Less classical, more popular music expected in remake

Chris Cobb, Canwest News Service

Published: Tuesday, August 19, 2008

OTTAWA - The CBC will announce a radical revamp of its Radio Two network today with the introduction of more popular and cross-cultural music and a de-emphasizing of classical content.

The Radio Two revamp, called “its most dramatic makeover ever” by CBC English services head Richard Stursberg, is prompted by what the publicly funded broadcaster has said is a desire to attract younger listeners. A re-branding, backed by a national advertising campaign, will likely see Radio Two referred to simply as “Two” or “The New Two.”

The focus during an invitation-only event at CBC’s Toronto headquarters Tuesday is expected to be the network’s new weekday and weekend shows and three new hosts - jazz-pop singer Molly Johnson, Halifax hip-hop performer Rich (Buck 65) Terfry and singer Julie Nesrallah.

CBC English services head Richard Stursberg called the change the ‘most dramatic makeover ever’ for the station.

The new schedule, to launch Sept. 2, will be controversial among many loyal Radio Two listeners who have already criticized the CBC for downgrading classical content.

Ian Morrison, spokesman for the watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, accused the CBC of planning to abandon a loyal audience of about one million Canadians and, in the process, ghettoizing classical music.

“It’s good for CBC radio to be playing a variety of musical genres,” he said Monday, “but this is a radical change. It is moving away from something only the public broadcaster can do to something many private broadcasters already do. And they are shoving classical music into the 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. low-audience ghetto.”

The Radio Two makeover is also a departure from CBC’s mandate as defined by the Canadian Broadcasting Act, said Morrison.

“The Canadian public broadcaster has a responsibility to transmit world classical culture to new generations of Canadians,” he said. “They are substantially moving away from that responsibility. They falsely assume that world classical culture is not something that can be marketed to appeal to younger audiences.”

Last Updated: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 | 4:40 PM
By Jessica Wong CBC News

[photo: The Gryphon Trio, from left, Annalee Patipatanakoon, Jamie Parker and Roman Borys, performs at the CBC’s Toronto Broadcast Centre on Tuesday. (Jessica Wong/CBC).]

With a goal of highlighting the diversity of Canada’s music scene to its listeners, CBC Radio hosted a launch event in Toronto on Tuesday, two weeks before revamped Radio 2 daytime programs hit the airwaves.

New hosts Molly Johnson, Julie Nesrallah and Rich Terfry, as well as CBC regular Tom Allen, via video, took the stage at the Broadcast Centre during the midday showcase, which gave media representatives, members of the Canadian music community and CBC staffers an idea of what to expect come Sept. 2.

Punctuating the event were lively performances by Alex Cuba, the Gryphon Trio, Divine Brown and Basia Bulat — representing the range of genres that will be featured on the dial starting next month.

Chris Boyce, programming director for CBC English Radio, likened the new mix to “an incredibly well-loaded iPod.”

“If you look at what most people have on their iPods, it’s not restricted to one genre of music or just a collection of 50 or 100 songs,” he told CBC News. “I don’t think you should expect anything less from your radio station.”

When this third wave of Radio 2 changes was announced earlier this year, a flood of complaints poured in, with many critics objecting to the network reducing the amount of classical music on the station. The news also came amid the CBC’s decision to disband the venerable CBC Radio Orchestra and both sparked protests across the country.

Classical music will continue to be the largest musical genre represented on Radio 2, Boyce reiterated on Tuesday.

However, “as a public broadcaster, our reason for being is to reflect Canada to Canadians and to reach Canadians,” he said, adding that one of his measures of success will be if Radio 2 has “a diversified audience listening to a diversified range of music.”

Nesrallah, an Ottawa-based mezzo-soprano, will be hosting Tempo, a classical music show from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays. She called her new gig “a win-win situation.”
‘Fun and accessible and smart’

She admitted that tackling the five-hour block “is a huge responsibility,” but added that she wants “to make it fun and accessible and smart because [classical music] is all those things.”

