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By David
Schiff |
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Classical-music radio stations in the United
States were once chock-full of nutty professors, eccentrics whose quirky
opinions served to educate and inspire generations of listeners. In the
1950s and ’60s in New York, for example, the obsessive Fleetwood,
on WNCN, might play a selection four times in a row if he liked, and the
outrageous Seymour DeKoven, on WFUV, proselytized fanatically for “barococo”
music. Far more than purveyors of musical appreciation, they were models
of musical devotion.
Today there are just a few strong personalities left on the air, like
the durable and majestically ponderous Robert J. Lurtsema on WGBH in Boston,
and their futures are imperiled by a bland format that has become the
norm on commercial and public stations alike. (Mr. Lurtsema himself has
been cut back to weekend mornings.) Station managers justify the new,
smooth approach as “welcoming,” but it is hard to imagine
how it could ever instill a passionate concern for music in a new generation.
Across the country, station managers and programmers seem to believe that
their audiences want a continuous and homogenous flow of background music,
interrupted as little as possible by announcements, let alone idiosyncratic
bursts of opinion. Shows like Jim Svejda’s Record Shelf and
Peter Schickele’s Schickele Mix, both syndicated by Public
Radio International, and Performance Today, produced by National
Public Radio, find themselves caught between, on one hand, a news and information
culture with little interest in classical music and, on the other, classical-station
executives for whom “education” has become a dirty word.
“The educational approach only leads to the graveyard,” said
Fred Child, the music director of WNYC in New York. But classical stations
like WNCN and KFAC in Los Angeles have died in other ways, pursuing “lite”
or crossover formats.
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