Radio: Culture in Texas

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Would Texans listen to three hours of classical music every night? Charles Barbe, a former symphony conductor turned highbrow disk jockey, thought they would. But, he recalls, "every advertising agency in town told us we were chumps." Finally, the owner of Houston's station KXYZ-FM, Oilman Glenn McCarthy, decided to give Barbe, and Texas, a chance. Both came through with a symphonic bang.

Houston listeners, hearing such recorded works as Parsifal, Tannhdüser, St. Matthew Passion, all complete, were enthusiastic, wrote more than 50 letters a day praising the program. The four sponsors were equally pleased: one of them got enough new business in six weeks to pay for his investment three times over. The program's first three trial months have been so successful that this week it is being expanded to twelve hours a day.

A Hoosier-born Princeton man, Barbe conducted at Milan's La Scala when he was 19; after he came home from World War II he conducted the Portland (Ore.) Symphony for three years. Today 44-year-old Barbe broadcasts his programs from a $40,000 studio built into his Houston home. Because he feels that "our audience is at least as intelligent as we are," he treats advertisers as they have rarely been treated before: he puts on their commercials only when he sees fit, edits and cuts them. Barbe is busy planning an elaborate Easter week program including Marcel Dupré's Stations of the Cross and the Bruckner Te Deum. Says he: "The assumption that the American people do not know and do not like good music is strictly for the birds."