Recent years have seen mounting recognition of the importance of television for comprehending transformations in the working lives of musicians and for understanding how music acquires a representational and narrative quality. These three books illuminate these issues and add to our historical knowledge of the interplay of musicians, music and television.

Murray Forman's extensively researched study challenges many of the assumptions that inform histories of popular music, disputing the marginalisation of television in cultural musicology and the neglect of music in television studies. It also contests the received idea (prevalent in many potted histories) that television only becomes significant with the appearance of Elvis Presley. By focusing on the early years, Forman is able to persuasively demonstrate how popular music and television have been woven together from the first tentative broadcasts during the 1930s. This perspective also allows him to trace an alternative non-rockist televisual history of pop through such strikingly unfashionable but musically influential musicians as Perry Como, Tony Martin, Dinah Shore, Lawrence Welk, Hazel Scott, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Desi Arnaz and Perez Prado, to name just a few.

Musical labour is central to Forman's narrative, and the book lucidly evokes the speculations and struggles, the anxieties and aspirations, as working musicians deal with corporate executives, wheeler-dealing entrepreneurs and union negotiators, while operating within budget constraints, the demands of sponsors and advertisers, and changing legal regulations, along with intolerant critics and pressure groups (such as the intimidating White Citizens Council). Unlike developments in the UK, where a public service was dominant from the beginning due to the BBC's early monopoly, in the US ‘as television progressed through the 1930s, there was never a doubt that it would be anything other than commercial’ (p. 23). This frequently entailed the ‘the brute appropriation of musical talent’ (p. 22).

Forman details the problems and possibilities posed by the emergent television aesthetic. Television provided exposure, as signalled in the book's title – a comment from Kirby Stone: ‘We could have knocked around in clubs for 10 years and never have been seen by the number of people who have seen us on television’ (p. 57). In this way, television gave an impetus to the careers of younger musicians and revitalised the livelihoods of many older performers. Forman contrasts the incursion of television into the lives of musicians with the introduction of sound into the lives of movie actors: one group of cultural workers found that their visual appearance became vital, along with a compulsion or coercion to introduce skits and visual gags for the screen. Meanwhile, those working in the ‘silent’ movies found that their visual appeal could be undermined by assumptions and expectations about their voice – a striking example of the material ironies and ideological interplay of the sonic and visual in the history of 20th-century music culture.

Television programmers drew from a diverse repertoire of pre-existing styles and genres, and Forman illustrates how the search for new formulas often produced an incoherent collision of music, comedy, drama, sketches and ersatz nightclub environments. Critically acclaimed performers missed cues, froze or attempted incompetent cringe-inducing improvisations before the cameras. Vaudeville and novelty were influential well into the 1950s, and the claim that television compromises musical integrity has clearly been a concern throughout its history.

During the struggle against racism and for Civil Rights, black musicians were generally more sympathetically presented and found a degree of respect that was not accorded to black actors and actresses confronting the rigid stereotypes pervasive in 1950s and 1960s drama and comedy. Latina/o musicians perhaps struggled more with stereotypical representations – crude portrayals as hot-blooded exotic Other in song lyrics and themed shows, often featuring mainstream performers such as Frank Sinatra (a singer who, ironically, was not immune from being portrayed as exotic and deviant Other himself). However, Latino musicians (mainly men) managed to achieve considerable influence within television and, as a result, in popular music culture more generally – particularly as a result of the popularity of mambo. The discussion of mambo provides more ammunition to fire at the rock'n'roll-dominated history of 1950s US popular music. Forman is attuned to the porous boundaries and ideological constructions of the ‘America’ in his story (unlike the other two books reviewed here). Geopolitical power relations and the cultural tensions throughout the Americas, United States, Caribbean and Latin America, are crucial and critical to any understanding of musical dialogues, practices and representations facilitated by television. Forman maps out these tensions and impacts with precision and clarity.

Only the conclusion is slightly disappointing. The final section shifts from the book's main focus on early television and attempts to encompass too much history in a broad schematic manner and without the engrossing details and depth of argument that sustains the first 300-plus pages. Forman channel hops and spins us fast-forward through the 1960s to the 1980s and 1990s, bounding from MTV to Napster to American Idol and then to the internet and some vague musings about games, TV and music. Yet, I can see how this is necessary for the overall sense of an ending, one that both acknowledges the unlinking of music and television and stresses the importance of these links for a historical understanding the present ‘as new screen-based technologies reconfigure the audience–artist dynamic’ (p. 339). Overall, this is a ‘rich and convoluted tale’ (p. 7) containing much more than space allows me to highlight here (such as equally absorbing analysis of the relations between amateurs and professionals, the impact of television in bars and taverns, and the changing character of the retail sector).

