Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres 9781501343216, 9781501343247, 9781501343230

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Genre, format, mediation
Communities: Imagined, affective, institutional, spatiotemporal, and sounding
Music radio studies
References
Part 1 Sounding Minority Radio
Chapter 1 Migrant Radio, Community, and (New) Fado: The Case of Radio ALFA
The role of radio in migrant communities
Portuguese community and radio in France: An overview
Radio ALFA: Broadcasting for the Portuguese community
(New) fado, identity, and experience
Conclusion
References
Chapter 2 On Sonic Assemblage: Indigenous Radio and the Management of Heteroglossia
Indigenous radio and anti-colonial politics
Darwin’s radio landscape
Radio Larrakia
Yolngu Radio/ARDS
Animating the sonic avatar: The politics of an assembled vocality
References
Chapter 3 Voicing Otherness on Air: Theorizing Radio through the Figure of Voice
Introduction
Othered voices
Verdens musik and the institutional framework of DR
Confidences and the institutional framework of Beur FM
Technological noises and bodily sounds
Conclusion
References
Part 2 Music Radio and Nation Building
Chapter 4 Broadcasting the New Nation: Radio and the Invention of National Genres in Latin America
La Hora del Charango and No Mundo do Baião
Broadcasting the real
The market of symbolic goods
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5 The Edufication and Musicalization of Radio: CKUA, ‘Good Music’, and ‘Uplifting Taste’
Edufication and musicalization
CKUA and the edufication of radio
Musicalization and uplifting taste
Music and the ‘middlebrow’ listener
Music programming for the foreground format
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6 Mediated Soundscapes: Representations of the National in the Soundscape Call-in Programme Äänien ilta
The mediated soundscape
The context of the national
The contents of the first and ninth programmes
The medium might be the message
Social memory, national memory, and heritage
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7 Dispositives of Sound: Folk Music Collections, Radio, and the National Imagination, 1890s–1960s
The archive as dispositive
Collecting folk music with the phonograph: Linking sound to the national (1890s–1930s)
Music radio and politics of national identity: Broadcasting ‘Swiss’ music as ‘spiritual defence’ (1930s–1960s)
Dispositives of sound (and silence): Archives and the control of national discourse
Acknowledgements
References
Part 3 Music Radio: Genre and Mediation
Chapter 8 Mediatization–Radiofication–Musicalization
Mediatization
Mediatization as radiofication
Musicalization
The future of music radio
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9 Formats, Genres, and Abstraction: On Musico-Generic Assemblages in the Context of Format Radio Production
Definitions of format
Definitions of genre
Perspectives from assemblage theory
Musico-generic assemblages
Musico-generic abstraction as the production of teleologies
In conclusion
References
Chapter 10 Music Radio’s Mediations of the Music-Cultural High/Low Divide before the 1980s
Music radio as assemblage
Music radio’s social mediation
High/low as a disciplinary dispositive
High/low as mediated within and through music radio
Conclusions
References
Part 4 Music Radio Convergences
Chapter 11 Format, the Literature of American Popular Music, and Mr Crump
Grounding categories
Vernacular perspectives and sentimental claims
W.C. Handy as format, Charley Patton as genre
References
Chapter 12 MTV and the Remediation of FM Radio
The concept of remediation
Presenting the case: The birth of MTV from the perspective of remediation
MTV, remediation, and oral discourse
Remediation and the MTV programming dynamic
Conclusion
References
Chapter 13 Music Radio as a Format Remediated for Stream-Based Music Use
Remediation of radio
Technologies, media, and format as theoretical and analytical foci
A change in theoretical frame and analytical scale from medium to format
Radio as a contributing format
Case: User-generated playlists in Spotify based on a proprietary radio show in Apple Music – The Alligator Hour with Joshua Homme
Case: Analysis of the differences between the Spotify radio function and their daily mix playlists
Conclusion
References
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Music Radio

ii

Music Radio Building Communities, Mediating Genres Edited by Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Steen Kaargaard Nielsen and Iben Have

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright ©  Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, Iben Have, and Contributors, 2019 Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image ©  Patrick Koslo/Getty images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Michelsen, Morten. | Krogh, Mads. | Nielsen, Steen Kaargaard. | Have, Iben, 1970Title: Music radio: building communities, mediating genres / edited by Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Steen Kaargaard Nielsen and Iben Have. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018038770| ISBN 9781501343216 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501343230 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Radio and music. | Music–Social aspects. Classification: LCC ML68 .M846 2019 | DDC 791.44/3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038770 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4321-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4323-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-4322-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Complexities of Genre, of Mediation, and of Community Mads Krogh and Morten Michelsen

vii ix

1

Part One  Sounding Minority Radio 1

Migrant Radio, Community, and (New) Fado: The Case of Radio ALFA  Pedro Moreira 31

2

On Sonic Assemblage: Indigenous Radio and the Management of Heteroglossia  Daniel Fisher 49

3

Voicing Otherness on Air: Theorizing Radio through the Figure of Voice  Kristine Ringsager and Sandra Lori Petersen 70

Part Two  Music Radio and Nation Building 4

Broadcasting the New Nation: Radio and the Invention of National Genres in Latin America  Marcio Pinho and Julio Mendívil 101

5

The Edufication and Musicalization of Radio: CKUA, ‘Good Music’, and ‘Uplifting Taste’  Brian Fauteux 120

6

Mediated Soundscapes: Representations of the National in the Soundscape Call-in Programme Äänien ilta  Meri Kytö 145

7

Dispositives of Sound: Folk Music Collections, Radio, and the National Imagination, 1890s–1960s  Johannes Müske 163

Part Three  Music Radio: Genre and Mediation 8 Mediatization–Radiofication–Musicalization  Alf Björnberg 193

vi Contents

  9

Formats, Genres, and Abstraction: On Musico-Generic Assemblages in the Context of Format Radio Production  Mads Krogh 211

10

Music Radio’s Mediations of the Music-Cultural High/Low Divide before the 1980s  Morten Michelsen 230

Part Four  Music Radio Convergences 11 Format, the Literature of American Popular Music, and Mr Crump  Eric Weisbard 253 12 MTV and the Remediation of FM Radio  Ariane Holzbach 273 13 Music Radio as a Format Remediated for Stream-Based Music Use  Andreas Lenander Ægidius 291 Notes on Contributors Index

311 316

List of Illustrations Figures 2.1 2.2 4.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7

Map of Australia including the seven states Map of Australia’s ‘top end’, the northern part of the Northern Territory A Bolivian charango with armadillo-shell resonator and a Peruvian charango with box-shaped resonator A map illustrating the numerous places that listen to Alberta’s Department of Education’s correspondence school broadcasts A month of scheduled programming by the University of Alberta’s Music Hour Middlebrow music featured in CKUA’s Broadcast Guide, March 1947 Promotional material for CKUA that features both education and entertainment Organization of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation 1940s–1960s The Dür Collection at SRI, proveniences The Dür Collection at SRI, musical styles The four top results of my search for Alligator Hour in the music streaming service Spotify Radio prominently placed in the upper left corner of the Spotify user interface Clicking the rightmost thumbs-up icon saves the played song to a playlist in Spotify Radioness evoked by the graphics in the user interface of Spotify Radio The control functions of Your Daily Mix user interface in Spotify Clicking either heart or remove in Your Daily Mix user interface in Spotify The graphical representation of Your Daily Mix in Spotify

51 56 106 126 132 135 141 178 179 180 301 303 303 304 305 305 306

viii List of Illustrations

Tables 6.1 6.2 6.3 12.1

Themes and duration of Äänien ilta programmes 2012–17 Playlist of the first Äänien ilta programme, The Finnish Soundscape (2012) Playlist of the ninth Äänien ilta programme, Transforming Finnish Soundscapes (2015) Programme units during the first hour of MTV aired on 1 August 1981

150 151 152 285

Preface In most countries around the world, celebrations of the first 100 years of broadcasted radio are just around the corner, beginning with the celebrations in the Netherlands in 2019. Historically, in most cases music has taken up about half of the broadcast time, while the sheer abundance of digital radio channels has necessitated even more the use of music in order to fill out millions of hours of air time. Radio has had a defining influence on the perception of what music is and, at the same time, musical practices and ideals have contributed decisively to the whole idea of what radio is and how it has developed. This mutual dependence has been and is still important to radio production and to music production, and it is this interdependence as well as its concrete results in the form of programmes, programme policies, practices, patterns of organization, habits of listening, and so on, that we refer to as music radio. Such intertwinings of radio and musical life were the subject of the Danish research project ‘Radio and Music in Denmark’ (RAMUND), www.ramund. ikk.ku.dk, which ran from 2013 to 2018. RAMUND’s overall research question asked in what ways the fields of music and radio have interacted since the launch of a Danish state radio in 1925. Musico-cultural conventions like performance formats, repertoires, genre conventions, aesthetics, and presentations have been incorporated into radio practices. At the same time, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (Danmarks Radio or DR) has continued to influence Danish musical life throughout the period. To establish a historiographic perspective on the changing relations between local music culture(s) and radio(s) and drawing on a historiographic framework defined by the use of ‘New History’ within radio studies and music studies, two broad concepts structured RAMUND’s theoretical field: genre culture and mediatization. These were informed by discussions of different ontologies of music and radio and by the fact that questions of music radio, genre, and mediatization are related to local, national, and transnational contexts simultaneously. Nine senior researchers, a postdoc, and a PhD student contributed to the first two project publications: Stil nu ind … Danmarks Radio og musikken [‘Tune in – The Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the Music’] and Tunes for All?

