Radio: Harmonia

HARMONIA Logo WFIU website

“The music of the distant past is brought to life by the performers of today on Harmonia, a weekly one-hour radio program of music that explores music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, and beyond. Join host Angela Mariani each week for an hour of exciting recordings, interviews, live excerpts, and commentary as she invites us to fire up our historical imaginations and spend an hour in the contemporary world of early music.”
Click here to link to Harmonia’s website, which includes podcasts, archived programs, and more information about the program and early music.
Harmonia is a production of WFIU, Bloomington (Indiana Public Media). Created by Angela Mariani for WFIU in 1991, it has been broadcast on hundreds of public radio stations and is also available globally via internet streaming through Indiana Public Media’s website (link above). In May of 2023 our production team celebrated Harmonia’s 1000th episode.

In Studio Picture 1996

Harmonia‘s origin

Back in 1991, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University’s Early Music Institute (now Historical Performance Institute), one of my part-time jobs was working at IU’s public radio station WFIU as a board announcer. I’d been working there for a couple of years when the current Program Director, Christina Kuzmych, asked me if I was interested in developing a weekly, one-hour early music program, with the potential of eventually seeking syndication. I was very excited to do it, but worried about the fact that I had just embarked on a doctoral degree, and producing and hosting a radio program sounded like a full-time job. I brought my dilemma to my teacher and mentor, the groundbreaking medieval music performer, scholar, and founder of the  Early Music Institute, Thomas Binkley. He told me, “You should definitely do it. You never know where it might lead.” How right he was. For the next fourteen years, I was the sole writer and producer of Harmonia. I picked the topics, chose the music, wrote the scripts, edited the interviews, answered listener e-mail, and to some degree took part in the publicity and marketing process–all while finishing the coursework for a doctorate, recording and touring with the medieval ensemble Altramar, and then joining the music faculty at Texas Tech University.  When I became a full-time professor at Texas Tech University, WFIU generously expanded the operation into a production and writing team, which has made it possible for me to continue with the show for another 16 years and counting.