The phrase "cosmetic change" is usually used to imply that an alteration is unimportant – the assumption being that surfaces can change but the essences remain untouched. But there are contexts in which the cosmetic and the essential aren't easy to separate: if Church of England vicars all started wearing make-up modelled on Marilyn Manson, that would imply something about the Church's vision of its role. Radio 3 has recently undergone a series of cosmetic changes; what they imply about the station's identity is still hard to read.

Take the morning slot, where Penny Gore, who for years presented Morning on 3, has been replaced by Rob Cowan, in a slot now variously referred to as Breakfast, The Breakfast Show, and, on one trail – ironically intended, I'm hoping – Wake Up with Rob. Does the change in nomenclature herald a new, more come-hither Three, or does it mean nothing at all?

Or take the changes in the afternoons, when a whole series of specialist programmes has been stripped out: Stage and Screen, Voices and Jazz Legends. In the evenings, Mixing It has vanished after 16 years of evangelising for "crossover" music. Are these changes evidence of Radio 3 retrenching, or Radio 3 renewing its sense of mission?

A change that seems to suggest renewal of mission is the elevation to evening peak times of Composer of the Week: every weekday, the unflappably cool Donald Macleod presents an enjoyable and informative combination of music and biography. Giving him a higher profile slot seems to be an unarguable gain, but it has been achieved by pushing the nightly concert forward, from 7.30pm to 7pm. This creates a valuable new alternative to The Archers, but at the cost of switching from live concert to pre-recorded. I didn't think that this shift would matter; two weeks in, it feels like quite a loss – the buzz is gone, replaced by the dull hum of Petroc Trelawney's over-enthusiastic, under-informative introductions.

I haven't yet made up my mind about a couple of new strands. On Sunday evenings, there is a long, unpresented sequence of poetry and music, entitled – presumably during the final 30 seconds of a meeting that everybody was keen to get away from – Words & Music. It uses classy actors (Juliet. Stevenson and Derek Jacobi, Imogen Stubbs and Bill Paterson), and has some good selections.

On paper it looks wonderful. In practice, it's rather frustrating: Auden followed by Wagner followed by Donne followed by Janacek is disorientating. Each newcomer has a different kind of intensity and a new set of resonances that competes with and, sometimes, cancels out the one before. Quite often the juxtapositions conjure up associations far removed from the ones that producer Jessica Isaacs suggests.

The other strand I'm ambivalent about is The Essay, a nightly 15-minute talk slot that is far from stupid, but which has shown a certain timidity about subject and tone. The Twenty Minutes slot it replaces was more varied.

The big change, though, is one of tone: overall, Radio 3 is now more ingratiating – con­stantly soliciting e-mails, pointing out how lovely that last piece of music was; there seem to be more short pieces of music and single movements extracted from longer works. The point, presumably, is to get bigger audiences, or at least to look as if they're trying. But in conceding the need for popularity, Radio 3 lets go of its raison d'être. Popularity is never in short supply, seriousness always is. Radio 3 offers us seriousness, and whether or not we like it, we always need it.

© 2007 The Independent. Reproduced with kind permission of The Independent.