Who's that again?

I was blurbing down the highway, which is the best time to be concentrating on classical music. In the car. On the Radio.

The station was in the middle of a piece of music. Since pieces of classical music can sometimes take hours, this was not so unusual. But I wanted to know something about the piece. Specifically, who was playing the piano. I'd heard the music about a billion times before, so that wasn't an unknown. But who was playing it?

Unfortunately, I thought that bit too loudly. Then a sophisticated bit of AI in the radio antennae must have penetrated the tinfoil hat I wasn't wearing. It said, hmmm, he wants to know who the pianist is. This information was relayed to the on-air personality, who waited the necessary 25 minutes until the piece was concluded, and then, just to make it fair, made sure I was in the middle of a tight turn between a semi and a bus going through a tunnel over a patch of ice so I really needed both hands on the wheel and couldn't turn up the radio. She chose just that moment to quickly mumble the name of the pianist as the first two words of the sentence while her voice was still warming up and gaining pitch and volume. She then relayed the name of the piece and the composer, which I already knew, at full volume and more drawn out. She was smiling as she said this, knowing she had won again.

We've played this game before. Usually I want to know some bit of insider information that the radio people are convinced that people do not want to know, which makes it easy. They just leave it out altogether. Such as, if the piece was originally written for piano and then orchestrated by somebody else, or the particular opus or catalog number so you know just which of Scarlatti's 500 piano sonatas in D major you just heard. They must figure that most people only want to hear the name of some long-dead Italian bloke and the word "sonata" and then they can get on with their day. Which sonata it is obviously doesn't matter unless you are planning to look for it.

In case what I want to know is less specialized information, the rules of the game are that the announcer must quickly blurt out the relevant information before I have time to turn up the volume, as their microphones are much softer then the music. By the time I get to the knob they can then go to commercials, which according to the Geneva Convention must be 5 times as loud as everything else. They got this as a concession after demanding too much humane treatment in other areas.

The game has gotten more evenhanded recently. Now you can go online to find listings of much of the music. However, if a local person is on the air what usually happens is that they list the first few items, and by the time they get to the piece you just listened to there is the ubiquitous "music continues...." If it is the national feed you might not experience the joy of these words. Usually you can find the information you want. Unless it involves an arranger, an arrangement, or a catalog number. And if you want to know who was playing the 3rd horn part you are definitely out of luck.

I try to soothe myself by suggesting that I'll probably have forgotten to write it down by the time I get out of the car anyhow. And that the concert patrons in Peoria will never know what I didn't remember to play for them because somebody mumbled.