to

Re-Vision Radio's

Musekal PhiloSophy

Music puts us in harmony with our deepest nature, making us feel more responsive and authentic.  Music is a form in which the basic patterns or archetypal models that underlie human experience are played out.  Music is a way to the depths of feeling and soul. However let us not forget that  music is based in the senses and in the body; for not only are brain waves significantly changed, but the biochemisrty is affected, producing changes in breath rate, blood pressure, and galvanic skin response.

The healing power of music, especially in times of need, has been long known.  I suggest that we expand our notion of the healing power of music to include the pleasure (eros) that it gives, whether that means being calmed, challenged, stimulated, or transported. The heightened sensitivity music can create, beyond what we ordinarily experience, is itself healing, calling up our deep reserves of energy and putting us in touch with the larger life of the cosmos.  (Scientists know, for example that music can trigger the release of endorphins. They also know that plants and animals respond favorably to music.)

"Music and health are intimately related in human history, from shamanic healing to 'witch doctors,' from the Hebrews to current-day programs of music therapy. King David played the harp to relieve the stress of King Saul . . . and the ancient Greeks used harp music to ease the outbursts of people with mental illness. Music therapy was also employed by such geographically disparate cultures as the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Native Americans. Health benefits have been described whether patients sit and listen to music, improvise tunes, write songs, discuss lyrics, perform compositions, or actively participate in the production of music. Music is claimed to be beneficial for patients of any age, ethnic or religious background, or stage of illness." --Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs

" . . . music listening and music therapy have been shown to help people overcome a broad range of psychological and physical problems." --Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain On Music

[ Added September 22, 2008 ]

"a schizoid polycentricity, a style of consciousness that thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions."

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack mixes PhiloSophy & Music--a harmonious interplay of dialectics/argument and song, prose composition and metrical composition; a concourse of prose discourse and lyrical outpouring that issues in a soulful Radio-text of ideas & love. Thus, since the The Gypsy Scholar brings his subject matter to play through song, Everybody Knows that the ability to put complex (philosophical) ideas into lyrics (of song) is the gift of Orpheus. And Everybody Knows what takes pages of text to explain a song can express in a few powerfully meaningful verses. The relationship of Argument to Song in the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is that the song is a way of saying everything the prose says, but all at once! Thus the Gypsy Scholar, in reading the essay, also let's the song do the talking, which, conversely, reveals the spoken-word essay as having itself a verbal music.  This means that the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, with its quality of a "recital," has a performative character, which makes scholarship a performance art. 

"Behind the lyric and the song is the governing, central idea, and you have to keep both of them going, so neither gets bogged down. The trick is to keep them going together.” (Stephen Sondheim

“Words make you think and music makes you feel. And song makes it possible to feel a thought.” (Pete Seeger quoting the words someone who he called a great popular song lyricist. Seeger reflects: “Quite an interesting way of putting it.”)

Thus Everybody Knows that the "governing, central idea" of the Tower of Song program is Musekal Philosophy. In other words, the program is not just "about" the words or the music, but what's behind them; the theory that under-stands them and thus eclectically puts them together. The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, then, allows the Gypsy Scholar to develop a central idea or over-arching theme sounded in the music to create a receptive mood. This midnight radio mood--engendered by sublime segues from words to eclectic sets of sounds (and everybody knows that radio-magic starts in the transitions)--is the psychic atmosphere from which listeners can soar in imaginative musical flights--into the Tower of Song.

The Tower of Song program's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, or the Essay in Argument & Song, makes for a program format that's not strictly a "music" program, but a musical and philosophical program that breaks down the strict boundaries between radio genres--music and information programing.  This means that the Gypsy Scholar doesn't just play songs, like deejays do, but showcases songs. This is possible because the essay puts song in con-text; contextualizes it. Hence the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. There are those who are on the innovative edge of art; those who experiment with remix and "how information becomes music." Because the Gypsy Scholar remixes the ideas from his favorite writers with the music from his favorite singer-songwriters, it's all about the art of translating information into music. Thus the Tower of Song program presents something new, something novel, on radio. (The Gypsy Scholar, in blurring the boundaries between the formats of informational and music programming, believes when it comes to people "getting" information it's a matter of how it is presented, and, conversely, in listening to music, it's the context in which it is heard.)  The Gypsy Scholar would inform (educate) and entertain (play), hence the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack.

