East Village Opera Company Redux

A.C. Douglas at Sounds and Fury posted recently on an interview he'd heard by the East Village Opera Company.

The comments of the Company, as well as A.C. Douglas' comments on their stance, reminded me of a post I had written on one of my old blogs, the name which shall remain forever forgotten...you'll note the striking similarities between my post and that of Mr. Douglas, although I would note that I go to great lengths to explain what he assumes needs not be said.

Enjoy:

On Studio Sparks, Eric Friesen asked listeners for their opinions on his guests, the East Village Opera Company, who came to the CBC studios in Ottawa to sell some records yesterday. Here goes…

They suck. No, that's not quite right, nor fair...

The East Village Opera Company was formed by a couple of Canadians who take opera arias and turn them into “rock” songs, to make them more accessible.

There is a long-standing tradition of popular artists pilfering classical music for tunes, all with varying degrees of success. I don’t mind this. If you can make it work, by all means, pilfer away. The East Village Opera Company does not, and I am afraid they do not even fail badly enough to put them in the category of Florence Foster Jenkins, and therefore worth listening to.

However, their tepid popera stylings (you can listen here) were not what really rankled me. Instead, it was their shameless use of common pop culture tropes about classical music to help sell their records.

The narrative goes something like this:

Mean, conservative classical musicians wouldn’t let them near the sacred bookcase containing the good opera music, so they had to go and find a way to bring this music to the masses, so it would reach out and touch more people, and get more people in the seats of the, for example, sold out Canadian Opera Company season. They're doing the classical world a favour, by making this music more accessible.

Not by singing it in English, of course. Nope, the Puccini arias are in Italian, the native language of rock. To boot, the lead singer’s voice is that of a young Aaron Neville, so you know he’s got that rock edge to his sound.

It got worse. There was their feigned surprise that classical musicians didn't despise them, or try to kick them out of the classical musicians club for raiding the sacred bookcase.

Check out their web site. Don't these guys look edgy, standing around, arms folded, on their East Village stage set, while accompanied by their edgy cremonese cellos?

Go watch the video. I think it sums up this project nicely.

The aria being performed is the very famous cabaletta from Verdi's Rigoletto, La donna è mobile. For those of you who don't speak Italian, what he's singing about is that women are fickle, unpredictable, like feathers in the wind. But you'd never know that watching the video.

The women should be slapping him for what he's singing, and at least that would have been a nod to what the song was about. Instead it's all E-infused 20-somethings clubbing to opera.

Now I know some of you re thinking, "But don't classical musicians do this all the time? Sing this stuff out of context?" Yes, but most classical musicians don't pretend to represent the intentions of dead composers if they were alive and composing today, as this pair did on CBC.

The frontmen for the group went on and on about how they felt that if Mozart were around today, he'd be using microphones and electric guitars. Sure, and he'd be writing his rock songs in Italian, just like everyone else.

Look, I don't doubt the skill or the sincerity of the musicians involved in this project. What I find frustrating is that their marketing sets them up as a bunch of rebels, who somehow got those stodgy old men at Decca, the giant classical music label, to let them record an album.

But here's the rub - I suspect that's exactly what happened. Some record exec took a look at this, and thought, "Hey, there's a whole segment of the population out there who want to look sophisticated but don't want to take the time to learn all the ins and outs of opera. Let's sell them this. They'll think they're getting "culture", and these nice boys are more than willing to be the front for us."

More power to them, because it appears to be working. Go check out the Amazon reviews for the CD.

Reading straight from the marketing copy, this light rock take on opera seems to be a hit for all those people who are frustrated with all the stuffy, boring, traditional approaches to classical music.

Make no mistake, the East Village Opera Company makes classical music fun!

All you have to do to believe this is to forget that the classical music recording industry pushes out these controversial, fun artists with an astonishing regularity that, surprise surprise, mirrors the popular music industry. Given that they're all owned by the same people, this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Or what about all this need to make classical music more accessible? Here we find some twisted logic, a logic many classical music lovers support enthusiastically - the need to "convert" people over to classical music.

Indeed, the East Village Opera Company, while trying to make classical music more "accessible", find their very footing in the proselytizing zeal which grounds the classical music industry.

They are part of an infrastructure which assumes that classical music is in dire need of help, and that if only people got to hear it they would become fanatics.

But how about the possibility that classical music doesn't need any help? Like all other musical genres, not everyone listens to it - do you see folk musicians going out there saying things like this?

And just take a look at the local classical music scene here in Toronto. You can go to a concert at lunch and attend one in the evening nearly every day this month.

In fact, you're spoiled for choice! Or how about, if you took the combined listening audience of CBC Radio 2 (even now) and classical 96.3 FM here in Toronto, classical music has one of the largest market shares in the city?

No one's listening to classical music? HA!

