91 Comments to “The Death of CBC Radio 2”

1. pingback: Posted: Mar 17th, 2008 at 11:38 pm

   1 The Death of CBC Radio 2 […] Con­tinue Reading […]

2. Jan Karlsbjerg Posted: Mar 18th, 2008 at 12:18 pm

   2 The guy can write. Very artic­u­late to be sure. But it’s also the most arro­gant and snobby string of argu­ments I’ve heard in a long time. But even this con­ver­sa­tion is point­less; it isn’t even hap­pen­ing. It belongs to another world. I feel, when talk­ing about these things, like a vis­i­tor to an iso­lated coun­try where every­body believes the Earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese: No one is going to lis­ten to me because every sin­gle one of my premises, my fun­da­men­tal assump­tions, is dif­fer­ent from theirs. Nicely done, equat­ing his per­sonal tastes (“premises and fun­da­men­tal assump­tions” he calls them because that sounds bet­ter than “taste” or “stuff that I like”) with some imag­ined person’s supe­rior facts and knowl­edge com­pared to the sur­round­ing hicks (the imag­ined per­son is the only one who knows that the Earth isn’t flat and that the moon isn’t made of cheese). The exam­ples of the flat Earth and the cheese moon are instant win­ners as they’re not only accepted facts, but stan­dard jokes, and every­body knows that you have to be not only stu­pid but out­right will­fully igno­rant to have these beliefs. ‚That’s how wrong you are if you dare to dis­agree with Rus­sell Smith about the future of CBC Radio 2. Another fal­lacy: Some­times there will be jazz; I’m guess­ing it will con­tinue to be the Hol­i­day Inn lounge jazz they already so adore. Here he’s mak­ing the unstated assump­tion that the radio sta­tion cur­rently only plays what it adores, that its cur­rent musi­cal reper­toire isn’t influ­enced by sur­veys (or guesses) of what the lis­ten­ers want to hear. Cur­rently, even though Radio 2 doesn’t com­pletely share Rus­sell Smith’s tastes, at least it shares his world­view: It’s snobby and uncom­pro­mis­ing and plays only what it “adores”. But soon (oh, the hor­ror) it will start play­ing what’s “pop­u­lar”. How rude and com­pletely unacceptable! The arti­cle is also a good illus­tra­tion of a point I made recently on my blog: If you do too much research and fact-checking before you start writ­ing an opin­ion piece or an explo­rative arti­cle, you risk not hav­ing any­thing to write about (Igno­rance is con­tent). To the extent that he is will­ing to say that the CBC has some argu­ments for what they’re plan­ning to do, they did some “mys­te­ri­ous stud­ies” accord­ing to which “no one” is inter­ested in clas­si­cal. The “no one” is either an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion or sim­ply a lazy lie. Either he hasn’t looked into it, actu­ally read what the CBC man­age­ment said, checked how many stud­ies there were, what they said, etc. (Worse still, he may actu­ally have looked into the sur­veys and found that he didn’t like what they showed. They may have showed, for exam­ple, that “4.7% of the Cana­dian radio lis­ten­ing audi­ence say they want state-funded clas­si­cal music”. Bet­ter to leave such an incon­ve­nient, uncon­vinc­ing fact out.) For the curi­ous, here’s some back­ground on me, Cana­dian radio wise: I’ve never lis­tened to Radio 2 for more than thirty sec­onds at a time. I don’t lis­ten to much live radio at all, and when I do it’s never music radio. I lis­ten to many, many pod­casts, many of which are radio shows from Aus­tralia, Den­mark, USA, Canada, and all of which are non-music shows Inso­far as I have an opin­ion about CBC Radio avail­abil­ity, it bugs me that Radio 1 only has AM cov­er­age of Van­cou­ver (none of my radio sources reli­ably pick up the trans­mit­ter on the Island in a qual­ity I can stand lis­ten­ing to) whereas Radio 2 FM comes through loud and clear.

3. David Drucker Posted: Mar 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pm

   3 Author Comment Hi Jan - I can see how you might feel the argu­ment is snobby. I’m always care­ful when I talk about my love of Clas­si­cal music (and I have to agree with Smith there that ‘Clas­si­cal’ is a ter­ri­ble name that makes all of us who love it sound like we are old fos­sils who just want old chest­nuts by dead com­posers, thank you). How­ever, I do have to admit that I have the exact same feel­ing try­ing to talk about ‘Art’ music ver­sus other music to oth­ers. I often feel like I live on another planet; I have none of the same points of ref­er­ence. When I com­plain that I don’t under­stand why nearly all pop music must be ‘songs’ (music that has a vocal part — that dis­tinc­tion is not made by most peo­ple), or why it all has to be so strictly ‘tonal’, peo­ple don’t even under­stand what I’m saying. There is noth­ing I would love more here than to be rid­ing with the herd. I would be thrilled if when I said I’d gone to a ‘Con­cert’, the image in the other person’s mind (and a host of assump­tions about the music and the evening) would be James Ehnes and the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony, not Feist or John Mayer. It would be great to be able to debate the mer­its of a new Con­certo or String Quar­tet (or Per­cus­sion Ensem­ble piece, if that will do), but usu­ally there are few peo­ple to do this with. I will for­give the writer for his allu­sions to ‘mys­te­ri­ous’ stud­ies, which does sound an awful lot like axe-grinding, because of those last few para­graphs. This really is about the cul­ture at large. I want to con­tinue to live in a cul­ture that is com­plex and non-homogenized and val­ues com­plex ideas. I want to be able to lis­ten on the ter­res­trial air­waves to chal­leng­ing music, that is not dis­pos­able, as so much pop music is designed to be, since it always comes in 3 to 5 minute por­tions, per­fectly timed for com­mer­cial inter­rup­tions. Sure, I like the odd minia­ture, but does every­thing have to be with a beat, a vocal part, and sim­ple har­monies? (By sim­ple, I mean har­monies that one can ana­lyze and put chord sym­bols below them on a first hear­ing, if you’ve gone to music school). Imag­ine how frus­trat­ing it must be to beg to have 1 sin­gle chan­nel — there are no clas­si­cal music sta­tions in Van­cou­ver, save CBC2 at present, when every­one else has hun­dreds of sta­tions cater­ing to all of their tastes — Rock, Pop, Oldies, Coun­try, Hip-Hop, etc. Are we really so small a con­stituency as to be on par with, say, lovers of bag­pipe music, or Polkas? Heck, I’ll even pay for the sta­tions (and not just on my taxes); I did it before for NPR, and I guess I might have to again for Satel­lite radio, but that’s beside the point. What about the kid who has yet to dis­cover this? Is Clas­si­cal Music going to be the province of the wealthy, or is it a trea­sure that all get to hear? I guess what I’m say­ing is, please don’t con­sider lovers of Clas­si­cal music (or ‘Art Music’ or ‘Com­plex Music’ if either of those terms fits bet­ter) to be snobs. Most of us really do feel like we do have a set of fun­da­men­tal assump­tions that are dif­fer­ent from every­body else’s, that we are shout­ing into the wind. In my case, it’s not that way by choice; it’s how I was raised. BTW, I do agree with you that CBC1 should be on FM here. We get no AM cov­er­age what­so­ever in our low floor in a high-rise, and I would love the occa­sional intel­li­gent talk as well. In fact, the old CBC2 had more than a minute of news on it, which was just fine with me as well; I don’t want all music all the time, but want my radio to be smart and inter­est­ing, not just some sonic wall­pa­per (as well as being loud and clear as well).

4. Jan Karlsbjerg Posted: Mar 18th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

   4 Ah, I didn’t express myself clearly enough. I don’t think every­one who likes clas­si­cal music is a snob. But this guy strikes me as a snob. He’s look­ing down his nose at every­body else and their bad — or just plain wrong — musi­cal taste. And if Radio 2 stops cater­ing to his tastes, then they might as well just close the station. Leav­ing that aside, the whole dis­cus­sion of pay­ing for radio sta­tions is inter­est­ing too. Remem­ber that on all of the com­mer­cial radio sta­tions, the lis­ten­ers already “pay for” their music: They lis­ten to ads. Mean­while these same lis­ten­ers have also been pay­ing for the clas­si­cal music on Radio 2: They pay their taxes just like you do. It sounds like satel­lite radio is the way to go for folks who have spe­cial tastes: Lots of spe­cial­ized sta­tions with exactly the mix you want. By the way, there are not 100 sta­tions on the FM dial in Van­cou­ver, let alone hun­dreds for each of the gen­res Rock, Pop, Oldies, Coun­try, Hip-Hop.

5. David Drucker Posted: Mar 18th, 2008 at 9:49 pm

   5 Author Comment I guess we peo­ple from Planet Clas­si­cal could go to Satel­lite Radio (although both XM and Sir­ius each have only 1 clas­si­cal chan­nel apiece, so it’s hardly much of a gain), but that is, again, miss­ing the point. The CBC was/is a pub­lic ser­vice, paid for by tax dol­lars. I found out not too long ago that the amount of money set aside for the CBC has not changed in a long, long time; cer­tainly not long enough to account for infla­tion. I do believe, how­ever, that it is still part of what is to hold Canada together, through a mis­sion to enlighten, inform, edu­cate as well as entertain. If one of the val­ues we as a soci­ety share is that expos­ing chil­dren and oth­ers to music that is not sim­plis­tic, that is dif­fer­ent, unfa­mil­iar and exper­i­men­tal at times, as well as a cul­tural legacy from the his­tory of the coun­try, it shouldn’t be some­thing we have to pay for through com­mer­cials, con­tri­bu­tions or sub­scrip­tion fees. The CBC doesn’t have the same lim­i­ta­tions that com­mer­cial radio sta­tions have. Instead of strik­ing out new ground and chal­leng­ing us, I see this new move to ‘Easy Lis­ten­ing’ as essen­tially aban­don­ing that mis­sion. Despite Smith’s unfor­tu­nate equat­ing of peo­ple who don’t agree with him as being bad or wrong, I do agree with him in this key point: Art unbound by for­mula — music that does not have to accom­pany words, for exam­ple — is the art that will be remem­bered by cul­tural his­to­ri­ans and will come to define our era. A coun­try with no pub­lic forum for such art, with nowhere for the less priv­i­leged to gain access to it and to intel­li­gent analy­sis of it, is an unso­phis­ti­cated one. If we make all of our insti­tu­tions some­thing only the rich can afford (and I include Clas­si­cal Radio pro­gram­ming as one of those insti­tu­tions, since CBC Radio 2 has been broad­cast­ing this kind of music for over 60 years), then I think Canada loses some­thing as a nation. Maybe I’m just hop­ing for a world where it’s not quite so pecu­liar to be a lover of this par­tic­u­lar art form. It is good stuff, you know, and will blow your mind if you let it.

6. Ashley Hilliard Posted: Mar 18th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

   6 I agree with David Drucker. Until now, CBC Radio 2 has been one of Canada’s great cul­tural insti­tu­tions. Sure, only a minor­ity is inter­ested at any time, but those who were curi­ous had a place to turn on the dial. Young peo­ple inter­ested in music often dis­cover “clas­si­cal” music as they mature. Clas­si­cal music might be defined as music that forms part of the cul­tural her­itage of man, and thus starts with the folk music of the world and expands from there. What now? CBC Radio 2’s man­date until now was to expose lis­ten­ers to the musi­cal her­itage of the world. Now it will be just another easy-listening sta­tion. All this in the name of “diversity”? CBC lis­ten­ers are livid over the changes. To quote an adver­tise­ment: “Those who like it, like it a lot.” Just go to the CBC web­site to read with what pas­sion lis­ten­ers have protested the deci­sion: http://www.insidethecbc.com/r2sept. To no avail. Jen­nifer McGuire, Head of Radio, defends the switch again in today’s Globe. She doesn’t care a fig for pub­lic opinion. Only pub­lic denun­ci­a­tion of these changes by the cul­tural com­mu­nity across Canada can reverse this disaster.

7. pingback: Posted: Mar 18th, 2008 at 11:17 pm

   7 Nancy Zimmerman: a canadian money coach (not a financial planner!) » Blog Archive » Freebie (or nearly) Wednesday: free REM online, an amazing music festival in Pemberton, and the XFiles set sale […] Lest any­one think I walk around in sack­cloth and ashes after Monday’s post — I assure you, I am not averse to good things in life, and esp. not averse to some rock n’ roll!  (but even these won’t com­pen­sate for the impend­ing death of cbc radio 2) […]

8. nancy (aka money coach) Posted: Mar 18th, 2008 at 11:26 pm

   8 I remain dis­traught — and I can barely tell Faure from Palest­rina, so can imag­ine how you’d be feel­ing. As I said in my com­ment on your other post, if it weren’t for cbc radio 2 being forced into my envi­ron­ment, I don’t know that I’d have much appre­ci­a­tion for “clas­si­cal” music. And I’m so grate­ful for it. Thanks for keep­ing us alerted to this. I’ll do what I can to let oth­ers know. Would it be just too awful to say “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?” I cer­tainly think we’re get­ting a park­ing lot. It sucks.

