Music to Someone's Ears

A friend who lives on the other side of the U.S.-Canadian border urges me by email to write in protest to the CBC. It seems that the CBC2 program that he used to listen to while driving home, which played Mozart to calm his weary and presumably frazzled brain, has been replaced by a new CBC2 radio program which plays the music of the DHKS, which appears to be pronounced ‘ducks’ and which appears to be the name of a band out of Winnipeg. My friend is not happy.

Probably none of us old folks is happy about this, even if we are not regular 5 p.m. Mozart listeners. The CBC, which in many ways is one of the crown jewels of Canada—even more than U.S. public radio is a crown jewel of U.S. radio broadcasting—has come upon hard times. The CBC is adequately funded by the government. It is not always having to beg listeners to give them money.

What the CBC is facing up to is a generational challenge. People who listen to CBC radio are old people. And if only old people listen to it, then the old people will eventually depart the radio scene in their grand departure from all scenes, and then the younger people will no longer be interested in funding the CBC. So the CBC embarked about eight years ago on a project to make its programming more relevant to younger people (and, alas, less relevant, to its long time and older listeners).

I have never been a big listener to CBC2, which is the classical radio channel that my friend is so unhappy about, but I surely have noted how the programming on CBC1 and 2 has changed. I used to listen to CBC1 much of the day, even though I could just as easily listen to U.S. public radio. But no longer since the Big Change. Programs about books and reading are replaced by programs about bands from Winnepeg; interviews and conversations with people involved in serious issues are replaced with interviews and conversations with singers and bands from the world of rock and contemporary popular music and people who blather about 'human interest' matters. I don’t even know the right words to categorize the bands. They’re not my mother’s music, for sure, and not mine, either; maybe not even my children’s, but possibly my grandchildren’s. Even a program that plays some of the best music on the CBC and hosted by a young-ish classical/jazz pianist who is a wonder in his knowledge of music and his ability to talk about it is cluttered about 40% of its running time with mindless babble that reminds me of Valley Girl talk. This program, ‘The Key of Charles,’ is one of the most schizophrenic radio music programs I’ve ever heard. I listen now and then and am always charmed by the actual music and appalled by the conversation. Maybe it’s the CBC’s attempt to keep both audiences attending. It does make me cringe, even as i continue to listen.

I heard someone talking on the radio a few months ago about some study showing that most people’s musical tastes solidify by the time they’re 35, and after that, they rarely buy CD’s or otherwise choose to listen to any one they didn’t listen to before that time. I mentally checked my own purchases and preferences and was pleased to identify quickly at least a half a dozen new people in my listening repertoire who showed up long after my 35th year. However, upon reconsideration, I realized that almost all the new people were actually old people: performers who were recording before I was 35 and I just hadn’t gotten around to listening to them until well after then. Miles Davis and Bill Evans, for example. And the few who didn’t fit that category? Well, Kristen Chenoweth who would have been the brightest star on Broadway if only she’d gotten there 20 or 30 years sooner; The Ahn Trio, whom I first heard playing Jimmy Hendrix’s ‘Rider in the Rain;’ and Eva Cassidy, who also is a singer of the 70’s who wasn’t born soon enough to have performed then. Madeleine Peyroux? Well, mostly she sounds like Billy Holladay, who was way before my thirties.

I guess the CBC is entitled, like the moving finger, to write and move on to the ‘DHKS.’ It’s just that us old ‘uns are stuck back at the beginning of the music.