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PDY Blog for 4-26-06 When I first came back to North Carolina about 16 years ago, I was delighted to discover the classical music station, WCPE, on the radio. I was coming off a very bad decade, and happy to be back home even under fairly stark financial circumstances. Christmas morning that first year found me working as a housekeeper at an isolated farmhouse just to pay the rent. With little else to look forward to, I was sure there’d be some stirring Christmas anthems from WCPE to brighten my day. After all, some of the greatest classical music was written for the church. But, no, there was the standard “top 40” fare of classical pops—and almost no music tied to the season. I called WCPE and complained bitterly to a very young sounding announcer. He explained, “the station manager felt we should not show partiality to one particular religion.” Well, that was only fair, but this was Christmas and I missed the music. Fast forward about ten years and I found to my amazement that the station had done a complete turnaround on religious music. Apparently, the station manager, Deborah Proctor, had gone through a religious transformation of some sort. Instead of no Christian music at all, there were now three full hours of Christian music every Sunday morning, including a purely religious broadcast from the Lutheran Church called “Sing for Joy.” If there is any doubt about the broadcast’s purpose, consult WCPE’s own website where you’ll find these words: “The program’s mission is simple: To provide music and commentary that will support the church in evangelism and worship. By providing sacred choral music and thoughtful commentary, Sing for Joy aims to prepare listeners for worship and to reinforce their worship experience.” It is not just the fact of 3 hours of Christian religious music, it is also the way it is presented. While there are the occasional brilliant religious works of the great composers, many of these broadcasts are filled with dreary ancient liturgical music that is just plain wrong for a Sunday morning. Casting an even darker spell, the announcer has an unctuous undertaker voice, the voice of that Baptist preacher we all thought we’d left behind in East Podunk. Bless his heart, the man means well; I know that. He is, in fact, the proud holder of a master of divinity degree from the Southeastern Theological Seminary at Wake Forest. Maybe that’s why he feels compelled to tell us all about Jesus between the musical selections he plays. But I have to tell you the sound of that voice and its juxtaposition with some of the most thrilling music ever written is enough to ruin my Sunday morning. And I do what I’m sure many thousand others do: I turn the radio off. Meanwhile, there is no similar acknowledgement of the music of other religions, except for the token one-hour programs on certain Jewish holy days. I happened to be listening one Sunday several years ago when a listener from out in Fearrington Village called up to complain. This was during one of the station’s “pledge drives” and the man tried to explain that while many of the station’s listeners might be devout Christians, a good many were not. I agreed with him as he said that a station whose financial support relied on such a broad base of listeners should not devote such a large block of time to any one religion’s music. What are the rest of us supposed to listen to during that 3 or 4 hours? I was appalled as WCPE’s announcers made light of the man’s suggestion. I remember one of them jokingly asked, “do Muslims have music?” I wrote a column published in the Chapel Hill Herald voicing my reaction and received an incredibly condescending letter from WCPE’s Deborah Proctor. She said that I should stop causing trouble and and that we should all look “to a time for healing.” And so it should have come as no surprise to me to hear Ms. Proctor during the station’s most recent pledge drive talking in support of the three-hour Sunday morning Christian broadcasts. Taking a page from Karl Rove, she fiercely gave a positive spin on our negative comments, joining that right wing chorus about the imagined “war on Christianity.” She said some people tried to claim they should not have such religious broadcasts because only a minority of people listened to them and others helped pay for them. In a tough bullying voice, she proclaimed: “I just can’t wait for somebody to say that to me again because I’ll say, ‘They don’t just pay for these broadcasts, they pay more….” Well, Ms. Proctor, that’s not the point. Some of us—I’ll venture to say thousands of us who listen to WCPE—don’t like having other people’s religious views rammed down our throats, especially on a classical music station. With contributions coming in from people in all 50 states and 40 foreign countries, I think the folks at WCPE might learn to be a little more receptive to constructive criticism. Now I know there are those who will say I shouldn’t criticize the people at this station which does, after all, provide our only source of classical music on the radio 24-7. They would say that without them, we would have no classical music at all. I say without them, we might have a station more responsive to its listeners. WCPE knows precisely how many have contributed to it; I’m wondering if they even care how many of us refuse to contribute because of that Sunday morning church service. HOME • COMMENTARY • BOOKS • PLAYS • CONTACT |