Lowell Institute Puts Culture On Air

Starting last Saturday, the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council treats Greater Boston radio listeners to its latest project, an FM station. Named for the transmitter's locaton atop Great Blue Hill, WGBH will be the Council's biggest gun in its program of adult education.

WGBH is designed also for those Bostonians who are fed up with the endless parade of soap-operas, vaudevillian corn, shallow theatricals, and bebop concerts. It offers the culture-starved full length drama performances, live music concerts, poetry read by the authors, and--most novel of all--regular courses recorded in classrooms of local colleges and universities. For those who like their news with a dash of intelligence, WGBH will call in faculty experts to analyze and interpret current affairs. Those whose yen for practical information goes beyond the chatty shopper's guide will get advice from such institutions as the Nursery Training School of Boston, (a Tufts College affiliate.) Among the programming highpoints are weekly broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, marking that organization's first full-length appearance on the air-waves since 1926.

630 Feet Up

Operating from 89.7 megacycles on the air from three in the afternoon to ten in the evening--except on Fridays when it will begin operations at 2:15 p.m. to accomodate the BSO.

Tucked away in the Great Blue Hill weather bureau's long disused kite-room is the station's 3 kilowatt transmitter, powerful enough to produce 20,000 watts of effective radiated power. This was a gift from Professor E.H. Armstrong of Columbia, inventor of the electronic circuit that made FM a reality. From its 630 foot-high platform, this power plant will make possible strong high-quality signals within a 65 mile radius, an area of some one and one third million families.

At the moment, most of these millions will have to go without the Broadcasting Council's new station--only 102,000 families own FM radios. But if Greater Boston listeners continue buying 38,000 FM sets a year, as they did during the last twelve months, WGBH will soon have a more substantial audience.

Symphony Hall, a member of the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, will supply the new station with office space and studios, as well as music. Programs will be wired from the Huntington Avenue headquarters up to the transmitter and sent out all over Eastern Massachusetts from there. The LICBC's other members, the Lowell Institute, Boston College, Boston University, MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts will foot all the bills--there will be no entreaties to buy or try as WGBH is non-commercial.

Cooperation

WGBH is only one of the Broadcasting Council's projects, although it is the biggest. For four years the Council has been running public education programs on AM, FM, and TV, has produced 847 hours of such programs as "The Music's the Thing" (9 p.m., Wed., WMEX) and "America at the Crossroads," (10 p.m., Fri., WEEI), and it expects to keep on doing so.

These programs have already won several awards, including citations for "outstanding contributions to education through broadcasting during 1948," and for "an exciting adventure in New England adult education."

On its inaugural programs last Saturday and Sunday the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council received plaudits for its latest project. James B. Conant, President of Harvard, called it "the composite voice of a whole education community, a sum of educational parts." Aaron Copland, Charles Elliott Norton Professor of Poetry, said he considers it "the bright new hope of American radio."

"I don't mean to be chauvinistic," Copland said, speaking from Symphony Hall over WGBH, "but a non-commercial station has a unique opportunity for bold programming." He suggested that is concentrate its music programming on contemporary works.