Digital platform promotes Canadian music
Look up the Canadian Music Centre in that indispensable sourcebook, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, and you will find four columns of type describing “a non-profit, nongovernmental library and information centre for the dissemination and promotion of Canadian concert, operatic, educational and church music.”
The encyclopedia was published in 1992 (second print edition) and, judging from the latest project of the CMC, as the institution is popularly known, the definition now needs some updating.
As Glenn Hodgins, the institution’s president and CEO, points out, Picanto, its new “digital platform for creative music content,” includes nine different musical categories: jazz, Indigenous, intercultural, sonic exploration-musique actuelle, electronic, vocal/ choral, chamber music, opera and orchestral.
What? No rock ’n’ roll? No country? No mainstream pop?
Historically — the centre was founded in 1959 with grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the performing rights organization CAPAC — it has been assumed that socalled commercial music was more or less able to take care of itself.
Like national music centres elsewhere, it has concentrated its attention on so-called art music, a category broadened over the years but still hated by musicians who feel excluded by its patrician implications. Picanto exemplifies how the situation continues to evolve. Its musical range is broader than the CMC’s founders would have foreseen but then, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would put it, this is 2021.
There was no such thing as a digital platform in 1959 and Picanto recognizes how much more accessible (COVID-19 notwithstanding) it needs to be to reach today’s public.
So what actually is Picanto? Its self-described mission is “to nurture, support and showcase Canadian musical talent at home and abroad,” celebrating “a world of new and uncommon music from diverse genres through music-video offerings, documentaries, educational videos and livestreaming events.”
A work in progress, it seeks “to increase the national and international listenership of Canadian music,” inviting artists to submit projects for exposure though the platform and, as Hodgins puts it, that includes collaborations with non-Canadian sources.
“The idea is simple,” an announcement declares.
“By working together, creating a large, comprehensive, professionally managed Canadian creative music platform, our chances of reaching the target public are greatly increased.”
The idea reportedly originated with composer Tim Brady and has been actively discussed for about a decade, Hodgins notes, as broadcasters recognized the arrival of the digital age and came to realize they had to transition from a oneto-many to a one-to-one approach to the public.
“We are aiming for 66 per cent Canadian content,” he said, “in order to allow for international participation.”
A panel of experts decides which among the various submissions to present on the platform, with $5,000 grants available to aid with production costs.
As this suggests, Picanto will need ongoing financial support. The Canada Council provided a $459,000 grant in 2019 to get things going and other agencies are being approached to make possible an $8-million to $10-million budget covering the next five years.
This is, of course, in addition to the budget needed to operate the Canadian Music Centre’s five regional offices: B.C., the Prairies, Quebec and Atlantic Canada, in addition to the national headquarters in Toronto.
The pandemic has forced closures for many months now, but the offices are usually open to the general public as well as to the professional musical community.
Composers look to the centre as a repository for their music and, with about 25,000 scores available for examination, it possesses the largest library collection of Canadian music.
It is also the source of Centrediscs, the ongoing series of compact disc recordings of Canadian music available for purchase, with the centre itself paying mailing costs.
Decades ago, Toronto composer John Beckwith wrote a provocative article titled “About Canadian Music: The PR Failure,” pointing out how under-represented our music has been in standard reference books.
The situation has since improved, thanks in no small part to Beckwith’s own efforts, but through the intervening years the CMC has remained a cornerstone source of information, a source that deserves to be better known by the general musical public.
In Toronto that can involve a visit to a renovated Victorian residence on Elm Street, where a staff of eight or nine strives to give an affirmative answer to the persistent question “Is there really a Canadian music?”
But you don’t really have to visit Chalmers House to find an answer to this question. Just boot up your computer, log into Picanto.ca and begin to listen.