The following is an original production of AZPM News.

There's a perception that people don't go to concerts, and plays, the opera because you have to dress up.

It's never really been true, certainly not in Tucson, but it's definitely not true now.

There's that perceived barrier that's not a real barrier.

This is Speaking Personally, filmed on location at the Paul and Alice Baker Center for Public Media.

My name is Tom McNamara.

My guest is James Reel on this edition.

James, thanks for joining us.

You are a colleague at Arizona Public Media.

You are the director of classical music for our FM radio stations.

And you've been at it for a while.

You have a lot of expertise and a lot of background in music management, in journalism.

And I know you're all about making music accessible, and we'll talk at length about that.

But the first thing I want to ask you, how does a kid living in a trailer park in Yuma, Arizona, many, many years ago, not too many, A lot.

get into classical music, get into the arts as deeply, as thoroughly, as publicly as you have in your career?

Sheer force of will.

Yeah.

I was the kind of nerdy kid who didn't have a whole lot of friends, had some, not a whole lot.

I was not athletically-inclined.

And I thought, well, as long as I'm sort of an outsider, I might as well go all the way and be completely different from all these other kids.

And I thought, I'd seen enough movies with the kind of snobbish middle-aged men who knew about art and music and literature.

And I thought, well, maybe I'll look into that and see if it's interesting, or at least something I can pose as.

And it turned out to be really interesting.

I didn't have any role models really, until we moved to Tucson.

I didn't have access to a music library.

Growing up in Yuma, not a lot of kids get to do that.

What was it like?

Really boring.

Yeah.

Like I said, I wasn't the most gregarious of kids, so that was fine.

I did a lot of solo playtime, a lot of reading.

And the public library was not too far from where I lived.

So I spent some time at the library.

I enjoyed going to school, but it wasn't exactly the place to paint a town red, except from third-degree burns when you touch the sidewalk.

So, I look back at it, and I think I might have benefited from a richer environment somehow, but I don't really think I would have turned out any differently.

You had to find your culture in Yuma, not to be smurch a community, but the music, the things you were looking for, you had to... Yeah.

But to be fair, I don't really have a good idea of what was available then.

Maybe there was a wealth of attractions there that I just wasn't aware of.

What age did you leave Yuma, then James?

Were you about... We... The family left Yuma when I was just about to enter high school.

Oh, okay.

And so we lived in Prescott Valley for a year, and then we came to Tucson for my sophomore year in high school.

And then that glorious day, you graduated from Flowing Wells High School.

Flowing Wells High School, as our enemies at Amphi used to call us, "seeping sewers."

Seeping sewers?

Oh my goodness, that's not fair.

No, it's not.

That was a good school.

Your time at the U of A, how did you begin stepping into the music scene with both feet?

I never really did step into the music scene with both feet.

I stuck my foot in, it's like the hokey pokey, you stick your foot into the music scene and twirl it around.

Take it all about?

Yeah, there you go.

Because I'm not a professional musician.

When somebody asks me what I play, I say, "I play CDs."

I do have instruments in there.

You still play CDs.

All right.

So do I. I do have instruments in my house, but I'm not going to pull them out when anybody is there.

Neighbors would object.

Right.

It's more... I'm the sort of music appreciation professional.

And when I was a freshman in college, I took Music 101, a music appreciation course, mainly for the easy A, because I already knew a lot of that stuff.

I'd just been sniffing it out on my own.

And once you're in, as long as you're paying attention, you keep picking up more and more information.

You become more and more familiar with the environment.

The Tucson music scene, when you got here many years ago versus the music scene now, how different is it?

Of course, I'm limited in what I knew as a teenager.

Right.

But there was the Tucson Symphony, which had existed since 1928.

There was the Tucson Opera Company, as it would call then.

It is now the Arizona Opera.

I think there was a ballet company then, a professional one.

Maybe it just started up a few years later.

There were community orchestras, like the Civic Orchestra of Tucson.

There were really good music programs in most of the schools.

The quality wasn't quite where it is now because smaller budgets.

