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country to assume its place as a prominent and vital part of modern
American life.
Cultural historians such as Susan Smulyan (1994), Michele Hilmes (1997)
and Susan Douglas (1999) have argued that discourses of cultural uplift proved
central to radio’s growth during this period, with cultural commentators celebrating the medium’s capacity to unite the American public in common appreciation of high cultural forms previously restricted to an elite few. The nation’s
musical elite, as Frank Biocca observes in his own analysis of this period,
proved among the most fervent proponents of radio’s capacity for cultural
uplift. ‘For the guardians of culture, [radio] was a massive funnel into which
centuries of music could be poured into the ear of the nation’, promising to
produce a new ‘aural awakening’ and ‘triumph of classical music’ (Biocca,
1990: 1, 10). Commercial sponsors, these commentators opined, were making
programs of ‘good’ music available across the country, while the new national
networks of NBC and CBS poured money from their own coffers into highbudget features such as New York Symphony conductor Walter Damrosch’s
Music Appreciation Hour, helping to inspire a love of the classics in the
nation’s youth.1 Exposing formerly disenfranchised populations to the benefits
of high culture, such programming promised to reach across social and geographical divides and effect an unprecedented transformation of popular taste.
Situating celebrations of radio’s capacity to uplift the nation’s musical taste
within the context of a larger music appreciation movement in early 20thcentury American culture, the present study identifies programming strategies
for securing classical music’s place on commercial broadcast schedules during the 1920s and early 1930s, and delineates critical responses to these
efforts by members of the nation’s musical elite. While championing radio’s
potential to promote national appreciation of ‘good’ music, proponents of
music appreciation frequently accused broadcasters of bias in favor of popular
fare and an inadequate representation of the classics that hindered goals of cultural uplift. Equally troubling were broadcasters’ efforts to render these works
fit for popular consumption, with critics expressing fears that methods used to
adapt classical compositions for radio airplay and explain them to lay audiences would threaten the integrity of the music and foster inappropriate modes
of aesthetic engagement. If radio bore the potential to produce a unified
national culture, this study shows that efforts to police the boundaries of musical taste during this period ultimately heightened and reified many of the same
differences that music appreciation advocates purported to dissolve, contributing to growing divisions between competing early 20th-century taste publics.
Questions of taste: terms and definitions
Far from defending an established tradition, discourses concerning radio’s
ability to advance the project of music appreciation served to assert a canon
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of ‘great works’ that emerged, as Lawrence Levine observes, as part of a new
formation of ‘highbrow culture’ during the 19th century and was consolidated during the early 20th century in response to an insurgent ‘jazz culture’
(Levine, 1988, 1993). The classical canon was thus by the 1920s still a recent
creation, constituting what Eric Hobsbawm (1992: 1–2) calls an ‘invented
tradition’ that gave ‘certain values and norms’ the appearance of established
historical truth during a period of pronounced social transformation.
Proponents of the classics, Levine argues, perceived jazz as ‘the new product of a new age’, embodying disruptive forces of modern capitalism against
which classical music offered a cultural bulwark through its appeal to ‘traditional’ values; highbrow taste culture was thus asserted in direct opposition
to popular lowbrow jazz culture and the two defined against each other, ‘as
convenient polar points, as antitheses’ (Levine, 1993: 174). As Pierre
Bourdieu observes, such practices of determinate negation are fundamental
to the logic of taste: ‘In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation, and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes’,
rooted in ‘intolerance … of the tastes of others’ (1984: 56). A taste culture,
as a rule, develops in response to perceived threats from and operates in
active opposition to alternative, competing taste cultures.
The term ‘taste culture’ is used throughout this study in the sense offered
by Herbert Gans, signifying both a set of cultural values embraced by a ‘taste
public’ that claims that culture as its own, as well as ‘the cultural forms which
express these values’ and toward which a particular taste public gravitates
(1974: 10–11). It is important to note, however, that taste cultures have been
defined historically not simply through the aesthetic forms they favor, but also
through favored forms of aesthetic experience. As Timothy Day (2002)
observes, the emergence of the classical canon was accompanied by new
modes of aesthetic engagement, privileging a ‘close listening’ whose origins
John Picker (2003) and Jonathan Sterne (2003) have traced back to the early
19th century.2 By the early 20th century, this style of listening was well established in Europe and America, where it was repeatedly upheld by music
appreciation advocates as the preferred way of experiencing the classics:
Listening to music became increasingly akin to a religious exercise, the opportunity for a mystical experience, a matter of intense concentration and attention both
to the structure, to the unfolding of the music’s argument, and to the inner meaning, of the sounds themselves. (Day, 2002: 205)
While pushing for greater inclusion of classical content on period program
schedules, music appreciation advocates during the 1920s and 1930s also
sought to control the way these aesthetic forms were experienced and interpreted by period audiences. Anticipating later critiques of classical music’s
commodification and degradation by 20th-century culture industries in work
such as Theodor W. Adorno’s (1945, 1994, 2002), critics charged that changes
in instrumentation and other adaptations of the classics for radio airplay
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altered their meaning, while explanations of the music provided by period
announcers encouraged superficial modes of aesthetic engagement that prevented the detailed attention to formal composition required for true appreciation of the classics. Concerned not only with ensuring adequate representation
of the classics on the radio dial, these critics also worked to regulate the manner in which this music was presented and perceived, stressing the influence
of musical form and modes of radio exegesis on early listening experiences.