x Preface

Music on Danish Radio (both 2018). Both focus on Danish music radio. While the first is a popular, case-based history of the developments from the 1920s until today, the second is a scholarly anthology with a substantial introduction and ten articles. The focus on Danish radio is due to a quite unusual access to detailed radio logs, to news manuscripts, and to sound files containing most of the surviving radio programmes, all in all about 1.5 million hours of radio. These sources are held in a data base (LARM.fm) accessible to all Danish researchers and students. In order to broaden the perspective and look beyond national radio, RAMUND invited a group of international researchers to join us in Copenhagen in May 2017 for the seminar Music – Sound – Radio: Theorizing Music Radio. For three days, twenty-five researchers from several continents debated a diverse series of issues concerning music, radio, and sound, and of the papers given, thirteen have been rewritten as articles to be presented here under the title Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres. We want to thank the many invited speakers at the RAMUND project seminars between 2013 and 2017. They have contributed more than they know. They are Alf Björnberg, Heiner Stahl, Julio Arce, Kate Lacey, Paddy Scannell, Richard Witts, Jason Toynbee, Sune Auken, Patrick Valiquet, Stig Hjarvard, Holger Schulze, Nick Prior, Golo Föllmer, Pedro Moreira, Aaron Johnson, Andreas Lenander Ægidius, Marcio Giacomin Pinho, Brian Fauteux, Mark Campbell, Johannes Müske, Giorgio Biancorosso, Eric Weisbard, Meri Kytö, Heikki Uimonen, and John Howland. We would also like to thank the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Humanities, which has made RAMUND, the seminars, and the publications possible through a generous grant. Copenhagen and Aarhus, May 2018 Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, and Iben Have

Introduction: Complexities of Genre, of Mediation, and of Community Mads Krogh and Morten Michelsen

Turn on the radio! If someone talks, flick through the stations, and soon you will find yourself engulfed in music. Follow the rhythms – adjust your mood by choice of station, adjust your schedule, your energy level, workflow and daily life to the flow of music. Follow the rhythms to the next room – adjust the atmosphere of your house and the vibes resonating through open doors and windows to your neighbours, reverberating across places, space, and everyday life worlds. Follow the rhythms though air or cable – allowing your neighbourhood or town or country to resonate in unison: ‘Good morning Scotland’, music for breakfast, driving, work, or to tuck you in. Follow the rhythms across media – turn on your car stereo, smart phone, or laptop – the same music, same flow but mobilized, leading you, on the road, through the day. Follow the rhythms socioculturally – music culture mediatized, radio differentiating people (Are you into hip-hop or R&B, Album Oriented Rock or Contemporary Hit Radio?); or radio coordinating everyday life worlds (as the epitome of industrial time) or contributing to nation building: ‘Good morning Scotland’. Follow the rhythms into the music and media industries – fads and fashions fashioned with an ear to radio formats, attuned to music directors’ sounding of taste patterns or listening habits – listeners’ life worlds and the entire vibrational milieu, so far alluded to, as reverberating in audience research, channel profiles, clocks, algorithms for generating playlists conjoined with the experience or ‘gut feeling’ of music directors and programmers. Follow the rhythms across this multilayered and complex field to grasp, however evasively, the dynamic multiplicity of what music radio is. This is what this book aims to do: contribute to probing the notion of music radio studies. In recent years music radio has become a fast-growing research area, developed in the intersection of (popular) music studies and radio studies but fuelled by a wider array of disciplines as traditional disciplinary borders

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become ever more porous – among them sound studies, arts studies, media and communication studies, anthropology, and sociology, to name a few.1 As documented by the conference ‘Music – Sound – Radio: Theorizing Music Radio’ (Copenhagen, May 2017) and the ensuing chapters in this volume, music radio is an area of dialogue, of shared interests and topics, and of conceptual developments between disciplines and cross-disciplinary reverberations (or rhythms) – in line with its subject. Two overarching topics stand out as particularly important although closely intertwined in the articles presented: Music radio’s significance for building communities and for mediating genres. These are topics well known from music studies, radio studies, media studies, and other adjacent fields, but they emerge with particular force and fruitful complexity in the context of music radio – or so we contend. Radio is the medium of nation building par excellence, but nations depend to a great extent on cultural heritage, including music distributed nationwide to encompass audiences otherwise divided by class, ethnicity, gender, and age (Hilmes 1997, 11–23). And even the recognition of ethnic minorities or local communities may require the broadcasting of cultural difference, for example, in the guise of artistic expressions. Moreover, music engenders its own communities in terms of musico-cultural fractions or formations within musical life and with radio as a seminal means of distribution. Simon Frith noted this in 2002, when stating that ‘radio is still the most important source of popular musical discourse, defining genres and genre communities, shaping music history and nostalgia, determining what we mean by “popular” music in the first place’ (41), and even in a time of digital

Ever since broadcasted radio’s early years, radio and music radio have been theorized. Well-known authors like Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin contributed to radio theory and radio in general; Adorno focused on music radio, and his analyses of radio (collected in Adorno [2006] 2009) informed his later cultural critiques in, for example, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947). Rudolf Arnheim ([1936] 1971) published an extensive aesthetics of the radio and referenced music frequently. After this early interest, radio and music radio research was mainly left to empiricists doing listener surveys. Only in the 1980s did music radio begin to regain attention, this time from popular music, cultural theory, and media scholars, and mainly in relation to popular music problematics. In German-speaking countries, fifteen to twenty doctoral theses on the subject saw the light of day, while a few seminal articles on music radio by Frith ([1983] 1988), Hennion and Méadel (1986) and Berland (1990) set a new agenda for historical and post-structuralist popular music studies. Media studies contributed to the field with historical analyses by Barnard (1989) and Scannell and Cardiff (1991). Since the turn of the millennium a small but steady flow of publications have dealt with music radio from a wealth of perspectives including the sound of radio (Föllmer 2013), listening in general (Lacey 2013), anthropology (Bessire and Fisher 2012) and historical studies (Baade and Deaville 2016). See Michelsen (2018a) for a more extensive review of music radio research.

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Introduction

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media (including digital media conversions and convergence) radio remains a key means of music diffusion (Rossman 2012; Dubber 2013). However, if musical genres emerge in the process of radio’s mediation of musical life, so do radio formats, that is, specific broadcasting templates for organizing programming and production. As such, music radio is as much about music’s or music culture’s impact on radio as it is about radio’s impact on musical life (Michelsen and Krogh 2017). Moreover, looming behind the two overarching topics is, as indicated, a range of differentiations as to, for example, which kinds of community building music radio may effect or which types of mediation are at play. The complexities of music radio call for research into this particular subject area and for theory development, which may in turn resonate with adjacent research fields and disciplines. To ‘follow the rhythms’ of music radio in space and time, sonically and materially, socially and culturally, is not merely to apply a musical metaphor but to address a prominent mediational aspect of the phenomenon of music radio, which may afford insights and speculation with ramifications beyond this particular research area. As such, it names but one avenue of theory development issuing from the subject, but relating to wider fields of study. In the remainder of this introduction we take further steps towards detailing the complexity of the two overarching topics regarding the significance of music radio. We hope to provide a basis for reading the ensuing articles – a mark-up of the topical cross domain to which the various articles contribute by showing various routes for empirical engagement, discussion, and theory development. Furthermore, the framework provided here qualifies the briefer accounts initiating each of the four parts which structure the overall layout of the book. We start out by looking into the relation of genre, format, and mediation, thereafter turning to issues of community building. Finally, we provide a few further comments on the constitution of music radio as a research field in terms of interdisciplinarity and lineages.

Genre, format, mediation Radio’s significance to the formation of musical genres is, as illustrated by the quote by Frith, well established. In recent years, various researchers have detailed trajectories of how this relation plays out with respect to particular

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genres and historical contexts of radio production (cf. Simpson 2011; Rossman 2012; Weisbard 2014; Brackett 2016). Commonly, these studies manifest a sociocultural understanding of genre derived from popular music studies. In other words, they relate to a field of genre theory which has itself seen remarkable developments in recent years. Whereas musicology may have excelled in taxonomic or typological descriptions of genre (Samson 2001) in line with classical genre theory and centred on issues of style and poetics, popular music studies has been predominantly occupied with genre as an aspect and a means of social practice. As such, genres have been regarded not merely as repetitive patterns of musical repertoires but as pertaining to wider musico-cultural contexts and to the continuous structuring of practices within such contexts. Conceptions of genre as rule-bound (Fabbri 1981; Frith 1996) or as configurations of musico-cultural conventions (Negus 1999; Toynbee 2000; Holt 2007; Lena 2012) attest to this line of thinking, which has, in recent years, been supplemented (and somewhat challenged) by writers emphasizing the contingency and non-linearity issuing from genres’ configurational compositeness. A key move in this respect has been the introduction into musical genre theory of distributed notions of the ontology of genres, whether by inspiration from cultural anthropology (Born 2005), actor-network theory (ANT; Drott 2013; Haworth 2016), or Deleuzian assemblage thinking (Born 2011; Brackett 2016; Born and Haworth 2017). As a common trait, these approaches emphasize how genres rely on mediations among an array of heterogeneous – social, discursive, material – elements, neither of which may fully explain the combined effect or co-functioning of elements in the formation of a certain genre identity in a particular situation. Moreover, elements are commonly regarded as promiscuous, that is, as being able to participate in various genres – in keeping with the principle of Derrida’s so-called law of genre stating that ‘participation never amounts to belonging’ (Derrida 1992, 230). Accordingly, these theoretical influences on musical genre theory manifest a resolute nonessentialism, allied to equally de-centred conceptions of other phenomena – such as music (Born 2005), the social (Born and Haworth 2017), or radio (Krogh 2018) – and they promote performative rather than descriptive understandings of genre labelling and musico-generic practice. In this perspective genre labelling may be regarded as an act of creating expectations. That is, an act of projecting certain musico-cultural affinities or logics of causality forward in a retro-active drawing-up of patterns in musical repertoires or culture. Thus,

