My Letter to the CBC Executives

Last night, I wrote my own let­ter to the CBC addresses men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous post. Rather than make this about my pref­er­ences, or love of Clas­si­cal Music, I wanted this to be more about the iden­tity of CBC as it relates to Canada, and how it could help to make this a bet­ter coun­try, and how the changes they are propos­ing (and I wanted to make sure I kept it as a pro­posal, giv­ing them the option to do as Coke did when it brought out New Coke, grace­fully back out ) are hurt­ing the coun­try. Here’s how it came out:

Dear Mr. Stursberg,

I write to you as a new and proud Per­ma­nent Res­i­dent of Canada.  My wife and I moved to Van­cou­ver from Boston in 2005. We had fallen in love with Van­cou­ver, one of the most admired and beau­ti­ful cities in the world, and we chose to live here, partly because of the phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment,  but also because of the excit­ing and authen­tic cul­tural life here.  I’ve been con­tin­u­ally impressed and encour­aged by the kind­ness, intel­li­gence, and thought­ful­ness of my new country.

Until today.

Today, I find myself writ­ing you with great shock and hor­ror about the deci­sions regard­ing both the removal of Clas­si­cal Music from CBC Radio 2 and the dis­band­ing of the 70-year old cul­tural insti­tu­tion and last of its kind in North Amer­ica, the CBC Sym­phony Orches­tra. Mr. Sturs­berg, these deci­sions are wrong, and do untold dam­age to both the peo­ple of Canada and the coun­try which I now call my home.

Clas­si­cal Music — which is, I believe,  a ridicu­lous name, sug­gest­ing stuffy con­cert halls and audi­ences of dod­der­ing old fogies who want the same old chest­nuts of Beethoven and Brahms played back to them over and over — is not ‘just another kind of music’.   It is the kind of music — let’s call it ‘Art Music’ — that makes you think, that is com­plex and chal­leng­ing. It is not always a ‘song’, with vocal part. It is some­times for ensem­bles other than ‘bands. It is not 4 min­utes in length, and may have com­plex har­monies and rhythms, with no part for a drum­mer. That kind of music, that breaks out of the mould of the mun­dane, the pre-digested and dis­pos­able, is pre­cisely the kind of thing that Canada’s air­waves should con­tinue to offer. It’s music (and Cana­dian per­form­ers) that deserves to be in the lives of the peo­ple who live here,

The musi­cal life of Van­cou­ver is par­tic­u­larly evis­cer­ated by the changes pro­posed.  If Art Music on CBC 2 and the orches­tra are gone, there will be noth­ing to take it’s place here. Unlike Toronto or Mon­treal, there are no com­mer­cial radio sta­tions that carry Art Music here.  The dis­band­ing of a major orches­tra sit­u­ated here, on top of silenc­ing of Art Music from our air­waves is a double-blow to the cul­tural life of this world-class city, so poised on great­ness as we pre­pare to host the world for the 2010 Olympics.  Should our radio be a bland pur­veyor of pop cul­ture, while we now pre­tend to be a major player on the world’s stage?

Art Music (or, if you insist on call­ing it Clas­si­cal Music), is some­thing the chil­dren of Van­cou­ver should be able to get with­out hav­ing to pay a ticket to see the sym­phony. It should not be an elit­ist, snobby treat that is only for the rich, who can afford the steep cost of tick­ets.  They should have the oppor­tu­nity to hear it at no cost. Chal­leng­ing cul­tural expe­ri­ences, like Art Music, that enrich our lives and minds, like Edu­ca­tion and Health Care, should be a right of every Cana­dian, and cer­tainly not just the ones liv­ing in the largest cities (and Van­cou­ver as well!) I believe that we are a bet­ter peo­ple with a shared cul­tural her­itage. Yes, there is other music brought by other cul­tures in this coun­try, but we all ben­e­fit from a radio chan­nel,  at least, just 1 radio chan­nel, that car­ries some of the great­est music ever writ­ten, and more than just a token 3 hours at mid-day, when chil­dren are in school, and work­ers are at work. In a truly great coun­try, great art isn’t a priv­i­lege; it is for every­one, and shouldn’t require them to fork over some cash just to be exposed or intro­duced to it.

