Classical Gas
Finding it harder to locate classical music on your radio dial? If you're in Miami, you no longer have any station with a classical format, the last such station having just switched to techno-pop. In Washington, you've lost your morning classical-music show on public-radio station WETA-FM, that station having switched to a news feed already carried on another of the capital's public stations. You've got a problem even if you're in New York, because public radio station WNYC will soon be cutting back it's daytime classical programming. But never mind where you are; National Public Radio is considering dropping its national classical-music shows altogether, on the theory that stations are using them not as feature programming, but as filler.
As it happens, you may not really have all that much of a problem. Washington, New York, and many other large cities have commercial stations playing classical music around the clock. And as it happens, cable music services offer classical formats. And for that matter, Internet radio features an astounding array of choices, including classical. Even so the air is thick with lamentations, many of them with a familiar melody of their own.
A New York cellist named David Finkel, for example, decries WNYC's decision because he sees it as the loss of the music gatekeeper of good taste who guides and teaches listeners. "I look at someone who's in charge of a radio station as curating a great art form," he told The New York Times. "If the station is essentially dedicated to classical music, these people need to make very serious and well-educated choices so that the public is given the music in the most intelligible and consistent format."
Pianist Wu Han (Finkel's wife) joined with other New York musicians in regretting the passing of a cultural model of her youth. "When you turn on the radio you should have the option of listening to classical music, without cost. I grew up learning a lot of classical music from listening to the radio."
Actually, Finkel's and Han's models are precisely the reasons that classical programming is waning. Finkel and Han are waxing nostalgic for a time when "classical" meant Romantic orchestration, and most classical radio programmers still adhere to that model. But while classical radio has remained static, audience taste has evolved. Thanks to low CD production costs, there is more "classical music" available than ever, though it's no longer focused on symphonic performances. These days, the classical audience has bypassed its gatekeepers, as Canadian music critic Jeet Heer has noted, and is pursuing an array of specialized forms from medieval chants to baroque medleys. It's a classical case of cultural plenitude.
Worse, National Public Radio is the exactly wrong model to respond to the specialization of tastes. Its "alternative network" structure assumes a bloc audience with bloc tastes not served by commercial radio, and its fundraising assumes the same. It thus must pursue the largest audience it can identify. These days, that's news, plus such humor programs as "A Prairie Home Companion."
A more likely model would be a profusion of FM "microradio" stations that would program eccentrically for small audiences. The FCC has never liked this idea, and neither has NPR, which has traditionally lobbied against microradio. NPR claims that further dividing the FM spectrum would have a deleterious effect on signal quality, and thus on its music programming, even though it is cutting back on music in favor of talk-based shows. NPR thus "serves" the radio-listening public much the way Amtrak—which has blocked proposed private high-speed rail lines—serves the travelling public.
The decline of old-fashioned symphonic-oriented radio programming may actually be good for the classical audience, because it may clear the air for new and better programming ideas. That's already beginning to happen in Miami, a city with no classical format at the moment. Stepping in to help fill the void is WVUM-FM, the University of Miami station. Though its classical programming is currently limited, host Katie O'Donnell, a music student, told the Miami Herald that "I'll add more contemporary music, both recent stuff and early 20th century composers that didn't get played" on the city's now-defunct classical station.
