Boston’s Classical Shapeshifting – Updated

Update 12/18: A new article in the Boston Globe here

Before I talk about Boston, I want to thank those of you who made suggestions about better Xmas programming.  Even without actually hearing the music you suggested, I can hear it in my head and it makes me smile.  The wonderful trio from Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ — wow, gorgeous.  If you haven’t played it on your station yet this year, please do.  And so many other great suggestions.  Sounds like a lot of you are enriching your listeners.

Boston is going through growing pains with the new classical switchover from WCRB to WGBH.

UPDATE: Sorry about that.  The rest of my post just disappeared overnight!  Here it is.

In merging the two cultures of WCRB and WGBH, management has decided after 58 years to drop one of the two live Boston Symphony broadcasts.  A blog post in the Boston Music Intelligencer, BMINT for short, has the details. Unfortunately, they decided to drop the Friday afternoon broadcast which has three times as many listeners as the Saturday evening broadcast (these figures not verified by Arbitron).  Saturday evening is when we want people to be out at live concerts, so the decision is not just unfriendly to the Boston Symphony but to live music in general. 

The second big issue is that the signal of the old WCRB is not as powerful as the WGBH signal, so a huge swath of listeners in central Boston and the southern part of the listening area can’t get the signal.  Maybe Boston’s dial is too crowded, but we’ve known in radio for a long time how to boost a signal or put up a translator.  We have the technology.  I hope this is just a growing pain for Boston.

Dear Boston, your new all-classical station is public now.  That means you own it!  Let the management know what you want and be sure to vote with your dollars when they get it right.

About Marty Ronish

Marty Ronish is an independent producer of classical music radio programs. She currently produces the Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcasts that air 52 weeks a year on more than 400 stations and online at www.cso.org. She also produces a radio series called "America's Music Festivals," which presents live music from some of the country's most dynamic festivals. She is a former Fulbright scholar and co-author of a catalogue of Handel's autograph manuscripts.

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9 thoughts on “Boston’s Classical Shapeshifting – Updated”

  1. The deal is different and the results are different.

    At least somewhat.

    The awful saga of WCRB’s exile from 102.5 in Boston to 99.5 in Lowell is told well in Wikipedia…

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WCRB

    … and predates the WGBH deal.

    By the terms of the Charles River Broadcasting Trust, the great pioneering station and work of Ted Jones would persist in perpetuity at 102.5. With Jones long dead, however, ways were found around that, and the result was moving WCRB from Boston to Lowell. And probably to oblivion, had WGBH not rescued it.

    In any case, the damage was done before WGBH came along.

    As with WQXR, selling to a noncommercial powerhouse saved WCRB, and with it a source of classical music on the FM dial. Also as with WQXR, the result was compromised. But while WQXR moved to a lesser signal in the same city, WCRB moved to an equally strong signal in a lesser city. The range of the signals on 102.5 and 99.5 are the same. Both are Class B facilities, radiating the equivalents of 50,000 watts at 500 feet above average terrain — the maximum in this part of the world (New York included). (Note that both stations are higher than 500 feet in antenna height and lower in wattage.) The difference is that 102.5 is in the Needham antenna farm, overlooking Boston, while 99.5 is on a hill near Lowell, overlooking I-495 on Boston’s far-outer beltway. WCRB’s signal from there is nearly as much a New Hampshire one as a Massachusetts one. While the signal is strong north of Boston, it’s all but absent south of it.

    I don’t know why, but I haven’t heard nearly the outcry over the WCRB-to-WGBH move as I still hear over the WQXR-to-WNYC move. Perhaps this is because New York is a bigger metro, with more people to be pissed off, or perhaps it’s because WNYC had already killed classical on its own FM station on 93.9, and had therefore already upset local classical music lovers.

    Check out the 73 comments below my post Why WQXR is Better Off as a Public Radio Station, which went up last July. The thread is still active today. Clearly some people remain royally torqued by the WQXR deal, and WNYC’s handling of it.