Like Nesrallah, Terfry says he plans to balance his performing career (as hip hop artist Buck 65) with his new radio duties.

Divine Brown also took the stage for Tuesday’s event to mark the launch of new Radio 2 programs this fall. Divine Brown also took the stage for Tuesday’s event to mark the launch of new Radio 2 programs this fall. (Jessica Wong/CBC)He sympathizes with worried classical music buffs. However, he also sees the format change as a way to spotlight other underrepresented but excellent musicians who don’t get regular airplay on Canadian radio.

“If I was face-to-face to a naysayer, I would say, ‘Seriously, I can understand you’re upset, but would you … have this radio station 100 per cent dominated by [classical] … and say to someone like Ron Sexsmith, ‘You do not deserve to be played on the radio at all?’ I don’t believe that anyone would really feel that way,” he said.

Terfry, who recalled “playing radio” with his friends as a child and will host the songwriter-focused afternoon show Drive, feels that much of the anxiety is coming from fans who don’t want to see Radio 2 become like “commercial-heavy, super-slick, overly produced radio with off-colour jokes and obnoxious this, that and sound effects.”

He believes that many will be relieved after tuning in to the new shows.

“I think it’s only going to take a few days on the air for a lot of those people to say, ‘I was imagining something really bad and this is actually really great and not what I was afraid of at all,’ ” Terfry said.

“I don’t think it’s going to take long for people to really get behind what we’re doing.”

In addition to the new daytime radio shows, including CBC host Jurgen Gothe’s new program Farrago and Radio 2 Morning, hosted weekdays by Allen and weekends by Johnson, the network is expanding its web offerings with four new dedicated online music channels dedicated to classical, jazz, Canadian songwriters and Canadian composers.

Protests to preserve classical music in drive-time dayparts on CBC Radio 2 were officially rendered unsuccessful today, with the announcement of the national network’s new lineup effective the 2nd of September. Stand On Guard For CBC got in their last digs before the formal launch, posting a hysterical letter from a woman who claimed she moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen because CBC weren’t so preoccupied with programming “very listenable material.” Who knew public radio was capable of cultivating its own equivalent to Susan Sarandon.

However, instead of threatening to move to a neighbouring country if she doesn’t get her political way, our version laments that we will soon become that high-culture-deprived country.

How much of the event held this afternoon deep inside the CBC’s Toronto Broadcast Centre was designed to appease the sorts who huddled together on Front Street on a cold and rainy Friday afternoon in mid-April to start raising a ruckus over the proposed Radio 2 changes? Not much at all, on the surface, even if plenty of effort was expended to explain how things are only going to get better.

The adjustments to the main FM feed will be accompanied by the launch of four online music streams — one of which will be exclusively classical, natch. And, introduced to those crossing a literal smokescreen into a cavernous television studio draped with retro renderings of the number “2” were several new on-air talents, including midday classical host Julie Nesrallah, a youthfully 40-ish mezzo-soprano from Ottawa, recruited to bring the vitality to classical programming that protesters believe it doesn’t require.

Nesrallah instantly seems like the kind of media figure that once would’ve been hired by Moses Znaimer, in contrast to the superintendent and schoolmarm types once entrusted with microphones at the CBC. But the lineup of Znaimer’s opportunistically labeled “The Nation’s Classical Station,” heard locally at 96.3 FM, currently employs no parallel. This might be radio but, under the circumstances, appearance is everything.

Freshly perpetuated by CBC Radio 2 is their belief in being all things to all people. The question is, do prospective listeners buy the notion that they are one of those “all people”? Force-feeding Western European culture to Canadian farmers via radio airwaves seemed an archaic enough idea when CBC started producing original FM content in 1964 — 45 years is an awfully long time to leave popular music genres to the free market to decide what to do with.

A need to update the mandate of Radio 2 reflects the fact that, in its effort to make money, commercial radio generally gave up trying to capture the public imagination through spinning music.

