KFAC: Requiem for a Radio Station; Part 4

You speak about the human contact with these musicians. We, of course, appreciate all musicians here in Los Angeles, it's often been said that every musician in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra is really a soloist who has learned to play with a large group of soloists to form a total instrument. Your associations with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra seem to have been about the same thing in just about any orchestra you've worked with. Yes, because otherwise otherwise, why should should they make music with an orchestra if they have no human contact? It's not easy and I am not looking forward to the concert just for the concert. I would like to have a contact with the orchestra. The same concept that I had with my friend of testing quartet, the first rehearsal that I did with my friend and I said to them, I am here not as a conductor, but as a human being who works with other human being, their composition, who is making music, the. That's the only Berent past president and chairman of the board

of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association noticed the maestro's attitude at his first rehearsal with the orchestra when he had his first rehearsal. He said the person sitting in the last chair of every section is as important as the first chair because unless we play and make music together, we are not an orchestra. I can make errors and you should tell me or question anything that I do because I appreciate your opinions. And though I stand here as a leader, you might be able to correct me. And I thought how marvelous to say it, but wondering would that really come to pass? And in the first rehearsal, he stopped the orchestra at one point and said, Excuse me, I don't know your name, but I see a question in your eyes. And one person said something and he said, You are right, I am wrong. And you realize then that this gentleman with an orchestra, that he is one with every player, not just a person who sits in first

chairs. Now, the maestro with his Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of Chopin's Piano Concerto number one in E, we hear the first movement with soloist Kristian Zimerman. How do you think of yourself or how did you think of yourself as a performer?

Did you consider yourself to be part of show business? Oh, yes. Let's face it, when you speak to the public and offer them something that entertains them, then you're an entertainer. It's like being a master of ceremonies on the stage or at a banquet or something like that. You are an entertainer and the manner in which you present what you present is what's going to make or break you. How do you feel like the influence, the musical life of Los Angeles? Well, you know, if it were not for the fact that we all received so much mail, I wouldn't know. I know people who have written me letters about just about world of opera alone, not only the AT&T show and I would interview people, the preview of the Philharmonic, how they listen just to find out what was going on at the Philharmonic and to hear some of the people who were going to be appearing because I these were all interview shows. Carl, I particularly enjoyed your interview with Beverly Sills.

What a terrific lady. You began to study voice seriously, I began to imitate the Galaxy recordings my mother had my mother played them morning, noon and night. She had 11 records and the only 11 recordings were 22 Arias. And I had memorized them the way children today memorize television commercials. So I didn't memorized. These are obviously fractured. I had no idea what the woman was saying on these funny little recordings. You can imagine what the fidelity was. People began to say that I should really go to a singing teacher and my mother had no idea where to take me. And we were walking on 57th Street on a newsstand. There was a magazine called Musical Career, and on the cover was a picture of a lady, said Estelle Liebling, coach to world famous singers. And my mother thought, nothing's too good for her little baby, never realizing that mislabeling was probably the most expensive vocal coach. My mother was totally naive in this area. She just thought Bubbles should have a vocal coach, one of the best in the world.

So she made an appointment with mislabeling and when we arrived mislabeling, said to my mother, Leave the little girl with the secretary and I'll hear you sing now. And my mother said, no, the appointment of my little girl, not for me. And mislabeling said, I don't teach children. I don't even know any children. I never forgot that line because I burst into tears. I felt she didn't like me. Anyhow, she took me in the studio and I sang Il Barcia the way I had learned it from Madam Galaxias recording it when I finished. I like all the other grown ups who had heard me, would applaud and be terribly impressed. She burst out laughing and I burst out crying and she said to my mother that she would take me and then announced to my mother that she was charging at that time an astronomical sum of fifteen dollars a half hour. Well, I mean, you know, fifteen dollars half hour was ridiculous. My father wasn't earning that in a day, so my mother told it was impossible. And she said, OK, this is the child interest me a lot. She taught me for nothing. I stayed with her for 35 years till she died. Oh.

