RADIO : More Talk, Less Bach : KUSC-FM’s neoformat, emphasizing personality over classical tradition, has built an ardent following while outraging many longtime listeners

It’s a word you don’t expect to hear when the talk turns to classical music radio: rage . In-your-face talk radio, sure. Shock jock shows, maybe. But how do you stoke up a steaming case of indignation over a station that plays Mozart?

Ask Ernest Fleischmann, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s executive vice president and managing director.

“I care very deeply about what happens to music in this city,” he said, “and I think KUSC has become a destructive force. It’s certainly having a very detrimental effect on the general level of perception among audiences for classical music. What do they take their listeners for? Halfway morons?”

Ask George Heussenstamm, a composer and professor of music at Cal State Northridge and a former manager of the Coleman Chamber Music Assn.: “I think it was a wonderful station in its earlier days, (but) I think it’s gone awry. Its direction is totally unfocused and nebulous and meaningless.”

Ask Wally Smith and Bonnie Grice. He’s the president of KUSC-FM (91.5), she’s the 6-to-10 morning drive show host (they’re also husband and wife). For more than two years, listeners have been peppering them with either devoted fan mail or rebukes that range from the disappointed to the snarling.

“I can understand a person’s rage,” said Grice. “I can understand them reacting that way to change, to something that has stayed the same for so long in their lives. And I guess this is a radical change.”

Radical indeed. Public-radio KUSC has been steadily moving away from the traditional classical-music station format--in which the on-air talk often is limited to little more than telling listeners what they have just finished hearing and are about to hear next--to one in which announcers are allowed, and encouraged, to develop a chatty, informal radio persona.

In the process, KUSC has attracted both an ardent following of listeners who see the change as an unstuffy and accessible alternative to traditionalism, and an equally passionate group of critics who say the station is debasing the very thing it is trying to enliven.

For its part, KUSC management has decided to stay the course. What began as an experiment has become, after an initial shaking-out period, the stated direction of the station. The hiring in June of the young, conversational and informal Tom Crann as the afternoon drive-time deejay punctuated the station’s determination to commit to a personality format. It did not, however, quell the debate over the format’s merits.

KUSC’s principal competition for classical listeners is KKGO-FM (105.1), a former all-jazz commercial station that switched to classical shortly after the demise of the venerable KFAC in September, 1989.

For nearly 58 years, KFAC was nearly monolithic, broadcasting classical music to Southern California on both the AM and FM bands. KKGO inherited much of the traditional style of KFAC and has hewn fairly closely to it since.

For most of its nearly 20 years of life as a classical station, KUSC also embraced the no-frills approach. But about the time of KFAC’s demise, KUSC’s Smith had begun to move away from mainstream classical programming and format. More emphasis was placed on the personalities of the announcers, and music by contemporary artists such as Frank Zappa began to appear alongside Baroque composers on the station playlist. A few months later, Grice was hired.

To some listeners mourning the loss of KFAC, the change was a shock.

“After KFAC, the poor audience said, ‘(a) we only have one (classical station) now, and (b) it’s gone crazy,’ ” Smith said.

The idea at the time, Smith said, was to “not just be the conservatory, the museum of classical music, but to be the sort of radical alternative that reaches out and tries to connect with people who might be the next audience of classical music. Public radio should do this. . . . You don’t have to feel like you’re a fool if you’ve never heard the Brahms Fourth Symphony before and you’re 45. It’s OK.”

The initial changes were thought of as experiments, Smith said; some remained, others were dropped. The playlist remains eclectic, and excerpts of pieces still are played during morning and afternoon drive time when traffic and weather must be sandwiched in. But traditional-style midday programming also has remained, as have the familiar critical and musicological programs hosted by veteran announcer Jim Svejda.

Still, how well Smith’s vision has succeeded continues to provoke arguments. A sampling of mail received by the station shows little middle ground of opinion:

* “The problem, in a nutshell, is simply that I am unable to handle the new image . . . which involves those interminable discourses on the part of your announcers on every conceivable subject, from movies to vacations to California weather, delivered in adorably chatty intimacy.”

* “Your positive attitude is refreshing. Your choice in music selection is put together like a piece of art. Thank you for increasing my musical knowledge in areas I’ve not yet explored.”

* “They fill the air with the kind of meta-discourse that has nothing to do with the business at hand: chat, jokes, anecdote, impertinent remark, cheerleading, commentary and moralizing on journalistic topics.”

* “There is . . . an intangible quality that keeps me a loyal listener. . . . It has something to do with the feeling of connection.”

* “Trite, condescending and irritating. . . . We don’t want chit-chat and pop deejay-type behavior. We want good music and people who respect it and their listeners.”

* “It is so nice to hear classical music being treated as something other than a great mystery, especially if you have had no directed musical training.”

Smith believes that the critics represent a “small but loud” number among KUSC’s listeners. Its audience--which averages 28,000 during any 15-minute interval from 6 a.m. to midnight--has remained fairly constant over the past few years--but he said station income from listeners during that time is up about $300,000 as a result of attracting new subscribers.

Meanwhile, at KKGO, the inherited tradition of KFAC continues to guide the programming, which attracts a slightly larger audience than KUSC. (Classical stations, according to the Arbitron rating service, generally account for no more than 2% of the listening audience in any market.)

“We had our own perspective of what a classical radio station should sound like,” said Saul Levine, KKGO’s president and general manager, “and we went right after that goal. We’re basically attempting to serve the predominant core of interests in classical music, and we do that by playing the great classical compositions and not deviating too far in the repertoire. We’ve stayed away from the abstract, esoteric kinds of things. Those kinds of things need exposure, but we’re not in a position to do it, because the bulk of our audience would not be too happy with it.”