That there is an overwhelming amount of wide-appeal music with zero chance of getting widespread airplay is no surprise — things started fragmenting in that direction decades ago — although the evisceration of the record industry gave validation to a new era.

So, then why adopt mainstream broadcast industry doublespeak in trying to explain what Radio 2 will do?

Chris Boyce, programming director for CBC Radio, trotted out the iPod analogy for the first time since… well, since the “We Play What We Want” slogan for born-in-Canada post-boomer variety hits format JACK-FM was paradoxically explained to skeptical American listeners in 2005. No need to bother with the hassle of figuring out how to use an MP3 player when ours is stocked with greatest hits of Huey Lewis and the News, etc.

“You shouldn’t have to settle for anything less than that on the radio,” said Boyce.

Breaking boundaries! Crossing genres! Yes, but whomever are we doing that for?

Maybe it can all be blamed on Paul Simon’s 1986 album Graceland, opening yuppie ears to the notion that there was a world of rhythms previously kept behind global barriers, while they were all caught up in listening to Paul Simon. From that point forward, the enlightened liberals among us would learn to party in all languages: Celtic! Klezmer! Polka! Samba! Zouk!

CBC Radio 2 is promising nothing of the sort, really. Rather, it’s being sold as the more sedate middle-aged interpretation of that world-beating perspective. Yes, the message involves plenty of inclusiveness — live homegrown acts offering songs between speeches at the launch hopped from guitarist Alex Cuba to classical Gryphon Trio, folkie Basia Bulat to R&B belter Divine Brown — but this rebel sell also teeters awfully close to the “no hard rock and no rap” positioning widely adopted by adult-contemporary stations across North America in the early-’90s.

The primary argument made by graying classical purists — that children like they once were are being systematically deprived of the enlightenment that comes with broadcasting symphonic sounds before and after the schoolday — is no less ludicrous. But at least it rationalizes the continued existence of a certain serendipity that the 21st century has otherwise rendered obsolete.

Meanwhile, this new schedule sheds light on the evening shows installed on CBC Radio 2 in April 2007: dinner jazz show Tonic, concert spotlight Canada Live, ambient bedtimer The Signal, and noctural mood-ring Nightwatch. But none of them are hosted by names widely known for anything but broadcasting — unlike two of the newer attention-baiting hires.

Molly Johnson purringly elucidated her history with the CBC: growing up across the street from the Mr. Dressup puppeteer, dropping by Peter Gzowski’s Morningside to explain bohemia to him, and later — while her music career was in corporate flux — getting called in for voiceover jobs, even though she was deemed “too sexy for sports.” Today, she made clear that her role on the new Radio 2 is that of establishment wacky chick, kind of like when Eartha Kitt resurfaced 20 years after playing Catwoman to become a gay disco icon. Mercifully, it seems Johnson has upmarket ambitions associated with jazzy weekend morning radio. The old men who control corporate Canada will love it.

And while the Radio 2 Morning show will continue to be hosted by Tom Allen — shifting gears from classical to the much-dreaded potpourri — the new afternoon Drive presenter is Rich Terfry, cashing in on the image cultivated as avant-rapper Buck 65 with a promised three-quarters CanCon program focusing on the words and music of singer-songwriters.

An east coast hipster who claims to hate hip-hop while rapping longingly about the 1950s? They couldn’t make this stuff up at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is why they had to hire it. Sporting a thrift-store wardrobe that made him look like he was trying too hard to seem younger than his 36 years, Terfry applied his scat style to explain his program’s agenda, closing with a quote attributed to a 1973 Mott The Hoople song, “Drivin’ Sister” — something or another about having been “too much on the clutch.”

Yet, the public unveiling of CBC Radio 2 could have been presented as a funeral for FM radio, and no one would have left feeling any different. Guess that means the wake will commence broadcast two weeks hence.

A reconstituted CBC Radio 2 got a head start on its scheduled Sept. 2 launch yesterday with a lavish media preview at CBC’s Toronto headquarters.

