Emily Reese: Living her dream of talking about music for a living

Emily Reese's journey to being a classical music radio host started with a flyer on a pegboard in Lincoln, Nebraska. "Do you know a lot about classical music? Do you want to talk on the radio?" read the flyer, remembered Emily. "I was excited at that prospect."

That was about ten years ago, when Emily was in graduate school at the University of Nebraska. Just a few years later, she came north and began working at American Public Media, where she's now a classical music host as well as host of the Top Score podcast. For our Member Appreciation Week, I asked Emily to share her story.

Emily grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa, and attended college at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She graduated in 1998, and "bounced around a lot," she said, ultimately deciding to study music theory in grad school.

"I loved having conversations about the way music sounds," said Emily in response to my question about how she decided to study music theory. "When I hear a passage of music I really like, I always want to know how it made me feel that way. Those are conversations that music theorists have."

The flyer Emily saw in Lincoln was advertising job openings at NET, Nebraska's public radio network. "Omaha has its own station," explained Emily, "and the rest of the state has NET. I had to deal with two time zones: I got used to saying, 'It's 10:00 central.'"

Most of Emily's work at NET ended up being in news broadcasting; for a period, she hosted NET's Morning Edition. "There were a million things I loved about working at that station," said Emily. "I learned a lot about news programming — you get good at working fast and thinking fast. But my passion was music, so I wanted to find somewhere I could focus on that."

Specifically, she knew she wanted to work at APM. "I knew that if I wanted to have a job where I was talking on the radio about classical music, it just seemed like this was the atmosphere. This was the place."

Emily was so confident that she wanted to work at APM that she took a leap of faith and moved to the Twin Cities in 2008 even before she had a job here.

"I'd applied for various positions and had interviews," she remembered, "and understandably, they were like, 'Why would you want to quit hosting Morning Edition and come be an intern?' Finally I just quit my job and made the break, and within 30 days of moving to Minnesota, I was working as an intern and doing continuity on the air."

After working in various roles throughout the company — including a return to newscasting, with Minnesota Public Radio — Emily ultimately became a full-time classical music host.

"Top Score started," said Emily, "with an article about Video Games Live. That was a happy accident." Brett Baldwin, managing digital producer for APM's music services, saw that the touring show of video game music was coming, said Emily, "and he said, 'See if you can get an interview with the host. I know you're a gamer.'

"That article," continued Emily, "ended up being very successful with our audience, and it made everyone wonder, 'Is there something here?' So we started a podcast dedicated to video game music. I hoped Top Score would be well-received, but I had no idea it would become such a success. It's really been a surprise."

Emily said she likes all the different ways she gets to talk about music in her job. "With Learning to Listen, I get to focus on the nerdy side of music, to exercise that part of my passion about music — to joyfully talk about so many details, but without being in an academic setting."

With Top Score, said Emily, "I'm able to introduce people to such great music that they might never have spent time with. I just love that I get to spend the bulk of my time just talking and thinking about music."

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