Essay: “a short piece of written work assigned to a student; paper, composition, thesis, treatise, dissertation; an artistic or journalistic work resembling a written essay but in another medium."

Thus, Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is "an an artistic work resembling a written essay but in another medium"--the medium of radio. This makes the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack a special genre of writing--a "radio-text." (The Gypsy Scholar is at pains to point out that the Essay in Argument & Song is one composition. (The reason that the song complements the text is that a song can express things in a way that the mere discursive essay cannot. It might take dozens of pages to say what one song can express.) In other words, the intermittent song is not merely a break in the discourse, which is then resumed again after the song, as in the usual practice. No, the argument and song, not to mention the background music behind the reading, are of one, continuous piece, and when seamlessly mixed should result in the listener not knowing exactly where the spoken part of the essay leaves off and the sung part begins, and vice versa.) Thus, Everybody Knows, because the song (and background music) of the essay transforms the text into (musical) texture, that the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is a "radio-text."

The Gypsy Scholar, as "Orphic Scholar," uses song in the essay not simply as an interlude but to at once concisely sum up, punctuate, and enhance, the argument of the essay. In other words, the song emotionally drives home the meaning of the information presented discursively in the essay, in order to connect mind and heart. The song (of the "Argument & Song" essay) functions in a special way to convey a meaning that would take numerous written essays to try and convey. This is why the GS relies on the bards/troubaours Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen so often in his musical essays; their songs naturally lend themselves to philosophical contemplation and imagination. The way the song works in the essay is difficult to explain, but the following astute observation of Leonard Cohen's songs by Tom Robbins is illuminating:

"And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person’s biochemical atmosphere more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact. The poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic passion, let alone disclosing the inherent mystical qualities of the material world.” 

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (a species of the Romantic Essay), in remixing high academic culture with low pop-culture, broadcasts big ideas through popular song, which issues in a Musekal Philosophy--a sonorous philosophy.

"Here was a man, who inside of a pop-song . . .you know, puts big ideas, big dreams.  It reminded me of Keats or Shelley or, you know, they were poets I was reading as a kid.  I said this is our . . . Shelley, this is our . . . Byron.  You know, there was an otherness to the language.  It was just a sensory overload of the language that first got to me."  (Bono on Leonard Cohen)

________________________________________________

A special note to interested listeners: this page particularly, along with the "Re-Vision Radio" page (#7), exists to promote that theory of Musekal Philosophy in order for listeners to fully appreciate what they hear on the program. For a more in-depth look at the Gypsy Scholar's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, see green-bordered sections below: "Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack," "Musekal Philosophy: Playing Philosophy, Playing Music," "Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack Goes to the Movies," "Musekal Philosophy: Philosophy In A New Key," "Musekal Philosophy: An Orphic Synthesis," and "Musekal Philosophy: Scholarship As Performance Art."

Re-Vision Radio's Broadcast Experiments Between Speech & Song

         The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy. --William Blake, Vala

"What I'm hoping for," wrote Yeats the month before his death," is a small book dealing with the relations between speech and song." Rekindled by his BBC broadcast experiments and by the revival of Broadsides between 1937 and 1937, Yeats's last hope was the final expression of one of his oldest, most frustrated desires. The recipient of the letter, Victor Clinton-Baddeley, who had worked closely with Yeats on the broadcasts, partially honored his request with Words for Music (1941), which contains a final chapter on Yeats's later theory of speaking verse. But Clinton-Baddeley was largely unaware that his subject's preoccupation with words for music at the end of his life had also been a passion of earlier days, and that the broadcast-broadside experiments in the late 1930s were but the last in a lifelong effort to revive the lost bardic arts of chanting and musical speech.

--The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Lost Bardic Arts (2008)

I think it's part of our tradition, which is quite different from the American literary tradition, that prose should have music. . . .  What you're doing as the writer is you're giving the reader sheet music and the reader is going to play the song. You know, so I try in write in a way that has a three-dimensionality that invites the reader to walk in . . . .

                  --Joseph O'Connor (Novelist and brother of Sinead O'Connor radio interview 3/10/11)

The Gypsy Scholar's Essay-with-Soundtrack ("Argument & Song") delivers
                                                                                       speech bewitched by song.

