Sergio A. Mims
Posted on April 30, 2014
In addition to being a
board member of Theaster Gates’s Black Cinema House and a film
journalist for Indiewire’s “Shadow and Act”—a Ralph Ellison-inspired
blog dedicated to the cinema of the African diaspora —Sergio Mims is
also one of the most well-established DJs on WHPK’s classical format.
For the second interview in our series profiling the veteran DJs of
WHPK, Mims invited us into the studio as he played Schubert’s opera
Fierrebras for the first half of his radio show—the unpretentiously
titled program, “Stuff From My Collection”—to discuss his loves, hates
and obsessions within the worlds of music and film.
How did you first get interested in music, especially in classical music?
I have to go back to when I was ten years old. My father used to give
me all kinds of recordings to listen to and one day he gave me a
recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado [and] I just gravitated
towards it, I thought it was the happiest music I ever heard. I said,
“Gee, I’d like to hear more like this.” At that time, there used to be a
supermarket called A&P, back in the days long ago. They would sell
classical records. There’d be a different one every other week, with
notes, and later you could compile all the records into a binder. I
still have it… and back then they would have record clubs. They had
Columbia Record Club or RCA Record Club, and they’d announce that you’re
getting this album for this month, and my father joined it for me, so I
was just getting records.
And why classical music? I don’t know, that’s sort of an eternal
question. It’s just something that spoke to me; I just gravitated
towards it more than any other music.
Who are some of your favorite composers?
I can tell you who I don’t like. That’s easier. I like [almost]
everybody, I can listen to everybody from Monteverdi to Stockhausen to
Hans Werner Henze to Allan Pettersson. Who I do not like, who I cannot
stand—I cannot stand Puccini, cannot stand Ralph Vaughan Williams. I
always say, if I was captured and you wanted to torture me and get me to
say everything I knew, put on La Boheme, or anything by Vaughan
Williams, and I will confess everything. There are some composers who
took me a while to warm up to, people who I like now who I didn’t like
before, but I will never like Puccini and I will never like Vaughan
Williams. Aaron Copland has a great quote about Vaughn Williams that
perfectly expresses how I feel: “Listening to the Fifth Symphony of
Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.”
I don’t know why Puccini’s so popular. I always say, people who like
Puccini don’t know music.
So I take it you’re not a fan of half the Lyric’s programming?
No! I won’t go [when they play Puccini]. And by the way, I’m glad you
brought that up. Because of this show, it’s really expanded my
horizons, I’ve been traveling even to Europe to see concerts. WHPK
programming, and my show in particular, are known outside the country,
so I have been to the Royal Opera House in London, I’ve been to the
English National Opera, I’ve been to the Lucerne Festival in
Switzerland. I was actually asked to be on a Swiss Radio Program last
year, but I couldn’t do it. This is because of the show and [online]
streaming. Classical music broadcast radio stations are a small
community, there’s not a lot of radio stations left that broadcast
classical music, and everybody tries to seek out what everyone else is
doing.
How did you get started with DJing at WHPK?
Well, that was Jake [Austen, format chief for Public Affairs
programming on WHPK]. Jake was after me for almost a year trying to get
me to do a show on movies, which I still do about once a month on the
station. But after a year I gave in, and I said, “OK, I’ll do it.” And I
did it for about 3 or 4 years, I would bring in filmmakers, we would do
a discussion, but I said, “Boy, I would really like to do a show on
classical music,” because when I got involved with WHPK and I saw all
the kinds of programming they have, I said, well, I would like to do
something like that. And one summer a position was open for a slot, and I
just jumped right in, and that’s been it ever since. Working and doing
this show on WHPK has been a real unexpected joy for me.
Can you talk a bit about how you decide what music to play?
It’s “Stuff From My Collection.” That’s it, it’s my collection. I
have a huge collection. I never repeated myself or played a recording
twice, because I have that many recordings, and I can look and see what
I’ve got and what haven’t I played yet. And I like to play extremes: I
will contrast Mozart with Schoenberg. Things like that to play around
with the programming, to give people a sense of what’s out there. I
always want to do something different with my show. I don’t want to do
the obvious stuff, I’ve never played Beethoven’s Fifth, I’ve never
played Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony.
What I’m really interested in is giving people a broad view of what
classical music is, which is why I’ve done everything from baroque to
really 21st-century stuff. Just yesterday, I broadcast John Adams, his
new work Gospel According to the Other Mary. I
everything, from one extreme to the other and everything in between.
And I hope that, if you didn’t like this, maybe I got something else
coming up, or something next week that you’ll like. I gotta play
something you like.
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