Introduction

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instead of accounting for what drives musico-generic trajectories (Lena 2012, 84–6), genre analysis may focus on how teleologies are produced by way of genre, which means that contingency or non-linearity is exposed and probed as a basis for genre-theoretical inquiry – as opposed to the (structuralist) determinism suggested in earlier conceptions of genre regulation or, indeed, rules (Fabbri 1981).2 While it may be claimed that popular music studies have proven a particularly flourishing ground for genre-theoretical development (Born and Haworth 2017, 6), it is by no means the case that this development occurred in isolation. Important inspirations have come from media, literary, and cultural studies – as exemplified by film scholar Stephen Neale’s definition of genre as ‘systems of orientations, expectations and conventions’ (1980, 19), which is frequently rehearsed by popular music scholars (e.g. Negus 1999, 28; Toynbee 2000, 103; Lena 2012, 6). Moreover, the development described has to some extent been driven by genre studies crossing over from popular music studies into realms of compositional, electronic, and experimental music (e.g. Drott 2013; Haworth 2016) just as it is mirrored in other disciplinary contexts such as anthropology (Barber 2007), media, and literary studies (Frow 2006; Jerslev, Mortensen, and Petersen 2011). Within radio studies, genre often denotes types of programmes such as sports radio, serials, soaps, phone-ins, news, and documentary (cf. Chignell 2009; Aroney and Olsson 2014; Ames 2016). Accordingly, music radio may encompass various genres of both radio and music, simultaneously produced within the context of specific programmes or channel ranges: For example, sports radio, featuring a mix of current pop, rock, rap, and R&B or chart shows manifesting an image of current trends as opposed to outdated musical styles or fads. However, in comparison with related media-research areas such as film studies or television studies (Jerslev, Mortensen, and Petersen 2011, 2), radio studies have paid less attention to developing the concept of genre theoretically.3 One reason for this may be the predominant use of the notion of format to denote combinations of content (e.g. certain kinds of music) and types of programming (e.g. chart shows) in addition to an array of circumstances such as the choice of host, style of jingles, amount and type of adverts, intended Cf. Krogh (this volume) for further perspectives on these genre-theoretical developments. For example, The Radio Studies Journal/Journal of Radio & Audio Media shows one hit (Hayes and Gravesen 2014) for a search on ‘genre theory’. However, cf. Rossman (2012), Weisbard (2014), Michelsen (2015), Baade and Deaville (2016), Krogh (forthcoming).

2 3

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listener segment, procedures for scheduling and for evaluation at the level of programme or station (Berland 1990; Greve 1996; Hendy 2000). As such, format implies a semantic cluster very close to that of genre, and the two terms are occasionally used interchangeably (Baade and Deaville 2016, 24; see also Cooper and Macaulay 2015; Ames 2016). Moreover, if musical genres are integral to the performance of identity by artists, fans, and others and to the building of communities in musical life (Brackett 2016), then format radio may be regarded a seminal arena for this activity – a context in which audience–music–media relations are literally construed and broadcasted, often with a claim based in audience research of representing already existing affiliations – a claim that makes the construction no less performative. However, again, this illustrates the close correlation of genre labelling and radio formatting. A close correlation or semantic overlap, which may explain the slight predominance of the latter concept at the expense of the former in the context of radio studies. This conceptual proximity becomes even more pronounced when the notion of format is used in the basic technological sense of a form (technique or code) of distribution; that is, the formats of AM, FM, and DAB radio as opposed to, for example, streaming or – in the process of radio production – audio formats such as LPs and CDs as opposed to wave-files or MP3s. In this sense, format denotes neither type nor organization of content but rather the means of distributing this via certain media. Nevertheless, matters are complicated because content and form of distribution are, of course, not necessarily easy to differentiate. Consider, for example, the role of digital formats in the integration of radio in online streaming services in recent years. The curating of playlists in online radio as offered by, for example, Spotify (Morris 2015; Ægidius, this volume) relies entirely on digitized music capable of being processed by selection algorithms and the digitized processing of listener action and preferences harvested through the interface (and in a broader sense through the internet). As such, means of production (type and organization of content) and of distribution converge, and it becomes clear that the circumstances included in the above description of radio formats – in terms of procedures for scheduling and for evaluation – would have to imply a broader sense of production arrangements or infrastructure including the involvement of formats in the technological or media-distributional sense. Conversely, in his theorization of media formats (in casu the MP3), Jonathan Sterne makes a parallel point, explaining how format theory should enquire into the complex conjunction of technology, contexts of production and reception,

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scientific and commercial interests, sensual configurations and institutional politics implied in any medium: If there were a single imperative of format theory, it would be to focus on the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in, whether we are talking about portable MP3 players, film projectors, television sets, parcels, mobile phones, or computers. (2012, 11)

In fact, the conceptual blurring that I have commented on regarding genre and format may be taken even further by looking into the concept of medium, which Sterne’s format theory is in part an attempt to qualify. For example, as asked by Jerslev, Mortensen, and Petersen (2011, 1), is e-mail a genre or a medium? Or how about podcasts, which have become increasingly important as a form (format?) of radio production and distribution (even if only hesitantly when it comes to music radio; Markman 2015). We return to the notion of media below. Research on radio’s significance to musical genres and the development of radio formats often positions itself within a continuum between sweeping sociohistorical perspectives and detailed case studies. In some cases, the former take precedence, as in T. W. Adorno’s somewhat totalizing claims about ‘radio music’ and music radio’s influence as part of the cultural industries on the status of so-called serious music (1945). In other cases, detailed case studies substantiate the generalized claims made in terms of genre and formats (cf. Rossman 2012; Weisbard 2014). The drift towards conceiving radio’s significance in overall socio-historical terms is enforced by the advancement, from within the realm of media studies, of mediatization theory. According to Hjarvard, mediatization is ‘the process whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic’ (2008, 113). Society’s dependency on media is not merely a matter of technological determination or affordances but also of the power of media institutions. On the one hand, the theory provides a productive framework for accounts of how radio technology and corporations came to be dominant factors in musical life. On the other hand, prevailing assumptions about this historical development should be continuously challenged to tease out the complexities or implied dialectics of the composite phenomenon of music radio (Michelsen and Krogh 2017; Björnberg, this volume). Another somewhat macro-oriented perspective on media of relevance to this collection is the media theory developed by Friedrich Kittler, which posits media technologies as ‘causative factors’ (Winthrop-Young and Wutz in Kittler

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1999, xxxv) in the formation of historical moments, that is, periods marked by discourse networks conjoining ‘the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store and produce relevant data’ (Kittler 1990, 369). The determination by media of the production and dissemination of data makes them decisive even to the formation of historical accounts – at the expense of any notion of the agential primacy of human creators: What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather … their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility. … At the moment of merciless submission to laws whose cases we are, the phantasm of man as the creator of media vanishes. And it becomes possible to take stock of the situation. (Kittler 1999, xl–xli)

However, despite this media-technological determinism acting at a generalized level of society and historical moment, and despite Kittler’s relative inattention to radio compared to other predominant twentieth-century mass media such as film and the gramophone, the theory lends itself to sensitive analyses of radio’s role in constituting genres and communities as demonstrated by Müske along with Pinho and Mendίvil (this volume). As a counter-tendency to enquiries into overarching lines of historical development, research on music radio has also emphasized a micro-social level of investigation. The anthropological study by Hennion and Méadel (1986) of programming practices at French RTL (Radio Télé Luxembourg) illustrates this point. Aiming to ‘determine the mechanisms by which radio and its audience reciprocally construct one another’ (281), the authors uncover a mesh of practices and processes of mediation at play in ‘the daily work of a radio station’ (285). In fact, they consider the act of mixing or mediating factors and forces a fundamental feature of the medium: ‘Radio is in a way the medium par excellence. It never stops mixing what it borrows, in order to produce itself ’ (285); and as such, it is simultaneously ‘the privileged site for understanding the reality of mediators and the effectiveness of the transformations they make’ (287). Via networks of mediation inflicted in the production of radio programmes, musical tracks are combined with speech, news, entertainment, and commercial material aided by audience research, regimes of management, procedures for scheduling and so on, in a ‘reconstruction of the musical catalogue … to be heard: that is to say as a way of constructing its own audience’ (287, emphasis in the original).

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Hennion and Méadel detail this networked transformation, thus illuminating how radio formats are configured on a micro-social level of action. Indeed, in their insistence on the local construction of ‘those realities that the sociologist of culture wishes always to grasp globally’ (299), they illustrate also the local construction of scalability – of techniques of measurement and representation by which ‘wider’ notions of genre and audiences are produced in the cause of programming (301). In doing so, and in particular in their use of the concepts of mediator and mediation, they demonstrate the impact of science and technology studies (STS) and ANT on music radio studies (see also Hennion 2001, 2003, 1993/2015). Similar inspirations – in part by direct association with the work of Hennion – are invoked by another music-sociological advocate of the concept of mediation, Georgina Born, though in juxtaposition with critical-theoretical and anthropological thinking on the subject (2005; see also Born 1995, 2010, 2013a). Born’s advocacy of the concept of mediation is intimately connected to her understanding of music, musical genres, and sociality as distributed phenomena – as evinced by her definition of an assemblage as ‘a particular combination of mediations’ (2005, 8). However, she emphasizes how mediation may be regarded as a means of providing stability and, accordingly, the ‘need to resist the equation of mediation simply with mobility or progressive change’ (30). As opposed to this latter tendency, she suggests ‘that theories of mediation should move beyond the sphere of micro-social interactions and trace the historical trajectories of musical assemblages, reconnecting them to analyses of the macro-dynamics of cultural history and technological change’ (34). While Born is not particularly occupied with radio, her suggestion reaffirms the need for historical specificity and, thus, the aforementioned balance between overall historical perspectives and detailed case studies in accounts of radio’s significance to the formation of musical genres. The determinism hinted at, for example, by Adorno’s account of the influence of radio on serious music, is avoided by implication of the contingency of mediation processes (in conjunction with assemblage theory). Thus, ‘on the basis of empirical research’, we should, according to Born, ‘be alert to both continuities and discontinuities in historical formations’ (34). Circling back to add yet another layer of complexity to the notion of mediation, one avenue for such historical enquiry is offered by the concept of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000). As hinted above and as remarked by various scholars (Hendy 2000; Tacchi 2000; Freire 2007; Lacey 2008; Dubber 2013), radio should not be regarded as a stable or given phenomenon marked by essential characteristics. Rather, its historical development involves dialogue