So please, East Village Opera Company, do your thing, just don't sell it as a kind of public service, and just let it be the capitalist music industry confection that it is.

CBC National Day of Action

Peter McGillivray left a comment on one of my CBC posts that deserves to be put up top!

Here it is:

Just to let you know, a National Day of Action is planned for Friday April 11th. We're going to have demonstrations at as many CBC installations as we possibly can to protest the changes to Radio Two and the axing of the CBC Radio Orchestra. Come visit the Facebook event site for more details

For those of you who aren't on Facebook, here are the details, from the site:

9am PST: Victoria: 1025 Pandora Avenue

9am PST: Vancouver: 775 Cambie Street
John Oliver, are you interested?

10am MST: Calgary: 1724 Westmount Blvd. NW
Contact - Andrew Nowry Andrewnowry@gmail.com

10am MST: Edmonton: 23 Edmonton City Centre, 10062-102nd Avenue
Contact - Scott Bursey

11am CST: Regina: 2440 Broad Street

11am CST: Winnipeg: 541 Portage Avenue

11am CST: Thunder Bay: 213 East Miles Street

12pm EST: Toronto: 250 Front Street West
Contact Peter McGillivray radio2@petermcgillivray.com (though I will probably be in Edmonton - could somebody else take over Toronto?)

12pm EST: Sudbury: 15 MacKenzie Street

12pm EST: Windsor:825 Riverside Drive West

12pm EST: Ottawa: 181 Queen Street, Ottawa
Meet at Sparks Street entrance
Contact:

12pm EST: Montreal: 1400 Rene Levesque East
Contact-Alexandra Fol
alexandra.fol@mail.mcgill.ca

1pm AST: Fredericton: 1160 Regent Street

1pm AST: Saint John: 560 Main Street

1pm AST: Moncton: 250 University Avenue

1pm AST: Halifax: 1601 South Park

1pm AST: Charlottetown: 430 University Avenue
Contact Kate Huston drummingdiva@hotmail.com

1:30pm NST: St John's: 25 Henry Street

Let's make sure we get this movement off Facebook and into the general public as well. over 100 people showed up in Vancouver. If we can get even 20 to show up at each CBC station we will have made a huge statement.

For inspiration check out the following group sites:
Save Classical Music at the CBC

Save the CBC Radio Orchestra

If you agree to show up to one of the protests, please sign the Facebook wall and tell us which city you live in so we can get an idea of numbers. Thanks, Canada!

The Good Liar's Paradox

The dilemma of the bad liar is that no one believes them even when they are telling the truth.

The paradox of the good liar is that everyone believes them.

The Sufferings of the Bourgeoisie

John Saunders, the White Anglo-Saxon Ravi Shankar, honked repeatedly as he edged his Volvo backwards out of the driveway of his North Toronto semi-detached. Turning his head, he glanced over at his daughter Britney in her 5-point harness, and Sir Pantsalot, the Saunder's family year-old Afghan Hound.

A Mozart rondo faded to the voice of Peter Togni:

"..ewelbox surprise for today..."

"Daddy, I want some candy."

"Honey, we'll get you some candy once Sir Pantsalot gets his shots at the vet."

The dog looked up at him suddenly, dropping his Bark and Fitz chew toy onto the floor.

"Damn..."

Sir Pantsalot sat straight up, and began to howl in the style of a branded cow. He quickly tired of howling, and settled upon a mix of heavy panting and wild barking, while pacing the leather bench like an expectant father.

"Damn! Damn! Damn!" Britney screamed. "Shut up supantslot! Shut up!"

Her anger quickly turned to tears. In her rage, she realised that the only solution to the noise would be to strike the Sir Pantsalot with her right hand, sticky from a recently consumed bag of Fruit Gushers.

The dog, equally frustrated by his circumstance, returned her volley by biting her on the hand. Britney screamed.

John sighed, and thought to himself, "This was no way to start the Saturday drive to Starbucks..."

Tautological Aphorism I

The only remedy for hubris is tragedy.

CBC Orchestra Disbands?

According to the CBC, that's what it's doing.

Although Chris Foley at the Collaborative Piano Blog found it surprisingly honest, I would beg to differ.

To say in the headline that the orchestra is disbanding implies some kind of collective action on the part of the musicians, and not an executive decision to slowly replace orchestral music on CBC with whatever's cheaper.

From the article:

The decision to disband the orchestra — formed in 1938 when radio orchestras were common — comes down to dollars and cents, a CBC executive in Vancouver said Thursday.

You see? Having a radio orchestra is old fashioned, and to stay "relevant", CBC needs to "embrace change" and stay "cutting edge". This means instead of keeping an irrelevant orchestra around, they will spend the money they saved broadcasting irrelevant orchestras.

