US panic as radio station blanks Met content
NewsCries of censorship are mounting after WCPE radio in North Carolina said it was opting out of six contemporary operas at New York’s Metropolitan Opera this season due to controversial content.
The discomfort is over racial, gender and religious themes.
The Met’s not worried. It’s only North Carolina.
Champion doesn’t have a gender theme — it’s about a gay boxer. No suggestion he envisaged himself as a woman.
“Discomfort is over racial, gender and religious themes” – the very basis of basically any opera. Great. Shut down the entire artform, because a bunch of woke eunuchs are gradually discovering the history of art – wich they now are busy demolishing and rewriting.
I think you’re a bit confused here. The “wokes” (as you call them) are the ones calling for WCPE to broadcast all of the Met operas this season.
Most Americans (card-carrying member here) don’t know what woke means. Ditto socialism.
They do, however, know who will be on Dancing with the Stars.
That last sentence in your comment betrays not having read the article at all. It seems you assumed “woke” youngsters were protesting the content of operas when in fact the story is the very opposite – a station manager who won’t broadcast an opera because “non-biblical sources are used in the libretto” (seemingly unaware that in Bach passions and Handel’s oratorios, no matter how pious the text, pretty much everything other than the recitatives come from “non-biblical sources”), nor other new operas because they depict violence, otherwise known as “pretty much every plot in opera”. You pointed that out – and so did every critic of the move!
No, this is more the ‘anti-woke’ crowd, proudly crowing their maleducation and bigotry.
Wrong target – the discomfort is not ‘wokism’, it is Christian fundamentalism. The radio station chief has two concerns, ‘modern, discordant, and difficult music’, and ‘adult themes and harsh language, particularly in music’. Quote “I have a moral decision to make here. What if one child hears this? When I stand before Jesus Christ on Judgement Day, what am I going to say?”. But don’t worry, she’s fine with La Boheme, Turandot, Madama Butterfly, and Nabucco!
That should have been ‘harsh language, particularly in ENGLISH!
The actual problem seems to be Adolf and Benito’s sleepers. I remember how every time the NEA came up, NC senator Jesse Helms would break into fits of demented yodeling about Yankee queers taking over the country.
Foolish comment. The impetus for this suppression isn’t coming from the “woke,” but from the anti-woke, who fear being exposed to stories of which they disapprove. Note that the operas being blocked are in English—it’s okay to sing about unacceptable topics as long as the rubes can’t understand the words!
Except for “Florencia en el Amazonas” which this station seems to be blocking merely because it’s in Spanish – which I guess makes it suspect in their eyes.
Panic? Really???
If they’re going to ban The Hours because a character commits suicide, they should probably ban Tosca the next time it’s broadcast. I’m sure others here will find other mainstream operas to suggest to this station manager for banning.
It’s only North Carolina? Could you be more insulting? North Carolina is one of the fastest growing states in the country and has much to offer on many fronts. Funny thing…this isn’t even the first time a radio station (not even in NC) has discontinued Met broadcasts due to “social issues”.
Yes, by population North Carolina is the 9th largest state in the U.S., and the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, where this music station is headquartered, has three major universities, several smaller ones, and one of the nation’s largest research parks (UK friends, read: estates), and is said to contain the nation’s highest per capita number of people with doctorate degrees. Parts of North Carolina are indeed still rural and “old South,” but this isn’t one of them.
The problem here is that the station management hasn’t been candid or respectful. It is certainly fine if a station wants to limit its programming scope to (e.g.) “Operas before 1900”. But if the claim is to eliminate certain music because of its social content, that claim is bogus; because the same “social content” standard would (and should) eliminate a lot of classic repertoire that has sordid content. So there is dishonesty here; and also a lack of respect for artists and listeners who are interested in new opera repertoire.
The Met itself censored (bleeped out) what it deemed to be offensive language in an opera by Terence Blanchard that was live-streamed on BBC Radio 3. I turned off the radio because I was offended by the censorship.
The Met is quite open about the fact that they bleep out “offensive” language. I don’t like it either, but they have no choice. The broadcasts go out over the public airwaves and FCC rules prohibit them from broadcasting certain words. If they didn’t bleep them out the Met and any station carrying the broadcast could be hit with hefty fines.
“It’s just North Carolina” doesn’t quite capture the situation. The station’s strong signal–its broadcasting tower is the tallest human-made structure in the state–not only reaches most of central and eastern North Carolina but also a substantial portion of southern Virginia.
But those are just the places covered by its over-the-air transmission. Through its website theclassicalstation.org, the station also streams worldwide on the Internet.
In any case, I find this a blinkered and hypocritical decision. Every Sunday morning, year-round, this station plays several hours of Christian classical music. I don’t like Christian classical music, so I don’t listen. I’d imagine that station listeners who aren’t Christian are also disinclined to listen. But they don’t try to censor the Christian classical music program, and the station doesn’t try to claim that children shouldn’t be exposed to musical descriptions of a man being nailed to a cross. Similarly, people who don’t want to listen to contemporary operas from the Met network–for which WCPE is the only participating station within 80 miles or more–are free not to listen. No one is tying them to their armchairs and forcing them to “consume” this music while they writhe in discomfort.
