Classic Ross Amico

Tag: WWFM

WWFM Radio Betrayal My Classical Music Sunset

It was last year on this date that I received the email notifying me that my long-running radio shows, “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord” would “sunset,” beginning in ten days. Sunset. What a euphemism. I suppose it allows me the dignity of the Old West, to just mosey off into the twilight. However, nothing about my dismissal was dignified. As an employee of WWFM since 1995, I deserved better.

When I turned down an offer I can only guess they thought I couldn’t refuse – to produce one new “Picture Perfect” a month for no financial compensation (BUT with the satisfaction of enjoying a continued presence on the station) – they cut the cord. They had wanted to air the show on Friday evenings in rotation with three other, unrelated programs.

The shows’ cancellations were peculiar to me, for more reasons than one, but foremost among them surely was because at that point the station was already airing both of them for free. Granted, they were all reruns, but I had never previously, since the start of the pandemic, been invited back into the studios to produce fresh installments. The last I was told, no one was allowed in except management (the managers, of course, were never laid off), for safety reasons, and the rest of us would be brought back as soon as the situation permitted.

Once seemingly every other business had resumed normal operations, I even extended the offer to come in and volunteer my services during pledge drives. I heard nothing in return. It doesn’t surprise me, as communication was always one of the most glaring of WWFM management’s many weaknesses. But in allowing so many relationships with knowledgeable, capable staff to erode, they painted themselves into a corner. On one occasion, sudden illnesses and personal obligations caused them to have to totally reschedule a pledge drive, because they no longer had back-up staff to draw on in order to keep things running smoothly.

Of course, what they did have was their trusty automation, so that they could continue to pump in the aural wallpaper from a service they subscribe to in Minnesota (less expensive than maintaining a staff of local talent). When they took criticism from listeners for the apparent lack of local content, they began to rerun whatever locally-produced shows they had left, during daylight hours. Of course, most of the music-oriented shows had been cancelled. Those that were left were mostly produced by one person and stuffed to the gills with chat. (I’ll reserve comment on the production values.) I can only speculate the thinking must have been that now people were getting local content. What they weren’t getting was very much music! And somehow, still, whenever I turn on the radio, when I do get music, all I seem to hear is Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (twice this week) and Edouard Lalo’s “Symphonie espangnole.” How many times a month DOES Classical 24 program that piece, anyway? I actually used to enjoy hearing it.

In any case, my tone was respectful. I did mention that if I were going to produce new shows, I would want it to be for a weekly slot. I know for a fact, reruns or no, “Picture Perfect” was an extraordinarily popular program. When it was cancelled, there was a roar of listener disapproval. I can recall multiple times over the decades when one listener complaint by telephone would be enough to send the current general manager into a tizzy and dicta would be handed down (No sopranos in the morning! No organ music! No Sibelius 4th!); but now, from everything that’s gotten back to me, complaints seem to be met with stony silence.

I concluded my email, “I sincerely thank you for the offer, and I am here if some opportunity should present itself to bring me back to do something more productive and satisfying in the future.

“I am still very interested in producing that light music show I proposed, for instance. If you’d like to talk about that, I am all ears.

In the meantime, best wishes.”

In response, I received a Dear John letter, thanking me for the shows I’ve produced over the years and wishing me the best of luck with my future endeavors. No suggestion that we might work together again in any capacity. Which is why I feel no compunction in raking WWFM over the coals every once in a while.

I was also asked if I might allow them to extend the 10-day sunset of my shows to May 20, since apparently they couldn’t get their act together in the amount of time stated in the first letter. So typical.

I can’t say that I am the station’s biggest fan now – I only listen in the car if I’m out for a quick jaunt or if I haven’t got a CD with me – but I have noticed they don’t seem to have ever implemented that Friday rotation of shows. Why drop locally-produced programs that you were already airing for free and then not do anything with the vacant real estate? WWFM, you sure does confuse me.

Anyway, even though I vent once in a while, I try not dwell too much upon it, as it’s in the past now, and I’ve got other things to keep me occupied. Still, you have to admit, 28 years is an awfully long time. What I miss more than the recorded shows are the live air shifts. That’s where I did my best work, providing my own programming, making alterations on the wing, and batting it back and forth during live interviews. These are skills I honed over nearly three decades of service. I understand (but only to some extent) the motivation in never paying me what I deserve (unless you’re in the upper echelon, classical music seldom pays), but the whole lack of respect, I never got. I should have been made full-time decades ago. How many people in the industry, my age, were as knowledgeable, capable, and good natured as I was?

