This is KUSC, now the largest listener-supported classical music station in the country and one of the last bastions of full-time classical music and arts programming on public radio.

There is no doubt that the station is currently on a roll: The latest Arbitron ratings rank it as the most listened-to public radio station in Southern California, ahead of public radio powerhouses KPCC and KCRW; it has had three million-dollar-plus on-air fundraising drives since spring 2007; it picked up 8,000 members and thousands more listeners after K-Mozart, L.A.’s longtime commercial classical music station, changed its format; and it is looking beyond recorded music, both airing and reporting on a growing range of local concerts and other arts events, and exploring new ways of using the Internet.

“It’s daunting but also an incredibly exciting time to be covering the arts in L.A.,” says Gail Eichenthal, the station’s program director. “As an indicator, the New York Times wrote that L.A. has become the symphonic capital of the world,” she says. “There was also a major spread in the New York Times Magazine on Los Angeles as a great center for the visual arts, from lofts to museums.” And the appointment of 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic has created headlines around the world. (With the excitement surrounding what some Philharmonic fans call “Dudamel sightings,” KUSC added live broadcasts of two sold-out concerts he conducted on successive Sundays last spring.)

KUSC is producing about 50 local concert broadcasts this year in addition to its long-standing Saturday-morning broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera season. These include live concerts by the Pacific Symphony as well as live coverage of major arts events such as the opening of the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Orange County.

This kind of arts coverage can sometimes require quick thinking. In January, for example, KUSC aired pianist André Watts’ concert with the USC Thornton Symphony Orchestra in Bovard Auditorium. Los Angeles was in the midst of a downpour the night of the concert, delaying the scheduled 7 p.m. start. But both Eichenthal and on-air host Alan Chapman were prepared – with more than umbrellas.

They had written their script to be flexible, with “fill” on the USC Thornton School of Music and various cultural programs at the university. Chapman provided extra material on the music, the composers and the performers, and they stretched a live interview with USC Thornton School dean Robert Cutietta.

“Alan wove this all together effortlessly,” Eichenthal says. “He is a master at it.”

But the 62-year-old station is not resting on its considerable laurels. Rather, says USC Radio president Brenda Barnes, she and others are vigorously strengthening local programming and advocating for local arts groups – supported by a recent $300,000 grant from the Irvine Foundation that included a mandate to cover the arts in Palm Springs, San Bernardino County and Santa Barbara County as well as the immediate Los Angeles area. The station also has formed a partnership with Colorado Public Radio to study classical music and the Internet.

Adapting a classical music radio format to the possibilities offered by the Internet and various forms of new media is not a simple task, Barnes says. “Creating a one-size-fits-all format to please 600,000 listeners is impossible,” she says. “And as the world changes, people are able to get what they want when they want it. They are not that patient.”

Many at KUSC find the possibilities exciting. Chapman, who hosts KUSC’s 9 a.m. to noon stint and a program of contemporary music, is one of them. “If you are talking about music that’s related to an art work or architecture, you have a multimedia corollary,” he says. “You can say, ‘Go to the Web site and you can see that work.’ Our obligation is not just keeping the music alive but connecting people to it.”

Use of the Internet also could help with one of classical music radio’s perennial problems: how to strike a balance between explaining the music and talking too much. Via the Internet, on-air hosts could provide more information to people who want more, while leaving others to listen to the music without excess talk, adds Kimberlea Daggy, who handles the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. slot.

Afternoon host Rich Capparela has a slightly different spin. “People can get classical music many ways – CD players, satellite radio, iPods,” he says. “If we cannot provide something that listeners cannot get that way, if we are to keep terrestrial radio alive, we have to differentiate ourselves from those media.

“The old standby,” he adds, “is companionship, personality, a warm body on the other side” of the radio.

Which leaves Barnes and KUSC general manager Eric DeWeese still struggling to find an answer, “What is the right and best way to forge a presence on the Internet?” Barnes asks. “It’s hard enough for a for-profit company. It’s even harder for a nonprofit.”

