If Proust had grown up listening to the radio, it’s easy to imagine him alighting on that medium as his ultimate symbol of involuntary memory. A chance encounter with a favorite tune can trigger far-reaching associations, making radio the sonic equivalent of the novelist’s famous madeleine.
Generations of music lovers credit radio with kindling their passion for classical music. But however fondly people recall the role that particular radio stations have played in their lives, nostalgia is hardly an adequate operating model for surviving in the twenty-first century. Classical radio has to negotiate a path amid a crowded and competitive entertainment landscape. Especially for stations that have demonstrated longevity, the paradox is how to remain true to an identity cultivated over the years — the basis for the loyalty they command — while trying to adapt to the reality of today’s listeners.
“Stations have to do everything they can to remain relevant in the new world of evolving technology,” observes Bryan Lowe, program director for king-fm (98.1) in Seattle. [Listen’s publisher, ArkivMusic, partners with king as the destination for its recommended recordings of playlists. — Ed.] The station has deep roots that have made it a continuous presence in the community but has been flexible in adapting to transformations in the media landscape.
Founded in 1948, king is the country’s second-oldest classical station (after New York City’s wqxr). For decades it was part of the Seattle media empire run by the Bullitt family. It remained locally owned while an increasing number of the city’s stations found themselves in the portfolios of out-of-state media companies. In 1992 the two heiresses who maintained control — Harriet Bullitt and Priscilla Bullitt Collins — made a savvy move to protect the heritage of Seattle’s classical radio: They donated the station to the community, setting it up under a non-profit partnership (called Beethoven) with joint ownership by the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera and ArtsFund, an umbrella group for local performing arts. Thus king has the unusual status of being a commercial non-profit station. All of its earnings — over $6 million total since 1992 — are turned over to its joint owners.
Lowe is a longtime staffer who has worked at the station since 1979, taking over as program director in 2005. Growing up listening to king, he was inspired to take up French horn, which he played with the Seattle Youth Symphony. Lowe’s also an avowed “tech guy” who served as the guru behind king’s pioneering introduction of online streaming in 1995. king, in fact, served as a testing ground when the RealAudio format was rolled out. The early leap to an online presence “launched us on the national and international scene,” Lowe says, but in the push-pull of entertainment media, the station inevitably lost that edge when streaming became standard practice.
In the meantime, Lowe points out that the model of “what you want when you want it” offered by other delivery devices has emerged as one of the biggest challenges for traditional radio. If radio once functioned as a kind of collective iPod, listeners now have personal technology at their fingertips to customize musical choices. “Many listeners know a handful of pieces they like to hear, and they want the rest of the time to be filled up for them intelligently. We can deliver programming that is parsed out into particular niches.”
He’s referring to the additional channels, available as online streaming, that king began offering last year as a supplement to its main fm channel. As with many classical stations, the home channel tends to avoid vocal music in its regular programming, but opera buffs can tune in to an online channel co-programmed by Seattle Opera; every two weeks it focuses on a specific opera — chosen and hosted by the company’s general director, Speight Jenkins — that streams around the clock. The Arts channel is the spot for talk radio and interviews with regional artists across disciplines, while the new Symphonic Favorites channel is meant to simulate concert-hall programming.
The most popular of the added channels is proving to be the Evergreen channel, which offers “calming background music.” Maxine Frost joined king in January to host the new channel after a stint at Portland’s classical station (kqoc). “Like other classical institutions, a big challenge is getting younger people to listen to our music,” Frost says. “The internet channels are trying to incorporate new listeners who might not have thought they’d be interested in classical music. The focus is on shorter pieces, with lots of chamber, that can work as background music to relax and unwind.”
What about the idea of classical radio as a place to discover new and unfamiliar music? Lowe emphasizes that it’s simply beyond the station’s scope to be a beacon for the avant-garde. “We’re still playing a mix of popular classics and substantial pieces like Beethoven’s quartets. But we would never do an Elliott Carter weekend. We have to be able to fulfill both aspects of our mission, which is to share great music and to make money for the arts. So our target audience is the broader base of people whose only exposure to classical music might be through us.”
