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Music and the Broadcast Experience
Music and
the Broadcast
Experience
Performance, Production, and Audiences
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
In loving memory of Sean Hudson
—Christina L. Baade
In loving memory of James and Nina Deaville
—James Deaville
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Contributor List xi
About the Companion Website xv
Introduction 1
[ viii ] Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book came into being over several years, during which our thinking
about broadcasting, music, and the history of their interaction developed
considerably. Not only have dramatic shifts in music industries, broadcast-
ing organizations, regulatory agencies, and digital media influenced our
thinking, but also we have witnessed the development of vibrant commu-
nities of scholars interested in the intersections between music and media.
In this regard, we are especially grateful to the contributors to this volume
for their intellectually inspiring work and for their enormous patience,
both with the project and with us, throughout the challenging process of
transforming a set of ideas into a completed volume. Our gratitude is not
only intellectual and professional but also deeply personal, given some of
the life events that have affected us in the course of this publication proj-
ect. Above all we extend our most sincere appreciation to Norm Hirschy,
our editor at Oxford University Press, for his thoughtful guidance and
patient understanding throughout the process.
The seeds for this book were sown in a series of conversations that
started when we were colleagues at McMaster University. Driven by our
interest in how mediation— especially radio and television broadcast-
ing— had affected musicking and musical meaning making for nearly
a century, in 2005 we organized a conference, Over the Waves: Music in/
and Broadcasting, which was generously funded by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The energy and intel-
lectual breadth shared by the nearly forty presenters, particularly the
inspiring keynotes given by Drs. Anahid Kassabian and Jenny Doctor,
contributed enormously to our developing thinking about music and
broadcasting—and how these intersections could be explored in book
form. As the book took shape, we were helped by several research assis-
tants: Agnes Malkinson and Dawn Stevenson at Carleton University and
Emily Gallomazzei and Dr. Simon Orpana at McMaster University. Simon
provided not only skillful copyediting but also insightful comments that
helped us strengthen many arguments in the book. We are grateful to Ken
Cruikshank, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, and funds associated with
the University Scholar award for help in funding the research assistants
from McMaster, the McMaster Arts Research Board for an indexing grant,
and John Osborne, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and
SSHRC for their support for the research assistants from Carleton and
the travel between Ottawa and Hamilton. We would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers for this volume who helped us refine our thinking
about the scope and focus of the book.
The success of such a collective undertaking depends so much on the
individual contributions of its authors that we would be remiss not to
stress again in closing how grateful we are to our authors, who readily par-
ticipated in the common vision of opening up an interdisciplinary dialogue
about music in broadcasting across academic fields and media platforms.
We firmly believe that Music and the Broadcast Experience explores new ter-
ritories in the interfaces between music and media, and that our contribu-
tors have provided strikingly creative and superbly researched and written
forays into those domains. Thank you one and all!
Christina would like to thank especially Sara Bannerman, Faiza Hirji, and
Christine Quail, colleagues in her Department of Communication Studies
and Multimedia, who have helped her develop her thinking not only as a
music scholar but also as a media scholar. She thanks her coeditor James
for being a model of intellectual curiosity and engagement. Christina also
thanks her partner, Alana Hudson, for her ongoing support throughout
the process of bringing this book into being. A particularly strong influence
on her thinking in this book was Sean Hudson, Alana’s brother and a pas-
sionate music lover. In life, he deeply touched his family and friends, and
in death, he has been greatly missed. Christina dedicates this book to his
memory.
James recognizes above all his partner, Carol, who has not waivered
in her stalwart support of him and this project. He also wishes to express
his deep appreciation for the understanding and patience of coeditor
Christina, the contributors, and OUP during a difficult time for him.