In his famous attack against linguistic prescriptivism, Steven Pinker identifies what he calls ‘the language mavens’: self-appointed ‘experts’ and cultural guardians who police language usage to align it with norms over which
only a small elite can in fact claim mastery. These norms, Pinker notes, were
themselves largely arbitrary conventions, adopted by an upwardly mobile
class of Englishmen as signs of distinction that set them apart from the greater
majority of the population and served to ‘differentiat[e] the elite from the rabble’ (Pinker, 1994: 373).. In the context of the present discussion, it seems
appropriate to speak of a comparable group of ‘music mavens’ who worked
to control sanctified forms of musical presentation or performance and assert
the legitimacy of their own, elite taste culture. However, much as language as
a shared cultural resource resists the formal fixity on which the mavens insist,
classical music’s dissemination throughout the larger culture presented not
only the promise of fostering public familiarity with preferred aesthetic
forms, but also the threat of opening those forms to new and different iterations, challenging the very values and norms whose primacy elite listeners
sought to secure. Musical mavenry in discourses on early radio programming
thus registered a profound ambivalence surrounding the popularization of
classical music, positioning the nation’s new medium of mass entertainment
as at once the greatest boon and greatest threat to music appreciation that the
country had ever known.
Making the musical nation: better living through classical music
Proponents of classical programming during the 1920s and 1930s drew on
broader discourses of music appreciation with established currency in early
20th-century American culture. As Mark Katz (2004) has argued in his recent
history of recorded music, this period witnessed the rise of a music appreciation movement in America of unprecedented scale. ‘[Classical] music was
valued in America as a civilizing influence and an agent of moral uplift’, Katz
explains, one that could create a more enlightened citizenry and ‘steer young
people clear of its presumed moral and aesthetic opposite: popular music, particularly ragtime and jazz’ (2004: 50). Working to minimize the perceived
threat of an insurgent popular culture, such discourses aimed to assert musical elites’ own taste culture as the dominant social norm and consolidate their
position of cultural authority in early 20th-century American life.
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While Katz’s analysis focuses on the phonograph’s role in advancing the
mission of music appreciation, radio, too, was celebrated during this period
for its potential to spread the benefits of ‘good’ music to all. With music constituting by some estimates over 70 per cent of period programming (Sterling
and Kittross, 2002: 81), commentators in the radio trades frequently drew on
discourses of cultural uplift to affirm radio’s importance for elevating the
nation’s musical taste. By exposing the public to the world’s best music,
asserted a contributor to Radio Merchandising in 1922: ‘The advent of radio
has come as a boon to the human race.… Avenues of culture and knowledge
are now available to everyone’ (Le Massena, 1922: 208). Affirmed another in
the pages of Radio Broadcast in 1924:
Heretofore, Americans, except those living in the larger cities, have been denied the
privile[g]e of hearing the best in music performed by accomplished musicians.… Today, by means of radio, symphony orchestras, operas, oratorios, vocal recitals, and
performances on all the solo instruments are accessible to those in even the most
remote rural districts. Broadcasting stations scattered over the entire continent nightly
offer much of the best in music.… There is no longer any reason why there should be
a drought of musical knowledge and appreciation in America. (Orchard, 1924: 454)
These discourses continued into the second half of decade, pervading not only
radio journals but also the period’s music magazines. The Musician in 1926,
for instance, featured a panegyric for broadcasting by Percy Scholes, a British
musicologist who conducted his own music appreciation program on the
BBC (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991: 195) and had published one of a growing
number of books on music appreciation for general audiences on both sides
of the Atlantic (Scholes, 1920). ‘For thousands of people, all over the world’,
Scholes opined, ‘Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn,
Schumann, Chopin, Wagner, Franck, Elgar and all the rest, were only born
three or four years ago, when radio became established’. Among the events of
recent history, he concluded, the birth of broadcasting was thus ‘far and away
one of greatest importance to the art of music since the present century
began’. By 1931, The Etude, a long-time radio advocate, similarly declared
that appreciation of classical music had grown dramatically since the formation of NBC and CBS in 1926 and 1927 respectively: ‘the public in five years
has come to know one thousand times as much about music as in the previous millennium’ (cited in Wilkins, 1969: 42, 129)..
Drawing on broader discourses of music appreciation, music educators and
industry commentators of the period thus repeatedly celebrated radio’s capacity to foster broader familiarity with the classics and elevate the public taste.