The new schedule, boasting 80 per cent Canadian music content, was formally unveiled by the network’s recently appointed key program hosts, Toronto jazz and blues singer Molly Johnson, Juno-winning songwriter and hip-hop artist Rich Terfry, a.k.a. Buck 65, and Canadian mezzo-soprano Julie Nesrallah. All three plan to continue their professional recording and performing careers on modified schedules.

The presentation was punctuated with performances by artists whose music, said CBC Radio program director Chris Boyce, is representative of the network’s new direction: Toronto soul/R&B star Divine Brown, London, Ont., songwriter Basia Bulat, Vancouver-based Alex Cuba and Toronto’s The Gryphon Trio.

CBC Radio 2’s reinvention, after decades as the beloved home of classical music in the Canadian broadcasting system, is the result of “three or four years of development and a lot of research into what it means to be a music service for Canadians today, and what it means to be a responsible public broadcaster,” Boyce said.

“Between 30,000 and 40,000 pieces of Canadian music are released every year, and only 300 or 400 get airplay on commercial radio. Till now, there has been nowhere on radio for the rest of it.”

Of the furore that erupted from classical music fans earlier this year when the network announced its intention to reduce classical music content to five hours on weekdays, Boyce said: “We expected it. This audience cares passionately about music, and we can’t write them off.

“We hope to build the same kind of audience commitment to other forms of Canadian music (in the new schedule).”

Greg Quill

August 20, 2008

Pretty much any press event where we get to pass through a giant synthetic rolling fog entryway into the guts of the CBC building is alright with us. But the mood at the “All-New 2″ formal launch party yesterday was kinda sorta awkwardly sombre, with lots of cross-armed silent protests (not to be confused with the not-so-silent protests of months past) emanating from certain attendees as the network celebrated its two week countdown to the third and final phase of its widescale Radio 2 revamp.

While partaking in just the right amount of tiny food objects paid for by our tax dollars, we took in the controversial and already well-publicized changes hitting the network’s daytime programming as of September 2. For those not keeping up, this notably includes the scaling down of its classical music programming by about two-thirds and the disbandment of the CBC Orchestra, all in hopes of finding a younger audience (maybe the same young audience that is signing up in droves to the 16,000 member and counting “Save Classical Music At the CBC” Facebook group). But it’s cool, according to programming director Chris Boyce; the changes are the result of a survey on Canadian arts and culture and radio listening habits, and it’s what the people want. It’s science, you guys.

Anyhow, in place of ye olde “classical” hits they’ve announced a new contemporary schedule which adds four new programs, three new hosts (jazz singer Molly Johnson, Halifax dynamo Richard “Buck 65″ Terfry, and mezzo-soprano Julie Nesrallah), and four genre-specific online music channels (jazz, Canadian songwriters, Canadian composers, and classical) to the commercial free, newly cross-genre hootenanny.

To avoid rehashing everything that’s been said to death about the upheaval, let’s just leave it with Ian Morrison, spokesman for the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting group:

It’s good for CBC radio to be playing a variety of musical genres but this is a radical change. It is moving away from something only the public broadcaster can do to something many private broadcasters already do. And they are shoving classical music into the 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. low audience ghetto.

And he’s right. But hey, we got to hear Buck 65 rabble on about his rad sounding 75% CanCon emerging artists afternoon drive slot, and then introduce a performance by the lovely Basia Bulat. If this is the direction we’re headed, maybe Radio 3 lite is the channel for us! Maybe classical purists just need to embrace their hipster leanings and the unconvinceables will tune in September 2 and realize it’s not the end of the world, maybe even not so bad after all.

Ha. Who are we kidding. Sweet fog installation though.

Photo by Tanja Tiziana, courtesy of the CBC.

