Offering listeners 'comfort, pleasure, solace'

When Jeanna Wearing says she's "thrilling" to the "golden oldies," she's not talking about The Mamas and the Papas.
"Hildegard of Bingham, Handel, they've been dead for years," the general manager of KCME (88.7 FM) said. "But their music is something of eternal beauty."

VENUE: The public airwaves, KCME, a public, nonprofit, listener-sponsored classical music station that broadcasts from Colorado Springs, north to southern Denver and south to the state line. Live streaming at kcme.org.

BACKGROUND: A fourth-generation Coloradan, Wearing grew up in Denver and first tuned into classical music in utero. "My mother was concertizing up to two weeks before I was born," she said.
The daughter of a classical pianist and a professional singer, Wearing studied ballet, piano and drama from an early age. When she hit puberty, she started training as a singer, and was named "The Most Promising Talent" at a regional opera competition.
"I thought all my studying was preparing me for a career in the performing arts," she said.
After moving to Fort Worth to study with a prominent voice teacher, Wearing wandered into a role as writer and host of a local radio program on composers' biographies. She was an immediate success and expanded to television before moving back to Colorado to be with her family, and then in 1995, to her current role at KCME. "You seize the opportunities that you have," she said.

TAKE ON THE SCENE: "The Colorado Springs art scene is, unfortunately, one of the best-kept secrets," Wearing said. "There's so much going on, we have a symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra, talented musicians, painters, dancers. We have a classical music station. Do you know how many cities in the United States have lost their classical music stations?" KCME's listenership hovers around 50,000 per week, with some 3,300 donating members.

CHALLENGES: "The only downside is that we don't have a base of population here," to assure that funding for the station will always be there, she said. "... The challenge is to find a way we can dispel the misconceptions about classical music - it takes time."

REWARDS: There are so many advantages, just the topographical beauty is so wonderful," Wearing said of Colorado Springs. "It's a friendly city, people know you ... For 30 years, people of this community and the surrounding areas have supported this station. It's nothing short of a miracle."

DEFINE SUCCESS: Wearing said the station has expanded into Chaffee County, Cañon City and Penrose.
"On a spiritual level," she said, "I define success as knowing you are providing a service from which people derive comfort, pleasure, solace."
She said she hopes to increase the station's membership base, add programming, and further projects with local arts groups. She hopes KCME might someday be in a larger building, with a live performance studio. "We have achieved a certain measure of success," she said. "Are we complacent? No. If your mind can consider it, there's no reason it can't happen."