- Music of the Stars
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The Music of the Stars is a four-hour radio program in the Chicago-Milwaukee radio market; it is heard worldwide from WLIP in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and is produced and hosted by Lou Rugani. The program in its original form first aired over WLIP AM 1050 on Sunday, May 30th, 1992; with its original title "The Big-Band Show", it was then broadcast during a six-hour window each Sunday morning and afternoon. After some time-shifting over the years, it has aired for most of the decade from 7 AM CT to 11 AM CST and since 2007 WLIP has repeated it in an encore re-broadcast from 12 noon to 4 PM CT.
Contents
Format
At first following a strict big-band radio format, the program slowly began to adopt an anthology or "omnibus" motif by the mid-1990s, and today begins its first segment ("The Torch Hour") with a torch song theme, transcending into "freeform radio" thematic segments in music, prose and comedy based on various concepts in everyday life, i.e. the varied seasons, moods, aspirations, life stages, etcetera. The Music of the Stars has been compared to such historic radio programs as "Music from Studio X", Martin Block's "Make Believe Ballroom", and the various Chicago overnight radio programs with Franklyn MacCormack, John Doremus and Jay Andres.
Themes
The introductory theme is "More than Love" by Herschel Burke Gilbert. (At the program's 1992 beginning, the opening theme had then been a Nelson Riddle arrangement of "Reveille".) The closing theme is "Magnificent Obsession" by Frank Skinner and Frederick Herbert. (For some years previously, "You Are Never Far Away from Me" by Robert Allen and Allen Roberts had signaled the program's end.)
Trivia
Each program during the entire month of October features themes related to Halloween.
The Music of the Stars received heavy promotion in early 1992 prior to the program's premier broadcast, but on that day all power to the station and the general area surrounding WLIP had been cut due to massive highway construction nearby.
External links
Categories:- American radio programs
- United States radio show stubs
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