Wooing rockers with the classics

If it sounds good, it is good. — Duke Ellington

Originally published in Current, Feb. 17, 1992
By Karen Everhart Bedford

In a quest to bring classical music to the baby boom generation, public radio's music programmers have adopted Ellington's famous quip as their creed.

"Everybody is after the 40-year-olds,'' says Ann Santen, g.m. of WGUC-FM, Cincinnati. "Sixty-five-year-olds will be dead in five years. The question is, how do we attract the younger listeners?''

Like WGUC, many public radio stations are adjusting their classical formats, presenting more consistent musical styles in a less formal style, hoping that a diverse audience will stay tuned throughout the day. This means selecting music that complements the busy lifestyles and evolving tastes of a generation that grew up on rock 'n roll.

"Research is the key to determining the programming that will have the most appeal,'' says Georgette Bronfman, music director at KWMU-FM, St. Louis. Bronfman says her listeners' average age is 40, and she hopes to conduct audience research to learn more about who's listening and how to attract people who aren't.

But public radio programmers often find the cost of full-blown focus-group research prohibitive. One auditorium test, in which a targeted audience responds to music, announcer breaks and program prototypes, costs about $60,000, according to Annette Griswold, former program director at KCFR-FM, Denver.

While at KCFR, Griswold participated in the Denver Project, a three-year research effort led by George Bailey and David Giovannoni. KCFR supplemented a substantial grant from CPB to learn what musical programming would serve the broadest range of KCFR listeners, ages 25 to 54.

Asking the listeners

Instead of all of us operating in the dark,'' says Griswold, "we asked listeners what they like to listen to, and when.'' Based on the research findings, the Denver Project transformed KCFR's eclectic programming mix to an all-classical format. On the new KCFR, programmers choose from the classical repertoire based on a musical piece's emotional mood and sound. (See Griswold's article.) The pay-off, Griswold adds, is that KCFR's listenership, membership and underwriting have reached their highest points in the station's 22-year existence.

Griswold now works as a consultant for KCFR's Modal Music project, an effort to disseminate the Denver Project's findings to public radio stations for the fee of $8,000 per station.

One of three stations signed up for Modal Music consultations so far is WMRA-FM, Harrisonburg, Va., where Brenda Hankey is the general manager. Hankey, who holds two master's degrees in music, is a firm believer in the value of audience research.

Hankey says the research efforts of Griswold and Eric Hammer, program director of WKSU-FM, Kent, Ohio, have transformed WMRA's sound. In its largely classical format, WMRA now sticks closely to the "light, upbeat mode.''

"We've tried to use the concept of flow, of having pieces that flow together, so that nothing leaps out at the listeners as out of place,'' Hankey says. Outside of the morning and evening drive times, she adds,"we try to stick to four to six pieces an hour, with nothing longer than 30 minutes.''

Hankey admits that for a time she felt her musical background was at odds with the principles of classical programming. "At first, for me there was a conflict. I felt it was our duty to educate [listeners] and make them like it.''

But, she adds: "You can't make people like anything on the radio.... It's a given that we can't make people listen to what they don't like.''

Although not all programmers are as enthusiastic as Hankey about audience research, many recognize that valid statistics about listener preferences are a useful tool in making programming decisions.

"The people most resistant to research are beginning to benefit from what we've learned from it,'' said Ruth Dreier. As head of American Public Radio's Classical Music Inititative, Dreier sees a growing acceptance among programmers that "research can be used as a positive tool rather than a negative set of rules.''

Arthur Cohen, Minnesota Public Radio's manager of classical music programming, puts himself in an "in between place'' on the use of research. "I see the value of research informing our decisions, but not selling out to the lowest common denominator,'' Cohen says.

"We spent many years when no one ever paid attention to their audience,'' Cohen adds. "People now are saying, `You want to make sure that they're there to be challenged.'''

Artistry in presentation

Tom Deacon, v.p. for programming at KUSC-FM, Los Angeles, agrees. "For a time, public radio was disconnected entirely from what it needed to serve. We have to acknowledge what's going on outside the closed world of classical music.''

While Deacon finds it "interesting'' to look at audience statistics, he has many of his own ideas about how to captivate a broader range of public radio listeners with the classical repertoire. Deacon wonders how valuable audience research is when considering individual pieces of music.

"Maybe a Schubert song will score low on audience research,'' he explains, "but put in the right context ... the same score will have the right appeal. The artistic elements of combining music on radio are not taken into account by bold and factual research.''

