Until fairly recently, my morning movements had a kind of ritualistic purity — the quick, business-like ablutions while the household slept, then the quite descent to the dark kitchen to switch on the coffee marker, the brief detour to gather the newspapers from the front lawn, and then a quick bowl of cereal as I scanned the front pages, and finally the delicate task of rousing the dreamy children from their beds — all of these performed to the soft and subtle hum of classical music, courtesy of our local public radio station.
It struck me as a fine arrangement, perfectly attuned to the slowly accelerating rhythms of a day’s beginning. The music was essential in setting the scene. Not that I really listened to it; it was just aural wallpaper. But it served to calm the air at those inevitable moments when the toast burns or the coffee maker floods or the 6-year-old screams that she will hate you for the rest of your dumb, boring life because you woke her up. Right then, a Bach trio is just the ticket.
And of course the radio offered more than music. Periodically NPR butted in with a brief news summary and the local announcer would take a stab, more often than not inaccurate, at the weather forecast. Over the years, I grew not to despise this announcer. He had one of those weightless public-radio voices — listening to his high tenor you could almost see his well-combed beard, his heavy woolen sweater, the Ben Shahn prints in his apartment. But he had the virtue of knowing when to shut up. He would have his say, then go back to playing Mozart or Brahms, and I could go back to asking my wife why she didn’t just drop a few lousy bucks on a new toaster that had at least one setting between “warm” and “charred,” and she could go back to pointing out how I was the one who was always complaining that we spent money like drunken sailors, so maybe I could just take my toaster and stick . . . Really, with the Haydn horn concerto in the background, it was like Matins.
But now Haydn is gone from our mornings — Brahms and Bach and Mozart, too. A few months ago, our local NPR affiliate announced that it was dropping its breakfast-time classical music programming in favor of the news broadcast Morning Edition. Morning Edition shares all the virtues and shortcomings of its sister show, All Things Considered, which runs for about 18 hours every afternoon on NPR stations. In both shows the coverage of world events is exhaustive, which is a nice way of saying “indiscriminate.” It’s as if someone has opened up the dullest section of the New York Times (take your pick) hell-bent on reading you every word of every story and there’s nothing you can do about it.
These days I perform my ablutions, make the trip downstairs, and fix the coffee and gather the papers and wake the children to a different soundtrack — a 12-minute report on, say, the collapse of the Bolivian mining industry due to a default on non-recourse bonds issued by the central bank that threatens to upset world tin markets well into the next century, like you cared. If I’ve heard that story once I’ve heard it a dozen times.
NPR affiliates are meant to be instruments of community service, and so the theory behind the switch in programming seems to be that Washingtonians are starved for information. Never mind that Washington is a city where the Sunday edition of the local paper weighs 12 pounds, where half the subway riders can be seen reading the Economist on their morning commute, and where the getting, storing, repackaging, and disseminating of information is the professional labor that preoccupies three of every four members of the local workforce. (I’m making these statistics up, by the way.) The theory seems to be that the broadcast of music distracts from the far more essential task of taking on board further details of the Bolivian tin crisis.
I disagree with the theory and for awhile toyed with acts of open rebellion, like changing stations or even mediums. This led to the unpleasant discovery that there’s nowhere else to go. Classical CDs don’t come with weather and traffic reports. On radio the alternatives are Howard Stern and Don Imus, and on TV there’s (shiver) Katie and Matt and the endless parade of pundits, movie stars, and prostate-cancer survivors who pass before their thrones each morning. No, it is Morning Edition or silence.
This week I’ve been trying silence. I will let you know how long I can stand it. My kids look on it as a kind of adventure — a throwback to mornings as our forebears must have lived them, before electronic media arrived to roil the air of dawn.
The quiet is eerie to them and to me, and we wonder at the strange noises that emerge: the trill of birds outside the window, the rustle of leaves in the morning breeze, the crackle of the bread as it blackens in the toaster.
ANDREW FERGUSON
