Sir, - RTE, in its desperate struggle to hang on to dwindling audiences, goes more and more "tabloid" with every reorganisation. Why not? You give the majority what they want, and you stay in business. I am saddened that my personal taste for the music of composers born before 1980 gets squeezed all the time.
I used to love to wake up to jolly John Creedon, with his soothing banter. I didn't mind having a wide mixture of music, because in the first half hour or so I'd get my statutory "fix" of my kind of music. No more. I had to look elsewhere. I'm not complaining. One is the victim of one's own tastes.
I found, FM3. Dear God, how could they do it? Here's this antiseptic voice patronising me at seven o'clock in the morning! She sounded like a nun, with the book in one hand, trying to hypnotise her third year class with the essentials of applied thermodynamics. As a preamble to Haydn's 8th Symphony, I get a dissertation on the work, including, in one sentence, the words "monothematicism" and "periodicity". Now, dear old Joe Haydn wrote that lovely piece when he was still in his twenties, and I'd say that monothematicism was high up on his table of low priorities. (By the way, my 3052 page edition of the Oxford Dictionary doesn't recognise this word.) If it were Hindemith or Schoenberg and I were in humour for intellectual challenge, I'd be glad of a short comment, but from an expert, of course.
Music is like love - there to excite and amuse us, troublesome and sad at times, but there always and everywhere. And it annoys the bejapers out of me to hear this arrogant obscurantist elitism which seems to suggest that we must keep at arm's length those terrible rough people, who might want to share this common, jointly owned treasure with us. Thank God for the likes of Fionn O'Leary, who clearly knows and loves his subject, and who welcomes all and sundry into this great field of free magic.
Now, if I were the cynical sort (which, thank the Lord I'm not, sir), I'd be saying RTE may know well what it is doing. Treating classical music programmes in "this manner will drive the listeners away in thousands. RTE can then shrug its crafty shoulders and take the programmes off because of lack of demand. Then we can have continuous rock and pop all day and night, and the kids who are so amenable to advertising will flock back.
Monothematicism my foot! - Yours, etc.,
Heytesbury St,
Dublin 8.