I took an awful lot of abuse over the years, despite having gone above and beyond to literally keep the station on the air (in the days before automation, braving all weather, and in the days before 24-hour broadcast, actually turning on the transmitter, whatever the toll on my personal life and circumstances). I pulled everyone’s fat out of the fire on more occasions than I can remember. But always, a week would go by, and we’d be back to what-have-you-done-for-us-lately.

A lousy place to work, then, especially once they started to drive out all the good people. I would have been out decades ago, if not for the relationships I developed with my fellow announcers and for an unspoken covenant I tried to keep with my listeners, to just ignore all the crap, or push through it, so that I can continue to share music with people who genuinely appreciate it.

Anyway, it was in my dreams last night, probably because of today’s anniversary, so I figured I’d better get it out there and move on.

“Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord” have found a new roost at KWAX, awaiting further efforts on my part to expand my Lilliputian empire. To these, I’ve added “Sweetness and Light,” first pitched to WWFM management years ago. But, as with the many, many times I pitched “The Lost Chord” before FINALLY getting the go-ahead, the idea was smilingly received, and then pushed off to the corner of a desk, never to be revisited until I next decided to bring it up. As seen in the excerpt from my email above, I suggested it one last time as a counteroffer to replace my sunsetting shows.

In my experience, any note that begins with “I hope this finds you well” and concludes with “Kind regards” seldom contains good news.

I do not expect to work at WWFM ever again. Those currently in charge would have to leave before I would even consider it. Bullshit and bureaucracy hold no interest for me. I’ve never been a phony. I’ve always been there for the music, rather than personal advancement. So, with nothing to lose, I can sit back and muse at how brilliantly the rotted wood of this bridge can burn.

More broadly, I lament the loss of quality classical music radio, which seems to have been compromised nearly everywhere. I do miss being able to just turn on the radio and being guaranteed to hear some professionally presented programs of engaging music, all uncut and presented as the composer intended.

That’s all for now, I hope you will continue to enjoy “The Lost Chord” (since 2003), “Picture Perfect” (since 2010) and “Sweetness and Light” (since December), by streaming them from their new home at KWAX.

April 19, 2024
Facebook Anniversary Reflection Radio Days

Wouldn’t you know it? Good Friday, the bleakest day on the Christian calendar, also marks my tenth anniversary on Facebook. This page was created on March 29, 2014, to promote my specialty shows and to keep contact with my listeners, after hosts were booted off the air at WWFM for the first time for financial reasons. So began a dark period during which most of the afternoons were filled with reruns of our specialty shows (with new ones airing at their regularly assigned times). At least I was still getting paid to generate new content. The rest of the day was spackled in with music from a streaming service in the Midwest, with no connection whatsoever to our community, bringing listeners fragments of larger works, plenty of vacuous, chatty commentary, and dumbed-down music history and background (observations I borrow from one our loyal supporters, who has since sadly passed away). But in this season of redemption and hope for the future, I won’t belabor the point. The local hosts were restored to their regular, live air shifts in 2016, and things returned, more or less, to normal, until COVID unhorsed us all.*

*Except management

March 29, 2024
WWFM Swan Song Radio Silence After 29 Years

Four years ago today was the last time I set foot in the studios of WWFM The Classical Network. With the first wave of COVID-19 poised to break across central New Jersey, the plan had been for all of us hosts to get five weeks ahead on our recorded specialty shows, with the balance of the broadcast schedule to be filled with piped-in programming from Classical 24 out of Minnesota.

Needless to say, the storehouse was rapidly depleted. When it became apparent we would be in for a longer haul, hosts were asked to select five more shows from the recorded archive. Eventually, and for the duration of the shutdown, this became the routine. Interestingly, every other radio station seemed to figure it out, with hosts either wiping everything down and doing their shifts in isolation or, in many cases, being equipped simply to broadcast from home.

Trusting, naïve soul that I was, I actually believed what I wanted to hear: that local part-time staff would be brought back as soon as possible. Granted, communication from on-high was always minimal at best. One would think that there would have been at least a monthly update, if only to keep up morale. Instead, if any email was received (very, very seldom), you could count on it was because it had to be written, and it would always contain bad news.

I could have moved on, of course, and tried to find a position elsewhere (I’d had a foot in the door at WRTI in Philadelphia, where I worked for several years, the last time WWFM went to automation), but WWFM was my home, and no matter how ridiculous things got there, at least I was largely allowed to do my own programming.