9. Bill Lee Posted: Mar 19th, 2008 at 2:04 am

   9 The text is read­ily avail­able, on the alter­na­tive mobile Globe site, Friends of CBC etc. But unless you write to the con­tact num­bers at CBC, your voice will not be counted. How­ever they try not to lis­ten to their listeners. http://ago.mobile.globeandmail.com/generated/archive/RTGAM/html/20080313/wrussell13.html http://www.friends.ca/News/Friends_News/archives/articles03130801.asp See also offi­clal CBC response and a half-dozen let­ter sin Tuesday’s Globe and Mail of 18 March. Many blogs quote the arti­cle too.

10. David Drucker Posted: Mar 19th, 2008 at 8:23 am

    10 Author Comment Nancy, you are exactly the kind of per­son who the CBC will hurt the most — the ones with­out large clas­si­cal music col­lec­tions to fall back on. I hope, for your sake as well as mine, that they recon­sider (although I remain pre­pared for the nearly inevitable). Thanks for the URLs, Bill. I’ve already sent a mes­sage to the CBC using their ‘con­tact us’ form, but I sus­pect that is going into the same black hole as the rest of the mes­sages about this. Per­haps there needs to be some­thing big­ger. A pub­lic protest? Per­haps a ‘decom­pos­ing’ com­poser with crowd at the CBC offices down­town (I wish we could do it in Toronto)?

11. Ashley Hilliard Posted: Mar 20th, 2008 at 8:46 pm

    11 Write to: http://www.cbc.ca/contact/ Send copies to: Jen­nifer McGuire is the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of CBC Radio. She reports to Richard Sturs­berg, Exec­u­tive VP of Eng­lish Ser­vices, who reports to Hubert Lacroix, CBC Pres­i­dent and CEO. You could write to each of them; the first two have oper­at­ing emails: jennifer.mcquire@cbc.ca richard.stursberg@cbc.ca Lacroix can be reli­ably reached only at P.O. Box 3220 Sta­tion C Ottawa K1Y 1E4 Then tell any­one you know who likes it that Canada has a national pub­lic radio sta­tion that plays “inter­est­ing” music to write as well.

12. Ashley Hilliard Posted: Mar 20th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

    12 Cor­rec­tion: Jen­nifer McGuire’s email: jennifer.mcguire@cbc.ca

13. David Drucker Posted: Mar 21st, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    13 Author Comment Thanks for the email addresses, Ash­ley. Appar­ently Jen­nifer McGuire is one of the biggest obsta­cles here. I’m not sure what I could say that will sway her, since she is obvi­ously deaf to opin­ions out­side of her own focus groups.

14. Ashley Posted: Mar 21st, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    14 That’s what I’ve heard as well, David. She’s a journalist.The irony is that she has been pro­moted to head of news and is only in charge of Eng­lish radio until they find a replace­ment. Wish she’d just go and leave R2 alone: http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=324431 The only hope I see is a con­tin­ued grass roots revolt, plus national cul­tural lead­ers speak­ing out. How to get to Bramwell Tovey, of the VSO?

15. Stephen Rees Posted: Mar 23rd, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    15 CBC Stereo (as it was called back then and CBC Radio 2 more recently) has been my almost con­stant com­pan­ion since I landed here in Octo­ber 1988. I will con­fess to brief flings with oth­ers. CJRT used to be good — there was even a com­mer­cial “clas­si­cal” sta­tion in TO once too. But you could find Radio 2 most places — and they had been increas­ing its reach. But the search for a large audi­ence is what has been killing it slowly. And any­way the best shows never were entirely classical.And the good thing about worth­while radio is that it can some­times sur­prise you. Which is some­thing that log­ging on to a clas­si­cal stream like AVRO (het beste van die beste) can­not do. But that is what I have been doing more and more lately. I have eclec­tic tastes — but I think what I like is “good music” and it does not fit neatly into any one genre — most of whose names are mean­ing­less to me. “Alter­na­tive” for instance — to what? I hate opera but like Car­men. And G&S. I can live with­out church music but like big organs — but also steam organs and Ham­mond organs. I often feel the need for Mahler, or Grieg, or The Tem­per­ance Seven. I sup­pose that is why I see so many peo­ple with ipods I will miss it — in fact I miss a lot of it already — but thanks to tech­nol­ogy I think I will find a way to sur­vive. But some­how I doubt pub­lic broad­cast­ing in Canada will. For if the CBC can­not do Radio 2 no-one can. For the best — absolute best — thing about Radio 2 was the absence of com­mer­cials. And the rea­son I turn it off now is the con­stant rep­e­ti­tion of their own pro­mos. Yeah I am blog man too. So long Tom. It was nice lis­ten­ing to you Jur­gen. I miss your gur­gle Shelagh.

16. Patricia Clarke Posted: Mar 24th, 2008 at 10:40 am

    16 Please bring back “Clas­si­cal” music to Radio 2,As well as all the well loved favourites there is much more “clas­si­cal” music still untouched and heard less often and if the CBC has its way .…. never ! If it is played less often ‚or never, how will any new lis­ten­ers even have the oppor­tu­nity to be edu­cated by its beauty.There are plenty of other sta­tions , chan­nels, pro­vid­ing pop,rock,light,country west­ern music the choice there is end­less. CBC2 is the , was the, only sta­tion which pro­vided clas­si­cal music all day long to peo­ple in rural Ontario and other rural areas of Canada. Please , please do not take this won­der­ful music from us.

17. pingback: Posted: Mar 26th, 2008 at 10:36 pm

    17 Nancy Zimmerman: a canadian money coach (not a financial planner!) » Blog Archive » Free concert: thoroughly modern Mozart […] the cbc is fail­ing to deliver , RIP, thank­fully Pacific Baroque Orches­tra will pro­vide — and free, this […]

18. Morley Chalmers Posted: Mar 28th, 2008 at 11:48 am

    18 I too am sad­dened by this ret­ro­grade deci­sion. I won’t be lis­ten­ing. Sig­nals the end of CBC Radio. CBC will become indis­tin­guish­able from com­mer­cial broadcasting. Since the announce­ment was sim­ply the bot­tom line of the changes, I’d be inter­ested in hearing/seeing the CBC’s own argu­ments in favour of dump­ing the cur­rent Radio 2 sched­ule and vir­tu­ally killing clas­si­cal music.

19. Ivan Bateman Posted: Mar 31st, 2008 at 8:14 am

    19 I have sent the fol­low­ing to Richard Sturs­berg and Jen­nifer Mcquire: I am alarmed about the seem­ingly inflex­i­ble atti­tude that you are adopt­ing with respect to the pub­lic out­cry about the plans for Radio 2 I was for­tu­nate to be exposed to “clas­si­cal” music by BBC radio 70 years ago. The pop era was in full swing (no pun intended) at that time and clas­si­cal was not “pop­u­lar” music. I was also lived in a large city where we endured heavy bomb­ing. A boarder who lived with us was a mem­ber of the BBC Sym­phony orches­tra and he prac­ticed his viola at a time when fear was the preva­lent sen­ti­ment. After the war I was able to go to live con­certs on a few occa­sions. These were my first expe­ri­ences of Hi-Fi per­for­mances and I was cap­ti­vated. How­ever, radio was the prime source since records were beyond our means. Over 50 years ago I came to this coun­try. Com­mer­cial radio was a waste­land of repet­i­tive pop and com­mer­cials in a small city. Only the CBC occa­sion­ally car­ried clas­si­cal offer­ings and con­certs were some­thing for Toron­to­ni­ans only. I depended on CJBC but even this changed when the French lan­guage for­mat was adopted. Radio 2 became my sta­tion of choice, espe­cially when its reach was extended by repeater sta­tions out­side Toronto. It stayed on my car dial while trav­el­ling in south­ern Ontario. Now most of what I have enjoyed is yield­ing to Muzak style offerings. Why can­not you put your­selves in the place that I occu­pied all those years ago? Through for­tu­nate cir­cum­stances I was exposed to an art form that became part of my edu­ca­tion. The love of that form has with­stood the pres­sure of pop­u­lar taste with its fickle fash­ions and lack of sub­stance. How can you reach those young peo­ple through the bar­rage of noise (lit­er­ally) that com­prises so much mod­ern music? I can com­pen­sate to some extent through mod­ern tech­nol­ogy. Inter­net stream­ing, Ipods, CDs all pro­vide the sound but the sense of com­mu­nity is missing. Think again please.

20. joeposts Posted: Apr 6th, 2008 at 12:40 am

    20 I was dis­ap­pointed to hear this news. That radio sta­tion was about the only legit­i­mate way peo­ple in smaller cities could lis­ten to uncon­ven­tional music. The only music stores around here that have a clas­si­cal music sec­tion have a TINY clas­si­cal music sec­tion and gen­er­ally only carry the pop­u­lar, long-dead artists and com­posers. Inter­net radio is great and all until you try drag­ging an eth­er­net cable and a lap­top com­puter behind you when you go jogging. So I’m left with few options — a satel­lite radio bill, a legally down­loaded DRM-infected file that may not work at all, wait­ing weeks and weeks for a CD deliv­ery, or a quick and easy (and prob­a­bly ille­gal) inter­net search & down­load. When the music indus­try all but stops dis­trib­ut­ing cer­tain styles of music, I don’t exactly feel guilty about ’steal­ing’ by file­shar­ing or down­load­ing it off USENET. Too bad for the musi­cians and com­posers though. I hope more uncon­ven­tional musi­cians fol­low the lead of artists like Trent Reznor, who recently made his lat­est instru­men­tal NIN album avail­able for down­load on his own web­site for a small fee.

21. David Drucker Posted: Apr 6th, 2008 at 5:26 am

    21 Author Comment Now there’s a dif­fer­ent angle: More vari­ety on the air­waves for uncon­ven­tional music dis­cour­ages ille­gal filesharing. I guess that is true (if one has no alter­na­tive), although it would prob­a­bly be less likely for some­one to down­load a file if they had never been exposed to that kind of music (or had any kind of context/program notes/DJ) so that they knew what to look for, much less download. In any case, less choice is always a bad thing. As for post­ing music online, I sus­pect that most orches­tras and/or soloists would do so except for the fact that they gen­er­ally don’t know much about that sort of mar­ket­ing, and are even more con­ser­v­a­tive about giv­ing any­thing away than the those musi­cians who make far more from con­certs and other avenues avail­able to those in the pop­u­lar music realm. One could argue that a clas­si­cal soloist would gain far more from the mar­ket­ing from the release of record­ings of their per­for­mances than they could ever get from CD sales (or sales on the iTunes store). Also, note that for clas­si­cal music, the ‘prod­uct’ that they are sell­ing is not nec­es­sar­ily the record­ing. Many record just as a way of doc­u­ment­ing a live per­for­mance (since con­tracts with record labels for clas­si­cal artists are few and far between, except for Naxos, where the per­former gets next to noth­ing but bet­ter distribution).

22. Lowell Guebert Posted: Apr 6th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    22 I am shocked bey­one belief! I have been a CBC lis­tener for years — why I even remem­ber hear­ing Bob Kerr! The CBC was always a haven for those who could not stand the pound­ing noise that is most of the rest of radio . But in their “wis­dom” they took clas­si­cal music off of the evening pro­gram­ming, and gave us “Tonic” They must know how bad it is, judg­ing by the num­ber of “com­mer­cials” that they air try­ing to con­vince us to tune in. You can get that kind of pro­gram­ming any­where. CBC does not have to com­pete with com­mer­cial radio. And they even want to kill Jur­gen Goth with his eclec­tic mix of musi­cal styles? And the CBC radio orches­tra in Van­cou­ver is dying too? How sad! Look at NPR in the U.S. and you will find that there are peo­ple who want to lis­ten to the great mas­ters. What the CBC really needs is some “Sound Advice” But they have killed that pro­gram too! A sad day for Canada!

23. Janette Griffiths Posted: Apr 9th, 2008 at 10:43 am

    23 As a British jour­nal­ist who spends a lot of time in Van­cou­ver, I am dev­as­tated by the changes to the Radio 2 sched­ule. Tom Allen and the much-missed Shel­ley Solmes were like friends to me. They taught me most of what I know and now love about clas­si­cal music. I have a sug­ges­tion: Can we not ask the big guns of clas­si­cal music to help? When the Royal Opera House was going through some very dif­fi­cult times, a peti­tion was sent to The Times, headed by Sir Colin Davis and signed by all the world’s great con­duc­tors — lament­ing the cav­a­lier treat­ment of the ROH com­pany dur­ing its closer for ren­o­va­tion. True Covent Gar­den is a plat­form for these con­duc­tors but so is Radio 2. And not just con­duc­tors. We could start with Pin­chas Zuck­er­man, Kent Nagano, Andrew Davis, Bramwell Tovey, Ben Hep­p­ner, Ger­ald Fin­ley (cur­rently get­ting rave reviews here in Lon­don) and get them to bring in their friends and col­leagues. And then, it would be inter­est­ing to know just what the cre­den­tials of Jen­nifer McGuire are. They must be very impres­sive given that she has been allowed carte blanche to tam­per with the qual­ity of life of mil­lions of Cana­di­ans across the coun­try. I think we need to know just what her qual­i­fi­ca­tions are!