However, increasing commercialization of broadcasting during the 1920s and
early 1930s would place this project of music appreciation in frequent tension
with countervailing pressures for programming with broader public appeal.
While programming strategies developed to negotiate these competing pressures of populism and cultural uplift ensured classical music a continued
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place on radio schedules, many of the nation’s music mavens would respond
critically to these strategies, viewing them as dangerous compromises that
threatened radio’s ability to serve as an effective instrument of music education and undermined a struggling highbrow taste public’s efforts to consolidate its cultural authority.
Programming the classics: classical music on the commercial dial
In his study of symphonic music on early network radio, Louis Carlat
observes that American broadcasting’s growing number of commercial sponsors often sought ‘to create goodwill by associating [themselves] with an elite
musical canon’, while NBC and CBS directly funded additional programs of
classical music ‘to enhance [their] own prestige’ and ‘mollify critics of commercial standards’ who believed that for-profit corporations made inherently
poor cultural custodians (Carlat, 1995: 188, 83). Nonetheless, economic
imperatives required that even the most responsible corporate citizen balance
goals of cultural uplift with attention to profit margins, programming popular
fare that boosted audience shares alongside highbrow content designed to elevate the public taste. While the expansion of commercial networks during the
1930s brought these tensions to a head, strategies used to resolve the competing demands of uplift and populism in most cases had direct precursors in
the programming practices developed by broadcasters during the 1920s.3
Throughout this period, commercial broadcasters pursued two major programming strategies for balancing competing demands of populism and cultural uplift. Many opted to segregate their classical programming, scheduling
programs devoted to classical content in alternation with programming devoted
to popular music. In some cases, these classical programs were specifically
designed to educate the general public, featuring lengthy expository announcements or accompanying lectures that explained the works for lay listeners,
while in other cases they were offered with minimal explanation, presuming the
listener’s prior familiarity with the music or their ability to intuitively grasp its
inner meaning and value. In addition to these segregated classical offerings,
broadcasters during this period also pursued a second strategy of integrated programming, alternating between popular and classical selections within the
course of a single show. This strategy gained particular prominence on network
radio during the late 1920s, with commercial sponsors adopting musical variety in growing numbers as their preferred advertising vehicle.
Many of the programs devoted to classical music during this period were
explicitly created as ‘music education’ series to help lay listeners deepen their
knowledge and appreciation of the classics. As early as 1924, AT&T station
WEAF in New York featured broadcasts of an Alfred Lewisohn ‘Free Public
Course in Chamber Music’ from Hunter College and a series of ‘symphonic
educational concerts’ by the New York Philharmonic.4 By the second half of
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the decade, NBC had created its own music appreciation series, including its
long-running Music Appreciation Hour, with Walter Damrosch (Howe,
2003), and a second series in 1930 directed by long-time music appreciation
advocate Sigmund Spaeth (Wilkins, 1969: 95). Typically ‘sustaining programs’ whose costs were borne by the stations or networks instead of commercial sponsors, these shows were offered as loss-leaders to help fulfill goals
of cultural uplift and win broadcasters increased cultural prestige.5
While music education programs typically included explanatory lectures,
series of straight concert music were also offered during this period.
Sustaining features during the first half of the decade included remote broadcasts of symphony concerts and operas over major metropolitan stations such
as New York’s WEAF and WJZ (Archer, 1938: 282; Banning, 1946: 112–13),
while NBC and CBS featured weekly studio presentations by their own concert orchestras and opera companies during the second half of the decade.
Sponsored concert series also appeared on commercial stations throughout
the late 1920s and early 1930s. Between 1926 and 1934, NBC featured concert music on The Atwater Kent Radio Hour and Balkite Hour, broadcasts of
the Chicago Civic Opera Company sponsored by the Brunswick Record
Company, and symphonic series sponsored by the Radio Corporation of
America, General Electric, Stromberg-Carlson and General Motors. CBS’s
first season featured concert music on the Columbia Phonograph Company
Program and Dodge Brothers Program, with the Philco Symphony Hour,
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra concerts on the General Household
Utilities Program and Stokowski concerts under Chesterfield cigarettes sponsorship added shortly thereafter.6
In addition to these segregated classical offerings, broadcasters also
attempted to integrate classical and popular music into the structure of single
half-hour or hour-long variety programs. In 1925, one radio reviewer
observed that: ‘At WWJ, in Detroit, they have the curious custom of alternating selections played by a dance orchestra with classical music by an instrumental trio’ (Welles, 1925: 754). This practice was far less peculiar by the
closing years of the decade, with musical variety shows proliferating on network schedules as the preferred format for commercial sponsors (see Figure 1).
