K-Mozart goes to the potter's grave
Feb. 24th, 2007 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkagesI am thirty-seven years old. I like classical music almost exclusively.
Apparently, everyone else with my taste is over sixty. I see it at concerts, where I'm more often than not the only person without grey hair. A few days ago, I saw it at the Met's film-cast of I Puritani, where I was the youngest person by twenty years in a sparsely-populated theater.
As a result, broadcasters are dropping the classical music format like mad. The latest casualty of this is LA's commercial classical music radio station, KMZT. It's going country as of Monday. Major advertisers like Mercedes and BMW dropped KMZT at the beginning of this year, preferring to focus on their 25-50-year-old customers.
I wasn't all that keen on KMZT, because of all the ads. There were tons of ads, and you could tell that a fair number of them had been sold to individual advertisers, because they were for wart remover or off-brands of margarine. During election season, if there was a sleazy candidate or issue with an attack ad, it would air several times nightly. But KMZT did some things right; they had a vision of playing popular, unchallenging pieces, but they were different pieces than those played by its public-radio competitor, KUSC, which under current management has a playlist generated solely out of the top 750-1000 pieces of classical music. It was nice to have someplace where one would not be assaulted by Michael Torke or enveloped by sticky gushing adoration of Morten Lauridsen. And God knows that during the innumerable and intolerable KUSC pledge breaks, Audi ads next to my Mendelssohn were by far the lesser of two evils.
So, now, there's just KUSC. But God knows what there will be in twenty years time. Will I have to go to Europe to catch a concert? Will all my classical CDs be extortionately-priced imports? I pray that under a Democratic government, funding for the arts in the schools will be restored, and that there will be a new generation brought up to care about classical music. Right.
Apparently, everyone else with my taste is over sixty. I see it at concerts, where I'm more often than not the only person without grey hair. A few days ago, I saw it at the Met's film-cast of I Puritani, where I was the youngest person by twenty years in a sparsely-populated theater.
As a result, broadcasters are dropping the classical music format like mad. The latest casualty of this is LA's commercial classical music radio station, KMZT. It's going country as of Monday. Major advertisers like Mercedes and BMW dropped KMZT at the beginning of this year, preferring to focus on their 25-50-year-old customers.
I wasn't all that keen on KMZT, because of all the ads. There were tons of ads, and you could tell that a fair number of them had been sold to individual advertisers, because they were for wart remover or off-brands of margarine. During election season, if there was a sleazy candidate or issue with an attack ad, it would air several times nightly. But KMZT did some things right; they had a vision of playing popular, unchallenging pieces, but they were different pieces than those played by its public-radio competitor, KUSC, which under current management has a playlist generated solely out of the top 750-1000 pieces of classical music. It was nice to have someplace where one would not be assaulted by Michael Torke or enveloped by sticky gushing adoration of Morten Lauridsen. And God knows that during the innumerable and intolerable KUSC pledge breaks, Audi ads next to my Mendelssohn were by far the lesser of two evils.
So, now, there's just KUSC. But God knows what there will be in twenty years time. Will I have to go to Europe to catch a concert? Will all my classical CDs be extortionately-priced imports? I pray that under a Democratic government, funding for the arts in the schools will be restored, and that there will be a new generation brought up to care about classical music. Right.