Smaller city.

Smaller city.

Sure.

But there were lots and lots of opportunities.

Yeah.

Can you go back to a trigger point for your career?

Because you were exposed to so many different types of music.

You have been president of the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, executive director of Tucson Pops.

So you're pretty spread out in the musical world.

Executive director of the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra.

Those are big credentials.

Was there a musical moment?

Mitch Miller, come on the TV or... Actually, I do remember.

A Lawrence Walker.

Yeah.

I do remember sing along with Mitch and following the bouncing ball.

We're both old enough.

Yeah.

Mitch Miller, because it was television, Mitch Miller conducted like a normal person, but the camera was so tight on him that the director kept saying, "Mitch, we're not getting your arms into the shot.

So can you move men?"

And eventually he was conducting like this.

He wasn't moving his elbows at all.

Stop doing the chicken.

Right.

That's why Mitch Miller conducted that way.

It was all because of television.

But no, I don't know that there was a turning point.

Maybe when I was in elementary school, they bused us to a different school auditorium.

And the local amateur orchestra of bank tellers and gynecologists was putting on a concert, especially for us.

And I thought it was pretty cool.

I think they played Smetana's 'Moldau' and maybe some other things.

And a march, because he taught us how to conduct a march from our seats.

And I think that was my only real experience with classical music at that point.

I don't know that it changed my life, but it certainly made me think about the possibilities.

Yeah.

You've written a book, I know.

And it's been a while since you wrote the book, but it's timeless.

Part of your mission, your vocation working in the music world is to make music, especially classical music and the others accessible to people.

And you wrote the "Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music."

Why are we so timid about certain genres, certain forms of music like classical?

Lack of familiarity, I think, is the basis of it.

If you're going to play classical music, you really need to achieve a certain level of facility on some sort of instrument.

The joke is for rock music, you play three chords on a guitar and you got it.

It's not that easy, but still the classical music tends to be harder.

And because a lot of it is non-vocal, you don't have lyrics to hang off of.

So what does this wordless music mean?

How do I follow it?

And it's long, more often than not.

Do I have the patience to sit there and listen to something that isn't telling me a love story through words I can understand?

I think not having the opportunity to sit down and give yourself time to experience it, especially in person, is what keeps a lot of people at arm's length from it.

It's different going to a concert than sitting in your home, because at home you can get distracted by any number of things and not pay attention.

Sometimes that means it can wash over you and you can enjoy it that way.

But at a concert, you have to sit there and pay attention to what's going on, whether you like it or not.

I was talking to my wife about coming to talk to you about classical music.

She grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, and she told me about how you'd go to a public square, go into town on a weekend.

There would be concerts, public concerts.

There would be classical music.

And so families were naturally drawn into this spectacle together, into the scene and into the music.

And we don't have that here.

How do we bridge that kind of thing?

Because the classical music here is over in the Symphony Hall, and it's not within reach unless you make an extraordinary effort.

Yeah.

Well, back in the olden days, they'd have bands that would get together at the band shell at the park.

We had a wind band that was run by an ancestor of Linda Ronstadt, the Ronstadt band in the 1880s and 90s.

And there was a Chinese ensemble that would play at a park down by the river.

So people could go out and promenade around and sit down and listen to this music free of charge, and it was accessible that way.

Then we thought when radio came along, that would democratize it more.

Professional musicians thought it was going to kill live music.

It didn't.

That worked to a certain extent.

But as the decades passed, people became more and more specialized in their tastes.

And even though you could flip the knob on a radio and hear any number of kinds of music, you always knew to go to a certain space to get the kind that you knew you liked.

Right.

And that's only gotten worse.

In 1990, I was at the Arizona Daily Star.

I was the classical music critic there.

And as the decade began, all the features critics sat down and said, "Well, what kinds of trends are we going to predict for the 90s?"

You know how that goes.

My prediction was that people's tastes were going to expand more and more.

We might not have as many specialists in a certain kind of music, whether it's alt-rock or classical or traditional country western.