A lot of our Chinese Canadians had western classical music taken from them once before in their lifetime. Their children were allowed to listen to the music forbidden during the Cultural Revolution not so long ago. Now, “only in Canada” the extermination of the CBC Radio Orchestra and the stripping of the CBC Radio Two of its major classical programming all suggest a pseudo-government control. “Pseudo” because the citizens cannot vote the irresponsible CBC executives out. Instead they must vote out an entire government party just to right an egregious act of cultural barbarism. So be it but what a waste. The Conservatives will either right this wrong or they will reveal to the country’s voters what they understand Canada’s future to be. Are the words “We stand on guard for thee” meaningful or just rote drivel? Perhaps it will become “We stand on guard for thee if necessary but not necessarily stand on guard for thee”.

Elevate the CBC Radio Orchestra to a national heritage institution and revitalize its funding to allow it to continue its excellence in representing Canada internationally.

[Original is here.]

From Monday’s Globe and Mail

August 18, 2008 at 8:17 AM EDT

2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Groups protest against ‘catastrophic’ cuts

The Department of Canadian Heritage has decided to cut five more arts and culture programs over the next two years, even as a chorus of complaints from the arts community and opposition MPs rains down on the federal government over cuts announced last week.

Eschewing formal announcements, the government posted notices on the web pages of programs including the Stabilization Projects and Capacity Building, two of the four initiatives under the Canadian Arts and Heritage Sustainability Program.

The Stabilization Projects, to be shut down in April, were established in seven cities from Victoria to Charlottetown to provide financial and administrative support to arts organizations. Capacity Building is a companion program to provide similar assistance to organizations with no access to a Stabilization Project. Capacity Building has given aid to 347 arts and 214 heritage organizations since 2002, but will be cut in 2010.

The department also plans to end its annual contributions of $300,000 to the A-V Presentation Trust, $1.5-million to the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund and $2.5-million to the National Training Program in the Film and Video Sector, adding to consternation over last week’s planned elimination of the $9-million Trade Routes - which helps cultural groups such as Hot Docs and the Canadian Independent Record Production Association export and sell products abroad. On the same day, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade cut the $4.7-million PromArt program - which provides travel grants to artists and arts organizations.

Numerous film and television executives speculated nervously that this belt-tightening could be a prelude to even more substantial cuts.

In a French-language interview with La Presse Canadienne yesterday, Canadian Heritage Minister Josee Verner defended the cuts saying the government only wanted to help arts and culture organizations in a more efficient manner and those being axed failed to demonstrate that they were providing sufficient returns for the dollars invested.

“Culture is an essential element of the identity of a nation and in that sense, will always have its unfailing support,” she said.

Earlier this week, Liberal Heritage critic Denis Coderre reacted furiously to the PromArt and Trade Routes cuts, calling them “totally unacceptable” and “disgusting.” He also poked fun at the government’s timing of the announcement, sarcastically suggesting more cuts would appear because “we still have a lot of Fridays, and you’ve got to use that.”

It took only until Wednesday.

Members of the Bloc Quebecois and NDP also had harsh words for the Conservatives, with Bloc MP Claude DeBellefeuille saying she “did not think it possible for a government to show so much contempt” for artists.

A slew of arts and culture organizations also released official statements condemning the cuts and arguing that the elimination of PromArt and Trade Routes will devastate individual organizations as well as Canada’s image abroad. Nearly all predated news of the latest cuts.

“It’s catastrophic for us,” said Alain Dancyger, executive director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, which recently earned international bookings after touring Paris with help from a PromArt grant. “But beyond our own survival, this decision makes no sense on many levels. At a time when Canadian culture is extremely dynamic and is in demand all over the world, this decision kills the cultural ‘carte de visite’ for our embassies, which need culture to lobby and to do business.”

Several more organizations, including Opera.ca, the Writers’ Union of Canada, Magnetic North Theatre Festival and the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, also pelted the government with scorn.

Last night, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion attended the Toronto Music Festival’s performance of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos , explaining to those who spotted him in the lobby that he was there to show support for the arts.

