Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIII, no. 3 (Fall 1997)
Letter from Canada
In his Summer "Letter from Britain," David Nicholls wrote about the impressive record of the BBC in commissioning new music.
He mentioned the "stark contrast between the situation on your side of the pond and mine," but he might have qualified
that further with "and your part of the the continent." We in Canada cannot compete with the
extensive commissioning activity of the BBC, but we nevertheless accomplish a good deal in a much smaller
situation.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was created by an Act of Parliament in 1936. It has never had an
exclusive monopoly on broadcasting but has rather been the national broadcast service supported by
public funds. The television networks carry advertising, but the radio is commercially unsponsored. There are
two services, in English and French, and each maintains its own national radio and television
networks.
Commissioning of new works in the early years of the CBC was slow to develop and was very sporadic.
The first commission seems to have gone, surprisingly enough, in 1939 to a youthful Benjamin Britten
(he spent a short time in Canada after heleft Britain and before going to the United States) for
Young Apollo). The war years inspired a few more works, among them John Weinzweig's
Our Canada for chamber orchestra, and Healy Willan's patriotic opera Transit Through Fire.
Willan also wrote Brébeuf for narrators, chorus and orchestra which, while not
patriotic, dealt with a well-known figure of the 17th century. Barbara Pentland and Godfrey Ridout
also composed CBC works in the 1940s.
Not to be overlooked, although they were not commissions in the usual sense, were countless scores
composed in the 1940s and 1950s for the CBC radio dramas. It was aperiod when the best theatre in Canada
was on the airwaves, and virtually every important composer in the country contributed scores as incidental music
for these live drama productions. These "commissions" provided young composers not only with a modest
income but, even more importantly, the opportunity to learn their craft on the job as they
prepared, and sometimes conducted, their works with a studio orchestra. Parenthetically,l I should
note that the National Film Board provided a similar opportunity, but that is another story.
The recovery after the war transformed Canada, both socially and economically, and it is within the
expanding frame of cultural activity that CBC commissions took a forward leap and established the pattern that
remains to the present. Commissions have almost always been what we call "serious" music, but the
1950s also included a "light music" feature. There was a very successfull talent program called
"Opportunity Knocks." It knocked not only for performers but also for composers, who were commissioned
to write short, light pieces to be played on the weekly broadcasts. From 1950 to 1957 they reached
105 pieces in number.
In the first sixty years of the CBC, close to eight hundred pieces were commissioned, ranging from
operas and large-scale orchestral pieces to solo works and unaccompanied choral pieces. There have been a
few electroacoustic pieces that especially suit the broadcast medium, but most of the compositions are
concert works and usually have their premieres before audiences in halls, not in the isolation of
studios. It goes without saying that all the performances are broadcast. Since 1950 there is
probably no composer of note who has not had commissions from the CBC. Virtually all the commissions
go to Canadians, but in addition to Britten there have been a few foreign commissions from Peter
Racine Fricker, Gunther Schuller and John Cage.
The idea for acommission usually originates with a producer, who develops it with a performer and
then advances the proposal within the music department. This has the salutary effect of spreading
the performances through a variety of programs. There is one central program, Two New Hours, which
with its executive producer David Jaeger and host Larry Lake serves as a focus for much new work, although
it's weekly broadcasts are not limited to CBC commissions nor to works by Canadians.
Related to the CBC's development of new music is the Young Composers Competition which has been held biannually
since 1973. The awards are financed not only by the CBC but also by a variety of other funding organizations in the country, but the CBC
provides broadcasts of the winning compositions on both French and English radio networks.
As David Nicholls reminded us in his article on the BBC, everything costs. In Canada, unlike
Britain, there is no household license fee for radio and television; the CBC must raise part of its
budget of approximately 1.3 billion (Canadian) dollars from revenues, but about seventy-five percent of the
budget is from a direct grant from Parliament. Like everything else these days, the CBC is being battered
with cuts, and, at a time when reductions in social programs excite much criticism, there has been growing
questioning of the public expenditures on broadcasting. Nevertheless, the CBC has maintained its
policy of commissioning new music. The budget, of course, is a miniscule proportion of the over-all budget of the
Corporation, but even so, the costs mount up when one adds to the basic commission the costs of
preparing parts, paying the performers, and the technical costs of production and broadcast. In the
past fifty years there has been a good deal of support for new music in Canada, financially from the Canada
Council and Provincial Arts councils, and in distribution from the Canadian Music Centre. But central to
the encouragement and dissemination of new works from our composers has been the CBC. The dollar
amounts may be insignificant compared to what is spent on hockey or other sporting events, but
the value is inestimable for the Canadian composer.
--Carl Morey
University of Toronto
Updated 1/6/98