The March

Today at 10:00 AM, sup­port­ers of the CBC Radio Orches­tra met at the Queen Eliz­a­beth Foun­tain. We waved to traf­fic going by on West Geor­gia, and heard speeches describ­ing how protests like this one were going on in Mon­treal and Toronto (and also in Roma­nia, where Prime Min­is­ter Stephen Harper is cur­rently visiting).

Some passed out song sheets (also with all of the names of all the BC Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment, to send hand­writ­ten let­ters to). We sang some a cou­ple of protest songs — to the tune of Three Blind Mice and Baa Baa Black Sheep (or Twin­kle twin­kle Star, if you will). My favourite bit was the sec­ond verse of the Baa Baa Black Sheep:

Bah, bah, hum­bug to the stingy beast
In his office way back east;
How can pencil-pushing jerks
Screw composer’s hard-earned works?
Bureau­crats don’t know their avant-garde
From a hole in their back yard.

Then the whole crowd marched a block south to the main doors of the CBC. Some of the radio orches­tra mem­bers gath­ered at the door, and there were more speeches and chant­ing. There was no vio­lence, and I think that frankly, the folks in the build­ing were glad we were there. After all, I think they would have joined us if they could have. Here are a few other pho­tos (the rest are on Flickr):

My Letter to the CBC Executives

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

Dear Mr. Stursberg,

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

Until today.

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

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

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

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

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

Yours Sin­cerely,

David Drucker

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

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

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

An Email and Live Protest on the CBC

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

Let’s give the CBC a lovely Mon­day morning

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

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

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

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

————————–

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

cc: All the fol­low­ing individuals:

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

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

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

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

The Sound of More Silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.