And now for something completely different

I went for a drive today, through Phoenix, for no particular reason. Just because I felt like it. Car radio on, listening to something... well let's not go into which aspect of talk radio exasperated me today... So I decided to switch to FM and go find a classical music station. In a city of three and a half million or so there are, naturally, a lot of radio stations. We even have an embarassment of riches. At least 3 classical music stations.

I found the first one; it was playing Mozart. Went searching for a second one. It was playing Mozart. Went searching and found the third one. It was playing Vivaldi. (I bet you thought it'd be Mozart - I certainly expected Mozart ). I was driving for about 3 hours (and add to that a stop at Starbucks). The range of composers these three stations ran through consisted of:

Mozart.
Carl Ditters van Dittersdorf.
Haydn.
Vivaldi.
(for a delicious thrill) Salieri.
Early Beethoven. Nothing later than his second symphony.

You might have guessed that I like classical music. Let's not go into the fact that the term 'Classical' has a specific meaning - here I'm using the word as the great unwashed would use it. So how does it happen that of the three 'classical' music stations in Phoenix, not one of them seems able to play anything written later than about 1800? I might add that, though this might seem like a small sample (3 or so hours on a Sunday afternoon) it's actually fairly representative of the fare on offer whatever the day or the hour.

Now why is this? Do the people who create the program lists have a bias toward the Baroque? Don't they know about the excellent music that's been written under the 'classical' umbrella since 1800? Many years ago I went through some musical education: it was biased toward the Baroque. Are these programmers the natural outcome of an educational process that emphasises the Baroque?

This differs a little from the situation where I come from; there we had two classical music stations that I can recall, MBS and ABC. Neither was a 'for profit' station. Indeed, the ABC is government funded. Even in that situation it was rare for a radio station to commit to running a symphony that ran a whole hour, let alone 3+ hours for an opera but they did do it. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. I suspect the classical music stations here stick to Baroque due to the relative brevity of a piece - it lets them get more ads in per hour.