Indeed, this is the CBC's logic - killing the orchestra is all about "outreach":

"We know for example that for a concert that we fund through our CBC Radio Orchestra, we can extend our reach to three by doing it through other musical organizations," said Jennifer McGuire, executive director of CBC English Radio.

OK, but given they've cut the amount of time alloted to broadcasting orchestral music, what does this mean?

The article also appears to ignore the function the orchestra played in the musical life of Vancouver residents, but who cares about them, right? That's what you get for not living in Toronto!

***

And then there's the reaction to it, the people commenting on the article, the echo chamber at the end of internet news articles that let people "join the conversation".

If only people on either side of the debate who comment on news articles had anything interesting to say. (Yes, I am aware of the self-referential position I put myself in by blogging this!)

Most comments fall into two categories, which are probably reflective of public opinion - cutting the CBC Radio Orchestra is outrageous, or cutting the CBC Radio Orchestra is a good thing becase taxpayer dollars could be more efficiently used. (This ignores the "CBC sucks or classical music sucks" comments, which are the argumentative equivalent of belching during a debate.)

Does anyone notice that these opposing arguments are not opposing at all, that they speak to a deep divide in how people think about culture and the world?

One speaks to a moral obligation the public broadcaster has to "culture", the other a moral obligation to "the taxpayer". Which one wins?

Where does the efficient use of taxpayer money fit in with the CBC's mandate to "inform, enlighten, and entertain"?

Are those three charges equal? Are they in order of importance?

It seems to me that CBC has, for the most part, abdicated the first two in favour of the third. So then, isn't the waste of taxpayer money that the CBC spends far more money on unelnlightening entertainment than they do on the CBC Radio Orchestra?

I think people who love the CBC and believe that it should be the country's premier cultural forum have to begin doing some heavy lifting here, intellectually speaking.

We can no longer point to Beethoven and expect people to go "oh, yes, we need that and those who followed him", because no one really understands that anymore - the news story comments make that much clear.

Rather, artists and intellectuals need to field on which this debate is played. We need to stop lamenting the supposed "golden age" of public enlightenment, and build that enlightened space for ourselves. Perhaps then, the CBC, as a consumate follower of trends, will come around.

CBC Radio Orchestra Cut - Boycott The CBC

According to the Chris Foley at the Collaborative Piano blog, CBC has cut the CBC Radio Orchestra.

From the (former) CBC Radio Orchestra website:

There's nothing else like it! The CBC Radio Orchestra is North America's only broadcast ensemble, a legacy of the days when radio orchestras were to be found all over our continent. With an audience as diverse as the Canadian experience, we create engaging musical radio programs, commission and perform new works as well as established classics, and showcase exceptional Canadian performers and conductors. Alain Trudel has led the orchestra since the fall of 2006. Under his direction the orchestra continues to tirelessly navigate a rich and varied musical landscape, never ceasing to grow and evolve.

No more. Today, I encouraged loyal Radio 2 listeners to tune out, because of programming changes. Now they are dismantling an entire orchestra.

What can one do? Here's a suggestion.

Classical musicians forget about the CBC as a broadcast platform. It seems that the only alternative is to build something out of the CBC's ashes, perhaps something akin to the local public broadcasting of orchestra concerts that happen across the US - the Minnesota Orchestra has it own radio program. Given the CBC's abandoning of high culture, why should the major Canadian orchestras rely on the CBC, when the CBC has just told Canadian orchestras that it will sacrifice professional musicians to pay for another episode of Air Farce? Why not just broadcast it themselves, or see if any other radio stations will pick up the slack? Moses Znaimer, anyone?

The numbers don't lie - there's a market for classical music, but the CBC doesn't care about that market anymore, instead groping hungrily for that elusive popera and light jazz standards market. Perhaps the only thing musicians can do is starve them back to their senses or move on.

So what about a general boycott? Given today's news, the time for letters to the program manager and hand wringing is past.

Oh, the Hypocrisy!

I have noted before my deep admiration for Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer.

Last fall, I attended a performance of his The Princess of the Stars up in Haliburton Forest. I had intended to review it, but cottage life...

The work takes place on a lake at dawn, and is a myth of Schafer's fashioning that unfolds before us, viewers who in some sense are also part of the action.

I enjoyed it immensely, despite the time of the performance and the chill in the morning air. It is unfortunate that I happened to sit next to people who did not enjoy it at all, and voiced their objections rather loudly afterwards, using opining with the age-old slander that Schafer's music is not music at all.

No matter. The point of this post is to point you towards a concert on the CBC's Concerts on Demand site which celebrates the 75th birthday of Canada's greatest living composer.

Yes, I am aware of what I just said about the CBC, but it's radio and TV we're looking to change, right? Let's just remember that offering concerts on demand isn't a substitute for broadcasting and promoting classical music and the arts in the blunter media of TV and radio.

