COMMENTARY : The Life and Times of KFAC : Some thoughts on the demise of a ‘classical’ radio station

KFAC is all but dead. In a couple of weeks, there will be no commercial radio station in Los Angeles devoted to serious if you must, call it classical --music.

It is an embarrassment, a disaster, a cause for communal shame and outrage. It also is, we fear, an unsettling sign of the times.

These, in case you hadn’t noticed, are the times when airlines must sponsor symphony concerts, when orchestras go a-begging and then go bankrupt. These are the times when the government decreases its support of the arts and, simultaneously, removes tax incentives that used to encourage private subsidy.

These are the times when music education disappears from school curricula. These are the times when politicians think it is their job to censor art and censure artists.

These are bad times. The Philistines are winning. Greed is triumphing. Our elected leaders, ever gentler and ever kinder, are looking the other way.

For all its cultural achievement (which is considerable) and for all its cultural pretension (which is enormous), Los Angeles has once again succumbed to backwoods standards and boondock sensibilities.

The situation at KFAC is just one small symptom of a large malaise. But it is revealing.

First the powers-that-be took away the AM outlet, blithely assuming that all people who wanted a little Mozart in their home or car owned an FM set. That was bad enough. Now this.

Rock, pop and schlock make money. That’s the basic reasoning. Ergo, we need more rock, pop and schlock. The stuff will, no doubt, improve our society. So much for the virtues of deregulation.

To hell with Beethoven, Brahms and Schoenberg, say our self-appointed guardians of sonic virtue. Who needs the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts? Who needs effete-elitist diversion?

If you really want that sound, that brand of entertainment--hey, no problem. Eat cake. Buy a CD. Buy a ticket for a live performance. If desperate, turn the knob to a more esoteric, less accessible station--if you can.

Stop. Who thinks of Beethoven as a sound, anyway? What sort of mind regards Brahms as mere entertainment? The answers boggle.

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But wait. Some unpleasant, stubbornly contrary questions keep nagging our righteous, mournful wrath.

Was KFAC as good as it should have been? Would the station have gone under with barely a whimper if it had been better? Why did it so seldom achieve the sophistication of comparable enterprises in Boston, New York and--dare we say it?--San Francisco?

Let’s face it. KFAC had high-brow aspirations that were often compromised, if not contradicted, by low-brow attitudes.

In the good old days--or were they the bad old days?--one had to contend with certain announcers who might easily be confused with revivalist missionaries. The tone was unctuous, the inflection pompous.

Those were the days when the station thought nothing of fragmenting symphonies. Those were the days when ears could be jolted with a jingly pitch for a hemorrhoid medication before the magic of a Mahler cadence even began to fade.

Then came the new regime, and many of the same irks lingered. Interviews with musicians resembled hype orgies in mutual admiration societies. The new breed of announcers sounded less like undertakers, perhaps, but more like over-the-back-fence chit-chat virtuosos.

The talk tended toward the inane, just as the programming tended toward the incoherent. Proper pronunciation of foreign names and titles was very much a sometime thing. We recall, with bemusement, the flustered female voice that came to repeated grief over the airwaves when confronting the name Monostatos in “The Magic Flute” and even mangled Sarastro . Then there was the imported expert, since departed, who distorted all French and Italian words with the same aberrant British mannerisms.

The station tried to do good deeds. This meant turning shrill shill for endless, endlessly obnoxious, ultimately fatuous marathons intended to increase the subscription fortunes of various local arts groups. This meant gushing over any local performance and/or performer within earshot of a presumably gullible public.

KFAC was promo heaven, a musical flack’s paradise. It insulted no one’s stupidity.

The philosophy seems to have been simple. If something made music, happened here and was “classical,” it had to be great.

Great. Great! GREAT!

This was the message. Get out there and defend our music, right or wrong.

Of course, wrong was hardly ever acknowledged. If KFAC harbored critical standards, they were kept pretty much a secret.

Never mind. Forget all that. It is too late.

We ‘ll miss the station. For all its blemishes, it filled a fundamental need. It couldn’t ruin the music on the records. It played happy host to music that doesn’t automatically bump and grind. It was a comforting, sometimes even uplifting presence on the dial.

And who knows, it might have gotten better.