The change has been brewing for years. Virtually since the day in 1995 that Laura Walker became president of the newly independent WNYC Foundation — owner and operator of New York City's famous WNYC (93.9 FM and 820 AM) — the probability mounted that the FM station, home for decades of a very successful classical music format in the most competitive radio city in the nation, was eventually going to eliminate or greatly diminish the diet of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and John Adams that the city's connoisseurs had grown to love.

Their replacement would be the commercially successful format already used on the AM station: news, talk, commentary and information from National Public Radio and WNYC's own local studios.

Here's how the reasoning went: we have to pay New York City $20 million to buy the two stations, and we need even more money to increase our audience and raise more money. What brings in more support, music or talk? Talk, of course. That's what the radio consultants have been telling us for years, and that's what we have found in our own fund-raising.

So, gradually at first, classical programs began to disappear from WNYC FM. Then came September 11th. WNYC's share of the destruction included the loss of its FM transmitter and antenna with the collapse of the World Trade Center, as well as the temporary loss of its nearby studios and offices, due to smoke and dust damage. Immediately, in response both to the loss of the FM signal and the urgent need for news around the clock, WNYC FM dropped all its midday music and began simulcasting the AM station.

It's been five months now, with no move back to music. But listeners didn't understand what was happening until 4 February 2002, when the astute weekly New York Observer detailed the unhappiness and off-air conflicts within the station, starting with Walker's $321,539 compensation package and then exploding with the news that the station was seriously considering dropping classical music almost completely.

New York — that smug city that, among other things, considers itself the classical music capital of the United States — suddenly faced the possibility of a future with only one classical station. And that was the staid, middle-of-the-road WQXR (96.3 FM), owned by the equally staid Gray Lady, The New York Times.

Listeners were outraged; protests poured in from highly placed, wealthy members of WNYC's own board, among many others. Walker pulled in her horns and said that the news/talk format was just one of several possibilities under consideration.

All this seemed like a catastrophe of the first significance in the Big Apple. In fact it was just New York coming in at the tail end of events, as usual. Classical music has been slowly disappearing from the commercial airwaves for more than a decade. At the same time, public radio, which had become the main hope for classical listeners nationwide, was also switching from Beethoven to Bob Edwards. Everybody knew that's where the money was.

The commercial story has been especially sad. The days of family-owned stations, which made enough money to be comfortable if not enough to be rich, have given way to the deregulated, consolidated era of powerful corporations whose obsessive focus is "shareholder value." They spent too much money (stations in New York and other large cities were going for upward of $100 million apiece) and owed too much money to waste time with a piddling few millions of profit. They needed lots, lots more — and right away.

So the cozy classical stations began to disappear — at first with some protest, but finally with barely a peep. WNCN (104.3 FM), New York's second upstart classical station, was sold in the early 1970s to a group that gave it a rock format. Furious fans fought back and got the signal sold to a firm that agreed to restore the old programming as long as it was in the black. But 20 years later, when that company found it could make a lot more just by selling WNCN, they did — with nary a peep.

Today, there are just 34 commercial stations around the country playing classical music, down from 48 in 1992 (although the share of the total listening audience shrank only slightly, from 1.8 percent in fall 1991 to 1.5 last summer). The most recent flip came just two months ago, when Cox Communications bought Miami's venerable WTMI (93.1 FM) and turned it into WPYM "Party 93.1," devoted to underground dance music.

As Sean Ross, editor of the Billboard Airplay Monitor trade weekly, put it: "If 20 years ago, or even five years ago, you had gone to a major [radio] group manager and said I'd like to take your classical to underground dance and make more money, you would have been greeted with skepticism. Now dance is more in the mainstream. It seems less frightening."

Still, since WTMI disappeared, the managers of a public station in nearby Palm Beach County, WXEL (90.7 FM), announced that they will broadcast 90 hours of classical music a week (as well as a news/information format) into Miami and Dade County, starting in early June.

One way that public stations are trying to preserve some balance of both news and music has been to acquire second frequencies in the same city, as Colorado Public Radio has done in Denver. The Colorado system has even joined with the University of Southern California's KUSC to create the Classical Public Radio Network, which combines the resources of both operations to form a 24-hour musical stream that is available for syndication nationwide to other public stations. And there are rival networks: Minnesota Public Radio's Classical 24, for instance, is not happy about the arrival of CPRN.

"The two signals have done magnificently in Denver," says CPRN artistic director Evans Mirageas, a former major-label record executive. "People today want more specificity, either all-classical or all-news. Gone is the idea of the intellectual companion, with news, lectures, jazz, classical music and so on. There are more 'genre-specific' listeners, and public broadcasters have awakened to this."

The move toward niche programming mirrors the trends in commercial pop, rock and rap, for which stations have been targeting their programs at increasingly specific audiences. (WKTU [103.5 FM] in New York, for example, is directed at 25-to-34-year-old women).

Where do we go from here? Are American classical music lovers doomed to the eventual dripping away of our favorite sounds from the airwaves, where so many of us (especially outside the main cities) learned how to listen to and appreciate the music?

Not necessarily. For starters there is the Internet, an inexhaustible resource for the dissemination of all manner of global sounds. Readers of an Internet magazine such as that of andante hardly need to be reminded of how much there is to read and hear in cyberspace. Internet radio itself is increasingly a place where old music can meet new ears, and it is addressing the hunger for the music around the nation — an appetite which will surely be piqued as computers enter more households and Internet access increases.

And now there's satellite radio, too, provided by two competing firms: XM Satellite Radio, based in Washington, D. C. and Sirius Satellite Radio, based in New York. The latter launched in its first four markets just last week on 14 February 2002.

As one who has enjoyed an XM installation for several months now, I can report that it's great — even with a few flaws in the design of the receivers. XM and Sirius have four and three classical channels respectively, with at least one devoted to vocal music (try finding that as a steady diet, or at all during a weekday, on your local station). The sound quality is superior to FM now, the reception is superb — I listened recently to one station on a round trip from New York to Vermont. It was wonderful.

All these trends and new developments suggest that traditional classical radio seems to be going the way of "adult standards" from the late '30s to mid '50s and slowly disappearing from the airwaves. Fortunately, as new technologies and avenues of distribution take its place, the music's staying power seems as strong as ever.