Note: a version of this piece originally appeared in the Traverse City Record-Eagle as part of the "Tuning In" series.
I’m going to attempt to do the impossible in this essay, which is to capture the spirit of Ted Beiderwieden and what he meant to Classical IPR.
To say that he was a volunteer doesn’t really do justice to the contributions he made to the station. He served in our phone room nearly every fund drive, answering phones almost every day and often multiple shifts per day.
Several years ago, Ted began helping with our music library as well. Over the span of three or four years, he handled every last album in our music library — ten thousand or more.
Ted’s job was straightforward: go through every entry in the catalog and make sure the composer’s name, piece title, and performers’ names were in the right place and spelled correctly. He made sure each individual movement was entered correctly, and that the run time for every piece was accurate.
He spent 20, 25, 30 hours a week doing literal data entry for us. Hundreds of hours a year.
Ted Beiderwieden was Interlochen Center for the Arts’ Volunteer of the Year three years in a row because of the hundreds (probably thousands?) of hours he spent at IPR editing our music library.
If you see a playlist displayed on Classical IPR, either on your FM radio or on our website or in the mobile app, you’re likely seeing Ted’s work. He was meticulous, he was thorough, he was relentless.
And he was grumpy about it.
It’s hard to explain his personality — he was somehow cantankerous while also being loving and generous. Grumbling but with a smile at the corners of it.
The bane of his existence was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a piece that usually has 15 separate movements, all of which need to be cataloged separately. Every time Ted would get to an album with Pictures on it, he’d groan and, in the same way my preschooler asks each time if he really REALLY has to eat his broccoli, he’d confirm that yes, I really did want all of those 15 movements cataloged.
For a couple of years, Ted and I would co-host an hour of music where he would present pieces of music he’d found during his work in our music library, pieces that he’d never heard and that our listeners likely hadn’t either.
For the record, I have a Ph.D. in musicology and Ted could match me in a classical music know-it-all competition.
I have a Post-It note, ink long faded, that I had attached to an album of Pictures at an Exhibition that I left at Ted’s desk. (He had a desk. He even had an office. That’s how important he was to us.) I knew he’d be annoyed, so I wrote, “Forgive me.”
The next day, the album was back on my desk with the same Post-It, but underneath my original message, he’d written, “Only because it’s in my nature to do so.”
Requiescat in pace, Pastor Ted.
Amanda Sewell is IPR's music director. She can be reached at amanda.sewell@interlochen.org
