Classical Radio

Thoughts on its life, demise, and continuance

A theater program advertisement for WNCN - a former New York Radio Station

Here are roughly 550 words on a topic I’ve been considering for a time.

In New York in the 1980s there were at least seven places on the radio dial (FM and AM) where, on a weekday, one could hear classical music.  There were two commercial stations alone that programmed it full time – WQXR FM (the radio station of the New York Times), and WNCN FM(owned by GAF).  The city owned WNYC which programmed hours of classical music a day, and other stations programmed at least one classical music program daily.  Of all the stations broadcasting at that time, only one – Columbia University’s WKCR FM– is still broadcasting classical music as it was then, on the same frequency and with a few of the same hosts.  The New York Times sold WQXR to New York Public Radio in 2009, resulting in a weaker signal at a new frequency, while WNYC (its new owner and once the home of satire-prone Morning Music hosted by droll Steve Post) became profoundly talk in format, leaving out classical music entirely.

WNCN gave way to a rock format in 1992, and WQXR AM– a throwback to 1944, relinquished classical music to an oldies and American standards format that same year.  Even WFUV at Fordham University and New York’s famously (or infamously) progressive WBAI eventually removed classical from its programming.  What remains are essentially two stations with only one programming classical music full time on a relatively weak transmitter.

Without analyzing the business decisions leading to the musical losses, the trend is still a frustrating if not sad one.  People carry around classical music on their phones and other portables.  The Internet has become efficient enough that streaming audio services can suffice where FM signals still manage other music.  There are solid reasons for curtailing classical music programming as generations shift, but the reasons for removing it entirely are short-sighted and destructive.

For me, the realm of art, music, and the imagination are almost of a continuum.  There must be sources of imagistic enlightenment to take us out of ourselves – places to assure us that thoughts and feelings devoted to the experience of life itself are still valid.  Imagination, unfortunately, seems to be in the crosshairs of commerce.  I’m reminded of the famous introduction to the ABC early 1960s science fiction series The Outer Limits.  “…sit back and we will control all you see and hear as the control voice takes you to…”

Currently, the control voice takes you to the next trend, the next car, the next medication, the next game, and the next phone, and the only way to refresh the scene is to consume more of it.  We must take the time to unplug and be at one with a good book or a good concert, even a good recording heard on a stereo while sitting on the living room couch as people did regularly decades before the business of micro technology sapped our attention spans.  Aside from subscribing to local symphony orchestra series, which is the ultimate, there are more modest steps that are also wonderful.

Do this – in the spirit of meditation take twenty minutes to do nothing but listen to a classical work – even a symphony.  Take no calls, accept no interruptions – make it a gallery of sound.  Read about the work you’re hearing, as if you were in the concert hall.  Make that a sonic vacation and do it regularly.  Attend a recital or a chamber performance. You’ll find it’s a treat.  Great music was meant to be a journey.  Listen to it where you can.

Here’s where the mini-essay ends.

For a little more background about my love of this form of radio communication, I offer a longer examination to those who have a little more time.

In thinking about themes on this site I remember that some of my thoughts have been coalescing for years on certain topics, and while they’re not all worthy of what used to be considered “long form” on Atlantic Magazine where it might take a couple of days to finish an article, I can at least put something into motion.  I think of this process in the way I think of a gallery in a museum, where the world can come into view in a concentrated space of time, in a concentrated place.

Thinking back as I have to my arrival in New York, one of the important components of life was the radio.  Yesterday, I turned on a portable radio to hear Birdflight – a daily program on Columbia University’s FM radio station (first non-commercial stereo station in the country) devoted to the music of Charlie Parker and hosted by the late Grammy Award winning Phil Schaap.  These are archived episodes in perpetual rebroadcasts as a sort of continuing memorial to Schaap who died last year (2021) at age 70.  The shows are still good.

The problem yesterday is that there was no signal on the little radio I’d turned on.  The station was off the air.  There was no music on its website either, but there was an apology regarding transmitter repair.  I felt a little depressed, noting the loss of a friend for the day, and noting that this left only one other station devoted to the performing arts.  Happily, the music was back this morning, and Birdflight was on at its usual time.  Columbia University has been conservative about preserving WKCR FM, in its enlightened form, for decades.  Were it not for that, another source for serious music would likely have been lost amid a radio landscape that has been largely deforested since the 1980s.

Classical music has always been important to me, yet I grew up listening to hit songs of the day on AM radio.  A radio was often on in the background or in the car.  My parents didn’t get an FM tuner in the car until I was away at college, so AM and its casualness were comfortable and familiar.  Driving around with AM, then, meant hearing the Billboard charts and even one classical daily program called Adventures in Good Music which was hosted by a deep-throated musicologist named Karl Haas who recorded the show at WJR in Detroit.  You could hear the program via that daytime signal even 200 miles away from its transmitter.

Meanwhile, I got my first stereo at 14. It was a basic model with an automatic turntable and an 8-track cassette player, aside from the AM-FM tuner.  The FM tuner was a big deal.  I was at last able to hear a stereo signal, and aside from regaling myself with disco or “album-oriented rock”, I was able to find some classical music – underscoring my need for more of it.  I was studying piano and learning about great music (classical and jazz) mainly by borrowing records from the library.  Before the stereo I had been given my aunt’s 1948 Magnavox console upon which I’d frequently listen to Arthur Fiedler’s 1935 78 RPM album with the Boston Pops, which was a recording of Rhapsody in Blue with a spirited rendition of the Strike Up the Band overture on the fourth side as an encore.

It didn’t hurt that my father grew up in Vienna and Berlin where there had even been chamber music performed in the apartment.  His father purportedly once wrote a letter to Gustav Mahler offering a suggestion for his opera presentations and received a sarcastic response.  This somewhat rarefied connection was passed along to me through gifts of little classical 45 records from Europe and a memorable afternoon where my father placed a pair of stereo headphones over my ears and played a recording of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata.  He warned me that it would be loud, but I was thrilled.  I was six or seven at the time.  Jascha Heifetz’s violin sounded like it was only inches from my head and this sound and its power became an indelible memory.

All of this is to set you the reader up for the point that classical music (a type of music meant to be heard and imagined) is a kind of basis for culture.  It has literally underscored civilizations.  It was the goal of rational societies that an orchestra be at the center of the lives of cities.  It was not surprising then that when I moved to New York in the mid-80’s, there was a lot of classical music on the FM dial and even some remaining on the AM dial.

A memory which I cherish comes from my first months in New York.  I’d found work in a restaurant’s kitchen preparing food for delivery.  Part of my job involved accompanying an assistant manager in a van and delivering drums of pound cake batter to one of the other restaurants (this one at Penn Station) in the small chain.  It was labor, but who cared at that age – particularly when there was work.  The manager always let me tune the AM radio in the panel van, and I’d go to the end of the dial at 1560 kHz where WQXR was broadcasting.  One morning in the van I heard a romantic work that grabbed my imagination and attention as it merged beautifully with the towers, the sea of traffic and summer haze.  It was stunning to me – a moment of complete joy amid a sweaty and rugged daily chore.  The radio host announced that it was a movement from Claude Debussy’s orchestrated Petite Suite (which I would later find out was the Ballet movement).  I loved its modal structure and the evocation of great space.  Thus began a quest to find a recording of the music, which I eventually did and which I still have.

This was a moment of synchronicity – even with the limited sonic range of an AM radio signal, which somehow only enhanced its mystery.  That AM station is long vanished, but the souvenir of a memory and the impact it made is still on-air for me.