The Barococo DJ

"You are invited," read the program, "to greet and praise De Koven in the Ladies' Lounge. Please refrain from criticizing the Maestro, for it never does any good and only gives De Koven the colic." At Manhattan's Town Hall last week, that injunction served to introduce Classical Disk Jockey Seymour De Koven, an evangelist of the baroque, a man dedicated to the proposition that scarcely any music worth listening to was written after 1828, the year Schubert died. After him, practically no composers were able to write decent "barococo" music, and the public had to settle for "nobodies like Berlioz and Brahms." Today, a segment of the public has also settled, quite happily, for De Koven. A self-appointed authority of magnificent self-assurance ("All FM has improved because of my blustering, bullying dogmatism"), he has built a radio following so loyal that it pays for a large slice of his air time out of its own pocket.

A Form of Exhibitionism. Except when he greets his followers in person, as he did at Town Hall, De Koven does his pleading for 17th and 18th century music over a dozen radio stations scattered from coast to coast. Although he is known to his listeners by his last name only ("I hate Seymour"), he corresponds with them incessantly, and has organized a hard core of 500 or so who voluntarily contribute the $150 it costs each week to broadcast two of his Manhattan shows over Station WRFM (a third show is broadcast over WNYC, a municipally owned and supported station). De Koven has resolutely banished all commercial sponsors, buys all the records he uses. He claims--and so far no one has felt the urge to challenge him --that he plays more baroque and rococo music (hence his coinage--"barococo") than any other disk jockey in the world.

Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Schubert--whoever the composer, the music is rarely heard quite as written: De Koven has an unsettling habit of cutting slow passages on the ground that "the fast ones are far more interesting." He is also a confirmed believer that "you don't have to be an intellectual to appreciate music. Who wants music to be profound?" De Koven's prejudices, in fact, are frequently more entertaining than his programs. "I attend no concerts," says he. "I consider them an anachronism like opera. Concerts are primarily mutual exhibitionism on the part of both performer and audience." He hates professional musicians "because professional musicians --professionals, not amateurs--hate music, and composers are even worse; they're a closed corporation." As for musical judgment: "I make fun of people who claim they can recognize music. They're phonies. I could play ten records by Kreisler, Heifetz, Elman, and no one could tell them apart." Humane Chicanery. Although he is sometimes billed as a musicologist, De Koven in fact has no degree from any college. Chicago-born, son of a doctor.

De Koven was enrolled at the University of Cincinnati as a prodigy of 14, but he took his tuition money and decamped for Germany, where he dabbled in piano and composition and found his "love life crys tallized at 15" ("I made Don Juan and Casanova look like amateurs"). When his money ran out, his mother sent him the price of a ticket home. He gave up composition for painting, painting for newspaper work in New Jersey, finally drifted to WNYC, where "they've regretted it ever since. They can't stand me, but they can't fire me. I'm considered the best salesman of classical music on radio. My chicanery is humanitarian."

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