Classical content on these programs was restricted to brief excerpts, cut with
judicious amounts of popular music. A review of NBC program scripts from
this period shows the Eveready Hour, for instance, following selections from
Mussorgsky and Grieg with the announcement that, ‘Just for a breather we
will call on the orchestra to play a brand new popular tune’, while the
Maxwell House Coffee Hour rounded out orchestral numbers by Bach and
Schubert with the announcement of a ‘light snappy selection’ on the banjo.7
While preserving classical music’s place on program schedules, varying these
selections with ‘lighter’ popular ‘breathers’ helped sponsors minimize the risk
of alienating taste publics who might find these works difficult or otherwise
unappealing and switch to another station.
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FIGURE 1
Percentage of network musical programming devoted to variety and
classical music, 1927–40
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Musical
Variety
1939
1937
1935
1933
1931
1929
1927
Concert
Music
Source: Compiled from data in Sterling and Kittross (2002: 844–6)
While these twin strategies of segregated and integrated programming
ensured classical music’s place on the commercial dial throughout the 1920s
and early 1930s, their effectiveness in advancing goals of music appreciation
was repeatedly challenged by educators and cultural critics. The remainder of
this study analyses responses to these programming strategies by music
mavens seeking to defend their taste culture from a perceived assault by commercial interests and corresponding encroachment from lowbrow, popular
culture. Pushing for greater representation of classical music on period program schedules, policing the boundaries of musical form and working to
ensure ‘correct’ modes of aesthetic engagement with the classics, these critics struggled to assert the legitimacy of their own taste culture and uphold
radio’s promise as a vital instrument of musical education.
‘A program of his own’: the highbrow’s struggle for radio
representation
While extant reports on programming from the early 1920s are scarce, more
systematic record-keeping by commercial networks during the second half of
the decade reveals a brief boom in programming devoted to concert music
during NBC’s and CBS’s opening seasons in 1926 and 1927, followed by a
sharp decline in the late 1920s and early 1930s.8 During the Great Depression,
Carlat explains, network officials began to balk at the high costs of the shows’
symphony orchestras, while sponsors of these programs complained of poor
returns on ad dollars. Though recovering slightly during the mid-1930s, programming devoted to classical music would never again reach the levels
enjoyed at the start of the network era, in Carlat’s view marking a gradual
‘eclipse of genteel uplift’ on the commercial dial (1995: 177).
Regardless of actual numbers, the essentially negative determinations
involved in taste made the logic of the music appreciation movement one of
Vancour, Popularizing the class
continual cultural crisis, with proponents of classical programming responding throughout the 1920s and 1930s to a perceived threat to their taste culture
and assault on its sacred values. While music mavens during this period
upheld radio’s potential as a powerful instrument of musical education, they
responded critically to programming strategies pursued by commercial broadcasters who, in their view, failed to fulfill the medium’s cultural promise.
Uplift, they maintained, required first and foremost an adequate presence of
classical music on program schedules. Broadcasters, however, favored programming that played to the popular taste, leaving the classics sorely underrepresented and undermining efforts to raise that popular taste to the
highbrows’ own level. Moreover, where classical content was included,
broadcasters displayed a troubling tendency toward lighter minuets and
waltzes, avoiding the symphonic fare regarded by many music appreciation
advocates as the height of musical expression.
Campaigns by highbrow critics in Radio Broadcast during this period
proved typical of music mavens’ push for greater representation of the classics. Inaugurating the journal’s review pages in 1924, columnist Jennie Irene
Mix regularly railed against radio’s rising tide of popular music, insisting that
current programming practices could never succeed in achieving goals of cultural uplift. ‘All the influence ever exerted by all the musicians who have ever
lived, and by all their interpreters, is as nothing when placed against the influence exerted by broadcast music’, she affirmed; yet, this powerful potential
had yet to be fully realized. While radio had the proven ability to ‘[bring]
good music, sometimes even the greatest music, to hundreds of thousands,
yes, millions, who otherwise could never hear such music at all’, for the most
part, ‘every hour of every day it is serving as a medium through which is disseminated an incredible amount of trash’ (Mix, 1924: 476). Carrying on
Mix’s crusade into the second half of the decade, the journal’s new critic,
John Wallace, continued to remark on broadcasters’ disturbing bias toward
popular programming. In a 1928 column entitled ‘Is the Highbrow Entitled to
a Program of His Own?’ Wallace explained that, ‘it seems apparent that radio
programs are directed, by an overwhelming majority, at the lowbrow’, with
the highbrow ‘privileged only to gather what crumbs he may from his numerous brothers’ table’ (Wallace, 1928c: 223–4). If segregated programming
served on one hand to protect the classics, it also gave highbrow critics feelings of increasing ghettoization, while the rising tide of variety left him to
snatch what few scraps of quality music he could from the surrounding dreck.
Equally troubling to critics during this period was the quality of the classical selections featured on commercial broadcasts. All ‘good’ music was not
of equal merit for music appreciation advocates, and broadcasters showed a
propensity toward the lesser, facile works at the expense of the more complex
and demanding compositions that, for music mavens, represented the height
of classical achievement. As Levine notes, criticisms of popular music frequently focused on its baser emotional appeals, condemning it ‘for returning
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civilized people to the jungles of barbarism’ (1993: 179). While music appreciation advocates did not deny the emotional appeal of classical compositions, it was the intellectual appeal of this music that ultimately distinguished
it from popular fare, and classical works were themselves differentially valued according to their degree of intellectual difficulty.