24. pingback: Posted: Apr 10th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

    24 Joe Posts » Culture is for those who can afford it. […] No clas­si­cal? Then kill Radio 2 and get it over with […]

25. Janette Griffiths Posted: Apr 12th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

    25 A post­script to my ear­lier com­ment and also in response to Mr Karls­berg: I don’t mind at all if he con­sid­ers me and all the other defend­ers of Radio 2 arro­gant and snobby. We’re in some excel­lent com­pany. Here is a quote from an exchange between com­poser James McMil­lan and Daniel Baren­boim dur­ing Barenboim’s Reith (BBC ver­sion of Massey) lec­tures last year. It might also help Rus­sell Smith come to terms with using that trou­ble­some term “clas­si­cal music”. From the tran­script of 2006 BBC Reith lec­tures. Daniel Baren­boim — Hear­ing — the neglected sense: JAMES McMIL­LAN: Hello my name is James McMil­lan, I’m another com­poser. Recently the Eng­lish musi­col­o­gist Julian John­son pro­duced a fas­ci­nat­ing book called Who Needs Clas­si­cal Music? He implies that seri­ous music has suf­fered in the face of the appar­ent tri­umph of the visual and the ver­bal, but also of what he would see as the banal and even the pop­ulist. And there­fore my ques­tion is this — “What is it about seri­ous music that baf­fles and indeed in some cases offends the advo­cates of an ever increas­ingly ubiq­ui­tous, nar­row, some might say debased pop­u­lar cul­ture? Is it its very abil­ity to rise from the mun­dane? Is it the sug­ges­tion that there may be such a thing as a secret inner life which can­not be reduced to a rig­or­ously enforced com­mon­al­ity, that there may be no such thing indeed as a closed universe?” DANIEL BARENBOIM: Wow! As you can see, Baren­boim was left speech­less. I’ll repaste the ques­tion in the mid­dle of that quote: “What is it about seri­ous music that baf­fles and indeed in some cases offends the advo­cates of an ever increas­ingly ubiq­ui­tous, nar­row, some might say debased pop­u­lar culture?” I think that answers that MacMil­lan pro­vides go a long way to explain­ing the malaise that is abroad in our ‘debased pop­u­lar culture’.

26. David Drucker Posted: Apr 12th, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    26 Author Comment Thanks for that addi­tion, Janette. Until recently, I attrib­uted my love of Clas­si­cal Music with the fact that I grew up with it. My par­ents were both clas­si­cal per­form­ers, and the house was nearly always full of peo­ple tak­ing voice or piano lessons, as well as cham­ber music rehearsals. It was not unusual for me to know a piece back­wards and for­wards by the time I attended the con­cert that even­tu­ally took place. That said, I also won­der if aside from this com­fort through famil­iar­ity, it did expose me to pat­terns and struc­tures (at least, in sound) that are far more com­plex than most chil­dren and ado­les­cents get a chance to hear. When I talked to friends about music (and for me, this was a fairly rare occur­rence, as with the excep­tion of fel­low piano stu­dents or a few oth­ers, doing so only alien­ated me from them), I was sur­prised to hear that most of the time, they were most inter­ested in the words to the song, not the melody, the har­monies or rhythm (although for some, you’d some­times hear some­one say, ‘I like the beat.’). Still, if it is the words that are what’s impor­tant, I can under­stand why much of pop­u­lar music (and par­tic­u­larly Rap and Hip-hop) are mainly con­cerned with the poetry and/or clev­er­ness of the lyrics, and this is why there are so few purely instru­men­tal works. Also, there is rarely a song much longer than a few min­utes, and it is nearly always the same tempo and vol­ume through­out — some­thing that harkens back to the Baroque era (where this prac­tice was adher­ing to a term in rhetoric, ‘The Doc­trine of Affec­tions’ — which sug­gested that one idea/tempo/mood should be used for each move­ment of a work, to avoid the impres­sion of chaos or disorder). I had dis­missed this as merely a com­mer­cial require­ment, because the songs fit into an eas­ily digestible bite-sized chunk, which in turn, could be put together into an album more eas­ily then say, a 20-minute multi-tempo work with quiet bits, loud bits, and every­thing in between. Mahler’s “I want a sym­phony to take in the whole world” would never fit a form such as this. The result is then, every­thing is a Song Cycle, with no real need for rela­tion­ships such as keys or major vs. minor, not much triple rhythm (too hard to dance to), and an empha­sis on the poetry, rather than much of a melody or har­monic idea. This, to me, is just too thin a gruel. Call me an arro­gant snob, but I’m just too hun­gry for com­plex­ity to set­tle for just poetry, espe­cially poetry that is usu­ally not much more than a sin­gle thought for each work.

27. Margaret Gunning Posted: May 22nd, 2008 at 10:11 am

    27 I think the whole­sale gut­ting of Radio 2 (with a sop to the old folks who still listen)is entirely dri­ven by age demo­graph­ics. Most peo­ple who love clas­si­cal music are middle-aged or older, old coots by the industry’s reck­on­ing. They’re just not cool enough, and they’re on the way out any­way, so why not just chop this bloody non­sense of wast­ing time on them and what they want? The CBC site insists that they’re “lis­ten­ing” (what crap!), respond­ing to “con­cerns” with care­ful expla­na­tions of how this step will improve Radio 2, broaden its man­date, draw new lis­ten­ers with its fresh new con­tent, etc. Why not just grab a shovel. No mat­ter that Radio 2 is a grand dame of cul­ture, the only one left in the coun­try. The execs at Moth­er­Corp see her as a dowa­ger, a queru­lous old dame who really should keep her mouth shut. Or maybe she’s an old horse who should be put out to pasture? Hmm, put out to pas­ture. I have a bet­ter idea. BLAM!

28. David Drucker Posted: May 22nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    28 Author Comment Mar­garet - I’m not sure that the demo­graphic of clas­si­cal music lis­ten­ers is quite as grey-haired as you sug­gest. True, I did see quite a few older peo­ple at the protests, but I also saw a lot of young peo­ple. And if demo­graph­ics are the key to pro­gram­ming choices (which seems to be what the form let­ters I get are say­ing), then the increas­ing Chi­nese demo­graphic would sug­gest that they should pro­gram more, not less clas­si­cal music. They are build­ing con­cert halls like mad in China, because the pop­u­la­tion can’t get enough of this stuff. What’s more, through­out the world, the age of clas­si­cal music lis­ten­ing is going down on aver­age, not up. In Venezuela, clas­si­cal music has become the way that poor chil­dren escape their sit­u­a­tions and has com­pletely rev­o­lu­tion­ized the edu­ca­tion and cul­ture of that country. To say that clas­si­cal music is just for old peo­ple isn’t borne out by the facts. I had a por­tion of this con­ver­sa­tion just the other evening with Todd Maf­fin, who claimed that it seemed obvi­ous that peo­ple wouldn’t want to have their tax dol­lars spent on a minor­ity of peo­ple, and that clas­si­cal music lis­ten­ers were all ‘dying’. I think this is the same mis­con­cep­tion that you are labour­ing under, and even if it were true, it wouldn’t make sense to insure that there are no new lis­ten­ers; just like it would make no sense to close the art muse­ums and bal­let com­pa­nies because their appre­ci­a­tors are pre­dom­i­nantly older people. The arts know no age, and gov­ern­ment spon­sor­ship to make sure that they don’t become an elit­ist activ­ity only of the rich is a right that Cana­di­ans should demand, just like health care, pub­lic parks, libraries and mass tran­sit. Clas­si­cal music — and again, I think part of the prob­lem is that the term is loaded with all sorts of cob­webs — or Art Music should be avail­able to all with­out hav­ing to have a high income or sta­tus. Just ask those kids in Caracas.

29. Margaret Gunning Posted: May 23rd, 2008 at 9:39 am

    29 Per­haps the elderly demo­graphic is a mis­per­cep­tion. But I don’t think Canada stacks up to the rest of the world in hon­our­ing the arts. It’s all Don Cherry and Timbits. How much fund­ing do orches­tras receive in Canada? When I moved to Van­cou­ver in the late ‘80s, the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony had gone broke and was dis­band­ing. So much for “world-class”. It stag­gered to its feet again, but barely. Even now, it is dumb­ing down its con­tent and run­ning absurd ads say­ing operas are like real­ity TV, soaps, etc., to make it more “accessible”. Clas­si­cal music is “for snobs”; peo­ple “don’t under­stand it”, or it’s “too seri­ous”, or “too bor­ing”. Even if none of this is true,a large seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion believes it. And per­haps the big­wigs at CBC are play­ing on that myth.

30. Esther Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 7:49 am

    30 “music appre­ci­a­tion” courses are not pop­u­lar. When kids com­plain, their par­ents run to school and say “teach some­thing else”. I, for one, absolutely needed that first push. Another rea­son: learn­ing to play a musi­cal instru­ment doesn’t increase your sta­tus, and that’s what our simul­ta­ne­ously advanced and back­ward north amer­i­can con­ti­nent is all about.

31. Mike Posted: Jul 6th, 2008 at 9:43 am

    31 Killing the CBC is quite delib­er­ate, it is being dumbed down to the point where its a pro­pa­ganda machine for Neo Cons. The heavy hands are all over it. Musak is your future. Have a look at some of the Brass­check TV videos to get a glimpse of your future.

32. Joan Posted: Jul 14th, 2008 at 11:32 pm

    32 I may be part of the “grey haired brigade” now, but I started lis­ten­ing to CBC radio as a teenager in Regina. I did not come from a musi­cal back­ground, but have gained a deep love of music as well as exten­sive knowl­edge of both com­posers and per­form­ers, thanks to the edu­cated, intel­li­gent broad­casts I lis­tened to for so many years.Yes, there is new tech­nol­ogy and we can all load up our I-Pods,but how many young peo­ple with­out musi­cal back­grounds will have the oppor­tu­nity to learn about music they are not famil­iar with? I have always con­sid­ered CBC Radio 2 to be a national trea­sure that we can be proud of, and I sim­ply can­not believe there aren’t enough lis­ten­ers! Nor can I believe that all those lis­ten­ers are “old”. Didn’t we all start out as young peo­ple? Surely, if we became CBC fans at a young age there must be oth­ers! And why should we all be forced to lis­ten to the same kinds of pro­gram­ing as all the other sta­tions? If it can’t remain worth­while, intel­li­gent and inter­est­ing, then we don’t need a gov­ern­ment funded sta­tion. Cana­di­ans need CBC Radio 2 to con­tinue pro­vid­ing decent music, as well as inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion about that music. I am mur­mur­ing LOUDLY!!!!

33. David Drucker Posted: Jul 15th, 2008 at 12:19 am

    33 Author Comment Joan, I agree with not all lis­ten­ers to Clas­si­cal Music not being old. I also agree (and have writ­ten in other post­ings), that this kind of art, which is not ‘dis­pos­able’, that like Shake­speare, Rodin, Dante and El Greco, some music from the past is never just for the old (or for the young, for that mat­ter). It does, how­ever, require atten­tion from when you are young, because it can help you grow up know­ing that there are big ideas out there worth hav­ing in your head through­out your life, not just the tail end of it. When some young Cana­di­ans will be denied the oppor­tu­nity of falling in love with Beethoven’s String Quar­tets or Bach’s Suites for solo instru­ments while every­thing is still new for them, and they feel things so intensely, is a tragedy that those now run­ning the CBC are obliv­i­ous to. But it’s hard to speak for the future. I have to remem­ber that Bach was nearly unknown for a hun­dred years after his death, when Mendelssohn and a bunch of other enthu­si­asts redis­cov­ered him. Per­haps we in Canada are going to go through a sim­i­lar cul­tural ice age. I can rec­om­mend one thing for you, though (and I couldn’t let it go with­out com­ment): It’s spelled ‘iPod’. One word, small i, cap­i­tal p. No hyphen. Spelling it any other way will surely brand you as ancient and irrel­e­vant. Just a word to the wise.

34. Alison Posted: Jul 16th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    34 The death of the CBC radio 2 marks a death in me as well. Adu­la­tion of the mediocre, homog­e­nized, unin­ter­est­ing aspects of pop cul­ture, which require no thought or par­tic­i­pa­tion, is once again in the fore­front. If demand­ing the reten­tion of some­thing that is fine and valu­able makes me elit­ist then so be it. How­ever, I will NEVER LISTEN TO CBC RADIO AGAIN!

35. pingback: Posted: Aug 20th, 2008 at 8:28 pm

    35 The All-New CBC Radio 2 Is For You - The Torontoist | Stand On Guard For CBC […] the right amount of tiny food objects paid for by our tax dol­lars, we took in the con­tro­ver­sial and already well-publicized changes hit­ting the network’s day­time pro­gram­ming as of Sep­tem­ber 2. For those not keeping […]

36. Barbara Acheson Cooper Posted: Aug 29th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

    36 As a Cana­dian and tax payer, I feel invested in CBC Radio 2 and am angry that the won­der­ful world of expert hosts and music that I have lis­tened to for years is being repalced by medi­oc­rity and in a pro­foundly insen­si­tive man­ner. Yes­ter­day I heard Eric Freisen wel­come his replace­ment … an inar­tic­u­late and self admited naive anouncer. Nice Going, CBC.

37. sandra Posted: Aug 29th, 2008 at 3:06 pm

    37 I only dis­cov­ered Radio2 a few years ago when I stopped lis­ten­ing to Radio-Canada FM which was replaced by Espace Musique…aurevoir musique classique…and now I am forced to mourn once again since Radio2 will be copy­ing Espace Musique:MEDIOCRITY! Every­thing which made Radio-Canada FM & Radio2 unique is being ignored…a sad reflec­tion of our level of awareness.Hello ele­va­tor music…mindless and never thought-provoking. Radio2 will be sadly missed, espe­cially chère Cather­ine Bellyea.

