I’ve been listening to the radio a lot, but I think that I’m ready to stop. Or at least to cut back.

When I say “the radio,” I mean WQXR, which has been New York’s premier classical-music station all my life. I listen to the broadcast, not online. My Sony receiver/amplifier supports only its own antenna, a white-insulated wire that I have draped across the other things on the credenza for best reception. Without headsets, I can’t hear the low surf of static.

As I wrote last fall (“Mantovani“), WQXR was my hopeful solution to the tedium of childhood sick days (of which there were not nearly enough). I did not learn anything about serious music, but I developed a taste for a lush, high-toned dialect of “easy listening.” At about the age of thirteen, this was brought to an end by the fever of the Vivaldi revival.

When I settled in Manhattan in 1980, I did not listen to the radio at all. I had a swelling library of LPS and CDs to choose from. I didn’t have to sit through the accessible bonbons that had delighted me as a child but that I dismissed as somewhat vulgar now, and I didn’t have to be informed of details that I already knew. Over time, the nuisance of having to get up to put on a new record diminished somehow. At one point, I had a CD “jukebox” with a capacity for 100 discs. Then, about twenty years ago, I was introduced to the iPod, and I set out to master the craft of artisanal playlists.

But the iPod, no longer made or supported by Apple, eventually let me down. I had been warned, and I had worried. Last summer, the set-up finally crashed. All was not lost; the many playlists that I had compiled, and the music required to turn them into sound, remained uploaded. But there was more to the arrangement than that, and it took all the summer and some of the fall, plus a lot of outside help, for me to find my bearings — a gloomy period. During that time, I turned to WQXR. In the past five months, I’ve listened to the station for at least fifty times more hours than I had in all the preceding decades. I really think it’s five, or even fifty thousand times, but I don’t want to risk exaggeration.

When the holidays came last December, it was very agreeable to be reminded of the larger world by WQXR’s announcers, whose voices and schedules had become familiar. Not for years had I had so sociable a Christmastime. I became extremely, almost embarrassingly involved in the station’s annual Classical Countdown, a five-day fiesta of listeners’ favorites that culminated on New Year’s Eve. The top slot went, as it always does, apparently, to Beethoven’s Ninth. In the circumstances, I almost liked it.

Listening to music chosen by other minds, once I let go of the irrelevant possibility that I could do it better myself, I was free to think more music as a public, cultural phenomenon. I don’t believe that the size of the classical-music audience has moved much. It was never large, relative to the audience for more popular kinds of music. But I think that the listenership has changed. The aspirational idealists who used to fill Lewisohn Stadium to hear Beethoven and Rachmaninoff on summer nights are now chamber-music fans who appreciate the liveliness that has always characterized classic jazz ensembles. It’s easier, perhaps, to appreciate — or just to hear — the intricacies of composition when they’re revealed by a handful of musicians. This shift was forecast by the astonishing popularity of baroque music in the Sixties, when The Four Seasons became almost as familiar as “Yesterday.”

And yet, as the Classical Countdown clearly establishes, string quartets and other small-format works don’t command the iconic regard that moves people to vote for things like Carmina Burana when asked to name their favorites.

WQXR has reminded me of the existence of quite a few works that I own and like but somehow don’t think of when it comes to compiling playlists. Yet it has also brought me to a seemingly opposed recognition: that the range of music that I would choose to listen to at any given time has contracted enormously over fifteen years. You might say that my taste has been distilled by the feedback loop of listening to my own playlists.

But the radio has taken me out of my own mind, too. Perhaps because WQXR plays so much music recorded “live,” in front of audiences, my grasp of the great music that I hear at home is no longer abstract; it is informed by my own years of concert-going. I’m more aware of the human performers who produce the sound of beautiful music. I can’t hear it, but I’m aware that players are breathing. I can’t see what they look like, but I know that they have lavished extraordinary effort and discipline upon their native skills. The Platonic illusion of great music “out there” has been swept away by whoops and hollers that would have terrified box-seat patrons sixty years ago.

But musicians, for all their respiring humanity, do not talk. Even WQXR’s most thoughtful announcers make a career out of it, and, to quote a great Sid Caesar skit, they’re breaking my brood. It’s not only, or even primarily, the interruption. It’s the shattering of a harmony that I may not have been aware of until a human voice cuts in a little too quickly after the final chord. Some days, this doesn’t bother me, which is great, because I don’t want to lose the connection. But when I’m in a mood that I would call “attentive,” I turn back to my own playlists.

For the time being, though, I’ll keep tuning in when I wake up in the morning.