By Andrew Cash

Well, we knew there had to be a hitch when Stephen Harper got up at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to sing a Beatles song. Setting the bar sufficiently low – it was a song Ringo sang, after all – is a Harper specialty.

But as the country woke up to the image of our wooden PM at the piano, many Canadian recording artists were twigging to yet another arts cut – one they say will hobble Canada’s specialized music community.

And like Harper’s arts misstep in the last election, this one – the chopping of the Canada Music Fund’s Canadian Musical Diversity component – has once again engaged and enraged a grassroots arts revolt.

Under pressure from NDP Heritage critic Charlie Angus, the Standing Committee on Heritage just wrapped up three days of hearings on the cuts and will deliver a report in the next few weeks to Parliament.

“We were all floored,” says budding jazz artist Sophia Perlman, one of the organizers of an October 26 protest in T.O. Perlman had been planning to seek funding for her first album from the program. “In this community, this is the grant.”

It all started with a good-news announcement at the end of July saying the feds were extending funding for the Canada Music Fund for the next five years. The $26.7 million annual budget supports several music initiatives, including those administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.

It also funds the popular FACTOR program, the public/private body responsible for grants and loans to musicians and music businesses in a range of musical styles, generally those plying more commercial routes.

But buried in the announcement was a bit of nasty business spelling the end of the Canadian Musical Diversity component. Worth $1.4 million a year, CMD funded recordings and some marketing for niche music that falls through the cracks: avant-garde, jazz, contemporary classical, some folk and experimental.

On average, close to 100 artists annually receive grants from the fund of between $10,000 and $12,000. Musicians say that turning off the CMD tap all but spells the end of a stellar Canadian cultural stream that nourished the likes of Jane Burnett, Eve Egoyan and this year’s NOW best jazz group pick, Drumheller.

Most things in life go better with music, and protests like the one last month are no different. The small but merry band of horn players, opera singers, drummers and folk artists met at the Glenn Gould statue in front of the CBC building and made their way through the streets, at one point marching into the Rex Hotel for an impromptu jam session with the combo onstage.

The public greeted them with an amused openness, a reception that seems to make the point that this kind of arts funding has intrinsic value. It enriches society in sublime ways that are usually, though not always, impossible to quantify.

Most artists affected didn’t realize the cut was coming until they got a letter from the Canada Council just weeks before the October 1 application deadline declaring that this would be the last round of financing.

Though Heritage Minister James Moore mused publicly that the fund was serving musicians who didn’t care about commercial career aspirations, the committee hearings heard much evidence to the contrary.

“We heard time and again that this funding was a crucial building block for many artists who now have international status and long-term careers,” says Angus. “The Tories just don’t understand how you build careers in music.”

Eve Egoyan is a case in point. The CMD program funded four of the internationally acclaimed pianist’s seven CDs. Her latest, the performance of a new work by Canadian composer Ann Southam, has received rave reviews.

“You don’t start popular,” Egoyan says. “It’s a process. This program is about Canadian creativity.”

The government isn’t actually reducing what it spends on music, but it is diverting the CMD fund to two new programs – digital and international marketing.

But as experimental folk artist Dan Misha Goldman says, “Without a good-quality record, you can’t do anything.”

Although witnesses at the Standing Committee testified otherwise, Canadian Heritage insists that there are still plenty of ways for specialized music to obtain funding through other Canada Council programs and through FACTOR and its Quebec sister org, MUSICACTION.

“These fund a wide variety of niche music,” says Heritage spokesperson Jean Heon. “The Canadian Music Fund [excluding CMD funds] provided yearly funding of over $1 million for classical, over $1.7 million for jazz and over $3 million for roots music.”

But genre tagging is complex. For example, should an Egoyan recording of new Canadian compositions duke it out with yet another Bach string quartet application in the same grant category?

There is another difference: FACTOR, a partnership between the feds, radio broadcasters and Canadian record labels, has private-sector business reps as well as artists on grant juries. The CMD fund was completely government-funded and almost exclusively peer juried.

Rumours abound that FACTOR convinced the government to cut the CMD fund and divert the extra cash to itself. But FACTOR head Heather Ostertag insists the group was never consulted. “I feel like we’ve been broadsided,” she says. “We should be working together to get more funding across the board.”

Singer/songwriter Goldman is clear he doesn’t want to see musicians fighting musicians. “FACTOR is important and serves a particular community really well,” he says. “And the Musical Diversity program does, too.”
MUSICAL SCORE

• $26.7 million Amount Canada Music Fund gives out per year

• $1.4 Amount Canadian Musical Diversity section gave out per year

• 94 Average number of artists funded by CMD per year

• $10,000-$12,000 Average grant for a CMD-funded artist

FACTOR public funding 48 per cent, or $8,466,329

FACTOR private funding 52 per cent, or $9,143,763

news@nowtoronto.com

Andrew Cash is the federal NDP candidate in Davenport riding

NOW | November 10-17, 2009 | VOL 29 NO 11

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 9:45 pm and is filed under All Blog Posts, Canadian, General, Music and Digital Culture, Now Magazine, Politics, Toronto. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.