Finally, last April, I received an email from management stating that my long-running weekly shows, “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord,” would “sunset” (euphemism for “be cancelled”) – effective in ten days! However, if I would care to produce one new “Picture Perfect” a month, using the WWFM facilities, it could air in rotation with three other shows on a Friday afternoon. For this, I would receive no financial compensation — but I would have the privilege of maintaining a continued presence on the station.

Thanks, but no thanks. (If I’m going to be exploited, at least offer me a weekly show!)

And just so you don’t think I was let go out of financial necessity, by the end, WWFM was airing “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord” for free, and I had even volunteered my services for pledge drives. The offers were ignored.

I had worked there since 1995 and over the decades put out more fires than I could possibly catalogue. Before the station went 24 hours, I used to arrive by 4:45 in the morning (later 5:45) to actually turn on the transmitter. Before automation, I braved innumerable snowstorms and changed more than my share of flat tires, frequently in stygian darkness. I climbed up on the roof on an icy ladder to sweep snow out of the satellite dish. I fielded many, many – too many – unexpected sizzlers, either because of human or technical error, to all appearances always keeping the station chugging along smoothly for our listeners.

But as a coworker remarked to me on her way to retirement, appreciation there has always been lacking. I guess I just expected more for 29 years of service. Having survived several mercurial regimes and precarious financial situations, it seemed like nothing would ever shake me loose. I fully anticipated continuing to broadcast there as long as I was physically able to do so. They could have gotten another 30 years out of me – likely longer than the station will actually last.

Now, of course, my recorded shows can be heard on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon. I’ve even added a third show, “Sweetness and Light,” which I’d actually pitched to the management of WWFM for the first time a couple of years before the pandemic. But the mills of God, they do grind slowly. The management at KWAX leaped at the idea.

Of course, recording at home is not really what I want to do. Optimally, what I would like is to return to live broadcasting. That’s my passion. It’s where I shine. None of this sound file editing and manufactured “reality.” On-the-fly live programming and interviews has always been where it’s at.

Although it’s been four years to the day that I was last inside the station, it was to finish loading all of my work into the computer against the impending arrival of COVID. My last air shift was actually two days earlier, on March 11, 2020. I thought I was just going on break.

March 11 happened to be the birthday anniversaries of Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Anthony Philip Heinrich, Astor Piazzolla, and Xavier Montsalvatge. Wednesday at 6:00 was always devoted to “Music from Marlboro,” which I also did live. For the record, that day the program consisted of Brahms’ String Sextet No. 2 and Bach’s Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3, in performances from the archive of the Marlboro Music Festival.

You can click on the images below my photo to read the rest of the playlist for what turned out to be my WWFM live action swan song.

March 13, 2024
Seward’s House A Serendipitous Encounter

I’ve been attending way too many weddings the past couple of years, and all of them, it seems, are held in upstate New York. This past weekend I was in Auburn, and with Saturday afternoon free, I decided to visit William H. Seward’s house. You know, Lincoln’s secretary of state. The guy who later purchased Alaska.

Anyway, no sooner did I walk through the door to sign up for the noon tour than I was met with “Aren’t you Ross Amico?”

To which I replied, “Why, yes. Yes, I am.”

Who was standing there, but a former WWFM volunteer, a musician in the Princeton area, who also happens to be a friend of one of the docents! I could see the person behind the admission desk crane her head to try to discern if I was anyone important; but I think she was fairly quickly disabused of the idea when we started to talk about classical music radio.

You never know whom you’re going to meet, or where.

Perhaps an interesting autobiographical postscript: I once played Seward in a 4th grade play! However, I have a terrible agent, so I never even got an audition with Steven Spielberg.

August 21, 2023
WWFM Cancels Shows Webcasts Remain Briefly

I am reluctant to direct anyone to the WWFM website at this point, after having been treated so shabbily. However, I wanted to let you know, if you are a fan of “Picture Perfect” or “The Lost Chord,” that webcasts of my recorded shows have been brought up to date and will remain accessible there for an undetermined amount of time.

