“Gaining Confidence from the Edgy & Strange”
(L-R: John Monroe ’95 & Jon Solera (Snitow) ’97, Studio C renovations)
[By John Monroe ’95.]
WPRB was such a huge part of my life as an undergraduate that it’s really difficult to even know where to begin. I first heard about the station in August 1991, during Outdoor Action, the week-long backpacking trip that used to be – and probably still is – recommended to incoming students as a way of forming preliminary friendships and thereby taking some of the social edge off the first weeks of freshman fall. One of the group leaders was a DJ at WPRB, jazz if I remember right, and told me about how the show’s programming worked, with classical in the morning, jazz at mid-day, and rock in the afternoon and evening, followed by various specialty shows at night.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Princeton would have a radio station – one that “could be heard in Philly,” no less, as I was told – and from the moment I first heard about it, I was intrigued. All through high school, I’d listened to “twentieth-century classical” music pretty much exclusively. I even looked composers up in Who’s Who and sent them fan mail (you’d be amazed who responded: Cage, George Crumb, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen, Tippett, Berio). At the same time, though, in I suppose typical geeky teenager fashion, I felt this odd social shame about how much I loved it. For me, the great revelation of college was discovering that one could find people who appreciated idiosyncrasies of this kind, rather than turning them into some kind of stigma. (more…)