Thus, the Gypsy Scholar invites fellow readers to walk into this musical "three-dimensionality" he calls the Tower of  Song

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack

"It has been said that the Troubadours [of the Twelfth-century Renaissance] are responsible for modern poetry. It is, however, mostly to their songs . . . that the troubadours owe their survival into the twentieth century. They envisioned love as inspiration to song."

"Let us bring to bear the persuasive powers of sweet-tongued Rhetoric and . . . let us have as well Music, the maid-servant of my house, to sing us melodies of varying mood."
(Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy)

"How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute.,
And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets
Where no crude surfet raigns."
(Milton, Comus)

Going back—"way, way back"—Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (or the Essay in Argument & Song) would pick up the fallen standard of the nineteenth-century Romantic Essay, which sought to transcend the boundaries of prose and non-prose and conjoin philosophy with poetry. (This is in keeping with the Romantic’s penchant for mixing genres.) The Romantic Essay has been described (based upon its development by Wordsworth and Coleridge) as a "conjunction of Reason and Passion that did not draw particularly sharp lines of differentiation between ‘poetry’ and the ‘impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose.’" Thus, for Coleridge: “The love of truth conjoined with a keen delight in a strict, skillful, yet impassioned argumentation, is my master-passion.” Following in this Romantic genre, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is conceived of as "the perfect union of words and music," and, thus, like the Romantic Essay, begins with an "impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose, following from a fairly strict following of traditional ‘public’ discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision." The Romantics maintained that "the end of philosophy is poetry." Thus--since music was separated from poetry relatively recently in the history of Western culture--the Gypsy Scholar would re-phrase it as "the end of philosophy is song"--as demonstrated by his Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack.

The charged expression that is poetry; the supercharged expression that is song.

“Not just into the music for the beat, but for the lyrics.”

"When I read about this ... I knew there was a song in there somewhere." (Battlefield Band)

Therefore, since "Eros redefines reason in its own terms," Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, mixing PhiloSophy & Song, or dialectics and music, replaces the "murders to dissect" (Wordsworth) mode of academic (Protestant) scholarship with service to Eros--insight, synthesis, celebration; "Reason in her most exalted mood." (Wordsworth) Thus, in the Tower of Song, the moments of Intellectual Coherence/Clarity reached through the Essay-with-Soundtrack are, at the same time, conveyed in music. "All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling." (Blaise Pascal)

“Words make you think and music makes you feel. And song makes it possible to feel a thought. Quite an interesting way of putting it.”  (Pete Seeger, quoting the words of the great popular song lyricist E. Y. Harburg ["Over the Rainbow"].)

And Everybody Knows that the Gypsy Scholar loves to find "an interesting way of putting it"*--i.e., the relationship between the prose and the song-lyric in the  Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. And, thus, your Re-Vision Radio host, the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist--in the role of the scholar-as-artist (of Eros) and longing to connect with that soulful dark blue-fire rhythm of things--romantically "burns the candle at both ends" (V.M.): logos & mythos, ideas and love, reason & imagination, fact & fantasy, realism & idealism, dialectical & mystical, mind & heart--the end of the Argument & Song on your radio dial, tuned to the Romantic Tower of Song.

