Endangering Classical Music by Dumbing It Down

    Nearly three years ago, I posted an entry on classical music as an endangered ecosystem. I’ve also posted, in years past, on how public radio’s commitment to classical music has declined in our new—not really so new anymore—century, viewing this as a symptom of endangerment. There have been others, none greater than the decline in funding for classical music teaching in the schools, at all levels: K-12 predominantly, but also at the college and university level. But that is a topic for a different post.
    As 2016 comes to an end, I want to return to one of my old topics in this subject, classical music on public radio—specifically, public radio in the state of Maine. Two momentous changes occurred this year. One is that the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) changed its name to Maine Public (MP). That’s it—Maine Public. The new name could mean anything—a water or gas or electric public utility, for example, or perhaps the state’s public library system, or the state public relations council, or the public health commission, or any of several other public entities. To the network, it’s a bit of a brag: we are the public, the name seems to be saying, no need for further identification. To any public employee in the state, the name could be confusing, even off-putting. Two was the creation of a second radio channel, Maine Public Classical. Whereas it had been possible to stream classical music 24/7 from the MPBN website, the new channel also broadcasts over the air, both on the FM band and on HD radio. This certainly increases the availability of classical music on the radio in the state, and suggests that it may not be so endangered after all.
    In fact, Maine has more classical radio stations than this. Some of the college and university radio stations play a bit of it, but there is another full-time station, WBACH, which can be heard from two stations in the state, one in the largest city, Portland, and the other in mid-coastal Maine. They stream the “world classical network,” from Cape Classical 107.5. It’s not exclusively Bach, although his music is well represented, and most of what’s heard is from the 18th and 19th centuries. Maine Public Classical’s station, which can be heard over the air in most but not all sections of the state, now programs the few shows that were left after years of classical music’s gradual shrinkage, the morning classical program from 9 to noon, the 8 pm hour’s symphony broadcasts from New York, Boston, Chicago, etc. and one weekly broadcast from a chamber music concert in the state of Maine, and Saturday afternoon opera. The Maine Public station, the same over-the-air station that reaches the whole state and has done so for decades, is now mostly talk, plus a couple of hours of music in the evenings and a little more on weekends that is difficult to categorize—more on that in another post, perhaps—but at any rate it’s meant to appeal to an under-40 audience. The same repertoire of talk shows one hears on most public radio stations today can be heard here in Maine, most of the time—BBC news all night, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, news talk shows like those hosted by Diane Rehm, and Tom Ashbrook; politics and the arts shows like those hosted by Terri Gross; and so on, along with a re-configuration and reduction in local news reporting.
    One would think that with WBACH and Maine Public Classical, the audience for Western art music was being better served than before. Certainly more classical music is more easily available over the air now than it was three, six, ten years ago. But what classical music is it? Is it the same classical music that was available in earlier years? No. There’s a much higher proportion of pop classics, and easy pieces—almost nothing that is atonal, for example. There’s a much higher percentage of short pieces. Strings predominate. Vocal music is in short supply. On “Classical 24,” the out-sourced service that Maine Public Classical uses for several hours a day, most pieces played are 20 minutes or less in length. If a piece is longer, then one movement from it is played, without apology. Composers, beware: if your compositions are longer than 20 minutes, they won’t be played in their entirety. Maine Public Classical does broadcast one other syndicated show, Performance Today, that is more varied than the others, in the sense that the host offers biographical tidbits about the composers, interviews performers, even offers listeners a little quiz--all in the name of educating the public and making classical music more attractive. A wider variety of pieces, and much more modern music, is played on Performance Today; yet most of them are, still, short.
    It was the polymath musicologist Charles Seeger who made fun of one of the synonyms for classical music—“serious music”—calling the name preposterous, as if no other music could stake the same claim. Had Seeger lived to hear the dumbing down of classical music on radio, he wouldn’t have needed to comment. Altogether, this dumbing down of classical music endangers it as much as, if not more than, its absence on radio.

