Glenn Gould had the right idea when it came to fashion: keep bundled up at all times and you’ll never feel caught in the rain. But those who huddled around the seated statue of Gould outside the CBC Broadcast Centre on Front Street, part of a national day of protest to “Raise a Ruckus For Radio 2,” were forced by today’s April showers to follow Gould’s sense of style.

And most of the 100 in attendance were older than the classical pianist — who died in 1982 at age 50 — ever had the opportunity to be.

Granted, it’s an age group who have the luxury to gather during a Friday noon hour, with protest signs as a younger surrogate: WHAT MESSAGE ARE YOU SENDING TO OUR YOUTH THEIR DREAMS DON’T MATTER (sic) read one, ARE 1,100,000 CLASSICAL LISTENERS IRRELEVANT read another. From the same designer of a WE ARE YOUR DEMOGRAPHIC sign came MR. HARPER, ARE YOU LISTENING?, and also CBC: STOP LYING TO YOUR AUDIENCE.

The announcement that CBC would be altering the music format on CBC Radio  2 this fall, confining exclusively classical music to the 10am to 3pm time slot, led to the initial backlash. Cutting the CBC Radio Orchestra, the last remaining broadcast ensemble on the continent, was regarded as an even greater betrayal.

But, in the cold drizzle, the rally sounded like a splitting headache: beating drums, bellowing voices, and “Hey Hey! Ho Ho! These Cuts Have Got to Go!” and “We sure matter! We sure matter! We sure matter!”

You’d think a group of people defending great music could come up with chants that are easier on the ears.

“Attention CBC Radio 2 listeners,” reads a brand new streetcar advert from Classical 96.3, a commercial station recently bought by a company led by Moses Znaimer. “Calm Down. Carry On.” The renamed CFMZ-FM registered a 5.3 share of local listeners in the latest ratings, compared to 1.9 for CBC Radio 2.

Changes to the national terrestrial radio music service from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation started last year, with the addition of a new dinnertime jazz program, Tonic, and eclectic evening performance show, Canada Live. Late nights, formerly home to boundary-defying Brave New Waves was replaced by more streamlined ethereal music show, The Signal, and overnight Nightstream.

Listeners were eased into these changes last year through a blog maintained by benched on-air host Jowi Taylor — since reassigned to the weekday Nightstream shift — where his attempts to engage website visitors with florid thoughts on musical diversity were responded to with complaints about the programming changes. He signed off the blog with a feisty rant directed at those who wouldn’t clam up about the perceived misallocation of “my tax dollars."

With the announcement of even further Radio 2 changes this fall, made during last month’s Canadian Music Week conference, the backlash crept into Canada’s National Newspaper — that is, the national newspaper whose opinion pages don’t feature anti-CBC diatribes every other day. Those lamenting the changes found the sympathetic ink being spilled by Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith.

First he advocated killing the Radio 2 service altogether would be better than cutting back on the classical programming. Then he got enough emails to justify a follow-up. And, this week, a column headlined “Classical is better than pop — and we know it." Smith showed up at the rally in his rain hat to give it a reading, with a few additional asides: “I really, really really hope you like Feist,” he said. “Because come September you’re going to hear a lot of her.”

Feist was just one of 50 artists — generally singer-songwriter types in the adult-alternative realm — endorsing the new CBC Radio 2 in a Globe advert, alongside the signatures of music-industry executives. Considering how the space cost somewhere around $30,000, that’s a pretty good return on the investment of paying Smith to ruminate in print each Thursday.

And he’s bound to keep his column for a while longer, since the movement calling themselves Stand on Guard for CBC used this day of rallies across the country to collect funds to buy their own Globe ad.

Their campaign will not only focus on the CBC Radio 2 changes, but also the shutdown of the CBC Radio Orchestra and previous closure of the CBC Records label, and related reduction of the Canadian production of new work.

