Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, thank you for this opportunity to comment on the recent and unfortunate decision to disband the CBC Radio Orchestra.
I speak to you as a music educator, and specifically as director of the School of Music at the University of British Columbia, which includes 400 undergraduate and graduate students preparing for professional careers in the concert music tradition. Across Canada, about 4,000 students are enrolled in similar university programs. These institutions are devoted to cultivating the boundless talents and energies of the next generation of musicians in the concert music tradition. Our enrolment numbers indicate that this tradition remains an urgent inspiration to young people today.
We operate in an atmosphere of respect for the long musical traditions of many countries, languages, and cultures, knowing that they are the richest source of nourishment for the musical life of the present and the future. Collectively, our programs produce about 1,000 graduates each year who are active across the country and beyond as professional soloists, orchestra members, chamber musicians, and as teachers in universities and schools. We represent a broad cross-section of Canada's always evolving multicultural fabric, and in particular we represent young adults who want to invest their future professional lives in music more for artistic and cultural reasons than for fame and fortune.
The radio orchestra represents the ideals to which our students aspire. It has been our nation's most eloquent proponent of Canadian music and talent. It has launched the careers of our most illustrious soloists, conductors, and composers and has presented them to the world. Our students look to the CBC for artistic leadership, investment, and endorsement, but the CBC has eroded its investment in the efforts of dedicated young artists, cutting its vibrant young performers and young composers competitions. This gives the younger listening public little chance to hear their amazing peers, and it amounts to a progressive silencing of a vital component of Canadian culture and heritage.
The music students in the nation are ample reason our national broadcaster has a moral duty to reinstate the radio orchestra as an engine of dynamic cultural vitality. There are thousands of students in university music programs and hundreds of thousands in high school bands and orchestras, civic youth orchestras, or taking private lessons. For every garage band, you can find at least as many young players devoted to concert music. The CBC should be a beacon for these young people, and the radio orchestra is the most effective and inspiring way to embody and enact their aspirations. The radio orchestra is the very heart of the radio music mandate of the CBC, and it should never be cut.
In thousands of broadcasts and through visits to northern Canadian communities such as Iqaluit, it has played an instrumental role in creating and sustaining a living musical heritage that is distinctly Canadian, but also reflects the long and diverse historical traditions that meet in a unique way in our nation. The radio orchestra has proved its value and earned its right to continue making relevant, indispensable, and lasting contributions to Canadian culture and heritage.
I am not disputing the social and cultural relevance of popular music in its moment. I am also a consumer of popular music and use it in my courses.
I salute the innovative approach to Canadian indie pop on Radio 3 and the representation of mainstream popular music on Radio One. What concerns me is that programming on Radio 2 is drifting towards a demographic model used by commercial broadcasters.
Commercial radio pinpoints pieces of the demographic puzzle, using music genres as a marketing tool to attract specific groups and pitch products to them. Over time, this approach has increasingly segregated musical genres and styles and has created a false sense that demographic groups have one-dimensional music interests that don't intersect.
CBC management seems to take an uncritical approach to the demographic orientation of commercial stations. Moreover, marketing considerations are irrelevant to the mandate of CBC Radio.
Radio 2 should not fall prey to simplistic ideas about who is listening and what kind of music they want to hear. Radio 2 should not take a supermarket approach and try to appeal to a variety of demographic groups by slotting each one somewhere in the schedule. It needs to have a clear identity so that listeners can rely on it and respect it for its commitment. It should not try to appeal to everyone on a statistical but incoherent basis.
Radio 2 should focus its mission on cultivating national identity and culture in a historical and global context. Let Radio 2 be the voice of Canada's longer musical heritage. That is a noble calling, and it will serve to educate and enrich the public, enhance our nation, and showcase it for the world. The radio orchestra has a vital role to play in this vision of CBC Radio.
Do I have about 30 seconds more?