How Frank Martin killed my career

Back in Jurassic time "when I was single and life was fun" (a witty clause I owe to Paul Simon), I wanted to be a disk jockey. I phoned CHUM-FM for an audition in Toronto because they were a classical station at the time. In my youthful snobbery, I thought that any other kind of music was detrimental to human development. I also thought that I had the precision of diction and clarity of tone that would fit right in with their announcers' style.

They gave me a time and place for an audition. I arrived at the studio well in advance, and was ushered into a dingy, yellow room where Sjef Frenken was currently on air. He ultimately became a member of the CRTC, the regulatory body in Canada that governs the use of FM frequencies, but at the time was an erudite-sounding, mellow-voiced announcer, sitting across the table from me in an acoustically-isolated studio with a very large microphone and a very obvious clock on the wall.

I sat, quieter than a crypt, fearing to scratch my nose in case the act was broadcast to the world. He turned down the monitor volume and handed me a script to read while the turntable in the control room was finishing a movement of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto.

I cleared my throat and commenced to read a paragraph which seemed to be a news item out of Montreal that I had heard not too long before. My eyes caught the intentional repetition of simple words, like "the the" in the typescript, and I successfully elided them.

Sjef pointed out another paragraph, gave me a moment to scan it, and then said, "Read it!" It made no sense. It seemed to be a news item that had been garbled in transmission. I immediately faced an internal dilemma: did a news announcer read exactly what was in front of him or did he try to make sense of it? I chose the latter, and to this day cannot say whether that was the right choice.

At that point, on cue from the control room, Sjef punched up his microphone and offered a segue into the next track that would have left me gasping in admiration had it not been for my being transfixed by the ON AIR sign on the wall and feeling a stuporous obligation to be silent.

The music commenced. He moved his mic aside once more and handed me a third sheet with a playlist on it. I was to introduce these items as though they were cued up in the control room.

In my best, most mature 20-year old voice, I mellowed my way through several well-known composers. "Volfgahng Ahmohdayoos Mote-zart", I intoned, and brought all my private-school modern languages savvy to bear upon "Say-zar Frahnk".

But then it happened. Luck forsook me as I announced that the next selection was the "Ode a la musique by Frank Martin".

You see, I had an uncle with the same last name and a cousin with the first but unfortunately neither man was Swiss in origin. How could I know that the composer should have sounded something like "frahnk mahr-TAN"?

Thus ended my career in radio. And a good thing, too. CHUM-FM went through a sea-change over the next few years. Had I made the cut, I would have ended up spinning the very kind of tinnitus-inducing ruckus that I so seriously despised.