The CBC already has a chan­nel ded­i­cated to pop­u­lar music:  Radio 3. Please, main­tain that chan­nel, and put all of your cre­ative think­ing into it.  But this mis­guided, focus-group dri­ven destruc­tion of some of Canada’s great­est cul­tural resources should halted. It’s a tragedy that can be averted, if you sim­ply lis­ten to the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple who I know are writ­ing you at this very moment, just like this new Cana­dian.  They, and I, have the con­fi­dence in you as thought­ful and vision­ary lead­ers, to stop this dis­as­ter from hit­ting our lives in Canada.

Yours Sin­cerely,

David Drucker

I’m not thrilled about that last sen­tence, but I have to admit that many who have com­mented on this state of affairs have called it a dis­as­ter, or a cat­a­stro­phy, so I sup­pose those terms were ring­ing in my ears as I wrote it.

I didn’t want this let­ter to be an angry mis­sive demand­ing their res­ig­na­tion. Some­how, that seems very un-Canadian. This is a coun­try where peo­ple think twice before hit­ting a stranger (unless, of course, it’s in a hockey rink). I wanted to offer these peo­ple a rea­son why the noble thing, the wise thing, and the thing they’d be ulti­mately applauded for, would be to reverse their pre­vi­ous deci­sion. I’d like to think that they’ll read it, but maybe I’m being too ide­al­is­tic. In any case, tomor­row is the march on the CBC offices in Van­cou­ver. We’ll meet at the Rob­son side of the Pub­lic Library at 10AM.  I’ll write about that tomor­row night.

Curi­ously, tomor­row is also the day of Mas­sive Tech Expo, the event where I found my first job (and place to live) before we moved here, so I have a lot of good mem­o­ries (and per­haps, expec­ta­tions) regard­ing the day. Let’s hope the Mas­sive mojo is still at work.

An Email and Live Protest on the CBC

On this Tues­day, April 1, at 10 in the morn­ing many of us are going march on the CBC Offices down­town. Don’t know if it will do any­thing more than make us feel bet­ter, but at least we can say we did some­thing. There is also more we can do, and it doesn’t require our phys­i­cal pres­ence. An email cam­paign has started (via Face­book). I’m going to pub­lish the rest here, so that peo­ple who either don’t want to have to locate on Face­book or don’t want to join can par­tic­i­pate as well. Here’s all of the infor­ma­tion (and it has some eye-opening infor­ma­tion about what the CBC has been up to lately):

Let’s give the CBC a lovely Mon­day morning

Here we go again, folks. It sure appears we’ve made our voices heard. Colum­nists in the major papers are tak­ing note and tak­ing sides. And the CBC execs them­selves sense the threat to their schemes, tak­ing out a full-page ad in the Sat­ur­day Globe in rebut­tal to our crit­i­cism. We’re going to keep the pres­sure up.

Every­body: Write an email out­lin­ing your out­rage over the changes hap­pen­ing to Radio Two. be as per­sonal as you can. If you need inspi­ra­tion, we’ve got a list of issues below, and many peo­ple have posted cre­ate feats of rhetor­i­cal splen­dour back at the Save Clas­si­cal Music at the CBC site. Write your quick email tonight to Richard Sturs­berg and CC it to all the peo­ple we men­tion below plus any jour­nal­ists you can think of. We expand­ing things this time to board mem­bers and mem­bers of par­lia­ment. Write you let­ter before the end of the day on Mon­day. Let’s make another huge state­ment, folks!

List of Issues and Email Addresses (Thanks to Mar­garet Logan for com­pil­ing all this!)