‘Music, to be sure, is an emotional art and so appeals to our emotions’, conceded Harvard instructor Walter Raymond Spalding in a typical music appreciation guide from the period; ‘but these [emotions] will take care of themselves.’
More difficult was mastering ‘the intellectual element’ of music and learning ‘to
follow and appreciate the logical growth and development of the musical
themes’ (Spalding, 1920: 2, 6). In his own book, Spaeth similarly distinguished
between the lesser ‘physical’ or ‘emotional’ appeals of music and higher-level
‘intellectual’ appeals, while urging listeners in a corresponding series of radio
lectures over New York station WOR to move beyond primitive ‘foot-listening’
or ‘heart-listening’ and engage in more advanced practices of ‘head-listening’.9
While neophytes would find the dance rhythms of a minuet or waltz more comforting to begin with, Spaeth assured them that they would eventually come to
appreciate the intellectual appeals of a Beethoven symphony: ‘When a symphonic masterpiece rouses your emotions at the same time that it stirs your reasoning faculties, you may be sure that you “belong,” so far as musical culture
is concerned’ (1924: 321). However, it was precisely because of their greater
accessibility that minuets and waltzes proved the preferred choice for the musical variety shows that replaced many concert series during the late 1920s, flouting the aesthetic hierarchies established by music appreciation advocates.
While more easily integrated with popular dance numbers, the weaker intellectual appeal of these selections made them of inherently lesser value for highbrow critics and of limited use for advancing goals of cultural uplift.
If concerns surrounding the amount and type of classical content on period
program schedules were prominent among proponents of music appreciation,
questions of composition would prove equally important. Proper appreciation
of the classics, critics insisted, required not only adequate representation of
quality works, but also respect for the complex musical structures on which
higher-level head-listening depended. For the nation’s increasingly vocal
class of music mavens, considerations of musical content were inseparable
from questions of musical form.
Matters of integrity: policing musical form
Commercial broadcasters of the 1920s and 1930s regularly altered the instrumentation and length of classical compositions for radio airplay, adapting
melodies for jazz orchestras and featuring truncated selections that focused
on short, easily recognizable themes. While helping to secure this music’s
place on program schedules and gain it an expanded audience, such efforts to
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popularize the classics for general consumption provoked considerable ire
among the period’s music mavens. Anticipating Adorno’s later, more celebrated critiques of these practices, critics charged that radio adaptation posed
direct threats to the integrity of classical works, altering their meaning and
presenting serious impediments to music appreciation.
Cashing in on public infatuation with jazz, many commercial broadcasters
of the 1920s adapted classical melodies and instrumentation for popular
dance bands, seeking to broaden the music’s appeal while obviating the need
for expensive concert orchestras. Populist critics such as the New York World’s
celebrated this method as making a formerly daunting taste culture accessible
to members of the general public. As he explained:
With the jazz bands adapting the classics or near classics to fox trot tempos, we are
getting familiar with better music. We learned ‘The Song of India,’ ‘To a Wild
Rose,’ ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ and Chopin’s ‘Nocturne’ this way.… Won’t some
orchestrator adapt the Ring operas to fox trot rhythm so we can learn without
falling asleep! (Radio Ham, 1924: 10E)
Highbrow critics such as Mix, however, regarded this practice as a direct
threat to the integrity of the works and an example of popular culture’s growing encroachment on the boundaries of good taste. ‘The jazzing of the classics’, she protested, ‘is the greatest outrage perpetrated by jazz orchestras.’
Instead of watering down the classics for public consumption, Mix insisted,
the public’s taste should be raised to appreciate them in their original and
intended form (1925: 67).10
Broadcasters’ tendency to feature excerpts from longer works also proved
problematic for period critics. Even for programs devoted to concert music,
longer symphonies were rarely presented in their entirety. ‘Music memory’
contests during the middle of the decade exacerbated tendencies toward truncation, training listeners to recognize just the opening bars or main themes of
classical selections.11 This practice continued into the 1930s on music education programs such as Damrosch’s, forming the target of Adorno’s later critique of what he labeled a ‘quotation listening’ that privileged superficial
recognition of melody over deeper musical understanding:
There is a strong suspicion that children are drilled on themes in order to ‘recognize’
music by some outside sign, so that they may win music appreciation contests, victory in which is considered the acme of success in schools throughout the land.…
In any case, it is disastrous to promote ‘that’s it’ responses to symphonic music. The
theme is one element of the composition and an important one, but when this element is hypostasized as the composition’s content, the stream of music is destroyed
and replaced by automatic recognition of what is, after all, one of the composition’s
tools among others. (Adorno, 1994: 333; see also Adorno, 1945: 214, 2002: 263–5)
Music appreciation advocates had expressed concerns about such automated
responses as early as the 1920s. Serious head-listening, Spaeth warned his
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own audience, required that one move beyond the automatic recognition of
familiar themes and appreciate their place within the larger structure of the
musical work. ‘A concert audience [that] … applauds a familiar encore after
a few bars have been played’, he explained, is ‘not applauding the performer
or that music. They are applauding themselves because they recognized it’,
thus demonstrating not a deep love of music but a shallow narcissism (Spaeth,
1924: 13). While truncated versions of the classics might familiarize the public with isolated themes from great works, the type of listening these promoted made them obstacles, not aids to music appreciation.
