Poster Winding Road Ahead
Winding Road Ahead
Matthew Quarisa via Flickr; Creative Commons

Winding Road Ahead

Bill Morelock's breaks from May 25, 2015

A simple note to deliver a message dense with emotions and enigmas? Probably can't be done. So, Warning: Winding Road Ahead.

As of Memorial Day, I'll be leaving Classical MPR as a staff member.

I especially want to speak to you who've been so kind as to listen with understanding and engagement to attempts over the years to make a certain kind of radio with this music we play. You've responded to eccentricities and explorations with the refreshing exuberance of sports fans: "You go guy!" Harboring these uncertain — and certainly indefinable — aspirations to emerge from a classical cocoon as any number of unpredictable and perhaps indecorous broadcast species, I've sometimes been moved to tears and joy by your grasping and approving the whimsies.

Call it a weakness. Call it a flaw. But the impulse to do this work this way is driven by questions and qualifications, an aesthetic of yeah-buts. Thus a breathtaking oxymoron develops: a foundation based on liquefaction. And when this aesthetic of unsure footing tries to survive day to day with stronger, stouter messages and approaches, of course it tends to sink and get absorbed. Which tires a body out. See the country I get into?

Bill Morelock
Bill Morelock
MPR photo/John Nicholson

Thing is, I believe in the value of the undermining. It's where humor thrives best. It's where I'm comfortable, where I want to live. Nearly busting a gut now, in fact, at these abstracted attempts to explain myself.

Bottom line is this: A certain time of life combined with a need to preserve a fragile way of thinking results in change of some sort. For me, a kind of retreat.

To you who've found something savory or sweet in the brew of uncertified history, music, fable and emotional swings Jack Paar might approve of, I say thanks; and to those who've laughed, contended, cajoled, egged me on to greater "indiscretions", I say Thanks. I'm betting you can understand a desire to work on some things that interest me, whether or not they rise to a level of general interest, and certainly not contrived with such an end in mind. But if, in spite of some long odds, they do take shape into artifacts that reach you … well, that will be dandy.

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