By Mark Schreiner
Dr. Jonathan Kramer is the sort of professor whose comments campus newspaper editors feel compelled to print in italics.
Here’s one example, from North Carolina State University’s Technician, reporting on a new faculty trio of violin, flute and harp:
“Why would Debussy write a piece for such an odd ensemble?” Kramer said. “Well, the sound is very particular, and Debussy found the combination fascinating.”
In addition to hearing Dr. Kramer’s voice on The Classical Station, you can also hear him play the cello
Why italics? It’s not because he has some sort of slant. It’s because Kramer communicates everything with passion. And language struggles to keep up with his exuberant energy.
That passion, an attractive and paradoxical combination of easy-going intensity, is Kramer’s trademark, whether in private music lessons, the lecture hall, on the concert stage or behind the WCPE microphone.
Regular listeners of The Classical Station know his voice and have heard him on early weekend mornings, providing brief but well-informed (and sometimes gently wry) facts about the Great Classical Music he plays.
Jonathan Kramer
But only the closest listeners will have realized that, in addition to hearing Dr. Kramer announce, they have also heard him play!
Just one example: Search the archive of daily playlists on TheClassicalStation.org, and you’ll find a piece played during Weekend Classics in March 2026. You heard the Sonata for Cello & Harp, Op. 28, composed by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) and performed by harpist Jacquelyn Bartlett and cellist Jonathan Kramer.
With him, WCPE listeners get words and music. And, he’s not the only expert on the announcing staff.
Dr. Jay Pierson, host of Thursday Night Opera House, is a professor of voice performance and a professional baritone. Hayden Jones, of the Saturday Evening Request Program, teaches languages at a local college. Many members of our announcing staff have earned advanced academic degrees, studied music and performance at the college and graduate levels, sung and played professionally, or worked in the production and recording industries. They bring you a wealth of experience, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Radio announcing is only Kramer’s latest career. It follows decades in which he worked as a:
- Touring string-band musician, playing coffeehouses across the country
- High school music teacher
- Big-city symphony and opera orchestra cellist
- Community orchestra conductor
- Globe-trotting ethnomusicologist who literally wrote the book on the subject
- Beloved teacher of music at one of the world’s most esteemed technical universities
The man who became a professor emeritus at NC State University didn’t climb the usual academic ladder. A native of Connecticut, he studied world music in college, but dropped out to tour the country with a two-man string band. Later, in New England, he taught music in high schools and lived on a farm commune. He studied cello at Yale with renowned cellist Aldo Parisot. He married and started a family.
Dr. Kramer with his cello and Indian schoolchildren.
Along a curlicue path, he continued studying the instrument with an expert teacher in Arizona, and then won a seat in the esteemed San Francisco Opera and Ballet Orchestras. After two years in SF, he returned to the East to join the North Carolina Symphony.
In Raleigh, he found his physical, intellectual and musical home. A master’s degree from Duke University, a PhD from the Union Institute, and a decade directing the Raleigh Civic Symphony.
The irresistible tug of his curiosity brought the instrumentalist into the world of ethnomusicology, the systematic, global study of how and why humans make music.
That interest took him to North India, where he studied dhrupad, an ancient form of Hindustani Classical Music, then to South Korea, where he studied a living folk music tradition that is millennia old.
Over his career, he’s visited much of the world, heard its music and jammed with its musicians.
Much of that passion and experience is captured in an innovative World Music textbook for undergrads, What in the World is Music?, that he wrote with co-author Dr. Alison E. Arnold.
The spring 2027 semester at NC State will start for the first time in nearly half a century without a lecture hall ringing with music and the teaching of Jonathan C. Kramer.
But he’ll be talking to you on The Classical Station, sharing insights about the Great Classical Music he loves as passionately as you do.
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