From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Day the Music Died
Public radio sells out.
Last week it was revealed that National Public Radio was laying off employees in its cultural programming division and, according to Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post, "gutting" its showcase classical-music program, "Performance Today." And this was all happening at the same time it was expanding its West Coast operations to concentrate on "the business side of entertainment."
That would be movies, TV and pop music. Classical music, what most people still associate with public radio, hasn't much of a business side anymore, and little of what it does have is on the West Coast. Looks like Beethoven is rolling over again.
These developments are only the latest in a long series of defeats for broadcast high culture at the hands of the corporate suits. After WNYC, New York's public radio station, lost a transmitter in the collapse of the World Trade Center, it relegated its classical-music programming to the 8 p.m.-to-midnight slot. But when WNYC got back to normal earlier this month, its music didn't. Though there is a new one-hour cultural-magazine show during the day, it is part of the news-talk format picked up from commercial radio that is proving more and more attractive to public stations. Music itself, as opposed to talk about music, or just plain talk, is heard only after 7 p.m.
Not that this shift has gone unlamented. WNYC's own Community Advisory Board passed a resolution that "deeply regrets" the changes and fears "the potential dilution of one of WNYC's core assets--the extraordinary and passionate loyalty of its listeners and members."
Passionately loyal they may be, but numerous they are not. At least not numerous enough. Public radio stations across the country are dumping their traditional formats--mainly classical music and jazz--or crowding them to the edges of their schedules because their marketers are telling them that there are many more listeners to a news-talk format.
Marketers? Wasn't the whole point of public radio, in the words of its charter, to "serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard"?
You may not be surprised to learn that the marketers themselves see no contradiction here. In the words of David Giovannoni, whose marketing firm, Audience Research Analysis, has been largely responsible for advising the network and local stations of serious music's unfavorable demographics: "I am not saying that program directors should make programming decisions based on how much money they're likely to raise. That would undermine the values at the very heart of our service, making it unworthy of support. I am saying, however, that program directors should make the difficult decisions that give the public the highest level of service. That means replacing lower-performance programming with higher-performance programming."
In other words, we are to regard it as strictly coincidental that "higher-performance programming" also happens to bring in more money.
Public broadcasters, says John Patterson of Voice of America, "are confusing public service with popularity." Mr. Patterson is also known as the "Metmaniac" for his ultimately successful campaign to bring back broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera to Washington when WGMS, the local commercial classical station, canceled them last spring. With "an organized program of prodding" by letter-writers and e-mailers, he persuaded WETA, a local public radio station, to pick up the broadcasts. But even that station was "under a lot of pressure to say no."
The problem, says Tom McCourt, a professor at the University of Illinois, Springfield, and the author of "Conflicting Communication Interests in America," is that consultants whose experience was in commercial radio "pretty much set the agenda for public radio in the mid-1990s." With their advice, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has set three standards to qualify for public funding: of minority ownership, average quarter-hour ratings and money raised through listener support.
Average quarter-hour ratings, used by commercial-radio ratings services, put a premium on a lowest-common-denominator audience: people who leave the radio on to one station all day as background noise, as opposed to those whose "passionate loyalty" is to particular programs or formats. Such people show up better in cumulative ratings. But the new thinking in public radio is that the background listeners are not only more numerous but also more likely to make up a "core listenership" that will give money.
You can see the effects of this thinking even on those stations that retain classical music. There is a reason why your local public radio station plays a lot more Telemann and Boccherini than Mahler and Bruckner (to say nothing of Schoenberg, Berg or Webern), and it has nothing to do with musical taste or quality. It is that the earlier composers simply wrote better background music--to play, as Auden put it of Mozart divertimenti, "while bottles were uncorked, / Milord chewed noisily, Milady talked."
Nowadays, the philistinism of the aristocracy is open to everyone. For the future of classical music on the radio, we need only look again at Washington's (Met-free) WGMS. It has risen to fourth place in the local ratings by an elaborate system of matching music--mostly shorter pieces and individual movements carved out of longer works--to the presumed moods of its listeners over the course of the broadcast day.
Jim Allison, program director at the commercial station, told Stephen Budiansky of The Atlantic Monthly recently that his job was "day-parting," or deciding what kinds of feelings people wanted from their music at, say, drive time in the morning ("energetic") or afternoon (more "relaxing"). "To help him match the sound to the desired mood," Mr. Budiansky writes, "Mr. Allison has a database containing descriptions of the music in the station's 10,000-CD library." These label the music's "mood and energy level" as, for example, "boisterous," "pleasant," "tranquil" or "lively."
This is the direction in which public radio is moving too. Except on Saturday afternoons, it is already hard for Washington listeners to tell the difference between the music on WGMS and WETA. And NPR, whose cutbacks, says Tom McCourt, are "really emblematic of the marketplace mentality that has overtaken public broadcasting in general," can hardly give a lead to the local stations anymore because it is controlled by them. It is not only covering "the business side of entertainment." It is part of the business side of entertainment.
We've come to the end of an era in high culture. Bruckner wrote a requiem Mass that might be appropriate to mark the moment. Not that public radio will to play it.
Mr. Bowman, the American editor of the TLS, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