38. Steve Horne Posted: Aug 29th, 2008 at 9:28 pm

    38 What an odd lit­tle blog this is. Pretty clear sit­u­a­tion to me…there aren’t enough clas­si­cal ears to sup­port an entire radio oper­a­tion, prob­a­bly never were but they had enough pull back in the day to direct the gov­ern­ment fund­ing to cre­ate the sta­tion (the his­tory of this is greatly inter­twined with the arrival of FM radio). The num­bers had dwin­dled to the point that no one in gov­ern­ment or CBC man­age­ment could come up with any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to keep it alive. I don’t know that they have suc­ceeded in cre­at­ing a great alter­na­tive — they haven’t been around long enough to judge. It’s rather funny that a few peo­ple here, includ­ing the Toronto Globe colum­nist, sug­gest that because the sta­tion no longer pan­ders to their niche inter­est it should be ter­mi­nated. Funny because they are really exer­cis­ing the same impulse as the peo­ple who ini­ti­ated the for­mat change.

39. David Drucker Posted: Aug 29th, 2008 at 10:01 pm

    39 Author Comment Steve, I’m going to assume that you’re not just being a troll (some­one who chimes in to get peo­ple upset at what they say just to enjoy the neg­a­tive energy). A niche, eh? Well, that may be so. I guess there are some arts that have a small fol­low­ing. Does that mean that they should be hard to dis­cover? I’m hop­ing that the state of Art Music’s dwin­dling fol­low­ing (and I guess that means that the mil­lions through­out the world are rel­a­tively small in num­ber com­pared to the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion) will be made some­what more bear­able to those of us who love it by the rise of Inter­net radio. In the mean­time, the loss of the last radio net­work in Canada that plays music that I want to lis­ten to is some­thing I’m deal­ing with. I’ve moved on, but that isn’t what really upsets me; What I’m most sad about is that there won’t be some kid, maybe in the mid­dle of nowhere, who dis­cov­ers it by chance. Some of these spec­tac­u­lar exam­ples of how human beings can be extra­or­di­nary and have their works live for cen­turies will once again lie dor­mant; who knows how long. This isn’t pan­der­ing to the inter­est of a few old farts (and by the way, if 47 is old fart sta­tus, then I guess I’m one of those). I know, by the luck of the fam­ily that I was born into, the appre­ci­a­tion of music that is not much more than a few verses and cho­ruses with a lit­tle chug­ging beat, dis­pos­able and utterly for­get­table, but the chances of some other kid get­ting to find this trea­sure grows smaller each day. It’s pre­cisely the oppo­site of elit­ism that I want; I want every­body to have this stuff for free, rather than hav­ing to pay tick­ets at some con­cert hall. And as to whether or not the pen­nies per year that this amounts to on your tax bill, I guess you won’t have to protest any more about it going to music for niches like mine.

40. Steve Horne Posted: Aug 30th, 2008 at 10:31 am

    40 No David, just because some­one dis­agrees with you doesn’t sug­gest they are a troll. In any event, I’m sur­prised by your out­look on music and I have to say I find the sit­u­a­tion to be quite the oppo­site. I’m pretty close to your age and I think that there has never been more oppor­tin­ity for “some kid, maybe in the mid­dle of nowhere” to dis­cover any imag­in­able vari­ety of music. I hap­pened to live in an area as a child that didn’t have access to CBC Stereo or much else on the FM dial. Now my kids are dis­cov­er­ing all sorts of music via the inter­net, satel­lite and a much wider vari­ety of FM sta­tions avail­able to them and of course all the stuff they trade back and forth with their friends . Do you really think that your music is endan­gered in this greatly expanded envi­ron­ment? Also, I’ve never bought into the argu­ment that this should be con­tin­ued because it costs a mere pen­nies per tax­payer. If that were our guide then we would pro­vide a radio net­work or any other gov­ern­ment sup­ported ser­vice for any niche group that demanded it.

41. David Drucker Posted: Aug 30th, 2008 at 11:13 am

    41 Author Comment Steve, you had to pay for the Inter­net for your home, so you are bet­ter off than many. If you get satel­lite as as well, you are much bet­ter off. FM radio is all but free. As for wider vari­ety of FM sta­tions, I live in a met­ro­pol­i­tan area and have not found that the case at all; there is a com­mer­cial ‘for­mula’ that most sta­tions fol­low. Yes, there are a few col­lege sta­tions (at very low power) but they also don’t pro­gram much in the way of the Classical/Art Music. Yes, Art Music on the radio is endan­gered — and I’d say, as of Sept. 2nd, all but extinct in Van­cou­ver. And as for ‘every niche group’ demand­ing a gov­ern­ment sup­ported ser­vice, do you really think that want­ing to have Art (in the broader sense) in our pub­lic life is some­thing that should never be pro­moted by gov­ern­ment? Even the US, which I left years ago, they had some recog­ni­tion (albeit pretty poor) of government-supported arts, for the good of the com­mu­nity. If it’s the free mar­ket to sup­port every art form, then some will sim­ply be drowned out by the din of com­mer­cial­ism, and that’s not always a good thing. That’s the way it works and has always worked since the begin­ning of Mass Media. By the way, I doubt that your kids are dis­cov­er­ing lots of Clas­si­cal Music on the FM dial and Inter­net, but I’m will­ing to be proven wrong if they are.

42. Jan Karlsbjerg Posted: Aug 31st, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    42 David: By the way, I doubt that your kids are dis­cov­er­ing lots of Clas­si­cal Music on the FM dial and Inter­net, but I’m will­ing to be proven wrong if they are. If they take in enough music from enough dif­fer­ent (and dif­fer­ent enough) sources, then I’m sure they come across the clas­si­cal / com­plex / chal­leng­ing music too, and then they can vote with their feet and wal­lets. They can par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions boards, “vote up” their favorite gen­res and arti­cles on online ser­vices, they can buy the music imme­di­ately through online stores, etc. And if clas­si­cal music comes out a win­ner in any of those forums, then by all means let’s hear about it. I lis­tened to a lot of clas­si­cal music grow­ing up, because I hung out at Denmark’s Radio’s P1 where all the polit­i­cal, news, debate, radio mon­tage, etc. was hap­pen­ing. There was a lot of clas­si­cal music there, and I always felt I was being force-fed it. It was part of a pack­age deal. You couldn’t hang out on the one radio chan­nel that had “the good stuff” with­out also pay­ing a lit­tle clas­si­cal music tax, with­out sit­ting through the clas­si­cal music propaganda. I’m sure they played it because they thought it was appre­ci­ated by many of the audi­ence, but at least for this par­tic­u­lar audi­ence mem­ber (me), the intro­duc­tions always sounded like this: Oh, so you want to lis­ten to the good news analy­sis show, that’s com­ing up, eh? Well first we’ll make you lis­ten to this vio­lin music for ten min­utes. The show you’re inter­ested in isn’t avail­able any­where else, you have to stay on this chan­nel, and really you have only one choice: Give in, change your taste, become like us and like it… or keep suf­fer­ing. And now: The violins. The media land­scape doesn’t allow for force-feeding and package-dealing any­more; there are too many alter­na­tives, and peo­ple turn away if they’re being pre­sented with pack­age deals like this. If the same pro­grams were being offered to me now, I’d sub­scribe to a pod­cast of the news-analysis pro­gram and never hear a bit of the unwanted filler music. Viewer and lis­tener sur­veys now get closer to the point: How many are ACTUALLY inter­ested in clas­si­cal music (as opposed to “how many sit through the clas­si­cal music because they like a par­tic­u­lar chan­nel and never, ever change the dial”). And in that clearer light of day, clas­si­cal music didn’t pull in enough peo­ple for the CBC to spend so much time and money on it.

43. Loyal Listener to the CBC - Jerry Lipinski Posted: Sep 1st, 2008 at 5:52 am

    43 Lis­ten­ers in Wind­sor, ONT and Leam­ing­ton have an alter­na­tive — they can lis­ten to a Detroit-area sta­tion, WRCJ 90.9FM. They have pretty diverse clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming, the Detroit Sym­phony Orches­tra (who now have Leonard Slatkin at the helm so that in and of itself is a good rea­son to switch) the down­side is they end clas­si­cal at 7PM each day and switch to jazz, but that shouldn’t faze the CBC lis­tener too much, since Danielle Charbonneau’s 7PM pro­gram got axed how long ago???

44. Steve Horne Posted: Sep 1st, 2008 at 10:01 am

    44 Hey David, my kids will dis­cover Clas­si­cal Music, or they won’t. Very demo­c­ra­tic process…the music must be strong enough to find a place in some kids heart now or a hun­dred years from now or it will just fade away. I do believe that the CBC man­agers have the right to change direc­tions when they see that they are not serv­ing enough of their audi­ence. I read today that most PBS sta­tions are drop­ping Mr. Rogers as of Sept. 2nd. There is sim­i­lar anger and dis­ap­point­ment from a hard core group of Mr. Rogers sup­port­ers but the fact is that kids in 2008 aren’t inter­ested in the show.

45. David Drucker Posted: Sep 1st, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    45 Author Comment I think your kids will never dis­cover that kind of music. It will be drowned out in a sea of com­mer­cial­ism. There are some arts that should be nur­tured. That’s why we have pub­lic build­ings ded­i­cated to that, and bal­let and opera com­pa­nies, the­atre troupes, and art gal­leries and muse­ums. The vast major­ity of those insti­tu­tions get some gov­ern­ment sup­port. Why this par­tic­u­lar part of human expe­ri­ence, that of music, should some­how be up for grabs by the free mar­ket is ridicu­lous. It’s not a ‘demo­c­ra­tic’ process of whether pop music is ‘bet­ter’ than art music. That’s an absurd cal­cu­la­tion, and you as an intel­li­gent per­son should know better. I think the ques­tion here is the word ‘serve’. Does the CBC serve an audi­ence bet­ter by giv­ing them what com­mer­cial sta­tions already do? I look to my tax dol­lars to fund all sorts of things that I don’t nec­es­sar­ily par­take in myself: pub­lic parks and libraries in places I’ve never been, muse­ums of art that I may or may not visit. That’s how I define the word. ‘Serv­ing’ by tak­ing an opin­ion poll (or in this case, cook­ing one up) and giv­ing exactly what the major­ity wants results in no growth or explo­ration for a cit­i­zenry. Soci­ety will never be chal­lenged when offered what the most peo­ple ask for. As for Mr. Rogers, I’m not sure I’d put him in the same league as Brahms, but it’s not sur­pris­ing that some­one who older peo­ple grew up with is no longer ‘rel­e­vant’ to kids. I’d say that there is a big dif­fer­ence between what he does and music that has been loved and per­formed for 300 years.

46. Steve Horne Posted: Sep 1st, 2008 at 8:31 pm

    46 David, I think you are twist­ing my words a bit here. I didn’t say any­thing about pop music being ‘bet­ter’ than art music. The demo­c­ra­tic process I was refer­ring to is that of humans mak­ing a choice, an indi­vid­ual choice, of what they value most and will save and nur­ture for future gen­er­a­tions. If you say that my kids will “never” dis­cover clas­si­cal music then so be it. They obvi­ously decided that it has no value to them. The only rea­son it has lasted through sev­eral hun­dred years is that some peo­ple decided that it is worth it. And I’m good with that. I’m actu­ally sup­port­ive of your right to try to keep the CBC as it was, I just don’t back your horse. As for the leg­endary Mr. Rogers, I never cot­toned to him myself, but I drew the anal­ogy not because he is the equal of Brahms, but because its a very sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion — a pub­lic broad­caster being pres­sured by the old guard to stay with the traditional. One more thing, I chal­lenge you to lis­ten to Radio 2 when it relaunches tomor­row and note the con­tent and then give me the co-ordinates of ONE com­mer­cial sta­tion that comes even close to it. I’m not con­vinced that it is going to be great radio, but my impres­sion of what is being launched in no way souds like “what com­mer­cial sta­tions already do”. Thanks for the dis­cus­sion David.

47. Jane Posted: Sep 2nd, 2008 at 10:20 am

    47 I am deeply dis­ap­pointed in your change of pro­gram­ing. Please bring back the clas­si­cal pro­grams I looked for­ward to hear­ing. What has hap­pened to our lovely learned, enter­tain­ing hosts of the past programing??????

48. James McDonall Posted: Sep 2nd, 2008 at 1:02 pm

    48 I am dis­gusted at the changes at the CBC. Being con­signed to the Muzack dun­geon in order to enjoy the musi­cal expres­sion of human spirit that is a birthright of every liv­ing being makes me feel like a second-class citizen. It seems that some have for­got­ten, or are sim­ply not aware that the music we call clas­si­cal is the root and seed of every kind of music cur­rently in exis­tence in the cog­ni­tive world. With­out the mar­vel­lous exper­i­ments of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Strauss or any of the great com­posers of our col­lec­tive cul­tural past, none of today’s so-called great musi­cians would even exist. Lov­ing clas­si­cal music is not elit­ist, but because it some­times requires some effort it is looked on as such. This is a shame, but it’s part of our soci­ety today — the pre­vail­ing atti­tude that any­thing worth hav­ing should just be given to us with­out any effort on our part. I feel for the youth of today who will never get a chance to expe­ri­ence the sim­ple joy and won­der of the com­plex approach, and I grieve for the future of a Canada with noth­ing but muzack, techno-grooves, hip-hop and other mind­less schlock to embrace in the name of Cana­dian content. As a Cana­dian tax­payer I say: Shame on the CBC for con­sign­ing music lovers all across this great land to the cul­tural dun­geon in the name of ratings.