1. The CBC Young Com­posers Com­pe­ti­tion has not been held since March 9, 2003. It, as well as the CBC Young Per­form­ers Com­pe­ti­tion, have been sus­pended for the past four years. The Canada Coun­cil pro­vided the fund­ing for the $10,000.00 grand prize.
2. CBC erased the clas­si­cal music bud­get for CBC Records in Feb­ru­ary 2008, pre­cisely on the eve of their first Grammy win by Cana­dian vio­lin­ist James Ehnes and the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony Orches­tra under Bramwell Tovey on the CBC Records label. Many artists, such as Measha Brueg­ger­gos­man, launched their careers on a CBC Records label record­ing.
3. The com­mis­sion­ing bud­get pre­vi­ously devoted to com­mis­sion­ing new works from com­posers is now spread out to cover jazz, pop musi­cians, and some unspec­i­fied amount of con­tem­po­rary music.
4. CBC can­celled Two New Hours, a multiple-award win­ning pro­gram that was aired for two hours a week in the incred­i­bly prime time slot of Sun­days 10pm to mid­night. This pro­gram was ded­i­cated to the music of liv­ing Cana­dian com­posers. It was can­celled in March 2007 in its 29^th year.
5. CBC can­celled The Arts Report. The late Val Ross, an arts colum­nist for The Globe and Mail, lamented the loss of this par­tic­u­lar radio seg­ment, say­ing that it kept her in touch with impor­tant cul­tural devel­op­ments across the coun­try.
6. CBC can­celled Music For A While, which aired clas­si­cal music daily from 6pm to 8pm. It has been replaced by Tonic, a jazz pro­gram which also fea­tures hip-hop, soul and world music.
7. CBC can­celled In Per­for­mance the flag­ship Clas­si­cal con­certs pro­gram. It was replaced by Canada Live, which has an uneven and unpre­dictable offer­ing of funk and R and B bands, jazz, Mid­dle east­ern fusion music, throatsing­ing…
8. The pro­posed cuts for the Fall of 2008 rep­re­sents fur­ther reduc­tions in clas­si­cal music con­tent, elim­i­nat­ing clas­si­cal music 6am to 10am and 3pm to 6pm.
9. The new hosts are not musi­col­o­gists and have lit­tle depth of knowl­edge to share with radio lis­ten­ers. Howard Dyck, for exam­ple, who is no longer host­ing Sat­ur­day After­noon at the Opera, is an Order of Canada recip­i­ent, a con­duc­tor and the recip­i­ent of numer­ous hon­ourary degrees for his con­tri­bu­tion to music in Canada. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dyck Larry Lake, for­mer host of Two New Hours, is a Toronto com­poser, per­former and broad­caster. He is Artis­tic Direc­tor of the Cana­dian Elec­tronic Ensem­ble, the old­est active live elec­tronic music group in the world, now in its 35^th sea­son. Other hosts whose, such as Tom Allen, Eric Friesen, Rick Phillips are also giants in the field of music broad­cast­ing.
10. The axing of the CBC Radio Orches­tra: North America’s 70 year old last remain­ing radio orches­tra and plat­form for count­less pre­mieres of new Cana­dian com­po­si­tions
11. Gone are Music & Com­pany — Tom Allen’s morn­ing show, Here’s to You — Cather­ine Belyea’s (For­merly Shel­ley Solmes’) all-request show, Stu­dio Sparks — due to the ven­er­a­ble Eric Friesen’s “retire­ment”, and Disc Drive — Jur­gen Gothe’s pop­u­lar drive-home show after almost 30 years. These changes come on the heels of last years round of cuts to vital pro­grams such as Danielle Charbonneau’s much-loved Music for Awhile; Larry Lake’s new com­poser show­case Two New Hours; Sym­phony Hall — Canada’s live orches­tra record­ing show­case; The Singer and the Song — Cather­ine Belyea’s excel­lent Clas­si­cal vocal pro­gram; North­ern Lights — the overnight Clas­si­cal pro­gram beloved by Night Owls every­where; The refor­mat­ting of In Per­for­mance– a pri­mar­ily clas­si­cal live per­for­mance show into the much-reviled Canada Live — a uni­formly non-classical and com­pletely unfo­cused hodge-podge of World music, soft pop, and sort-of Jazz; and the con­tro­ver­sial replace­ment of vet­eran Howard Dyck from Sat­ur­day After­noon at the Opera after many years of great ser­vice.
12. The CBC axing the Radio Orches­tra one day cit­ing lack of resources, and the next day buy­ing hugely expen­sive full-page ad in the Globe and Mail to con­vince us how won­der­ful every­thing is going to be in their Brave New World.