But the availability of the music was going to make it possible for people to sample all kinds of things.

And they'd have some sort of at least casual familiarity with all kinds of music.

Didn't turn out that way.

Now we're prisoners of the algorithm.

In the 1970s, Harlan Ellison was on KUAT Channel 6, sitting in the studio talking to a bunch of students.

And I think he was promoting his book about TV called The Glass Teat.

And he said, "People get what they want because they want what they get.

It's a circle and it reinforces itself.

And the more you get it, the more you want it.

And the less you care about what you're not getting and the less you demand."

And that's where we are now, I think.

Yeah.

And you talk about that.

The texture of traditional media, terrestrial radio, we call it in the industry.

You know, radios, we've known it for years.

Television, challenged now by streaming and all kinds of podcasts, if you want to toss that in.

So many media coming at people and you get what you want.

Yeah.

And you bring it in.

What about social media?

Sort of in the midst of all this other media, is social media a friend or a foe of trying to make classical music, chamber music, pop music, pops, accessible to people?

Does it help?

Does it hurt more?

A little of both?

It could help.

I'm not sure how it could hurt, really, except through abusive AI and phony stories.

You see a lot of that on Facebook now.

All these heartwarming stories about some celebrity doing something noble.

Yeah.

It's nonsense.

They didn't do it.

Right.

You can see, essentially, ads or at least announcements for events going on.

And you might follow that click on it and think, "Oh, that sounds kind of interesting."

At least you know it exists.

You have no excuse to be ignorant anymore because you're slapped in the face by one ad after another, one post by a friend after another.

The question is, can you experience it somehow?

Are you going to go to that performance or is there a way to tune into the performance?

There are a lot of performances you can stream, but usually that's part of a paid service.

Yeah.

So how much can you pay?

It's the cable TV problem and the streaming platforms.

You'll wind up subscribing to half a dozen different services and it really adds up.

Getting pricey.

Yeah.

I know that you do a lot of outreach too.

Recently, you were signed up to be at a function where you were exposing young people and children to music, and you do a lot of that.

Are they hearing you?

Is that part of a broader effort to... Yeah.

I try not to be like Socrates who has put to death for corrupting the youth, but maybe I come close.

I don't know.

Don't do that.

Kids are open to anything until they reach junior high and then they develop attitude.

But smaller kids, they'll pay attention to what you have to say for a couple of minutes anyway.

And if you can hook them, fine.

And they don't know that one kind of music is supposed to be for this kind of people and another is supposed to be for that kind of people.

They don't care.

They just want to be engaged.

Yeah.

So it's nice to work with young kids and it's nice to work with older folks at retirement communities.

I've taught a lot of classes at Academy Village, for example, and those people are really engaged.

Lifelong learners out there.

Yeah.

They ask great questions.

You and I were recently involved in the event at Saddlebrook.

Great questions there.

Sometimes very technical questions.

Great answers too, I would say.

Yeah.

We had a nice time.

We had a good, really dialed in focused audience that appreciated.

And part of your outreach is as classical muse director, as our colleague at AZPM Radio, your host of the morning classical show, tell us about, you know, I worked radio in my very early days in life and during college a little bit afterwards at the New Jersey shore.

It was rock and pop music and news, but there it was.

It was radio.

There's a certain magic to radio.

There's a certain reach and a certain touch.

You don't get anywhere else as with what you find in your music, classical music and the others.

Talk about the magic of both and maybe how they intertwine for you and how you'd like to see that happen for the people who listen to you.

Radio is a great job for an introvert because unlike in a studio with cameras, you're there all by yourself more often than not.

It's just you and that microphone in your face and you can pretend you're talking to your best friend or you can imagine that you're talking to thousands of people at once.

It doesn't really matter.

You can just put yourself in a mindset that makes you comfortable.

You don't have to worry about people gesturing at you with cues or anything like that.

And so in radio, even though it's broadcasting to the broad public, you really need to think of it as communicating with just one or two people.

Right.

Trying to keep it personal, not pompous.

