The public radio wars can get ugly.

Several years ago, the battle was over how many hours Atlanta's WABE should devote to news/talk vs. classical music. Radio professionals and listeners traded loaded terms such as "elitist," "dumbing down" and "fascist."

Georgia Public Broadcasting (ENLARGE)
Terrance McKnight's WNYC show juxtaposes classical works with newer music.
WABE (ENLARGE)
WABE announcer and Atlanta Symphony Chorus member Wanda Yang Temko says Terrance McKnight's casual eclecticism shortchanges classical music.
MOST POPULAR STORIES Best-selling book brings back painful memories for Simon David Archuleta's dad loses 'American Idol' backstage pass Actor Farina arrested with gun in luggage at LAX Ludacris returns to Banneker High with message of hope Gospel singer Dottie Rambo dies in tour bus wreck in Mo.
EMAIL THIS PRINT THIS MOST POPULAR

On WABE (90.1-FM), the matter was eventually settled online: wabe.org now carries both the live radio broadcast and a menu of NPR news and information programs.

The latest skirmish is just as incendiary, this time pitting insiders against each other. It was the hot topic recently at a public radio conference in New York. Lois Reitzes, WABE program director and morning announcer, participated in a session called "Classical Radio in the 21st Century."

The fuss is no longer over music vs. talk, but rather the pedantic debate over what qualifies as "classical" music. The radio argument is an important subset of the larger cultural angst over classical music's future — and how the genre can be saved, reinvented or mummified.

It started like this: A few months ago, New York's WNYC hired away Georgia Public Broadcasting's Terrance McKnight, whose "Studio GPB" show was an unexpected mix of classical standards set in a broader musical context. In one segment, for example, McKnight opened with a couple of Otis Redding songs followed by Robert Schumann lieder, showing new and old settings of love and remorse. (GPB is broadcast across the state but not in Atlanta.)

Now established in New York, McKnight's "Evening Music" has received extravagant praise in some quarters, condemnation in others.

Among the latter is Wanda Yang Temko, WABE's "Afternoon Classics" announcer, an Atlanta Symphony Chorus member and pure-voiced soprano with Baroque music training.

On her blog, "The Atlanta Chronicles," Temko wrote that McKnight was hired by WNYC "for the reasons that I hated listening to him: casual, nontraditional. ... When we try to bill eclecticism as classical music, we are short-changing the latter. When we artificially make connections between pop music and classical music, we are setting up new barriers. ... Stop the pandering."

From the opposite mind-set came Greg Sandow, a prominent New York-based blogger (linked on artsjournal.com). He raved over McKnight's gambit of playing African-American Mississippi folk songs before the slow movement of Beethoven's Op. 109 Piano Sonata, and discussing both with insight.

"[T]his is the kind of programming that can attract the new, young audience that classical-music people always talk about," he wrote and, in a shot aimed squarely at the keep-it-pure camp, continued, "McKnight might be a strong sign that classical music really has a future, but it's not the future many people wanted."

For his part, McKnight doesn't make grand claims. "We're presenting mostly old music, but making connections in a new way," he says, "like getting a new generation of curators to freshen up the museum."

Not that McKnight's style will be heard anytime soon in WABE's daily mix. Reitzes says she "approves" of McKnight's thematic shows, but cautions that what fits in one city might not succeed in another. What's more, his show is "destination listening."

"As much as we don't want to think of ourselves as 'wallpaper,' " she continues, "the reality is that a lot of people listen to WABE at work or as background. Specialization, not eclecticism, is what the research tells us is required to attract the largest audience."

The core of the radio debate echoes, in a modified form, arguments you hear after Atlanta Symphony concerts of contemporary music and beyond. The mood (if not the reality) among some classical music insiders is that this glorious art form, which held cultural dominance for going on 500 years, has been slipping into a niche market of sustainable irrelevance.

Temko's argument — keep the traditional "barriers" in place and new listeners will tune in — stands in defiance of what seems like the flow of American society. What's overlooked is that today's classical "tradition" is of recent construction. So are notions of artistic purity.

The historical norm, which accounts for so-called classical music's evergreen vitality, is the ability of its musicians or fans to rail against outsiders up to a point, then absorb the fresh style. Composers do this when they fuse Latin American folk rhythms into a Verdi-style opera, or when a compelling new work is scored for violin, clarinet and dance-club DJ.

Radio programmers in markets such as Atlanta's might soon feel the same pull around the edges, with the same thrill of the new.

As Reitzes admits, "It's a burden to program within too narrow a scope; it limits our creativity."