What does? Oh. It's. I guess in closing, Kyra, what I really want to ask you is this was not just

a job for you, it was you. No, it was truly a passion, but it must be quite a feeling to have influenced so many people and meant so much as so many. You know, I didn't fully realize how many they were until I left the station. And the mail that I received was just fabulous. Your paycheck isn't your total success. The greatest part of your success is the fact that people acknowledge that you've helped them and thank you for it and make you feel as though you are an important person to them and everybody wants to be important to somebody. And you certainly were. Thank you, Carl. In ending this, would you leave us and all of your listeners and great fans with a final piece of music? How about my signature? I loved this music ever since I first started to do World of Opera. I love Giuseppe Verdi's music, and it's

been my theme song for so many years. I think I'll probably have it posted on my gravestone when I die. The prelude to the first act of these La Traviata. Well, uh,

uh. You're listening to KFAC Requiem for a radio station on case here w I'm Nicola Lubich. When I found out that the new owners of KFAC had fired all of the

old announcers, those wonderful, qualified, intelligent men who were the signatures of KFAC, I was horrified. But of course, I kept listening to the station. And the music, of course, was so wonderful that I stayed with it so that the loss of KFAC classic music is a terrible loss for me. With the demise of KFAC, we're really saying goodbye to two radio stations, the one that we grew up with ceased to be in 1986 when Louise Hafitz bought KFAC and fired the familiar voices, hoping to attract a larger audience. She brought in a younger staff. Rich Cafarella was already known to us from QSI, which how do you feel about the demise of KFAC on a personal level? Profoundly sad.

You know, it's funny, as this story breaks and as it becomes a reality for everyone, it's old news for those of us on staff. We had that sneaking little black hole growing somewhere in our gut back in January when the sale was first rumored, then announced. And all of us went through the seven stages of denial and anger and pleading and all that. And long ago I was able to work through hoops. I'm going to lose a job and have to find another one. And so for me personally, that crisis is long over. In a bigger scale, though, I still feel a profound sense of shame and dignity and sadness as a resident of Southern California, that this sort of thing should happen. And if I had known if I could have imagined, if someone could have told me 10 or 12 years ago that someday I would move to Los Angeles, pick a cherry job working on a great public station, and then move on to a fine

commercial station and then have the classical market virtually wither in front of me, I would have not believe them. Coming from public radio, you had obviously a very different style of announcing in a very different sensibility about radio. But still, you were walking into the shoes of legends. How did I feel? Awful. I can recall walking through that wonderful KFAC library in the first few weeks, feeling exactly as you said, the legends and ghosts and history and quite frankly, unworthy the first several months I was there. It's it's very flattering to be asked by a station like KFAC to be part of the staff. And at the same time, when you know, you're following 35 year veterans, it doesn't matter how many years you've got yourself, it it humbles you. And it was very, very difficult to be a KFAC the first several months.

And I can remember being on the air at the time. Carl's opera program wasn't feeling me a couple. I mean, I Maximo Copel, my goodness, you know, who the hell do I think I am to be sitting here at this time of day? I can imagine. The fact is that the old KFAC announcing staff fulfilled people's expectations and their preconceptions and they did it superbly. And nowadays one is hard pressed to find a classical announcer. But, boy, I'll tell you, these men will never see their like again. I agree with you. They were very special, weren't they? But tell me, how is it for you working at KFAC? The three years I've had a KFAC have been the finest three years of my entire broadcast career, I have been treated within and without with respect and dignity. I've been appreciated in ways I didn't know were imaginable

and have discovered new ways through the medium of commercial radio to communicate. There's been so much talk about the old KFAC versus the new KFAC. What do you think the main differences were between the two stations, KFAC under Louise Hafitz, under the specific direction of Bob Goldfarb, her program director was programing driven as opposed to sales driven. Of course, didn't do great things for sales, but it did great things for programing. And I think that that was a major difference in the last three years of KFAC. But then perhaps the dream caused the demise of one thing. Well, I think what really caused the demise of KFAC was its greatest asset. The biggest asset of KFAC was, as they say in the trades. It's Stic.

KFAC was blessed with a monster signal. I mean, you could hear that station in Ethiopia, for goodness sakes. And it was its Achilles heel. It became the subject of a high priced buyout. The sad thing about the passing of KFAC is I believe it was done really well. Ninety two point three KFAC, Los Angeles, where classical music comes alive. Good day, Richard Campanella with you. We have coming up later on works by Hjalmarsson and Sergei Rachmaninoff right now about the strongest argument I know for living in a second story. Walk up. We'll be hearing the Cleveland Orchestra, led by Lorin Maazel in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev. Dennis McDougal, you cover the radio beat for the Los Angeles Times.

