One Year of Radio: Reflections From Our Classical KING Host Fellow
This article was written by Leona Oliveros, Classical KING’s 2023-2024 host fellow.
When I first applied to the Seattle Arts Fellowship with the Seattle Opera and Classical KING, I did not think I stood a chance. I was a community college teacher looking for creative outlets outside of the classroom, and stumbled upon the job description for the host fellowship. It seemed low-risk, high-reward; if I did not get the fellowship, my life was no different, but if I was offered the fellowship, I had a chance to open my life up to an entirely new world. With that risk, came reward, and I started my year in radio in October 2023.
Some of my first assignments involved getting familiar with the basic production and operations of radio. I spent many hours a week ripping CD tracks that would eventually play on-air and studied the hosting styles of all my new coworkers. Every week there were programming meetings with all the hosts, where weekly topics ranging from planning fund drives to our growing social media initiative were discussed. I had to learn the storytelling format and was given an assortment of playlists to write mock-stories for radio. Every week I brought dozens of stories to my coaching sessions with long-time host, Dave Beck.
Dave listened to me read these stories every week and gave feedback based on story structure, vocal delivery, and name pronunciations. While public speaking is not unfamiliar to me as a teacher, there was a different kind of pressure in speaking for radio. Unlike a classroom with hour-long periods, I was limited to telling my stories in less than two minutes. A challenge in writing for classical radio was finding a point of connection between the audience of today, and the composers and performers of an old and cherished musical tradition. I worried that my lack of classical music training would be a roadblock, but it helped me view the music and histories of classical composers and with the lens of relatability. One of the very first stories I brought to Dave was a link between Franz Schubert’s Die Forelle to the end-of-cycle jingle of Samsung laundry machines – a story not found in music archives, but instead a connection I made because of my own laundry machine.
A perk of the fellowship were my lunch meetings with leaders of different Seattle arts organizations. Some people I met with include Quinton Morris, founder of Key to Change, Jeremy Jolley, Director of Education and Community Engagement at Seattle Symphony, Raymond Tymus-Jones, the President of Cornish College, and Classical KING’s own CEO, Brenda Barnes. These lunches gave me a peek into the history, organization, and needs of a wide variety of arts organizations. I also had regular career coaching with Classical KING’s Chief Content Officer, Michelle Maestas Simonsen, who helped me process my meetings with leaders and experiences with the station into something tangible. As someone entering radio for the first time, these meetings helped me envision what it would mean to continue arts-based work in the future.
After a few months of familiarizing myself with the station, I became more involved with the technical side of radio. Instead of reading my stories in coaching sessions, I practiced recording them in Adobe Audition in as few takes as possible. I learned how to do data entry and show loading for beloved weekend syndicated shows like The Score and Sunday Baroque. This helped me get comfortable with our music management system, Music Master, and our automation system, Zetta. Broadcast concerts are also a major part of Classical KING’s programming, and I participated in event operations and social media curation for Northwest Focus Live and the Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival.
When I finally learned how to track ahead in preparation for my debut Saturday morning show, all my previous hours of writing, reading, and recording helped make the transition much smoother than I anticipated. Small things like microphone placement, preferred audio levels, and even the ruffling of paper notes became easier to manage, and eventually approaching the recording studios stopped being intimidating and started becoming a normal part of my weekly routine.
A highlight of my time here was my participation in the Bang on a Can Media Workshop, a music journalism experience nested in the middle of a new music festival. With the sponsorship of Classical King and the Seattle Opera I flew to North Adams, Massachusetts to grow as a writer and interviewer. This week-long immersive experience pushed me into long-form audio storytelling, which you can read more about here.
Public radio does not exist in isolation, and the Seattle area has a buffet of stations worth exploring. First we visited our neighbor, KEXP, and took a tour with their senior Production Engineer, Matt Ogaz, who also supports Classical KING during live broadcasts like Northwest Focus Live. Then, we took a trip to the U-District to visit the studios of KUOW with their Philanthropy Officer, Gina Kilbridge. And most recently, we visited the new waterfront studios of KNKX and learned how they navigate a mixed-format station from their Director of Music Content, Carol Handley. These station visits helped me zoom out of my Classical KING bubble and into the larger public radio landscape of the Northwest. While there are many similarities between stations, it was valuable to see how news, music genre, and location all influence these stations’ identities.
At my final coaching session with Dave Beck, we listened back to the audio recording I submitted with my application over a year ago. I read aloud a story script using the voice recorder app on my phone and spoke with a subtle, nervous register that lacks the ease that I now have when speaking into a microphone. To hear such strong evidence of my growth at this final coaching session tied a nice bow on this year-long experience.
While my time with Classical KING is coming to a close, it is opening up many new doors for me. I am taking on new teaching assignments at my community college and finding ways to integrate public speaking and journalism more intentionally in my own teaching practice. I am also stepping into the world of freelance writing, which has led me back to Bang on a Can for a social media outreach project. My year in radio may be coming to an end, but it successfully brought me a variety of professional experiences that have opened my world in ways that I could never have predicted.
It has been a pleasure being your on-air Saturday morning companion for the past 7 months on Classical KING. Mabuhay and thank you to Seattle Opera and Classical KING for taking me on this journey.
Classical KING’s Host Fellowship is sponsored by an Anonymous supporter.
