Casual Archives: Observations from the WGUC CD Giveaway
About a month ago, Cincinnati’s public classical radio station, WGUC extended an invite to Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra staff and University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music students to help clear out their 13,000 title CD collection. Take home what you like. WGUC, who first began broadcasting in 1960, are moving their station to a new location in Evanston along with their sister station, WVXU. In the current media landscape, it logistically did not make sense for WGUC to trudge to their brand new building with 13,000 dusty CDs in tow. As a dual citizen of CSO staff and CCM, I spent a couple hours in their CD library scouring the shelves, and found myself reflecting on the experience for days afterward. I arrived to the giveaway a few hours after it began, so some areas of the library were already barren. The CDs were organized by record label, and I lamented the fact that the ECM section was empty by the time I got there. However, failing to score an ECM New Series release on CD was not what lingered in my mind in the aftermath. It was the fact that the tangible reminders of a radio station’s taste, history, and life were becoming scattered, shelves already standing desolate where there once was a story. I completely understand WGUC’s decision to liquidate the CDs as a practical necessity, but I was compelled to think on a broad scale about what is lost when we shift our listening, collecting, and archiving from the physical to the digital. As music organizations such as radio stations become increasingly reliant on digital music to fill their broadcasts, what knowledge of their organization’s ever-evolving identity are tucked away into a computer hard drive?
WGUC has occupied their current location since 1980, a space which the Cincinnati Enquirer covered in their 1980 news article, “WGUC Moves Into New Home,” boasting “a library that has room for 2,000 tapes and 20,000 albums.” The tiny corner of the radio station I visited captured the 1980s essence flawlessly. Dark wooden door frames outlined each entryway, offices and rooms named with signs in a font reminiscent of a vintage DYMO label maker. Despite the vastness of the station’s CD collection, the library was actually quite intimate, the CDs nestled away in rows upon rows of wooden shelves. The room gave off a warm, dusty aura not unlike a secondhand bookstore or a hidden nook of a library. I wove back and forth amongst the shelves as I searched for specific recordings of classical favorites, checked spines for certain composer names to jump out at me, and located esteemed record labels I could summon to mind.
As I flitted around the WGUC CD library, it didn’t feel like “shopping” or cleaning out the space. It felt like perusing an archive, one that I was also allowed to take home with me. Their CD library was in no way established to function as an archive, and I am certain the radio station has other ways of archiving their history, such as preserving their broadcasts. And in the video above, WGUC music director Jessica Lorey describes how after listening to a CD in the library, the audio is then ripped from the CD digitally to use for broadcast, rendering the CDs somewhat obsolete after that point. Despite these facts, I saw value in witnessing a physical manifestation of what classical music curators cared about during the CD boom. Classical music enthusiasts were early champions of CDs in the 1980s — the format afforded the highest fidelity and also accommodated the immense length of classical music works. No longer would symphonies need to be split between sides of an LP, or operas stretched across giant boxsets. I imagine these benefits appealed to radio broadcasters as well, offering a new versatility for playing music selections on the air. With each spine I examined, I noticed which record labels, conductors, soloists, and of course, which composers mattered. Certain biases I held about classical music radio’s taste were confirmed, while others were challenged.
Although I did perceive as much Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler as I expected to, and wasn’t entirely shocked to find Erik Satie, Philip Glass and Steve Reich beside them, I was also delighted to find Eliáne Radigue, John Cage, Phill Niblock, Ellen Fullman, and John Zorn. There was a section of WGUC’s library devoted to Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation record label (of which I shamelessly slid each release left on the shelf onto my growing pile). There were also many releases available from the German contemporary classical record label, Wergo, where I accumulated the bulk of my John Cage CDs. My coworker who attended the giveaway before I did told me he found tons of early computer music CDs. Scanning these aisles of recordings, I gained insight into this particular radio station, finding it to be one that preserved tradition while also encouraging musical innovation and highlighting those closer to the fringes than the mainstream airwaves.
I wrestled with the fact that I encountered a space that came across like an archive, but was not in any official capacity, and that I didn’t have a phrase for this phenomenon. Until a term popped into my head: casual archives. Casual archives are spaces that were not intended to be archives, but through the passage of time come to represent history and authentically preserve snapshots of the objects contained within and those who interacted with them. The phrase captures the unintentional, spontaneous, and impermanent nature of a space like the WGUC CD library. Its primary function was to house the station’s music collection and to provide easy access to the breadth of classical music recordings. As time passed, I imagine the library shifted from a functional space to one that preserved, a time capsule. By the end, I could understand it maybe even being a space of nuisance and clutter. While an official archive compiles objects of value for preservation, a casual archive is casual in the sense that it may not be so protected. Once defunct, the casual archive may be disintegrated.
After brainstorming the term casual archives, I wanted to see if there was already a term in existence to describe this type of space (if there is I would love to hear about it). I felt hopeless that trying to search online with my highly specific request would produce any results. Oddly and unexpectedly, my search “name for spaces that act like archives but aren’t” generated one overwhelmingly unanimous result: liminal spaces. Once I overcame the initial surprise at the results, the term liminal space did seem related to the concept I was thinking about. Liminal spaces are areas, typically transitional in nature such as hallways or airports, that take on an uncanny quality when empty or out of use. The WGUC CD library at one time was probably bustling with individuals swooping in to collect recordings for the day’s broadcasts, whereas in more recent years the traffic maybe died down to an eerie stall. As I was there, the whole space was nostalgic in the plaintive, wistful way.
The shifting emphasis from physical to digital within this context makes me recall a blog I wrote a couple months ago about the impermanence that digital music encourages. The impermanence of digital music and streaming bleeds over into our relationship with physical media as well. Our attachment to music as recorded sound in all its forms is frayed when we embrace the fluid nature of digital media. Maybe the liquidation of WGUC’s CD library is simply a manifestation of progressing from the past to the present, allowing one technology to fade as another comes to the fore. There was a marked lack of LPs in the library, which suggests this type of cleaning out has happened before. Also, I’ve noticed within rock journalism that physical promotional copies are much less prevalent than in the past, and I wonder if classical albums are favoring digital promo copies as well. Or, maybe WGUC will start fresh and build another CD library at their new location. But all of this can also signify a change in how we relate to recorded sound, a relationship as ethereal and tenuous as streamed music is. In light of this fact, I encourage you to think about where you see casual archives in your daily life and appreciate what they offer and what you can learn from them. Because by their nature, they may not be there forever.
– Hannah Blanchette
April 15, 2025 | Blog