WHRB Winter Orgy notes: Atterberg to Gorecki to Roach

WHRB is at it again. January is reading period at Harvard (can't tell all you students how unspeakably quaint that sounds to a working stiff with two kids...) and Harvard Radio at 95.3 FM (web site with streaming audio) spends this neither-fish-nor-fowl time upending their usual excellent format and getting all orgiastic on us. The Orgy Season as it has come to be known (really Orgy Seasons, there is another one later in the year) are built on a simple premise:

1. Pick a premise, artist, topic, time period, record label or what have you that can be expressed in audio terms,

2. Collect, find, or, presumably, steal (I can't figure out any other way they could get their hands on some of this stuff) every bit of audio you can find on the subject,

3. Assemble, and play all of it in whatever order you need to play it to make your point (most often the choice is an artist played chronologically) until it runs out - not until the clock runs out, until you have PLAYED IT ALL.

Is Orgy Season great radio? I don't know, ask someone else. Is it one of the reasons I love living in Boston? Yep. Somewhere around 18-20 years ago WHRB played 98 hours of John Coltrane and I knew I had moved to the right city)

This January's Winter Orgy is underway. Among the remaining orgies are (the links are to wikipedia pages, in case you don't know the subject, try WHRB's web site for a .pdf file of the entire Winter Orgy):

January 17: BB King

January 18: Women in Jazz

January 19: The 27 Club (rock and roll legends that died at age 27)

January 20: Kurt Magnus Atterberg

January 21-22: Max Roach

January 23-24: Claude Debussy

January 24-25: Georg Philipp Telemann

January 25: Henryk Gorecki

January 27: Ethel Merman Centenary

January 27: American Narrated Cantatas

January 28: Third Stream Orgy

January 29: Anthology of American Folk Music

January 29: (Clement) Janequin and (Claudin de) Sermisy

January 30: Bass Clarinet in Jazz

January 31: The Rain Orgy ("the many guises of rain in modern music")

If you live out of town, there has never been a better use devised for streaming audio than listening to WHRB from afar. If your radio looks like the one in the photo above, get yourself an FM radio...