This aspect of her job is “the biggest challenge that I’ve had to deal with” at KUSC, she adds. “When I got here, in 1997, KUSC was in debt, the schedule needed work, but I knew what to do. It was just hard work, relentless long days. In this world, it’s harder to know what to do.”

The task has driven Barnes, holder of undergraduate and master’s degrees in music and musicology, back to school. She’s finished three years of course work in a degree program at USC’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development, studying (what else?) classical music and the Internet. “It gives me a chance to collect some experts on campus,” she says, to help figure out what to do.

One thing she does know, however, is that “there is one gigantic issue standing in our way and that’s music rights” – that is, what to pay performers, composers, publishers and record companies when the music is available at any time as opposed to being part of a radio broadcast. At present, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio pay a flat fee for the rights to broadcast music and the rights to stream that music – meaning transmit those broadcasts through the Internet. “What I don’t have,” Barnes says, “is the rights to stream something other than our broadcasts.”

Before crossing that bridge, she is trying to determine what people want from the Internet in terms of classical music. “It may be that I want to create an all-Mozart stream,” she says. “I don’t know yet.” A major revamp of the station’s “no-bells-and-whistles” Web site is on hold until she and DeWeese reach that decision.

KUSC, which is licensed to the University of Southern California, has come a long way since 1997, when Barnes was hired by Martha Harris, now USC’s senior vice president for university relations, to stem the tide that Barnes describes as “losing listeners and hemorrhaging money.”

The station had made what some staff members consider a disastrous experiment with an eclectic music format. It had experimented “for the right reason but made the wrong choice,” Barnes says. The station’s leadership at that time felt Los Angeles was increasingly diverse, and classical music was losing ground. “So they played all kinds of different music, not just program to program, but maybe first some blues, then classical, all together.” It didn’t work.

Or, as veteran evening host Jim Svejda puts it: “You can’t do that. You can’t mix the milk dishes with the meat dishes. You have to realize who your audience is.”

KUSC eventually switched back to an all-classical format, but when it did, it had full-time competition from a commercial station, K-Mozart. It also had $1.2 million in debt with another $750,000 looming. It wasn’t just “a cash flow issue,” Barnes says; the university had determined that the station was in “fairly serious trouble.”

Within two years she had the station operating in the black, and the debt was retired in 2001. Then, in February 2007, K-Mozart dropped its classical music format. As a result, both listeners and contributions have flowed toward KUSC. When Barnes arrived, the station’s annual budget was $2 million; today it is $6 million. It has 33,000 members.

“We are definitely in a different world,” she says. “We saw the change (when K-Mozart changed format) immediately in fundraising. We had been raising between $650,000 and $750,000 in each on-air drive. In the first drive after K-Mozart’s format change, that went to $1.2 million, then last fall we raised $1.3 million.”

This February the station received $1.14 million, with 7,506 pledges in seven days. Forty percent of the pledges were from first-time donors. A shorter spring membership drive this year raised $700,000 from 4,528 pledges.

More listeners mean more contacts with more questions – “happy problems,” Barnes says, “but things we need to sort out nonetheless.”

In addition to examining Internet and network possibilities, KUSC also needs to develop more reserves and an endowment, she says. The station has initiated a major donor program, a leadership circle for donors who give $2,500 or more. “At the beginning of the effort in 2004 we had a handful of people at that level,” says Janet McIntyre, KUSC’s director of development. “Now we have 119. We are also working on legacies, that is, having people include the station in their wills or trusts.”

About six or seven percent of KUSC’s budget comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; foundations and corporations also provide support, with Lexus the biggest corporate supporter. “The movie business also found out that a lot of Academy voters listen to KUSC,” Barnes adds, so that has proven profitable as well, especially around Oscar time.

The Federal Communications Commission licenses the station to USC, but the university provides no financial support to the station. In fact, KUSC pays USC about $500,000 a year for such expenses as accounting and legal services. “That’s probably less than we would pay if we got things separately elsewhere,” Barnes says.