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and interference with other media technologies and institutions, for example, though of course not exclusively, in the context of musical life. As remarked by Freire, ‘New technologies for radio reception, delivery and programming … all changed the industries and the output of radio at various points in its history, arguably remediating earlier technologies and approaches along the way’ (2007, 36). Moreover, if remediation concerns the representation of one medium in another not only in a formal or technological sense but also in terms of cultural, economic, social, and material practices (Bolter and Grusin 2000), then the historical and reciprocal remediation of radio and musical life should be regarded as a multidimensional phenomenon, manifesting a problem or a field of enquiry rather than a clear-cut relation of determination. Furthermore, while remediation presupposes notions of particular media – such as radio remediating newspapers and phonograms only to be itself remediated by television (Holzbach, this volume), podcasts (Bottomley 2015), or online streaming services (Freire 2007; Ægidius, this volume) – it simultaneously highlights the unstable and negotiated status of the media implied. The remediated features of an old medium are never merely given, but constructed in the process. That is, in representing an old medium, new media emphasize certain features – certain notions or parameters of radioness (Freire 2007) – which are afforded by the old medium but, nevertheless, contingently drawn forth among other possible features. The instability, highlighted by processes of remediation, of what particular media consists in, their effects and relations to other media, points to a general problem of identity and delimitation. In fact, it presents the production and delimitation of particular media within networks of remediation in a sense akin to the distributed understanding of genre and format remarked upon above.4 Drawing upon authors like Kittler, Born, Hennion, and Bolter and Grusin helps explaining why music radio’s significance to the constitution of music genres illustrates the fruitful complexity which was also initially noted. Genre, format, mediation – each notion not only manifests a conceptual space for discussion stimulated by, but also probing, the phenomenon of music radio. Indeed, reaching again for the trope invoked at the outset of this chapter, perhaps

This relatedness of thought is underlined by Bolter and Grusin’s reliance on ANT (especially Latour) in their rejection of media determinism by reference to the hybrid nature of any medium: ‘Media do have agency, but that agency is constrained and hybrid. To say that digital media “challenge” earlier media is the rhetoric of technological determinism only if technology is considered in isolation. In all cases we mean to say that the agency for cultural change is located in the interaction of formal, material, and economic logics that slip into and out of the grasp of individuals and social groups’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 78, emphasis in original).

4

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11

the rhythms of music radio propagate not only socio-materially, across spaces, in everyday musico-cultural practices and institutional contexts, but into the realm of theory development.

Communities: Imagined, affective, institutional, spatiotemporal, and sounding The term community has been central to the social sciences ever since its early years, and the accumulated body of research is enormous. Moreover, just like the word ‘community’ in everyday language may be used in many different ways, its uses in research has been manifold. In the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Graham Crow states that ‘“Community” is concerned with people having something in common, although there is much debate about precisely what that thing is’ (2007, n.p.). Nevertheless, he accounts for five main aspects in the uses: Shared space (i.e. people sharing a delimited geographical area); shared interests or identities reaching beyond specific places; questions of inclusion and exclusion; questions of participation at the same time (if not place); the change in membership; and questions of cohesion and conflict within a community. In various ways and to varying degrees, the communities implicated by music radio involve all these aspects manifesting thus the basic complexity of the term. Add to this a focus in the present context on the anthropological leitmotif of cultural complexity and the basic processual dynamism of communities’ ‘everchanging settings’ (Marcelin 2006, 539) and the challenges for an analytically adequate framework for understanding music radio-related communities begin to emerge. Sociologically inclined genre researchers like Lena (2012) understand music genres as intimately linked with communities marked by a consensus regarding a particular style of music. As such, the significance of music radio in terms of community building is already implied in the attention given to genre in the above. However, contrary to, for example, Lena’s notion of avant-garde genres where everybody knows each other (2012, 28–33), radio broadcasting, even at a local community level, would often evoke audiences with a shared attachment to a programme or a station, but with no direct contact, knowledge of, or intimate relation among each other. In consequence, it seems reasonable to call upon the concept of imagined communities as developed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

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([1983] 1991). Anderson coined the term in order to investigate how nationalism works as an idea. He defined nations as imagined because ‘the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion. … In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of faceto-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’ ([1983] 1991, 6). This naming of a sense of belonging despite not actually knowing the others who share a similar sense has been important, and the term has since been used in a very wide variety of contexts, including radio studies. While Anderson contributed decisively to changes in how community was conceptualized, another contributor in the 1980s was anthropologist Anthony Cohen who in The Symbolic Construction of Community (1985) reached beyond the fixity of communities in time and place by thinking of communities not as structures but as sites for the production of meaning: Community exists in the minds of its members, and should not be confused with geographic or sociographic assertions of ‘fact’. By extension, the distinctiveness of communities and, thus, the reality of their boundaries, similarly lies in the mind, in the meanings which people attach to them, not in their structural forms. As we have seen, this reality of community is expressed and embellished symbolically. (Cohen 1985, 98)

Also to Cohen, who built this argument on a wealth of ethnographic field work in small communities, the subjective sense of belonging is what actually creates communities. In continuation of this, ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s discussion of the term community is concerned with understanding the dynamic processes that may cast a light on ‘music’s role in community formation’ (2011, 350). Her reflections on music communities may help understand the meeting between radio and music communities. She begins by offering a definition: A musical community is, whatever its location in time or space, a collectivity constructed through and sustained by musical processes and/or performances. A musical community can be socially and/or symbolically constituted; music making may give rise to real-time social relationships or may exist most fully in the realm of a virtual setting or in the imagination. … a musical community is a social entity, an outcome of a combination of social and musical processes, rendering those who participate in making or listening to music aware of a connection among themselves. (Shelemay 2011, 364–5)

Introduction

13

She also offers a tripartite framework for understanding the various interrelations between social and musical domains: processes of descent (rooted in traditions like kinship or religion), dissent (oppositional groups) and affinity (based on taste). In this context, processes of affinity are the most relevant. They emerge ‘from individual preferences, quickly followed by a desire for social proximity or association with others equally enamoured’ (2011, 373) and often they are related to other factors like race, age, or gender. The musical processes involved in this (here, primarily listening) add to the sense of community because ‘music can generate a sense of shared identity’ (2011, 363) that may be transitory or long-lasting. In such ways, musical practices may work in ways similar to media in affording imagined communities. In her study of US broadcasting from 1922 to 1952, Michele Hilmes underlined that radio helped develop the imaginary community of nationhood even more than the printed press had in the nineteenth century as suggested by Anderson. She states that radio, more than any other agency, possessed the power not only to assert actively the unifying power of simultaneous experience but to communicate meanings about the nature of that unifying experience. Radio not only responded to the dominant social tensions of its era but, by addressing its audience’s situation directly in music, comedy, and narrative drama, made those tensions subject of its constructed symbolic universe. … As the nation found a voice through radio, the ‘imagined community’ of the twentieth-century United States began to take shape. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that it spoke univocally. (1997, 11–13)

In mediating music and speech, US radio afforded the means of identifying (or not) with those who broadcasted and their institutions. In your imagination you could join a music community on air and leave after the song or the programme was over – or stay. In its programming, radio defined what was appropriate and juxtaposed a long series of musical, literary, and dramatic repertoires that had previously been miles apart (Scannell and Cardiff 1991, 181–4); and as radio became still more popular, still more citizens were offered these means of belonging to the nation, to an array of taste communities, to a social, ethnic or gendered group, or whatever type of community you could imagine. And conversely, of course, listeners could feel repelled due to, for example, ethnic or social markers of (dis)identification. Imagined communities do not have clear border demarcations or ‘membership’ requirements. Reasons for participation may range from listening

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to the radio regularly in a semi-attentive way to being a devoted fan of specific programmes or radio hosts. The difference is the intensity of the engagement, but both lead to senses of community because of the assumption that somebody else out there is listening and engaging as well. In a way, it is the broadcasting medium as such which affords this sense, though in cooperation with listeners who decide on the actual meanings of given radio communities. Listeners do the imagining in constant interplay with radio sets and listening contexts, with programmes and channel ranges and with programmers and programming policies that conversely try to define – or imagine – their listeners. As noted above in connection with the concept of mediation, this makes for a complex and contingent process. Another aspect of the importance of imagination to music radio communities relates to the abstract nature of radio (i.e. sounds separated from their soundproducing bodies), which to early radio practitioners and theoreticians called for the cooperation of listeners to co-create the programmes by applying their imagination based on previous experiences (Michelsen 2018b). Andrew Crisell has pointed out that this goes for contemporary radio as well ([1986] 1994, 7), and Susan Douglas has even hailed radio’s abstractness as the freeing of the auditory imagination from the regime of visuality ([1999] 2004, 31). In order to analyse this in more detail, Michelsen has suggested the terms micro- and macro-social radio imaginaries (2018b). They are inspired partly by Georgina Born’s model for the analysis of music’s social mediation (Born 2011), partly by political philosopher Charles Taylor, who has defined social imaginaries in this way: The social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society … I am thinking rather of the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. (Taylor 2002, 91, 106)

The micro-social imaginary includes individual listeners’ work ‘when listening and when using sound in identity work and in managing close social ties to known persons and spaces like the home’, while the macro-social radio imaginary includes ‘how listeners use radio to conceive of themselves as part of larger social groups whose members do not know each other’ (Michelsen 2018b). The two imaginaries are, of course, overlapping in many ways.