————————–

Send your let­ter to Richard Sturs­berg, head of Eng­lish ser­vices at CBC, con­demn­ing any of the issues above, or, prefer­ably, one of your own. Demand his res­ig­na­tion for single-handedly destroy­ing 70 years of a care­fully evolved musi­cal ecol­ogy at CBC Radio 2.

cc: All the fol­low­ing individuals:

1. CBC Pres­i­dent Hubert Lacroix ht.lacroix@cbc.ca
2. CBC board chair­man Tim­o­thy Cas­grain through his assis­tant Kath­leen Mar­tin Kathleen.Martin@cbc.ca
3. Board mem­bers Peter Her­rn­dorf pherrndo@nac-cna.ca
4. and Trina McQueen tmcqueen@sympatico.ca
5. Stursberg’s Exec­u­tive Assis­tant, Cathy Katrib-Reyes KatribC@CBC.CA
6. Lacroix‘s Chief of Staff Francine Letourneau francine.letourneau@radio-canada.ca
7. Exec in charge of CBC Radio, Jen­nifer McGuire
8. jennifer_mcguire@cbc.ca or jennifer.mcguire@cbc.ca
9. Radio 2 Pro­gram­ming chief mark_steinmetz@cbc.ca or mark.steinmetz@cbc.ca
10. Peter Stein­metz, Chair of the Cana­dian Song­writ­ers Hall of Fame psteinmetz@casselsbrock.com
11. Josee Verner, Min­is­ter of Her­itage Min_Verner@pch.gc.ca
12. Prime Min­is­ter Stephen Harper Harper.S@parl.gc.ca
13. Lib­eral Her­itage critic Mau­ril Bélanger
14. Belanger.M@parl.gc.ca
15. NDP Her­itage critic Char­lie Angus angusc@parl.gc.ca
16. (optional) The major news­pa­per jour­nal­ist of your choice — local is best!

To make it eas­ier, here all all the email addresses for past­ing into your email client:
to: Richard_Stursberg@cbc.ca; stursber@cbc.ca
cc: KatribC@CBC.CA; ht.lacroix@cbc.ca; pherrndo@nac-cna.ca; tmcqueen@sympatico.ca;
francine.letourneau@radio-canada.ca; psteinmetz@casselsbrock.com; Min_Verner@pch.gc.ca;
Harper.S@parl.gc.ca, Kathleen.Martin@cbc.ca; Belanger.M@parl.gc.ca; angusc@parl.gc.ca;
mark_steinmetz@cbc.ca; mark.steinmetz@cbc.ca; jennifer_mcguire@cbc.ca; jennifer.mcguire@cbc.ca

(Note: your email client may require com­mas rather than semi-colons)

So there you have it. I’m work­ing on my email. If you have time (and this affects you as well), please send one of your own.

The Sound of More Silence

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse with the CBC, they prove me wrong. This morn­ing, I lit­er­ally awoke to this news story:

CBC kills radio orches­tra
Vancouver-based group last of its type in North Amer­ica
Lloyd Dykk, Van­cou­ver Sun
Pub­lished: Fri­day, March 28, 2008

VANCOUVER — The Vancouver-based CBC Radio Orches­tra — the last radio orches­tra left in North Amer­ica — is dead.

