Thank you.
My name is Dominic Lloyd. I've been programming folk, roots, and world music in Canada for a decade now.
My initial experience was six years as the artistic director of the Dawson City Music Festival in the Yukon Territory, and, more recently, I have been at the West End Cultural Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Throughout my career I've been responsible for creating live music performance opportunities for local, national, and international musicians in a variety of settings.
The West End Cultural Centre is an organization like no other in Canada. We present approximately 80 concerts per year with emerging and established artists, and our mandate is to present music out of the mainstream and to provide performance opportunities for artists who would otherwise have no place to play.
The CBC has been an invaluable partner to our organization, both in concert presentation and the community programming we do. Since the changes at Radio 2 started about a year or so ago, we've been able to work with the CBC on a number of projects that are creating even more opportunities for artists.
I'm here today because I think the changes at CBC Radio 2 are a good thing. They're going to bring a closer reflection of the Canadian mosaic to the airwaves and they are going to provide some much-needed exposure to deserving Canadian artists who are not going to get that exposure anywhere else.
I think I'm here because a lot of the press I've read about the changes at Radio 2 is overwhelmingly negative and much of what I've sensed from the classical community, in print, has been an “us versus them” scenario and that classical and non-classical music cannot coexist. I'm here to say they can and they should.
Whether it's a symphony pop series with Sarah Slean, a pop singer, singing at the Winnipeg New Music Festival or a rapper from Halifax, Buck 65, performing with Symphony Nova Scotia or members of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra performing in my venue with a South Asian fusion band from Toronto called autorickshaw, which the CBC just recorded in December, these are all developmental opportunities, both for classical and non-classical artists, and they need to be heard, and the CBC is the place where they are being heard.
I really don't like the fact that the debate is pitting one music community against another. We're all interested in the presentation and preservation of important non-commercial music. What I've heard or what I seem to be getting a sense of is that people are saying that by adding a wider variety of programming to Radio 2, the CBC is somehow going commercial. I think this is completely wrong.
The artists I work with are not artists who are getting airplay on commercial radio. They are producing artistically sound and intelligent music, but it's not being played in the mainstream. Since January 2007, the CBC has recorded 15 concerts I have presented at the West End Cultural Centre. These have included local folk singers, emerging talents of young aboriginal fiddlers from reserves in northern Manitoba, new Canadian artists, a professional guitar player from Brazil who now makes his home in Winnipeg, and a percussionist who played with the national orchestra of Mozambique. These people live in Winnipeg; they're performing in our venues and they're being recorded and played across the country on CBC.
Their music is all valid and it all should be heard. You'd be hard-pressed to find any of them being played on commercial radio. As Derek said, outside the very fledgling campus community radio scene and perhaps CKUA in Alberta, the CBC is the only place many of these artists will get airplay.
So my intention on being here today is to underline the fact that the CBC is adding to its program, it's not taking away from it. I don't believe classical music is disappearing from the airwaves. I think there are thousands of independent Canadian artists who are creating, performing, and touring non-commercial music who will benefit from these changes.
I agree with the sentiments that programs like the cancelled DiscDrive will be missed, and so too will programs like Global Village and Brave New Waves. But programs like Canada Live and The Signal are filling a void and they're bringing various types of music to the ears of all Canadians.
It's true that some non-classical music now has a home at Radio 2, but to say it would have a home somewhere else is simply untrue. Artists like Hawksley Workman or Christine Fellows are finding airplay at CBC, but they are not finding it elsewhere.
I'm not saying we should do away with classical music, far from it. What I am saying, however, is that broadening our horizons should not be something we fear but something we embrace. Canada is a mosaic of cultures, and the changes at Radio 2 will be more representative of that mosaic.
Thank you.