49. PETER MILNE Posted: Sep 2nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm

    49 THE NEW CRC RADIO 2 IS LIKE NEEDING A 6 PACK BEFORE BREAKFAST. THEY “WERE” THE SOURCE FOR CLASSICAL. NOW APPEAR TO BE THE SOURCE FOR CLASSICAL RAP, WHICH IS AN OXYMORON. MY TAX DOLLARS AT WORK??????/

50. Derek Borne Posted: Sep 3rd, 2008 at 2:31 am

    50 I thought that turn­ing on radio 2 was going to be the equiv­i­lant of attend­ing a funeral, but I was wrong. I do miss the sooth­ing voices and beau­ti­ful music, but the DJ’s must retire and life must go on. It is up to the lis­ten­ers to con­tinue their passion’s. If you are sooo into the clas­si­cal scene then you should be pro­mot­ing it and edu­cat­ing the unlearned. Look at the Punk/Hardcore scences. They have to push their music. It is not main­stream. Those who want clas­si­cal will get it. The world is not into the side line busi­ness. The world shifts and changes and every­thing that is in the world fol­lows. Times change, DJ’s get old, but Gov­ern­ments will always be crazy

51. Christopher Posted: Sep 3rd, 2008 at 6:08 am

    51 I need some­where to vent! The new radio 2 is the most awful elit­ist unlis­ten­able non­sense — pre­sum­ably the playlist has been dreamt up by the same Mil­ton Fried­man addled brain that coined that small black cloud “every­where music takes you” when this all began. I put up with the loss of Danielle Char­bon­neau and the Sat­ur­day shows, I like the guy in Mon­treal whose ren­o­va­tions are never fin­ished — I even began to like the live music in the evening. I was happy with the move of the new music slot to ear­lier than mid­night . The recent changes though are uni­formly awful. And the enor­mous prob­lem is that there is nowhere else to go! The Toronto clas­sic sta­tion is plagued with adver­tise­ments, a rather grat­ing chatty style and lacks the eclec­ti­cism. Pub­lic radio and TV were founded by a gen­er­a­tion which under­stood pub­lic ser­vice and all of the social rea­sons why it should exist. Now the neo-con lunatics have taken over and are turn­ing the coun­try into their asy­lum. This was an agres­sively polit­i­cal move and needs to be responded to polit­i­cally. An elec­tion may be a use­ful time to do this kind of thing! Christopher

52. David T. BRown Posted: Sep 3rd, 2008 at 6:35 am

    52 Mes­sage to CBC Radio 2 senior man­agers, 02 Sep­tem­ber 2008: Ms. McGuire - I am com­pelled, point­less though it may be, to share the pro­found sense of sad­ness and loss that I feel about the abysmally ill-conceived pro­gram­ming changes at Radio 2. You have been part of a team that has sys­tem­at­i­cally dis­man­tled one of the high­est qual­ity, most endur­ing, and best-loved col­lec­tion of radio pro­gram­ming in the world, and replaced it with a mass of flavour-of-the-month medi­oc­rity. You and your col­leagues may have pro­ceeded with the best of inten­tions, dri­ven by some mis­guided notions that demo­graphic rat­ings are the key to qual­ity and integrity. But the end result is a trav­esty — a shame­ful evis­cer­a­tion of the best of Cana­dian radio pro­gram­ming in favour of a point­less pas­tiche of atom­ized pop­ulist ele­ments, none of which has enough of a con­stituency to gen­er­ate an audi­ence on its own, and so dis­parate and poorly inte­grated that it will never attract an audi­ence with the patience to endure the rest of the medi­oc­rity for the few bits they might actu­ally be inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to. I cling to the faint hope that dis­mal rat­ings, audi­ence out­rage, and per­haps even polit­i­cal inter­ven­tion will even­tu­ally cor­rect the fool­ish tra­jec­tory that Radio 2 is cur­rently fol­low­ing, but I am not opti­mistic… the mul­ti­tude of simul­ta­ne­ous cuts and blows that have been deliv­ered to Radio 2 are prob­a­bly fatal. Were you not pay­ing atten­tion over the past many months to the tor­rent of thought­ful and com­pelling com­men­tary opposed to these changes? Does the over­whelm­ing major­ity of neg­a­tive inter­net posts on the CBC site and else­where not reg­is­ter on the col­lec­tive con­science of CBC radio pol­i­cy­mak­ers? The fact that these changes are greeted on your blogs and com­ment boards not with joy and enthu­si­asm, or even with tepid sup­port, but rather with out­rage or with responses sim­i­lar to mourn­ing the death of a loved one, should send a mes­sage to you and your col­leagues. Where is the out­pour­ing of sup­port from the demo­graphic that this new pro­gram­ming is sup­posed to attract? How can these com­pelling and pre­scient indi­ca­tors be so resound­ingly ignored? You know not the mag­ni­tude of the dis­ser­vice you have done to the Cana­dian public. With pro­found sad­ness and bewilderment, David Brown

53. David T. Brown Posted: Sep 3rd, 2008 at 6:38 am

    53 To: “CBC New Radio2” Sub­ject: Re: Fwd: Pro­found sad­ness Cc: jennifer_mcguire@cbc.ca, ht.lacroix@cbc.ca, richard_stursberg@cbc.ca, mark_steinmetz@cbc.ca Dear Ms. Mitton, Thank you for the cour­tesy of a reply, even a boil­er­plate one. I take no excep­tion to the premise that Radio 2 should reflect Canada to Cana­di­ans, nor do I con­fine my lis­ten­ing to the nar­row con­fines of so-called ‘clas­si­cal’ music. How­ever, the enor­mously dis­rup­tive, non-consultative, poorly-justified changes in sched­ul­ing and for­mat of Radio 2 are a major dis­ser­vice not only to the loyal lis­ten­er­ship that Radio 2 had acquired over its pre­vi­ous his­tory, but also an aban­don­ment of the val­ues and integrity that dif­fer­en­ti­ated this ser­vice from every other broad­cast ser­vice in the coun­try: the thought­ful pre­sen­ta­tion of endur­ing music at times when most Cana­di­ans (includ­ing work­ing peo­ple, com­muters, and stu­dents) can access, enjoy, and learn from it. Though I wel­come the pres­ence of online music, propos­ing that we switch our alle­giance to Inter­net sources is no solu­tion at all. First, Inter­net sources are absolutely use­less to all but the most well-heeled com­muters who can afford the puni­tive costs of such mobile ser­vices. You neglect the needs of that sub­stan­tial pro­por­tion of your audi­ence that lis­tens on the radio while com­mut­ing to work or school. Sec­ond, back-to-back musi­cal selec­tions form inter­net sources, pre­sented with­out com­men­tary, inter­pre­ta­tion, con­text or expla­na­tion, does lit­tle to achieve the role that Radio Two ful­filled so admirably for decades: edu­cat­ing a will­ing audi­ence about the best music of many gen­res, at times when lis­ten­er­ship is high­est and alter­na­tive modes of pro­gram­ming deliv­ery to mobile lis­ten­ers are fewest. Third, though access to pop­u­lar gen­res and tran­sient musi­cal fads is widely avail­able through com­mer­cial broad­cast­ing nation­wide, access to qual­ity com­mer­cial free pro­gram­ming fea­tur­ing the most endur­ing and mean­ing­ful musi­cal tra­di­tions at peak times is not, clos­ing off the one truly unique avenue for musi­cal edu­ca­tion and edi­fi­ca­tion that was avail­able to every­one in our vast nation. Fourth, the dis­parate, dis­con­nected, and limited-appeal pas­tiche of pro­gram­ming that has been sub­sti­tuted for proven, pop­u­lar, excel­lent shows such as Disc Drive and Music and Com­pany will never gar­ner a cohe­sive audi­ence — the gen­res and per­form­ers are far too dis­parate, far too unproven, and — frankly — not of suf­fi­cient over­all qual­ity to ever mea­sure up to the time-tested and endur­ing excel­lence of the ‘clas­si­cal’ reper­toire, the estab­lished jazz lex­i­con, and the eclec­tic array of time-tested stan­dards and inno­v­a­tive new mate­r­ial that was so effec­tively pre­sented by Tom Allen and Jur­gen Gothe. Despite my regard for the stan­dard ‘clas­si­cal’ and endur­ing pop­u­lar reper­toires, I am not a stuffy tra­di­tion­al­ist. I have given Radio 2 a chance by tun­ing in since the changes occurred, and will con­tinue to keep an open mind and open ears. But to date, the new pro­gram­ming is frankly awful, and the pathetic spec­ta­cle of Tom Allen prepar­ing thought­ful and witty intro­duc­tions to banal four-chord, third-rate, puerile mate­r­ial — regard­less of its national ori­gin — is excru­ci­at­ing. Worse still is the train wreck that has replaced Disc Drive. I think I am rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much of the loyal Radio 2 audi­ence that has been com­pletely alien­ated by these mis­guided changes, and unless there is a rad­i­cal change in the mate­r­ial that is now being pre­sented, par­tic­u­larly in the morn­ing and evening drive-to slots, my radio will be per­ma­nently tuned to NPR or Jazz 91, egre­gious com­mer­cial inter­rup­tions and fundrais­ing notwith­stand­ing. This dis­turbs me vis­cer­ally, as a proud Cana­dian who cham­pi­oned the excel­lence of CBC Radio 2 at every oppor­tu­nity and who trum­peted the unique and won­der­ful phe­nom­e­non of excel­lent, acces­si­ble, nationally-broadcasted radio of the high­est calibre. CBC has made a grave and pro­found error. Please acknowl­edge it. I sin­cerely hope that there is enough integrity and wis­dom in other sec­tors of the cor­po­ra­tion to rec­og­nize and fix this unwar­ranted, unnec­es­sary, and mis­guided pol­icy blun­der before its con­sum­mate fail­ure is used to jus­tify fur­ther cuts to our vital (and once superb) national radio service. I look for­ward to your reply, auto­mated or oth­er­wise, with the endur­ing but prob­a­bly vain hope that it might reflect a review of the present tra­jec­tory and a rever­sion to more endur­ing and sub­stan­tive pro­gram­ming objectives. Sin­cerely, David Brown

54. David T. Brown Posted: Sep 3rd, 2008 at 6:41 am

    54 To: “CBC New Radio2” Sub­ject: Re: Fwd: Pro­found sad­ness Cc: jennifer_mcguire@cbc.ca, ht.lacroix@cbc.ca, richard_stursberg@cbc.ca, mark_steinmetz@cbc.ca Dear Ms. Mitton, Thank you for the cour­tesy of a reply, even a boil­er­plate one. I take no excep­tion to the premise that Radio 2 should reflect Canada to Cana­di­ans, nor do I con­fine my lis­ten­ing to the nar­row con­fines of so-called ‘clas­si­cal’ music. How­ever, the enor­mously dis­rup­tive, non-consultative, poorly-justified changes in sched­ul­ing and for­mat of Radio 2 are a major dis­ser­vice not only to the loyal lis­ten­er­ship that Radio 2 had acquired over its pre­vi­ous his­tory, but also an aban­don­ment of the val­ues and integrity that dif­fer­en­ti­ated this ser­vice from every other broad­cast ser­vice in the coun­try: the thought­ful pre­sen­ta­tion of endur­ing music at times when most Cana­di­ans (includ­ing work­ing peo­ple, com­muters, and stu­dents) can access, enjoy, and learn from it. Though I wel­come the pres­ence of online music, propos­ing that we switch our alle­giance to Inter­net sources is no solu­tion at all. First, Inter­net sources are absolutely use­less to all but the most well-heeled com­muters who can afford the puni­tive costs of such mobile ser­vices. You neglect the needs of that sub­stan­tial pro­por­tion of your audi­ence that lis­tens on the radio while com­mut­ing to work or school. Sec­ond, back-to-back musi­cal selec­tions form inter­net sources, pre­sented with­out com­men­tary, inter­pre­ta­tion, con­text or expla­na­tion, does lit­tle to achieve the role that Radio Two ful­filled so admirably for decades: edu­cat­ing a will­ing audi­ence about the best music of many gen­res, at times when lis­ten­er­ship is high­est and alter­na­tive modes of pro­gram­ming deliv­ery to mobile lis­ten­ers are fewest. Third, though access to pop­u­lar gen­res and tran­sient musi­cal fads is widely avail­able through com­mer­cial broad­cast­ing nation­wide, access to qual­ity com­mer­cial free pro­gram­ming fea­tur­ing the most endur­ing and mean­ing­ful musi­cal tra­di­tions at peak times is not, clos­ing off the one truly unique avenue for musi­cal edu­ca­tion and edi­fi­ca­tion that was avail­able to every­one in our vast nation. Fourth, the dis­parate, dis­con­nected, and limited-appeal pas­tiche of pro­gram­ming that has been sub­sti­tuted for proven, pop­u­lar, excel­lent shows such as Disc Drive and Music and Com­pany will never gar­ner a cohe­sive audi­ence — the gen­res and per­form­ers are far too dis­parate, far too unproven, and — frankly — not of suf­fi­cient over­all qual­ity to ever mea­sure up to the time-tested and endur­ing excel­lence of the ‘clas­si­cal’ reper­toire, the estab­lished jazz lex­i­con, and the eclec­tic array of time-tested stan­dards and inno­v­a­tive new mate­r­ial that was so effec­tively pre­sented by Tom Allen and Jur­gen Gothe. Despite my regard for the stan­dard ‘clas­si­cal’ and endur­ing pop­u­lar reper­toires, I am not a stuffy tra­di­tion­al­ist. I have given Radio 2 a chance by tun­ing in since the changes occurred, and will con­tinue to keep an open mind and open ears. But to date, the new pro­gram­ming is frankly awful, and the pathetic spec­ta­cle of Tom Allen prepar­ing thought­ful and witty intro­duc­tions to banal four-chord, third-rate, puerile mate­r­ial — regard­less of its national ori­gin — is excru­ci­at­ing. Worse still is the train wreck that has replaced Disc Drive. I think I am rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much of the loyal Radio 2 audi­ence that has been com­pletely alien­ated by these mis­guided changes, and unless there is a rad­i­cal change in the mate­r­ial that is now being pre­sented, par­tic­u­larly in the morn­ing and evening drive-to slots, my radio will be per­ma­nently tuned to NPR or Jazz 91, egre­gious com­mer­cial inter­rup­tions and fundrais­ing notwith­stand­ing. This dis­turbs me vis­cer­ally, as a proud Cana­dian who cham­pi­oned the excel­lence of CBC Radio 2 at every oppor­tu­nity and who trum­peted the unique and won­der­ful phe­nom­e­non of excel­lent, acces­si­ble, nationally-broadcasted radio of the high­est calibre. CBC has made a grave and pro­found error. Please acknowl­edge it. I sin­cerely hope that there is enough integrity and wis­dom in other sec­tors of the cor­po­ra­tion to rec­og­nize and fix this unwar­ranted, unnec­es­sary, and mis­guided pol­icy blun­der before its con­sum­mate fail­ure is used to jus­tify fur­ther cuts to our vital (and once superb) national radio service. I look for­ward to your reply, auto­mated or oth­er­wise, with the endur­ing but prob­a­bly vain hope that it might reflect a review of teh present tra­jec­tory and a rever­sion to more endur­ing and sub­stan­tive pro­gram­ming objectives. Sin­cerely, David Brown

