One of KERA’s public television bretheren, WNET in New York, recently undertook a major rebranding effort of its properties both on air and online.  Besides a new logo and graphic standards, station management also wanted a new aural identity for the station (as well as its sister station WLIW).  To do this, who better to contact than the nearby Julliard School, long known as a pinnacle of musical higher education?

WNET held a competition among students, and chose third-year composition student Niccolo Athens’ submission as the station’s new on-air musical identity.  Then, they held a studio session with a 30-piece Julliard student orchestra to record Athens’ different treatments of his original four-note motif (composer Chuck Lovejoy also did a jazz arrangement for WLIW).

In a time when budgets are tight for everyone – especially non-profit organizations –  it seems like a brilliant idea to tap this resource of talent in an effort to keep production costs low for the rebranding campaign.  And it must be a rush for a student composer to see his work broadcast to the masses, multiple times a day, for months (if not years) to come.

The station assembled a short video about the recording sessions and composer.  One of the (very attractive) new station IDs is at the end:

The new station IDs made their debut on air earlier this week. You can see several different versions of the new IDs with Athens’ theme here (scroll down to bottom of page).