Tuesday evening The Boston Musical Intelligencer presented a panel discussion – “What Can We Do for Classical Music Radio in Boston?” – at the Old South Church in Copley Square.
The moderator:
William M. Bulger, former Massachusetts Senate President and President, University of Massachusetts, board member of the Boston Public Library and Boston Symphony Orchestra
The panelists:
Richard Dyer, former classical music critic, The Boston Globe; Christopher Lydon, Radio Talk Host; Dave MacNeill, for many decades announcer, then general manager at the old WCRB; andJohn Voci, general manager, WGBH
The issues, occasioned by WGBH’s purchase of all-classical WCRB, which allows ‘GBH to offload its classical radio programming to ‘CRB and refashion 89.7 FM as a news and talk station:
• Friday afternoon broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra are cancelled.
• In Boston’s Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and areas south of Boston, listeners are
unable to receive a clear signal from “all-classical” WCRB.
• Much of the music on WCRB is programed by a Minneapolis syndicate.
• Area listeners have lost fifty hours a week of quality classical music.
• Do we really need more talk radio and duplicative NPR programming?
• Are WGBH contributors pleased with the changes?
• Are WCRB listeners pleased?
•Will the administration at WGBH reconsider?
Let’s start, as always, with the optics: Beautiful place, the Old South Church, and arrayed in front of the altar were 12 people (moderator, panelists, and “respondents” from The Boston Musical Intelligencer – one of whom was a woman and none of whom was a person of color.
Billy Bulger (who’s got to have a portrait in the attic) delivered a series of introductions that ranged from the interminable to the unlistenable. (He also, despite being a board member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, referred to the HAYden Society.)
But it was the sight of Chris Lydon and Bulger within several feet of one another (isn’t there some Temporary Restraining Order still in effect?) that was most attention-getting, especially when Bulger tweaked Lydon about his tony address, then said, “How nice to give a needle to Chris Lydon . . . a gentle needle . . . he’s an old friend.”
Good to know Bulger hasn’t lost an ounce of his oozing insincerity.
Lydon, for his part, was entirely sincere in highlighting “really just two points:”
1) “If we can cover the Red Sox, we can cover everything James Levine does.”
2) “This town we live in is wildly interesting” – from traditional Boston to Cambridge, “the frontal lobe of the universe.”
As for the other panelists, Richard Dyer sounded like an auctioneer making his comments, and John Voci stuck to the WGBH party line, which is that ‘GBH saved classical music in Boston by buying WCRB, is presenting a 140% increase in Boston Symphony Orchestra performances (despite cancelling Friday afternoon BSO broadcasts)
Meanwhile, former WCRBnik Dave MacNeill – how to say this? – totally HIJACKED the proceedings with his long-winded and repetitive bloviations about ‘CRB minutia, radio-industry inside baseball, and revisionist history.
And then there was the audience segment of the program.
The commenters ranged from classical gasbags to insufferable Me-Me’s to the crowd favorite who 1) complained about “the dumbing down of music on WCRB,” 2) asked “how many times can we hear Vivaldi’s ‘The Seasons’?” and 3) concluded “I don’t believe the purpose of art and music is to make us relax.”
All the while, the panel sat like some stonefaced government body listening to victim impact statements.
In the end, the once-iron-handed Bulger allowed the proceedings to descend into a public broadcast pity party. Exhibit A: half the house left before Bulger could issue his perfunctory thank-yous.
And so we come to the takeaway, as they have it on WGBH: Two-thirds of the audience gets crappy reception of WCRB.
That’s the most telling detail of all.
Campaign Outsider 
Did anyone confirm the assertion that “much of the music on WCRB is programed by a Minneapolis syndicate”? If so, is this programming done primarily in the wee hours when there are very few listeners?
There’s no question that WCRB’s playlist has expanded greatly in the shows that were carried over from the old WCRB. Laura Carlo now includes music from the modern era — i.e., composed after 1800! — beyond the one work that Keith Lockhart brought in on a daily basis.
And WGBH’s classical programming carried over to WCRB hasn’t changed its playlists very much — even after canning Richard Nisely, it’s still full of local live performances in and out of studio. And Cathy Fuller still plays primarily piano performance programming per preference.
The major gripe has to be signal strength, like you say. How about a repeater mounted atop the Pru?
Here is the deal on “…the Minneapolis syndicate….”which is none other than Minnesota Public Radio, a huge force nationally in PubRadio.
Go to the Classical Music web site and click on the schedule. Then click on “view full week”. All of the people in the yellow sections are MPR people, from a service called “Classical24”.
You can got to http://classical24.publicradio.org/ and click on Host biographies.
I am down in New Jersey but I got interested in this thing because the events were wrongly compared to the take over of WQXR, our dead-from-the-neck-up commerical Classical music station by WNYC, another huge force in PubRadio.
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Thanks, Richard. That’s a lot of yellow:
http://wwe.wgbh.org/995/playlist.cfm?rstation=AllClassical&guide=1
Laura Carlo’s, Cathy Fuller’s, and Ray Brown’s shows are locally produced, as are the “live from the Fraser Performance Studio” bits and the BSO concerts. Most everything else is from satellite, or so I’m told.
No, there’s no space on the dial for a translator for WCRB in Boston. The best they could do would be to simulcast on WPLM 99.1, which covers most of the areas that 99.5. doesn’t reach. However, WGBH probably doesn’t have the money to buy WPLM, and it’s not at all clear that the current owners would sell it.
Thanks for the report on this gathering. For reasons you make clear, it’s one of those things that I’m interested in hearing about, but wouldn’t care to witness first-hand.
The live performances on GBH have long been of spotty quality, and with Knisely and Ron Della Chiesa gone, poor Cathy Fuller is the only one left around with an appreciation of the range of classical music.
Robert J was, and still is, irreplaceable. One may not have liked what he was playing at any given moment, but one learned. (Remember the 5 hours of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in all of its incarnations.)
I have shifted to WPCE on the internet, and will likely stay there.
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Dave MacNeill seemed to get one fact wrong: WBMS as a classical AM station operated on 1090 kHz, not 1470, although some classical music MAY have been broadcast on another station then at 1470 (now WWZN-AM 1510). He definitely screwed up the recent events at WQXR-FM in New York. Almost all of the unrestricted FMs in NYC operate with SIX-THOUSAND watts atop the Empire State Building, about a quarter-of-a-mile above City streets…that’s the equivalent of FIFTY-THOUSAND watts at about 500 feet (the height of the original John Hancock building in Boston). Dave said WQXR’s new frequency caused the station to reduce its signal to SIX-THOUSAND watts…that was WQXR’s power BEFORE the switch; now it operates on a frequency originally used in Newark, NJ (105.9) with just SIX-HUNDRED watts. Sorry to bore you with those numbers. His near-hagiography of Mario Mazza was more disturbing. Dave may indeed have been very aware of WCRB’s financial condition in the early 1990’s, but it was unnecessary to go the route Mario Mazza chose; he DID air portions of longer pieces throughout his reign when there are hundreds of integral shorter pieces he chose not to broadcast. KING-FM in Seattle (a market very comparable to Boston) achieved similar ratings in Arbitron diaries, and sometimes SUPERIOR ratings running a decent and honorable classical music operation there.
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