There is no panic. North Carolina has made a sharp turn to the right and is a strong advocate of the death penalty. Yes, it is part of the so-called culture wars that in the South involves banning books, people and opera (not to mention films).
BTW:
– Tosca features rape, torture, murder and suicide.
– Turandot cuts off the head of suitors who can’t answer her riddles.
– Don Giovanni opens with the attempted rape of Donna Anna whose father tries to avenge her honor and is murdered by the Don. Later on Leporello, his servant, sings an aria detailing the thousands of women the Don has seduced.
– La Traviata is about a woman who sleeps with rich men for money.
– And let’s not talk about Carmen.
Addendum to my other comment here:
Many of the announcers on this station are volunteers with a love of classical music, and their enthusiasm is heartwarming, but there seems to be no ongoing training in correct pronunciation. In the past week or two I’ve heard, among other examples, the first name of Murray Perahia pronounced as if it were the woman’s name Marie; the W in Gerard Schwarz pronounced as it would be in German, the W in Edo de Waart pronounced as it would be in English (“wart”); the first syllable of Libor Pesek announced as if it rhymed with “lie”; and almost everyone at the station regularly mispronounces the surname of Trevor Pinnock as “Pinnick.” And so on.
I’m glad there is still an American station that broadcasts classical music 24 hours a day and has not succumbed to NPR news talky-talky, but such embarrassing mispronunciations (certainly not all the time but far too often) have been going on for as long as I can remember.
The singing in these operas is actually comprehensible over the radio? Or even in person?
Just say it’s about a fossil dig in the Gobi Desert and no one will be the wiser.
Makes as much sense as Massachusetts or Sweden boycotting Ballo in Maschera…
‘Inbreeding is more common in the following states: Washington, Oregon, Montana, South Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Maine. Generally, inbreeding is more common in the southeast region of the U.S. and more rural states.’
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-inbred-states
How ignorant of North Carolina, home to Duke University and UNC/Chapel Hill, outstanding institutions of teaching and knowledge to combat ignorance! Not o mention, the city of Ashville, a bastion of culture.
I wouldn’t blame this on the state of North Carolina, but rather on that one program director who is ignorant and bigoted, or afraid of those who are.
Censorship? It is after all a private / donor supported radio station. They are and will continue to exist at the behest of their patrons. Let the numbers decide whether this was a prudent move or not. I take it those crying censorship etc never tap a news source..
What’s the problem, really?
The folks in NC don’t have to listen to the wokester operas from NYC, and NYC doesn’t care if the hicks in NC don’t want it. And NC doesn’t care if NYC doesn’t care. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Just another step forward in the eventual US National Divorce which can’t come soon enuf if you asked many folks.
Politically, this is censoring anything that challenges white, straight, supremacy. NC is in the South.
Normal left out the best part, however. The station manager justified her decision by saying that the same issues in standard operas are OK because they are in a foreign language.
I kid you not.
Who cares about them. Let them stew in their own backward juices. Broadcast of the MET are available from hundreds of Internet broadcasters worldwide.
And, PS, don’t think you can stop the little nippers from listening on their ear-buds to any and everything they wish.
It is a public radio station, they get some state and federal funding. This is a decision borne out of fear because the Republican Party controls the legislature with a supermajority and all it will take is one MAGA nut job legislator to make a stink and pull funding, or worse.
This is a result of the far right Christo-fascistization of the Republican Party, an outdated US constitution that gives too much power to the minority, and a feckless Democratic Party that put its head in the sand or were embroiled in purity tests from the left for 40 years while the Republicans were busy exploiting the faults with the constitution. Sadly, it may be too late to save us.
While I quite agree (kindred spirit?) with most of the things you say about the current U.S. political situation, they’re not relevant here, because the specific subject at hand is a specific American classical music outlet, and the first sentence of your post makes an incorrect assumption.
Unless something has changed very recently, this station’s periodic fundraising drives have stated, for decades, that it is not owned by any university or other institution, receives NO state or federal funding, and receives all of its income from individual listener donations and some “underwriting” by sympathetic businesses.
https://theclassicalstation.org/about-us/
I doubt that the Met Opera was on the wavelength of many MAGAnuts, but now that this woman has alerted them I expect they will start paying attention. They won’t actually listen to any of the operas, but they will start complaining about them.
She’s given them their next victim in the right wing culture war.
No conversations were held with John Adams before Gelb decided to put his 2000 oratorio “El Nino” on the stage with a fully staged black twist. They just rented the performance and are doing whatever the blithley choose to do. The rumor is Peter Sellars drives Gelb nuts.
As others have mentioned, other stations offer the Met via livestream. WEKU Classical broadcasts all Met offerings and always will. The stream is at http://www.weku.org