NYPR Archives & Preservation
WNYC's First Music Director is a Pioneer in the Broadcast of Classical Music
WNYC's first Music Supervisor (Music Director) Herman Neuman was an accomplished conductor and composer and oversaw the department from its beginning in 1924 to 1967. He continued to do his regular "world" music program (classical), Hands Across the Sea into the 1970s.
In the station's earliest days, Neuman also acted as staff pianist. In a 1964 interview, he recalled he would give as many as five piano recitals a day, announcing the selections himself from a standard volume called Masterpieces of Piano Music. Neuman said that many of the vocalists he accompanied were "song pluggers" who were dispatched to the station by music publishers to sing their latest songs on the air and encourage the sale of sheet music.
In this broadcast on the station's 40th anniversary in 1964, Neuman performs some of the musical works he used to play on the station in 1924 and 1925. He also talks with band leader Enric Madriguere who joined Neuman on WNYC's first broadcast, July 8, 1924.
Herman Neuman started the Masterwork Hour in 1929, radio's longest-running program of recorded classical music. At the time, the station could not afford phonograph records so the program was done with review copies and the generosity of a Brooklyn attorney, who made his large personal collection available to WNYC. In 1936 Neuman began Hands Across the Sea, a program "devoted to the international exchange of serious music." He continued to produce and host the program into the 1970s. Under his leadership and that of Station Director Morris Novik, the American Music Festival was launched in 1940 and continued well into the 1980s.
Neuman was also a conductor who led orchestras in this country and abroad. In 1936 he went to Europe and conducted concerts of American music in Oslo, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, and London. A postwar conducting trip to Poland raised a few paranoid eyebrows at the State Department and FBI whose cold warriors suspected a bit more than just baton waving.
Upon Herman Neuman's filing for retirement Station Director Seymour N. Siegel wrote the following tribute in the July-August 1967 Masterwork Bulletin, WNYC's program guide:
Dr. Herman Neuman has been the Music Director of the Municipal Broadcasting System since WNYC first went on the air in July of 1924. He is the inventor of the Masterwork Hour, 'Radio's oldest continuous program of fine music'. He has given more young artists an opportunity for public performances than, perhaps, any concert manager in the City. For more than two decades, he coordinated WNYC's famous American Music Festivals, which means he must be credited with the responsibility of making possible more first performances of American composers than any orchestra conductor in the United States. He has been an innovator and a pioneer in the establishment of high musical standards for you City station and has fiercely and tenaciously defended those standards of excellence over the years . If ever an institution can be considered the shadow of a man, WNYC's world-wide reputation for "the best in music always" can be attributed to Dr. Neuman. After more than 43 years of loyal, devoted and dedicated service to the culture of the people of our City, Dr. Neuman has applied for retirement. While we hope that he will continue for a log time to present Hands Across the Sea on Saturday afternoons as he has for the past quarter of a century, he leaves the staff of WNYC with the deep affection and boundless appreciation of his colleagues.
Herman Neuman died in 1976 at the age of 80.