WHRB Harvard Radio Caters to its Own Crowd

Flip the dial to Harvard Radio WHRB 95.3 FM in Eliot, Winthrop or any other brick House on the river and it will most likely just come up static.

The station's transmitter is perched atop the Prudential Center--the tallest building in downtown Boston--but even so, the signal often gets fuzzy inside the University's brick walls. Asa result, many Harvard students cannot even hear the music broadcast from the basement of Pennypacker Hall by their own classmates.

"Radio in general has a pretty low profile on campus," says WHRB president Eric J. Aiese '02. "People don't listen to the radio like people do in the real world, yet at the same time we're pushing the whole Harvard aspect to get people to tune in."

Gregory A. Dorsainville '02, the station's general manager, is heading up one of WHRB's latest projects to encourage more Harvard students to listen. The station is producing a compilation compact disc of Harvard music--the greatest hits of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, the Mozart Society Orchestra, a handful of Harvard a cappella groups and the Kuumba singers--that Dorsainville hopes to send to incoming students the summer before their first year at Harvard.

And to supplement the effort, the station is enlisting the help of a penguin to win over Harvard listeners. The WHRB board (or 'whirrbees' as they call themselves) voted recently to change the WHRB mascot from a chicken to a penguin.

"We thought a penguin might be more versatile," Aiese says. "A penguin's classier."

The plan is for the new mascot--tentatively named Herbie--to make appearances in front of the Science Center or at sports events to promote WHRB's ongoing 60th anniversary concert series.

And the station's compers agree that a push to increase the WHRB profile is necessary.

One new deejay says he has experienced the station's low name recognition first-hand.

"When I talk about it to my friends...they're all like, 'Oh wow, we have a radio station,'" says Thomas M. Bechtold '04.

Off-campus, however, the station boasts a loyal following among music aficionados in the Boston area.

"Anybody who's serious about classical music in the Boston area considers WHRB the best--and not just during orgy period when lots of wild and wonderful things happen," says Robert D. Levin '68, the Robinson professor of music at Harvard and an alumnus of the station.

"If WHRB were to change its programming the Boston area would be a huge loser," Levin says.

This type of praise for WHRB's unique classical, jazz, blues, punk and underground rock programming doesn't coming only from locals.

Thanks to the station's new initiative to broadcast Harvard Radio over the Internet, listeners all over the world can hear WHRB's programming. One German man e-mailed the station every few hours during a recent Verdi "orgy" when deejays played the Italian opera composer for four days straight, ecstatic to find a station that played so much Verdi.

Fitting In

Feedback from fans in Germany and closer to home convinces the WHRB staff that the station fills an important hole in radio programming.

"Off campus, we continue filling the niche of quality radio as a lot of other radio has gotten more corporate and cookie cutter," Aiese says.

In the mid-1990s, the Federal Communications Commission loosened radio regulations, allowing a single company to own more than one radio station in a market. Aiese says the regulatory change means that radio stations are becoming increasingly homogenous throughout the country.

Aiese says WHRB has actually benefitted from the shift.

"We've kind of grown into our own niche. All these developments have really helped people find us on the dial," he says.

WHRB has much more freedom to cater to its audience, he says, because it has no corporate headquarters to answer to.

"We get a lot of feedback thanking us for not 'selling out,'" Aiese says.

And, as far as he's concerned, they've pretty much got their market covered.

The only other popular classical station in the area--WCRB, 102.5 FM--plays music that Aiese describes as "top 40" classical music.

At Harvard Radio, the classical department won't play a piece more than once a year.

And none of the departments will play music simply to pull in college listeners.

Dorsainville says the station recognizes that students are only transient consumers of Boston radio.

"It's not as if we attempted to say, 'We're not going to play what the student body likes.' There are just a lot more people in the community who appreciate the avant-garde," he says.

And Aiese says over time, most student deejays come to recognize the value of the station's distinctive character--even though it means they can't always play their favorite music.

"Given the choice between having tradition and personality for the station versus having 84 personalities, I'd definitely choose the former."

Preserving A Tradition

The personality that current members of WHRB work to preserve is one that has stayed relatively steady ever since the station's incorporation in 1951.

Even before the official date, Harvard Radio existed, founded in 1941 as a component of The Harvard Crimson before a split in 1943 created "The Harvard Voice" or WHRV radio.

The station's most famous tradition--the "orgies" which highlight the music of one composer or subject over one to 10 days of Harvard reading period--began in 1943 before WHRB even existed.

The latest addition to the WHRB tradition is the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, which WCRB, Boston's other classical music station, dropped last year. Aiese says the station has won over many new area listeners with the move.

"We've had this tradition of broadcasting excellence," he says. "We've got a really loyal audience, very interactive. They're listening to the radio as an activity, not just as background on their way to work. Quality really matters."