Detroit Classical Station Skips Ivory Tower Approach

It’s 5 p.m. on a Monday in Detroit, and disc jockey Dave Wagner is shepherding motorists home with the usual rush-hour mix of traffic reports, weather updates and short, up-tempo compact disc recordings.

“Music of Mario Castel-Nuovo Tedesco,” Wagner says as the acoustic guitar piece ends. “Say that 10 times real fast.”

Also on the play list are baroque piano renditions of “Hey Jude” and “All You Need Is Love” from “Bach Meets the Beatles,” and Stravinsky’s “Circus Polka”--”possibly the only piece ever written for an audience with peanuts on their breath,” Wagner says.

It is classical music. And Wagner and his colleagues at WQRS-FM are taking a decidedly unclassical approach to presenting it.

“This place is a lot of yuks,” he says.

Wagner, 39, is no dilettante DJ-for-hire. He has a doctorate in music from the University of Michigan, belongs to the American Organists Society and is choirmaster at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Grosse Pointe Farms.

But he is serious about dusting off classical music and making it more appealing to a younger, increasingly affluent radio audience.

“I play mostly things in major keys--short pieces, without a lot of commentary,” said Wagner, program director at WQRS and its evening drive-time host since 1980.

“We’re not only giving them reasons to listen. We’re giving them reasons not to turn us off.”

WQRS is among the increasing numbers of commercial, classical-format stations stressing entertainment and shedding self-imposed roles as cultural custodians, according to Peter Besheer, executive vice president of the New York-based Concert Music Network.

“The adjective that would describe these newer stations would be ‘friendly,’ ” he said. “They would minimize talk and focus on providing real emphasis on the music and introduce it in an inviting way.

“By contrast, the old-line stations tend to be elitist, a bit stuffy and believe they have a social obligation to make people hear what they want them to hear. They view their job as to educate the listener. The modern station is much less patronizing, less paternalistic.”

Some traditional listeners remain, including an older woman who phoned Wagner to say he incorrectly identified a Chopin work as “Opus 25” instead of “Opus 10.”

“It’s the music police!” yelps Wagner, jumping up to check the label and then telling the caller she is indeed correct. “Only at a classical station will people do that.”

As for newer listeners, he says: “This big yuppie generation is growing up. . . . They want to try something different besides the Chuck Berry songs they grew up with.”

Despite efforts at WQRS and elsewhere to broaden classical music’s appeal, the format will never dominate commercial radio.

Of more than 10,000 U.S. stations, only 34 commercial outlets broadcast classics full time, Besheer said. But more than half of them have revamped their programming and their staffs in ways similar to WQRS, he said.

The Arbitron ratings service ranked WQRS 19th in the 26-station Detroit market in the fall of 1987. But its majority owner, Boston businessman Howard Tanger, said ratings fail to reflect the new listeners’ affluence and their attractiveness to advertisers.

Between its founding in 1960 and 1985, when Tanger acquired it for a reported $5 million, WQRS was run as a money-losing tax shelter that carried as few as two ads an hour, Wagner said.

Tanger said during a telephone interview that WQRS and its sister station, WTMI-FM in Miami, are profitable. He declined to give specific figures but said earnings from both will allow him to acquire WFLN-FM in Philadelphia--a traditional classical station. That deal is pending.

“Our philosophy is simple--we believe we play the ‘Top 40’ of classical music,” Tanger said. “We attempt to minimize the chatter. We encourage our people on the air to be personalities. We don’t embrace the concept of teaching.

“We are still considered by some in the industry to be renegades,” Tanger said. “But I know what we are doing is the wave of the future.

“We do have listeners who alternate between AOR (album-oriented rock), classic rock and classical music,” he said. “The two are not inconsistent. Times have changed. . . . we view every radio station as a competitor.”

“A lot of people are coming to us straight from rock,” Wagner said. “A lot of people say, ‘I’ve never listened to classical music, but I like your approach and you don’t make me feel stupid when I listen to it.’

“Obviously, I do that by being stupider than anybody else,” the DJ added.