There’s a passionate and well-written article by Janet Danielson in the Vancouver Sun from Monday about the CBC orchestra. Click here to read it.
She reiterates the point that the CBC Orchestra plays new music by Canadian composers — content you won’t find anywhere else. Even if other orchestras pick up the baton that the CBC is dropping, it’s hard for them to get new music played on the radio. Program directors have a new-music filter. They always have to keep those ratings up.
I suppose new music appeals more to a niche audience and belongs on the web, but at the moment, the only music you can really post on the web is streaming audio from radio broadcasts. It’s a vicious cycle.
It’s going to be a long time before the world’s lawyers and the record companies give up their stranglehold on music on the web.
So Canadian composers are losing an important platform for getting their new orchestral music heard.
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David Duff, head of the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio, linked to this article as well, with this commentary: “Suffice it to say that the current situation at CBC Radio 2–including the disbanding of the CBC Radio Orchestra–is a combination of political correctness, dumbing down, and serving interests other than those of the listeners (an unfortunate practice which exists in American public radio as well).”