And here's something else, just for the sheer pleasure - R. Murray Schafer's own program notes to his compositions (warning, opens to a pdf)! They are a delight to read, and well worth browsing before, during, and after the concert. Schafer is not only a great musician, he's a wonderful writer, as opinionated and vibrant in his words as in his compositions.

Enjoy!

Turning off the CBC

I know the news about CBC Radio 2 finally doing away with any kind of pretense that it's a classical music station a few weeks ago has generated a storm of controversy.

Russell Smith, in the Globe and Mail, has devoted two of his Thursday columns to this topic. He claims the reaction to his columns is "bigger than any response to anything I have ever published in a newspaper (yes, beating out both porn and grammar)." People are outraged.

The issue of Radio 2 is one I've tried to tackle before. And given my interest, perhaps my loyal readers are wondering why I haven't said anything and added my voice to Smith and his readers' outrage.

My main reason is that I no longer listen to CBC Radio 2.

Well, that's not quite true. Saturdays are still, for the most part, CBC Radio 2 days for me, but I think this is just a coincidence and has little to do with any effort on the CBC's part to retain loyal listeners.

Indeed, I am sure that if they could come up with some clever reason to move Saturday Afternoon at the Opera to the midnight-6 AM shift, they would. They could even play an opera recording on Sunday nights, dub it "Opera Weekends", and proclaim that they've doubled the amount of opera on CBC Radio 2!

The arguments of Smith et al are trenchant, and I agree with them, but I but I think their idealism leads them up a blind alley, an alley that ignores the people who are in charge now.

Isn't it all obvious what is happening? The ad men (and women) have taken over the CBC.

***

I wonder if this well-worn sentence, from Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy, doesn't point towards CBC's main problem:

Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: “This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers."

What does this mean, you ask? It's that, somewhere along the way, the culture of the humanities got recoded with the culture of marketing.

Humanistic thinking must be "saleable" (read dumbed down) in order to qualify as legitimate.

Not so long ago, one could look at the CBC and say that their mandate was to educate and to broaden the kinds of discourse found in the public sphere. Not anymore. It is clear to anyone who watches or listens to the CBC that their mandate is to achieve market share. So what does that mean? Cast as wide a net as possible to catch as many as you can, and don't worry about what you're catching.

In other words, the only way to get CBC back to its educational mandate, and yes, this means putting "difficult" music on, and having "complicated" conversations, things that most bureaucrats believe the "average" person is incapable of, is by switching off the CBC.

You have to remember that the people who think they know best about "what people want" aren't snooty elitests listening to Webern while reading The Last Days of Virgil, rather they are people who have virtually no tastes at all. It is their position in the bureaucracy that gives them this authority, and not their knowledge of culture, or their appreciation of the arts.

So they are not looking down at the rabble, they are imagining the rabble too dumb to understand things that they, clever bureaucrats they are, don't understand either!

This much is clear - All they understand are numbers. The CBC's communications strategy has been full off talk of "target markets" and "demographics". That's why writing letters is a great way to vent, but a waste of time to effect change when the only numbers they understand are ratings.

Mother corp haters used to complain that the CBC didn't care about ratings, and that's why they allowed all this esoteric crap on the radio instead of the latest popular music. Now that it's clear that the CBC cares only about ratings, why should the big chunk of old listeners they have spent the past 15 years alienating keep listening?

Let me ask you that, classical music listener - Why do you listen to CBC Radio 2 anymore? Because you used to love it? Out of patriotic duty? Why?

I am ever optimistic. Perhaps one day, the pendulum will swing back, and the humanities will again be seen as something intrinsically worthwhile instead of an impractical luxury that takes money away from repackaging bad bonds into complex securities to trade on the derivatives markets.

Until then, the only way to change things is to use that very same market CBC execs have deluded themselves into believing they are a part of and must lead by following whatever it is the "people" want.

Starve the monster, and just turn off the CBC.

Coyne on Tipping

Andrew Coyne, a well-known Canadian opinionator, has a piece in this month's Macleans magazine about the scourge of tipping people in the service sector.

It's highly enjoyable mainly because it's true. There is something unseemly about tipping, and as Coyne points out, the conventions of tipping are completely arbitrary. I'm usually one for ritual, but who does tipping really help if it's so asymetrically applied?

My one reservation is Coyne injunction to encourage the individual to stop tipping. While this lines up nicely with his libertarian leanings, it seems that the only way that tipping would become shameful is if restaurants and hoteliers decide to discourage it publicly, an unlikely scenario.

Here in Toronto, there was a big move from restaurateurs to stop using bottled water and serve water only from the humble Toronto tap - can you see them banding together and proudly boasting their restaurant is a tip-free zone?

So Coyne's point is taken and accepted, but how many of us are willing to band together to stop tipping, and how much pressure would be needed to get tip-soaked industries to do anything to address the wage issue they hide behind to justify tipping?