Tom McGee's Blog

[edited to add…]
My fears were exag­ger­ated. WQXR is actu­ally bet­ter than what it used to be. The music they’re play­ing is con­sis­tently inter­est­ing and not at all triv­ial. I find I’m lis­ten­ing to it at least as much as I am to the new (crap­pier) XM clas­si­cal lineup.

[This was the orig­i­nal post:]

Once upon a time, when I first moved to this part of the coun­try, New York City had three thriv­ing radio sta­tions for clas­si­cal music fans. WNYC was the long-established pub­lic radio sta­tion, with live broad­casts, no com­mer­cials, and a fresh approach. WQXR, owned by The New York Times, was the stodgy “Radio Free Park Avenue” source for classical-as-background sewing-machine baroque string music, with the occa­sional major sym­phony live broad­cast plus the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera every week­end. And WNCN was the adven­tur­ous choice higher up on the dial, though with more commercials.

WNCN went bust a long time ago. WNYC has been in the process of mov­ing into an all-talk for­mat for some time. They’d already given up on clas­si­cal dur­ing the time I was most likely to lis­ten, week­ends dur­ing the day. And WQXR was about to go under as well, until WXQR bought their license and promised to keep their clas­si­cal for­mat. That way, WNYC could go, at last, to all-talk; while still pre­serv­ing one clas­si­cal choice for New Yorkers.

The hope was that WQXR’s for­mat could be livened up a lit­tle, some of the stodgier announc­ers shown the door, cut down on the end­less com­mer­cials, and in the process make their pro­gram­ming choices less, well, commercial.

Alas, it’s not to be. The head­line in the Times’ arti­cle this morn­ing is, “More but Selec­tive Music for the New WQXR.” Some excerpts:

Don’t expect to hear much vocal music. Vivaldi? “Just about anything.”

I’ve already got a prob­lem. No vocal music is one of the most-common symp­toms of weak clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming, based on some focus group or sur­vey or some­thing of blue-haired stay-at-homes. And I’m so tired of Vivaldi I can’t tell you. If I hear “Win­ter” from “The Sea­sons” one more time it’s not going to be pretty.

WNYC offi­cials were clear that much of its music would remain safe and on the tra­di­tional side in an effort not to alien­ate its long­time listeners…there may indeed be times when the more rad­i­cal and unfa­mil­iar pieces work, but we will not favor them over the work that speaks directly to the needs of uplift, beauty and contemplation.

While I com­pletely under­stand why early Pen­derecki or any­thing by Xenakis might not be ideal choices for the com­mer­cial radio dial, I don’t put much hope in what­ever their super­fi­cial notion of “uplift” might mean. Some­times I want to con­tem­plate the com­plex­ity and vari­ety of seri­ous music, and not just treat music like the paint­ing over the sofa while I con­tem­plate some­thing else. Appar­ently, the more adven­tur­ous stuff will wind up on their inter­net stream; but I don’t get the inter­net in my car, at least not yet.

The pro­gram­mers also pro­vided a sam­ple list of “core com­posers” and the works that would most likely play on the radio ver­sus the internet…Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, Schu­bert and Wag­ner were there. So were Cop­land, Janacek, Gersh­win, Satie, Sibelius and the ever-popular Vivaldi. Mahler was missing.

Now I’ve really got a prob­lem. Why do I think that we’re really going to be hear­ing the most dumbed-down repertory?

Sibelius’ sym­phonies but not his tone poems; Janacek cham­ber works but not operas. Brahms sym­phonies but not choral works; Beethoven sym­phonies and piano con­cer­tos but not the late piano sonatas, songs or cham­ber works.

There’s the smok­ing gun: not the late piano sonatas. It’s clear they’re aim­ing for “pretty,” and leave “inter­est­ing” out of the pic­ture as much as possible.

Vivaldi had sweep­ing approval. Except for “shorter sacred works.”

There you have it. I won­der if I’ll get around to even mak­ing it a pre-set on my car radio. Well there’s still satel­lite radio, right?

Well, ever since the Sirius/XM merger, the clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming has been about as deep as a col­or­ing book. One would get the impres­sion that Grieg was the most impor­tant com­poser of all time. And the once-fascinating “Vox” chan­nel for vocal music is now Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Radio. I play a lit­tle game with myself when I switch to that chan­nel — Which Verdi opera will they be play­ing? I’m sel­dom sur­prised. It’s really not been worth the sub­scrip­tion fee lately.

Well there’s still the CD changer…