SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Over this past week, we've been airing a lot of tributes and appreciations and obituaries about one of NPR's most longtime and legendary voices, Susan Stamberg. She died on October 16 at age 87. And one of Susan's greatest skills was her ability to make art that does not make any noise seem very visual on the radio.
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SUSAN STAMBERG: He wrote it in chalk. It looks like chalk on a blackboard.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It is.
STAMBERG: And he's smushed his hand over it so it - the letters do move.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yes, they do.
PFEIFFER: If she was at a museum looking at art, she could make listeners feel that they were seeing the art along with her. And that is not easy to do in the radio business. So for this week's Reporter's Notebook segment, where we explain how we do our jobs, we've invited two reporters from NPR's arts desk - movie and arts critic Bob Mondello and cultural correspondent Neda Ulaby. I wanted them to come on today's show to talk about what they learned from Susan over the decades and how they approach the challenge of covering the arts on the radio. Hi, Bob. Hi, Neda.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Good to be here.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Hi.
STAMBERG: So I don't know if some listeners have given thought to how difficult it can be to convey something that's visual in an auditory medium like radio. If you're doing things like paintings or drawings or sculpture or architecture that have no sound, that's hard. So Bob, would you start and first describe the challenge of sometimes having no sound to work with when you're doing radio stories?
MONDELLO: Well, you frequently don't have any sound, but there is already - always sound in the universe. I mean, it's just out there, and you'll hear it. So I mean, Susan used to wear hard heels when she went to an art gallery so you'd hear her footsteps as she walked around.
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UNIDENTIFIED CURATOR: Yes. The napkins, the ceramics when possible.
MONDELLO: I - she found all kinds of ways to put you in the space. And most of what you do is to describe.
ULABY: To back Bob up, like, Susan would find sound the way a photographer will find light. When she did a piece about the artist Dan Flavin - this is one example that jumps into my mind. This is an artist who makes art out of fluorescent light bulbs. And she started this piece by saying...
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STAMBERG: There's been a buzz about Dan Flavin's work since the 1960s, and the buzz is not all talk.
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STAMBERG: Some of his early light works make a buzz, as fluorescent lights often do. Yes, fluorescent lights - that's Dan Flavin's medium.
ULABY: The way she wrote about art was, I mean, I'm going to spend the rest of my life just admiring how she wrote about art. She writes, his flourescent lights...
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STAMBERG: His fluorescent lights don't just hang there. They inhabit space. They wash the walls with color. They mix colors, so the white walls seem painted. They bathe space...
ULABY: They bathe space and visitors in a warm and completely artificial glow.
PFEIFFER: She was so good at it.
MONDELLO: She's so great. Oh, my God. It's just, like...
ULABY: You know, I've been told that great radio is like watching a movie in your mind.
MONDELLO: Yeah.
ULABY: And Susan Stamberg was an auteur.
PFEIFFER: Why do you think she was so good? What - how was she thinking that made her special?
MONDELLO: She was kind of inventing it. You know, in the early '70s, when she was starting out, there weren't other places where this was being done. The - I mean, culture wasn't really covered on - even on television particularly but certainly not on radio, so she had to invent a way to do it.
And what she almost always did, what you discovered very early on in her pieces - and it's sort of uniform - all of her art gallery pieces, all of her going to someone's home to see art, all of that kind of stuff - she starts by creating a scene. She designs the entry into the piece in a way that is sort of involving and pulls you in. And she'd do that in all kinds of different ways. I mean, in one piece, a piece about Gauguin, she started with a song...
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STAMBERG: (Singing) Were I in Gauguin's shoes...
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MONDELLO: ...Which - that does - just does not occur to me, right?
PFEIFFER: A painter.
MONDELLO: I mean, it just didn't - right?
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STAMBERG: (Singing) I would embrace the muse and even thank her.
Edward Kleban, the lyricist of "A Chorus Line," wrote this song about Gauguin.
(Singing) And I would choose whatever Gauguin chose and walk around in only...
PFEIFFER: Neda, you did a story recently about the Bread and Puppet theater troupe.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Welcome to our "Domestic Resurrection Revolution In Progress."
PFEIFFER: And if I remember correctly, you never left the scene. The whole time, we feel like we're there with them, horns and singing and people imitating sheep. What is your goal when you never leave a scene like that in your stories?