Music, sustainability, and public radio

    Although we had little down-time at the cultural sustainability conference, early in the mornings before breakfast I listened to Vermont Public Radio, broadcasting NPR’s ubiquitous news program, Morning Edition. One of the flashpoints for music’s sustainability is its future on US public radio--what used to be called noncommercial radio, and now should be called brief commercial radio based on those 3-sentence announcements naming corporate underwriters, what they do, and how to contact them. Whereas music programming, particularly classical music, once dominated public radio, in the new millennium it’s gradually lost its hold, to the point that today most public radio stations broadcast news and talk shows over the air, having moved classical music to the Internet or to broadcast channels that conventional radios cannot receive. I've blogged here before about classical music's future, on radio and elsewhere. Meanwhile, music of many kinds still can be heard on several low-power, local community radio stations.
    In New England, I date the public radio all-talk trend from the 1990s, the decade when Boston-area WBUR-FM gradually removed music from prime time to its peripheral schedule, late at night and on weekends. In 1997, despite much protest, WBUR dropped music programming entirely, in favor of news and talk shows. WBUR’s award-winning and highly popular late night jazz show, hosted by Tony Cennamo, was among the programs eliminated. Boston’s WGBH-FM still provided much music programming, including the paradigmatic Morning Pro Musica, hosted by Robert J. Lurtsema, aired also by many other stations in New England, including Maine Public Radio. But in the new millennium, after the charismatic Lurtsema died in 2000, WGBH-FM also pushed music gradually to the side, and today it too is all-talk, all the time. What of Vermont?
    I didn’t hear enough public radio in Vermont to get an impression, but after returning to Maine I looked up its programming schedule. Not to my surprise, I found that Vermont had followed the trend, and was programming news and information almost exclusively. What did surprise me was that in some of the on-line articles I read about how Vermont made that transition, the man behind the trend was identified as Vermont Public Radio’s Mark Vogelsang. In 2012, Vogelsang left Vermont to become head of Maine Public Radio. Would Maine now follow Vermont? Most likely.
    Since Vogelsang took over, peripheral blocks once reserved for music have been replaced by talk shows. The 11 p.m. hour, once a haven for soothing music (“Echoes,” with John DiLiberto), is now punctuated by the noisy drumming that introduces segments of On Point, produced, incidentally, by WBUR, but on air there in the mornings when the drum-banging is a little less annoying. Maine weekend early mornings, once given over to classical music, now feature information shows: On Being, Living on Earth, Only a Game, and Bob Edwards Weekend. These shows do have their merits, but to music listeners, airing them on early weekend mornings is especially galling, as the classical music host, Jennifer Mitchell, used to start with Robert J. Lurtsema’s signature show-opener, a dawn-chorus of bird sounds, appropriate at that early hour—although not as rewarding as the real thing one could hear through an open window.
    Another ominous sign was the departure, last month, of Maine Public Radio’s morning classical music host, Suzanne Nance, for a position at a commercial, all-classical music station in Chicago. Morning classical music remains from 9 to noon on Maine Public Radio, but now with rotating local hosts while the station says it’s undertaking a national search for a replacement. Maine is the New England morning classical music holdout. If and when it goes, it will join Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, none of whose public radio networks broadcast classical music in the morning (or, for the most part, anytime else day or night).
    A word about Suzanne Nance is in order. For several years she not only hosted the morning program but also was a strong, public voice for classical music live performance in Maine. Herself a singer, she could be heard in concerts in Portland and elsewhere in the state; importantly, she hosted on her program visiting composers, conductors, soloists and chamber groups for a half hour, on average one day a week; and besides talking about their upcoming concerts in the state they sometimes played live music on her show. Not everyone liked her enthusiastic, up-front personality; and some thought she didn’t program enough music from before 1800; but no one doubted that her presence boosted classical music in Maine. Thus, her departure as radio host is an even greater loss for classical music in the state.
    By chance, a little after returning to Maine from Vermont, I met someone who until earlier this year had worked for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. I asked about Suzanne Nance’s departure. “Well,” the answer came, “I shouldn’t talk out of school. But since I am out of school, I will.” Having left the job at MPBN, the person (who will remain nameless here) told me that Suzanne “read the tea leaves and decided that she ought to move on. She’d been looking for another position, and when this came along, she decided to go.” I asked if this was a career move up for her. “More of a lateral move,” was the reply. “What did she see in the tea leaves?” I asked. “The new head, Vogelsang, wants to make it all news and talk radio. That’s what he did in Vermont. You can see he’s gradually doing it already.” “Yes,” I said, “I’ve noticed.”
