The sleepy frequencies of CBC Radio 2 aren’t the first thing you’d associate with heat, but the station’s brass are currently catching a lot of it for their plan to scale back their programming of European classical music. Judging from their ad campaign, they intend to fill their non-classical schedule with jazz, world music and singer/songwriters like Jann Arden, whose days of topping the fickle charts are behind them but who can count on the country’s Arts and Culture Centre circuit to keep their careers alive.

Classical fans, angry that the Holy Mother Corp would dare take away their beloved art music have turned to unlikely champion Facebook, as well as Globe and Mail columnist and recent EYE WEEKLY cover boy Russell Smith (who called classical “the greatest and most challenging music,” presumably in existence), to save them from the philistine hordes. Meanwhile, CBC brass insist they just want to represent our country’s rich cultural mosaic.

Both sides are half-right. European classical music is inarguably more intellectually stimulating than light pop, and replacing the former with the latter would unquestionably dumb the station down. But to claim, as Smith does, that the European classical tradition is the only one that challenges listeners is staggeringly myopic.

Indian classical music, for example, requires just as much intense training to play (it can take decades of intense study to achieve the status of pandit, or master) and to learn to appreciate. Even in 1971 at the height of Indian classical’s vogue in the west, an audience at Madison Square Garden applauding Ravi Shankar and friends tuning their instruments confirmed that westerners could learn a lot about art-music traditions outside their own. You can’t lump the Iranian musicians whose concert at Lula Lounge was recorded and put on the CBC Radio 2 website in the same category as lite-jazzer Diana Krall (not to mention the fact that all jazz is not created equal — John Coltrane is taught in conservatories right next to Bach), and unless CBC executives are planning a massive bait and switch, getting more world music on the national airwaves is a victory we should all be celebrating.

In Toronto, we’re spoiled for choice. You can hear dozens of different kinds of non-Western-classical art music (serious jazz, avant-garde classical, various world traditions, the more experimental end of art rock and the list goes on) in one place: community and college radio stations such as CIUT and CKLN. What you’d hope Radio 2 would do is to emulate the best programming of those stations, yet improving on their production values and shoestring budgets.
There are much more appealing alternatives to being an all-classical station at the expense of every other kind of art music, and to turning Radio 2 into a 24-hour-a-day drum-circle-and-free-jazz money pit, which wouldn’t serve enough of an audience to be worthwhile. But Smith and the classical defence brigade are right to bemoan turning Radio 2 into a national version of commercial dinner-jazz station Jazz FM. The country doesn’t need a national light pop broadcaster.

Along with Jann Arden and the Cowboy Junkies, in their concert archive (supposedly an indication of what they’ll be programming) CBC Radio 2 also have performances from the likes of Vancouver out-jazzers Fond of Tigers and Toronto-reared ghazale singer Kiran Ahluwalia. It should be obvious which of them needs the CBC more.

Putting our paper where our ink is
With this, our Green Issue, we’re taking the environmental consciousness that has informed our editorial content and extending it to the physical product of the paper, too. This issue is printed on 100 per cent post-consumer recycled Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)–certified paper, the gold standard for environmentalism in the world of printing. The FSC is a global organization who, according to their mission statement, “promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world’s forests.” They work to manage the timber industry so that forests maintain their biodiversity and ecological balance. We’re proud to announce that beginning today, all the stock we buy for the printing of EYE WEEKLY will be 100 per cent recycled FSC-certified paper.