But it is members’ contributions that continue to provide 70 percent of KUSC’s budget, and on-air fundraising remains the best way of getting the money the station needs. Barnes and DeWeese are sensitive, however, to listeners’ dislike of these interruptions to the music. In fiscal year 2008, the station reduced the time it spent fundraising by seven days over the previous year. “We decided that because we are raising more money, we should think about how to reward the people who are giving that money,” Barnes says. “We do our best to make on-air fundraising interesting, but it’s not people’s favorite.

“We are saying, ‘We know you are giving more and we appreciate it and we are trying to do fundraising less.’” The staff thought about dropping one drive but learned that stations that have done that have had to reinstate the drive. “We didn’t want to bait and switch. We will keep the drives intact but make them shorter, so we aren’t doing something we’ll have to renege on.”

Gail Eichenthal, like several others on the KUSC staff, had worked at the station years ago. Known to many Angelenos as the voice of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she also carries her tape recorder and keen questions to arts institutions all over the Southland. She returned to KUSC in 2005 after a 16-year absence, when she was an anchor and reporter at KNX 1070 Newsradio. Along with KUSC colleague Brian Lauritzen, she co-produces broadcasts of the Los Angeles Opera and the L.A. Philharmonic. The two also are responsible for Spotlight on the Arts, short takes on upcoming arts events in Southern California, and Arts Alive, a weekly arts magazine that airs Saturdays at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. In March, Eichenthal traveled with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on its European tour and broadcast reports back for KUSC.

Format changes at other stations brought two other veteran announcers – Dennis Bartel and Rich Capparela – back to KUSC last year. Since then, they have brought a more local presence to the morning and afternoon drive-time programs, which had been losing listeners.

“The audience has almost doubled since Rich and I came back,” Bartel says, attributing part of that to K-Mozart’s departure. “Last fall’s ratings showed that from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. KUSC had 210,000 different listeners. A year earlier it was 100,000. That is larger than the audience for entire stations in some other cities.” Looking longer term, KUSC had an audience of 379,000 in the fall of 1998. By fall 2007, the audience was 564,700.

“We wanted to get away from a feeling of detachment,” says Bartel, who tries to keep it light when he does the morning traffic and weather. He and Capparela do the reports several times an hour for people who don’t want to switch stations for the information. “We wanted a connection with the audiences right here and now,” Bartel adds, and commuting is a major part of the Los Angeles experience.

Bartel also features a “Great Composer Quiz” – with questions such as, which composer liked all things green? – as well as snippets about arts news or countries celebrating national holidays.

While Bartel gets people up and moving, Capparela views his assignment as keeping them from melting down during their afternoon commutes. His “Anti-Road Rage Melody” – “your car tune,” a pun for which he takes full responsibility and blame – airs at 5 p.m. every day. He picks soothing music, adding that he has some special recordings that he holds back for occasions “when the roads are particularly bad.” He also talks regularly about the array of items that turn up on area freeways. “Every day there’s a ladder,” he said. “I think there’s a state law.”

Bartel, who grew up in Norwalk and graduated from USC in 1976, had started with KUSC in 1972 when it was still a student station. He left in 1980 and ultimately ended up at WGMS-FM in Washington, D.C., until it dropped its classical music format last year. Meantime, he had also been writing professionally for 30 years.

An American studies and telecommunications major at the university, he didn’t get interested in classical music until KUSC announced it would turn professional and adopt that format. He had been a rock DJ but said he was afraid he’d never again be on the radio “so I dove into classical music headfirst, listening to records and reading books.” Wally Smith, former station general manager, told “about encountering me on the lawn outside Doheny Library one afternoon reading Grout’s A History of Western Music, a massive and dense tome if ever there was one.” Smith was so impressed with Bartel’s initiative that he hired him to do some announcing on a classical shift. “After that I just kept it up.”

For his part, Capparela says that when he grew up in New York State, his father was old-school Italian, thinking classical music “wasn’t music for men.” But a high school teacher introduced him to music by Wagner, Vaughan Williams and Berlioz. Capparela later decided he wanted most of all to be a classical music announcer and started that career in Schenectady in 1972. He’s been at KUSC three different times, returning last year from K-Mozart when it dropped its classical format.

