On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Judith Conrad wrote:

> I think the Loiellets were Belgian not Hollandisch,

Ah, synchronicity. I walked into my apartment tonight to find
a very odd stream of music oozing like congealed treacle from
the radio (my wife, a native New Yorker, has a deplorable
weakness for WBORE or whatever that Times station calls itself).

This stuff sounded, if you listened closely, like 18th century music --
that is, the harmonies and melodic figures were, to a first approximation,
those characteristic of that admirable epoch. But it was being played by a
cello, violin, and  piano, and I don't mean an fpo either, I mean one of those
hulking  two-ton Panzer tanks.  The fiddle and the cello sounded almost equally
massive and thick, except for the relentless, wailing, wide-enough-to-walk-on
vibrato.

What on earth _is_ this, I thought?

The answer finally came: It was, or had been at one time, a sonata
by J-B Loeillet (have I got those vowels in the right order?) for oboe, flute,
and continuo, re-arranged by the modestly-named "Eroica Trio" for the
above-mentioned mass of heavily-varnished timber.

That's probably the only time anything by this composer has ever found
itself in that frequency band. That station simply will not play this
repertoire unless it's wearing some kind of Brahmsian false beard.
They won't play harpsichord music except on the piano; they won't
play organ music except in orchestral transcription, and in fact they
unblushingly broadcast the campy enormities of Leopold Stokowski.
Even Mozart, as often as not, gets turned into Beethoven-
on-steroids.

What's the matter with these people? Why is older music so threatening?