Just to show that they aren’t railing against all popular culture, they also cite the “failure of Radio 3 to become a national broadcast network for non-classical music.” Radio 3 recently moved its principal platform from Sirius Satellite Radio to online, and boasts of a rabid podcast following for its CanCon indie-rock.

For anyone who knows anything about non-classical music, and has heeded the musical breaks on the information-oriented CBC Radio One, it’s easy to guess what they have in mind for Radio 2. Mornings will offer “a range of genres including classical, pop, jazz and roots” and afternoon drive will focus on vocal music. A wider palette than what’s currently heard on the commercial airwaves, but nothing that’s likely to infuriate, or shatter glass.

However, it will represent some evolution from the original Radio 2 ambition of edifying rural rubes with the work of dead white males.

Smith posited in his latest Globe column whether the singing of Molly Johnson is worth more than the compositions of Sergei Prokofiev.

What he said during a debate on CBC Radio One’s The Current on Wednesday was a bit more nuanced, though, advocating radio for “the sensitive kid bored by the beer-drinking frat culture” like he was. “There are hundreds of thousands of emo kids, and underprivileged kids, around the country who need an escape from the boredom of the bored mass culture around them.”

But, when those proverbial emo kids have never touched a terrestrial radio in their lives, the only place to turn is to the vitriolic greybeards.

Bob Stevenson, the artistic director of local contemporary ensemble Arraymusic, led the charge in the rain. He shared the story about how, as a 14-year-old, he encountered the music of Charles Ives on the CBC, which motivated him to attend a free concert the public broadcaster was sponsoring. And how he remembers when a three-hour piece by composer Morton Feldman was presented on the Sunday night show Two New Hours — back then, they were willing to postpone the 11pm newscast to air it uninterrupted.

There will be no more airtime for such indulgences on the CBC.

“They counted on our apathy,” hollered Stevenson. “They counted on us giving up. They counted on us not doing anything about it — they’ve been doing that for 40 years now. They counted on it. And they were… wrong!

“This is public radio, the public airwaves, our tax dollars. They. Work. For. Us.”

Subsequent speakers relayed tales of how the Canadian soldiers liberating the Dutch in World War II were brought to tears when the classical music started wafting over their airwaves once again; that the Eastern Bloc countries managed to support their own orchestras even in the darkest days of Communism; how employees of the CBC have verified that their building is a “toxic atmosphere.”

CBC Radio Orchestra, which will be forced to disband come November, will be performing the Great Canadian Songbook next weekend from their Vancouver base, with songs from Randy Bachman, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. That will vanish, it was lamented, in favour of the new format.

Y’know, a format where actual Randy Bachman, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young songs will be played alongside much younger songwriters.

An opinion piece from University of Victoria music professor Christopher Butterfield, published this week in the Victoria Times-Colonist — titled "The CBC is slamming the door on Canadian culture"— was also read: “Keep thinking of the CBC as an art gallery, and the orchestra as the space devoted to new work by Canadian artists. By terminating the orchestra, the CBC has closed the contemporary gallery.”

Classical 96.3, as a commercial station, is licensed to play 20 per cent Canadian Content — generally on the lighter side of the classical music spectrum. Znaimer’s new media empire, focused on the “Zoomer” demographic, is using multiple platforms to reach people over 50 — selling lifestyle products to retired boomers.

Of course, those are people whose idea of cultural indulgence is an Alaskan cruise, not a protest in the rain. Naturally, some anti-Stephen Harper sentiment was part and parcel of the raging rhetoric.

Maybe you never get too old to get excited when hearing that security guards gave up on trying to enforce trespassing rules?

“They want you to feel like you have no power out here on the street,” shouted Stevenson. “But if we don’t like what happens in September we’ll be back here. And there will be more of us.”

Maybe they won’t all be golden aged, either. Noted was an all-access concert sticker on the violin case of a woman watching the rally — she apparently was hired for the string ensemble for last week’s Mary J. Blige/Jay-Z concert at the Air Canada Centre. Worlds that this crowd, for all their alleged liberalism, would rather not have collide.

Previously on the Scroll: Toronto radio ratings

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