Schedule of Future Themes

I select music on a rather spur-of-the-moment basis. This means that, while I usually come into a show with some specific ideas of different pieces of music that I would like to play, oftentimes I end up not playing them because I did not have room. On many occasions, I have brought music into the studio for weeks on end with the idea of playing them, only to be sidetracked by something else that I found interesting (in one case, more than two months).

Even so, I usually am able to plan on working with certain themes. The music might be flexible, but when I say I want to work on a certain theme, you can pretty much bank on it. So, without further ado, here is the list of themes that I will be working on for future broadcasts.

Themes on the Schedule

• New stuff from Sigur Ros! I'm going to try to program it as soon as I can get the album.

Shows in the Works

• I have a huge influx of new(ish) material on its way. In addition to the above-mentioned Sigur Ros, I have some really interesting Rennaisance material inbound. Some great material from old favorites Gabrielli, Palestrina and Monteverdi, but we also get to add material from a few other early music legends to our rotation - the great Josquin des Prez, Johannes Ockeghem, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Orlando di Lassus, among others. Some of this material is performed by Chanticleer, the fine ensemble from San Francisco, so this is definitely something worth looking forward to.
• We also have a lovely looking recording of harpsichord music by the great Frenchman Jean Philippe Rameau, a leading composer and theorist, contemporary of J.S. Bach and Francois Couperin, who was as important to the development of French classical music as Bach was to the Germans. I had to choose between the harpsichord work and an "opera" (actually a play by Voltaire set to incidental music written by Rameau), and I may yet try to acquire the opera in the future.
• To top off our additions, we are awaiting a recording of the great Gustav Leonhardt playing Bach's Art of the Fugue.
• We're looking at so much material here that I fully expect to be spreading it out across several shows (the Art of the Fugue itself will probably take up an entire show). At some point I could also consider doing a show devoted to Rennaisance music. As Monteverdi actually classifies as late Rennaisance/early Baroque, I could also potentially work up a theme that traces the development of music from the late Rennaisance to the flowering of the Baroque, working our way from Monteverdi and Gabrielli, through Heinrich Schutz and Girolamo Frescobaldi, working our way up to Henry Purcell and Dietrich Buxtehude, then finally to Bach, Couperin and Rameau (and possibly Jean-Baptiste Lully). It is an interesting concept, but I'd need to add some material in order to make it work.

This page is maintained by Douglas Flummer, your humble pilot and navigator.
Last Update: June 26th, 2008
Email: saxman@siu.edu
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