Popular

The book argues that the civic ambition of American radio in the 1930s and 40s centered on the production of self-governing and opinion-forming individuals – a cluster of ideas that the book names radio's civic paradigm. A range of programs, from classical music broadcasts to multi-opinion radio forum discussions of public affairs, were designed to promote both civic engagement and individualization. The “public interest” regulation of radio, and continuing broadcaster anxiety about further political reform to broadcasting, meant that at least until the end of WW2, American radio did not just create popular entertainment, but also fostered programs of high civic ambition, aimed at changing not just pleasing citizens. The civic paradigm was also however, the book argues, divisive. Not all Americans shared its values of openness to change and acknowledgement of diversity, and radio researchers discovered that radio had a class-divided audience. The 1938 War of the Worlds panic exposed this division, most clearly between those who wanted radio simply to speak the truth, and those who understood it as a medium whose primary virtue was that it could expose citizens to different perspectives and allow them to try out different ways of thinking. For these and other reasons, the civic paradigm was waning by the end of WW2. But the ambitions of radio's golden age have not been well remembered in radio history.

Critical theorists have noted a regressive discourse of gender running through much modernist cultural commentary; they have highlighted ways in which its value-laden language is often attached to discussion of entertainment film, as a powerful branch of mass culture. It has similarly attached itself to film music, as a supposedly overemotional and manipulative remnant of European late romanticism. The purpose of this book is to interrogate some of the implications of the opposition between film music and serious “classical music,” drawing the former into closer historical alignment with the latter. It therefore reflects as much upon ideas about music and musical values as about film, analyzing the implications of gender-related ideas about music alongside those about film. It consequently proposes a history of twentieth-century music that would include the scores of a number of the major Hollywood movies discussed here, like The Bride of Frankenstein, King Kong, Rebecca, Gone With The Wind, Citizen Kane, or Psycho.

During the 1960s many avant‐garde musicians were intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, and often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. This volume examines the encounter of avant‐garde music and ‘the sixties’, across a range of genres, aesthetic positions, and geographical locations. Rather than providing a comprehensive survey, the intention is to give an indication of the richness of avant‐garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts. Many of these musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Yet this stance threw up some sharp dilemmas. For instance, how could institutional and governmental subsidy for recondite music continue to be justified in the context of demands for democratised decision‐making in cultural affairs? How was the cultural baggage of established performance institutions (such as concert halls, symphony orchestras, and broadcasting organizations) to be reconciled with a radical critique of bourgeois values? Most fundamentally, how could avant‐garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? The contributors address music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory ‘events’, performance art, and experimental popular music, and explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan, and parts of the so‐called ‘Third World’. Each chapter draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period.

This book explores the sonic dimension of film exhibition in Britain, from the emergence of cinema through to the introduction of synchronized sound. With contributions from many of the acknowledged experts on British silent film, as well as specialists on film music, the chapters provide an introduction to diverse aspect of early film sound: vocal performance (from lecturing and reciting to voicing the drama), music (from the forerunners of music for visual spectacle, to the impact of legislation and the development of an aesthetic), and performance in cinemas (from dancing and singalong films to live stage prologues, and even musical performances captured in British Pathé’s early sound shorts). Other topics include the sonic eclecticism of performances at the Film Society, British International Pictures’ first synchronized sound films, and the role of institutions such as the Musicians’ Union and the Performing Right Society in relation to cinema music and musicians.

This book chronicles how in the late 1950s, the BBC established Britain's own electronic music studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, in opposition to famous academic studios in Continental Europe and America. Rather than compete with these other studios, however, the BBC built a studio initially to provide its own avant‐garde dramatic productions with “special sound,” experimental sounds that were “neither music nor sound effect.” Very quickly, however, from the ashes of highbrow BBC radio drama emerged a popular lowbrow kind of electronic music in the form of quirky tonal jingles, signature tunes such as the one for Doctor Who, and incidental music for hundreds of programs lasting until the studio's closure in 1998. These influential sounds and styles, heard by millions of listeners over decades of operation on television and radio, have served as a primary inspiration for the use of electronic instruments in popular music. This history focuses on engineers, composers, directors, producers, bureaucrats, equipment, and locations to construct a narrative of the shifting perception toward electronic music in British culture. By combining a historical discussion with an analysis of specific works, this book derives new hermeneutical models for understanding how the output of the Radiophonic Workshop fits into the larger history of electronic music.

This book examines how the British Broadcasting Corporation mobilized popular music to support the war effort on the home front and among the forces overseas. To an unprecedented degree, the wartime BBC programmed popular music and studied its audiences in order to build national unity, boost morale, and increase industrial production. The BBC also used popular music and jazz to promote the wartime values of virile masculinity, greater public participation for women, Anglo-American friendship, and pride in a common British culture. At the same time that it developed special programming for women factory workers and male soldiers, however, the BBC also came into uneasy contact with the threats of (ef)feminized sentimentality, Americanization, and new representations of nonwhite, racialized “Others.” It responded by regulating and even censoring popular music repertories and performers while listeners, the press, and Parliament energetically debated its decisions. Throughout the war, broadcast performances by singers like Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton; bandleaders including Geraldo, Victor Silvester, Harry Parry, and Glenn Miller; and theater organists like Sandy Macpherson helped reshape and reframe prewar understandings of gender, race, class, and nationality for the nation at war. This book argues that, rather than providing the soundtrack for a unified “People’s War,” popular music broadcasting at the BBC exposed the divergent ideologies, tastes, and perspectives of the nation.