    What prompts this blog entry is that Vogelsang himself spoke for nearly an hour today, on MPBN, in response to listeners’ questions. He confirmed that his plan for Maine Public Radio was to move towards two separate stations, one for news and information, and the other for classical music. Of course, this means no jazz, no folk music, no popular music; it means the end on Maine radio for shows like A Prairie Home Companion, for years arguably the largest fund-raiser for public radio; it means the end for other staples that the Maine audience likes, such as alternative music and singer-songwriters; and it’s already the end for shows like American Routes, hosted by folklorist Nick Spitzer out of New Orleans, which went off the MPBN air last spring.
    These programming changes are cause for a measured lament, and the lament goes beyond music programming on public radio: it is a lament for a generation and a way of life that included listening to music on radio, particularly classical music; it is a recognition of the passing of a segment of a generation for whom classical music on radio represented more than merely music, but also a set of values, values increasingly out of step in a contemporary, diverse global society. Vogelsang dropped the statistic that most people under 30 don’t even own radios, and don’t listen to them except perhaps in their automobiles; and we are hearing that this young generation doesn’t own nearly as many cars as past generations did. The automobile, once the symbol of freedom, is being replaced by the smartphone, the symbol of connectedness. Culture is rapidly changing; those who wish to address questions of musical sustainability will need to look elsewhere besides public radio.
    Radio executives like Vogelsang are consumed with other survival issues, not least the survival of public radio itself, as it moves in the digital direction and its Internet presence becomes more important than over-the-air. All programs need to be available on the Internet, he said; that will become our primary means of delivery. When news breaks, should it go immediately on the public radio website, or do we wait until it’s broadcast and only then put it on the website? This is the kind of nuts and bolts question that radio and television executives think about, not what they will do with their music programming. They already know the answer to that one. And when pressed on it, as he was by at least one listener this afternoon, Vogelsang said it wasn't going away: classical music would be available 24/7 on another MPBN station, as it is on the Internet right now. (MPBN streams it from its website.) And after all, music of all kinds is available elsewhere on the Internet. Indeed, with Internet services like Pandora and Spotify and now Apple’s iRadio along with iTunes, the under-30 generation is able to hear the artists and individual music tracks they want there. Most won't realize what they are missing: voices like Suzanne Nance’s, which helped sustain the live classical music performance community in the state of Maine, for example; or the history and biography and other context that once came in the liner or brochure notes that accompanied a record album or CD, now replaced by "album art."
    Measured lament behind us, the transition to news and talk on Maine Public Radio offers the chance for MPBN to become a conduit for civic dialogue in the state. Vogelsang understands this, and has initiated programs like Maine Calling, now expanded in prime time, the noon hour, to four days a week. People are invited to call in from all areas of the state to discuss issues of local, regional, and national importance. This was the show he appeared on today, and I was one of the callers. Rather than prolong the lament, I decided to focus on the possibility of a future in which MPBN became more of what local community radio in this area already is, on WERU-FM, a “voice of many voices.” I suggested they make an effort to get out of their regional news focus on Portland, Augusta, and Bangor (the three major Maine cities) and get their news and information teams out across the state to find out what is going on in the Maine forests, the blueberry lands, the fisheries, and rural life all over Maine. I suggested that there be more working-class voices heard on air (and Internet), adding that it could increase their contributor base enormously. (Vogelsang asked me, “How do you do that?” One answer: get those news teams out into the whole state, talk to the people, and record their voices.)
    The future of classical music on public radio—let alone the future of music on radio—let alone the future of radio itself—is debated within a larger context that involves globalization, unprecedented connectedness and decreasing privacy, changes in media and transformations in daily life and experience. In this discussion, sustainability cannot simply mean preservation of an older set of experiences--that is impossible--but, rather, reassessment, continuity, and possibilities previously unrealizeable.
   