Introduction

15

Common to the various authors mentioned so far with regard to imagined communities is a stress on their symbolic nature. Such communities are not in any way tangible but based on ‘assumptions, images, feelings, consciousness’ (Hilmes 1997, 12). Moving on from the symbolic, Born points out ‘music’s capacity to create “affective alliances” … [thereby] engendering musical collectivities that are irreducible to prior forms of social identity’ (2012, 266). It would probably be an exaggeration to consider imagined communities as such to be affective communities, but when radio-based and music-based communities intertwine, their ‘creators’ (mainly the listeners) invest affectively in their imaginations tied as they are to aspects of identity play or consolidation. Music-based and radio-based, imagined communities share traits, and in many ways they merge as radio contributes to the preservation and development of music-based communities by making the music accessible and by discoursing on the music in question, and as music contributes to defining what radio is content-wise in terms of genre demarcations, etc. Such merged music radio communities work to sustain and develop themselves, and they also sustain music’s and radio’s wider engagements in other cultural and societal spheres, such as, ‘the nation’ (Pinho and Mendίvil, this volume; Currid 2006). Following on from these reflections, we would suggest that considering music radio communities as imagined communities opens an avenue for discussions of music radio sociality in a somewhat different way than, for example, the conceptions of genre mentioned. And this consideration sits well with Born’s model for social mediation mentioned above (see also Michelsen, this volume) – the latter offering an obvious frame for grasping the dynamism of the multitude of differing types of communities emerging from music, from radio, and from their merger in music radio. Still, having made these remarks, even further perspectives may be added on the role of music radio in community building in terms of institutional configurations along with spatiotemporal demarcations. Music radio communities come in all shapes and sizes. In principle, they can last from a few minutes (‘my song’ as listened to by thousands) to a lifetime (as habitual listener to the national broadcasting corporation). The intensity of the participation might differ for the individual and among individuals. One can be an avid fan or just mildly interested. There are differences among the varied communities in question, but what these differences consist of (in what ways they are different) are open to interpretation. Differences may be signified by musical genre or by topic, affording the inclusion and exclusion of particular audiences, but in the end, only individual listeners decide if they want to become

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participants of imagined communities, whether musically designed for them or not. Inside the walls of the broadcasting corporations those working there might regard themselves as a single community, but within each institution, all kinds of work-relations produce communities of different sizes and depths as well, some overlapping while others might be antagonistic. Beyond the walls of the institutions the millions of listeners to private operators or national broadcasting corporations form communities of an equally complex nature – not least in terms of the imagined communities discussed above. One question is how such communities are related to the institutions. For example, historically, when national broadcasting corporations became tied to notions of ‘a people’ to be entertained and educated as expressed in various public service models. Radio’s crucial contributions to twentieth-century nation building was one consequence of this, for example, when turning public service ideals into a host of radio practices as David Hendy notes in his book on public service broadcasting (2013). Also, such communities in their generality tended to be long-lasting. Sometimes participating in these could last a lifetime, and in a music radio perspective the actual sounds affording such community formation might include particular repertoires of music as well as the generic sound of the radio playing in the home and the noises of its malfunctions in equal measure.5 More specifically, certain programmes, programme series, and/or hosts became the basis for community building because of the relation to listeners’ individual musical tastes or preferences for a voice or a discourse (Scannell 1991). Such communities might last for shorter whiles, maybe only for the length of a song. Here, the actual sounds of the programme (e.g. radiogenic features like the technician’s choice of settings at the mixing console, programme pace, choice of music, etc.) could be important for maintaining the communities built. Linking these examples is an alternation between an anchoring in a national space and the place of the radio studio. However, this alternation is but one among several possible. Another is geographical, as when national broadcasting corporations, which are obviously tied to a state, broadcast from inside the state to beyond its borders to international audiences and expatriates. Historically this has been a general practice on the short-wave band (see Müske, this volume). Yet A variation of this would be ‘Golden Oldies’ programmes taking you back for a short while to less troubled times and the communities of yesteryear.

5

Introduction

17

another is social. As several have argued, radio was important in constructing the ideals for a common middle class and articulating a broad middlebrow culture (see Frith [1983] 1988; Scannell and Cardiff 1991), but at the same time radio insisted on addressing distinct social groups, in the process reinforcing their constitution. From early on such distinctions based on class, gender, age, and occupation (e.g. workers, women, children and, say, fishermen) could be found in the daily programme schedules. In some countries some of these groups organized themselves in listeners’ societies according to class, region, religion, or occupation, that is, specific communities emerging in reaction to the general phenomenon of radio and succeeding in some ways to influence the institutions’ programming policies by insisting that broadcasts had to reflect their members’ concerns (see Skovmand 1975 for a Danish context). As the European radio industry became deregulated during the 1980s such societies lost their relevance. More recently, within national borders, community radio has worked along the ideals of national public radios, but at a much smaller scale, to serve relatively small communities, be they tied to geographically defined places, along ethnic lines, or by interest. One example is the diasporas’ use of FM and internet radio as a means to keep together the dispersed community without being based in the region of origin (Moreira, this volume). Nowadays, such community stations are the most obvious markers of social and ethnic difference within the field of radio as broadcasters and listeners often proudly highlight their relations to specific class-based and/or ethnic and/or localized segments and remind us of the constant negotiations of inclusion and exclusion. While discussions of communities to a large extent focus on their participants’ choices, it is still relevant to stress that during most of the twentieth century listeners did not have the vast range of digitally provided programmes to choose from compared to the 2010s. And although radio was from the very beginning to some extent interactive (as evidenced by listeners’ letters), listeners did not have much influence. They were, so to speak, already constructed by the producers as listeners belonging to this or that community along the lines mentioned above. Such notions of community were offered to the public in terms of programming for its individual members to use however they saw fit. With its mix of education and entertainment, public service institutions basically constructed a national community of listeners. In the decades after the Second World War, broadcasting corporations formatted programmes accepting that listeners did in fact have quite different interests and uses of radio. For example, after the war the BBC

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began segmenting its listeners according to cultural status reserving Radio One, Two, and Three for different cultural tastes. Nevertheless, the three channels together still made up a totality. BBC management did not consider that to be segmentation in a modern sense even though a case could be made for that. BBC and other national broadcasters only turned to the segmentation understood as a tool to gain as many listeners as possible using programming as a tool, and not as before as an end, as deregulation set in in the 1970s and 1980s. Also, the principle of segmentation was informed by the commercial logic of the advertising industry, a way of thinking that the public service institutions only slowly accepted in a situation where they were forced to compete with commercial radio stations for listeners. Basically, the communities imagined by the radio slowly changed from a public of citizens to segments based on ways of consuming. A final topic to be highlighted in this section’s discussion of music radio’s significance to community building is the specifically sounding dimension of this activity, which in a certain way reconnects us to the issue of mediation detailed above. The communities in question are sound-based communities. Radio affords an intimacy more readily than the audio-visual(ist) regimes of television and film because of the absent, sound-producing body (apart from the radio set). But it also affords imagined socialities – ties to the absent co-listeners. This duality is noticed by Georgina Born who remarks that transphonic technologies like gramophone and radio are ‘both interiorising, in the domestic provenance of early sound media and the inter-corporeal, prosthetic uses of telephony, and exteriorising, in those media oriented more to engendering collective forms of life and work’ (2013b, 3). This interiority/ exteriority duality of sounding media points towards treating music radio as a composite phenomenon relying on the co-functioning of music, other sounds, silences, and voices to erase the categorical borders among the components of radio’s sound. Golo Föllmer (2013) has developed this perspective in his study of the aesthetics of contemporary commercial radio, as has Kate Lacey (2013) by focusing on listening in the twentieth century. Both contribute decisively to understanding how music radio works, and the evolving discipline of sound studies has worked to deliver increasingly nuanced ways of understanding music as an integral part of a broader sound panorama and also to draw attention to the cultural embeddedness of such panoramas. Some of the contributions in this volume turn towards sound studies from an anthropological perspective, most explicitly Kytö by analysing a Finnish radio programme broadcasting non-music recordings of and commentaries

Introduction

19

on everyday gadgets and machinery, which in their isolation on the air afford listening strategies akin to those used for concentrated listening to music. Ringsager and Petersen analyse the radiogenic mediation of hosts’ voices in a French and a Danish programme teasing out the gendered and racialized aspects of the two voices in their complex mediated contexts. Fisher, on the other hand, comments on the entire sound world and sonic syntax of two Indigeneous radio stations in Australia from the perspective of assemblage theory. In these ways all four authors contribute to a broader view on what music radio is by taking into consideration a mesh of musical, semi-musical, and non-musical sounds which individual listeners may hear as mainly musicalized or non-musicalized (or as something in between) and use for imagining communities where each might belong.

Music radio studies The importance of sound studies to recent developments in research on music radio reacquaints us with the issue of the status of the research field that was touched upon initially. It highlights but one avenue of influence while pointing to the composite or interrelated character of music radio studies as a field developing in between the array of disciplines drawn upon by scholars such as the authors of this collected volume. That is, established disciplines such as musicology, anthropology, sociology, and media and communication studies along with more recent ‘studies’ such as popular music studies, radio studies, and sound studies. It might be slightly exaggerated to talk about music radio studies even in this in-between sense, partly because the object might be too specific to merit a ‘studies’, partly because we have until now seen no signs of institutionalization (journals and regular conferences, for example). What is exciting, though, is the cross-fertilization or co-creation taking place in the interdisciplinary dialogue. Rather than to merely evoke scholarly positioning and disciplinary border drawing, moving between areas of study and established traditions holds the potential for challenging or reworking their perspectives. That is, of manifesting an interdisciplinarity akin to the ‘agonistic-antagonistic mode’ detailed by Barry and Born: By pointing to the agonistic-antagonistic mode we highlight how this kind of interdisciplinarity commonly stems from a commitment or desire to contest or transcend the given epistemological and/or ontological assumptions of specific

20

Music Radio historical disciplines, a move that makes the new interdiscipline irreducible to its ‘antecedent disciplines’. (2013, 12, emphasis in the original)

We see this kind of interdisciplinarity manifested in several of the themes running through this introduction. First, the insistence on treating music radio as a composite phenomenon irreducible to its media and music components calls for a conciliation of the disciplines mentioned. Secondly, the balancing of macro-social and media-technological logics and situated dynamics of mediation in historiographical accounts calls for the conversation between sociological and anthropological traditions whether in the guise of, for example, mediatization theory, music anthropology, or STS. Thirdly, the exploration of music radio communities in-between perspectives of genre theory, political theory, organizational theory, affect theory, studies of identity, space, and time calls once again for interdisciplinary dialogues. Returning to the figure used at the opening of this introduction, one might say that the rhythms of music radio resonate not only in its manifestation as a multilayered empirical and thematic field of interest. The interdisciplinarity of what might be referred to as music radio studies manifests a similar reverberation, propagating in between the array of adjacent disciplines, leaving none of them untouched. In this sense, to grasp the dynamic multiplicity of what music radio is, is, indeed, an ‘epistemological and/or ontological’ endeavour in line with the mode imagined by Born and Berry – not only because it concerns the existence and meanings (i.e. function, status, etc.) of a particular phenomenon (music radio) but also because it raises the question of how this phenomenon may be encountered or known, the lessons that may be derived or theories developed, in a word, the study (or ‘-logy’) that may emanate from scholarly engagement. We hope the present collection may be a small step towards furthering this endeavour.