[x] Acknowledgments
CONTRIBUTOR LIST
www.oup.com/us/musicandthebroadcastexperience
Introduction [3]
music, particularly in North America and Europe, the most privileged
regions in the digital divide. The language of crisis runs through much of
the press coverage of musical life: classical music organizations struggling
for financial survival, record companies searching for new revenue streams,
and musicians of all sorts negotiating precarious livelihoods.12 Changes in
broadcasting are also part of this story, including corporate consolidation,
relaxed regulatory, decreasing musical diversity in terrestrial commercial
radio, the turn in public radio from classical and jazz formats to talk, and
the rise of live, contest-oriented music reality shows in television, like the
Idol franchise, which in the United States was the most watched show from
2004 to 2012.13
For those of us who think historically about music and broadcasting,
the revolutions of the early twenty-first century—and the dialectics of
techno-optimism and cultural crisis that frame them—recall discourses
that accompanied the birth of radio broadcasting in the early twentieth
century and of television broadcasting at midcentury. Now, in the midst
of the triple revolution, as Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman term the rise
of social networking, the personalized Internet, and connected mobile
devices,14 our ways of relating to broadcasting and to music are being called
into question: the nature of their symbiosis is seeming less like common
sense and more like a historically situated phenomenon. Living through
the “triple revolution” thus opens a fresh vantage point from which to
investigate the relationship between music and broadcasting—or, rather,
relationships, because, as the chapters in this book will show, the role of
music in broadcasting is complex, changing, and contingent.
While contributing to discussions of the history of broadcasting, our
approach for this book resists situating music broadcasting as a purely his-
torical phenomenon, for three key reasons. First, traditional broadcasting
remains a significant force in musical life, as demonstrated by terrestrial
radio’s continued importance as a promotional outlet for record compa-
nies, by the vitality of community radio, and by the vast global majority
(including many in North America and Europe) who do not have access to
the Internet.15 Second, we consider it important to probe what precisely
makes new forms like Internet radio, live streaming, and YouTube videos
different from traditional broadcasting forms; to this end, we devote spe-
cial attention to their impact on musical performance, distribution, and
consumption. Third, we see this change as an ongoing process: we do not
claim that we are yet at the end of the triple revolution.
Over the last twenty years, many scholars have engaged with ques-
tions about music and broadcasting in historical and contemporary con-
texts; however, as will be discussed later, their conversations have not
Our ultimate aim in this volume is to explore the usefulness and lim-
itations of broadcasting as a concept for making sense of music and its
cultural role, both historically and today. We accomplish this by bringing
together a series of case studies that key moments and concerns in music
broadcasting, past and present, identified and discussed by leading schol-
ars in the field, hailing from both media and music studies. Unified by their
attentiveness both to musical sound and meaning and to broadcasting
structures, practices, audiences, and discourses, their contributions cluster
around a diverse range of topics and approaches:
• The role of live orchestral concerts and opera in the early development
of radio and their relation to ideologies of musical uplift and classical
music (Jenny Doctor [chapter 1] and Timothy Taylor [chapter 2])
Introduction [5]
• Production cultures and their relation to television genre: classical music
programming in the 1950s, science fiction in the 1960s, and musical the-
ater reality television in the 2010s (Shawn VanCour [chapter 3], Louis
Niebur [chapter 4], and Christine Quail [chapter 5])
• The function of music in two contrasting forms of sponsored radio in
the 1930s: mainstream dance music (“sweet” as opposed to swing) in
the nationally broadcast Let’s Dance and western swing in regional Texas
radio (Rika Asai [chapter 6] and Alexander Russo [chapter 7])
• The fortunes of musical celebrity and artistic ambition on television: in
Arturo Toscanini’s and Eugene Ormandy’s first television broadcasts in
1948 and in John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s week on the Mike Douglas
Show in 1972 (James Deaville [chapter 8] and Norma Coates [chapter 9])
• Questions of music format and political economy in the development of
online radio (Ronald Rodman [chapter 10] and Tim Wall [chapter 11])
• The negotiation of space, community, and participation among audi-
ences, online and offline, in the early twenty-first century—at a large
electronic dance music (EDM) festival, in YouTube worship music com-
munities, and in prison (Fabian Holt [chapter 12], Monique Ingalls
[chapter 13], and Christina Baade [chapter 14])
Each of the topical sections brings together researchers from distinct dis-
ciplinary backgrounds (music studies and media studies; musicology and
ethnomusicology), allowing readers to reflect upon the differences and
similarities of their approaches (for further discussion, see the introduc-
tions to each section).