And in the Tower of Song, those "funny voices" from "way, way back" can he heard: "Love that discourses in my mind" (Pugatorio, Canto II). Practicing its own form of the twelfth-century Troubadour "Dialectic of Love," the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist would use his Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack to discourse on love and philosophy, love and ideas--the philosophy of love and the love of philosophy ("wisdom"). Indeed, in the Tower of Song (listening to Socrates and Plato) these two are so intertwined that one can't tell if the philosophers are singing about the virtues of love or, conversely, if the lovers are decanting on the pleasures of philosophy. Ergo, in the Tower of Song one can find following equation etched in the wall: PhiloSophy = Music = Love ("Oh, Socrates and Plato / They praised it [love] to the sky." --Van Morrison.) Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack--with its "flowers of discourse"--plays both aspects of the psyche: both reason and imagination; both critical/scholarly intellect and intuitive/poetic heart, academic research and mystical insearch, secular hermeneutics and sacred hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, scholarly rigor and poetic reverie, painstaking precise phrasing and euphoric poetic diction, Apollonian clarity and Dionysian obscurity, philosophical questioning and romantic questing, philosophical aptitude and the musical amplitude of heightened discourse. This issues in the paradoxical reuniting of the Western head and heart—a Romantic commingling of a "sensuous reason" and a "feeling intellect," thereby synthesizing the left and right brain: "If my heart could do my thinking / And my head begin to feel / I would look upon the world anew / And know what's truly real." (Van Morrison) It’s the great Platonic synthesis of logos and mythos; between the earlier mytho-mystical, as it was transmitted through the Greek Mystery Religions, and the newer rationalist development in Philosophy that had broken away from it: "Intellectual rigor [logos] and Olympian inspiration [mythos] no longer stood opposed.” Thus, Everybody Knows that the thinker becomes a melodious thinker and, conversely, the singer becomes a philosophical singer. Running the popular song through the engine of dialectic not only re-visions the song philosophically, but returns the dialectic to its original Orphic/Pythagorean/Platonic music--making philosophy musical. In other words, Platonic dialectic becomes oracular poetry/song “after it has risen, with an incredible impulse, through the mania [madness] of Eros to the heights of philosophy." And the "heights of philosophy" are expressed on Re-Vision Radio as the "flowers of discourse."

Love or music--which power can uplift man to the sublimest heights? It is a large question; yet it seems to me that one should answer it in this way: Love cannot give an idea of music; music can give an idea of love. But why separate them? They are two wings of the soul. (Hector Berlioz)

As a Philosophical program, it's about Ideas. As a Musical program, it's about Music as Idea (and, conversely, the Idea of Music). Because Everybody Knows that on radio Information alone doesn't do it--to feel soulful--Music, too, is needed. Thus the Tower of Song program is finally about a Musekal Philosophy--or, "Philosophy in a New Key." With musical echoes reverberating throughout the text, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is thoroughly song-haunted-- memorable song lyrics fading in and fading out between the written lines, generating a steady stream of correspondences between ideas & song. In reading between the lines of dialectic and song, moving back and forth between the prose and musical text--with margins of nuanced associations--a Soul-text of Musekal Philosophy. Thus the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which shows music's role as a kind of verbal melody and, conversely, dialectic's role as a kind of melodious phrasing, is realized as a hyper-text of musical dialectic--a soul-inflected montage of the spoken word and music. Thus Everybody Knows that the Gypsy Scholar's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is designed to make the words sing.

“Tennyson’s style, the most flawless in English poetry after Milton’s and Pope’s, is itself a sensibility, a means of apprehending both the internal and the external world. Intuitively, Tennyson understood what poetry was, argument that could not be separated from song, gesture, dance, and the rhythms of a unique but representative individual’s breath-soul.” (Trilling and Bloom, eds., The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Victorian Prose and Poetry.)


The (dialectical) relationship of Argument & Song in Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack can be understood in a variety of ways (many of which I have already delineated*), as the performance of the essay entails the strategic shifting from (the juxtaposition of ) argument to song, from song back to argument.  Looking at the essay from the prism of the Song, yields a multifaceted range of meaning the essay speaks.  Therefore, one of the interesting ways of understanding the content of the essay is to become aware how each song slightly alters the perception of what is being said in the essay—i.e., another shade of meaning registers on the attentive listener's consciousness. It's as if (looked at from the point of view of the musicality of the essay) each successive song is a window (or frame of reference) through which the essay's argument is then recognized and now re-visioned.

By approaching the familiar from a different angle, we see the shape of the subject change dramatically.
--W. I. Thompson

Again, it's as if the Gypsy Scholar is entreating his listeners: "You've heard the argument through this song, now try seeing what I mean through the emphasis of this song." In this sense, the position of the song in the essay is not simply one-dimensional; commenting upon what has been expressed in prose, or amplifying the meaning of the argument thus far.  The relationship between Argument & Song in the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is much more complex (because dialectical).  It could even be said that each song sings the essay in its own lyrical ambiance and, conversely, the argument contextualizes each song in its own rhetorical logic.  This is why Gypsy Scholar's "Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital” states:  “Thus, Everybody Knows, there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song.”

From his imaginal window in the Tower of Song the Gypsy Scholar looks back to the "freeform" midnight radio born in the 1960s. And because PhiloSophy is (as admitted by Plato) a form of “play”--an artistic endeavor--, it makes the scholar of philosophy a scholar-artist-musician, who is distinguished by his or her ability to synthesize and play with knowledge--to create a collage of ideas or intellectual mind-jazz.