       

Classical music as an endangered ecosystem

Henry Doktorski performs with philharmonic orchestra

     I thought it would be fitting to start off the new year with an old topic. I’ve been reading about animal communication (zoosemiotics) and animal rights lately, with a view to filling out certain parts of my argument in favor of a sound commons for all living beings; but I wanted to finish up the ecosystem as descriptor thread, looking again at business ecosystems, with some more attention to James F. Moore’s notions of innovation, cooperation, and co-evolution as the new paradigm for successful business corporations. One argument for animal rights extends the principles of human rights to all animals; and of course the argument for cultural equity extends these rights to all cultures, as I’ve mentioned in earlier entries when discussing the benefits of cultural diversity (again, modeled on biodiversity). The idea of the acoustic niche combined with cultural equity suggests that in the social world all music cultures have inherent rights to survive. I’ve raised the issue before, also, about the periodic sounding of the death-knell for classical music. These days it’s hard to read about classical music without coming across an essay nostalgic for the good old days when people went to symphony and bought recordings and made sure their children had music lessons and when everyone knew that classical music was the best music in the world. But today, these essayists opine, classical music has fallen on hard times: it’s endangered, it’s lost most of its audience, kids don’t want to take piano lessons any more, music education is fast disappearing from the schools, and unless we do something about it, classical music won’t survive.
    Classical music is one of several case studies in music and sustainability. When the rhetoric of the periodic death-knells uses words like “endangered,” it’s helpful to think of the classical music culture as an ecosystem. Picking up the thread from the previous blog entry, this is another instance of ecosystem as descriptor. The classical music culture consists of composers and performers, amateur and professional; it includes music educators and music schools (conservatories, music in K-12 education, music in the colleges and universities, courses and teachers and students and all the music performance ensembles); it includes music institutions such as symphony orchestras and string quartets, early music ensembles, opera companies and town bands, as well as patrons (whether private donors, corporations, or government funded organizations such as arts councils); and of course it includes the listeners who get their music and the places where they find it, in concerts and tours, media products including recordings, television and film, advertising, various venues where music is performed and heard, as well as distribution channels such as the Internet. Music is the central idea, activity, and product; it is the energy that flows through the classical music ecosystem, as through all worlds of music.
    When back in 1984 I wrote that music cultures behaved as ecosystems, what I had in mind was that they could be studied as complex systems much in the same way that ecologists were studying ecosystems: in terms of adaptation, musical energy flowing through the system, and cycles of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth or revival. Most ethnomusicologists then (myself included) were still bound to the culture area idea, borrowed from anthropology, thinking of musics as characteristic sound structures, activities and ideas about music attached to peoples (usually regional, ethnic and/or occupational groups) living in particular places. In this way, ethnomusicologists could conceive of Native America, let us say, as a whole music culture area, and also as the differing music cultures of several indigenous tribal groups, such as Kiowa or Zuni or Passamaquoddy. Beyond description and comparison, the question was why was this people’s music over here as it was, and different from that people’s music over there.
       But younger ethnomusicologists were challenging the usefulness of the notion that each cultural group had its own characteristic music. If instead of looking at music as process, the way ethnomusicologists liked to do, we started looking at the way people actually consumed music as product, then it was apparent that music moved as easily from one group to another in the marketplace as any other product--more easily than most. Soon, ethnomusicologists were studying popular musics and the music industry, all over the world—including so-called world music, an industry marketing category. In a globalizing world, it seemed a little musty to concentrate on the older, traditional layer of music in a given culture when most people were involved with newer, popular musics, marketed as recordings, much (but not all) of it made in the West--a situation that has changed with the rise of indigenous popular music production throughout the world.
    Studying the music industry in this way suggests another use for ecology, the business ecosystem, which as I wrote in my last blog entry is a concept pioneered by James F. Moore. Although the people involved with classical music in the West take great pains to distinguish it from popular music, and although they are often reluctant to view it as a business—seeing it instead as art rather than commerce, its purpose enlightenment and pleasure rather than profit—in many ways it functions as an industry. What happens when we think of it it as a business ecosystem in Moore’s sense of the term?
    Central to Moore’s idea of a business ecosystem is the corporation. Although the classical music ecosystem has its corporations (music publishers, private colleges and universities, media companies, etc.) it is useful to conceive not only of business corporations but also cultural institutions run increasingly as businesses, ones that compete and cooperate, and that adapt and co-evolve (or not). In his most recent essay on the topic, Moore writes that “the term 'business ecosystem' and its plural, 'business ecosystems,' refer to intentional communities of economic actors whose individual business activities share in some large measure the fate of the whole community. . . . [Corporations] must dialogue closely with customers,” Moore continues, “so that what is created is what the customer wants and is willing to pay for. Mastering these challenges, of what might be called 'distributed creativity,' is the aim of the ecosystem organizational form. The conventional hierarchical firm does not effectively address the breadth and importance of inter-firm relationships. The unaided market is not able to achieve inter-firm coordination sufficient to justify players aligning their dreams, plans, and product road maps" ("Business Ecosystems and the View from the Firm," The Antitrust Bulletin, Vol. 51, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 33-34).