The head of CBC Radio music, Mark Stein­metz, flew from Toronto Thurs­day to tell the orchestra’s 35 free­lance musi­cians that the orches­tra will be dis­banded in Sep­tem­ber, key play­ers in the Van­cou­ver music scene said.
Stein­metz met with the musi­cians at a late after­noon meet­ing at the Geor­gian Court Hotel, which is near the down­town CBC build­ing. Reporters were barred from the meet­ing.
Colin Miles, head of the Cana­dian Music Cen­tre, an orga­ni­za­tion that pro­motes Cana­dian com­posers, said his under­stand­ing was that Stein­metz con­sid­ered axing the orches­tra an inter­nal CBC mat­ter and had no plans for a pub­lic meet­ing fol­low­ing the session.

The CBC Radio Orches­tra was founded by John Avi­son in 1938 and has had an illus­tri­ous his­tory.
It orig­i­nally con­sisted of 25 musi­cians and was increased to 35 in 1952.
Its other con­duc­tors were the Eng­lish­man John Eliot Gar­diner and Mario Bernardi. Quebec’s Alain Trudel has held the reins of the orches­tra for the past two years.

The orches­tra does only eight con­certs a year, but that’s irrel­e­vant, Miles said. “If they’re cost­ing so lit­tle, why get rid of it when it’s a national treasure?”

Richard Kurth, head of the Uni­ver­sity of B.C.’s school of music, called the loss of the orches­tra “a tragic event, both cul­tur­ally and eco­nom­i­cally, for the musi­cal life of the region and of the nation.”
He said he feels that being the last radio orches­tra in North Amer­ica has to be put in con­text — radio orches­tras con­tinue to play vital roles in Euro­pean nations, he said, and that shows peo­ple do lis­ten to them.

“The CBC is appar­ently plan­ning to use the money to record and broad­cast other Cana­dian orches­tras,” Kurth said. “We … have to wait to see whether they would actu­ally do that, beyond the degree to which they already do.… They were cut­ting the orches­tra just as it entered a period of renewed vital­ity with a dynamic new conductor.”

“This is the most impor­tant orches­tra in the coun­try, with a 70-year his­tory,” Miles said. “What the CBC is doing to their man­date is what [U.S. Pres­i­dent George] Bush is doing to the constitution.”

After news of the CBC meet­ing leaked, Miles orga­nized a rally of local musi­cians in the lobby of the Geor­gian Court Hotel. The approx­i­mately 40 peo­ple who showed up included musi­cal heavy­weights such as Bramwell Tovey, con­duc­tor of the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony Orches­tra, and music lovers such as Mary Lou Hen­ley, one of the city’s top arts patrons. As for­mer CBC Radio Orches­tra cel­list Ian Hamp­ton described it, the loss of the orches­tra was only the next log­i­cal step in the “dumb­ing down” of the pub­lic network.

The loss of the orches­tra comes as lit­tle sur­prise to Vancouver’s music com­mu­nity. In recent months, the CBC has killed such clas­si­cal music shows as Music for a While and In Performance.

Despite my shock and sad­ness on los­ing clas­si­cal music on CBC Radio 2, I could say that this doesn’t sting quite as much, and feels a bit like ‘the other shoe drop­ping’ (i.e. the inevitable follow-on to what’s been hap­pen­ing to date). I did hear the CBC as recently as last year, when they played a bril­liant per­for­mance of Shostakovich’s Piano Con­certo No. 1 with my child­hood friend Sarah Davis Buech­ner as soloist. Alain Trudel, who I believe was indeed that ‘dynamic’ con­duc­tor Miles spoke of, was the con­duc­tor of that con­cert and is indeed a bril­liant tal­ent. I hope he doesn’t leave the coun­try to pur­sue his career (although that seems likely). The fact that the CBC was based in Van­cou­ver means that the musi­cal life of this city is affected even more than most of Canada.

Clearly, some­one in the CBC has it in for Clas­si­cal Music and peo­ple who lis­ten to it. Their reign of ter­ror is far from over. Appro­pri­ately enough, this day in late March, it’s snow­ing like crazy. Metaphoric frozen tears do match my mood.