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Haworth, Christopher. 2016. ‘“All the Musics Which Computers Make Possible”: 1 Questions of Genre at the Prix Ars Electronica’. Organised Sound 21 (1): 15–29, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771815000345. Hayes, Joy Elisabeth, and Dana Gravesen. 2014. ‘“I Think I’m Gonna Throw up …”: Toward a Cultural Theory of Shock Radio’. Journal of Radio & Audio Media 21 (2): 202–16, DOI:10.1080/19376529.2014.950144. Hendy, David. 2000. Radio in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hendy, David. 2013. Public Service Broadcasting. Houndsmills (UK): Palgrave Macmillan. Hennion, Antoine. 2001. ‘Music Lovers: Taste as Performance’. Theory, Culture & Society 18 (5): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1177/02632760122051940. Hennion, Antoine. 2003. ‘Music and Mediation: Towards a New Sociology of Music’. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Calyton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 80–91. London, Routledge. Hennion, Antoine (1993) 2015. The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation. Translated by M. Rigaud and P. Collier. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hennion, Antoine, and Cécile Méadel. 1986. ‘Programming Music: Radio as Mediator’. Media, Culture & Society 8 (3): 281–303. Hilmes, Michele. 1997. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. ‘The Mediatization of Society’. Nordicom Review 29 (2): 102–31, https://doi.org/10.1515/nor-2017-0181. Holt, Fabian. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1947. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Amsterdam: Querido. Jerslev, Anne, Mette Mortensen, and Line Nybro Petersen. 2011. ‘Introduction. Challenging Genre – Genre Challenges: New Media, New Boundaries, New Formations’. Mediekultur 51: 1–7. Kittler, Friedrich. 1990. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated with an introduction by Geoffrey Winthorp-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Krogh, Mads. 2018. ‘Non/Linear Radio’. In Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio, edited by Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Iben Have and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Krogh, Mads. Forthcoming. ‘Musico-Generic Assemblages: On Format Radio and Musical Genre Cultures Within (and Beyond) the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’. In Music and Genre: New Directions, edited by Georgina Born and David Brackett. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Lacey, Kate. 2008. ‘Ten Years of Radio Studies: The Very Idea’. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 6 (1): 21–32, https://doi. org/10.1386/rajo.6.1.21_4. Lacey, Kate. 2013. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity. Lena, Jennifer. 2012. Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Marcelin, Louis Herns. 2006. ‘Communities’. In Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. James Birx, 539. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Accessed 26 March 2018, http://dx.doi. org/10.4135/9781412952453.n183. Markman, Kris M. 2015. ‘Considerations – Reflections and Future Research. Everything Old Is New Again: Podcasting as Radio’s Revival’. Journal of Radio & Audio Media 22 (2): 240–3, DOI:10.1080/19376529.2015.1083376. Michelsen, Morten 2015. ‘Mellem musik, litteratur og oplysning. En radiogenretypologi for Statsradiofoniens udsendelser i mellemkrigstiden (Between Music, Literature and Education. A Radio Genre Typology for Statsradiofonien’s Interbellum Programmes)’. In Radioverdener: Auditiv kultur, historie og arkiver (Radio Worlds: Auditive Culture, History and Archives), edited by Erik Granly Jensen, Jacob Kreutzfeldt, Morten Michelsen and Erik Svendsen, 59–78. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Michelsen, Morten. 2018a. ‘Introduction: Music Radio Research’. In Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio, edited by Morten Michelsen Mads Krogh, Iben Have and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, 309–44. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Michelsen, Morten. 2018b. ‘Radios, Sounds, Imaginaries: Music, Space, and Broadcasting in the 1950s’. In Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mads Walther-Hansen and Martin Knakkergaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michelsen, Morten, and Mads Krogh. 2017. ‘Music, Radio and Mediatization’. Media, Culture & Society 39 (4): 520–35, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716648494. Morris, Jeremy Wade. 2015. ‘Curation by Code: Infomediaries and the Data Mining of Taste’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 446–63, https://doi. org/10.1177/1367549415577387. Neale, Stephen. 1980. Genre. London: British Film Institute. Negus, Keith 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge. Rossman, Gabriel. 2012. Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Samson, Jim. 2001. ‘Genre’. Grove Music Online. Accessed 25 April 2018, http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk:2048/grovemusic/view/10.1093/ gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040599. Scannell, Paddy. 1991. ‘Introduction: The Relevance of Talk’. In Broadcast Talk, edited by Paddy Scannell, 1–13. London: Sage.

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Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. 1991. A Social History of British Broadcasting, Volume One 1922–1939: Serving the Nation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 2011. ‘Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music’. Journal of the American Musicological Society 64 (2): 349–90, DOI:10.1525/ jams.2011.64.2.349. Simpson, Kim. 2011. Early ’70s Radio: The American Format Revolution. London: Continuum. Skovmand, Roar. 1975. ‘De ledende kræfter 1926–1940 (The Prime Movers 1926–1940)’. In DR 50, edited by Roar Skovmand. København: Danmarks Radio. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. London: Duke University Press. Tacchi, Jo. 2000. ‘The Need for Radio Theory in the Digital Age’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2): 289–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/136787790000300217. Taylor, Charles. 2002. ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’. Public Culture 14 (1): 91–124. Toynbee, Jason. 2000. Making Popular Music. London: Arnold. Weisbard, Eric. 2014. Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Sounding Minority Radio Despite national broadcasting corporations and commercial networks dominating the airwaves, radio studies has demonstrated the seminal importance of community radio and other independent and non-commercial stations. Since the great wave of deregulation in Europe in the 1980s, public service institutions have become still more challenged by competition from commercial operators focusing on music radio and by political parties accepting the changing rules of the media market. Simultaneously, deregulation made room for a large amount of non-commercial community radio operators addressing more or less specific communities, be they defined by place, interest, ethnicity, taste, or something entirely different. Although the changes may be described as a wave, it is also necessary to point out that they happened quite differently and along different time scales (from the 1970s to the 2000s) in different parts of Europe, and that the tripartite structure of public service, commercial, and community radio stations seems to be a nearly global phenomenon. Among the many reasons for the re-emergence of radio as something worth studying may be the advent of community radio. Not least to academics, community radio was interesting for political reasons because it afforded citizens to work with mass media. This was interpreted as a positive step in the direction of increased democratization and a more equal access to the media. Research in this area has fostered a long list of interesting results, often with a focus on marginalized communities gaining a voice and, hereby, the possibility of strengthening the ties of the community and to speak to others on behalf of the community. Such research has often been closely related to activism (cf. Gordon 2009 and 2012), while other researchers have used their research on community radio as examples in order to discuss more general questions concerning media uses.

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According to Bessire and Fisher, ‘Anthropologists did not begin to develop their tacit knowledge of radio into a systematic analytical project until the 1990s ushered in the rise of “the anthropology of media”’ (2012, 9). But as it happened it became a fruitful way to understand how radio worked, and in addition, how anthropologists contributed to the understanding of radio as an aural phenomenon by involving music, voices, and other sounds in the research and drawing upon ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and sound studies. Since then the field has grown immensely and studies of community radio around the world abound. Bessire and Fisher’s edited volume Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century (2012) demonstrates this interest while Born’s Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (2004) is among the few works to engage with national public service institutions from an anthropological point of view. In this first part, three chapters add to the anthropology of music, voice, and sounds as produced by minorities, specifically migrants or Indigenous people, on commercial radio, public service national radio, and community radio. The first, Pedro Moreira’s ‘Migrant Radio, Community, and (New) Fado: The Case of Radio ALFA’, is concerned with Portuguese migrants and people of Portuguese descent broadcasting specifically to the Portuguese migrant community in and around Paris (and to many other, non-related communities and individual listeners). The second, Daniel Fisher’s ‘On Sonic Assemblage: Indigenous Radio and the Management of Heteroglossia’, analyses two different Indigenous community broadcasting stations in Darwin, Australia, while the third, Kristine Ringsager and Sandra Lori Petersen’s ‘Voicing Otherness on Air: Theorizing Radio through the Figure of Voice’, presents two radio hosts belonging to migrant communities in France and Denmark, respectively. To all four authors a production perspective is important, and questions concerning why planners and presenters do what they do and what their intentions are inform the chapters. Also, questions on the movement from general programming strategies to actual playlists and how the music is discursively framed are being debated. Developing from such problematics, questions concerning audiences are included, mainly on how they are constructed and imagined by radio producers and hosts, but also on how the stations and hosts promote various notions of community through their programming. How radio broadcasting is a way of gaining a voice and negotiating identity is important to all. Moreira focuses on Radio ALFA’s uses of fado as a way of negotiating different ways of belonging: as young or as old, as first-generation



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or as second-generation migrants, as descendants of migrants or as French – and as mediated by a commercial radio station. Today, fado is a stylistically diverse phenomenon, and the various mediations of fado and its contributions to migrant identity work all contribute to conjoin the diversity within the community and to demonstrating the complexities of fado as a genre. Building on the work of, among others, Bakhtin, Gofmann, and Gell, Fisher thinks of Radio Larrakia and Yolngu Radio/ARDS as fragile juxtapositions of sounds, talk, and music which taken together as an assemblage ‘allow us to hear the unfinished character of the Aboriginal voice as a contested space’ demonstrating the heteroglossia and actual diversity of Indigenous cultures. This ‘voice’ is described as an avatar of a valued social person, a non-personal, but voiced position with social agency within communities. Ringsager and Petersen continue the discussion of voice as sounding and as othered in a double sense: as female and as migrant. While relations between voice and agency are in some ways obvious, mediated voices instantly engender analytical challenges due to their multilayered contexts, among them institutional and technological aspects as well as linguistic ideologies. The two hosts discussed are found to be entangled in such complexities including the ‘liberty’ of the radio voice and a series of contextual restraints on the self-same liberty.