"Today, in the 21st century, the problem is synthesis--collage--how to put it all together, or put it in juxtaposition so it makes some sense." ―Jennifer Stone (7/17/7)

"Freeform radio is an art form. The airwaves are the empty canvas, the producer is the artist, and the sound is the paint." ―Julius Lester (1974)

“Songs will literally jump out at you at the perfect moment and talk to you.” --DJ at a community radio station

". . . but it was a staple of the underground format. There was a sense of accomplishing something mighty creative. Not just disc jockey work, but weaving songs together in progression to make a statement or a theme." ―Ed Shane (1997)

“I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life.” ―Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1

"… and songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.” ―Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1

Therefore, tied by those "twenty-seven angels" to the writing table in the Tower of Song, the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist (the Magus of Ceremonies) re-visions PhiloSophy leading, finally, not to ponderous academic desiccation (Wordsworth's "murders to dissect"), but (because it has transcended "Protestant scholarship" in its service to eros) to ecstatic Dionysian celebration--a sort of mind-jazz ensemble.

Brother Cornel West has lately embodied the Gypsy Scholar's ideal of the "Inspired Scholar" or the "Orphic Scholar," who combines in his soul both philosophy and music and gives utterance to ideas through song. Prof. West has now recorded a CD mixing the inspired lecture with the rhythms of hip-hop. And in this Emersonian tradition of the "Orphic Scholar," this Black Orpheus seems to have taken a page out of the Gypsy Scholar's website, where he dialectically mixes the metaphors of scholarship and music to describe his ideal:

"I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind and a jazzman in the world of ideas."

Tell it like it is Brother West! *

_____________________________________

* For more "interesting way(s) of putting it"--the dialectical relationship between the prose and the lyric; (Argument & Song) in the Essay-with-Soundtrack--, see the Gypsy Scholar's Re-VisionRadio Manifesto & Visionary Recital on page #4, "Program Guide" (short version), or page #7, "Re-Vision Radio" (long version).

"Program Guide"  

"Re-Vision Radio"  

* For the illustration of the scholar-as-musician--the "Orphic Scholar"--go to the end of this page to see where the Gypsy Scholar is going with all this.

The experimental format of RE-VISION RADIO is a seamless mixing of argument & song, dialectics & music, or logos & mythos; in other words, philosophical essays are put to music, producing the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. Thus Everybody Knows, since there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song, that RE-VISION RADIO puts its philosophy best in song—as the lyric goes: “That’s why I’m telling you in song.” In mixing the noetic texts of Philosophy with the poetic texts of Song, RE-VISION RADIO offers its listeners an Orphic soundscape; an eclectic medley of the esoteric and the popular, high academic culture and low pop-culture—high argument & deep song—not from the Ivory Tower, but from “that tower down the track”: the TOWER OF SONG.  (Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital)

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack:

Con-fusing Argument & Song

The Tower of Song is the radio program that attempts to mix (or con-fuse) spoken-word/ argument (dialectic) with song so perfectly that it might confuse its listeners as to what kind (category) of programming it really is--a talk or music program? Con-fusing in the sense that--as opposed to music programs--listeners won't know for certain whether the song merely serves as a brief respite or interlude between the talk segments (the song exists for the sake of the discourse), or--as opposed to talk programs--the spoken-word part is just an excuse to showcase a song (discourse exists for the sake of the song). Or, to put this last option in another way, that the spoken- word part becomes (what they call on radio) a "lead-in" to the song--an extended lead-in (the The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack as liner-notes of philosophical proportions). There is yet another way that The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is con-fusing. Because the ideas and song are so harmonious, it makes you think that the Gypsy Scholar didn't write the essay and then look for songs to go with it (as would be the normal way to go about it), but rather he wrote the essay exclusively with the song in mind. (And the GS must confess here that once in a while a song strikes him as so wonderful that he will write an entire essay around the song; just so he can lead up to it as a grand finale. Again, the The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, mixes Argument & Song so adroitly that it creates the illusion that the song was tailor-made just for the essay.

