

Therefore, whenever I write for German radio a talk about America that includes lots of proper names, I try to be present when that talk is recorded. While the person translating my talk may have produced a reasonable facsimile of my English, there is no sure way he can script the pronunciation of names. Thus, just before the final recording is made, I insist that we "do the names," as I call it, which means that I ask the announcer chosen to speak my talk go through the text with me, from beginning to end, finding all the proper names and making sure that each is pronounced in the American way, which is to say as their owner wishes.

What is reflected in this principle is the absence of nationally accepted standards in the speaking of our language. In Germany, there is something called "good German," also called high German or hoch Deutsch, which is the language of the educated classes; it is the language that radio announcers speak. If an American, by contrast, were told that he or she speaks "good American," there would be a chuckle; there's no such thing in our country.

In West Berlin, where I've been living from time to time over the past few years, the most popular radio station, especially among young people, is AFN, as it is called, or Armed Forces Network. Owned and run by the American military, it plays fifty-five minutes of pop music punctuated, every hour on the hour, by five-minute newscasts direct from America. Broadcast by our soldiers, to our soldiers, AFN operates as though no one other than Americans would listen to it.

However, because young Berliners like American pop music, AFN is customarily the only local station played beyond the earshot of a single listener, often to odd results. Fresh to Berlin, I walked into my neighborhood grocery store. Hearing the American news aired behind the butcher's counter, I didn't think twice about addressing the three clerks in English, "Do you have. . . .?" Their faces revealed puzzlement, if not fear, as I realized that none of these fans of AFN actually spoke English. What happened, of course, is that their love of American radio, the sound of their store, had deceived me into thinking that they did.

Another afternoon in late spring I was at nude beach on a Berlin lake. Now the whole principle of a nude beach, in case you haven't been to one, is that if everybody is similarly naked, no one is going to be looking at you. On this rather tightly packed nude beach, where I was lying beside other Berliners, the only sound in the air was good ole AFN; and when the news came on, the German owners of these portable-blasters didn't turn them down. As the newscaster back home reported that the Mianus River Bridge had fallen down, I let out a scream of recognition. I must have been the only person on the beach who knew that the Mianus River Bridge was part of the Thruway in Connecticut's Fairfield County, because everyone around was looking directly at me, naked twice over. Quite simply, American radio had blown my cover as an American in Berlin.

Working as I do as an independent radio producer in both America and Europe, I get opportunities to observe revelatory differences. When Glenn Gould died several years ago, National Public Radio, which then had a Sunday arts show, asked me to talk about him as a pianist. Since I have a private rule as a commentator never to do anything that somebody else could do better, I recommended two other critics, one of whom spoke to NPR about Gould the pianist. As it happened, this NPR Sunday Arts show was at the time celebrating radio art month, mostly, if I remember correctly, by playing Bob and Ray; and since Gould had also produced some of the most extraordinary radio programs ever made in North America--hour-long compositions of interwoven speech and sound--I proposed to do a feature on those, "to any length you wish," as I told the man from NPR. Oh yes, he said, he knew of these Gould programs, but hadn't actually heard them, because they hadn't been broadcast too often south of the border. He said he would need to discuss my proposal with his colleagues. On my answering machine two days later was a message telling me that they couldn't commission my proposed feature, because, as the voice told me, "We can only feature things that everybody knows."

The following spring, I was in the office of the radio drama department at Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the flagship German stations, where I made the same speech about Glenn Gould's radio art. "Do you think them the best ever done in North America?" my producer asked me. "Yes, I do" was my reply. "Well then, please do a feature about them, to any length you wish," he said, then adding, "We don't know anything about them, and should." I swear I didn't prompt him to say this. Taking the very same bone offered to NPR, my man at Westdeutscher Rundfunk was merely reflecting a different, more adventurous set of values about the possible purposes of public broadcasting.

I should add that my man at Westdeutscher Rundfunk got his high reputation not by attracting a gross number of listeners but by winning prizes in professional competitions for excellence in radio production. While we have similar prizes for peer-recognition here, they aren't so well-known, because, in the career of a radio producer here, such prizes, in truth, count for little, if for anything at all.

One difference in the social situation between German radio and American is that German newspapers and magazines print hour-by-hour daily schedules announcing what will be broadcast on radio. Here in America newspapers customarily print such comprehensive schedules for TV programming, but no newspaper prints more than a few selected "Radio Highlights." Indeed, in America we can get program schedules from individual stations, but there is no single place where an American radio listener can find everything that will be available on his or her radio at any certain time.

