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Review by Larry Jenkins - Northern News, Wednesday March 12, 2003
Concert FM is one of the relatively unsung national treasures in my opinion.
There was a time when a Philistine Government set about dismantling the service, citing poor ratings as justification, but the Friends of Concert FM was born and advocated for its survival and forces from within National Radio, including a very pro-active Concert FM staff, managed to save it.
It has gone on expanding its listener quotient while introducing some radical changes in programming, which have not always been favourably accepted, but one thing it has done in the recent past that will forever endear the management to my heart was to initiate the series of four programmes called The Good of the Arts.
The Good of the Arts was written and presented by Alan Riach as a 'poetic mediation on the arts.'
Riach, sometime Associate Professor of English at Waikato University and now a Reader in Literature at Glasgow University in the UK, has put together one of the most engaging explorations of the ongoing questions of What is Art? And How do the Arts serve us? since the days of Plato and Aristotle.
I was so struck by the rightness and beauty of the whole thing that I accessed the website of SouthWest, a collaboration of two Concert FM producers, Roger Smith and Gareth Watkins.
Here on this website I was able to download the transcripts of the four programmes and reading them is almost better than hearing them, even at the expense of not having the beautiful Scottish burr of Riach himself as a guide.
What he has put together makes such sense and is such a wonderful reference tool to defenders of the arts that I will certainly keep it and use it for that very purpose. And I would advise anyone who is put in the position of having to seek funding for an arts-related activity or organisation to get themselves a hard copy and start highlighting.
One of the most useful passages to arts advocates comes right at the beginning of the first programme, Old Maps and New. Riach asserts that 'in any age of crass commercialism, the arts are disadvantaged, partly because the training that is needed to help us comprehend them is so vulnerable. The vanity of rampant managers and the strafing heartlessness of advertising clog up the channels of contemplation.'
But then he points out that the arts 'look after themselves'. (Riach quotes the American poet William Carlos Williams, who puts it this way: '...civilisation is wiped out, Homer persists. England will disappear. Shakespeare will be there’). The creative force that produces them is so essential, so profoundly necessary that the are as inevitable in human life as the desire for shelter, food and procreation.' Amen. Convince educators of that fact and the battle will be won forever.
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The Good of the Arts
Transcripts