If classical music really sounded as it's described in radio ads, its composers would have fallen asleep while writing it. "You've found an oasis - a place where you can get away from all the craziness," intones WCLV, a station in Ohio. "Rise above it all," Washington, DC's WETA proclaims.

These stations regularly offer more raucous selections than these exhortations suggest, but they are advertising themselves as musical sanitoriums. The San Francisco-based station KDFC has a daily "island of sanity", including slow pieces by Mozart and Bach, in the interest of tempering rush-hour woes.