    It’s not hard to map the classical music industry onto Moore’s idea of ecosystems. Doing so suggests one reason why it’s endangered: it is out of touch with the market. The people involved with classical music surely form an intentional community with an awareness of a shared fate, more like European aristocrats powerless against the rise of the merchant class, than like the community of producers, designers, marketers, evangelists, and consumers surrounding Apple (Moore’s favorite illustration of a thriving business ecosystem). Despite the fierce competition among composers, performers, conductors and orchestras, recording companies and so forth, they know that they’re all in this together, struggling against what they regard as the cheap thrills of non-classical musics.
     But one place where they fail is in dialoguing with customers. Instead, they speak in a top-down monologue, starting with classical music educators who transmit elitism and professionalism, with little respect for the musical amateur. The virtues of its structural complexity, the intellectual experience of apprehending the beauty of its formal characteristics, the virtuoso skills of its finest performers, the notion that being involved with classical music will make someone a more civilized, more refined, and better person—these are not virtues that came out of focus-group dialogues between corporations and customers, or in this case classical music institutions and, broadly speaking, the classical music consumers who support the industry. Instead, they came from cultural leaders in Victorian-era Europe, 150 years ago. In a culture that prized amateurism, particularly the gentleman amateur, and might even have been said to have invented that tradition, this emphasis on professionalism may appear contradictory. However, the skills of the gentleman amateur were at least as well-developed as that of the professional; the difference was that he didn't do it for the money. To be sure, classical music consumers can and do parrot these virtues; but seldom do they originate with them.
    At certain periods in the twentieth century, the classical music industry was able to gain significant market share through recordings, often on the basis of these virtues, but coupled with another, namely connoisseurship. The earliest major record companies, Victor and Columbia, marketing 78s, offered as much classical music as any other kind, and not only priced those records higher but advertised them with much more fanfare. As I’ve written earlier on this blog, connoisseurship in music (whether classical music or any other kind) can lead to the accumulation of social capital, to be spent at appropriate occasions among like-minded people. Accumulating a record collection, for example, carried with it the possibility of connoisseurship even for those who lacked musical talent. Classical music critics such as Irving Kolodin wrote guides to recorded music (the first was published in 1941) that enabled one not only to own the best performances but to be able to say why they were the best. In the 1960s, budget-priced LPs on labels like Nonesuch as Turnabout made a much wider repertoire available, including early music, and the more expensive labels followed suit. Recording techniques improved, and with the higher fidelity of the LP recordings a concert-hall like experience in one’s own apartment or home became possible. More, higher fidelity records led some listeners to buy fine stereo playback systems. Connoisseurship flourished among hi-fi enthusiasts as well in the quest for an absolute sound that was indistinguishable from that of the concert hall.
    The connoisseur’s search for high fidelity in classical music extended to fidelity in performance, leading to the idea of historically-informed performance, and the feeling that it was somehow better to listen to the classical music of the past as the audience would have heard it when it was first composed—and that meant period instruments instead of technologically improved ones, and fidelity to the score whenever possible in preference to traditions that had been handed down in practice from one generation of performers to the next. Today the majority of early music on recordings is performed on period instruments or their reproductions. Just as an aside, it would be interesting to see a revival with period instruments and just about everything else except fidelity to the original score – which would become fidelity to the original recording – in, say, early rock 'n roll. Why not? Such revivals have existed in many kinds of music for decades – blues, jazz, old-time string band music, and Irish traditional music to name a few.
    Historically-informed performance and its alleged authenticity fascinates me. In the introduction to ethnomusicology course that I’ve taught to undergraduates at Brown—it is one of the courses required for the music major—I ask them to think about this aspect of the classical music culture. One year I played an audio recording of an orchestral piece from the 18th century as performed on period instruments by a historically-informed group, then followed it with the same piece as performed in the early 1960s by the non-historically informed Berlin Philharmonic. The students preferred the lush sound of the latter, commenting on the dry timbres and occasional out-of-tune harmonies of the former. The next year I did the same experiment, but this time I showed them a video of the same two orchestras playing the same piece. Now the students responded positively to the historically-minded group, commenting on the clearly differentiated instrumental texture and the enthusiasm of the performers, who were young people dressed like themselves and who moved around and showed emotion as they played. The Berlin Philharmonic became for them a parody of musical fogeyism, and instead of a lush sound the music was perceived as “muddy” and undifferentiated, while the performers’ formal outfits and stiff postures were ridiculed. However, ten years later when I showed the video again—this was in the twenty-first century—some students found the “hippies” playing the period instruments, gesturing and moving about, to be the ridiculous ones, while the Berliners, whose performance style and sound had become remote and exotic, were intriguing.
    Returning to classical music as a business ecosystem, we see another area where there is room for improvement if classical music is to come off the endangered species list. That is what Moore calls inter-firm cooperation. Instead of competing for an ever-dwindling group of classical music composers, performers, and listeners, classical music's businesses could consider how the feeling that they are all in this together can lead toward a common goal benefitting all. This has in fact been happening for many decades, but not intensely enough to make over the ecosystem in terms of Moore's principles of innovation, cooperation, and co-evolution. His ideas might help the classical music culture take steps to make its ecosystem more resilient; but this would require visionary leadership, combined efforts, and changed attitudes.

