Canadian Composers: Broadcasts Repurposed for Online

Here’s a rare chance to hear a lot of previously unavailable music by Canadian composers.

The Globe and Mail reports:

This week, the Canadian Music Centre launched Centrestreams, an audio-streaming service that makes the CMC’s collection of 8,000 recordings, by about 700 Canadian composers, available online at http://www.musiccentre.ca.

The CMC’s sound archive is made up almost entirely of works composed, performed and recorded in the last 50 years. Many of the recordings originated as CBC radio broadcasts, often from the now-defunct Two New Hours program. But other recordings were provided by composers themselves – and arrived, over the years, in a wide variety of formats, including vinyl LPs, analog tapes and compact discs.

Centrestreams offers about 90,000 minutes – or just over 62 solid days – of music, ranging from big, orchestral compositions to small pieces for single instruments. The Canadian composers represented are a remarkably diverse group.

You can read the whole story here.  I like it when music like this can live online, where it can reach a worldwide niche audience.