ULABY: Oh, to be more like Susan (laughter), I would say, which is to be both wholeheartedly present and skeptical and appreciative and to call it like you see it.
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ULABY: This ragtag circus tours in a rickety bus packed with handmade masks, colorful flags and 15 puppeteers who fervently believe in the revolutionary power of art...
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ULABY: ...Like actual revolution.
When you mentioned that story, what it makes me think of is how Susan treated and respected art stories like political stories. They were the same to her. They are the same to those of us who are Susan's children. She was very hard-nosed about it.
PFEIFFER: Neda, I sometimes, when I go out and do stories - and Bob - I come back overwhelmed by the amount of tape I have. The two of you often get to work with a bounty of sound and archival material. But how - do you find it overwhelming, too, or how do you narrow down all that archival material and hours of tape and decide what is best for your stories?
MONDELLO: With movies, they give us a certain number of scenes. They don't usually give us the whole movie.
PFEIFFER: You're forced to work with a certain...
MONDELLO: Right. So I'm...
PFEIFFER: ...Limited number.
MONDELLO: ...Stuck with what they give us. And that's useful to a certain extent because then I write around the sound that I'm given. I cannot start writing without the sound, though. If they hold off and don't give us clips until the day that the piece is airing, I'm going out of my mind...
PFEIFFER: 'Cause you haven't been able to start writing.
MONDELLO: ...'Cause I don't know how to write without the sound.
PFEIFFER: Yeah.
MONDELLO: I just don't know how to do it.
PFEIFFER: The sound we use - it flows in and out of what we write. So without the sound...
MONDELLO: Right.
PFEIFFER: ...You're not sure what you should be writing.
MONDELLO: You have no idea.
PFEIFFER: Neda, when you went out with Bread and Puppet, I'm assuming that you came back with maybe hours of tape. How do you begin the winnowing-down process?
ULABY: I mean, to be honest, it helps to have been a producer for Bob Mondello and for Susan Stamberg.
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ULABY: You develop an ear, and you don't - you're ruthless. You know, you don't waste time with sound that isn't great. You identify...
MONDELLO: Yeah, that's true.
ULABY: ...Six great pieces of tape, and then you work with those. You let that tape tell the story, and you don't mess around with stuff that, you know, oh, well, you know, the - you just stick to the great-sounding tape.
PFEIFFER: Do you know it when you hear it out on the field, or do you relisten to all your tape and then realize what's good?
ULABY: Sometimes. I mean, sometimes it depends on whether it's verbal or nonverbal. You know, I read an interview with a producer at "This American Life" years ago who said that she would come home from her interviews, and she would write an email to her dad, telling him - summarizing the interviews, basically, like, this is what the guy told me. And then she would just go straight to the tape where the person said those things.
PFEIFFER: Ah.
ULABY: And I feel the same way. Like, I think, if I was telling somebody I loved about this interview, what are the best parts? What are the parts that stick in my head that I can't get unstuck out of my head? And I go straight to those.
PFEIFFER: For listeners who may not be thinking about transitions and writing in and out of tape, what do you think it is they liked about Susan's pieces?
ULABY: So what Susan did that connected with listeners so deeply was that she approached every story with beginner's mind. She was a journeyman radio artist, even though she was the most experienced person at NPR. And beginner's mind, you know, there's this quote - in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind, there are few. So Susan was a perfect example of that. She approached every story as if it was her first one. She was open. She sought to learn from everyone around her. She did not pack up her ego along with her recording equipment.
And when she reported, Susan respected the intelligence of her audience, and that's what made her feel like a friend. When I first started at NPR, I was a production assistant, and part of my job was to sort the mail, including Susan Stamberg's mail. And this was back when people still sent mail.
MONDELLO: (Laughter).
ULABY: And I remember Susan getting a postcard from a prisoner in a jail. And I turned it over, and it said, dear Susan, how are you? I am fine. But when things are tough, (crying) listening to your voice makes me feel like there's an arm around my shoulder. And I felt exactly the same way.
PFEIFFER: Yeah, she could have that effect on people, really. I mean, that's - it's what a lot of us strive for but not everyone achieves, and she really did. That's cultural correspondent Neda Ulaby and NPR movie and arts critic Bob Mondello. Thank you very much.
MONDELLO: Thank you.
ULABY: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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