“WNYC-FM told its staff this week that it would end ‘New Sounds,’ a genre-defying radio program that has played an outsize role in the city’s new music scene for nearly four decades,” writes Michael Cooper in Friday’s (10/11) New York Times. “The station said in an email sent to its staff on Thursday that it planned to close the program by the end of the year, along with most of its remaining music programming, as it shifts to more news and talk…. ‘New Sounds, which has been hosted since its beginning by John Schaefer, eked out a distinctive place on the dial with programming that was truly eclectic. It was one of the first, if not the very first, radio program to play Philip Glass’s 1984 opera ‘Akhnaten.’ … It featured the Bang on a Can collective in its early days…. It drew Brian Eno and the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to its studio, and on any given night might feature Balinese gamelan music, country, avant-garde jazz or all of the above…. The show’s disappearance comes as radio is changing dramatically.… WQXR, New York Public Radio’s music station, remains committed to classical music, the station said.”
Posted October 16, 2019
