Julie Nesrallah, would you please shut up?

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The charming Julie Nesrallah is the CBC’s classical music radio hostess after the bilge and swill of regular morning guitar and drums music is over.

I am sure she is charming and engaging in real life. But as a classical radio hostess, I have a few words of advice to offer.

  1. Classical music is not a branch of psychotherapy. This means that you are not a psychotherapist and we are not patients. Classical music is not therapy.
  2. Some of us love our work, others like their work, few hate their work. Classical music is not there to help us to adjust to the rigors of the working day.
  3. Classical composers are not retrospectively in need of your psychotherapy either. They were musicians scraping a living between the cathedrals and chancellery until the 19th century, when cities began to subsidize music. No amount of psychobabble would have cured Robert Schumann’s depression.
  4. Play the music; tell us who the composer is, and say what records you are playing or refer to the on-line playlist URL. Then shut up and get out of the way of the music.
  5. You have no idea why people listen to classical music and neither do I. To assume that we are all stressed, in need of moments of peace and stillness to help us to adjust to the rigors of life, and that you are the high priestess dispensing calm and uplift, is pretentious silliness.

Got that? Thank you for paying attention to this message.