![]() “We try to play things that will surprise people,” says Menz. The same ethos also enlivens the jazz department as well as shows called The Darker Side (soul, hip hop, R&B), and The Record Hospital (known as “RH,” which doesn’t treat ailing vinyl discs, but airs punk and its indie successors). For sheer diversity and depth of repertoire, WHRB is unrivaled. It doesn’t even air consecutive pieces from the same historical era, so there is no “Baroque Hour,” only shows like Afternoon Concert or Special Concert, plus thematic programs dedicated to the Cleveland Orchestra, say, or the British Choral Tradition. “What makes us great is our extensive library,” notes Eisenach, “and our rule that we never play the same piece of CM twice in one academic year.” WHRB’s catalog contains 49,000 CM items (80 percent on CDs) the station also draws on Harvard’s vast Loeb Music Library, and thus can cue up just about any recording of anything. “These pieces are famous for a reason.” Yet listeners rarely hear them on WHRB except as part of a Warhorse Orgy during one of its famous “Orgy®” periods. “Warhorses are fun,” says Louise Eisenach ’16, a former co-director of the CM department. Most selections are “warhorses”-familiar compositions like Beethoven’s Fifth or Ninth Symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. In the “real world,” nearly all “CM” (WHRB shorthand for “classical music”) stations deploy a rather limited playlist. But WHRB (“whirrb” to fans) airs nearly 70 hours a week of classical music, and does certain things no other station does. Some would argue that WHRB is the best classical-music radio station in the United States: an audacious, if untestable, claim. Richard Levy ’58 and trustee Robert Landry ’79 are professional broadcast engineers living in the Boston area who provide invaluable help with technical problems, including the rare emergency fix-it call. Trustee Marie Breaux Epstein ’90, an accountant, watches over business procedures. Trustee Bill Malone ’58, for example, is a broadcast-law expert who, as an undergraduate, helped shepherd the station’s application for an FM license through the Federal Communications Commission. Although WHRB is staffed and run by students, ghosts sit on its board, help the station financially, and contribute expertise to its operations. There will be a reunion banquet, ghost panel discussions, and audio and video presentations. This fall, WHRB celebrates its seventy-fifth birthday on October 2-4, bringing together many of its 3,000 alumni, known as “ghosts” in the station’s lingo. Photograph courtesy of Harvard University Archives WHRB's Bruce Morton ’52 interviews freshman Henry Lorrin Lau ’54 of Hawaii. In an average year, about 150 DJs sit at its microphones in a warren of studios in the basement of Pennypacker Hall. WHRB beams music, news, and sports from a tower atop One Financial Center in Boston to an audience roughly circumscribed by Route 495, a beltway about 30 miles from downtown. Indeed, the station that began in 1940 with a signal carried by the electrical system in Harvard’s dorms has evolved into a 24/7 radio presence that matches the reach of the Greater Boston’s commercial stations. They had to compete on the air with their professional counterparts.” “It is not a ‘college radio station,’ but a radio station run by college students, who knew from the very beginning that it takes only a second to change the channel. “The station has always been serious about radio,” says David Elliott ’64, chairman of WHRB’s board of trustees since 1996 and an anchoring presence at the station for 50 years. “Like this one.”Įven more amazing, perhaps: many of the brief songs were musically complex works. “At the station, people subject themselves to ridiculous dares,” he says. I had pulled 80 or 90 songs, and played 60 or 65”: a torrent of music, with barely time in between to announce titles and segue to the next tune. “A minute can seem like a very long time. “It was the most stressful 90 minutes of my life,” says Peter Menz ’15, a former rock director for the Record Hospital department at Harvard’s WHRB, who produced and deejayed the broadcast. There may not be another radio station in America that would air a show like the one WHRB (95.3 FM) broadcast in February of 2013: an hour and a half of music with no song longer than one minute.
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