The Death of CBC Radio 2

I had written a bit about my shock and sadness about the awful changes planned for CBC2, including getting rid of most of its classical music programming, including one of the best parts of getting up in the morning (Music and Company with Tom Allen). I could rant and rave all I want, but Russell Smith, of the Globe and Mail (whose article was reposted by the site ‘Friends of Canadian Broadcasting‘) says it better than I ever could. The Globe and Mail doesn’t allow people to read the entire article any more without being a subscriber. Since I don’t know how long his article will remain on the other site, I’m going to do take the somewhat unorthodox action and repost it here in total as well, as I think it should be read by many (although the people who I wish would read it the most are the current clueless management of the CBC):

No classical? Then kill Radio 2 and get it over with by Russell Smith
March 13, 2008

I am almost too depressed about the planned “overhaul” of CBC’s Radio 2 to even write about it. What’s the point? We’ve all seen the writing on the wall for some time now, and resistance is futile: The CBC no longer feels there is any point to devoting an entire radio station to the more musically and intellectually complex style of music colloquially, though entirely inappropriately, known as “classical” (more on that tendentious terminology in a moment), because, according to its mysterious studies, no one is interested in that any more.

So, come September, there will only be “classical” music (God, I hate that term!) at midday on weekdays; the rest of the air time will be taken up with light pop and jazz. Yes, that’s right, explicitly light: In an interview with The Globe and Mail last week, the executive director of radio explained that the station will be playing even more Joni Mitchell and Diana Krall. The executives have also proudly expressed their interest in playing more middle-of-the-road pop such as Feist and Serena Ryder. Yes, they are proud, proud to be brave purveyors of Serena Ryder and Diana Krall, the very best culture our country has to offer.

In other words, Radio 2 will become essentially an easy-listening station. It will play, aside from four hours a day when everybody is at work, the kind of verse-chorus-verse popular music that is likely to win awards at industry-created ceremonies - the Junos, the Grammys, the Smushies, the Great Mall Music Prize.

Sometimes there will be jazz; I’m guessing it will continue to be the Holiday Inn lounge jazz they already so adore. It’s also pretty safe to say there will be no underground pop music, nothing noisy or electronic - unless they keep Laurie Brown’s The Signal (surely they must, they must at least keep The Signal?) - and of course that will be only late at night so it doesn’t disturb the imagined audience, an audience of the mousiest, nicest, middlest of middle Canadians.

Notice how the CBC has already won half the public-relations battle through its choice of language. It is wise, if it wants to dismiss exciting and abstract music that doesn’t have a 4/4 beat, to call such music “classical.” That word instantly relegates it to the past. “Classical” connotes that which is established, respected, stuffy - another word for “old favourites.”

“Classical” is wholly inadequate in describing an intellectual tradition that has always thrived on innovation, on radical new interpretations, on defiance of previous traditions, indeed, of iconoclasm. When Arthur Honegger sat down to write Pacific 231, when Olivier Messiaen began The Quartet for the End of Time, when Edgard Varèse ordered his orchestra to play along to tape recordings from sawmills, do you think they wanted to write something “classical?”

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.

I assume, for example, that the point of having a government-funded radio station is not to garner the largest possible audience; if that were the goal, and that goal were attained, such a station would be commercially viable and no longer in need of government support. I also assume that art and intellectual inquiry can sometimes be challenging and demanding of intense concentration, and that they are naturally not always going to attract lucrative audiences, and that this does not make them any less valuable, which is why governments in enlightened countries support them and provide access to them.

I guess I assume, too, something even more fundamental and even more fundamentally unpopular, which is that not all art is of equal value. Art that does not tend to follow strict generic conventions (such as, for example, the verse-chorus-verse structure of 90 per cent of pop music) is deserving of extra attention. Art unbound by formula tends to indicate the area where the best, the most original talents are working.

And this is not, I assure you, about the past; it is about the future. 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.

And furthermore, a radio station that is indistinguishable from commercial stations - other than by its fanatical niceness - will have no reason to receive government support. Why not just shut it down already?

© Globe and Mail

Wow.

I think he really nails it in those last few paragraphs. I take a little solace in that Russell Smith is not the only person who is saying that CBC Radio 2 should be put out of its misery, having lost one of the main reasons for its existence.  Apparently, the fastest growing group on Facebook is Save Classical Music on the CBC, with over 5,000 members this week. I’m contemplating some letters to my MP and other officials, but it’s going to be an uphill battle to save CBC 2, and I also have to keep in mind that I may have to simply adapt.

