WTJU's Changing --

Big changes are coming to WTJU, and they'll be here in August.

We are at a juncture in the life of 53-year-old WTJU where change is needed in order to build listenership, student involvement and revenue. This is your invitation to help shape the station.

Our current schedule is being revised, and the future of classical music at the station -- and how it fits into this plan -- is up for discussion.

You can be part of that discussion. The University of Virginia has set up a forum where listeners (like yourself) and station volunteers (like me) can have their say. And your voice does matter.

One of the features of the change is to make the schedule more consistent by moving each genre to its own part of the day. That means that at the very least, our evening classical programming will go away.

Already slated to be canceled:

The Early Music Show, our self-produced program of medieval and renaissance music.

Five-Star Edition, which featured outstanding contemporary and archival performances of the basic repertoire.


Eventide, with Andrew Pratt - lush, romantic music for evening listening


A Time for Singing - An Shaffer's long-running show (over 20 years) showcasing the great opera singers.

Portrait of the Artist - Our weekly look at a great composer, performer, or ensemble.

Mitchell with Music - The avuncular John Mitchell's long-running program of classical music and artist interviews.

What happens to our morning classical programming? And our Sunday afternoon opera? And our other programs? That depends, in part, on you and your response to the forum's survey.

Now is the time for all good listeners to come to the aid of their music. Because come August, everything changes. Participate in the forum, and have a say in the direction of that change.

WTJU Forum

Help Write a Symphony - #twittercomposition

British composer Sam Watts is writing a symphony -- with a lot of help. A savvy user of social media, he's asked people to contribute to the new work by sending in a note through Twitter. As he explains in his blog A Composer's Campfire,

It’s madness, I know, but I’m asking as many Twitter users as possible to tweet me with a musical note (A-G, naturals, sharps and flats) and these notes will, in the order I receive them, be the melody of the composition.  It will be a three or four movement symphony (depending on how many notes I get).

Tweet me (@i_is_sam) with your choice of note (you can even specify note duration if you like) and include the hashtag #twittercomposition! Only one note per tweeter please! Then please tweet about it to all your followers to get them involved.  That’s it.  I’ll do the rest. 

 You can also just to a search for #twittercomposition to find out more.

In his most recent post, Watts talks about the development of the composition. It looks like it's going to be a symphony, probably in three movements. The core melody will be 140 notes (Twitter limits messages to 140 characters).

#twittercomposition is a rare opportunity to see the creative process at work. Because the composition's based on social media interaction, we can watch the work evolve from inception to completion.

Will the #TwitterComposition be the greatest symphony in the world? Perhaps not, but by the nature of its creation, it will very much be a symphony of the world

Kings of the High Cs

Today an operatic tenor who does not have a ringing, full voiced “top” is likely to find his career limited to minor roles in lesser opera houses. The high C sung full voiced from the chest is a phenomenon that dates only from the first third of the 19th Century. Until the time of Donizetti and Bellini, a light, agile voice, was the ideal for tenors. Today, we would call that kind of singer a tenore di grazia, and it is no longer considered ideal, at least in the operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, and their successors.

Before about 1835, the legacy of the castrati was a light, agile, but technically accomplished singing style. One of the finest singers of this type was the French tenor Adolphe Nourrit, a cultured man as well as a fine tenor who created some of the most brilliant tenor roles of Rossini and Meyerbeer. At the Paris Opera, he was the king of tenors, the favorite of Rossini himself. The fine French tenor Giovanni David, the creator of the role of Rodrigo in Rossini’s Otello in 1816, is said to have begun experimenting with pushing the “chest voice” above the tenor’s “break” (where the chest voice begins to yield to the head voice, or falsetto) at high G.

But the real change occurred in 1837, when the tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez, newly returned to Paris from a triumphant stay in Italy, stunned the audience at the Paris Opéra, with a series of chest-voice top Cs in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. The style of agile, light-voiced tenors like Nourrit was eclipsed virtually overnight, seemingly for good. Thereafter the tenor who could not manage an interpolated high C in the aria Di quella pira in Verdi’s Il trovatore (which is not in the score) was liable to find himself hooted off the stage, especially in Italy. Heroic, dramatic tenors such as Caruso and Gigli became the leading stars of the operatic stage throughout much of the 20th Century.

We have seen the rebirth of the Rossini tenor repertoire recently, with the appearance of such fine singers as Juan Diego Florez, Lawrence Brownlee, and others. While they sing full-voiced throughout their range, the head voice plays a role in the astounding agility with which these singers execute Rossini’s extremely difficult music for the tenor voice. As a result we are hearing some of the finest performances of Rossini’s music today since the music was first performed almost 200 years ago.