References Bessire, Lucas, and Daniel Fisher, eds. 2012. Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century. New York and London: New York University Press. Born, Georgina. 2004. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Secker & Warburg. Gordon, Janey, ed. 2009. Notions of Community: A Collection of Community Media Debates and Dilemmas. Bern: Peter Lang. Gordon, Janey, ed. 2012. Community Radio in the Twenty-first Century. Bern: Peter Lang.

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1

Migrant Radio, Community, and (New) Fado: The Case of Radio ALFA Pedro Moreira

When I decided, in 2014, to study Radio ALFA – a radio station based in Paris broadcasting to the Portuguese community residing in this area through FM, the internet, and a digital cable channel – I was curious about the way it was promoted as ‘The Voice of Lusophony’, its actual slogan, as well as values and ​​ discourses associated to it. As an ethnomusicologist I wondered how music was mediated and wanted to identify discourses about it on radio programmes. When radio programmers promote a certain notion of ‘community’, why do they choose specific music genres and artists over others? What is the relation between radio producers, the specific context, radio policy, and musical choices? Do certain musical choices and discourses reveal the broadcasting station’s policy and strategy in defining its target audience and a broader sense of community? After some preliminary research my first interest was in defining the relationship between programming policies, in a broader sense, and the construction of an idea of a ‘Portuguese community’ imagined and mediated through the radio. I soon realized that the focus of the research would be on media production. As Peterson points out: Just as ethnographies of media consumption have needed to move beyond reception to the creative spaces where people integrate media texts into their lives, so ethnographies of production must recognize the fundamental relationship between the production of texts, the construction of identity, and the connections between production cultures and the larger cultural worlds in which they are embedded. (Peterson 2003, 162)

Analysing production itself as a social process, mainly through its actors, institutions, and cultural products, discloses how discourses are normalized or negotiated, who produces them, and their relationship with the larger cultural

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world, with economic and political contingencies. The study of media and expressive culture from the perspective of production allows us to go beyond causal and direct assumptions that may interfere with a crystallized perspective on the usage of concepts like community or identity, not taking them for granted. These are the reasons why, in this article, the interlocutors’ discourses are important if we are to understand how the community is imagined and how it defines the radio station’s policies. The intense fieldwork allowed me to do several interviews with Radio ALFA’s staff, historical research, mainly in newspapers, and listen to several of Radio ALFA’s broadcasts. The main questions I will address in this article are the following: What is the role of Radio ALFA in the Portuguese migrant context in the Paris area? What role does broadcasted ‘Portuguese’ music play in the construction of a notion of community? What is the role of fado in Radio ALFA broadcasting, and why was it so prominent in the interlocutor’s discourses? What role does fado play in negotiating identity in this migrant radio context? For this purpose I have divided the chapter into four sections: (1) covering the state of the art concerning the role of radio in migrant communities from an anthropological and ethnomusicological perspective; (2) providing a brief historical overview of the relation between the Portuguese community and radio in France; (3) exploring the establishment of Radio ALFA and its broadcasting policy; and (4) analysing fado’s role in the radio station in defining and negotiating identity and experience.

The role of radio in migrant communities Recently fields such as anthropology (Ferreira 2013; Kosnick 2007, 2012; Peterson 2003; Cottle 2000; Dayan 1999) and ethnomusicology (Toynbee and Dueck 2011) have begun to take an interest in media in the context of migrant communities. The existing ethnographies seek mainly to study the processes of self-representation in the media, focusing on the culture of origin and reception in the new country. As stated by the anthropologist Kosnick, ‘Migrant media are of prime importance as arenas for producing and circulating identity claims in order to intervene in the politics of representation’ (2007, 2–3). The reterritorialization of migrant groups and the way they express them­ selves in ethnic minority media (Riggins 1992) reveal the construction of their mediated identities and communities as well as the negotiations of memories



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and cultural practices they adopt as a way of self-representation. An overview of the international media groups reveals the emergence of small-scale media that claim a space and affirm their values, expressive practices, and ideology through radio, print media, the internet, television and so on (Cottle 2000). The space they occupy mainly reveals an affirmation of values ​​of authenticity, ethnicity, and identity that aim to respond to their limited representation in the major and hegemonic media. As Cottle notes, The media occupy a key site and perform a crucial role in the public representation of unequal social relations and the play of cultural power. It is in and through representations, for example, that members of the media audience are variously invited to construct a sense of who ‘we’ are in relation to who ‘we’ are not, whether as ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, ‘citizen’ and ‘foreigner’, ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, ‘friend’ and ‘foe’, ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’. (2000, 2)

The impact of human mobility on a large scale, with people carrying expressive practices with them through media (e.g. audio and image), has been central to studies of music practices and their uses. As the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl states regarding migration and music in general, ‘There have been large numbers of musical results: preservation of old forms in new venues, but with changed functions; development of mixed, hybrid, syncretic forms of music; changed concepts of ethnic, national and personal identity; and lots more’ (2005, 335). That is why studying music and its uses in the context of migrant groups enables us to move away from discourses that crystalize ethnicity. Riggins highlights how these voluntary minorities, in this case emigrants (one of the four groups he defines), produce this mediascape and shape their actions in the specific context of the host country and in relation to ethnicity: ‘The term ethnicity has been defined in a variety of ways, but there is general agreement that it refers to people who perceive themselves as constituting a community because of common culture, ancestry, language, history, religion, or customs’ (Riggins 1992, 1). Media representation enables those working with it the opportunity to decide what public image their ethnic group should promote, both for the community and for the host country, as an unequal opposition between the minority ‘us’ and the majority ‘them’. The same emic categories produced in the context of minority media and in the network of discourses involved, such as ‘Portuguese community’, ‘media of the Portuguese community’ and ‘integration’, assume

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different meanings in the migratory contexts of the Portuguese diaspora, as the anthropologist Ferreira (2013) suggests in other contexts (France, Canada, and Brazil). According to authors such as Alonso and Oiarzabal (2010) and Karim (2003), the concept of community, which can be analysed from different disciplinary perspectives, emphasizes its importance in these contexts, especially when intersected with that of identity. We may also recall the work of Appadurai and what he defines as the modern production of subjectivities in a world where the nation-state is no longer so important in defining individuals (Appadurai 1996, 16). Nevertheless, the idea of the nation-state in the context of migrant radio is relevant because it creates an abstract space related to the idea of a distant nation and even to specific regions and habits of the country of origin. The study of migrant minority media as an abstract space where ideas of a certain nation or region circulate can certainly question whether cultural groups are becoming less tied to geographic places due to the complexity of contemporary societies (Turino 2008). Nation, or in this case motherland, still plays an important role in the construction of identities and is not being completely diminished by global processes. It is through the circulation of identities and expressive symbols in this mediated and mediatized space that individuals of a certain community construct part of their individual and collective identity relating themselves to the nation or region to which they belong. The relation between migrants and media in the new modern scenario allows for the production of individual and collective imagination that is not only physically based in the motherland. National and regional symbols, authentic or not, establish new imagined worlds marked by negotiation and reflection about migrant cultural practices and categories (Melo and Silva 2009, 36). In the field of ethnomusicology Shelemay (2011), building on the work of Turino (2008), Anderson (1983), and Cohen (1985), questions the role of the symbolic construction of communities and their significance in the context of musical practices. As Shelemay asserts, It is not surprising that increasingly widespread diaspora populations, and the challenges of mass migration, have forced scholars to focus on diaspora’s borders and strategies for community definition, and to discard older models that sought ideal types. But it is also clear that music has been implicated in processes of community building, rendering these questions relevant to a very broad swath of musicological inquiry. (2011, 380)



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The approach that emerges in the context of Cohen’s symbolic anthropology, reflected in Shelemays’ study, highlights the community as more of an experience than a structure to be defined. Other studies within (ethno)musicology offer different perspectives. As Turino claims, ‘Music, dance, festivals and other public expressive practices are a primary way that people articulate the collective identities that are fundamental to forming and sustaining social groups, which are, in turn, basic to survival’ (2008, 2). We can add to this media and massmediated musical practices. Therefore, in this chapter, rather than describing or classifying a structure, I am interested in understanding the experiences associated with the idea of​​ community in the context of Radio ALFA, particularly in the case of fado, and how identities are mediated and experienced through transformation and difference (Hall 1990, 235). In this sense, ‘The performing arts are frequently fulcrums of identity, allowing people to intimately feel themselves part of the community through the realization of a shared cultural knowledge’ (Turino 2008, 2). It is thus central here to address the role of music in the construction of experiences associated with the notion of ‘Portuguese community’, knowing that music helps generate and sustain the collective, while at the same time, it contributes to establishing social boundaries both within the group and with those outside of it. Music can also provide avenues for penetrating these social boundaries and bringing new constituencies into the fold. (Shelemay 2011, 368)

It is in the way these communities are established that it becomes crucial to analyse the associated discourses that accompany and legitimize their mediated expressive practices.

