As the year ended, France’s state-owned classical-music station started making mildly alarming announcements. A new France-Musique was coming, said a deep male voice, the kind usually heard in beer commercials, and listeners would find that music had never “touched” them so “closely.” Various on-the-air producers used the traditional New Year’s Eve greetings to announce they were being moved to time-slot Siberia or dropped altogether, and some made bitter speeches.
There was some reason for alarm. One way of bringing music closer to listeners was to multiply celebrity sound bites, as when movie executive Daniel Toscan du Plantier told us what he has on his record shelf at home. Then there are the man-in-the-street interviews, one of which resulted in something like this: “Mozart year didn’t matter to me, I’m not interested in that kind of music.”
A new boss was facing the fact that the station had been losing audience share to Radio-Classique, which broadcasts the sort of classical elevator music that people here call musique d’accompagnement. To listeners who know France-Musique and the immense erudition of many of its producers, not only in classical music but also in jazz, this seemed puzzling. By its nature the station does not and never will have a mass audience: marketing gimmicks can do nothing to change that.
Thus came another salvo in this country’s cultural wars, where the battles are mostly fought on silly ground—Is graffiti art? Why can’t the French sing rock ’n’ roll? But the
