Through the years, broadcasting has given rise to a huge body of research, television much more so than radio. Yet despite the ubiquity of music in broadcast media since its beginnings in the 1920s only a small number of music and media scholars have studied the relations between music, radio and television in one way or another. Apart from listener surveys, the earliest research on broadcast music was published in Germany in the early 1930s, and until the 1980s only intermittent publications on the subject saw the light of day. As Baade and Deaville point out in their introduction, the development of popular music studies was important to the study of music and broadcasting. Philip Tagg's 1979 dissertation on Kojak was among the first works to take television music seriously, and in the following decades a small number of still-current articles and books were published. Since the millennium, general television and radio studies have prospered, and the music angle has become a little more common, even though it may hardly be said to have constituted a breakthrough. In such a situation an anthology on music and broadcasting is in itself heartily to be welcomed and, as the collection suggests several ways of developing the field, the welcome is so much the warmer.
Music and the Broadcast Experience contains an introduction, 14 essays, an extended list of suggestions for further reading and a companion website. The essays are ordered chronologically in six sections. Four essays deal with pre-war radio, three with post-war television, one with 1970s television and six with post-millennium broadcast or new media. Apart from a Brit (Tim Wall) and a Dane (Fabian Holt), the authors work in North American institutions, and most case studies arise from a North American context. Exceptions are a Belgian music festival (Holt), the BBC (Jenny Doctor, Louis Niebur) and online media (Wall, Monique Ingalls).
The essays present fascinating cases or close readings of shorter or longer programme series. Cases on art music include Shawn Vancour's ‘Spectacular Sound’, which analyses the CBS 1952 series Meet the Masters based on questions of how to create visual interest and spectacular sound (‘the intersection of enhanced visual and aural appeal’, p. 89). James Deaville compares the first television performances by Toscanini and Ormandy in 1948 and how Toscanini's celebrity status and visuality supported his media success. This essay is followed by Norma Coates's piece on John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's week-long take-over of a US mainstream talk show in the early 1970s and how the couple's radical politics helped ratings increase and supported the host's future career. Another close reading of music television is Christine McQuail's ‘Music Theater Meets Reality TV’. In this McQuail discusses two recent Canadian instances of television programmes dedicated to casting musical theatre shows: The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music. Two twin essays both deal with 1930s’ food-sponsored radio entertainment. The first, Rika Asai's ‘“From Operatic Stomp to a Benny Goodman Stomp”’, takes up NBC's Let's Dance, sponsored by National Biscuits Company, examined through Goffman's framing perspective in order to understand the broadcasts as multiframed endeavours that effectively blurred the lines between its elements (commercials, music and several speech positions). The second, Alexander Russo's ‘Passing Pappy's Biscuits’, analyses shows hosted by Pappy O'Daniel by focusing on how they articulated an uneven modernity – how radio shows could manage to simultaneously look back and look ahead. Louis Niebur investigates in its entirety the soundtrack of a single programme, The Machine Stops, taken from a 1996 BBC science fiction series. Drawing on film-music theory, Niebur includes a sound-studies perspective when discussing the continuum between music and other sounds, where sounds can have musical functions (musique concrète) or vice versa, the extreme fluidity among categories being a main point.
The more general essays cover a wide variety of themes. In ‘Broadcasting – Concerts’ Jenny Doctor touches upon several themes regarding classical music and radio, not least the BBC's contributions to the mediatisation of the classical concert in the 1920s and the 2000s. From the other side of the dam Timothy Taylor investigates ‘The Role of Opera in the Rise of Radio in the United States’. Inventor Lee de Forest's considerations on how the broadcast of opera may bring about a cultural uplift in the population and not least legitimise the new medium is one main theme and the actual growth in early opera broadcasts another. The remainder of the essays bring us up to date. Ron Rodman argues for a hyper-fragmentation of ‘Radio Formats in the United States’, not least thanks to the many new kinds of radio afforded by the Internet. Tim Wall continues this perspective in his ‘Music Radio Goes Online’ with a focus on the political economy and cultural experience of the new services or, as he phrases it, ‘radio as a public good and for the public good’.
Continuing the Internet theme, Fabian Holt investigates how an EDM music festival engages in broadcasting via You-tube in ‘New Media, New Worlds’. The Tomorrowland Festival becomes a more comprehensive experience by producing such (micro-)broadcasts, with regard to more intense consumption, as well as creating imagined worlds. In ‘Worship on the Web’ Monique Ingalls turns to You-tube as well, but in order to look at the social life of worship videos as a genre. She finds that people engaging in producing and using such videos cross a series of traditional boundaries concerning media and what is private and public. While Ingalls describes creative uses of You-tube videos and thus changes the main production focus of the previous articles somewhat, Christina Baade is the only one turning the table 180 degrees by setting the tactics of music listening as her main focus. In ‘Incarcerated Music’ she has chosen to discuss how inmates (or rather, one inmate: ‘Patrick's prison narrative’) use radio in efforts to maintain subjectivity despite the extremely disciplinary regime to which they are subjected.
Based on a view of music as complex and multiply mediated phenomena and a broad cultural studies-related, theoretical framework the volume has several main themes. As mentioned, a production perspective runs through most of the essays. Importantly, this includes much more than the intentions of actual programme producers, for example the sponsors, the regulatory agencies and the technologies. Together with the many different uses of music in the very different broadcasting contexts, contributors develop the production perspective as a rather complex set of positions, often bordering onwhat has been considered its alternative, a reception perspective: the border becomes refreshingly unclear when Deaville uses the celebrity figure of Toscanini to fuse the two areas. In general, audiences are included, mostly as the abstract, intended audiences of the producers. This has much to do with the source situation, which is becoming still better as archival access becomes more widespread. As we come closer to the present, investigating actual audiences becomes a distinct possibility for the authors, who often use more or less ethnographic methods (quantitative studies are not included). The authors also take the reader through the various historical stages of liveness from a time when playing live music was considered a necessity, over various mixes of live and ‘mechanical’, where the host or DJ became the live element for the playlists of companies like Spotify. Liveness has been considered by many as a defining quality for broadcasting, while at the same time it is a debated term because of its many uses. Questions concerning radio formats and music genres and their interrelations abound, probably because the two terms in all their complexity are among the best ways to elucidate the various intimate relations between music, musical life in general and broadcast media. This is done, for example, by Russo in a fine discussion of the relations between western swing, radio advertising and Texarkana culture.
Baade and Deaville have gathered a fine collection of essays. Despite the obvious common denominator – broadcasting – the collection as a whole might be too broad for some readers, but that really is a minor quibble. Much more important is that they draw attention to what still more scholars consider a central topic: music and broadcast media. They demonstrate that the time is ripe for both historical and contemporary studies, with methods and theoretical frames aplenty. It is tempting to point to all of the exciting topics which the editors have not included. However, it must be up to other scholars to do studies on music and radio after World War II and on music and television after the 1970s – and on music and broadcasting in Asia, South America, Africa, Europe, and so on.