Deacon emphasizes the power of "personality radio'' to keep younger listeners listening to classical music. "The success of classical music radio radio today depends on the host's ability to communicate with the broadest possible audience.'' For Deacon, that includes the traditional audience, plus people aged 25 to 50 who have been turned off by the condescending tone of classical music presenters.

"Younger listeners have to feel that they're not being talked down to ... that their own music is not being invalidated by anything the announcer says.''

In fact, presentation may be the one element that all classical music programmers are working especially hard to improve. "Everyone is looking for the magical host,'' says Dreier. Or at least a friendly and conversational one.

Rather than instructing listeners about historical periods or technical elements of music, announcers talk about the composers and performers as real people. For example, Robert Aubry Davis, afternoon host for WETA-FM, Washington, likes to describe Beethoven as a "radical revolutionary.'' When introducing Rossini's early works, Brenda Hankey offers comparisons of what she liked to do as a teenager:"I played with Barbie dolls when I was 14, but when Rossini was that age, he wrote this symphony.''

Overhauling the concert

Programmers want to break with tradition in another facet of classical music radio — concert broadcasts. "Usually concert programs are monotone drones,'' says Hankey. "I don't like the way they're produced.''

"Most syndicated performances are presented as if [radio listeners] are in the concert hall,'' but today's audience doesn't listen to radio that way, explains Richard Glasford, music director at WNYC, New York. "A lot of concert producers haven't recognized that.''

"It's an open question whether or not a national distributor can create a [concert broadcast] product that appeals to a broad and targeted audience to be useful to stations,''says Dreier. She's trying to create such a product for APR with the Symphonic Music Service, a year-round weeknightly program that draws from performances of eight orchestras.
<qp>In developing the series, APR researched audience response to orchestral broadcasts. "We discovered that, given a choice in the evenings, listeners would prefer to hear orchestral performances,'' Dreier reports, "but it depends on the same thing that disc programs depend on=content and host.

"The new and innovative approach that Ruth is talking about has been going on for five years,'' retorts Martin Goldsmith, host of NPR's Performance Today. "We're not presenting a full-length concert or trying to recreate the feeling of being in the performance hall. We've been doing it for five years, leaping from city to city, performance to performance.''

In an audacious departure from traditional radio presentation, one concert host literally steps on stage. Eric Friesen, Dreier's predecessor in the APR music project, emcees Minnesota Orchestra broadcasts in a tuxedo, according to Dreier, striding into the lights to introduce the music and even interview the soloist, annoying some concert-goers and delighting others. Friesen's is just one of the presentation styles Dreier is testing on focus groups in her project.

Dreier maintains that, with three major orchestras — Philadelphia, Boston and the New York Philharmonic — no longer on the air, it's time for public radio networks and stations to pool their resources for performance broadcasts. "It's too expensive, and the market is too small to be in competition.''

With its Classical Music Initiative, APR has demonstrated a willingness to experiment with classical music programming. Schickele Mix, a major new APR program, demonstrates, as Dreier describes it, APR's "interest in testing the assumptions that underlie programming.''

Classical is great, too

The hour-long program, which premiered in January, features composer Peter (P.D.Q. Bach) Schickele as host. In each program, Schickele discusses a musical concept such as parallel thirds, and spins a series of discs illustrating his point. The catch is that Schickele mixes musical genres, presenting Mozart, the Beatles and the Judds in the same set.

Tom Voegeli, creator of APR's Saint Paul Sunday Morning, produces Schickele Mix. Voegeli has experimented with classical music formats for a more than a decade. He says that he developed Schickele Mix as a program for people who like contemporary music, such as folk, jazz and the blues, and hear similarities. Schickele Mix, Voegli says, "brings classical music to people as a form that's also great.''

"I hope that it will serve two audiences,'' he explains — "the classical music lover [who] finds it lighthearted, but not lightweight, and the classical music intrigued, who loves some of it, and wants to learn more.''

Voegli admits that stations with classical identities will have to find a suitable slot for Schickele Mix. "It's not designed to be in the middle of classical music programming.'' But for stations that carry NPR's newsmagazines, Voegeli says, "it makes a good transition back to classical.''

The answer to revitalizing the classical music format, Voegeli contends, is "not to play only what people want to hear and don't challenge them, it's coming up with new ways of saying, `This is great music and come to it however you want.'''