Music mavens’ critiques thus isolated questions not only of musical content but also musical form. Form itself, however, was merely a proximate
goal, with critics’ concerns resting ultimately on the modes of listener
engagement fostered by broadcasters’ tendencies toward adaptation and truncation of the classics. Concerns over the forms of aesthetic experience
required for full and authentic appreciation of classical music would gain
their most heightened expression during this period in criticisms focused on
one final area of musical presentation: explanations of the classics by early
announcers and program hosts.
Exegetical issues: spreading cultural capital
If an obstacle to the popularization of the classics was the public’s inability to
understand or engage them, radio offered a valuable means of disseminating
not only the works themselves, but also the cultural capital needed to successfully decode them. Prefatory remarks by station announcers and hosts on
commercial programs were often designed to help orient neophyte listeners,
initiating them into the mysteries of high culture and guiding their interpretations of the music they heard. However, the exegetical commentary provided
by these broadcasters met with frequent disapproval from the period’s music
mavens, who critiqued these practices as fostering inappropriate modes of
aesthetic engagement that prevented full appreciation of the works in question. Again raising objections better known from later work such as Adorno’s,
critics charged that historical and biographical modes of explanation pursued
by many broadcasters discouraged deeper understanding of the music, while
emphasis on representational and associational qualities of the music over
questions of formal composition failed to foster the level of intellectual
engagement required for preferred practices of head-listening.
While persisting on some programs throughout the 1930s, historical and
biographical modes of explanation proved particularly prevalent during the
early to middle 1920s. WEAF’s 1922 broadcasts of recitals from the College
of the City of New York, for example, prepared listeners for the music of Bach
with the announcement that ‘he was born in the year 1685 and died in 1750’,
had completed over 140 compositions over the course of his career, and that
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301
his ‘Fugue in E Flat Major’ featured on the program was ‘one of the … last
and greatest [compositions] of Bach’s life’. Dvorak’s ‘Largo from Symphony
No. 9’ was similarly prefaced with the explanation that the piece was composed during a brief stay in the US, information on Dvorak’s birth and death,
and a list of major works.12 This emphasis on the composer’s life and accomplishments over musical analysis, critics feared, would create what Adorno
later lambasted as a ‘cult of personalities’ that ‘shows scant respect for the
works themselves’ (1994: 360). Rather than promoting understandings of
musical form, such practices, they claimed, stressed ‘incidental’ details foreign to the works’ true and inner meaning.
Among the earliest to lament this alleged miscarriage of music education was
again Sigmund Spaeth, who invited listeners in 1924 to recall audiences during
concert pianist Ignacy Paderewski’s recent US tour who showed more interest
in ‘the length of his famous chrysanthemum hair’ than his music. ‘They were
chiefly interested in Paderewski as a world figure’, lamented Spaeth; ‘his music
was really a secondary matter’ (1924: 49–50). By 1931, contributors to the
Music Supervisors’ Journal had designated historical and biographical exegesis
as demonstrably ineffective means of music education; explained musicologist
Theodore Finney: ‘If we were to put the emphasis of the course in music appreciation entirely on this...we should properly call it “appreciation of musicians,”
and even then it would have little value’ (1931: 23). While music education programs such as Damrosch’s continued to place heavy emphasis on this technique well into the next decade, NBC’s own producers explicitly cautioned
against this practice for sponsored series. In her 1931 industry manual, How
to Write for Radio, the network’s Assistant Continuity Director, Katharine
Seymour, explained that ‘such details as exact dates’ or ‘obscure facts about
[a] composer’s education, early life, etc. are not meant for the ear. They do
not hold the listener’s attention. They belong only in a biography of the composer, in a book’ (Seymour and Martin, 1931: 41).