You're not sitting in the Waldorf Astoria Ballroom with the black tie and maybe telling a little story to make the music come to life a little bit more, but you want to get off the air as quickly as possible.

Let the music play because people want to hear the music.

They don't want to hear me.

We used to have a saying in radio, "Less chatter, more platter."

Okay.

So I go for the platter as much as possible.

Back when you were spinning more.

But back in our early radio days, we were spinning, cue up a record and let go at the proper millisecond and there you go.

Yes, it is an extremely personal medium and you're dialing it out there to a broader audience, but you do have a dedicated audience, most of whom are familiar with, let's talk classical music, the terminology.

I won't belabor my early days in college radio where we were broadcasting in New York City doing classical music shows and no names, but we had young people getting on the air mispronouncing classical composers, classical terms and all.

And then the phones would light up and I won't go into that either, but is the terminology a great barrier to people warming up?

It can be.

That's why you shouldn't sling it around civilians.

I was the classical music critic at the Arizona Daily Star in the 90s and I tried not to infantilize the audience, but if I used a technical term, I tried to make it clear in the context of the review what it was referring to.

But I'm not going to talk about Sonata Allegro form and the harmonic sequences and stuff like that in a situation where I'm not talking to music professionals.

All you've got to do, whether you're a music critic or a radio person, is just stay one step ahead of your audience so they think you know what you're talking about.

But they don't know how much you don't know.

If you make a mistake with something they do know, that's when the phones are going to light up.

Yeah, we've all done it for years.

Talk about Tucson.

You just mentioned Tucson.

You have invested your life and your career, your knowledge, your aspirations in this community, in music.

What is it about Tucson that just makes you sing, so to speak?

You don't want to hear me sing, trust me.

I like the environment.

I like to hike.

I have lots of people that I know, friends.

I like the possibilities for going out and drinking wine with friends.

I like to be able to go to plays and concerts and dance performances if I feel the urge.

It's just a nice little environment.

It's professional, but it's low pressure.

It's a pleasant place to be.

Once you're in a community for a while, people get to know you and they ask you to do things.

That's how I've gotten into most of the things I've done.

I've been asked.

I very rarely actually applied for anything.

When I was a freshman in college, I auditioned for the radio job at KUATFM.

My first shift happened a few weeks later.

Christmas Eve, 1976.

All right, you got the holiday shift.

That helped.

Nobody else wanted to work.

After people get used to you, they start asking you if maybe you're interested in helping them with this project or that project.

That's how I've gotten into just about everything else.

I've been on boards like the Friends of Chamber Music or Winding Road Theater Ensemble.

It's because they came to me and thought I might have some ideas that would be useful.

When I went to the Star, the fellow who had been the classical music critic encountered me and said, "You ought to apply for my job."

So I did.

I applied for that, but I was kind of invited to apply.

Then it's just one favor after another that turns into work sometimes.

But it's nice.

It's nice to be known.

It's nice to be asked.

I think a lot of us can relate to what you're saying too over the years.

You stay long enough.

You start making friends and sinking roots.

You don't want to tear yourself away.

But having said that, one of the raps, as you know, against Tucson is we don't hold on to things.

Baseball comes and baseball goes.

We're holding on to hockey, sports, things like that.

They come and they go.

We can't retain major league entertainment, major league sports.

What about music as far as Tucson goes?

Are we having a hard time retaining a quality aspect and organization of music in this town?

Or is it fleeting and you have to keep reaching to pull it back into this community to keep it healthy?

The problem with the arts in Tucson is funding.

Tucson has very few corporate headquarters.

The corporate headquarters we do have tend to focus on science funding or education funding, not arts funding.

The money's in Phoenix and the Phoenix area.

That's why companies like Arizona Theatre Company, Arizona Opera relocate their home offices to Phoenix because that's where the money is.

And yet they keep performing in Tucson.

To the extent that we're a revolving door for artists, that could be true.

But I prefer to look at it, for example, with the Tucson Symphony, especially during the George Hansen years and since then when he was the music director, we get a lot of young go-getters hired as principal players, the concert master, first violinist, the principal oboist, whatever it might be.