Although it can be risky to generalize from case studies, as the politi-
cal scientist Yves-Chantal Gagnon has observed, the approach also offers
many benefits: in particular, case studies enable in-depth analyses of com-
plex phenomena, contexts, and histories, and they can serve as the basis
for meaningful theory building.18 Rather than providing a comprehensive
history of music broadcasting or sweeping theories of its trajectory, this
volume demonstrates a range of productive theoretical and methodologi-
cal approaches to music broadcasting in different contexts, laying the
groundwork for more comprehensive accounts in the future. The volume’s
lack of comprehensiveness must be acknowledged especially in the case
of geography: all of our chapters focus on European and North American
contexts, particularly the United States. Although our focus reflects the
historic importance of the US and British broadcasting systems, particu-
larly in Anglophone scholarship, we acknowledge that much more is being
said—and remains to be said—about non-English-language broadcasting
and other global contexts.19
Introduction [7]
radio as a means of one-way communication from a single transmitter to
multiple receivers, as opposed to two-way, ship-to-ship communications
using Morse code, which had been in wide use during World War I. The
notions of a centralized source, the dissemination of material through the
air, and the broad and seemingly passive reception of that material thus
carried through from agriculture to radio and then to television. Although
the point may be crude, it is worth underlining that the audience (i.e.,
human beings) had replaced the soil as recipient in the chain of relation-
ships encompassed by the term. The question remained open, however, as
to whether the ideas and entertainment that were broadcast would take
root. Understanding the audience and how it received the messages it
heard became one of the core challenges in making sense of broadcasting
and its social role.
“Mass media,” a term that entered the lexicon in 1923 in the context of
advertising,22 proved to be a more generative concept for understanding
the impact of broadcasting in modern society than the organicist meta-
phors of agriculture. Since the late nineteenth century, the “masses,” along
with mass culture, mass taste, mass production, and mass markets, had
come to be understood as a crucial aspect of modernity, an era in which
urban, industrial, “mass” society was superseding rural, agrarian, and
communal ways of life. As Raymond Williams has explained, the masses
were conceptualized in two main ways during the twentieth century: as an
active, potentially antihegemonic “social force” (e.g., organized labor or the
Occupy movement) and as an “ignorant, unstable” multitude, to be treated
as an object of study and even manipulation.23 At the simplest level, the
mass media of radio, television, and the press were characterized by their
ability to reach a large number of people, often simultaneously, but their
impact on the masses (in Williams’s second sense) was not simply a matter
of scale. Advertisers, academics, and broadcasters themselves recognized
that the media had become one of the primary means for promoting senses
of social belonging, value, and cultural meaning in modern society—for
good or ill; motivated by a range of critical and instrumental aims, they set
out to understand both the media and its mass audience. These concerns
helped shape contemporary understanding of “mass media” as encompass-
ing the technologies, institutions, and ideologies involved in the produc-
tion and dissemination of information and entertainment, with the aim
of describing how the press, radio, and television affect modern societies.24
In the speed and range of its one-to-many transmission, along with the
immediacy and emotional potency of sound and image,25 radio and televi-
sion broadcasting were forms of mass media seemingly even more power-
ful than the press. Marshall McLuhan described the rise of electronic media
Introduction [9]
satellite radio, and digital broadcasting, each of which was accompanied
by debates about consumer choice, media ownership, regulation, and the
public good.30 Throughout these shifts, concepts of “television” and “radio”
as fields of cultural production and modes of consumption have remained
resilient in public, industrial, and academic discourses; the question is the
degree to which the traditional concept of broadcasting remains in the
picture.
Finally, many scholars have pointed to the persistence of older broad-
casting models in the postbroadcast era, especially in regard to questions
of media ownership and regulations, global contexts, and the digital divide.
We are compelled by Charles Acland’s concept of “residual media,” which
challenges narratives of new media technologies simply supplanting old
ones, considering instead the complexities of older media existing along-
side the new.31 These questions are addressed in Quail’s chapter on music
competition reality shows, international syndication, and Canadian iden-
tity (chapter 5), and in Baade’s chapter on music listening in US prisons,
which is highly dependent on terrestrial radio and television (chapter 14).