55. Ray Catellier Posted: Sep 3rd, 2008 at 10:46 am

    55 David Brown, I share your sen­ti­ments. I am greatly sad­dened by these changes by CBC Radio II. As a “young” 34 year old lis­tener, I do not fit the demo­graphic that CBC brass thinks it’s speak­ing to with their changes. I miss Tom Allen, Eric Friesen, Jur­gen Gothe and Danielle Charbonneau’s pro­grams immensely.

56. David Drucker Posted: Sep 3rd, 2008 at 11:00 am

    56 Author Comment David, you put it bet­ter than I could. At the moment I’ve moved on and am cur­rently lis­ten­ing to KUSC via the inter­net. When I’m trav­el­ing, I’ll have to resort to pod­casts and my own collection. The Online Clas­si­cal Chan­nel that the CBC has been pro­mot­ing com­pletely misses the point of the edu­ca­tion and edi­fi­ca­tion issue you point out so well. In fact, it is so incred­i­bly depress­ing that I can’t bear to put it on (hence my move to other stream­ing sta­tions out­side of Canada). The Clas­si­cal ‘stream’ from the CBC is like all mankind has been destroyed by some nuclear holo­caust, and out of the bunkers some com­puter is mind­lessly queu­ing up Beethoven, fol­lowed by Rossini, fol­lowed by Vivaldi, with no human logic, voice or expla­na­tion other than the text of the piece on the screen. I too miss Tom Allen, and my days are just a bit less joy­ful at their begin­ning with­out his music, ‘This day in…’, ‘Cage Match’, con­tem­pla­tion of the lat­est med­ical or sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies, chats with the Web God­dess, Arts Report or any of the other bits of the world he brought to me each week­day morn­ing. I didn’t only lose the music, I lost a companion.

57. James McDonall Posted: Sep 4th, 2008 at 10:59 am

    57 Since this is a mat­ter of my tax dol­lars, I’ve Emailed to my Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment, to the Min­is­ter of Cul­ture, and to the Prime Min­is­ter to look into this trav­esty. There must be some acknowl­edg­ment of the clas­si­cal world, and to the edu­ca­tion it engen­ders, or in twenty years our cul­tural her­itage will amount to noth­ing more than the 4-beat, 3-tone teeny­bop­per “stuff” that’s com­ing out now. I encour­age every­one here opposed to the changes to do as I have — write to your Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment, to the Min­is­ter of Cul­ture, and to the Prime Min­is­ter with your con­cerns. Per­haps we can mobi­lize and get the CBC big­wigs fired for this.

58. pauline fedeski Posted: Sep 4th, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    58 poten­tial immi­grants should be informed that CBC Canada doesn’t DO the clas­sics of any sort anymore…if they want intel­li­gent speech,drama and music, they should go some­where else.

59. Jenna Posted: Sep 4th, 2008 at 9:03 pm

    59 I grew up in the Cana­dian arc­tic. My ear­li­est mem­o­ries are of squeaky snow, north­ern lights, and CBC radio. Absent TV, a radio sta­tion is a hub of cul­ture that hones lis­ten­ers into the per­sons they will become. CBC turned me into a Cana­dian. And, while my youth was radio 1, my adult­hood (thus far) has been sound-tracked by radio 2 (with the occa­sional espace musique inter­lude). The loss of ‘clas­si­cal’ music is pal­pa­ble and I mourn it as I would the loss of any other inte­gral part of my iden­tity. I endorse James McDonall’s demo­c­ra­tic urg­ings, and enjoin him (or oth­ers) to post and cir­cu­late forums for reach­ing Min­is­ter of Cul­ture et.al.

60. Vicki Wood Posted: Sep 7th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

    60 I feel a tremen­dous loss every morn­ing as I drive to work, and again on the drive home. Per­haps there are other clas­si­cal sta­tions in larger cen­tres, but not here in Hal­i­fax. So After 30 years of start­ing my day with the CBC, it will have to be an ipod or buy satel­lite radio. I find it very hard to under­stand how the CBC could stive to be and sound just like every other radio station.

61. Tim Posted: Sep 9th, 2008 at 1:09 pm

    61 Although I have not lis­tened reg­u­larly to CBC2 in the recent months, when tun­ing into the sta­tion the other day while loung­ing around the house, I was sur­prised to hear a sta­tion that sounded more like a small col­lege radio sta­tion than the high qual­ity sta­tion I once new. The pro­gram hosts sounded very much like ama­teur col­lege stu­dents with pro­gram­ming so eclec­tic and diver­si­fied that I can’t see it appeal­ing to any­one. That’s a shame. But often good things come from change. It just might not be at CBC.

62. Scott Henthorn Posted: Sep 9th, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    62 I have been adjust­ing to the changes at Radio 2, and came to this blog search­ing for some info on the new shows. For what it’s worth I will weigh in on this debate (argument). It is true that I liked know­ing the CBC was play­ing clas­si­cal music at almost any time of the day even when I was not lis­ten­ing. The prob­lem when I lis­tened was that I did not enjoy it that much. Accu­rately, I did not like most of what was played. Much of what was and is still played on the clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming is in fact Clas­si­cal music; some slightly pre-classical, and per­haps more post-classical or roman­tic. The twen­ti­eth cen­tury music tended to be the safe stuff. I remem­ber Sheila Rogers giv­ing a longish intro­duc­tion to a Schoen­berg piece a few years ago. She was talk­ing in gen­eral about his inno­va­tions and I waited eagerly for what she might play as Schoen­berg almost never gets played on the CBC. I was dis­ap­pointed when she played one of his Cabaret songs. I like these well enough but they are his Pop music really. If music edu­ca­tion is the CBC’s duty, then it has been falling down on this duty for years. It has played a largely safe reper­toire and only rarely has it pushed us out of our comfort. Per­haps Roman­tic would be a bet­ter name for the class of music we are bemoan­ing the loss of on CBC R2. This is the period of music that, at least if my mem­ory serves, has had the most play. Roman­tic also suits the gen­eral mood of all such music. It is a lov­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion of elite to elite. (To say that clas­si­cal music is not elit­ist is a fail­ure in demo­graphic obser­va­tion.) In many ways Roman­tic music is bet­ter than other kinds of music. More time­andsweatand­blood has gone into this music than you aver­age pop diddy. Years of train­ing are required to read and play music of the roman­tic kind. Such time and encour­age­ment toward learn­ing are largely a lux­ury of the elite class. The music is also roman­tic because it often harkens us back to a bygone time. True clas­si­cal music was writ­ten to flat­ter pro­foundly con­ceited power elite. For this rea­son I find it dif­fi­cult to get into. The dirty faced pro­le­tariat that resides in me won’t let me lis­ten as if this music had no con­text; as if it were pure music for its own sake. What some of you here have failed to real­ize is that the music the new for­mat is in fact elite pop. There are many artists on Drive that do not get much play any­where else. Some may say that is just as well, but a good deal of the music offered is well crafted thought­ful and 75% Cana­dian. Even 15 years ago it would have been dif­fi­cult to pull off that kind of Can con in the folk-pop-rock-hiphop-what have you genres.

63. David Drucker Posted: Sep 10th, 2008 at 11:07 pm

    63 Author Comment Scott - I can’t com­ment much on what CBC R2 plays now, because I no longer have it on. I heard a fair amount of Roman­tic era music (from, say Beethoven through Richard Strauss and early ‘safe’ Schoen­berg), but also some really fine Baroque and yes, ‘Clas­si­cal’ (i.e. Mozart and Haydn) on CBC R2. The fact that the music that I like is all called ‘Clas­si­cal’ music is, as I’ve said, a mis­nomer, akin to call­ing all crea­tures that don’t live in the sea ‘mam­mals’ or all non-deserts, ‘Salads’. I made an inter­est­ing dis­cov­ery this past week­end, when I was putting together most of what I had in my iTunes library to copy to another hard drive for some rel­a­tives who requested a copy (and it was all Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment free stuff, so they could play it). My cur­rent col­lec­tion of ‘Clas­si­cal’ music is about 14,500 pieces of music, and accord­ing to iTunes, if I played it through, non-stop, 24 hours a day, it would take 60 days before I reached the end and had to repeat some­thing. How­ever, I believe that my library is a frac­tion of the clas­si­cal music that is out there. When I get told that I’m too ‘nar­row’ for not lis­ten­ing to pop/rock/folk/hiphop-what have you, I just don’t know what to say, but I know that my taste isn’t nar­row. I just like stuff that’s more com­pli­cated, and that hap­pens to include a lot of music. They’ve just never heard of it. Now, even fewer will have.

64. Arlene Cross Posted: Sep 12th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    64 I am applalled that restor­ing CBC Radio 2 to its for­mer glory is not even an elec­tion issue. No, I am not being friv­ilous! For the sake of Cana­dian cul­ture and our her­itage, we need to stop Harper from form­ing his own radio sta­tion like some tin­pot dictator.

65. Arlene Cross Posted: Sep 12th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    65 No I hadn’t already said that. Are all these sites funded by the Con­ser­v­a­tive Party of Canada?

66. Judith Curtis Posted: Sep 13th, 2008 at 4:39 pm

    66 David Brown has said it so well, and noth­ing I could add would be more cogent or more heart­felt. Early morn­ing pro­gram­ming on Radio 2 is ‘truly awful’, and what hap­pens after 3 p.m. is ‘a train wreck’; thank you, David, for sum­ming it up. It used to be pos­si­ble to pick out CBC from the two com­mer­cial sta­tions on either side of it. Now, except for a very few hours in the sched­ule, it’s impos­si­ble to tell the dif­fer­ence, and in our house we’ve given up try­ing, given up lis­ten­ing. The ‘clas­si­cal’ pro­gram­ming from 10 to 3 is pleas­ant, but gen­er­ally pap. What still con­fronts me every day is the fact that some­thing really essen­tial has gone out of my life. It feels like a bereave­ment, and the anger and sense of loss are profound.

