Off the Record
Bob Kerr was a legendary CBC radio personality who hosted a classical music show called “Off the Record” for over 35 years (d. 2003 at age 84). These were the days when CBC had an AM station dedicated to news and talk and an FM station dedicated primarily to classical music (I miss the old CBC FM), but also with newscasts. At this point, you would rightly wonder where the liberal arts fit into this narrative, but bear with me.
Bob Kerr would end every broadcast with however much of Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel’s famous and ubiquitous Canon in D he needed to fill the remaining time in his slot, although it was always the airy Romantic-style Jean-François Paillard Chamber Orchestra version recorded in 1968. On good days, the piece would reach the climactic middle part, where you could just imagine the violinists’ bows furiously flying across the strings but, on most days, the first little snippet of Johann’s greatest hit would leave you wanting more (at least it did for me – not everyone is as enamoured with it as I am).
Intro to Music 1
I started listening to classical music in earnest after having taken a basic “music appreciation” course from Professor Harold Wiens in the third year of my Bachelor of Arts program at the University of Alberta in the early 1980s. To say that this hooked me on the music of the masters for life and enriched my very being (despite my having obtained only a 7 in the course based on the old stanine system!) would be an understatement, but there was even more to it than that.
While at least one full year of fine arts was a requirement for my degree, this was not some sort of “easy credit” class – it was demanding and part of an overall liberal education that enabled me to engage with the world on a more thoughtful, holistic, and what I hoped would be intelligent basis.
Being a liberal arts student in the early 1980s
The early ‘80s were a particularly heady time to be studying the liberal arts in university in Canada. Focussing on history and political science in particular, as I did, the National Energy Program, the patriation of the Canadian Constitution, and Québec separatism were all at the forefront of public discourse. Further afield, the Cold War was in full force, with the prospect of nuclear annihilation never entirely far from thought.
These were, of course, exactly the issues that CBC Radio news brought to Canadians’ attention every day at 3 PM, right after Bob Kerr’s snippet of the Canon had injected a moment of blissful calm into listeners’ day. As I progressed with my education, both the music and the news were starting to take on a different complexion for me.
The third year: the beginnings of a unified whole
The third year of my liberal arts education was the year when all my learning started to present as a unified whole. It was precisely then that connections among both disciplines and individual courses became evident. For instance, I realized that Baroque music’s ornate, exaggerated, and energetic style was also reflected in the exuberant detail and deep colour of Baroque art and the highly decorative and florid movements of Baroque architecture.
Similarly, in the Age of Enlightenment of the (mostly) later 18th century, ideas such as individual liberty and religious tolerance permeated philosophy, economics, politics, and public life in general. Concurrently, scholars consider the lighter, clearer, and less-complex “classical era” music of Haydn and Mozart (in contrast to the heavier Baroque strains of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and, of course, Pachelbel) to be the most dominant outward expression of this period. This is also, of course, the era of the French and American Revolutions, which also drew heavily from contemporary intellectual currents. I found it fascinating that we could not only study and understand the zeitgeist of a given era but also understand how one era organically evolved into the next.
Tools for life
When I started discerning the temporal and thematic interconnectedness among the history, political science, music, literature, and philosophy classes I was studying in my liberal arts quest, it was as if a supernova had exploded in my mind. I absolutely loved discovering all this synthesis and how it gave me the fundamentals to begin formulating more mature and complex thoughts about what was happening around me in Canada and the world, as well as the tools to nurture an evolving philosophy of life over the years.
Notwithstanding pre-existing personal bias and a considerable amount of immaturity, I was able to hear Pachelbel’s Canon and listen to the CBC news right afterward with an entirely different mindset. This was, and continues to be, the essence of the joy in my liberal arts education.
The liberal arts today
As political scientist (and then Interim Academic Dean of the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus), Roger Epp, once wrote in an article for the local paper, “A liberal education is not to be taken lightly, or diminished with one-liners about BA graduates serving up fries behind the fast-food counter. Before something valuable is taken away or restricted, it is often necessary to devalue it.” It is beyond the scope of this piece to make the full case for the value of the liberal arts (as this book does), but I know that my own education has imbued every single aspect of my life, both personally and professionally, with a depth of enjoyment, understanding, and ability that would otherwise undoubtedly have been absent or at least significantly lessened.