Ultimately, our aim is not to deny the impact of the Internet, mobility, and
social networks on concepts of radio and television, but we do want to be
more precise about the nature and scope of their impact. Several chapters
in this book offer insights into these questions, including Holt’s chapter on
promotional videos and live-streaming of the EDM festival Tomorrowland
(chapter 12); Ingalls’s chapter on user-created praise music videos and com-
munity on YouTube (chapter 13); and Wall’s chapter on the music stream-
ing service Last.fm (chapter 11).
Turning to the designation of “music,” it is helpful to recall Antoine
Hennion’s observation that “music has nothing but mediations to show:
instruments, musicians, scores, stages, record[ings]. … The works are not
‘already there,’ faced with differences in tastes also ‘already there,’ over-
determined by the social. They always have to be played again.”32 In other
words, music—even before it is broadcast or recorded—is defined and
becomes knowable through mediation, encompassing a range of activi-
ties and technologies. Hennion’s thinking about music resonates with
Williams’s consideration of the word “medium,” which long “had the sense
of an intervening or intermediate agency or substance.”33 Carrying as it
does the implications of movement and circulation, this fluid sense of the
word “medium” continues to shape our contemporary understandings of
“the media” as shaping—mediating—our awareness not only of music but
also of the world in which we live. It is also worth emphasizing the role of
agency in these concepts of mediation; participants engage actively in the
process of meaning making—and music making—an insight conveyed in
Introduction [ 11 ]
critique in mass culture was undoubtedly rooted in his own “elite” back-
ground, as well as his experiences in Nazi Germany (he wrote his essays
on popular music and jazz while living as an émigré in the United States).
Adorno’s portrayal of audiences acted upon by a culture industry invited
questions about whether they were really so passive. For scholars associ-
ated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the
answer was no. Especially influential was Stuart Hall’s theory of encod-
ing/decoding (1973), which provided a model for analyzing the contingent
and varied ways in which audiences interpreted (decoded)—even repur-
posed—the media.40 Hall and other Birmingham school theorists helped
develop a space for academics not only to take seriously the experiences,
thoughts, and voices of the working class, people of color, youth, women,
and other disenfranchised groups but also to engage seriously with popular
culture and media content. In tension with Frankfurt school views on the
culture industry, the Birmingham thinkers were foundational for research
into television, radio, and popular music, including the work of several
scholars in this book, including Quail (chapter 5), Russo (chapter 7), Coates
(chapter 9), and Baade (chapter 14).
One of the most challenging aspects of approaching popular music as a
category is that it encompasses a wide range of contemporary and past musi-
cal genres, styles, and practices. In this volume alone, the category includes
musical theater (Quail, c hapter 5), Yoko Ono’s avant-garde performances
(Coates, chapter 9), sweet dance music of the 1930s (Asai, c hapter 6), west-
ern swing (Russo, chapter 7), electronic dance music (Holt, chapter 12), con-
temporary worship music (Ingalls, chapter 13), and indie, punk, and pop
(Baade, chapter 14). Another challenge is that although audiences, fans,
and subcultural participants might have decoded and repurposed popular
music, their identities were also inscribed and coopted by broadcasters and
marketers. Popular music was thus situated as the commercialized, mass-
distributed “other” to pure, authentic folk music (a tension explored by
Russo in his chapter on western swing in 1930s radio shows aimed at white
rural Texans [chapter 7]), as well as to classical music.
The chapters by Doctor ( chapter 1), Taylor ( chapter 2), VanCour
(chapter 3), and Deaville (chapter 8) illustrate how broadcasters framed
classical music—opera, symphonies, and chamber music—as culturally
significant, especially in the early years of radio and television broadcast-
ing. Simultaneously, nineteenth-century discourses of classical music’s
transcendence helped raise the status of broadcasting itself. As David
Goodman has observed, “It was vital for commercial and political reasons
that broadcast classical music become part of a program of uplift and more
equal provision of access to esteemed culture for all.”41 Thus, although