‘Maybe we'll need a cart for our Emmys’: Montana PBS receives 12 regional nominations

Montana PBS has received 12 regional Emmy nominations for the 63rd annual Northwest Emmy Awards. Six of these works were produced on MSU’s campus, which is home to KUSM-TV, Bozeman’s Montana PBS station.

The nominated projects — “11th and Grant with Eric Funk,” “Handel’s Messiah: Montana Baroque,” played by Baroque Music Montana and “The Noël Concert,”performed by the MSU School of Music — take local sound to the big screen. For all of these works, PBS brought MSU students behind the scenes to gain hands-on experience with TV production.

“We are trying to tell the local stories of a little bit of everybody's life in Montana,” said Montana PBS Director and General Manager Aaron Pruitt.

When Eric Funk pitched “11th and Grant” twenty years ago, he wanted to highlight Montana musicians from all genres. Funk, a longtime MSU music professor, said that the show was always meant to balance performance and personal storytelling.

“I wanted 45 minutes of music, 15 minutes of interview,” he said. “I want my audience, when they get done watching a show, to feel like they know these guys.”

For Funk, the show displays the diversity of musical talent in Montana.

“I mean, we're a microcosm of the country, if not the world. Good grief, we’ve got zydeco in Montana.” Funk said. “We’re trying to get the whole range, not just the spit-polished, real slick, shiny stuff.”

He said the show's visual aspect paints a more intimate picture of the artists and their music than audio alone.

“We can really take you right up. You can almost feel their breath,” Funk said. “That visual component is so important because when these guys are in earnest, it's heartbreaking. It has that real, physical feeling.”

This year, “11th and Grant” was nominated for an episode featuring artists Nick Spear and Susan O’Dea from Big Sky City Lights, a folk duo that performs across Montana.

“[Spear] and [O’Dea] fire off these looks at each other that are just so beautiful,” he said. “There’s just this professional respect and playfulness.”

The second nominated work, “Handel’s Messiah: Montana Baroque,” is a live recording of Baroque Music Montana’s two-and-a-half-hour-long performance of Handel's Messiah.

The group played authentic instruments from the Baroque period, which encompasses art produced from the end of the Renaissance period to the start of the Classical period.

“That’s the first complete Baroque performance of that composition, which is basically played as written,” said producer and MSU music professor Jeremiah Slovarp. According to him, this means that artists play period-accurate instruments, such as Baroque violins with strings made of animal sinew.

“No one plays Handel’s Messiah as it was written because no one plays those instruments anymore,” Slovarp said. “You’ve got to find these freaks of nature that will go out and play these really weird instruments that no one knows about.”

Montana PBS Director of Production Scott Sterling said that capturing a live performance comes with its own unique challenges. “You don’t get to go back and take two,” he said. “That’s the ultimate job of live TV directing — telling that story in real time.”

The final nominated piece was a live-recorded show of “The Noël! Concert.” Pruitt said the piece was a fun collaboration between Montana PBS and the University.

“We're highlighting the students who are performing,” he said. “At the same time, it's all these students behind the scenes helping to produce the television coverage.”

Pruitt said that working in public media gives artists and producers the freedom to create work that commercial television companies would pass on.

“Quite often, we in public television will say, ‘We're going to do that, even though it's not commercially viable,’” Pruitt said.

For Sterling, the ability to capture stories that other production companies would pass on is the magic of public television.

“We tell stories and we do content because it’s meaningful. I would rather something that is truly meaningful that maybe few people watch, but it impacts those people more,” Sterling said.

“That’s the special thing about public media. If that were to go away, I don’t know what could replace it.”

Slovarp said that the Emmy nominations recognize the quality of work being produced at KUSM-TV.

“It’s a big honor to get that kind of recognition,” Slovarp said. “It’s great for the people that I get to work with in my studio and at PBS, many of whom are my former students or other students from the film and music programs there at MSU.”

According to Pruitt, these nominations prove that Montana PBS is producing work that can compete with larger production companies.

“We are proud of being able to go to Seattle at the end of May and have twelve nominations, and maybe we'll need a cart for our Emmys afterwards,” Pruitt said.