If such discourses demonstrated a growing disaffection with historical and
biographical modes of explanation, these were replaced with forms of exegetical commentary during the late 1920s and early 1930s that many critics found
equally troubling. A growing emphasis on ‘program music’ that depicted
events, settings, or stories proved an invaluable aid to popularization of the classics, but for critics neglected higher forms of ‘absolute’, symphonic music and
diverted attention from questions of composition required to grasp the latter’s
import.13 While program music was generally of a lower order than abstract
symphonies, Spaeth remarked, it might still possess aesthetic merit; however,
this required that one move beyond the piece’s superficial representation qualities and focus, as with symphonic fare, on the music’s deeper structure. ‘A program is quite legitimate as a means of arousing a preliminary interest’, he
advised, ‘[but] if the piece is worth while for itself alone, it will eventually push
this artificial significance into the background’ (Spaeth, 1924: 88). To help
guide the casual radio fan in proper practices of classical listening, Wallace
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advised readers of his column in 1928 to sit in a darkened room and focus
intently on the sound, teasing out structural relationships between different
instruments and noting the subtle interplay between different melodic lines:
Turn off the lights … exclude all conceivable distractions and then concentrate on
the sound issuing from the loud speaker as though you were entombed in a mine
waiting for the faint ring of a distant pick ax.… Pick out one of the thinnest and
feeblest … sound[s] and follow it through the maze like a bloodhound pursuing little Eliza through the forest. Keep on its trail and see what it does – and what some
of the big bullying noises do to it.… Next try listening to two tunes – or two instruments – at once. Watch how the two tunes sneak along side by side, some times
drawing together and shaking hands; other times running off on by paths and making faces at each other. Watch them intertwine and overlap and disappear and
emerge again with a new suit and their hair combed on the other side.… In such
wise, listening to the symphony orchestra becomes a grand game with yourself just
as much a participant as the orchestra. (1928a: 365)
Announcers and program hosts, however, proved less than helpful in advancing this agenda, repeatedly emphasizing the music’s representational qualities
over questions of formal composition. NBC’s Coward Comfort Hour, in a
typical musical variety broadcast from 1927, introduced a highbrow selection
from Edvard Grieg by announcing that the composer:
… has painted for us a musical picture of the rugged cliffs and crags of his
Norwegian coast, in the ‘Hall of the Mountain King’.… The music brings into
being the antics of the elves and gnomes that inhabit the crannies and caves.14
Announcers’ continuity for the network’s Grand Opera presentations of
Mozart, Verdi, or Donizetti likewise featured elaborate plot summaries describing the stage scenes that accompanied the music, while omitting any discussion
of composition.15 Even the mighty Damrosch was denounced by Wallace for
‘lay[ing] a misleading emphasis on the “story” content of … [the] music’, offering images of falling raindrops to explain the rhythms of a Glazounouw
scherzo, or explaining the content of the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony by inviting listeners to imagine themselves discovering an impressive statue while strolling through the park (Wallace, 1928b: 20).16
Thus, in addition to critiquing commercial broadcasters for insufficient representation of classical content and formal adaptations that threatened the structural integrity of the works or encouraged superficial recognition of themes over
deeper intellectual engagement with the music, proponents of music appreciation during the 1920s and 1930s also found fault with the modes of explanation
provided by period announcers and program hosts. While a potentially powerful tool for advancing lay audiences’ appreciation of the classics, the exegetical
commentary pursued during this period was criticized for misleading remarks
that focused on historical or biographical information incidental to the
music itself, or on the music’s representational qualities rather than questions of
Vancour, Popularizing the classics
303
composition. Such methods, critics complained, might help to popularize classical compositions for general consumption, but would foster inappropriate
modes of aesthetic engagement that threatened the very standards of taste this
programming was intended to uphold.
Conclusion: the perils of popularization
Drawing on broader discourses of cultural uplift, proponents of classical programming during the 1920s and 1930s argued that radio presented a valued
instrument of musical education that could elevate the nation’s taste by
spreading the benefits of good music to all members of the American public.
Balancing goals of cultural uplift and demands for popular programming with
mass market appeal, commercial broadcasters during this period alternated
between programs of classic music and those devoted to popular content,
while also integrating classical selections into musical variety programs
alongside popular dance numbers. Despite these efforts, however, proponents
of music appreciation proved critical of broadcasters’ methods, seeking to
preserve adequate representation of classical content, protect the formal
integrity of cherished works and promote preferred modes of aesthetic
engagement. Classical offerings, they complained, were too few or of inferior
quality, while adaptation of classical compositions for radio airplay degraded
them and encouraged superficial recognition of melody over deeper engagement with compositional structure. Explanations that emphasized extraneous
elements such as history and biography, or placed undue emphasis on the
music’s pictorial qualities, were similarly criticized as fostering forms of aesthetic engagement inimical to proper appreciation of the classics.
Examining discourses of musical mavenry from this period reveals a profound ambivalence surrounding radio’s role as a medium of cultural uplift.
While capable of disseminating privileged cultural forms to formerly disadvantaged portions of the population, radio’s use for purposes of music appreciation
at the same time moved these forms beyond the control of their original taste
public. On one hand affirming radio’s capacity for cultural uplift, highbrow critics during this period also sought to reclaim their cultural authority over the
music they purported to popularize, defending the boundaries of their own,
recently consolidated taste culture from the perceived threat of an insurgent
popular culture. In their efforts to elevate some forms of classical programming
and modes of aesthetic engagement while delegitimizing others, music appreciation advocates ultimately reproduced the same cultural differences they
claimed to overcome, reinforcing divisions between high and popular culture in
their very effort to dissolve them. At once reflective and productive of deeper
divisions between competing early 20th-century taste publics, tensions during
this period surrounding radio’s popularization of the classics established terms
of debate that would resonate in American culture for decades to come.
