Goodbye to Gidon Hod

The 7 AM news this morning included a bit about the passing of Gidon Hod, who had been a long-time broadcaster on Kol Yisrael.  I think he was best known to most Israelis as a sports broadcaster, but I was familiar with him as the host for many years of a classical music quiz program on Kol Hamusica that ran for the last half-hour of his Thursday noon-to-two-PM show “Sha’atayim ad Shtayim”.  I’ve been an avid listener of classical music since I was 11 or 12, and in my younger days I performed a lot of it as well, so more often than not I could identify the piece, although my preference for orchestral music rather than opera put me at a distinct disadvantage whenever the mystery composition was from the latter repertoire.  I actually found the main difficulty was the technical challenge of getting through to the studio telephone line.  And of course, not knowing the name of the piece meant I could now identify something that was familiar; and not infrequently, I would be introduced to something I’d not heard before.  Win-win.

From the late 1990’s onward I was a regular participant in the quiz. Throughout the run of the show, there was a group of about 30-40 regular callers, and while the composition of this group changed slowly over time, I was always impressed with how much more knowledgeable about the pieces than I were many of my cohorts. This was not a community in the traditional sense of the word, but it nevertheless was a community of sorts, and I got used to and looked forward to hearing the voices of my fellow classical music aficionados every week.

I also got used to Gidon’s occasionally acerbic treatment of callers: he would sometimes respond to a caller with, “No, we’re looking for a correct answer”. On several occasions he corrected my Hebrew in a somewhat condescending way, (for example, in translating the title of Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia” to Hebrew, the word used for “central” is “tichonit”, not “merkazit”), but that was fine with me, that’s how we learn. And as I said, usually when I managed to get through, I got the right answer.

Around 8 or 9 years ago, Gidon hosted a face-to-face show (in which I participated) at the Kol Hamusica studio in Tel-Aviv.  I did not win, but I got a CD or two for showing up.

A few years after that, when the then- (and now-) Prime Ministers erroneously thought that replacing Kol Yisrael with a new Broadcasting Company (at a cost of hundreds of millions of shekels to the taxpayers) would net him better press coverage, most of the old-time hosts on Kol Hamusica were sent out to pasture, and the format of the programming changed.  I did not like and still do not like listening to any of the new hosts, and thus tend to avoid listening to the new version of Kol Hamusica.  Gidon’s show remained, but it was switched to a format in which the full two hours was a quiz show.  I preferred the earlier format, but the modified version did allow for the airing of longer sections from the pieces selected, as well as time for Gidon or the caller to comment on the background of a given piece.

At the end very end of 2021, at the beginning of that day’s program, Gidon announced that it would be the last show, that management had decided to replace it with something else. To this day I don’t fully understand the decision. I doubt that it was Gidon’s age that was the primary concern (he was 90 upon his death), as several mornings a week they now have a super-annoying announcer from 7 to 8, a re-tread from one of the other channels, who is of a comparable age, but who unlike Gidon is off the charts on the pomposity scale. If they were going to insist on putting an old fogie in that slot, they should have given it to Gidon. And when they eventually settled on a replacement for Gidon’s show, it was hosted by yet another irritating announcer. This is not what our sages meant by the concept of yeridat hadorot, but it’s similar.

So upon hearing this morning’s broadcast, I found it ironic that the same folks who unceremoniously dumped Gidon Hod nearly three years ago – from what I gathered, he was only told shortly before going on the air that day that his noontime show was being cut – were respectfully eulogizing him. They would have done better to treat him and his listeners nicely in the first place.

After Gidon’s show was taken of the air, one of the regulars put together a Whatsapp group of former quiz participants, and there are one or two folks in the group who from time-to-time post clips of pieces for us to identify, or in some cases to introduce lesser-known composers.  (It was actually through this group, shortly after shabbat ended last night, that I got the news of Gidon’s passing.)  But it’s not the same as having a designated time each week that we all listen to the program and call in with our answers.

So here’s a thanks to Gidon Hod for all those years of Shaatayim ad Shtayim. It’s still missed.