My informal poll of friends is running about 50/50. Some actually love being able to listen to talk on the way to their odd hour jobs, others resent losing our one spot for soothing classical music. What have most of us done? It seems we have switched channels to the local university public radio station (89.9) that plays wonderful, pure jazz all day. I’m sure UCF radio is thanking you.
Classical Screw Up
January 16, 2010 by anhinga
A few weeks ago PBS radio (90.7 in Orlando) changed its broadcasting. Where I once listened to Sunday Baroque, string quartets, great orchestras there is now all talk, all the time. May I say this as gently as possible? PBS, your every thought is not all that fascinating. There are wonderful programs with spoken words, like Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, the rare literary shows, some sections of All Things Considered and the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, but the prater that replaced good classical music is often just pontificating, self-absorbed voices of our” intellectual superiors” who scrape the landscape for “untold stories.” Not all are bad or uninteresting, but there should be room for the cream of the crop as well as good classical music.
So annoying. Our version of PBS has a totally horendous blue grass group that’s taken over the usual classical time slot on Sunday afternoon. I like blue grass music, that’s not the problem, these guys sound like a very bad garage band.
Our PBS seems to think ALL bluegrass is high culture, too. I like a lot of it, but not all, and in small doses. Perhaps they aren’t qualified to judge what is good and not in that genre, but our ears can. 🙂
I rarely, if ever, listen to the radio. I have my iPod in the car and listen to audio books as I drive around town or sometimes put on one of my playlists. At home it’s the iPod, too.
I wonder how long it will be before car manufacturers stop installing radios in cars. I think it may be closer than we think.
Oh, I hope you are wrong. I love listening to the radio while I drive and those little buds won’t stay in my ears.
I like some of the talk and some of the classical. It depends on my mood and the programming.
We are lucky enough to pick up two PBS stations here. One is from the local university (Kent State). They play classical music from 9am until 3pm during the week. I think they play it at night as well but I’m not sure. They also have Celtic music on Friday evenings and Folk Alley (folk music) on Saturday nights. I enjoy all of it, from classical to folks.
But if I’m in the mood for chatter, I can tune into he Cleveland station which seems to be all talk, all the time. I mostly listen to that when driving because I have a driving phobia and for some reason I can’t explain, it helps to have people chattering on the radio. It’s calming.