August 11, 2008

Dear Mr. Stursberg,

Thank you for your response. At first glance, your logic appears impenetrable, and achingly familiar to me from my years in the states. Nonetheless I found myself inspired to write you again, as I am puzzled by your arguments.

In rural areas where television channels are few and fuzzy, where high-speed internet may not exist, where cable or satellite are a significant expense, and where other cultural distractions don’t exist, the strong signal of CBC Radio becomes essential to the local culture. Yet the CBC “extensive Arts & Culture Study” focused on six Canadian cities?

Why has the board of directors concluded that the CBC programming must be redesigned to “primarily reach an audience within the 24 to 35 years age group”?

According to Statistics Canada, the population of Canada is rapidly aging; the 2006 Census shows the median age is now 39.5. Although we live in an increasingly urban country, 1/5 of us live in deep rural isolation, where the population is aging at a faster clip than in the cities (with the exception of the far north).

The economic and cultural importance of rural areas must be emphasized and clarified. Over the decades, the challenging nature of the music formerly presented by the CBC has created a truly unusual situation (yet one taken for granted by Canadians) in establishing a common intellectual foundation between our urban and rural populations. This has enabled a higher degree of cultural and economic exchange between urban and rural populations, which has made Canada culturally and economically stronger than our neighbor to the south. City folks are far more comfortable about keeping a place in the country, or becoming involved in rural communities on at least a part time basis, and rural folks are less intimidated by urban culture. It would be difficult to prove that Canadian life offers a greater cultural exchange between rural and urban areas than America, yet in my experience I know this to be true.

How does the CBC management actually know how many people listen to CBC 2 on a regular basis, and how old they are and where they live?

Everyone I know from Vancouver to Victoria to Salt Spring to the Queen Charlottes listens to CBC religiously. None of us would hover over our computers to download “serious” music. Downloading requires up to date computer equipment, internet subscription, and there can be additional charges for bandwidth—all of which are expensive for those on limited incomes.

Downloading is not only not free—it’s not private. There’s a lot to be said for the mystery of what songs I listened to when, and how they influenced my thought, spirit, and actions.

On this more personal note, I’ll confess that the experience of listening to CBC Radio while driving across Canada a few times in the mid-90s inspired me to move to Canada and become a Canadian citizen. Back then, CBC Radio presented the cutting edge of a range of cultures including Inuit. I still find it difficult to verbalize the revelatory combination of challenging music with the supreme intelligence of the natural landscape— all day every day for weeks on end. I doubt I would have made such a life-altering decision in order to have free access to “very listenable material” with the option of downloading “serious music.” However, the new policies of the CBC will have the perhaps desirable effect of discouraging cultural workers like me from immigrating to Canada.

If the age group of 24-35 is deemed to be the most culturally significant group in Canada, the future leaders of our country, why has the CBC determined that they should be intellectually nourished by “very listenable material” (“extended pop concerts, jazz and folk festival material”)?

How could the CBC assume that pop concerts translate to the medium of radio?

Pop music concerts attract crowds for myriad reasons beyond the music. On a silent dark night in the woods alone, or in a stuffy and lonely city apartment, pop concert music tends to fall far short of what it might sound like in the midst of a cheering dancing crowd.

CBC Radio 2, in pandering to what it perceives to be the young public taste, will fall by the wayside, as it already has with regard to news and public discussion. Should CBC Radio fall by the wayside, you will find yourself living in—the equivalent of the states. For the CBC is the only significant cultural element that consistently distinguishes Canadian culture from rampant, subservient, and ignorant commercialism. Why break our hearts to offer the public what no Canadian in their right mind would demand from the CBC: easy listening catering to the 24 to 35 demographic?

Please do share this letter with your colleagues at CBC and with the 40 anonymous “cultural leaders” who have sold us all down this particular river. It may help to encourage a perspective that others find difficult to articulate. I’ll be sharing this letter with a few people myself.

My very best regards,

Tina Dickey