Basic

Name

Reed Hessler

Personal

About Me

I became an announcer and producer at WBJC in December of 1978 and it has been a pleasure to experience the station's considerable growth since that time. Looking back now, I am amazed at how far we've come. Every weeknight, as well as Sunday afternoons, I join my colleagues in choosing and presenting the music heard on WBJC. Classical music entertains, exhilarates, pacifies and challenges me. My love of music was stimulated by my music teacher parents and was fostered through choral singing as a youth, hearing and loving the Verdi Requiem at age thirteen , and discovering while pursuing an English degree in college that the counterpoint in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony turned me on as much as the electric guitar and bass lines in Jefferson Airplane's music. Ultimately, I became an obsessive classical music listener and returned to school for a while to study music.

My interest in film history is equal to my love for music and I have seen an average of one film a day for about seventeen years. Every Spring, I teach a course in Asian film at Johns Hopkins University. Two years ago, I taught courses in ethnic music at Western High School in Baltimore. The course sparked an interest in the history of the blues…from Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson through Muddy Waters and beyond. In addition to my reading about the subject, I have listened to and enjoyed more than one-hundred blues recordings during the past year. My wife of fourteen years is Dyane Fancey, a teacher and poet. We spend all of our spare time together and, needless to say, Dyane hears a lot of music and sees a lot of movies.