What Were They Thinking?

I know I’m of a tiny minor­ity of peo­ple who lis­ten to CBC2 in the morn­ing. There­fore this is prob­a­bly going to be irrel­e­vant to most peo­ple. Oh well, I’m going to shout anyway.

WHAT THE HELL HAVE THEY DONE TO CBC2?

This past week, there have been big changes in CBC2. For those not famil­iar, this is the FM CBC, which, up until now, was Clas­si­cal music and some talk in the morn­ing, more Clas­si­cal and some Jazz in the evening, and var­i­ous dif­fer­ent pro­grams in the evening with an empha­sis on Jazz. On Sat­ur­day morn­ings there is the ven­er­a­ble Vinyl Café, which sounds sus­pi­ciously to these NPR-raised ears like A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion, but that’s not rel­e­vant here.

Some­where in the CBC, they decided that CBC2 was to be about music. Music, music and lit­tle else. In fact, they have a new slo­gan, CBC2: Wher­ever Music Takes You (which is not only mean­ing­less, but smacks of focus-group tested mar­ket­ing pablum).

So how does this new com­mit­ment to more music play out? It used to be that you got a good deal of music, prob­a­bly about 40 min­utes worth per hour, but you also got a lit­tle local news, national news, weather, some sports scores, and a pleas­antly chatty Arts Report with Joe Cum­mings as he ban­tered with Tom Allen over the cur­rent Arts scene or event.

That’s all changed. Now, there is 57 min­utes of music, fol­lowed by an unbe­liev­ably short National news report on the hour. There is no local news or weather, no sports scores, no arts cov­er­age. There is no Joe Cum­mings, which means that for the vast major­ity of each hour, Tom Allen is left to carry Music and Com­pany on his own. Now, I think the world of Tom Allen. In fact, I’ve lauded him in many of these pages as prob­a­bly the best Clas­si­cal DJ on the planet. But I can tell that he is hav­ing a hard time with the new for­mat. He can’t do as much research on the selec­tions, and it shows. What’s more, it just gets too intense. You need more of a break in the morn­ing from solid music. At the end of the 2 minute and 50 sec­ond news­cast, you get a mes­sage say­ing to tune into CBC1 to hear more news. Oth­er­wise, it’s another 57 min­utes of music before any relief. There’s no bal­ance whatsoever.

So that’s the new seg­re­ga­tion­ist approach to the CBC. If you want talk, tune into CBC1 (which is, of course on the AM dial, and all but impos­si­ble to receive in our build­ing, so I have to stream it from the Inter­net; the sound qual­ity is hor­rific because of all the com­pres­sion from the AM band plus dig­i­tal con­ver­sion and down-sampling.) Oth­er­wise, you’re out of luck. You’ll get music and lit­tle in the way of voice ‘inter­rup­tion’, aside from Tom’s DJ work.

Was the CBC think­ing that peo­ple who lis­ten to Clas­si­cal music in the morn­ing don’t want to hear the news of the day? That they don’t care what the weather fore­cast is? That they don’t care who won in hockey last night? That they don’t want an Arts Report?

I’m afraid that CBC2 is falling into the same trap that so many Amer­i­can Clas­si­cal music sta­tions fell into over the years, that Clas­si­cal music should be treated as a pleas­ant wall­pa­per for peo­ple, a lulling doctor’s wait­ing room for the day. If that’s the case, I’ve got news for you, CBC: Those sta­tions usu­ally don’t last long. You’ll need the sup­port of some set of posh car deal­ers, car­pet mer­chants, and other lux­ury mer­chan­dis­ers who’ll want some recog­ni­tion, and you’ll steadily nar­row the pro­gram­ming diet until it’s nearly all Vivaldi’s The Sea­sons and Pachelbel’s Canon as you die a slow death.

I learned a few weeks ago from local CBC reporter Todd Maf­fin that the CBC hasn’t got­ten a raise in the bud­get for a long time. I don’t know if these changes are budget-driven. If so, I hope that they are not dri­ving the CBC2 into obliv­ion the way that NPR has made Clas­si­cal music almost nonex­is­tent (that net­work is nearly all News and Cur­rent Events). I would like to think that these were just mis­guided changes and that they will see the error of their ways. I’m not hold­ing my breath, though.

So now, we have to do all sorts of work just to find out the weather fore­cast and a lit­tle bit more about what’s going on in the world. It would be nice to do this with­out hav­ing to dive into top-40 or all-talk-all-the-time. And, of course, there’s TV, but that just seems mind-numbing so early in the day.

All in all, this is def­i­nitely a change for the worse, at least for our mornings.