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Everett-Green: 1 of 3 on CBC R2 changes - CANON FIRE
By admin1 | July 27, 2008
The Globe and Mail has commissioned their music critic, Robert Everett-Green, to write a three-part series on the planned changes at Radio 2. The first installment was published Saturday July 26 and can be found here.
The second installment (August 2) discusses the question “How did we ever get the idea that “public radio” means “classical radio” and can be found here.
The third installment (August 9) asks the question: “is this really the end for the CBC Radio Orchestra, or can it be kept alive by other means?” and can be found here.
Here is part 1.
CANON FIRE
Robert Everett-Green. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.:Jul 26, 2008. p. R.5
2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
In the first of a three-part series, Globe music critic Robert Everett-Green examines the increasingly strident turf wars between fans of pop and of classical music, the growing flap over this fall’s sweeping changes to CBC Radio 2, and the undeniable politics behind the battle over what constitutes culture
Classical music gives me a headache. Not the music, much of which I love, but the politics that supports it and can sometimes overwhelm it.
Fans of “serious music” like to say that the object of their affection is too universal to be touched by political concerns. But even aside from the many blatant instances to the contrary (including manipulation by despots from Louis XIV to Stalin), there’s hardly any aspect of classical-music culture that doesn’t assume for it some kind of privileged position in society.
That’s especially obvious now, with the flap over CBC Radio 2’s changes to the role of classical music in its programming. Ask any of those who are upset to explain why Canada’s only national public music broadcaster should be predominantly devoted to Western classical music, and they’ll eventually give you some variation on the notion that it’s more ennobling, more deserving, or just better than every other kind.
Everyone has the right to think that their music is best, including the teenagers who hurry through Toronto’s Bathurst subway station to escape the classical music played through the PA system to deter them from hanging around. But only classical fans and organizations believe that the quality of their music gives it and them a natural entitlement to the lion’s share of public funding.
The CBC’s apparent challenge to this sense of entitlement has produced an artificial unanimity among its classical listeners. In more normal times, they would be hard-pressed to find a definition of “classical music” they would all be willing to take to the barricades.
I experienced this first-hand when Radio 2 asked me several years ago to choose and introduce six pieces to be used to fill up time left at the end of live broadcasts on its afternoon classical program. One of my pieces was Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet , a long, repetitive, ever-more elaborate orchestration of a scrap of devotional song. The piece provoked hundreds of e-mails, letters and phone calls from listeners who not only loathed the piece, but said they felt betrayed by the CBC. They were expecting to hear “classical music.” They were so incensed by what they did hear that the CBC got the host to read an apology on the next day’s program. And yet Bryars is a classically trained composer whose music is regularly played by the same musicians who perform Bach and Beethoven.
Michael Kennedy, in The Oxford Dictionary of Music , defines classical as “music generally regarded as having permanent rather than ephemeral value … the opposite of light or popular music.” Fine, but what about classical pieces that were once hugely successful (the operas of 18th-century composer Johann Hasse, for example) and that have vanished without a trace? Were they “classical” then, but not any more?
And what about the dances that Mozart wrote for use at parties, and the melodies in classical works that are essentially pop songs with high-class orchestrations? What about classical or high-art music traditions that don’t originate in Europe?
Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre has been thinking about such things, and this weekend, lobs an innocent-looking grenade at the Western classical establishment, in the form of a festival entitled What Is Classical? The programming includes Chinese and Pakistani classical music; new compositions by Montreal composer Ana Sokolovic; opera rearranged for pop audiences (via the East Village Opera Company); and a performance by the Either/ Orchestra, a big band that plays reconfigured versions of “classic” jazz and Ethiopian songs.
” ‘Classical music’ means different things to different communities,” says Harbourfront music programmer Dalton Higgins. “If we in Canada are going to be honest with ourselves, we’re going to want a world in which ‘classical music’ represents more diversity.”
Of course, the fight at the CBC is not about Pinchas Zukerman vs. Ravi Shankar. It’s about classical vs. pop, and about who has the power to control the balance between the two.
Nobody in Winnipeg’s classical community was upset last year when the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra played a new concerto for turntable and orchestra written by Nicole Lizee, who plays keyboards for the Montreal band Besnard Lakes. I think that’s because the WSO and Lizee (who studied composition at McGill University) were seen to be absorbing a dynamic bit of pop culture into the body of classical music.
That’s not so different from what Bartok did when he imported elements of Hungarian folk music into his works for classical performers. In both cases, something was pulled from the margin into the centre, and the centre became stronger.
What distresses some of the CBC’s classical listeners is the feeling that the margin is invading the centre. If a DJ track can be presented on the same footing as a piano piece by Fauré, what’s to stop more pop pieces from completely displacing classical music? Ephemeral value will trump permanent value.
It’s at this point that classical listeners start complaining about how politics are creeping into the CBC’s programming, not noticing or admitting that the previous situation was also political. It just didn’t seem that way, because it was in harmony with the fans’ assumption that classical music deserves special status.
Till now, pop and classical have been two solitudes on CBC Radio. New programs like The Signal look for bridges between the two. On this show, which is on Radio 2 every night at 10, it’s common to hear a song by Bjork next to a symphony by Henryk Gorecki. Earlier this week, I heard a piece by exploratory cellist Erik Friedlander, right after Canadian film composer Rob Carli’s chamber-music arrangement (for the Art of Time Ensemble) of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android , featuring the Barenaked Ladies’ Steven Page.
When I mentioned The Signal to Elisabeth Bihl, executive director of the Canadian Music Centre, she said it was “wonderful, in that it mixes experimental music of all kinds.” But she would much prefer to hear the composers she represents on a show like Two New Hours , the defunct Sunday-evening program that focused exclusively on contemporary classical composition. The problem with The Signal ’s melange, she said, is that “I don’t know what’s coming,” i.e. whether the next thing will be a composed piece for orchestra or a recording from the last Pop Montreal festival. In other words, she wants more solitude, not less.
The view can look strange from the other direction, too. Jonny Bunce, artistic director at Toronto’s Music Gallery, told me recently about a concert in the gallery’s X Avant series, which has been bridging the two solitudes for the past three years. Bunce recalled watching some indie kids who had come to hear OM, a minimalist rock band, and who were deeply amused by the prior performance by Toca Loca, a contemporary classical trio.
“To see the ‘opening band’ read all the music from a music stand was the funniest thing they had ever seen,” Bunce said. Real bands, in those kids’ experience, don’t need to read their music, and never write it down.
For the people who dislike the CBC’s programming changes, being exposed to that degree of culture shock is not funny. They were comfortable with the status quo, and see the changes as an unfair, unilateral disruption. The commonest complaint among those I spoke with was that they hadn’t been sufficiently consulted. They expected to have some power over what the CBC does, beyond their status as citizens who help pay for the network.
These people may think that the power they want is based only on the high social and artistic merit of their music, and has nothing to do with politics. But culture is always political, whether the culture we’re talking about legitimates the state (as opera did for Louis XIV) or whether it’s a minority interest in a democracy.
The debate about changes at the CBC might be clearer if everyone would just accept that. It’s time to stop treating a few programming changes as if they were a crime against civilization.
Topics: Press, Press About CBCRO, Press about CBC |
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