Trying Not to Do Anything Rash

I don’t usually write much about my own health, mostly because I usually think that it’s a boring subject. Not this past weekend, though. Last Saturday, the first day of the first weekend I’d had to myself in 2 weeks, I was sitting right where I am right now, at my computer. I was itching a little on my hands after I had just washed them. I looked down and the sight that I saw was not pleasant. My arms had what I thought were hives; nasty red bumps, the kind you get from an allergic reaction. It got worse with each hour. Now, a day later, from my head to my toes and everywhere in between, I’m covered with an angry red rash, and it itches like crazy. I could barely sleep Saturday or last night from the itching (it seemed to move around, like a forest fire).

The culprit, it turns out, was penicillin (or rather, Amoxicillin, in the same family of antibiotics) The Friday before last week I made a follow-up visit to my dentist, after root canal work the preceding Monday. I didn’t write about it here because aside from the discomfort, it wasn’t all that notable. In order to head off a possible abscess,  I’d been taking 3 Amoxicillin a day for about a week. All of the sudden, on day 10, this rash hits.

The clinic was closed on Sunday, but this morning I went in and saw a doctor, who prescribed some antihistamine and Cortisone lotion. Hopefully in a few days I should be better. In the meantime, I look like a disaster (not being able to shower or shave for 3 days doesn’t help either). No photos are necessary, believe me.

I’m now wondering if I’m going to have to wear a Medicalert Bracelet. Being allergic to a raft of foods like my friend Matt would be one thing, but being allergic to Penicillin seems a bit scarier, even though these days the ‘wonder drugs’ are less effective on all of these new super-germs than they used to be. At least this new discovery is not something that will bother me day-to-day (I hope).  As I try to keep from scratching and releasing new histamines into my bloodstream, I also try to think of that.

Pam’s Photos, March Flowers and Disturbing Radio News

After many hours culling through the over 1,000 photos that she took on her trip to Antarctica, Pam has put together just under 200 of them in a slide show on Flickr. Many are very impressive, and she went to some pains to annotate them as well. If you want to read the descriptions, you can access the individual photos as well. I’m glad that she can share her trip with so many friends and family.

Spring has Sprung Forward
One of the things I do love about the climate here is the fact that our winters, while being plenty wet, dark and dreary, are not very long. During our walk last weekend, Pam and I spied many clusters of crocuses, and I expect that we’ll be seeing daffodils and tulips either this week or next. This is very different from the winters I remember in Boston, which seemed to stretch on and on. Groundhog Day, as Garrison Keillor used to say about Minnesota’s Winter, was for us, ’some sort of cruel joke’.

This weekend is also the starting gun that seems to set off a rush toward Spring, with the switch to Daylight Savings time (which the Province suggests might be more aptly called ‘Daylight-Saving Time’, following the pattern of ‘man-eating’ tiger or ‘mind-expanding book’). At any rate, I’ll now leave work in full sun, and we’ll be getting up before dawn for just a little while longer.

CBC Radio Two to Change Programming Again?
I’ve learned that in September, CBC Radio 2 will once again be changing their programming, and unfortunately for people like me, it will no longer include Classical music before 9AM, and will no longer have any Classical music after 3PM. As they slowly whittle away at the programming that I would like to listen to, I’m going to be eventually forced to turn to the Internet (and, if I take the plunge, XM Satellite radio) for music that’s not in my collection (and my collection is huge!). That’s a shame, since I’ve found that Tom Allen’s wonderful ‘Music and Company’ to be the only morning radio show that has consistently made my day better. I fear I will be writing him a fan letter as they cancel his program in September.

It was bad enough when the CBC banned news longer than 3 minutes from Radio 2. Now they are going to be banning Classical programming from much of their schedule. Not much left for me to listen to, I guess. I keep telling myself that with the growth of the Internet to wireless devices, it won’t be long before the WiMax (or other) cloud will make standard analog radio a quaint memory. Still, I foresee a bumpy road before small constituencies like the one I’m a member of are squeezed off the dial, at least until we find our new broadcast medium. Too bad you blew it, CBC.

Alaskan King Crab at Sun Sui Wah

It’s that time of year again, when the Alaskan King Crab turns up at the Sun Sui Wah Restaurant on Main Street. It’s a combination of spectacle and cuisine that only lasts for a few weeks. This year, we got together with a bunch of friends and had one.