Also, he said, “we run a pretty tight ship in terms of what we feel should be said on the air.”

In deviating from the usual, KUSC, Levine said, is fulfilling its purpose as a public-radio station to present alternative programming that may appeal to a smaller number of listeners with specialized tastes.

“They probably are, and should do, unique things to serve these various interests,” he said.

KUSC’s point people in the format wars are Grice in the morning and Crann in the afternoon.

Both are given to chattiness and the occasional flights of serendipity between musical selections that they say either draw listeners to them in an almost familial bond or make them pound their steering wheels in frustration. The two even appeared as verbs in one irritated letter from a listener renewing a station subscription “probably for the final time, if we continue to be Griced and Cranned.”

But, they say, they are merely a pair of nice guys trying to finish first.

“Why is showing enthusiasm for the music denigrating it?” said the 26-year-old Crann, who has a degree in English literature from Providence College and has worked in broadcasting since his graduation, most recently at WNED, a Buffalo, N.Y., classical station. “There’s a certain element who thinks that if we open (the music) up to anyone, it will no longer be their domain and expertise, that we have to curate and tend classical music. They think that if people aren’t appropriately serious enough, it won’t be for the elite or the intellectuals anymore. That scares me a little bit.”

The idea of a musical elite “went out with the wash when the hippies went down the drain,” Fleischmann countered.

“For virtually everyone I know who loves music,” he said, “one of the greatest things is when we can share or convert someone or open someone up to the terrific satisfactions and stimulations that music can give. We’re all proselytizers.”

Composer-professor Heussenstamm said talk of elitism among classical’s aficionados is absurd.

“There’s nothing wrong with anyone enjoying music,” he said. “With the music that I love, I’d be very happy if the whole world loved it.”

However, he added, he believes that KUSC has alienated many knowledgeable listeners not so much through untraditional selections and on-air personalities as by discontinuing monthly publication of the station’s program guide, which carried each day’s playlist and programming schedule.

KUSC’s Smith said the high cost of the publication made it prohibitive.

Personality radio on a classical station “is a risk,” said Grice, who married Smith after coming to KUSC in November, 1989, from WKSU, a classical music public-radio station at Kent State University in Ohio, where she was the morning host and arts producer. “People aren’t going to like your personality sometimes, but what else can I do? It’s me. A lot of people criticize me for being too chipper and too cheery, but I can’t help it. I don’t care whether I’m considered lowbrow by the highbrows. That’s OK with me.”

Reactions to the conversational format among the Southern California professional musical community are, like those of the listening public, split.

Iona Brown, the music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, is particularly taken with Grice and said she doesn’t consider the format lowbrow.

“I don’t think she trivializes classical music at all,” Brown said. “She’s very, very easy to relate to, somehow. She really knows her subject and really knows what she thinks the listeners want to hear about. You can’t separate music from human emotion and all that goes with it.”

Separation from the human voice, however, would suit Heussenstamm better.

“These personalities simply get in the way as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “They’ve gone so much overboard. The emphasis is on the people rather than the music they’re supposed to represent.” Heussenstamm did, however, acknowledge that the format could be “a vehicle for education.”

So did both Paul Salamunovich, music director of Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Deborah Rutter, executive director of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, who said they believe the lighter format would probably attract younger listeners, who would in turn begin to fill concert halls.

Smith said that “the Arbitron (ratings) data suggest that we are beginning to reach more people in the 25-to-44 age group than we used to, although the majority of our listeners are still 55 and older. We do get letters from parents who say their teen-age children are listening to us or that very young children are big fans of programs on KUSC. There’s anecdotal evidence that people who haven’t listened to classical music before are beginning to find access to it.”

Erich Vollmer, executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Assn., said: “The approach they’re taking now is a viable one for the ‘90s. It’s a wonderful cross section of classical and dipping a little bit into pop. And I’m not offended by the chitchat. It’s going to attract a lot of people to classical music, and I don’t think any of us in this day and age can afford to be standoffish in that cause.”

Fleischmann, however, said he believes that KUSC offers little in the way of musical education.

“The information they impart,” he said, “is superficial and very often wrong. It’s like flying blind half the time. It’s really sad that the station that is linked to a leading university (USC) and that was one of the beacons of the cultural scene has now become a sort of happy-talk, wallpaper sort of middle-of-the-road station. Everything seems flimsy and superficial and boring. I wouldn’t like to be educated by people who talk this happy stuff. Thank God for KKGO.”

(Fleischmann appears on KKGO two times a day on weekdays on a brief spot titled “Notes From the Philharmonic.” KUSC produces and broadcasts L.A. Chamber Orchestra concerts.)

Smith has heard the criticism but remains unswayed. In the personalities of its announcers, he believes, KUSC likely has found its niche.

“Radio,” he said, “is most effective when it is full of personality. All through the years, whether it was Singing Jack Smith or Emperor Bob Hudson or Wolfman Jack or Gary Owens, you name it. Talk radio has the biggest audience in Los Angeles radio because they (the hosts) are people who become friends.

“It’s no fun to be challenged about what we’re doing. It was much easier when we were the totally loved guru of classical music. But I care so much about the future of this medium and of this music that I’m taking risks that I think we need to take. We’ll be making refinements so that it won’t be quite as radical as it seems to be, but we’ll also find ways of preserving the form so that it can compete in the future.”