Since the New Year, National Public Radio has been rolling out a lot of new spots and background-filler music, mostly synthetic but including plenty of clips from small-combo, big-band, even an occasional symphony orchestra, and of course solo guitar or piano, and the other day I heard, for about three seconds, a mournful trumpet that could have been Wynton Marsalis.  The sonic substrate is almost always synthetic, with multi tracks coming from the sequencer, such as this favorite, for an electronic celesta:

I don’t know who tinkers these tiny ten-second pieces; I wrote to B. J. Leiderman to ask, without getting a response.  My guess is that he farms out a lot of them, possibly to a workshop or class where many of the spots are exhibited on a table at the end of the semester and chosen for radio publication later.  I listen as much as I can, because the spots are always ear-catching, with melodic and even harmonic interest from time to time.

 But there is one major sound barrier: the thud bass.  It has no pitch, only heavy meteorism, always palpable even when the volume is turned down low.  Usually it is on a sequencer track, sometimes as an arhythmic rumble like an underfilled waterbed, but more often synchronized with a second track which is a basic-boom-chick drum machine, with the offbeat (“chick”) a synthetic snare-drum flam, which is totally annoying.  Sometimes there is a disco drum, at 132 to the minute.  And this morning I heard two percussion sequencer tracks that weren’t even synchronized with each other, let alone with the music they supposedly support.  Is there any way to get through to NPR to send that thud bass to the drumpster, without going through Congress?  I’m all in favor of synthetics, and sequencers, but like instruments and players, they have to be carefully handled and even more carefully watched.  If you get Living on Earth on Sundays, keep on enjoying this ditzy bit, accompanied by a xylophone-marimba rhythm sequencer:

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the music of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many music subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.