Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we used to be able to hear this kind of music programming, on at least for a few mornings per week, during the Charles Amirkhanian era on KPFA. But that is ancient history, and this sort of music is totally absent from KPFA these days; I don’t know about the state of other Pacifica stations. In fact, “classical” music of any sort has been mostly absent from Bay Area public radio ever since the mid 1980s when KQED dropped its music programming for an all-news-and-talk format. (Not that this was any great loss: KQED’s music programming was decidedly on the stodgy side—all DWEMs all the time—the chances of hearing a work by a living composer, especially an American, were virtually nil.) It is only when I go on the road that I am reminded that classical music still forms the backbone of programming at many public radio stations. I am, in any case, largely indifferent to “classical” music in the narrow sense of the term, that is, music composed mainly by German speaking composers between roughly 1750 and 1820. If all of the works of Hayden, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, et al, vanished in the night, I would not miss them at all.

When WNYC2 is playing something I find disagreeable, I usually switch to 1.FM’s all baroque channel. This station plays an excellent selection of well-chosen recordings from the baroque repertory, generally avoids war horses, and is otherwise largely blameless, except for its commercials, which are some of the coarsest, most vulgar examples of the form imaginable. You really have to hear some of these to believe them—it’s as if they have been imported from some all-night AM country station in (insert your least favorite flyover state). When they are juxtaposed with a twenty-minute set of harpsichord music or a Bach cantata, extreme cognitive dissonance is the inevitable result.

For those who are unacquainted with it, Shadows is, on one level, a sort of Romeo and Juliet in the Carpathians: the story of the doomed love of Ivan and Maritchka (in the opening scene, while they are yet children, Maritchka’s father kills Ivan’s father with an ax; not a promising start for a romance, certainly). On another level it’s a ninety-minute sequence of images and sounds of stunning beauty and power. Set in and around a village in the western Ukraine at some indefinite time in the past, it takes its colors and forms from richly decorated traditional costumes, heavily ornamented wooden Orthodox churches, and strange vernacular architecture, juxtaposed with rugged snow-covered mountains, roaring rivers, and ample quantities of spilled blood.

And then there is the sound: In the opening scenes, three musicians with long, straight, narrow-bored wooden horns repeatedly play a barbaric fanfare in strident dis-unison, a sound that frames the tragic deaths of both Ivan’s older brother (crushed by a falling tree) and of his father, and is featured in the father’s funeral procession. It is a sound that has remained firmly lodged in my memory since I first saw Shadows over twenty-five years ago. In addition, the movie is saturated with traditional (or traditional-style) music: female choral singing of the sort the slavs excel at, dances and revelry accompanied by bagpipes, and a chorus of young women playing mouth harps, are just a few examples.

Sergei Paradjanov (1924–1990) is not nearly as well known in the West as as his friend and contemporary Andrei Tarkovsky. In part, this is because Soviet authorities censored, suppressed, and generally interfered with his work. He was imprisoned twice, first in 1973–77, and again in 1982, on charges including bribery and homosexuality. His real crime, of course, was nonconformity with the goals and standards of Soviet cinema and society. However one may feel about the respective merits of communism versus capitalism or of Soviet versus Western society, there can be no doubt that the crushing of a great artist such as Paradjanov by the heavy hand of the state is a crime against humanity.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Paradjanov’s other major works, The Color of Pomegranates (1969), The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), and Ashik Kerib (1988 ) are all readily available on DVD, for example from Kino. If you have not yet seen them, you should.

Stay tuned.