But why should there be? The truth is that we really don't need comprehensive radio schedules in America, because most American stations here broadcast a single kind of programming for most, if not all, of the day; and most of us, familiar with which stations broadcast what we want, in practice turn to a station that we know will have that particular kind of programming. In New York City, where I live, there are two stations that broadcast news continuously, and another that has just switched over to continuously broadcasting sports news and sports talk. Another station broadcasts country music, a third black music, a fourth light pop music, a fifth heavier rock, a sixth old rock, and so on. And most New Yorker radio listeners are loyal to a few stations, while blissfully ignorant of the others. In truth, we don't need an elaborate schedule to confirm what we already know. In one American city, Miami, the principal newspaper prints only a list of radio stations, accompanied by their location on the dial and then a single tag line such as "Gospel" or "Nostalgic Pop" for its particular kind of programming.

This isn't broadcasting in the sense of trying to reach the largest number of people but something else, which I call narrowcasting, which is to say programming that is aimed at only a segment of the mass audience. Most commercial radio stations really aren't interested in attracting a gross maximum number of listeners, but instead in defining an audience reached by no one else. This is done for a legitimate commercial reason, which is the claim to deliver to potential advertisers a group of listeners with particular characteristics. For instance, a manufacturer of hair straightener would be smarter if it advertised on a station playing black music, while classical music stations in this country depends upon such advertisers as stockbrokers and international airlines. Both these last enterprises would in turn address deaf ears if they purchased time on a station playing, say, the top-40 hits.

There's another way to illustrate the difference between the broadcasting of American television and the narrowcasting of radio. Television networks compete directly with one another for the largest possible audience. Every weekday, around 7:00 p.m. in my city, all four of them broadcast the national news; around 11:00, three of them broadcast the local news. Around two in the weekday afternoons, they all have soap operas. They are competing with one another for what they guess would be the taste of the largest possible audience at each of those time slots. On New York City radio, by comparison, you cannot find such similar programming for any periods longer than the noontime five-minute newscast. Otherwise, New York City radio stations are in competition only with those few broadcasters whose characteristic fare most nearly resembles theirs.

In this sense, it could be said that as advertising media, radio stations in this country resemble not television stations but newspapers in cities with more than one paper. As the New York Times is aimed at a public different from those purchasing the Daily News, so the ads in the New York Times differ from those in the Daily News, which has different ads from those in the Amsterdam News, which is published in Harlem. Similarly, most slick magazines nowadays are aimed not at the general audience but a narrow definable segment. The suspicion is that as the number of television stations expands in this country, thanks to cable transmission, we shall start to see more narrowcasting on the tube as well.

In the Middle East, where I recently spent sometime, Voice of America and the BBC World Service sit next to each other on the AM dial, and the differences between them are not uninstructive. Voice of America is an arm, indeed a rather musical arm, of our propaganda services; and even in its English programming, it is designed to tell the rest of the world about what is happening in America. There is news, to be sure, and features, in addition to editorials, which are prefaced with the advice that such editorials represent "the official view of the U.S. government." What sports news there is on VOA has an international focus, such as the World Cup of soccer or an American winning the Tour de France bicycle race, because, it can be assumed, foreigners aren't much interested in baseball.

The BBC World Service is something else. It is designed mostly for British people living outside the country. The BBC's ten-minute newscasts at the head of most hours are treasured around the world for their credibility, broadcasting as they often do, news that might be censored in one's own country; but the other programming on the BBC has another focus. On an evening music program, the announcer says, "Bill and Sally Jones, now in Mauritius, write that their record collection has been delayed in transit from England; they would like to hear one of their favorite songs," which the disk jockey now plays. Early one Saturday evening, I remember a program that I think went on forever, or at least for a half-hour, wholly of interim cricket scores from weekend matches in progress all over England and the former colonies. Since these cricket statistics involved not only "runs" and "innings," which are two terms I understand, but numbers for an item called "overs," I knew this program wasn't for me.

The only radio comparable to the BBC for Americans overseas would be the AFTRS, or the Armed Forces Television and Radio Service, which is aimed specifically at our servicemen around the world. If you're traveling with a portable radio to Italy, or Germany, or Taiwan, or anywhere else in the world where American military personnel are stationed, try to find it, because, to be frank, you'll be pleased to tune it in. In Berlin, where I've spent some time, AFN broadcasts live baseball games, some of them beginning in the middle of the night, since the time zone including Berlin is several hours ahead of Los Angeles, but the voice of Vin Scully always warms American ears. One difference between the Armed Forces Network and Voice of America is that, if you close your eyes, AFN will do for you what the BBC World Service does for an Englishman--it will make you feel at home.

It is commonly said that public radio stations in America resemble those in Europe in that both are free of commercials, but there the resemblance ends. The European stations have thousands of employees, most of them civil servants who can expect to retain their jobs until they quit or retire; the American public stations have only a few employees who customarily come and go as easily as gas station attendants.