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Notes
1. The National Broadcasting Company made its first broadcast in November
1926. The Columbia Broadcasting System’s first broadcast was in September 1927.
2. Sterne traces this minute attention to sonic detail back to the introduction of
the stethoscope in the early 19th century, arguing that medical practices during this
period positioned listening as ‘a site of skill and potential virtuosity’ that quickly
spread to other quarters of Victorian society (2003: 93). Picker’s own analysis
focuses on the ways that literary practices registered this growing valuation of close
listening, while both authors argue that the rise of mechanical sound reproduction in
the late 19th century made concerns with analysing the inner structure of sound
increasingly widespread.
3. While commercial networks did not gain dominance until the 1930s, corporateowned stations existed throughout the 1920s. As Robert McChesney notes, most of
these were not directly profitable, serving instead ‘to generate favorable publicity for
the owner’s primary enterprise’, and many did not pursue sponsored programming
until late in the decade (1994: 14). However, these stations were not immune from
populist pressures, targeting general audiences in most cases and commonly catering
to the popular taste.
4. References to these series are given regular mention in WEAF program logs
from the spring of this year. See, for example, logs for 6 March and 2 April 1924 (Red
Network Master Books, August 1922–3 May 1924, National Broadcasting Company
Collection, LC, Washington, DC).
5. While sponsored programs would come to dominate network schedules by the
second half of the decade, as late as 1932, sustaining programs still accounted for over
half of all network programming (Sterling and Kittross, 2002: 126).
6. For an overview of these and other programs, see Wilkins (1969: 61–102, 130–50).
For additional details on CBS programs from this period, see CBS (1939: 1–30).
7. Remarks by George C. Furness, Eveready Hour script for 1 March 1927 (Red
Network Master Books, 7 November 1926–1 April 1927, National Broadcasting
Collection, LC, Washington, DC), and announcer’s continuity for Maxwell House
Coffee Concert Hour, 13 July 1927 (Blue Network Master Books, February
1922–November 1927, National Broadcasting Collection, LC, Washington, DC).
8. Biocca (1990: 11) reports that networks between 1926 and 1927 gave programs
of popular and classical music equal representation. For statistics on concert music for
the remainder of the decade and early 1930s, see Figure 1.
9. Spaeth discusses these different types of listening at length in one of his book
chapters (1924: 49–69). While it is difficult to ascertain the exact content of Spaeth’s
radio series, the New York Herald-Tribune summarizes a discussion of ‘foot-listening’
and ‘head-listening’ from one lecture that duplicates portions of this chapter almost
verbatim (Yates, 1924).
10. For an insightful discussion of this article, see Wurtzler (2007: 199–200).
11. For an example of an early radio contest on a Seattle-area station, see Wood (1923:
406). Judith Waller, program manager at Chicago’s WMAQ, documents a contest on her
station that same year; see Waller (‘WMAQ Children Programs, 1922–1932’, p. 1, in
National Association of Broadcasters/Hedges Collection, Series 134, Subseries B, Box
10, Folder 5, LAB, College Park, MD). Katz notes that the popularity of music appreciation contests increased during the middle of the decade, with 1400 cities around the
country participating in them by 1926 (2004: 64–5).
12. Continuity for Baldwin Organ Recital, 9 December 1922 (Red Network Master
Books, August 1922–3 May 1923, National Broadcasting Company Collection, LC,
Washington, DC).
Vancour, Popularizing the classics
305
13. As Spaeth explained the matter, whereas program music’s ‘words, action,
scenery or accompanying pictures, tells a story [or] indicates a definite episode’,
absolute music ‘has no descriptive title, nor does it lean on any other extraneous factors for support. It is music, pure and simple, with nothing but tones and time to carry
its message’ (1924: 85–6).
14. Continuity for Coward Comfort Hour, 24 February 1927 (Red Network Master
Books, 7 November 1926–1 April 1927, National Broadcasting Company Collection,
LC, Washington, DC).
15. For National Grand Opera Company scripts, see National Broadcasting
Company Records (Box 450, Folder 7, WHS, Madison, WI).
16. Examples of Damrosch’s methods cited here are taken from sample MAH
exams included in his memoirs; see Damrosch (1930: 374–7). For Glazounow,
Damrosch offered the following rhyme, which he claimed was ‘illustrated by the
music’: ‘Rain is falling, dancing up and down; Drenching all the children in the
town.’ For Beethoven, Damrosch instructed students to picture themselves ‘[taking]
a walk in a lovely garden, in which one finds a statue erected to the memory of some
national hero’.
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Shawn Vancour [email: sgvancour@wisF.edu]