I don't, of course, get to go to a lot of summer cottages (and I'm not bitter), but when I do, the pleasure of being in close proximity to docks and bikinis is closely matched by a new rural joy I have recently discovered. It's the joy of listening to beautiful music without blabber and schmaltz -- music radio as it should be.

It's radio that you can't get on your radio, though. Why do I hear it only at cottages? Because people at cottages often don't get cable TV. So they subscribe to satellite providers, and get all these weird channels. Not something, you might think, that exactly enhances quiet summer life -- but hidden in the morass of golf channels and local lacrosse games is the Galaxie music network: 30 channels of different kinds of music. You hook your TV up to your stereo, and you have uninterrupted music of your choice -- highly specialized choices, too: specific kinds of folk, ambient electronica, chamber music -- 24 hours a day, without any lighthearted anecdotes about bird watching, or sudden switches to new-age pop.

And the music is brilliant: as challenging or as mindless as you want. I sit there in front of the TV for hours (while others are splashing about in the sun and waves, like normal people, as my mother always told me I should do), absorbed by the choices made by the mysterious genius who programs, say, the chamber-music channel. There might be an obscure little Saint-Saëns piece, followed by a classic like Death and the Maiden, followed by something eerie by Schoenberg. It's music for people who are interested in music. Obviously the programmer is someone very clever and educated, a total music dweeb. And there's nothing at all to indicate who it is.

There's nothing to watch on the screen, of course, except the name of the composer and the piece and the people playing it, but I keep checking that screen because most of the pieces are ones I don't know, so I want to learn what they are. And the dumb water-splashers are momentarily distracted by me yelling out, in joy and amazement, back up at the cottage, "Schoenberg!" Schoenberg, no less! Can you imagine hearing a piece of Schoenberg chamber music on CBC Radio? They're petrified of anything that isn't Mozart.

Imagine if CBC Radio Two, supposedly the music channel, were like this? I imagine if it programmed music, just music, punctuated by the only relevant information you might need (composer, piece, performer, a date, maybe one anecdote about the piece -- not about the host). The only people who listened would be people with an interest in serious music -- which might, I venture, be a group as large or even larger than retirees with an interest in bird watching. And it would be much cheaper to produce; since it's not about information or "personalities," you don't have to pay news-gathering services, or the massive salaries that "personality" hosts demand. So why didn't the CBC think of it?

Well, actually, they did. This is what fascinates me. Galaxie is a branch of the CBC, and a highly successful one. It is based in Ottawa. The general manager is an old-school CBC music expert called Alain Pineau. The DJs who program the music are experts on one, and only one, genre. (The brain and sensitivity behind the chamber-music channel, for example, is Bill Skolnik, a composer, musician and former CBC Radio music producer). They have an ingenious system of programming: The DJs live all over the country, and work from home. They use a computer program called Selector, which can access the entire CBC musical archive. Everything is lined up and played by the computer. It's like a vast and sensitive jukebox.

There are no ads at any time (and not even any advertising for the network itself), but Galaxie claims that it actually makes money. How? You don't, as a satellite-TV subscriber, sign up specifically for Galaxie. You just happen to get it, along with several golf channels. But the satellite-TV provider still pays Galaxie a small fee for every subscriber it has. (You also get it if you have digital TV.) And it's a supercheap, stripped-down, mechanized operation.

Right now, Galaxie is the only reason I can imagine for getting either satellite or digital TV. But Galaxie program director Mike Giunta says that there are plans afoot to get Galaxie onto the Internet. They are trying to sell high-speed service providers (such as Rogers or Bell) the Galaxie transmissions. Subscribers to the high-speed service would get the stations for free, as a perk for signing up. Galaxie would then earn a small fee for every subscriber on the network.

This is an ideal use of the million-channel universe: It's ultracheap, ultraniche marketing. A channel on chamber music has horizontal rather than vertical appeal: It's not a particular age group or geographic region that's going to listen, but 22-year-old music students and 70-year-old intellectuals in different parts of the world. And it's so cheap to put new specialty music channels up, there can be one for every minute niche. If I were a regular radio producer, I would be scared by this. If the music you want comes for free, over the Internet, it's going to put bad radio out of business.