European stations pay directly those independent producers like myself who make programs for them--pay them not only for the expenses of production, but for broadcasting rights--and pay for those broadcasting rights again should the programs ever be rebroadcast. In my experience, they are scrupulous not only about paying the producer, even if he lives in another country, but about letting him or her know where and when their programs have been aired. American public stations can barely pay their fulltime staff. Most of the individuals who do special programs for local public stations in this country aren't paid at all, and most of the programs that come from "networks" like National Public Radio or American Public Radio are available to the local stations for modest sums, if not free.

European stations get their budgets from the licenses that must be purchased to use a home radio in those countries; and if a listener is caught without a license, he or she can be fined. In America, public stations have no such government-assistance in collecting revenue. Forbidden as well to broadcast the commercials that subsidize the free transmission of commercial stations, they must instead beg, often obnoxiously, usually to cover just operating costs. More elaborate radio productions, like the show you're now hearing, U.S. Ear, must be financed from sources outside of local stations. That means petitioning foundations, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was the principal funder for this broadcast, or the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Ford Foundation, which bankrolled the American Public Radio Program Fund. Sometimes a private foundation here will, on its own initiative, produce a program like "Music from the Hearts of Space."

Most such programs are then "distributed" to individual public stations gratis--that's right, absolutely free; and in this country, there are literally hundreds of independent producers, having gotten funds from somewhere to make their tapes, who are then literally knocking each other dead in order to give programs away to local public stations like your own. You heard it right--to give them away. Needless to say, once such programs are aired, nothing goes back to the artists involved in producing them--nothing, not even any documentation telling that their program had been broadcast, or rebroadcast; and in this respect as well, the American system differs from the European.

Another practice distinguishing European radio from American is that most of what you hear over there has been produced expressly for radio. Here very little is produced expressly for radio, aside from commercials, newscasts and a specialized feature program like this one. Most of what you hear on American radio, on public stations as well as commercial ones--most of what you hear--was initially produced for records, which is to say that it is then reproduced on radio. To put it succinctly, radio in Europe is a production medium; here it is a reproduction medium. Even our so-called quality radio stations are mostly reproducers, playing as they do classical music or jazz that is commonly available on your local record store.

Television, curiously, is still mostly a production medium, filled as it is with shows that were initially made for television. Even if we see so many shows as repeat presentation, they were still made with the small screen as the ultimate transmission medium. Television becomes a reproduction channel when it shows films that were initially made for moviehouses.

Let me consider, by contrast, a typical weekday programming schedule over the public station in Berlin, Sender Freies Berlin. There is a radio play, a feature about a classical composer's career, a portrait of a Berlin neighborhood. There are discussion programs, instructional programs. There are tapes of live concerts, usually on the premises of the radio station itself, often of music that is unavailable on records (such as very contemporary compositions)--in other words, most of the shows on Sender Freies Berlin were produced expressly for radio broadcast.

There are other differences as well. Because listener-sponsored American stations don't have sufficient funds to purchase an abundance of audiotape, much of what is produced expressly for radio here is necessarily done live, directly into a microphone that is electronically attached to a home receiver. I remember once doing a show at a New York City public station about a new book of mine, an anthology of American sound poetry; and among the guests accompanying me to this program were not only contributors to the book but a Swedish sound poet who had done a lot of radio work in his native country. On the wall of this studio he noticed a sign warning him against saying any of seven naughty words that, if uttered over the air, could get the broadcasting station in legal trouble. Then he realized that everything he said in that studio would go immediately out over the air, and he remarked that he has never before spoken live on radio. "They wouldn't allow it in Sweden to anyone other than newscasters." Come to America, I told him, for radio opportunities unavailable back home.

In working, as I've done, as an independent producer for public radio in both Germany and America, I've observed many differences, but none is so curious, or comic, as their divergent attitudes towards copies of one's work. In America, copies can be made quite easily, often on cassette copying decks that are freely available; in Germany, as elsewhere in European radio, there are explicit rules forbidding the replication of audiotape, except with certain dispensations.

It used to be in Germany that no one involved with a program was entitled to a copy--I said no one, absolutely no one. You could make a copy of your program when it was broadcast, but that was done on your own time, in your own house where no one could catch you; but you were forbidden to make a copy in the radio station itself. Since everyone involved with the production of your program knew this prohibition against audio copying was no more tenable than that against the consumption of alcohol, it became the custom for a producer of a program, someone like myself, to take surreptitiously into the editing studio itself a blank reel of tape, or a cassette recorder filled with tape. You would then excuse the staff technician to go get coffee or whatever for a length of time greater than one's program. Then you'd whip out your stuff and make a copy on the premises, putting it back into your bag. Fortunately, the security doorman at these stations didn't check the luggage of people coming in and out.