Classical Music's Radio Future

In November, 2010, I wrote three entries in this blog about the future of classical music on US radio. WGBH-FM, Boston's premier classical music station since 1951, had nearly a year earlier acquired the other Boston classical music radio station, WCRB-FM, and decided to switch the flagship station to a mostly talk-show and news format. In the year and a half that followed, an increasing number of public radio stations, ones that once played classical music for at least part of the day, have gone over to news, opinion, and information, sometimes making classical music (chiefly the warhorses) available 24/7 on radio channels that require the Internet or special receivers.

Seldom, if ever, have public radio stations justified these decisions in front of the public. Classical music on radio goes (away) without saying. And so the May 3 announcement, on the public broadcasting blog "Current.com," is of interest not only because it offers a rationale but also insight into today's public radio climate. I quote from the entry: "WUIS, a public radio station operated by the University of Illinois Springfield, will transition from classical to news and talk in July, reports the Illinois Times. The shift follows the retirement of Karl Scroggin at the end of March, who had hosted the weekday Classics since 1984. The station has already started streaming a 24-hour classical digital channel with live announcers. 'We recognize classical radio is one of those things that's slowly going away, but we're still willing to make an effort to get it to people who want it,'" General Manager Bill Wheelhouse said. [Italics are mine. The quotation is from Current.org, May 3, 2012.]

"Slowly going away." Fade to black. Belief in the inevitability of this departure must be shared by most pubradio (as it's called in the trade) managers--that classical music has become a niche market, no longer popular with the majority of listeners. One might argue that because so much different music, and in such quantity as never before, is available today on the Internet, for streaming and download, all genres, not only classical, have become niche musics. At the same time the number of pubradio programs available to stations by subscription has also increased enormously--and these are chiefly talk and information shows, not music.

Nowadays pubradio stations rely more and more on local and regional fundraising from members and business underwriters. Surveys reveal that talk radio attracts more listeners than classical music programming; more listeners supposedly translates to more members, or at least to an argument (made to legislative bodies that still fund pubradio) that the taxpaying public is being served. Classical radio isn't "slowly going away" of its own accord; pubradio programmers are squeezing it out in favor of talk, opinions, points of view. Everybody has one, today--and talk radio is there to air the chatter.

The decline of classical music programming on pubradio signals a cultural shift; cultural in the Arnoldian sense as well as the anthropological. People of a certain age will recall that in its earliest days, public television was called "educational televison." Public radio also was meant to have an educational purpose, and because the consensus among educators in the twentieth century was that classical music was the music of the highest quality, it followed that music programming on pubradio should emphasize it, just as the news programming on public television and radio was meant for a well-educated audience.

Classical music on radio, then, reflected the kind of highbrow cultural uplift characteristic of the rising middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century. A person of that rising class subscribed to symphony orchestra concerts and attended opera as well as musical theatre; a person of that class read The New York Times and the better novels that were reviewed there, perhaps through a book club. A family of that class made certain that their children were exposed to classical music: piano or violin lessons, most likely, along with Young People's Concerts.

It is no coincidence that with the decline of the American middle class--the idea of a rising middle in today's "developed" economies is laughable; it is, rather, a rapidly falling middle--classical music's future on US radio (as elsewhere) is unsustainable in its present form. It is that economic reality, a decline in the patron class, coupled with the media availability of so much "other music" to interest people with eclectic taste, that accounts in large part for the cultural shift that causes pubradio program managers to say "We recognize that classical radio is one of those things that's slowly going away..."