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.