ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 1, 1996 TAG: 9611010001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DEMETRI TELIONIS
WVTF RECENTLY completed its fall fund drive. At times like this, I always lament the fact that year after year, our public radio offers less and less of what some of us expect. I am very unhappy to see the hours of classical music decrease steadily over the years and be replaced by talk, talk, talk and some other programs of questionable value.
Classical music is now a rarity on your radio dial. Did you notice that except for our ``sleeping hours,'' i.e. a few hours after midnight, we get only six hours of serious music per day? All these other programs have been eroding our good music very slowly over the years. I am terrified at the prospect that this may continue. We must try to reverse the trend.
Here are some of the things that happened. The news has been devouring more and more time. ``Morning Edition'' and ``All Things Considered'' are first-class programs, but why four hours in the morning and three in the afternoon? And if this is not enough, every hour classical music is interrupted with more news, making it impossible to program complete works.
After ``All Things Considered,'' you must endure every day another hour of ``talking,'' giving you all kinds of relatively useless information which, if you need, you could get from the appropriate source. Over the past few years, we lost all our evening concerts and had them replaced - to my personal frustration - by the ``Jeff Hunt Show.'' So, after 4 p.m., no more classical music.
Hunt is a charming fellow, and I should confess that he has kept me good company for literally thousands of evenings. A few years ago, Hunt would launch the beginning of his show at 10 p.m., after the evening concert, with one hour of classical music, tastefully selected to complement the earlier program. Now from 8 p.m. on, Hunt serves us an assortment of unidentified, quasi-modern music that sounds like ``Music by Musk,'' light rock, some form of jazz chuka-chaka-chuka and doom-doom-di-room-doom.
I and perhaps many others who have full-time jobs have been particularly frustrated with WVTF's schedule because it offers very little good music during the hours that we can afford the time to turn to our radio, namely, in the evenings. Many of us wrote to the manager suggesting that at least they should offer good music some of the evenings. We never got any response, nor were any of our short letters published in their newsletter, which includes only flattering comments from listeners.
I published similar comments in The Spectrum, a Virginia Tech newspaper, and among others, I received the following counter-argument: ``Some people say that it is the station's duty to educate the public, by playing more classical music or airing educational programs. But we must remember that WVTF is a radio station, not a conservatory, music-appreciation class or guardian of cultural mores.'' I believe that a public-radio station, one operated by a comprehensive university, should be exactly all that.
At least, this appears to be the mission of most public radio stations. A quick search in the Web will convince you. Start with http://www.npr.org. You will also find there that most of the peer stations broadcast three to five hours of classical music after the evening news, as opposed to WVTF's none.
The quality of WVTF evening programming has been continuously dropping and, unfortunately, this coincides with the time that it has become part of Tech.
I strongly believe that the changes brought to its broadcasting schedule do not reflect the character of the university, nor the cultural level of the community. I feel embarrassed when visitors or newcomers discover that in our area there is no classical music anywhere on the radio dial in the evening. This gives a message about the people in this area, and we all know that this is the wrong message.
Some argued that one of our options might be to found a new radio station, truer to the mission of public radio. But I believe that we should claim back WVTF. The new management has hijacked our station. This is the station we nourished with our contributions for the past 25 years. If we cannot have it all, we should demand our fair share.
This is not a rhetorical argument. I propose that some accommodation be made where part of the equipment is transferred to a new radio station that Tech could sponsor. I don't see why we should give up our investment so that some manager can claim in his resume an impressive increase in revenues and great improvements in ``listenership.''
Would you give up as lightly your local public library if it were being converted to free electronic entertainment? I am sure that it, too, could vastly increase its popularity if it would replace some of those boring books with exciting video games and a few oversized television screens.
Demetri Telionis is a professor of engineering mechanics at Virginia Tech.
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