The air up there

Despite the Canadian Broadcasting Company's recently-acquired talents for sowing consternation, at least they're doing right by Canada's leading avant-garde trickster, R. Murray Schafer, on the occasion of his 75th birthday—all week long, Radio 2's evening program The Signal is running tributes. The party kicked off yesterday night with a live recording of my favorite Schafer opus, the inimitably mischievous "...No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes"—you can listen to the entire Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra birthday concert online. The program also includes the string-quartet-and-string adventure "Four Forty," not to mention Schafer's own idiosyncratic contribution to the concerto repertoire—"North White," for snowmobile and orchestra.