I got my turn holding him. I have to admit that for a moment it did remind me of one of the creatures from Alien. I always wonder who was the first person to try eating what looks like an enormous insect. Never mind, as you can see, all’s well that ends well (in our stomachs, that is):

Thanks to Irma Cho for these fun photos.

Remembering Leonard Rosenman, Film and Concert Composer

James Dean was already dead before I was born, but nevertheless, I couldn’t help but marvel at his performances in the movies Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. In fact, I admit it: I’m a big James Dean fan, even if there are only 3 movies. I vividly remember seeing those movies when I was a teenager at a repertory cinema (now there’s something that has gone away, a victim of DVD rentals and plasma screens), with Cynthia Nikitin, a friend who I still keep in touch with and is hopefully going to be visiting us here in Vancouver later this spring.

Dean’s movies, especially East of Eden, made a great impact on me. The emotions and moods that made up Cal’s world didn’t seem all that far from my own adolescent thoughts and feelings. I also remember that I immediately loved the soundtrack, which was as rich and complicated as the film’s plot, direction and acting, filled with angst and conflict. In that incredible scene where Cal’s father rejects his gift (money to pay him back what he’d lost in his refrigerated vegetable debacle — it’s no good because it was an ill-gotten gain from the war economy), I remember how Elia Kazan’s camera shifted to a strange tilt (mirroring the off-centre relationship between Cal and his father). I also remembered the brutal, stabbing music accompanying the trip that Cal takes his brother Aron to see his mother (now a Madame at a brothel in Salinas instead of being dead, as he had been told), an act of desperation and lashing out at his father and brother. It’s strong, angular, and very dissonant music, sounding far more like the works of Arnold Schoenberg than Hollywood.

There’s a reason that East of Eden’s music is closer to The Second Viennese School than Sunset Boulevard: the composer of the score was Dean’s piano teacher, New York roommate and friend Leonard Rosenman. Rosenman died yesterday at the age of 83.

When Dean got his first acting break, he introduced Elia Kazan to Rosenman, and that’s how Rosenman got his first break as a film composer. He had actually already studied with Schoenberg, and also with the Italian composer, Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood on a fellowship (a place I attended as well). He had all the credentials of a New York Intellectual 1950s composer, and if things had gone the usual way, he would have probably become a professor at some college, teaching Music Theory and Composition, and writing an oeuvre of chamber music with the occasional orchestral commission, if he was lucky. (This is a career that for me as well, is the road not taken). That all changed after the film work. Rosenman despaired that his East Coast colleagues felt he had ’sold out’ and wouldn’t even look at his serious pieces (much less perform them) after he left New York and the New Music scene. He eventually got some performances, but the move to LA meant that he had to channel his craft into film. By doing so, I think that Rosenman stands as one of the few bridges between Expressionist concert music (Schoenberg, et al), and cinema in the 1950s and 60s.

Both Schoenberg and Dallapiccola were serial composers, and it’s still difficult to say assess just what kind of an affect they had on music, even though it’s been a century (!) since Schoenberg wrote the first of his works that abandoned tonality. If Schoenberg’s techniques, or at least the sound world he gave birth to, were to hit the mainstream, East of Eden is one of those films where one of his pupils actually got through to the masses. The Expressionist aesthetic of that movie’s soundtrack is as close as Schoenberg’s sound as you ever hear in film from that era. It’s not just East of Eden, either. Rosenman also wrote the score to Fantastic Voyage in 1966, and that score is a dead ringer for Schoenberg’s ‘Five Pieces for Orchestra’ of 1909. It still strikes me as amazing that the science fiction movie music accompanying miniaturized scuba divers and a nuclear submarine repairing the body of a scientist really had its roots in music written for the concert hall some 57 years earlier!

In some ways, Jerry Goldsmith (who also died recently in 2004) represented the bridge between Stravinsky and perhaps Bartok and cinema, but Rosenman is, I think, truly the heir to Schoenberg.

Rosenman had a long an fruitful career in Hollywood. Unfortunately, In recent years he’d succumbed to frontotemporal dementia. I hope that some of his concert and film music gets played. I discovered that the iTunes store indeed had a wonderful recording (far better than the original soundtrack orchestra) by San Francisco composer John Adams conducting the London Sinfonietta in the music from East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. It’s definitely worth getting.