Nuance 7

The radio is very hard to listen to these days, for me, anyway. Even the CBC. I don't know where they went wrong, but they never seem to get it right. Many of us used to equate our national broadcaster with classical music, since that was what they played on their fm station, now known as Radio 2, for many years. Then came a new president who did a major hatchet job, gutted most of the classical music programming from Radio 2 and has with one exception banned all classical music from the am or Radio 1 stations. I find this sad, and troubling. The daily regional programs play a mixture of news, social commentary, interviews and some music. Almost all the music they play is shit to the ears. I often phone in to complain, but they don't seem to care. Classical music has been demoted from being very good to very bad. It doesn't fit their political or ideological agenda. This is the music of privilege, of the elites. Music composed by dead white European males. They don't care that it is beautiful, nor that it is technically superior to any of the garbage that passes as pop music these days. If you play the Mozart Requiem to a plant, the plant grows and flourishes. Not so if it is subjected to Drake. But Drake is Canadian, and young people, who have absolutely no sense of value, love his music, and the CBC does want to be relevant to young listeners, even if they couldn't be bothered. It's like grandma getting all kinds of extensive plastic surgery then struts out in her minisckirt and five inch heels, transformed into a cougar. But everyone knows she's just a pathetic old lady who wants to save btteries on her vibrator and get boned by as many young studlies as she can lure into her lair. And that is the CBC. I think Jurgen Gothe had it right when he was host of Disc Drive on Radio 2 during the 80's and 90's. He managed to integrate classical with jazz, world and some of the better pop and Canadian content, and he pulled it off. I don't know why they can't keep the formula going, nor why they seem to hate classical music so much. Perhaps our national broadcaster no longer has a sense of leadership or sees itself as a role model. I don't know. I do know that in my salad days, when I was a callow twenty-two year old, I began listening to the classical music on CBC fm. It opened for me so many new worlds, and I can only say that I have completely benefited from this largess of classical music programming. It did not turn me into a snob, nor was I from a posh, socially elite family. Rather, I grew up firmly proletarian and working class. I especially absorbed the incredible complex beauty of Baroque music in counterpoint, learning also from the same program hosts about the marvelous benefits of Bach and Vivaldi on the human brain. I was, in many ways, mentored by the CBC. And now they have taken it all away, except for during midday, when I'm at work. Even if Canada is now multicultural, our roots are in Europe, and classical music, as well as being beautiful, honours those roots, and gives us an invaluable education of our history. Yes, it is also the music of the colonizers, who inflicted unspeakable harm on the indigenous peoples, as well as on other people of colour. But pretending that part of our history doesn't exist, and regarding it as something of no value is simply a kneejerk reaciton fueled by postmodernist revisionism. Yes, let's continue to welcome the new and the diverse. But any country that forgets and despises its roots is also going to be shoring up for itself a lot of future grief. And we will be also depriving future genrations of the incomparable beauty of the music and art that flouished in Europe, despite the racism, despite the colonization, despite the warmongering. We do not have to accept or praise those things in order to appreciate the beauty that is also their legacy to us.