THE TOWER OF SONG'S PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

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Re-Vision Radio's Tower of Song, hosted by the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist, is a Musical & Philosophical-Literary program dedicated to the "Life of the Mind" and broadcast "in the middle of the night." It's an eclectic, free-form radio program (looking back to Sixties "underground radio") that falls between the cracks of traditional radio formats, with either "information" or "music" programs. Combing the two formats, the program seeks to both educate and entertain. ("That's why I'm telling you in song." ~Van Morrison)

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The Gypsy Scholar, practicing "scholarship as performance art," presents his Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack which, in mixing the spoken word with music (Argument & Song; high argument with deep song, high academic culture with low popular culture), allows him to "rave on words on printed page." However, in mixing and remixing Argument & Song (highbrow academic culture with lowbrow pop-culture), the program comes to listeners not from the Ivory Tower but from "that tower down the track"—the Tower of Song (located in "Squidrow").

 

The Tower of Song program’s “Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack” is designed in an audio-visual way that qualifies as a multimedia form of communication (multimedia: “the use of a variety of artistic or communicative media”); that is, the program communicates with spoken text, visual image, and music. The Gypsy Scholar has discovered that the Tower of Song program is in line with the recent academic reformist movement called "Re-enchanting The Academy," which has as one of its functions "Not to explain the World but to Sing it" (enchant: from in- + cantare, to sing). Thus, it's a program that deals in Ideas—the ideas in music and the music in ideas. In this sense, because of the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, it's an experimental "music" program that doesn't, like traditional music shows do, just play songs randomly—it showcases songs thematically; con-text-ualizes them so that listeners will hear familiar songs in a new way.

 

The concept of Re-Vision Radio means that the Tower of Song program is (a) radio itself seen in a different way (re-vision) and (b) radio designed in an audio-visual way (vision). Thus, the Tower of Song website in cyberspace is an integral part of the broadcast, with thematic images that are synergistic with the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. Re-Vision Radio's Tower of Song program looks back in a new way to old-time radio—radio as "Theater of the Imagination"—, making Re-Vision Radio the alternative radio concept that lets you see what it means. Therefore, the goal of the Gypsy Scholar's music program (as midnight radio vigil) is to transport its listeners, "in the middle of the night," into that great architectural "acoustic space" of song—the TOWER OF SONG.

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“Oh let my Lamp at midnight hour / Be seen in some high Lonely Towr, / Where I may oft out-watch the Bear, / With thrice great Hermes.” (Milton)

"In the lonely, dead of midnight / In the dimness, of the twilight / By the streetlight, by the lamplight .... / And I'm workin', on the insight." (Van Morrison)