Hacker News Reader

Comment by agalunar | Hacker News Reader

> The assumption that music the author doesn't like must be a – likely political – statement is, let's just say, revealing and itself highly political.

Where are you getting this impression from? I just went back through the piece and can't find a place where the author implies that "music they don't like must be a (political) statement" whatsoever.

View on HN

> Where are you getting this impression from?

This part: The station prides itself on operating without any government funding, which in turn requires it to play music that people enjoy hearing and never the kind that some stations (and performing ensembles) play just because it’s avant-garde or purports to make some political statement.

Yes, exactly that bit. This is a cultural-conservative screed in Sunday dress.

That's not the only way to interpret that passage (it's not how I interpreted the passage, in any case). There's no contradiction in saying "pop music is also popular and so our station also has programs that play pop music". In fact, I took the author as meaning "there is some classical music that people only play b/c it's avant garde or political, &c, but the subset of classical music that we happen to play is what people request". And I'm not even sure that's a criticism of those other subgenres of classical music – more an observation on the general population's preferences and the influence of funding on the programming decisions of radio stations.

edit: to be clear, I vigorously agree with everything else you wrote in your first comment! I just want to assume good faith for the author of the featured piece.

Any idea what kind of broadcasting practices the author might be alluding to? I doubt it's about union songs.

Is it about representation issues? I'm not sure if there's even attempt do address that in classical music broadcasting. (Women composers are very much underrepresented in the scores that survived.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com