67. Dave Galloway Posted: Sep 15th, 2008 at 8:35 pm

    67 Dear Mr. Drucker, I think it would be inter­est­ing to frame this debate in terms of CBC 2 being an “audio museum”. We have muse­ums across the coun­try to pre­serve and pro­mote great cul­tural works — to inform, edu­cate and enter­tain. The GREAT thing about radio is that the audio for­mat cheaply allows the equiv­a­lent for sound aka music. CBC 2 should see it’s role to put great works of music ( art ) ons dis­play in a man­ner that informs, edu­cates and enter­tain. Oh gee, that’s what it was doing. Imag­ine what would hap­pen if we opened our muse­ums to have MOST of the dis­plays ‘pop’ / pop­u­lar art? We would LOSE the entire value of the museums. Dave Gal­loway

68. David Drucker Posted: Sep 15th, 2008 at 10:34 pm

    68 Author Comment Thanks for the com­ment, Mr. Galloway. I sup­pose we could equate what CBC 2 was with some of the other, ‘Phys­i­cal’ exam­ples of the Arts in our lives, but I guess I’m resis­tant against the idea of just show­cas­ing great works of the past. There are new works of Clas­si­cal Music being writ­ten today, and some very fine works are by liv­ing Cana­dian Com­posers (I’ve met some of them here in Van­cou­ver). A ‘Museum’ of old music might play right into the hands of those who say that this stuff is old, out-of-date and no longer rel­e­vant to Soci­ety today. Of course, those of us who know some of the reper­tory also know that it’s exactly the oppo­site; there are pas­sages from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring that are just as bru­tal and star­tling as explo­sions on the tele­vi­sion from sui­cide bombers in Kan­da­har and Bagh­dad. The first move­ment of Vaughn Williams’ Fourth Sym­phony car­ries just as much anguish in reac­tion to mod­ern con­flict today as it did in the midst of World War II. Even the less obvi­ous exam­ples (I’m think­ing per­haps of the late piano sonatas of Beethoven)of works writ­ten in other cen­turies that are ‘time­less’ and still just as fresh in terms of insights for life today in that they deal with life, death, the pas­sage of time, mem­ory and the jour­neys that life brings. I guess what I’m say­ing is that yes, it is a Museum, but one in which the num­ber of exhibits is con­stantly grow­ing, and yes, offers a respite from the crass com­mer­cial­ism and sim­plis­tic mes­sag­ing and con­struc­tion of mod­ern Pop music.

69. David Drucker Posted: Sep 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    69 Author Comment For Dorothy Watts: I too am in a state of bereave­ment over CBC Radio 2. I invited Cather­ine, Eric, Jur­gen, Peter and Howard into my home week after week. I had tea with them and they enter­tained me, enlight­ened me and uplifted me. I feel as if a good friend had left for good and slammed the door behind her. It’s not just about play­ing music. It’s about cre­at­ing inti­macy, about intel­li­gent com­men­tary and about broad­en­ing scope. More than any­thing, I miss Eric Friesen who pro­vided a delight­ful mix of clas­sic clas­si­cal and clas­sic pop in a way that fed the heart and the head. It sad­dens me to real­ize that the over 50 demo­graphic is con­sid­ered entirely expendable.

70. Shirlee Mays Posted: Sep 18th, 2008 at 9:04 pm

    70 I am so dis­gusted at the aban­don­ment of truly good music and my old “friends” Jur­gen and Shel­ley and oth­ers that I, too, am not lis­ten­ing to this sta­tion any more. How do the pow­ers that be dare to uni­lat­er­ally change a for­mat which has been a part of this coun­try for so many years. I am a pro­fes­sional vio­lin­ist who moved here from the U.S. enough years ago to remem­ber Bob Kerr and when I trav­eled on tours I lis­tened to this sta­tion all over Canada and also when­ever I was in the north­ern U.S. Shame on all who are respon­si­ble for this devo­lu­tion of my favorite music station.

71. roger d white Posted: Sep 19th, 2008 at 5:55 am

    71 Typ­i­cal cana­dian logic: take a one of a kind ‘GREAT’ sta­tion, that had evolved over 25 years into a bril­liant one and turn it into one that is so much like a thou­sand oth­ers. Do they learn noth­ing from his­tory? you can’t ram stuff (Cana­dian con­tent) down people’s throat and get them to like it,quite the reverse happens,it’s just not good enough. There are enough of us on this side of the speaker to deserve a decent ‘clas­si­cal’ sta­tion like pre stu­dio sparks radio 2. This move ranks with the scrap­ping of the Arrow. Grow up! Roger White

72. Ray Clancy Posted: Sep 23rd, 2008 at 4:43 am

    72 Radio 2 I per­son­ally have never lis­tened to that program,so Im not miss­ing anything.However,I have been get­ting my clas­si­cal music fix for over 20 years from WCPE.They have been broad­cast­ing this type of music for over 30 years.I’m sur­prised that nobody has picked up on this sta­tion and writ­ten about it because theres lots of peo­ple out there who would love to have a good reli­able clas­si­cal music sta­tion to lis­ten to.WCPE 89.7 FM is located in Wake Forest,North Car­olina and is avail­able 24/7 com­mer­cial free,totally lis­tener supported.I first got it on C-band satel­lite on the Galaxy 5 satel­lite. They have dis­con­tin­ued this feed and is now on AMC 1 at 103.0 W KU band.This is even bet­ter and can be received with a cheap FTA satel­lite receiver and an 18″ dish,but even bet­ter, its stream­ing free on the internet.I get it both ways and Im lis­ten­ing to it as I type. Check it out at” theclassicalstation.org ” , they will be glad to help you and maybe you can become a member.Its the best.

73. Tony Martinez Posted: Sep 30th, 2008 at 9:19 am

    73 I have tried the new CBC Radio 2 and I just can’t lis­ten to it, much as I enjoyed Tom Allen’s sub­tle humour before. I feel as if the soul of the coun­try is being destroyed. Before we could turn to CBC 2 on our drive to and from work, and feel soothed. I invari­ably drove slower and was hap­pier. Clas­si­cal means that it has stood the test of time. Many fads come and go and only a few remain, whether or not they were thought to be pop­u­lar at the time. It is wrong to have removed clas­si­cal music from the lives of Cana­di­ans. In my area of SW Ontario there are now no clas­si­cal sta­tions on the radio. I am despon­dent, frus­trated, dis­ap­pointed and feel pow­er­less to do any­thing about it. This is so un-Canadian yet the peo­ple who took this deci­sion clearly have their own agenda and care not. I am now lis­ten­ing to ABC Clas­sic FM from Aus­tralia. Are we so poor in spirit that we will need to turn to other nations for our cul­tural sustenance?

74. David Drucker Posted: Sep 30th, 2008 at 11:55 am

    74 Author Comment I absolutely agree, Tony. The loss of ter­res­trial clas­si­cal radio in our area is a big gap­ing hole in our cul­tural life. Isn’t it inter­est­ing that now Harper is in the news about cut­ting Arts fund­ing and say­ing that Arts fund­ing isn’t for ‘Ordi­nary’ cit­i­zens? In a sim­i­lar trend to cli­mate change, one could say that CBC2 was per­haps the first extinc­tion in the com­ing Cli­mac­tic Dis­as­ter for the Arts in Canada.

75. Ray Clancy Posted: Oct 6th, 2008 at 5:02 pm

    75 IN my note re WCPE I should have noted that this sta­tion would not be avail­able on a car radio here in Ontario,But stream­ing free on the inter­net when you are out of the car is a good way to go.I would expect that for $100.00 or less a good small dish satel­lite hookup in your back yard would be great.Works for me and has for at least 20 years

76. Margo Hearne Posted: Oct 16th, 2008 at 4:43 pm

    76 I’m ter­ri­bly dis­ap­pointed with the new II. I worked for years to get it here in this remote cor­ner of Canada only to have all that energy dis­ap­pear. It’s not enjoy­able, and while some clas­si­cal is thrown in in mid­day, my lis­ten­ing hours were always morn­ing and after­noon, now its rap and pop. I feel bit­ter about sup­port­ing and request­ing access to it for so many years. Would it have been too much for CBC to perhaps…ask the lis­ten­ers if we wanted a change?…So impolite.

77. Tracey Posted: Oct 17th, 2008 at 11:25 am

    77 I, too, am in mourn­ing over the loss of the music I loved to hear. Like many oth­ers who have com­mented here, not a day goes by that I don’t notice or think about that loss. Some­thing essen­tial is gone, and it has had a sur­pris­ingly pro­found effect on my qual­ity of life. I think of Sept 2nd as ‘the day the music died’. Like count­less oth­ers, I am unable to lis­ten at work, so it is early morn­ing and late after­noon when I can lis­ten to the radio and the music on CBC is now so much.…garbage. It seems to con­sist of not very com­pelling or inter­est­ing folk, coun­try twang (please, don’t we have more than enough of that else­where?) obscure, odd and not very good, or plain old bad cov­ers. Who puts together a playlist like that? I hate it! I am still in shock that the CBC could actu­ally do what they did, in light of all the neg­a­tive feed­back, and the alien­ation of their very loyal fan base.

78. Judy Jackson Posted: Oct 26th, 2008 at 10:06 pm

    78 I am like all the above, dev­as­tated with the ‘loss’ of CBC2 for me because of the new pro­gram­ming. In other words ‘dumb­ing down’. I feel so help­less with no one to turn to who can or will wish to have it restored. I was check­ing to find some­one to inform Seat­tle King FM that I was turn­ing back to that sta­tion in des­per­a­tion but I will paste what I found about it also. Sim­i­lar to what we are deal­ing with. HOW SAD! adv Mon­day, August 30, 2004 — Page updated at 09:29 A.M. Radio KING-FM strikes a sour note for some By Melinda Bar­green Seat­tle Times music critic Host George Shangrow was fired in December. KING-FM changes prompt big response Classical-music audi­ences are not always enam­ored of change. But when recent changes at Clas­sic KING-FM (98.1), one of the nation’s top clas­si­cal sta­tions, pro­voke more than 70 angry e-mails to the news­pa­per, you can be fairly sure that change has sparked unusual outrage. The non­re­newal of radio host George Shangrow’s con­tract last Decem­ber was the first man­i­fes­ta­tion of new direc­tions at the sta­tion, where 16-year vet­eran Shangrow’s “Live, By George” show had long been a pop­u­lar forum for bring­ing live local per­for­mances to the lis­ten­ing audience. Last month, the sta­tion announced the depar­ture of another long­time host, Tom Dahlstrom, who had been at KING-FM for more than 17 years. The move was described as a “res­ig­na­tion” by KING’s press release but char­ac­ter­ized as a fir­ing by Shangrow; Dahlstrom declined to com­ment, cit­ing the terms of his depar­ture. His exit cre­ated a wave of dis­plea­sure in e-mails and let­ters, most of whose sub­text was: “What is going on at KING-FM?” Host Tom Dahlstrom left KING-FM last month. “First you fire George Shangrow, a qual­ity evening host with an infec­tious love and solid knowl­edge of clas­si­cal music … ” wrote lis­tener Chris Blanchett in an e-mail to KING man­age­ment, with a copy to The Seat­tle Times. “Now you fire Tom Dahlstrom, the most genially engag­ing radio per­son­al­ity on Seat­tle air­waves. And this is part of a strat­egy to expand your audi­ence? Is step one of this master-plan to piss-off your exist­ing audi­ence? Because that is exactly what you are doing.” Blanchett has co-founded what he calls “a grass-roots orga­ni­za­tion called SAVE KING-FM,” (e-mail savekingfm@yahoo.com) with the goal of get­ting Dahlstrom and Shangrow rein­stated at the sta­tion. About 100 KING-FM fans have joined the orga­ni­za­tion thus far, Blanchett says. So what, indeed, is going on? Pro­gram direc­tor Bob Gold­farb, who took over from long­time pre­de­ces­sor Peter New­man upon Newman’s retire­ment last sum­mer, says the changes amount to only “a few dif­fer­ences … part of a con­scious effort to keep the sta­tion as vital and indis­pens­able as it has always been.” A 30-year vet­eran of classical-music radio who has held posts at many sta­tions, Gold­farb was hired by New­man in May 2002 as a con­sul­tant for KING-FM. What is less well-known is that Gold­farb orig­i­nally hired New­man. In the sum­mer of 1977, Gold­farb was at KING-FM for a short period as interim pro­gram direc­tor, and at that time he hired New­man for the per­ma­nent post. Gold­farb says the main shift at KING-FM has been a broad­en­ing of pro­gram­ming that includes more vari­ety. He won’t com­ment on the deci­sion to ter­mi­nate Dahlstrom’s or Shangrow’s employ­ment at the sta­tion and says of the result­ing e-mails and let­ters, “It’s great to know that KING-FM is so impor­tant to so many people. “I’m always sad when peo­ple are unhappy with change,” Gold­farb con­tin­ues. “We don’t want to lose old friends. That is always a cause for concern.” But Gold­farb says there is less pub­lic unhap­pi­ness, not more, about what KING-FM is doing. He points to an annual research study, con­ducted for the past three years by the research firm of FMR Asso­ciates in Tuc­son, Ariz. The firm annu­ally phones Seattle-area res­i­dents, screen­ing them to dis­cover whether respon­dents are part of KING’s “actual or poten­tial” audi­ence. Last year, 48 per­cent of respon­dents reported feel­ing “more sat­is­fied” with KING-FM than the pre­vi­ous year. In 2004, that fig­ure rose to 62 per­cent. (The sur­vey was con­ducted in July, after Shangrow’s depar­ture but before Dahlstrom’s.) “Anec­do­tal infor­ma­tion can be sug­ges­tive,” says Gold­farb of those who have con­tacted the sta­tion, and The Times, to com­plain. “But it’s good to get a fix on sta­tis­ti­cal responses.” The station’s rat­ings, how­ever, do not reg­is­ter a jump in approval. The most recent Arbi­tron rat­ings period yielded a 2.6 per­cent share of the total radio lis­ten­ers older than 12, down slightly from last year’s 2.9 (the 2002 fig­ure for the same period was 2.7). Aver­age time spent lis­ten­ing was up in 2004: 8 hours, 15 min­utes per week, up from 2003’s 6 hours, 30 min­utes per week. Addi­tion­ally, the sta­tion has been a pio­neer in Inter­net stream­ing, the process by which lis­ten­ers around the world can hear live pro­gram­ming over their com­put­ers by vis­it­ing the Web site (www.king.org). KING-FM now has between 50,000 and 60,000 con­nec­tions to its Win­dows Media Player Web­stream every week, and another 30,000 con­nec­tions to its RealPlayer stream. The typ­i­cal length of lis­ten­ing is 60–80 min­utes on the Win­dows stream, and more than 90 min­utes on Real Audio, accord­ing to the station’s Bryan Lowe. “Our music has evolved in a direc­tion that is clearly pleas­ing to lis­ten­ers,” Gold­farb says. “I think we play more great music now, not music that just sounds pleas­ant. There is more early music, more choral music, more themed music — for exam­ple, all the Beethoven piano sonatas. We’re also aug­ment­ing the pro­gram­ming with infor­ma­tion fea­tures; Brad Eaton has an arts news story every morn­ing. We’ve added the BBC News a year ago, and peo­ple like it. “What about the hosts? We have a ter­rific team. I have con­fi­dence in every­one who’s here now. No more depar­tures are planned.” Shangrow said Dahlstrom was fired because he made a few last-minute changes to pro­gram­ming in order to com­mem­o­rate his­tor­i­cal events. Does Gold­farb really insist on strict con­trol over every­thing that is aired? “It’s pretty stan­dard in radio,” replies Gold­farb, “for hosts to con­cen­trate on pre­sent­ing music. The music direc­tor chooses all the music. The host con­sults with the music direc­tor if a change is wanted. Music is bet­ter cho­sen if the flow is care­fully con­sid­ered; spon­tane­ity can result in choices that are not as well thought through. We are look­ing for cer­tain bal­ances in vari­ety and contrast.” George Shangrow, not sur­pris­ingly, doesn’t agree. “I think that [Goldfarb’s] research is ridicu­lous,” wrote Shangrow in a recent e-mail. “The main thing he went after me for was a ‘polka band’ on a live Okto­ber­fest show from KPC [Kirk­land Per­for­mance Cen­ter]. It was a seven-minute seg­ment and the sta­tion received seven phone calls say­ing how much they liked the music and the segment. “I remem­ber talk­ing with Gold­farb about the fact that in busi­ness, peo­ple really only phone when they are unhappy, and that get­ting seven lis­tener calls that were very happy about a seg­ment that lasted only seven min­utes was surely an indi­ca­tion that peo­ple were lis­ten­ing, inter­ested and involved. He informed me that that was incor­rect, and that only the ‘con­trolled data’ of Arbi­tron and pro­fes­sion­ally con­ducted sur­veys could be counted on to tell what the pub­lic was thinking.” The sta­tion has begun issu­ing press releases about upcom­ing con­tent, as it did with the Aug. 23–27 focus on “Edu­cat­ing Tomorrow’s Audi­ences,” air­ing 7 p.m. con­ver­sa­tions with such music-education fig­ures as Mar­cus Tsu­takawa (Garfield High School Orches­tra and Seat­tle Youth Sym­phony Junior Sym­phony), Perry Lorenzo (Seat­tle Opera edu­ca­tion direc­tor), Doug Fulling­ton (Tudor Choir con­duc­tor, Pacific North­west Bal­let his­to­rian), Patri­cia Costa-Kim (Seat­tle Sym­phony edu­ca­tion direc­tor) and Gre­gory Van­cil (Seat­tle Bach Choir conductor). Peter Don­nelly, a KING-FM board mem­ber and pres­i­dent of Arts­Fund (one of three recip­i­ent orga­ni­za­tions of KING-FM’s pro­ceeds), declined to com­ment on per­son­nel changes at the sta­tion or on KING-FM’s new direc­tion. Don­nelly observed, “Orga­ni­za­tions need to be peri­od­i­cally rethought and rede­fined.” In 1992, KING-FM own­ers Priscilla Bul­litt Collins and Har­riet Bul­litt decided to put KING-FM under the con­trol of a newly cre­ated com­pany, Clas­sic Radio, which is the present licensee of KING-FM. In turn, the Bul­litt sis­ters donated their shares in that for-profit com­pany to Beethoven, a non­profit cor­po­ra­tion. Beethoven dis­trib­utes the station’s income to the Seat­tle Sym­phony, Seat­tle Opera and ArtsFund.