This is not the same as indefinitely. As soon as upper management gets around to it, they will be removed. So it could be a week, or they could last the summer, or it could take six months. Certainly, as the shows begin to gain traction elsewhere, I will want them taken down myself. In the meantime, you can listen to them here:

PICTURE PERFECT

https://www.wwfm.org/show/picture-perfect-with-ross-amico

THE LOST CHORD

https://www.wwfm.org/show/the-lost-chord-with-ross-amico

If you haven’t heard the news, both have been dropped from the WWFM on-air line-up, as part of a bewildering and characteristically slow-moving shake-up. Their inherent qualities aside, both have amassed large followings on the strength of their longevity alone, with “Picture Perfect,” the movie music show, a presence on the station for 13 years, and “The Lost Chord,” devoted to unusual and neglected music, running for 20.

With only ten days’ notice, I was contacted by the station manager via email and told that the shows would be “sunsetting” at the end of April. (Then, for some reason, “Picture Perfect” ran for another two weeks beyond the stated time.) I was given a Hobson’s choice to continue “Picture Perfect” on a once-a-month basis, to be aired in rotation with three other shows on Friday evenings at 6:00. All episodes would be newly-recorded. Should I be amenable to this, I would have the privilege of producing them without pay. I was given a week to get back to them with my decision. (Did this mean I would be permitted, finally, after three years, to come in and use the station facilities?)

Obviously, for a professional broadcaster whose show had run weekly for 13 years, the terms were unacceptable. Matters of exploitation aside (nothing new at the station, unfortunately), the show would be lost in a rotating line-up. How do you build and hold onto an audience when you’re only on the air for an hour the first Friday of every month?

I hasten to add, despite my disappointment, I sent a temperately-worded response, hoping to keep the channels open for the possibility of future collaboration, but in turn I received, after two weeks, what was essentially a Dear John letter.

All the same, webcast audio for the the recent shows, especially, has been brought up to date. I also now have copies of every sound file in my possession, so I will begin promoting and distributing to other markets, with the possibility of getting the shows on another local terrestrial radio station.

To further ensure their rehabilitation, I have ordered recording equipment so that I can begin supplementing archival material with newly-produced programs, which I have been chafing to do, especially as my collection and contacts have continued to grow for three otherwise stagnant years, as I was led to believe I would be welcomed back into the WWFM studios. And certainly I have no shortage of ideas.

Thankfully, in the meantime, the shows ARE syndicated. For now, I have a foothold at KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon. You can listen to them there at the following times, with East Coast conversions in parentheses:

PICTURE PERFECT – Fridays on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD – Saturdays on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

KWAX is an excellent station that demonstrates evident respect for everything it broadcasts, presenting the music complete, and with minimal chatter. Do make it a point to check out their programming, especially during the week. After three years of classical radio swamp gas in central New Jersey, it’s like a breath of fresh air. The station manager? Fellow WWFM exile Peter Van de Graaff.

Whatever my future success, having been associated with the station for 28 years, it’s hardly surprising that I view the handling of the entire situation by upper management as a betrayal, of both me and the shows’ listeners and supporters. And it would be one thing (two things?) if it were only MY shows, but the entire station is seemingly in free-fall.

Remember, if you’re not happy with the changes the station has undergone in the past few years, it’s not too late for you to voice your dissatisfaction.

WWFM announced the cancellation of “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord” (along with Carl Hemmingsen’s “Half Past”) on its Facebook page, WWFM The Classical Network, on May 13. You can scroll down to the relevant post after following the link.

https://www.facebook.com/wwfmtheclassicalnetwork

But if you really want to reach the top, consider emailing the station manager at alice@wwfm.org.

Don’t believe it if they blame the changes on finances. Live on-air hosts cost money, for sure, but none of us have been paid for our recorded shows for a long, long time, well-predating the pandemic. To cancel a popular show like “Picture Perfect” and to drop “The Lost Chord” from a Sunday-at-10 p.m. timeslot – not exactly prime real estate, but a great cult slot – demonstrates a baffling lack of awareness. What’s airing at those times now? More canned music from that service in Minnesota.

I’m pretty confident that it’s because of listener blowback from good people like you that the webcasts are being kept up for the moment. So thank you to those of you who have already come forward. Don’t think that your complaints don’t make a difference. Even if the shows are not restored, management should know when it’s made an unpopular decision, even as it continues to circle the drain.

The one silver lining is that it looks like the station finally removed that horrible looking photo of me from its website, thank goodness. Lord, how I hated that photo.

I thank WWFM for all the opportunities it has afforded me over the years to share great music with an incalculable number of listeners. And thank YOU for being among them. I am sorry for all of us that it is not the same quality classical music station it was 28 years ago.

On the bright side, there’s nowhere to go but up. Excelsior!

June 4, 2023

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