John Frayne
He Holds the Record:
Classics by Request host John Frayne Tracks Down What Listeners Want
 Sometimes the caller is a mom who wants to hear a piano piece her child is trying to learn. Other times it’s a choir member who wants a preview of what he’s singing on Sunday. When John Frayne picks up the phone on Saturday mornings at WILL-FM, he has to be ready for anything.
As host of WILL-FM’s Classics by Request, John has tracked down music from commercials and movies, or rare recordings to play for a caller’s anniversary or birthday. Occasionally, all he has to go on are a few bars hummed into the phone by the caller. "The requests range from the most esoteric to the most familiar," says John.
During the four-and-a-half-hour program, John pulls records and CDs from the shelf and answers listener phone calls himself. "I usually start off with a 20- to 30-minute work and that gives me time to find the recordings for the next couple of pieces," he says.
John has been doing the program since 1986, and also hosts After the Opera: An Opera Preview on Saturday afternoons and
Prairie Performances on Sunday afternoons. Until he retired
in 1997 after 32 years of service, he was also a University of Illinois English professor. John also reviews concerts for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette and is a movie buff, having taught film appreciation courses and film adaptation courses.
"I like to share my enjoyment of music," says John. "I’m a music lover and record collector. When I travel across the country, I’m always looking for the nearest NPR classical music station. When I have a party, I’m forever changing records."
So, he says, hosting a classical music request program comes naturally to him. "I like the contact with people and every Saturday, it’s like a fishing expedition." Although he had some training in piano and cello, and took a year’s leave in the 1980s to study music theory in the U of I School of Music, John says he’s not a professional student of music. "My focus is on the non-technical and I feel it makes it easier to communicate with a wider audience," he says.
Working at WILL wasn’t John’s first experience in broadcasting. In college at Fordham University in the Bronx, John was a music announcer at WFUV radio and became music director at the station before going into the Army in 1953. After getting out of the service, he managed a store for The Record Hunter, a New York concern famous for selling rare recordings. He moved to Champaign-Urbana in 1965 after going to graduate school.
Occasionally John finds a caller-requested recording in his own sizable record collection. Asked how many records he owns, John says, "I stopped counting at 20,000." Some of them are stored at his farm in Monticello, some at his house in Champaign, where he lives with his wife, Eva Rostek Frayne, who recently retired from teaching German and humanities at Parkland College. "I started collecting as a high school student in New York City," says John. "In the great blizzard of 1947, I was in a record store and bought Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. The buses weren’t running in the Bronx, so I trudged all the way home in the snow with my purchase. I remember my mother saying, ‘Well, John, now you have enough records.’ She later had cause to revise her estimate."
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