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It was the kind of year when the best you could do sometimes, was to look at someone with benevolent incomprehension, and wonder: “What on earth were (or are) you thinking? I just don't get it.”

Kanye West caught the spirit in one sentence, as the rapper and producer struggled to absorb the notion that his latest record, 808s & Heartbreak, might not please absolutely everyone. “You know people sometimes don't understand great art when they first hear it,” he said. Forgive them, Lord. They just don't get it.

Many thousands of people were not getting it this year, as CBC Radio 2 dragged itself across a plane of broken glass in an effort to freshen up its programs. The network's trims to classical music, and its bigger pop playlist, were so polarizing that you could hardly call the reactions a debate. Classical fans fumed at the Corp's treacherous sellout. Others wondered why it took so long to stop marginalizing so many good Canadian musicians.

CBC Television literally failed to get it when CTV hustled the rights to use the jingle heard for four decades at the start of CBC's Hockey Night in Canada. A national contest found a new theme, but the hardcore fans were not fooled.

The CBC also turned the lights off for its last remaining radio orchestra, though music director Alain Trudel vowed to keep it alive as a freestanding National Broadcast Orchestra. CTV cancelled next year's round of Canadian Idol, but so far nobody has stepped forward to offer Ben Mulroney and friends a spot on community cable. The London Symphony Orchestra went online with an Idol-style hunt for personnel for a YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Ben should maybe look into it.

Stephen Harper proved himself an overachiever at not getting it, when he ridiculed those who swan about at ritzy arts events that couldn't possibly interest “ordinary Canadians.” His wife, Laureen, skipped the National Arts Centre's annual gala concert, of which she was honorary chair, and the arts became a hot election issue.

Axl Rose finally delivered Chinese Democracy, the Guns N' Roses album he had been messing with for 14 years, at a reported cost of at least as many millions, and nobody got why it took him so long. He then set his lawyers on Dr. Pepper, claiming that the soft-drink company was too slow to fulfill a promise to give a free pop to everyone in America if Rose got his record out before the year's end (Dr. P says the coupons are in the mail).

A lot of old things became new again this year, as pop continued to eat itself with all the trimmings. A small posse of musicians (including Adele, Raphael Saadiq and Alice Russell) discovered vintage Motown the way Columbus discovered the Americas, and old or disregarded synth gear became essential equipment for bands as diverse as Crystal Castles and Franz Ferdinand. Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) drew lots of chatter by making simpler, more danceable versions of the kind of omnivorous pop mashups John Oswald was doing a couple of decades ago. As David Bowie once said, what often matters isn't who does something first, but who does it second. Or even third.

Leaks of new music to the Internet became a virtually formalized practice in 2009, as big-market performers (including Kanye, Fall Out Boy and GNR) streamed their entire albums online before they reached stores. The big record companies, now busy mainly as manufacturers and distributors of hard product, fretted all over again about how to figure out the new music buyer, still not getting why the power has shifted to the likes of iTunes and MySpace.

David Cronenberg's opera version of his 1986 horror film The Fly buzzed harmlessly at two major opera houses, thanks to a flaky text by David Henry Hwang and an inert score by the usually crafty Howard Shore. La Scala commissioned an opera version of the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, somehow missing the inconvenient truth that opera and didactic non-fiction go together like pickles and ice cream.

Pianist Anton Kuerti's son, Julian, took over several plum gigs with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he's an assistant conductor, when visiting stickhandler Gennady Rozhdestvensky went into a snit about the font size of his name in the BSO's advertising (really). Canadian Helden-tenor Ben Heppner sang the monster role of Siegfried for the first time, pianist Angela Hewitt spent much of the year in an unprecedented world tour of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and violinist James Ehnes won Grammy, Juno and Gramophone Magazine awards for his concerto recordings.

It was a good year for some single-named female pop singers, as Feist, Adele, Rihanna and Britney got bigger or, in Britney's case, pulled out of a deep tailspin; while tepid new records or personal crises got the better of Madonna, Beyoncé and Shania. Carla Bruni, the new first lady of France, defied the sneers of her husband's critics and produced a good album of soft-brushed steamy cabaret songs.

Inexplicably huge careers opened up for Ne-Yo, T-Pain, Lil Wayne and Leona Lewis, who should all be grateful they outshone their more talented peers. Someone dented Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher's ribs at a Toronto concert, and Steven Page's squeaky-clean image got smudged when the Barenaked Lady was caught red-handed with a controlled substance.

Auto-Tune, a software program that makes everything sound in tune, became the most-abused gadget in music. Its eerily flattened-out effect on shaky voices (take a bow, Kanye) is the sound most likely to scream “the zero years!” in another decade.

Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter had 100th birthdays this year, and Carter was actually around to enjoy the cake. R. Murray Schafer hit 75, and like those older composers was treated to a rush of performances.

The music world got smaller with the passing of composers Mauricio Kagel, Henry Brant, Talivaldis Kenins, Eldon Rathburn and Neil Hefti; singers Odetta, Yma Sumac, Isaac Hayes, Miriam Makeba, Giuseppe di Stefano, Jo Stafford, Henri Salvador and Frankie Kerr (Teenage Head); conductor Richard Hickox; seminal rocker Bo Diddley; producer Jerry Wexler; drummers Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience) and Jimmy Carl Black (Mothers of Invention); guitarist and vintage jazz savant Jeff Healey; keyboardist Richard Wright (Pink Floyd); bassist Kenny McLean (Platinum Blonde); and fiddler Oliver Schroer, who once summarized his life in the art by saying: “I don't write music, I catch it as it goes by.” Ollie got it for sure, and thanks to him, so did we.