An Email and Live Protest on the CBC

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

Let’s give the CBC a lovely Monday morning

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

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

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

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

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

cc: All the following individuals:

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

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

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

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

The Sound of More Silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.