Well-rounded education as a luxury
Now, I understand that, when I attended university, the cost of a liberal arts education was a fraction of what it is now (even taking inflation into account), so students today often decide that this type of holistic education is a luxury with questionable career benefits (research shows that this is not the case), unless it’s a prerequisite for another degree, such as law (there is a reason it is a prerequisite for a professional career like law, no?).
However, we should ask why governments have made this type of education so unreachable for so many and should also ask why voters often support governments who espouse sometimes drastic cuts to liberal education programs? To paraphrase Roger Epp, it may well be because a liberal education can be, in many ways, a challenge to the established order, a danger, even, to the status quo. People who have been educated to think about things in a more comprehensive way, in pursuit of “Whatsoever things are true” (the University of Alberta motto), are very often going to engage the world differently than those who have not had that privilege, and many see this as a threat.
Timeless, gentle Pachelbel
I recognize that not everyone would want, or be able, to obtain a liberal arts education and there are some incredibly brilliant people who have not gone that route. That’s fine, of course, as we need every type of trade and profession in our lives (I have been both a tradesperson and a professional). However, as a society, we are poorer for more people not experiencing the joy (there’s that word again) of figuring out how it all fits together, and for people not only forgoing the liberal arts, but of actively and often derisively devaluing it. The question of whether the world as it is these days, with authoritarianism on the rise and social media undermining evidence-based decision making, is the result of this devaluation, but that is an examination for another time.
The news is still on CBC Radio at 3 PM, but what good is that if the soft and calming strains of Pachelbel’s timeless, gentle Canon in D aren’t there to pave the way beforehand?
Well you don’t need to sell me on the value of the liberal arts. 🙂 You made me nostalgic for my own days of discovery in the Faculty of Arts (which you witnessed)!
You point out a particular era — the 1980s — it triggered a vague memory of something I read recently which I’ll try to find. The gist was though a historicized account of English literature in particular — why it ascended, and why and how it has descended. Although I would never support a “business case” against the relevance of liberal arts, I do believe it has a lot to answer for with respect to its elitism and insularity. This must also be considered in the wider contexts of how higher education in general has been decimated, and how cultural dissemination has been altered by the interwebs.
I love this perspective being added to the conversation. Thanks for posting!
I was taught to question things from my parents. I learned to memorize and to repeat what I heard in grade school. But I learned to think and evaluate in university during my bachelor of arts degree. Information is useless unless you can sift it and judge the worth of the data. Good article Jerry.
Much appreciated, Brian. We can discuss further in person!
Thanks for your piece on Pachelbel and Bob Kerr–I now can buy the exact version that he played. I so loved his show.
I’d love to know which version of Airs and Dances he played as his intro–does anyone here know?
Amy, I think someone did answer this in the Facebook comments thread – I hope it helps!
Jerry, we may have been in some of the same classes at U of A in the early to mid 1980s. I did music history with Regula Quereshi, and it was a transformative experience. I went on the become an English professor, but my sense of how music history, intellectual history, and political history were intertwined was also awakened in those years. Thanks for your article. (I too miss CBC FM and the classical music programming, especially Jurgen Gothe and his cats.)
Very interesting! I did my BA in 1979-83 and my MA 1984-86. The music course with Harold Wiens was in fall of 1981. That’s the only music course I did, as I did some other courses to meet my fine arts requirement.
I was lucky to be raised in the Netherlands where I completed a tough secondary education program with Classics, modern languages, math and science.
Then I became a scientist (geologist) and there was nothing like Liberal Arts during my university education, but I did have that unique secondary education experience and I’m forever grateful for it. I also never worked as hard (and I’m 71 now) as during those high school years. Everything afterwards was a breezer
I’m sure that your secondary education requirements were much more demanding than mine and I wasn’t smart enough in high school to appreciate the opportunities I did have there. You are fortunate and it sounds like it all turned out very well for you. Great to be 71 and able to look back on things with fondness!