Since the Massey Lectures began in 1961, many noted thinkers have addressed the nation on CBC Radio. Ideas executive producer Bernie Lucht has been involved with the series for many years. Here’s his inside look at the Masseys then and now.
My first connection with the Massey Lectures came a decade after the series began. In 1971, I returned to Canada from a two-year posting as a CUSO volunteer in Nigeria. The program Ideas was looking for a production assistant, and against all odds, I got the job.
My first assignment was to edit the raw studio recordings of that year’s Massey lecturer, James A. Corry. He was one of Canada’s most distinguished political scientists and a former principal of Queen’s University. Corry’s topic was The Power of the Law.
I set myself up in a tiny, fluorescent-lit editing room with the stack of tapes, armed with the tools of the trade — an ancient, floor-mounted Ampex reel-to-reel machine, a notepad, a stopwatch, a yellow grease pencil, a razor blade and a little roll of special white adhesive tape.
Professor Corry was a naturally slow and thoughtful speaker. As I listened, I thought it would have been nice if he had spoken just a little bit faster. Technically, I could speed him up, but actually doing so seemed like sacrilege. Speed up the lectures of a distinguished and respected scholar? Who was I, a junior staff member, to do that? But I set aside any reservations and started in.
The way to get Professor Corry to speak more quickly was to edit the pauses in his speech. There were pauses everywhere—between paragraphs, between sentences, between clauses and phrases, and even between individual words. I shortened many of them; most of the others, I cut out entirely. It was laborious work that required making thousands of edits.
These days we edit digitally, but back then it was all done by hand. I physically marked the quarter-inch tape with my grease pencil and sliced out the bits I didn’t want with the razor blade. Then I stuck the ends back together with the adhesive tape. I had to make sure the edit was undetectable to the ear. It was a good idea to save the bits that were cut out, including breaths and pauses, in case you needed to put them back in.
Picture the edit room festooned with many strips of tape, all carefully labeled with grease pencil.
After the broadcast, we received a lot of comments. Many came from people who said that they had enjoyed the lectures, but were somewhat puzzled: they had never heard Corry talk so quickly.
This was my introduction to the Massey Lectures and the start of a long association with them.
The lectures were named after Vincent Massey, the first Canadian-born governor general. In the early years, contributors came from all over the world, from Martin Luther King in the U.S. to Doris Lessing in England and Northrop Frye in Canada. In 1995, in keeping with the CBC’s mandate to promote Canadian talent, we decided to present exclusively Canadian writers and thinkers.
Ideas has been producing the Massey Lectures since the show began in 1965. As executive producer of the show for more than twenty years, I have been directly involved in choosing the lecturers since 1985.
Since then, we’ve broadcast lectures by the essayist and novelist John Ralston Saul; Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities; the scholar, journalist and Liberal Party leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff; the well-known historian of everyday life, Margaret Visser; Janice Gross Stein, head of the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies; and the former UN envoy of HIV AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis.
The Massey Lectures have grown in scope through the years and a few years ago even escaped the tight confines of the radio studio. These days, we take the Masseys on the road. Each year, the lecturers travel to five cities, and give the addresses that add up to the weeklong broadcast on Ideas. This year’s lecture, by storyteller Alberto Manguel, begins tonight.
Meanwhile, House of Anansi Press has been part of spreading the word, putting out the lectures as books since 1989. Before that, CBC printed the addresses, but many have been long out of print.
Last spring, Sarah MacLachlan, House of Anansi’s president, and Lynn Henry, the publisher, told me they wanted to publish five lectures from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book would include Massey Lectures by the liberal economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith; the ‘60s social activist Paul Goodman; Martin Luther King; urban thinker Jane Jacobs; and former Trudeau cabinet minister, Eric Kierans.
They asked me to write the book’s introduction, and I jumped at the chance to tell the story of the Massey Lectures and put each of these “lost” lectures” in the context of its times.
What strikes me about The Lost Massey Lectures is how concerns that people had thirty and forty years ago resonate today. When John Kenneth Galbraith talked in 1965 about poverty in developing countries, he could have been describing the world we live in now. And when Paul Goodman spoke a year later about the war in Vietnam, his words evoke Iraq. The effect is almost eerie.
We often think that the issues and ideas we grapple with today are new, that we are facing them for the first time in history. And in many ways, we are. But I bristle at the idea that everything is new: alongside change is continuity.
Everything we think today is built upon a foundation of human thought that is millennia old. For me, The Lost Massey Lectures give us a chance to reflect on how much has changed within the living memory of many of us, and how little.
This year’s Massey Lecture, by Alberto Manguel, runs this week on CBC Radio’s Ideas. The City of Words is available from House of Anansi Press. In 2009, the Massey lecturer will be cultural anthropologist Wade Davis; in 2010, Margaret Atwood will take the podium.
Words at Large is CBC’s online destination for Canadians who love books. Look for something new every day, from CBC programs and podcasts, to interviews with writers and more. Stay tuned for our newly designed and expanded site.
Comments
I don't think First entries of every Massey lectures are still available on the CBC site.
Though the RealAudio at 8k was of poor quality, we could at least hear the first of the five lectures by each of the Massey Lecturers.
The one I like most from that era is the one by Doris Lessing. She is sharp! She was then and she still is as we could see her responding lately of her winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
I really think if time and budget allow, you should have them all back and available in a better format.
Regards,
Marc
Posted by: Marc Bedard | November 7, 2007 10:55 PM
I don't think First entries of every Massey lectures are still available on the CBC site.
Though the RealAudio at 8k was of poor quality, we could at least hear the first of the five lectures by each of the Massey Lecturers.
The one I like most from that era is the one by Doris Lessing. She is sharp! She was then and she still is as we could see her responding lately of her winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
I really think if time and budget allow, you should have them all back and available in a better format.
Regards,
Marc
Posted by: Marc Bedard | November 7, 2007 10:55 PM
I would be interested in video or audio recordings of Northrop Frye lectures, interviews, etc.
Surely such recordings were made at some point. I wonder why they are not available, even on Youtube?
After all, one can even see a BBC interview with Carl Jung on youtube.
Posted by: Dale Scott | May 26, 2008 07:58 PM
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