Since everyone involved with radio production realized the ridiculousness of this rule, it was decided a few years ago to let the technician make made a copy of your work, only with the explicit approval of an executive at the broadcasting station. I remember once telephoning an executive at home at night in order to get his verbal permission. I think he later had to submit confirmation in writing. This copy was then made on a tiny cassette recorder already in the production studio. However, since this cassette machine was scarcely of the highest quality, my own work, in this case a delicate fugue of the Biblical Gospels with four interwoven speakers, sounded so muddy that I henceforth thought that my production was unsuccessful. (Not until I later got, by another ruse, a copy of the original tape did I learn how wrong I was in my initial estimate.) I should point out that this all this prohibition against copying was designed supposedly to protect guys like me, the authors of a radio program, against anyone stealing my cultural property. It became, in truth, a way of preventing me from taking it for myself.

As noted, this rule is quite specific in allowing only the program's author to have a copy; and where this generally works in my favor, it once worked against me. My first contact with German radio came in 1980, when I was interviewed by a staff producer at Westdeutscher Rundfunk about my sound poetry. My work, along with our interview, became a principal part of his feature about American sound poetry. When I later came to do my own productions for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, I became interested in archiving my own radio activity, and so asked this staff producer for a copy of this program in which I appeared. He said he would give me one, as soon as he had time to make a copy. A year passed; and since I hadn't gotten a copy, I reminded him about it. He said he would get to it soon. Another year passed. Since I had some time to kill in his anteroom, where his loyal secretary sat, I asked her to remind him about this long-promised copy. She suddenly looked horrified. "He's not allowed to give you a copy," she replied; "only the author of a program is allowed to have a copy. He's the author of that feature; you're just a star!." I thought twice about whether I was misunderstanding her English--I'd never been "just a star" before. As it happens, a few days later, my man at Westdeutscher Rundfunk gave me a copy of this program; and stuck with free time in the anteroom again, I mentioned to the loyal secretary that I finally got what I wanted. Her response was, simply, "You shouldn't have told me; he's not allowed to do that."

There's one impractical wrinkle in the current copying policy, and that forbids the making of your own archive copy until after the program is broadcast. (Apparently an exception was made for my Gospels, perhaps because I was present in the studio at the time.) This last rule is designed, supposedly, to protect the investment of the production station. Since there are thirteen autonomous stations in the German system, they don't want you selling the program to another of them before the initial station broadcasts it. That seems reasonable in principle, but it is self-defeating in practice. When I'm not composing audiotape for them, I script features about American radio art; but since the technicians are capable of making mistakes in my absence, there is no way for me to correct them until after my program is broadcast. One of these programs, a feature about classic American radio comedy, included examples from Jack Benny. Now Benny, you may remember, portrayed himself as an incorrigibly stingy man; as a comedian, he also had a genius for pausing before he said the joke, thereby getting people to laugh first in nervous expectation of the joke and then again after he said it. His most famous joke, which I incorporated in its original American English into my feature, had him whistling in the park, marveling about what a nice night it was. A heavy male voice interrupts him, "Hey, bud, your money, or your life." There is no answer; so the heavy male voice repeats himself. As Benny is still silent, the audience laughs nervously. Benny then utters the classic punch line in praise of his own stinginess, "Hold on, I'm thinking it over." When the German technicians heard this tape, they decided to cut it after the first round of laughter, assuming the joke was then complete, thereby leaving Benny's classic punchline literally on the cutting room floor. Unfortunately, since a cassette copy of this production could not be made available to me until after the program was first broadcast, I didn't get a chance to notice the technician's error until it was harder to correct than it would have been before.

I have one more story about copies. A few years ago I wrote for the New York Times an article about American artists working in German radio. The article was pegged to National Public Radio's first American broadcast, albeit in abridged form, of John Cage's Roaratorio, which had been produced a few years before for Westdeutscher Rundfunk. I asked National Public Radio for an advance copy of this abridgement, which they sent me on cassette. Wanting, as any scrupulous critic would, to compare it with the original 60-minute work, I asked for a copy of that as well. A few days later, I got a call from NPR telling me that their technician had made a mistake; and instead of copying Cage's Roaratorio onto a cassette, he had put it on ten-inch reels. Would I mind? Well, since the acoustic quality of reel to reel copies is considerably superior, I leaped at the chance.

The following spring, over lunch at Westdeutscher Rundfunk, I told my producer the story of how I obtained a reel-to-reel copy of Cage's masterpiece. I could see him getting angrier and angrier. "They aren't allowed to make copies of Roaratorio," he screamed; "that's against contract." I changed the subject. Already amused by this German uptightness about copies, I happened to tell this last story a few days later to another audio artist who worked for this executive. This colleague, an Austrian, told me, considerately, "You shouldn't have told him that story." Why not, I asked. "He'll think you irresponsible." I was speechless, but, needless to say, impressed.