As a program dedicated to the "Life of the Mind," the Tower of Song deals in Ideas—the ideas in music and the music in ideas.

"The office of the [Orphic] scholar is to cheer, to raise and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation." –Emerson

The Gypsy Scholar—broadcasting in exile (from the "Ivory Tower")—has taken Emerson's advice, and is working for the ("another office") degree of the "Orphic Scholar." It's not so much that the academic scholar becomes a "popularizer," but more that he becomes the public (outsider) intellectual: ". . . the public role of the intellectual as outsider, 'amateur,' and disturber of the status quo." (Edward Said) Therefore, the "Gypsy Scholar" radio handle stands for the outsider intellectual and the affirmation of "unpaid," or "amateur" (for the love of it), status of scholarship. However, in today's university this is a down-and-out status:

"Sometimes—most time—I think that the way down and out leads out of the university, out of the academy. But perhaps it is rather that we should recover the Academy of earlier days—the Academy of Plato in Athens, the Academy of Ficino in Florence. . . . At any rate, the point is first of all to find again the mysteries." –N. O. Brown (Phi Beta Kappa Graduation Address, Columbia University, 1968.) [For Platonic Academy, see "School of the Night"page.]

"To find again the mysteries"—this is the task of the "Orphic Scholar." Yet, given the reality of the university today, this goal must be sought outside the academy. More plainly and accurately stated, scholarship moving down and out (to that "tower down the track") means that the Gypsy Scholar's field of study is the phenomenon of "the vulgar," "the profane," "the common"—popular culture (as expressed in today's popular song, especially "sixties" and post-sixties music; that historical "triumph of vulgarity"). Thus, Ralph Waldo Emerson's advice to the young scholar: “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” In this neo-Troubadourean /Dantean move down to the "vulgar," the Gypsy Scholar (as a "troubadour of knowledge") doesn't leave high culture (traditional philosophy, poetry, literature, arts and letters) behind, but instead subordinates it to a blend/mix of the high and the low. As stated in his "Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital": ". . . high academic culture and low pop-culture—high argument & deep song—; not from the Ivory Tower, but from 'that tower down the track,' the TOWER OF SONG...." [See  "Re-Vision Radio" page.]       Therefore, the Gypsy Scholar, broadcasting in exile from the Ivory Tower, seeks "another office"—the higher office of the Orphic Scholar:

"Ah ye old ghosts! ye builders of dungeons in the air! why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of nature, and I know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector & delineator of occult harmonies & unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, & wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing, a priest of the Soul yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health & [the] harmonious power [of music].” [See Emerson section on "Musekal Philosophy" page.]

Orphic Scholarship, then, ever mindful of Wordsworth's Romantic complaint—"murders to dissect"—, re-visions a scholarship that synthesizes and celebrates; a scholarship not in service to thanatos, but in service to eros—“Reason in its most exalted mood.” Scholarship under eros is a Romantic re-enchantment, and this re-visioning of scholarship of the Ivory Tower can be called "re-enchantment of the academy." Therefore, the Orphic Scholar in our new age logically becomes the Radio-scholar (the public intellectual on radio) of the "Joyous Science," which is the practice of "scholarship as performance art:" a mode of scholarship as artistic endeavor, wherein the modern-day "Orphic Scholar" is distinguished by the ability to synthesize and "play with knowledge"—to create “a collage of ideas” in a musical context. For the scholar-artist, or "Orphic Scholar," on radio the literary text becomes "radio-text." [For the complete lowdown on the GS's mixing of philosophy and song through the "Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack," see "Musekal Philosophy" page.]       To cite the "Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital' once more in rethinking or re-visioning radio:

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"RE-VISION RADIO is a Philosophical and Musical program broadcast from an imaginal window at ----- on your radio dial from the TOWER OF SONG. It’s hosted by the Gypsy Scholar and Bohemian Essayist, with a flower in one hand (or name) and a sword in the other. RE-VISION RADIO is a “Soul-making” program, because it’s essentially an “underworld perspective”—a seeing below surface appearances to the occult or symbolic truth of things. Thus, Everybody Knows, RE-VISION RADIO is truly Underground Radio.... RE-VISION RADIO’s musical inter-textuality, because it reads metaphorically between the lines of Philosophy & Song, becomes the imaginal hyper-textuality of a Soul-text." [For full "Manifesto," see "Re-Vision Radio" page.]   

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The Gypsy Scholar takes his cue from the Romantics, who believed that "the business of philosophy was no longer just to analyze and argue but to expand and alter our vision." This Romantic project is the Philosophical Quest-Romance that the "literary" Gypsy Scholar holds out to both his listeners and his readers—to search for and enter the imaginal TOWER OF SONG (a three-dimensionality of architectural "frozen music" that allows the reader /listener to walk in). [See "Philosophy Quest-Romance" page.]      

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The purpose of Re-Vision Radio and its cyberspace website is to help guide its listeners to find and enter into that "invisible landscape" in order to discover the magic door (le porte magique) that opens into the TOWER OF SONG,"where the poetic champions compose", and where all mystic hallways (synesthetically lined with intricate tapestries of spoken-word and song) lead to Soul-making connexions—an imaginal realm where all meanings, through the synergy of magical radio effects (ideas+music+images), are finally and wonderfully visible—that allow you see what they mean! And, if the Orphic deep-song is really "heard"—by entering into its unfolding—, then radio listeners might completely enter the TOWER OF SONG and see what it means.

“Works of literature also move in time like music and spread out in images like painting. The word narrative or mythos conveys the sense of movement caught by the ear, and the word meaning or dianoia conveys, or at least preserves, the sense of simultaneity caught by the eye. We listen to the poem as it moves from beginning to end, but as soon as the whole of it is in our minds at once we ‘see’ what it means. More exactly, this response is not simply to the whole of it, but to a whole in it: we have a vision of meaning or dianoia whenever any simultaneous apprehension is possible.” —Northrop Frye

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack creates a new sonic form, a radio-text where Argument & Song (dialectics and music, logos and mythos, analysis and synthesis) interface. And because there's a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song, this means Re-Vision Radio’s essays contextualize its songs, and, conversely, its songs compose the essay. Thus, the fusion of song and argument is the rhyme and reason for the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, and function (in the way the history of Rock 'n' Roll describes) as “lyrics that make one think”.

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, mixing Argument & Song in a way that's both intellectually stimulating and emotionally satisfying, is designed to facilitate philosophical enchantment (“to make magical again”), wherein a central idea or theme is musically expressed in order to create an overall mood, and thus guiding its listeners into the Tower of Song. And because Re-Vision Radio participates in the great Romantic project of the "re-enchantment of the world,” the Gypsy Scholar would invite listeners to enter the center of enchantment by following, "in the middle of the night,” the song into the Tower of Song. Therefore, before the dawn breaks and the Orphic magic ends (as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), the Gypsy Scholar wants to know this from his listeners: