Classical music at the CBC

The CBC shouldn’t be playing anything that can be found on other stations. Regardless of genre, it’s easy to find it elsewhere on the dial or (if you have it) the internet. The CBC doesn’t need to be playing it. What it does need to do, based on its mandate and for the health of Canadian culture, is promote Canadian culture regionally and nationally. And the government should be proud to fund and promote it. Period.

Of course, in terms of Canadian contemporary classical composers that means 20th and 21st century repertoire exclusively. Is there an audience for that? There should be, but because people only seem to want what they can find on other stations, the CBC doesn’t program it. And don’t even bother mentioning Two New Hours. Two hours a week? And now they’ve cut that because they’re trying to compete with other radio stations. And yelling about classical music just makes them think ‘audience’, which perpetuates the problem. How about just focusing on helping Canadian artists do their work?

Ideally, the government, through the CBC, should be communicating the idea that Canadian culture is worth promoting, and if there’s no audience, so what? Keep promoting it, make it cool and cutting edge, and the audience will come. We will have something we can be proud of.
Relegating classical programming exclusively to the middle of the day is a problem. An hour in the morning and a one or two hour drive home show seems more reasonable. And up from four hours to six means representation late at night and early morning. Having said that, if we’re promoting Canadian classical music (think Two New Hours), then maybe six hours a day is too much. Not for me, because we’d wind up hearing a wide range of really interesting stuff, from avante-garde to mainstream to different types of fusions, interesting interviews, etc. Unfortunately, because the CBC thinks it has to play Mozart, et al (which, again, can easily be found on other stations) in order to get funding, we don’t receive that benefit.

The idea here is to support a living Canadian culture, not European museum culture. Don’t get me wrong; I love most eras of what we call “classical music”. But when I want to listen to it, I get out a CD and put it on. I don’t depend on the CBC to do it for me, because that’s not what they exist for. And by that, I mean that it’s not within their mandate to play the music of dead white Europeans, as great as that music is. Their mandate is to play the music of living (and dead) Canadians. The more Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven they play, the less they’re doing their job.

Perhaps we should be agitating for quality, cutting edge material from any and all genres representing Canadian culture instead of complaining about less classical music. The knock against “soft-pop” and “sort-of jazz” is snobbery. The people producing a lot of this stuff are hard-working musicians, not manufactured pop princesses and princes (Avril excepted). Of course, just like classical music, the CBC is playing that stuff for the sake of an audience which already has better options on the dial.

And, by the way, “wreaking havoc on the Canadian Classical music scene” is going a bit far. It’s not like all of us musicians are going to roll over and die, or chamber groups and orchestras are going to throw in the towel, or all the contemporary composers are going to quit doing what they do. As a working, regularly commissioned composer and professional performer, I have neither sought nor received support from the CBC (although I did get paid as a sideman for a CBC recording once; good money, too).

We might want to think about putting energy into a sustained letter writing campaign to the federal government demanding more funding rather than attacking the CBC for trying to survive. Reminding the government that they’re responsibility is to promote and encourage the production of Canadian culture regardless of audience seems to me a more constructive approach than complaining that the CBC isn’t playing what some other radio station is already playing. Do we really think that what Canadian artists produce is so crappy that there will be no audience for it?