Under Construction

You know how it is: A drippy faucet leads to a tile com­ing off, which leads to a hole in the wall, which leads to…a new bath­room. Well, that’s what hap­pened to us years ago in Boston, and that’s all sup­posed to be a metaphor for what’s going on right now with this blog (or at least, the design of it).

I just wanted to ‘fix’ a Flickr badge, and incor­po­rate some new func­tion­al­ity. That led to the whole design com­ing apart before my eyes. So, bear with me while I essen­tially start from scratch. I’m exper­i­ment­ing with a new look. I’ve tried 2 new themes so far and I’m not happy with either of them. I really hate mess­ing with this.

An Impressive (and Maybe Historic) Speech

I’ve not said much about the US elec­tion to date. I’ll be vot­ing in it, as an Amer­i­can abroad (even though I’m not really ‘abroad’).  Still, being a cit­i­zen, it’s my right to do so, at least up until I give up Amer­i­can cit­i­zen­ship, which for prac­ti­cal rea­sons I doubt I’ll ever do, no mat­ter how expen­sive the US gov­ern­ment makes it to keep it (but who knows what the future will bring).

It should come as no sur­prise that I’m sup­port­ing the can­di­dacy of Barack Obama. I was never a fan of Hilary Clin­ton. She was always too stri­dent and never owned up to the mis­take of vot­ing for the Iraq war. A sim­ple apol­ogy would have been fine for me (like the one Richard Clarke gave to the 9/11 wid­ows). Lately she’s struck me as so unpleas­ant and shrill in so many ways (includ­ing more than a whiff of some of the worst intru­sive and med­dle­some self-righteousness that Mod­ern Lib­er­al­ism in the US  can be; It Takes a Vil­lage indeed…) that I can even imag­ine her los­ing to John McCain on pure back­lash, and a McCain in the Oval Office would be far worse then Hilary. I also hated the idea of the Pres­i­dency being a tro­phy tossed back and forth between two fam­i­lies that each felt them­selves uniquely enti­tled to it. After Hilary’s stint, it would be Jeb Bush for two terms, and then it would be Chelsea’s turn, fol­lowed by… the twins? Sure; By that time the US would have been reduced to Third World Nation sta­tus, and it wouldn’t mat­ter any more which Dynasty got their four or eight-year Time-share slot in the Pres­i­den­tial Palace.

But I digress…

Obama struck me as far more inspir­ing and inter­est­ing, (although admit­tedly not as much as Howard Dean did), but I couldn’t put my fin­ger on why until the speech he gave today. He made the speech because he had to deal with the toxic state­ments made by the Pas­tor of his Church,  and why he hadn’t dis­tanced him­self from the man who made it (in addi­tion to leav­ing the Church itself).

That was the rea­son for the speech. What I heard instead, was a clear and elo­quent med­i­ta­tion on why the US is still so divided, how it got to where it is today, and maybe, how it can begin to move forward.

Bush and the Repub­li­cans had been using Race as a way of split­ting up the elec­torate, mainly to keep the South in their pocket. It has always been in their best inter­est to keep the dia­log on racial inequal­ity a taboo in pub­lic life, or to sim­ply ignore it. With this speech, I think Obama began to open up the dia­log about this topic, touch­ing upon one exposed nerve after another:  Slav­ery and the Con­sti­tu­tion, Wel­fare, Affir­ma­tive Action, Immi­gra­tion… He men­tioned them all. In essence, both sides of the debate on race have merit, but we have to all move on now, if we have the courage to. It was the kind of speech that a patient, edu­cated, and dare I say it — a wise States­man (rather than merely a politi­cian) would give. Whether or not Obama wins the elec­tion, I have a hunch this speech will be talked about and stud­ied in his­tory texts for a long time.

But don’t take my word for it. If you have the time, watch the speech on YouTube. I’ve embed­ded it here, despite the mediocre qual­ity of the video and audio. If I find a bet­ter source, I’ll link to it. (I’ve done this, thanks to Al ‘Bokashi-man’ Pasternak’s pointer.)