Like many others at KUSC, Capparela also performs music as well as talking about it. A baritone, he’s the lead singer for a group called Otherwise Normal, for which he also plays rhythm guitar and keyboard. Alan Chapman teaches music theory at Colburn Conservatory, performs cabaret music with his wife, Karen Benjamin, and writes music, including Les Moose: The Operatic Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, commissioned for the L.A. Opera’s 1997-1998 in-school program.

Kimberlea Daggy intended to pursue an opera career but found out when she started working part-time at station WILL in Champaign, Illinois, that she liked reaching people through the radio and could have a greater impact as a radio host than as an opera singer. “I see seeds of my current career being planted at the time,” she says. She sings in her church choir and, as a baseball fan, confesses, “It’s still my dream to sing the National Anthem at Dodger Stadium.”

Others played instruments when they were kids – oboe and English horn for Jim Svejda and percussion for Scott Crowell, the station’s listener/membership assistant.

Steve Coghill, who programs the music for KUSC’s Sacred Classics, aired on Sunday mornings, and other shows, says he came to classical music, appropriately enough, through public radio. The computers that he and others use at KUSC contain 17,000 pieces of music on their hard drives. They can sort music by length, when it was last played and at what time of day.

In addition, Capparela keeps two computer screens busy during his afternoon program, often with a Los Angeles traffic map showing the day’s trouble spots.

“The technology has changed,” Eichenthal says. “I used to edit interviews with a razor blade. Now I just tap on my laptop to edit tape. The whole computer age occurred while I was gone.”

KUSC also plays film music – and unashamedly so, according to Svejda.

“It’s as natural for the L.A. Philharmonic to play Bernard Hermann (who wrote the Academy Award-winning score for The Devil and Daniel Webster plus music for Psycho, Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver) as it is for the Vienna Philharmonic to play Strauss,” Svejda says. “It is the music for Los Angeles. For the Los Angeles station not to play film music is absurd.

“Some of the great music today is being written for films,” he adds. If someone says, “Oh, it’s only film music,” that’s wrong. “It’s certainly the most listened to. If you add up all the people who ever heard music by John Adams compared to the audience for John Williams’ music – literally billions of people have heard Williams’ music.”

Indeed, KUSC tries to get a variety of textures and moods in the music it programs. There might be a full orchestra, then a piano solo or vocal music. “There’s a certain amount of core repertoire,” says Coghill, who is KUSC’s director of operations. “Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, music that’s really endured over the years,” as well as attempts to find room for lesser known or contemporary composers.

“My position is to be a conduit,” Daggy says. “What is the best piece of music that I can play for you at 2:30? You’re at work, you’re running errands.” When she hosted the morning shift, she started the 9 a.m. segment with Morning Mozart, asking rhetorically, “How can you go wrong by starting a program with Mozart?” Programs are mapped out months ahead, “but sometimes everything goes out the window, as when (tenor Luciano) Pavarotti died and we were all in here making sure we paid proper homage to his career.”

The KUSC schedule includes Modern Masterpieces, for which Alan Chapman delights in making the selections. He aims to program music from the last 100 years, with special emphasis on the last 15 to 20 years. Igor Stravinsky is a personal hero, he says, and he also likes composers Toru Takemitsu, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Steve Reich, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Jennifer Higdon.

“Yes, modern music is challenging,” Chapman says. “Beethoven was challenging. They said Stravinsky was eccentric.

“If you are going to stay within safe boundaries, you might as well say the whole tradition is dead. It’s like ignoring today’s novels and reading only Dickens or ignoring today’s movies and watching only movies from the 1930s. These are not of our time or our world.”

But, he adds, he doesn’t have an agenda. “I don’t play anything only because I think it’s important and should be heard. It has to be something I want to hear and I think the audience would be interested in.”

On KUSC, he concludes, “You don’t hear any false sentiment on the air. We all love and live this music.”

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

Journalist Kay Mills learned firsthand about KUSC and the Internet last summer when she listened to the station online while in Paris researching a novel.