    At least in that respect, the WGBH-WCRB deal has had somewhat different results. So far.

    The question in both cases is whether the stations will take advantage of what noncommercial stations can do, and commercial ones can’t. (Which I outline in that last link.) We’ll see.

    Reply
  2. Mr. Seals is factually wrong on the difference between the operations on 89.7 and 99.5 in/near Boston. WGBH-FM 89.7 is a grandfathered ONE-HUNDRED-THOUSAND-WATT station on a frequency allocated to public broadcasters. The 99.5 operation is on a frequency usually allocated to commercial broadcasters, and here, the 27,000-watt facility is in fact the equivalent of 50,000 watts at nearly (but strangely not exactly) 500 feet.

    Reply
    • Mr. Glavin is spot on. WGBH (call letters stand for Great Blue Hill, after all) is in fact the ONLY 100K Class “C” transmitter in all of New England. The 89.7 signal is legendary for actually getting into six states.

      Reply
    • First, I wasn’t comparing 99.5 to 89.7. I was comparing 99.5 to 102.7.

      Second, check out my original post about the move, which includes much technical information, including three coverage maps (WCRB, WGBH and WBUR) and links to hard data about those and other facilities.

      If you find any factual errors there, post them in the comment thread. I’ll be glad to change what I wrote, which I can’t here.

      Third, you’re factually wrong about the spelling of my surname. 🙂

      Cheers,

      Doc

      Reply
  3. I stand corrected, sort of. The end result in both the New York City and Boston cases is the same: Classical Music on FM is being pushed out and away.

    And, forgive me, but “…perhaps it’s because WNYC had already killed classical on its own FM station on 93.9, and had therefore already upset local classical music lovers…” is totally unfair. Before the switch over to WQXR, WNYC’s music programming on Evening Music and Overnight Music had become the boldest and grandest anywhere. No one got pissed off, the Upper West Side wasn’t listening. They were falling asleep at Avery Fisher Hall or being put to sleep by the old dead from the neck up WQXR. While we lost music on FM for the daytime hours , we did gain the totally new web stream, wnyc2, which is absolutely terrific and survives basically unscathed today as Q2.

    The new WQXR is a totally different place. There is a liveliness that has not been there in years. In all honesty, I am NOT a WQXR 105.9 listener. I am at heart Q2 listener. But my curiosity is getting to me and I am streaming the 105.9 stream, now at a slick 128bits, just to see what is going on.

    The events in Boston and New York are just examples in major cities of the phenomenon going on all over the country, Classical Music on FM being sent over the hill to HD radio (in cars?) and to the internet.

    But, hey THE INTERNET!! SHOUTCAST!! At least three years ago, I was listening to Birmingham Music (not Alabama), OTTO, Adagio, and all sorts of USA PubRadio outlets. Now, AccuRadio is solid. There are a zillion Classical streams at Live365. There have never been more choices for listeners of Classical Music.

    I do not need WQXR, I want WQXR. I want New York Public Radio in all of its forms. I am sure that there are many in Boston who are just as internet savvy as I am, and who still want that local Classical Music outlet to survive and thrive, and I want that for them as much as I want it for me.

    Are there pissed off people in Boston? Sure. But I have to think that they are just as much a painful pimple on the rear of the elephant as are the complainers in New York City.

    Reply
  4. I just went to WCRB and found a link to Comments. There were 65 comments. I started to read, and the farther I went, the more it resembled what we have seen at WNYC/WQXR. Most of the people who are writing are unhappy, cannot get a signal, someone they liked got canned, whatever.

    As someone in the WQXR comments pointed out to me, it is mostly the people who are unhappy that do the writing. It is true that the vitriol we have experienced at WQXR is not there. So, maybe they are more polite in Boston than in New York City. But that is the only possible difference.

    Reply

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