79. David Drucker Posted: Oct 26th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    79 Author Comment Judy - Thanks for the update. Sad to see that good Clas­si­cal Music pro­gram­ming as well as hosts are becom­ing an endan­gered species on both sides of the Canada/US bor­der, at least on this coast. My brother fre­quently had KING-FM on when we visit him in Seat­tle (we can’t bring it in here, except of course through the Internet).

80. Ron Teljeur Posted: Oct 31st, 2008 at 10:53 am

    80 I learned to appre­ci­ate “clas­si­cal” music while chan­nel surf­ing about 18 years ago. I hit the CBC dur­ing a Yur­gen (sp?) Gothe pro­gram and felt instantly refreshed and relaxed. I lis­ten to A LOT of dif­fer­ent music and my 300 disc cd player on ran­dom play gets very inter­est­ing (metal­lica to vivaldi to soggy bot­tom boys). Radio 2 was my guar­an­teed stress relief after some of life’s try­ing moments. So to find that there is now just another soft schlock radio sta­tion out there really pissed me off!

81. Margo Hearne Posted: Nov 12th, 2008 at 9:37 pm

    81 ‘CBC Radio 2 — every­where music takes you’ is such a mean­ing­less piece of dri­vel that if I hear it one more time, I shall throw my radio out the win­dow. Rap or light pop doesn’t take me any­where except to the ‘off’ switch on CBC radio 2. Still depressed about the changes. Is it all over? Isn’t there any­thing more we can do?

82. James Pottt Posted: Dec 16th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    82 The one thing that both­ers me most in all this is not the need for change, but the change for the gut­ter. You may call me snob­bish or what­ever but I can­not for the life of me see how any­one with only the least bit of taste could pos­si­bly like the kind of musak stuff that now comes through this sta­tion in the morn­ing from 6 till 9 and and then later on in the after­noon till 6 o’clock. Maybe we should be thank­ful for small favours but it seems that “Tonic” has cho­sen the smarter route of slowly migrat­ing back to the more jazzy feel. Let’s hope and pray that the foul breath of this McGuire twit doesn’t get it all smelly again. I only wish Tom Allen would get his act together. Seems like he talks like there is not tomor­row, try­ing to put off the next assault on his sense of taste as long as pos­si­ble. It really puz­zles me who this stuff is meant for. Our kids (from 20 and up) cer­tainly can’t stand it. Too much all over the place. It is now offi­cially called Crappy 2.

83. Michael Kalman Posted: Dec 17th, 2008 at 9:10 am

    83 I do try. I tune in now and again, and shortly there­after tune out enraged. I’m pos­i­tive that this rad­i­cal shift in pro­gram­ming is Stephen Harper’s path to jus­ti­fy­ing shut­ting it down: If nobody is lis­ten­ing why shouldn’t we close up shop or pri­va­tize it? Sadly, nobody is lis­ten­ing and this bully will get his way. I despise what has hap­pened. It breaks my heart.

84. Lorica Posted: Jan 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    84 I am not opposed to change if it sticks to the for­mat lis­ten­ers grew fond of and remained loyal 23 yrs. how­ever in regards to the “2“format for me I find the “2” annoy­ing points are Rich Terfy and Tom Allen and their prone to log­or­rhea while they are on their air spot is frus­trat­ing and I am too sad for the death of cbc. To quote’ “and the good ol’ years”

85. Peter Posted: Jan 31st, 2009 at 11:22 am

    85 I miss the old CBC radio 2 so much! I loved it when you had clas­si­cal music from 6am to 6pm, with the only excep­tions being Disc Drive which had a mix, as well as the very occa­sional jazz piece on Eric Friesen’s show. The final incar­na­tion of what I and oth­ers call “the old Radio Two” had jazz and more urban sounds from 6 to 8. I didn’t mind that change at all. But when they dealt this grand old insti­tu­tion its final blow and reduced the clas­si­cal por­tion to 5 hours (from 10 to 3) they really did a great dis­ser­vice to Cana­dian culture. I used to love the clas­si­cal music in the morn­ing with Tom Allen. Nowa­days, they don’t play one note of clas­si­cal until 10am. By then I have been up for hours and I am not likely to tune in. I don’t care for the host of the new (and only) clas­si­cal show on week­days, and I don’t care for the pro­gram­ming of that show either.

86. Peggy Walt Posted: Feb 12th, 2009 at 5:19 am

    86 Radio 2 nowa­days is so sad. I won­der if all the “new” lis­ten­ers have tuned in in droves and are lov­ing it? for me it’s really annoy­ing every time I have to turn it off because of bad music, music that doesn’t inter­est me or some silly com­ments by hosts who aren’t very skilled. then I long for the good old days when it played in my home and office all day.

87. Michael Kalman Posted: Feb 15th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

    87 From FRIENDS of Cana­dian Broad­cast­ing website - “Her­itage Min­is­ter James Moore con­firmed yes­ter­day that his gov­ern­ment would sup­port plac­ing ads on CBC Radio One and Two. Respond­ing to a ques­tion from Char­lie Angus, the NDP Her­itage Critic, Moore con­firmed a Con­ser­v­a­tive pol­icy posi­tion that Stephen Harper has kept under wraps since 2004. — This con­firms our long-standing and well-founded sus­pi­cions! The future of commercial-free CBC Radio is now on the line. All of us who care about Cana­dian pub­lic broad­cast­ing need to act together, force­fully, now.”

88. Chris Thomas Slater Posted: Mar 12th, 2009 at 10:10 pm

    88 What­ever the rea­sons for the changes in musi­cal pro­gram­ing at cbc, they are repul­sive, nau­se­at­ing and clearly move cbc pro­gram­ing sharply to the direc­tion of the refuse pile of pop/elevator music. “Clas­si­cal”, as in that which is estab­lished, respectable, and stuffy, is what some musi­cal morons used, in the past, to describe cbc. Clearly to reg­u­lar cbc lis­ten­ers this was not the case. Cbc used to be one of the best in inno­v­a­tive, cre­ative and, van­guard, audio art. There was very lit­tle talk and lots of inspir­ing sounds. Now we are hear­ing, too often, “every­where music takes you” as a sick­en­ing reminder that cbc is going nowhere except the music wastepile. If bud­get cuts have hap­pened that is no rea­son to degrade the qual­ity of pro­gram­ing. Many low bud­get, such as uni­ver­sity radio sta­tions, are now doing bet­ter pro­gram­ing that cbc radio. Chris Slater — Vancouver

89. Rob Kneeland Posted: Mar 30th, 2009 at 4:08 am

    89 I can­not add more to what has already been said except, when asked what I was pas­sion­ate about, I USED to say, pub­lic radio and the CBC. Judg­ing from the com­ments here, I was not the only one. Pity no one in the gov­ern­ment cares. Worse, I don’t know where to go to for a replace­ment. There is some talk about Aus­tralian Pub­lic Radio online. Yes, we can all put our iPods on shuf­fle, but it is not the same thing. Oh, god, Tom is play­ing more Ser­rena Ryder as I write just to rub salt in my wounds!!!

90. Marion Corless Posted: Apr 29th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    90 To all. Today I was phoned by “the friends of CBC”. I am afraid I did not give her an oppor­tu­nity to give me her mes­sage. I had to tell her how sad I am with the new pro­gram­ming. I told her that I started to lis­ten to CBC when I was 7. now 80 years later I would love to con­tinue . I find that the good gram­mer and excel­lent dic­tion have almost com­pletely dis­ap­peared. There still are a few left like Cather­ine Dun­can, Bill Richard­son ‚Peter T and oth­ers who have been allowed to stay,who have pleas­ing voices. I do hear “take a lis­ten” or “Hey you” on other replaced pro­grams. Why do the pow­ers that be on the “new” radio 2 feel that bad gram­mer, using verbs as nouns, adjec­tives in place of adverbs are Cana­dian?. We have been blam­ing the teach­ers for our chil­drens igno­rance of gram­mer. May I remind the new pro­gram­mers that it is not only the mun­dane music that jars for­mer lis­ten­ers ears. CBC has always been a leader and proudly Canadian,what has hap­pened ? Cer­tainly we need change, but please dont replace excel­lent pro­gram­ming, by copy­ing the com­mer­cial radio, let them con­tinue with theirs and let the CBC be once again known as a real leader, not a copier. I still lis­ten every day, some­days I enjoy and other tines I am sad.. Please hear my plea

91. Fred Posted: Jun 8th, 2009 at 10:26 am

    91 I used to lis­ten to CBC 2 for hours at a time. Now, I lis­ten to it for fif­teen sec­onds a day–the time it takes me to get up and turn off my alarm, and turn off what­ever awful music is playing. Today I was hook­ing up new speak­ers and put on Tempo to see if I had con­fig­ured them cor­rectly. Tempo was ter­ri­ble! Vac­u­ous, inane com­ments by Julie Nes­ral­lah (mostly about her­self, nat­u­rally) made me despair–what hap­pened to intel­li­gent musi­cal com­men­tary? Every­thing on Radio 2 has been dumbed down, includ­ing Sat­ur­day After­noon at the Opera. I’ve taken to mut­ing Bill Richardson’s com­ments and intro­duc­tions to the operas he “hosts” because his com­ments and per­son­al­ity are so irri­tat­ing. Hav­ing him suc­ceed Howard Dyck is like hav­ing Don Cherry take over from Peter Mansbridge.