I found out early this morning: tuning to 104.1 FM and expecting to hear the Cleveland Orchestra, I heard instead...the Electric Light Orchestra. The long-threatened demise of WGMS is now a fait accompli. Bonneville International Corp. didn't sell out to Dan Snyder in the end, but to the perception--in my opinion erroneous--that classical music is a dying art form, in radio and elsewhere. WGMS, which purveyed Mozart and Mendelssohn to the Washington, DC listening public for six decades, is now something called "George 104," dedicated to playing "The Music of the Seventies...The Eighties...And Anything We Want!!!" (Just as long as what they want doesn't involve anyone named Beethoven, apparently.)
On a hunch I fiddled around with the dial, and sure enough came upon WETA-FM just as announcer Scott Blankenship introduced the Theme and Variations for flute and string quartet, by Amy Beach. About an hour later I was reading the scoop from Paul Farhi, the Washington Post's excellent media reporter: Bonneville and WETA have been in negotiations for the past month, planning an orderly turnover of classical programming to WETA, a public station that switched from classical to an all-news format a few years ago.
In a sense this is good news: WETA has the strongest signal of any station in the Washington area, no commercials, and a library of 43,000 classical recordings (including the 18,000 it inherited from WGMS). I will now resume sending the membership checks to WETA that I stopped sending when it switched to all-news (just as long as they don't expect me to listen during Pledge Week). It would be nice if WETA and WGMS were both still classical outlets, as they were for so many years. The Washington public supported them both, and--despite the pessimism of Dan DeVany and Joel Oxley--still would. And it would also be nice to listen in to old friends like James Bartels, Chip Rienza and Diana Hollander when the mood struck me. Wherever they land on the radio dial, I hope their parachutes are golden.
Comments (1)
I am glad that we once again have WETA back again perhaps some of the staff from wgms will make the move to public radio? It is silly to assume that culture is gone based on marketing surveys since they are market driven and ofen limit their interest to say "purple haired people between the ages of 18 and 39" or equally silly groupings -- not realizing that there is more to a radio station then selling things, or only playing what a narrow band of people wants to hear. Thank god for public radio!!
Posted by Ann Potter | January 24, 2007 4:43 PM
Posted on January 24, 2007 16:43