Audio by Adam

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:24 — 13.2MB)

A gumshoe is hired find to find God. Straight radio theater comedy I adapted, directed and produced based on the classic Woody Allen story.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:48 — 18.1MB)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:13 — 6.6MB)

Avant-garde musical artists have always liked to stretch the limits of what traditional musical instruments can do. But some artists have gone even farther and explored the less orthodox music of familiar objects.  This story explores the experimental music written especially for toys as performed in a concert in hipster Brooklyn.  Features toy piano virtuouso Margaret Leng Tan, a balloon composer and instrumentalist, and Isabel Negron, among others.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:59 — 4.8MB)

Art Spiegelman is most famous for his Pulitzer Prize winning work “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Nazis are portrayed as cats, and Jews are depicted as mice.  In this profile, Spiegelman talks about his roots as a Mad Magazine afficionado, underground cartoonist, and his experience growing up in a Queens NY family overshadowed by the Shoah.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:42 — 5.2MB)

Professor Maxine Greene of Teachers College, Columbia University, 91, has spent her educating and inspiring educators, artists and children in humanistic “wide-awakedness” and the social imagination.  Now 91, Maxine  has also been Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education since 1975. She just received a Gold Medal from Barnarnd College.  Maxine grew up with my mother in Brooklyn, and was a frequent dinner guest at our home on East 70th Street.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:30 — 7.8MB)

Pamelia Kursten is the 21st century’s greatest theremin virtuosa, who has turned an instrument most associate with creepy sci-fi “woo-woo” music into an art form. Hear what she has to say and how she does it in this sound-rich piece, originally produced for the Voice of America’s “Our World” science program.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:50 — 6.3MB)

A profile of the great (and eminently personable) cellist Yo-Yo Ma based on personal interviews and archival recordings.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:32 — 35.3MB)

This is a 38 minute narration-free documentary of the 20th century using (other than my one minute spoken introduction) only archival sound, speeches and other audio artifacts of that talkative 100 years. The montage is of my own making and perspective as the American I happen to be, and hopefully, takes the listener on a real voyage, despite my limitations.

It was prepared for worldwide broadcast on the Voice of America on New Year’s Even 1999; it subsequently won the Grand Prize and the Gold Medal at the New York Festivals, and a Special VOA award, and I was flattered to learn in it often used in journalism classes.

A note on how to listen to it:  all on one 38 minutes go, with the lights off. It’s fun to try identify the source of the sound you are hearing the first time around. Then check your impressions against the complete list of sound elements which I hope to post as a sidebar on this blog (when I learn how to do it.)  You can also write me and request an email copy, no prob.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:48 — 2.2MB)

This is a story about some of the most beautiful short poetry I have ever come across. Edited by the poet Jane Hirshfield (see “Given Sugar, Given Salt” elsewhere in this blog), it is a collection of short erotic haiku-like poems written by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, who were part of the Japanese medieval court.  The themes – transience, love, loneliness, and erotic longing – are eternal, but the words come across both artful and vividly personal (not to mention steamy) across the centuries.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:51 — 7.2MB)

English eccentricity, tradition, esthetics, mathematics, and a bit of obsessive-compulsiveness combine in the English art of changeringing or bellringing. I traveled to County Somerset in the heart of King Arthur country to get the lowdown and had a blast.