And they'd play here for a few years, very few years, and then they'd move on.

And they would move on to a bigger, more prestigious orchestra.

So it wasn't that they were just fed up with Tucson.

They were preparing themselves for really splendid careers like Lauren Roth, who had been the concert master of the Tucson Symphony for several years, has gone off to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

That's one of the major orchestras in the United States.

So I can't really complain about that.

I do, however, kind of miss the days when you'd go to a symphony concert and you look at the woodwind section and there are people like Warren Sutherland and Jean-Louis Kashi who'd been there for decades and they were still playing well.

And you become more familiar with the people in the orchestra.

A question from another direction.

This past weekend I went with my family to an Andre Rue concert in the movie theater.

And he is, if folks don't know him, he's from the Netherlands.

He's a Dutch orchestra leader, the son of an orchestra leader, very well known in Europe.

His orchestra is not what some people would regard as the old school stuffy, you know, keep it very classic and end of story.

He kind of made it hip.

He put a lot of young people into his orchestra.

They dance around.

He plays Johann Strauss Waltz.

That's his bailiwick, as you probably know.

But they kind of made it fun.

They made it a lot more contemporary.

Our orchestras of the more classic nature, having to do that or doing that in response to the times, in response to trying to stay viable and bring people in, or are they just doing it because it's the thing to do in 2025, 2026?

I'm not sure they have to do it so much as they're feeling freer to do it.

Okay.

There was a feeling way back when that if you were an orchestra musician you had to be in formation and not show emotion, not move, but players are encouraged to move as the music makes them feel it's appropriate.

Now, orchestra members are not dressing quite so formally anymore.

Go to the Tucson Symphony.

They're not wearing tails.

You go to the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music Concerts and these top notch touring string quartets and trios often aren't even wearing ties.

You know, they're just, they're dressed like you, for example.

Well, maybe a little fancier for stage work, but there's a perception that people don't go to concerts and plays the opera because you have to dress up.

Right.

It's never really been true, certainly not in Tucson, but it's definitely not true now.

There's that perceived barrier that's not a real barrier.

It's hard to get into the Tucson Music Hall, the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall because of the TSA people going through your bags now and making sure that the women don't carry purses that are bigger than this.

Right.

That's the only real barrier and we get that at the airport.

So I don't think a lot of the impediments are real.

Arts organizations are making appearances at pubs, for example.

They're experimenting with shorter performances.

So they're doing all sorts of things, different times of day, trying to find out what works.

A lot of things don't work and a lot of things aren't working because there's competition from all the stuff you can do at home.

I don't think people are not going to the opera because they're too busy going to whatever they're doing at La Rosa, the former Benedictine monastery with popular music.

It's because they're just staying home and watching Netflix or doing SODUCO or whatever they do at home.

Yeah.

They're busy.

Yeah.

Life is busy.

You have to get their attention.

You've left your imprint on so many organizations and in so many areas over many years.

That's a nice way of saying what I've left behind.

No, you've left your mark, so to speak, in a very positive way.

You continue to do that with us and with other organizations.

What's left?

What would you like to do next in your career, which is really more of a vocation?

You've dialed it in pretty thoroughly.

I'm getting pretty close to retirement.

Actually, I could have retired already.

I'm that ancient, but I'll probably be formally retired in another two and a half years.

I've been thinking about what I want to do after that, and I do want to not have a full-time job anymore, but I'm not interested in withdrawing to my man cave entirely.

If they still want me, I'll probably still be working part-time with the Tucson Pops Orchestra, where I'm the executive director.

I may come back and do a few weekend shifts at the classical station here at AZPM.

Who knows?

I'm not necessarily going to say no.

Yeah.

Are you willing to work holidays at Christmas Eve shift?

Yeah.

I don't have friends, so why not?

All right.

Well, James, thank you so much for sharing your life, sharing your profession with us, and of course, continued success as our colleague at AZPM and everything else you do.

We appreciate it.

Thank you.

It's been great.

Yeah.