‘Traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling’: producing multicultural Canada through narrations of mobility on CBC Radio’s Fuse

ABSTRACT

This case study of Fuse, a live concert-style radio programme produced between 2005 and 2008 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), explores the distinctive ways that travel and mobility were narrated on air. I suggest that there are meaningful correlations between the discursive tropes that I label ‘transit’ and ‘road’ narratives, and the patterns of representation found on Fuse. These correlations contribute to maintaining hierarchical discourses about Canadian social relations in the face of policies and discourses relating to multiculturalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Public service broadcasting
• radio
• popular music
• multiculturalism
• collaborative performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw completed her doctorate in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland (St. John’s, Canada). Her research focused on relationships between public policy, music programming on Canada’s national public broadcaster (CBC), and intercultural communications between musicians. She is the curator for the Irish Traditional Music Archive’s digital exhibition A Grand Time: The Songs, Music, and Dance of Newfoundland’s Cape Shore (2018) and the co-guest-editor of the 2018 volume of the Yearbook for Traditional Music.

Notes

1 That is, all music except for western art music (though at least a few episodes included western art music).

2 Bands, for example, tended to have an appointed spokesperson(s); other members of the ensemble were listed in the opening and closing credits but typically not addressed during the rest of the broadcast. The lack of direct address often made it impossible to distinguish backing voices, particularly if the episode featured multi-instrumentalists. My focus on leads reflected this limitation.

3 Elsewhere I have labelled this category of production ‘fusion programming’. For other case studies of fusion programming, see Draisey-Collishaw (2017, forthcoming).

4 An archived copy of the original programme for ‘Palimpsest’ is available from the South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive: https://vads.ac.uk/x-large.php?uid=47421&sos=0 (accessed 20 September 2018).

5 The Group of Seven was a group of landscape painters active between 1920 and 1933. Their work sought to develop a distinctively Canadian style based on direct contact with the natural environment.

6 Parenthetical notes following each performer’s name indicate age (if available) and performance genre. For bands, the average age of members was calculated. See Table 1 for definitions of genre categories used for analysis.

7 The Juno Awards are annual music industry awards that acknowledge the artistic and technical achievements of Canadian musicians.

8 Alanis Morissette (b. 1974) is an Ottawa-born alt-rock singer-songwriter.

9 Randy Bachman (b. 1973) is a multi-award-winning guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known as a founding member of the rock bands The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. He is also the host of Vinyl Tap, a specialist disc-spin show targeting listeners with interests in ‘classic’ rock of the 1960s and 1970s, that has broadcast via CBC since 2005.

10 Details of gender were unavailable for the remaining 0.5% of musicians.

11 30 of the 41 performers who feature in the subset of episodes featuring travel narratives are male. When this figure is broken down, it becomes apparent that the skew is specific to road narratives: 18 of 24 musicians are male, a ratio of 3:1. The gender balance for musicians associated with transit narratives, on the other hand, reflects series-wide tendencies: a ratio of just over 2:1.

12 Linden featured alongside a young singer-songwriter from the Canadian Prairies, Alana Levandoski (Fuse, 22 April 2006).

13 The Supershow was a CBC-produced concert that was staged in the National Concert Hall in Ottawa (2003). Mir were the headliners, supported by an Orchestra and a variety of guest artists, including Mary Jane Lamond. ‘The Mir Supershow 2003’ is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HU88tjkuM9c (uploaded 14 June 2007 by MIR; accessed 8 September 2016).

14 It is beyond the scope of this article to describe the many vantage points from which audiences observed/heard Fuse. See Draisey-Collishaw (2017) on the interpellation of audiences by producers of fusion programming.

15 The categories of my analysis are based on the 2006 Census of Canada. Statistics Canada defines visible minorities as ‘persons; other than Aboriginal peoples; who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour’ (Statistics Canada 2007). In its account of Canada’s ethnoracial profile, Statistics Canada does not address ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Caucasian’, or ‘white’ populations. With the intent of supporting a more holistic overview of the Canadian populace that labels everyone—not just those who are visibly Other—I also include ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘white’ categories. The inclusion of the ‘Aboriginal’ category signals the special status of Indigenous peoples within Canada, but also speaks to differences in data collection employed in the 2006 Census, which distinguish between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this article was completed as part of my doctoral studies in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. This work was also supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship programme.