Do you really think Louise HIGH-PITCHED thought that Kathak could be commercially viable? Yes, I do. I've spoken with Louise and her partners, and I authentically believe that they went in with the best of intentions. And they genuinely believe that if they brought in a new guard, I think that Louise and her programing director, Bob Goldfarb, really did believe that they would be able to bring in the numbers. So I think she went in with the best of intentions, but she probably paid too high a price and the cash flow just wasn't there. That audience just didn't materialize, not in the numbers that she and Goldfarb thought were there. But when you went to KFAC in 1986 as Louise Horvitz's program director, what was your vision?

I thought that Los Angeles deserved a 24 hour a day classical music station that played the full spectrum of classical music, that presented classical music in a lively, interesting, enticing way. And that was a good business that would attract advertisers as well as listeners. The idea was to play the best performances available of the best music in the repertoire, including the most popular, but including a lot of music that was not on the list of the top hits but that we thought listeners would be interested in. I suppose the question that you're asked the most or if if people ask you is why you changed the announcing staff. That was certainly the least popular move that you made, I think. I think you're right. I think it is the question I'm asked the most. And the answer is that I think the station needed refreshing. The station had grown stagnant in a lot of ways.

The music programing was, I think, not very thoughtfully considered. And the announcing style, I think, did not invite people into classical music. My sense of it was that the people who announced the music seems to be more involved with themselves than with the music. And you don't get new people interested in the kind of music if it seems to be some sort of exclusive club. So our ambition was to try to get the music presented by people who were knowledgeable in music and who had a kind of sparkle in their personality that would invite people in not only on the strength of the music, but also on the strength of the presentation of the old guard Dixon Crane, who in their own self deprecating brand of humor, referred to themselves as the dinosaurs. They didn't just spin platters in my conversations with them

at the demise of the old cafe. See, I got the sense that that they simply love their jobs was just such a shock when I think it was just a shock to me. It was a shock to that audience that the, uh, the KFAC dinosaurs had cultivated over a generation when they, too, were victims to the Arbitron acts. The problem in making a change of format is, well, it's partly an artistic decision. Partly you're taking a chance. It's just like presenting a performer in concert. Will they click with the audience or not? You don't know. And one thing that you can do is fall back on something that's safe. You can say, well, this has worked and we could continue it, or you can say we have higher ambitions. We think that we can do better.

We think we can be more popular and we think we can raise the level of the quality of the presentation. We took a chance. And when you take a chance, there's some risk and some of that includes a downside as well as an upside. But I think the reason for doing it was part of that artistic vision that we had for FHC. The commentaries of music critic Alan Rich were a regular feature on KFAC. I moved to California 10 years ago expecting to continue my career as a print journalism music critic. Then I took on some extra work as a radio commentator, broadcasting

further critical material once, twice or three times a week, first on a public radio station. Later on KFAC, my tux came on just before 830 a.m. in what is known in the local media as Drivetime. The response from those morning broadcasts was infinitely greater than anything I've ever done in print, radio. Even cultural radio is ingrained in the California lifestyle. I was fired from the first station from my belief that serious comment on the state of music in Los Angeles legitimately also embraced comment on the state of music criticism. And I had some suspicions that some local criticism was damaging rather than constructive toward the cultural growth potential of this area at KFAC, despite expected pressures from TIME salesmen and sponsors. I encountered no such opposition. This was a management that understood serious thinking about serious music and recognized the place of both in the life of the community. Other outlets remain my newspaper brand X some music on other stations, including this one. But KFAC, with its full time serious programing

and its willingness to downplay smooth public relations in favor of honest commentary on the state of music in this growing community was a special and charitable venture, especially in the last few years when the new management gave it a marvelous cleansing from the old fashioned music. Appreciation is jargon. The musical growth of this area is what attracted me here in the first place, very much in the fertile soil in which that growth took place will vanish with the death of KFAC. This is Allen Rich. Now the KFAC is off the air. What is the future of classical music radio in Los Angeles? Opinions vary widely, widely. Smith, KUSA general manager, and John Curry, director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, favor presenting classical music in a mixed format.