In some respects, Doyle Green's book complements Forman's and fills in some of these gaps, as its focus is mainly on a later period during which US TV sitcoms were produced and promoted to young viewers in their teens. It draws heavily on political economy, media television studies and ideological critique, and selectively (and rather casually) on Adorno's more familiar criticisms of the culture industry – standardisation, pseudo individualisation and manipulation. The book contains compelling arguments about the corporate and commercial contexts and impact, and some quite intriguing details, along with some rather gratuitous uses of familiar gossip. There are lots and lots of ‘contradictions’ and ‘constructions’ before we reach the conclusion that ‘teen culture is a complicated and contradictory set of competing discourse engaged in ideology marketing’ (p. 175). Indeed. If only the contradictions were disentangled in the manner of Forman's study rather than left within the knotty concepts from cultural studies.

The book is given a slightly misleading title. I kept waiting for the ‘tunes’ to appear. But there are very few references to popular music in these shows – when the sounds do appear the book accrues momentum. But, in general there is little sense of what teen sitcoms sound like. There is far too much viewing and not enough listening (as is so often the case in studies of television). Although a contribution to media studies, the book has little to impart to those of us interested in music on television. After Forman's in-depth historical research, the book demonstrates the limitations of the author's self-defined method of ‘watching TV for research’ (p. 1).

In contrast, Ron Rodman's Tuning In is another major work of research and scholarship, providing a comprehensive elaboration and painstakingly illustrated analysis, featuring many illuminating and occasionally obfuscatory diagrams and charts, all explicating the narrative function of music on television in the US. Rodman draws from music semiotics and the study of film scores and analyses how meaning is encoded and conveyed in the genres of science fiction, western and police drama, along with commercials and adverts. A coda takes us on a fleeting frantic excursion into postmodern television and the predictable ‘loss of intelligibility’ that afflicts scholars when encountering Twin Peaks – a lack of any reference to Moby at this juncture is a curious absence.

Rodman convincingly argues that the corporate structures of US television drew from radio programming and incorporated music according to assumptions about demographic groupings and the demands of advertisers and sponsors. He astutely links an understanding of corporate context with genre theory and ideological critique, while remaining attuned to the fine nuances of musical detail. The book provides an incisive synthesis of musicology, analysis of film music and television studies. It is an insightful history of varied styles of narrative music on television, with some fascinating case studies of the changing sonic textures associated with different genres (I particularly enjoyed the section on police drama).

However, the book is open to the type of criticisms that are routinely levelled at both musicology and semiotics (compounded when the two are brought together). Many of Rodman's points about meaning and interpretation can be stated without the excess of technical terms which pervade the text and often mystify more than they clarify. The book is addressed to notationally competent musicologists, versed in the tonal vocabulary of Western art music, willing to accept a little too uncritically some of the claims of systematising semiotics. There is no doubt about the book's musicological significance. But its potential for interdisciplinary dialogue is hampered by the reliance on notation and a technical vocabulary that doesn't always seem appropriate for understanding what's going on sonically, visually and socially.

My second reservation concerns the functionalist and reductionist model of the relationship between musical meaning, cultural identity, television drama and social practice – it's all a bit too neat and tidy. For example, when discussing Hill Street Blues there is a thoughtful exploration of Mike Post's music. The many reference points in this composer's oeuvre might suggest an opening up of the signifying contexts and consequences of the theme. But instead its ‘function’ is narrowed in these terms:

Well, yes. This much is obvious from watching television as research. It's a police soap, and it would be unusual (but worthy of attention) if the musical theme did not ‘reflect’ the dramatic content in some way. But, these are not ‘real people’. This is fiction. And, unless my memory is playing tricks with me, there were some decidedly idiosyncratic fictional characters in Hill Street Blues – Belker, J.D. LaRue and Howard Hunter immediately spring to mind (and, was Joyce Davenport real?). There is surely a lot more going on here. Perhaps the TV theme is contributing to the illusion that these are (and are like) real people. It's pseudo-reality – a trick that the aforementioned Adorno was disturbed about in his writings on movies and television. There are perhaps further steps required in the ideological critique here, along with additional links to be analysed in the semiotic chains of meaning.

TV theme tunes revel in a life beyond and outside the box. This is a challenge for researchers. Clearly this study has to be limited in some way, but the domestic conditions of reception (particularly in the period being studied) and the way viewers constantly bridge the distinction between total attention and distracted listening/ viewing is not factored into the musicological semiotics. Discussions of narrative are confined to the programmes, the music within the screen space. Yet, recordings of television theme tunes are listened to and replayed in all manner of social contexts, and used as inspiration by other musicians. Twin Peaks, for example, occupies a much wider musical narrative within which the absent Moby is an important character in a postmodern plot. Maybe the Mario Kart game has entered the ongoing story narrated by Mike Post's Hill Street Blues theme (it must surely have some significance within a semiotic chain). Perhaps I'm unfairly pushing at the boundaries of the book, but my quibble is that the concept of ‘extradiegetic’ is not deployed in the expanded sense of the social narratives through which dramas and music become part of our lives and dialogue with other creative arts. This limitation seems all the more acute alongside Forman's book which provides abundant examples of the way television music, far from operating homologously or reflectively, works dynamically beyond the screen and speakers as a constitutive mediator of the material practices and ideological struggles through which music is made, meanings are constituted and representations are contested.