quote:

Give us back our CBC Radio Orchestra
The official reason is that -- at two cents per Canadian -- it's too expensive. An observer might think the move has more to do with the dumbing down at CBC Radio 2
Janet Danielson, Vancouver Sun
Published: Monday, April 14, 2008

It is not altogether clear who is served by the CBC's recent decision to scrap its Radio Orchestra.

The official reason is that it is too expensive. The CBC's government support is now down to 1970's levels, less than half the average per capita national radio funding of the top 18 OECD countries.

The only lower-funded national radio (excluding U.S.A.'s NPR) is that of New Zealand, which in 1989 made the clever move of turning its radio orchestra into a Crown corporation. It costs roughly $600,000 a year to keep the CBC Radio Orchestra running, which is 0.0035 per cent of the total CBC budget and 0.3 per cent of the Radio Canada budget. Out of the annual $50 per capita cost of the CBC, this amounts to two cents per Canadian.

A high per-concert cost has also been cited. Musicians' fees for the CBC Radio Orchestra are $400,000 for eight concerts per year. Yet a CBC Radio Orchestra concert averages 78 per cent of the cost of a National Arts Centre Orchestra concert, despite the many new works that the CBC Radio Orchestra performs.

Premiere performances require expertise and more rehearsal time. The CBC Radio Orchestra specializes in Canadian music; the National Arts Centre Orchestra repertoire is directed less towards fostering Canadian culture and more towards bringing world-class artists to perform in the national capital. Thus there is little overlap between the two orchestras.

Furthermore, the CBC Radio Orchestra's unique role in commissioning and performing Canadian music is not easily transferred to city and community orchestras whose obligations to their own local audiences must take priority over national concerns.

Radio 2 is also claiming better to reflect the people and music of Canada by presenting a broader range of genres. The scrapping of the CBC Radio Orchestra will enable it to direct funds towards this broader range of genres. The original mandate of the CBC to "inform, enlighten and entertain" does not, according to the CBC 2005 Arts & Culture Survey, reflect the "new reality."

Classical music, we are told, is one genre among many, and the paternalism of the Massey and Fowler commissions which shaped the CBC in the 1950s has become odious. The exclusively European roots of classical music, and its association with colonialism and elitism, make it less and less relevant to the changing Canadian scene.

Claims of beauty, profundity or originality are dismissed as mere window-dressing by an elite bent on retaining cultural dominance.

But in 2008, what social group constitutes Canada's elite?

Its cultural workers, earning on average $13,000 a year from their art? Recent immigrants, whose children are flooding into conservatories, music festivals, and youth orchestras?

Concertgoers, who pay far less for concert tickets than hockey fans pay to watch a game? The elderly who were promised CBC Radio 2 as a university in their own homes and are now disappointed?

And what about the majority of Radio 2 listeners, who, according to the CBC's own 2005 survey, asked for less of today's popular music and the same or more classical music?

Have we really reached the point where to voice a preference for classical music is to disenfranchise oneself?

Then there is the question of genre. The CBC website breezily assures us, "we'll be drawing from a broader, richer and diverse spectrum of music: classical, jazz, folk, world, R & B, singer-songwriter and roots."

Breaking down music into categories of genre is not as clear-cut and fair-minded as it might seem.

Why have "classical" as a single genre -- why not Renaissance polyphony, 19th century art song, French baroque opera, serial music, and minimalism, just to name a few?

By any measure, these "genres" are much more sonically distinct from each other than are, say, singer-songwriter and folk. But composer/performer music is now jammed into a shrinking "classical" pigeonhole in CBC programming.

It can be further argued that without "classical" music, none of the other genres CBC is proposing for Radio 2 would exist.

The harmonies undergirding all current forms of popular music derive from classical chord progressions painstakingly worked out over centuries. It's a strange kind of thinking that prunes the trunk to make more space for the branches.

The axing of the CBC Radio Orchestra may be best read as an act of iconoclasm. Canadian listeners feel betrayed, especially when they see how enthusiastically the real elites -- the huge multinational music companies -- support the changes at Radio 2.

The CBC Radio Orchestra gave Canadians more than their two cents' worth, and we want it back.

Janet Danielson of Burnaby is the newsletter editor of the Canadian League of Composers.

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