HOW CAN MUSICOLOGY BE MADE MORE ACCESSIBLE WITH THE HELP OF RADIO? A Comparison of the Listening Habits of German and Croatian Classical Music Radio Listeners Case Study: The Broadcast Croatian Music Alphabetarium of Croatian Radio

Abstract

This article presents the Croatian Music Alphabetarium of Croatian Radio, one of the numerous music broadcasts of Croatian Radio's Third Program (HR3), the only specialized public radio station for culture in Croatia, as a case study of a (seemingly successful) attempt to make scholarly musicological texts (in the form of radio speech) more accessible. The results of Croatian radio market research published in 2015 speak in favour of the possibility of making scientific musicological texts more accessible to the general public with the help of radio. These results were compared and supplemented with the results of the German survey from 2006, which clarify the expectations of German classical music listeners, and thus helps us understand the Croatian classical music listeners' expectations, which have not been researched in our country so far. The Croatian research also reveals that Croatian listeners are willing to listen to a speech for up to half an hour if they are interested in the topic, what encourages us to present and argue for the publication of scholarly musicological texts on the radio. Furthermore, the Croatian research reveals that our case study broadcast deals with two out of the fourteen most interesting topics for the Croatian listeners - cultural heritage and contemporary culture. The Croatian musicologists who studied musicology and music journalism are well media educated, and thus willing to publish their texts not only in professional and scientific journals but also on HR3. In order for that to happen the HR3 editors, who are accomplished musicologists and journalists, have to demonstrate their willingness as well as their superiors to broadcast scholarly musicological texts. Since the foundation of the Croatian Radio Third program (in 1964) and the Department of Musicology in Zagreb (in 1970), named Department of Musicology and Music Journalism in the period between 1977 and 1994, these conditions had been met until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. During that period (1964-2020) HR3 regularly broadcasted scholarly musicological texts, and in the last eight years HR3 has produced as many as two weekly broadcasts and two monthly broadcasts with scholarly musicological texts. The pandemic has given rise to the negative trend of reducing speech in classical music broadcasts, but hopefully not for long.