". . . don’t we know that all of this is a prelude to the song itself, . . . the song itself that dialectic performs?" –Socrates (Plato, Republic)

“The music isn’t really an interlude, but serves as an extension of the dialogue.”
–Delroy Lindo (on new theatrical play 4/4/7)

"Behind the lyric and the song is the governing, central idea, and you have to keep both of them going, so neither gets bogged down. The trick is to keep them going together.” –Stephen Sondheim

"The point of writing about a figure like Orpheus is not to expose him to our intellectual curiosity and self-serving need to dissect–a caricature of true Orphic fragmentation–but rather to evoke him and his song." –Thomas Moore

Thus Everybody Knows that the "governing, central idea" of the Tower of Song program is Musekal Philosophy. In other words, the program is not just "about" the words or the music, but what's behind them; the theory that under-stands them and thus puts them together. The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, then, allows the Gypsy Scholar to develop a central idea or over-arching theme sounded in the music to create a receptive mood. This midnight radio mood--engendered by sublime segues from words to eclectic sets of sounds (and everybody knows that radio-magic starts in the transitions)--is the psychic atmosphere from which listeners can soar in imaginative musical flights--into the Tower of Song.

And Everybody Knows, because Orpheus played his best music for an underworld audience, that Re-Vision Radio is Underground Radio. (This means that the Gypsy Scholar re-visions radio back--"way, way back"--to 1960's free-form "underground radio.")

 
The Tower of Song program was created out of the Gypsy Scholar's love for radio—especially 60's "underground radio." The fact that he couldn't get enough of it when it died out means that it was his "Impossible Love" affair with underground (free-form) radio. This is why the Gypsy Scholar created a place—a late-night sanctuary—where one could go to find an alternative to most of what is called "non-commercial" radio. This is why Re-VisionRadio is a "Soul-making" program. This is why the the Tower of Song  is from the "invisible landscape"—"Somewhere Else" radio.

There is no cure for impossible love when it revolutionizes our lives. When it leads to the future as well as into the past, when it cannot be comprehended on a purely personal level, then it is not an illness, but an initiation. Initiation into depths, but also into longing, and this will not, should not, ever cease. This longing keeps us in proximity to our souls. It reminds us, as we conscientiously go through the obligations and activities of every day, that there is a place, a "somewhere else" where we also belong and need to go to from time to time. We are reminded of this place by a sentence we read in a newspaper, a picture on a subway wall, a memory brought to life by a smell, [a piece of dialogue from a movie that speaks to us, a beautiful face that haunts our dreams, a passage from a book taken randomly off the shelf,] or by a song we hear on the radio . . . –Impossible Love

The Gypsy Scholar  & Bohemian Essayist,  mixing and remixing argument & song—dialectics & music—in a musical and philosophical program,  presents his    Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack,    which "Orphic" Scholarship reveals itself to be a kind of performance-art.

What are the Treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves, are they any other than Mental Studies & Performances? --William Blake
  
The Gypsy Scholar's program,   because breaks down the strict boundaries between conventional radio genres/formats of "music" and "informational" programming,   also breaks down the strict boundaries between high, academic culture and low pop-culture —between "high argument" and "deep song"—, and therefore  ...  is broadcast not  from the "Ivory Tower" but from "that tower down the track / the Tower of Song." 

And because PhiloSophy (as admitted by Plato) is a form of “play” —an artistic endeavor—, it makes the student of philosophy (via radio) a scholar-artist, who is distinguished by his or her ability to synthesize and play with knowledge —"to create a collage or montage of ideas or intellectual mind-jazz." And given that the radio program in Argument & Song is inspired by Orpheus —bard, prophet, master rhetorician and divine musician and "singer of love-songs” — the Gypsy Scholar, exiled from the Ivory Tower, offers the following insights into what he is trying to do with another, higher office (of scholarship) in that "tower down the track, the Tower of  Song":


Ah ye old ghosts! ye builders of dungeons in the air! [ivory towers] why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of nature, and I know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector & delineator of occult harmonies & unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, & wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing, a priest of the Soul yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health & [the] harmonious power [of music].

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation.

I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Professor of the Joyous Science, Troubadour of Knowledge, and Orphic Scholar]

Yes, upon graduating, the Gypsy Scholar could have gone into teaching in the Ivory Tower, but he was destined for "another office":

Professor of Musekal Philosophy; Troubadour of Knowledge & Lecturer in the Joyous Science.