But Bob Goldfarb and Thomas Cassity disagree. Well, it's been suggested by Dennis McDougal at the L.A. Times that you are over at USC clicking your heels as you are the sole game in town these days. Is that really true as to whether or not we're smiling? The answer is yes, whether or not we think this is a good thing for the city of Los Angeles. The answer is no. I think that we would welcome a good commercial classical music radio station competitor, because anything that helps keep classical music listeners paying attention to the classical music format is in the best interest of ourselves and previously of KFAC. Do you feel now that it is your duty, in fact, to present a 24 hour serious classical music service to the public of Los Angeles as there is no other station to do it? Well, when I came back from my brief stint in New York City, I began to talk very much about the fact that QIC had to provide some

leadership in developing new audiences for serious classical music. As we know it. We will have to be more considerate of that core audience that really needs to have on radio that standard classical music recordings. But in fact, we still believe we have an obligation as public radio to also lead the taste as well as to follow it so. Well, we think that there is a great deal of repertory in the field of jazz, the American musical theater. In the film music business. We feel that there's a lot in New Age and we feel that there's a lot in pop music that really represents a connecting link with audiences of the future that we do not currently have folk and other areas as well. I'm talking about reaching out for new ears for classical music such as the Kronos Quartet has done, for example, in presenting it in new styles so that we can connect with listeners who are not interested in classical music. And, you know, it's been out of the public schools for about 20 years now.

And if we don't want to become truly an archive, we've got to find ways of getting people to pay attention to Mozart and Haydn and Stravinsky, as well as Frank Zappa and Brian Eno and Charlie Parker and a few other really talented musical people who made serious music. The way people listen to the radio is to expect a certain kind of music at a certain place on the dial. So a station that has multiple formats, one of which is classical, still can't have quite the same impact. Better to have that than no classical music at all, of course. But I think the loss is considerable unless someone comes forward to program classical music 24 hours a day. I suspect the whole idea of world world music all day long, the disc jockey plus lots of discs is I think in some ways not the most perceptive formula for giving people the real cultural experience because the experience is diluted by all

this. Music just goes on and on. You can hear Verdi's Requiem at seven a.m., you know, you can hear operas galore and there's no real insight about the music comes through from the people talking. And it is literally a 24 hour wall to wall music. And I wonder if anybody's going to see their goes. Campisi Disastrous loss. Shouldn't we be thinking in terms really of a proper cultural force? Sometimes of these disasters happen. You wonder whether the more modest objective of more mixed programing wouldn't have a greater long term cultural effect. There has been talk of another radio station going taking up the slack for KFAC and I was reading that, but he would not give up his jazz side. There is enough jazz on everything else. The only way to make a classical music station successful

is whole hog or nothing. You either do it or you don't. You either learn how to do it right or you fail. Life with that KFAC is going to be a very sad life for me. I've listened to it, I've loved it, and I'm going to miss it tremendously. Only yesterday, there was a 24 hour classical music station. Today There's an emptiness in the air, but for those of us who love the music, we will always remember the voices and they will echo in our collective memory. So it was a labor of love and, well, yeah, it got to a point where I said, I can't give

this up. I liked it. I love what I'm doing. I also had a feeling of pride and dignity that I wasn't selling a sleazy product. I think that's very important music that's been around for about 400 years or better and will be here long after we're gone. But to have it checked out from under me the way it was and now the way is being jerked up and under the public of Los Angeles, I feel a great sense of betrayal. This is Nicola Lubitsch, your host and producer, thanking you for spending the last three hours with me. This has been a surprisingly emotional project. I've spent weeks listening to the many voices who tell this story.

And as Gail Eichenthal said, I love those guys, those guys who love the music and who taught us to love it too. Tom Dixon, Carl Princi, Fred Crane and Thomas Cassidy, we count on those who love classical music to pick up the banner and fight the good fight, because, as Fred Crane said,. It ain't over till it's over. You know, the fight isn't through yet. And remember, Beethoven rolls over for no one. KFAC Requiem for a radio station was produced in the studios of KCRW Santa Monica. The editor and associate producer was Tom Lowry, the production coordinator was Andrea Beard, post-production mixing was by Jerry Summers. A special thanks to Nancy Levy and the KCRW Music Library to

Lucia DeLisa for her time and generosity and to Jim Schveda for setting the standard. This production would not have been possible without the many KFAC listeners who share their memories and voices with us and to them we dedicate this show.