Hi. I'm Jon Washburn, from the Vancouver Chamber Choir, Canada's longest-existing professional choir.
For 40 years now, I've lived on both sides of the radio speaker--as a regular performer and as a regular listener.
From the outset, I want to state clearly that Canada needs the following things: one, its radio orchestra reinstated; two, its national classical music network restored, probably by moving jazz and popular music to a third network; and three, a revitalized CBC administration, which prizes Canada's vigorous musical heritage and wants to build on it and expand it instead of trading it in on newer, seemingly more fashionable or more flashy models.
Preservation and development of our heritage, our cultural roots, and artistic history are crucially important to the maintenance of Canada's artistic creativity. Flowers must have fertile earth to spring from. Our artistic heritage must be preserved for the sake of the future, and heritage, in my opinion, should be additive. You don't tear down a heritage building to erect a new one. And the CBC shouldn't tear down one music to supplant it with another.
Classical music, in its many different forms and manifestations, is a preserver and creator of heritage par excellence. It preserves our musical past through the work of living performers, and it creates our musical future through the work of living composers. It is indeed, in spite of its name, a living and vital art made up of many diverse kinds of music important to a civil society. It is the cornerstone of musical education, the handmaid of Canadian culture, and the envy of various forms of entertainment music, which aspire to its permanency and longevity.
It should be noted that today's classical music practitioners are ethnically diverse, with deep roots in Canada's immigrant populations, and often seek out classical music as a universally respected route to education and advancement.
I consider radio to be the perfect medium for music. Marshall McLuhan called radio a hot medium, requiring listeners to create their own images, unlike the cooler medium of television, which tries to do everything for you. Indeed, I find that music on radio remains music, while music on TV usually reduces itself to spectacle. On radio, music can preserve its purity.
The CBC, as our national public radio broadcaster, is an essential lifeline to classical music for all Canadians who reside outside of Toronto and Montreal. For them, the CBC should aspire to more than mere entertainment. It should be an instrument for promoting the flow and exchange of cultural expression, the documentation and preservation of our musical heritage, and the creation and facilitation of our musical future. It should represent the nation's art and culture to all corners of Canada and should not descend to the aims or content of private commercial radio.
The CBC Radio Orchestra has been the single most important supporter of Canadian composers and Canadian music for 70 years now. It has set a clarion example to my own organization and to many others. But its work is not finished. I simply do not understand why the CBC brass are not exceedingly proud of it or why they want to undercut it instead of growing it. Rather than being proud parents, they're acting like ugly stepmothers.
Somehow we need to get the radio orchestra reinstated. We need to reverse course on the gutting of classical programming on Radio 2, and we need to persuade the CBC leadership that destroying Canada's classical infrastructure is no way to build our country's artistic or cultural strengths. Anything the committee can do to assist in achieving these goals will be of great importance to the future of our country.