On the other side of your radio, heading into the holiday season with heart suspended, I balance your need to believe I’m really there with my need to let you have the truth. So here’s the truth: I’ll be on the air on Rosh Hashanah. And on Yom Kippur. Yep, even on that holiest night of Kol Nidre, when the antique chant yearning from here to Haifa stirs up tears in the toughest Jewish eyes, I’ll be hosting the usual weeknight symphonies and string quartets. The show must go on, I learned as a kid in drama class. But while the show goes on, the real “I” will be, body and (I hope) soul, in shul.
My first assignment at the Seattle radio station where I now host the weeknight shift was as a weekend afternoon announcer: Saturdays and Sundays. So there lurked a professional conflict. In contrast to my earlier days in the radio business, I have in my later years committed to observance of Shabbat and its attendant laws. So my first entry into the world of milk, meat and music was to run this job offer by a rabbi: I’ll be prerecorded, I said. But how will this look?
It turns out I was asking the wrong question. It turns out that we live in an age where a certain sophistication can be assumed. The right question was: “Can I do this?”
Not so long ago, the fake milk served with coffee after a kosher meat meal had to be brought to the table in its original container. The technology to create such stuff was new enough to require evidence, even from the most strictly kosher kitchen. Today, witness the lovely little creamers at the end of supervised steak dinners, the dinners with the invitations marked “dietary laws observed.” You know the technology exists to make something that looks like, but isn’t, milk.
And so it goes with my radio shifts and me. Just as something milk-like now appears without a label that screams, “This isn’t milk,” so someone lifelike now can make sounds without a constant reminder that says “prerecorded.”
But constant or not, the reminder is there. In fact, the rabbi asked me whether I acknowledge the participation of a technical person. Indeed I do, which is why you’ll hear my thanks to the “technical producer” or “studio producer” during my shift. Without him, and the software he monitors, the recordings I make in advance would not be heard.
Unlike more prominent talk show or newscast hosts, whose work must be timely in a different way, I view the job of classical music radio announcer as akin to the job of the picture frame in a gallery. You go to see the art, not the frame.
So, in the spirit of the season, I hope you’ll forgive me if I’ve blown an illusion for you. For other listeners, the passing of an eve of a Jewish holiday will go unnoticed. But for you and me, I trust that these evenings will be filled with our truest selves, searching out the sweetest harmonies that we can, to carry us, our loved ones, and all of B’nai Yisrael into this New Year.
L’shana tova!
Gigi Yellen hosts weeknights on 98.1 Classical KING FM