The
metaphor of the safe haven and the desire to be “welcoming”
have had powerful effects on programming. The station’s identity
must be kept consistent throughout the day, so the desired demilitarized
zone will appear no matter when a listener turns on the set. Chat must
be kept to a minimum: just a smoothly intoned mention of composer, title,
and performers between selections.
And the selections themselves must never rock the boat. Contemporary music—apart
from movie music and, for some reason, works of Alan Hovhaness—is
almost univer-sally banned from play, though it may survive if it pops
up in concerts recorded live. Second-string composers like Telemann, Boccherini,
and Glazunov are played as often as the three B’s.
Just as programmers express horror at the thought of educating the fringe
audience, they tend to dismiss the idea of reaching out to the young.
“We feel that the audience will come to us as they get older,”
said Ms. White, of Portland. This strategy may seem complacent, but with
baby-boomers swelling the ranks of the elderly and living for decades
past the average classical listening age of 50, passive receptivity and
a welcoming tone may be all that is needed to double or triple the classical
audience.
Mr. Kausch, of Public Radio International in Minneapolis, said that the
defensive stance of classical stations is a result of the evaporation
of support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the shift by many
NPR stations, like WBUR in Boston, to an all-news format. Both KBPS and
WNYC, as stand-alone public stations, must pay their own way. In many
markets, the desire for an impersonal round-the-clock “haven”
and economic pressures have led stations to use programming services offered
by PRI (Classical 24) and WFMT in Chicago (Beethoven Service) to fill
their schedules without having to staff the station during the night and
on weekends.
Although these services usually provide as respectable a mix of less familiar
pieces and well-known classics (though little opera or twentieth-century
music) as is heard on most in-house shows, their specific musical offerings
rarely appear in station program guides or newspaper listings. These services
also seem indifferent to performers. They play recent releases or older
recordings by familiar or obscure players with no clear reasons given
for the choice.
This haphazard approach, though, serves the desire fora continuous flow
of classic music on demand. Listeners caught in traffic or fighting insomnia,
industry wisdom suggests, just want to be able to hear some classical
music: almost any will do. Like the dairy product “soft-serve,”
the music flows out in easily digestible form even if you are not quite
sure of its ingredients.
On a recent morning, I realized just how much I had come to expect only
“smooth” classics on the air. After dropping my daughter off
at school, I switched the radio from the local Howard Stern wannabe back
to KBPS. A noisy torrent of orchestral colors flooded the car. After a
few seconds I realized that it was Sibelius, the suitably stormy music
for the “Tempest”: not exactly new music but a nice jolt of
musical energy. When it abated, the announcer quickly apologized for playing
such music during the “morning rush” and promised a swift
reversion to Baroque music. A Bach concerto soon followed: smooth Bach.