Portuguese community and radio in France: An overview Portuguese emigration to France from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s marked the establishment of several migrant groups in different cities, with the majority concentrated in the Paris area in the Île-de-France region. According to the statistics, from the end of the Second World War until 1962 there was no significant increase in Portuguese emigration to France. After 1963, mainly because of the Colonial War (1961–74) and the socio-economic situation of Portugal after long-term dictatorship (1933–74), the numbers increased from

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11.3 per cent in 1963 to 22 per cent in 1975, making the Portuguese the largest migrant community in France.1 According to the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), there were a total of 567,000 Portuguese in France in 2005, excluding Lusophone descendants,2 distributed mainly in the Paris area with 244,000 migrants. The second largest Portuguese community, counting 54,000 migrants, is located in Rhône-Alpes. Most of the migrants come from the districts of Northern Portugal, including Viana do Castelo, Braga, Porto, Castelo Branco, Aveiro, and Leiria. If we include in the Portuguese community Portuguese emigrants as well as their children (mainly born in France) and grandchildren (born in France), the figure increases to approximately 1,200,000 people. Although the statistics show a decrease in the community numbers due to death, requests for French nationality and the occasional return of first-generation emigrants to Portugal, there are also new migratory flows (Branco 2013, 211–12). However, for audience target purposes, as Director of Radio ALFA Fernando Lopes mentioned, in addition to the Portuguese community, it is essential to also take into consideration all those belonging to the ‘great Lusophone family’, pointing out that in France there are between 800,000 and 1 million speakers of Portuguese, and about 50 per cent of them live in the Paris region (Lopes, interview 2014). From a historical perspective, the presence of the Portuguese community in the radio mediascape in France can be traced back to the 1960s and the programme Émission pour les travailleurs (Broadcast for Workers) spoken in Portuguese and broadcasted from 1966 to 1992 on ORTF and on Radio France Internationale (1975) on short wave. This was a one-hour programme with the following aim: ‘More than a mixture of useful tips for living and working in France, information about Portugal, echoes of the French news, and music of the homeland (15 September 1966, broadcast)’ (Cunha 2003). The letters addressed to the programme, sent from thousands of people in Portugal, as well as the various subjects approached on air led to the creation of a public space that reflected the construction and affirmation of the Portuguese community in France. As Cunha points out, presenting and reading the letters on the radio programme contributed to the creation of a shared space delimited by the notion of something common, of belonging. The programme went through The Portuguese community was the largest until 1982, when it was surpassed by the Algerian, and again the largest between 1999 and 2004. 2 The numbers presented here exclude those with dual citizenship (French–Portuguese) (270,000 in 1999) and French born from Portuguese origin (approx. 389,000) (Branco 2013, 210). 1



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several phases that reflect the different social and political situations of Portuguese emigrants in France, establishing a connection with Portugal and its memories: Phase 1 from 1966 to 1973, characterized by social and legal approaches to integration; Phase 2 from 1974 to 1975, with a more politicized line of discussion; and Phase 3 from 1976 to 1982, with the French government encouraging the return of emigrants to their country of origin. It was from 1983 to 1992, a period marked by the entry of Portugal to the European Union and the emergence of several independent or pirate radio stations, that the targeted audience started to include the so-called second-generation or Lusophone descendants (Cunha 2003). The rise of pirate or independent radio broadcasting allowed the Portuguese to launch radio projects that sought to mirror other social and cultural realities of emigration. In the context of French radio policy, until then conditioned by state monopoly, the legal framework of private radio gained more supporters in the Socialist Party. In his election campaign, François Mitterrand promised to review the situation if elected, which eventually happened. On 29 July 1982, the Fillioud Act, named after the then minister of communications, Georges Fillioud, liberalized FM frequencies and allowed radio stations to broadcast freely (Kuhn 1995, 77 et seq.). In the early 1980s three Portuguese pirate radio stations were operating in the Paris region: Radio Eglantine, Radio Clube Português (RCP), and Portugal no Mundo, closely linked to the Cultural Associations community. For example, at Radio Eglantine the musician Nicolau Lopes presented the project for the creation of the Paris Philharmonic Band in 1986. As Cunha argues, it was in this new scenario that ‘the concept of the Portuguese community, as a quasi-unique symbolic landmark, is gradually being diluted in favour of a representation that values public space as a privileged sphere of belonging’ (2003, 7). It was in this space of wider representation, helped by the associative movement and concern for the second generation (children of the emigrants), that Radio ALFA appeared, a hybrid radio station designed to reflect the experiences and everyday life of Portuguese emigrants in the Paris region (Laureano 2011).

Radio ALFA: Broadcasting for the Portuguese community The opportunity to legalize radio allowed a group of Portuguese emigrants in Paris to start a new project. Most of them, including Helena Machado, Artur Silva, Fernando Silva, Jaime Mendes, and Rogério do Carmo, had

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previously been involved in radio projects in the Portuguese community and wanted a different representation of their community in the public sphere. Initially they debated the name, with several options from Radio Community to Radio Portugal, and concluded that the initials of the Lusophone-French Association of Audiovisuals, ALFA (in Portuguese), would be the appropriate name for the initiative. They were granted a radio licence the same year, 1987, but the legal permit included only 12 hours of broadcasting per day. The other twelve hours were to be shared with Tabala FM, an ‘African’ radio station. The first broadcast took place on 5 October 1987 at 2.00 pm, celebrating the Portuguese holiday, Republic Implantation Day (Carmo 2014, 697–700). The association struggled with financial problems until the 1990s, having to be creative in the use of publicity to keep the broadcasting licence. However, considerable debts made it difficult for the association to continue, leading to the purchase of the radio by a Portuguese emigrant-owned financial group. In 1992 the frequency 98.6 FM belonged entirely to Radio ALFA, at that point transmitting 24 hours a day.3 In 1997 Radio ALFA started to broadcast via satellite radio, both nation- and worldwide, and in 1999 the radio station was also launched over the internet. Currently, Radio ALFA has several thematic web radios: ALFA Fado (dedicated to fado music), ALFA Pop (dedicated to Portuguese pop and rock music), ALFA Sat (dedicated to Lusophone music), and ALFA FM.4 The aim of the radio station was also to rethink the identity of the Portuguese community in the Paris region. As stated by one of the founders, the main purpose was ‘to remind the French people that we were the largest foreign community in France! A radio that, personally, could enter the homes of all Portuguese who listened to us, so as not to forget our mother tongue and to transmit it to their descendants’ (Carmo 2014, 697). But how should this be done? What was the public image of the Portuguese community the station wanted to promote? According to Fernando Silva, one of the radio founders, The radio stations that existed were very nostalgic, a kind of ‘Saudade’ corner. They did not take into account the evolution of the Portuguese community in

From 1992 onwards, Radio ALFA was no longer an association, but a commercial radio station. Radio ALFA FM covers about 70 kilometres around Paris with some variation (approx. 30 kilometres).

3 4



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France, nor the youth of Portuguese origin. We wanted the Portuguese to assert themselves as citizens here in France. … We wanted to show that there was another Portugal, another Portuguese music, and that the Portuguese living in France were not the clichés cultivated within the community by elder emigrants. (‘Radio ALFA em Paris’, 2012)

Rethinking the image and media representation of the Portuguese community was a main priority to Radio ALFA’s founders, who sought a different symbolic self-representation: ‘To distance themselves from the stereotypes associated with elder emigrants and establish a more contemporary relationship with the motherland; showing a modern and up to date Portuguese community’ (Silva, 6 November 2014). This was a radio station that did not relate to the motherland only through memory, but also through the current reality, showing to the community ‘another Portugal’. The broadcasting policy defined in the early days is still present today in the discourse of the current radio director. The main purpose was to define a hybrid radio that served the community in a context of emigration: We did not want a radio that was turned entirely to Portugal, but a radio that dealt with the reality of the Portuguese community in France, the reality in which they were integrated. It is of no interest to a Portuguese emigrant to know how the traffic is in Lisbon when he is stuck in traffic on the A86 in Paris! (Silva, 7 November 2014)

Even if Radio ALFA is presented discursively as a community radio, officially it is a commercial enterprise, giving it different legal obligations. According to the current director of Radio ALFA, Fernando Lopes, The role of Radio ALFA is to inform about Portugal and the Lusophone countries, to talk about daily practical questions in the country where they live, which is France, and also to give them world news. It is to really integrate the Portuguese living here … . The Portuguese news can be delivered by a Portuguese radio, the French news, by a French radio, but the news to the Portuguese community living in the Paris area can only be delivered by Radio ALFA. (Lopes, interview 2014)

It is also part of the strategy to broadcast elements of Portuguese culture, such as music, poetry, and other cultural expressive practices. But beyond its devotion to the mission of keeping alive the relation to the motherland, Radio ALFA explores other audiences under the large umbrella of ‘Lusophony’, which increases the number of listeners. Programmes about Brazilian music as well as Cape Verte, Angola, and Mozambique are equally important for gathering

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the Lusophone ‘family’. The concept of ‘Lusophony’ itself has been used with different meanings in the colonial and postcolonial periods (Cidra 2016; Sousa and Pinto 1999): Beyond the purely linguistic meaning, Lusophony has at least three interrelated interpretations. Firstly, Lusophony is a geo-linguistic space, that is, a number of highly dispersed regions, countries and societies whose official and/or maternal language is Portuguese. Secondly, Lusophony is a sentiment, a memory of a common past, a partition of common culture and history. Thirdly, it is a set of political and cultural institutions attempting to develop the Portuguese language and culture in Portuguese speaking spaces and fora. (Sousa and Pinto 1999, 2)

According to the radio station director, imagining this community is one of the biggest challenges, as it is difficult to understand what constitutes the community and to define the programming grid according to it. If the targets were initially the ‘housewife’ segment in the morning, the ‘worker’ in the afternoon, and the second generation at night, this distinction has now become more difficult to make. The broadcasting must change, because the younger generation wants different things than their parents and grandparents, and the region now also houses new emigrants with different tastes: ‘The new emigrants are very interested to hear about Portugal, they will, for sure, listen to Radio ALFA. The great challenge is keeping the Luso-descendants interested, particularly those who have married a nonPortuguese wife, for instance. When they’ll have children, why listen to Radio ALFA?’ (Lopes, interview 2014). The dynamics of production and mediation of this fluid and imagined community is what characterizes this ethnic minority media. This constant reflection reveals the construction of identities and an imagined community, the negotiations of memory and the adopted practices of the expressive culture. The media production must consider the commercial nature of the radio as well as the specific quota of legally established French music (about 40 per cent), which include the major hits from pop to rock, hip-hop, reggaeton, and also French popular music, leaving 60 per cent of the broadcasting schedule for Portuguese music, which also includes Lusophone music from Cape Verde, Brazil, Angola, and other places. Radio ALFA also promotes programmes with public interaction, such as Ponto de Encontro (Meeting Point), and live events such as fado nights (in Sala Vasco da Gama) or the annual Radio ALFA radio party that takes place in



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June during the Portuguese Popular Saints holiday, which gathers thousands of people. These are fundamental to extending the experience of belonging to the community using identity elements in the media-centred production.

(New) fado, identity, and experience Fado is one of the symbols of Portuguese expressive culture used in the construction of identity and a sense of community by Radio ALFA. To better understand the role of fado in identity processes we should recall some important moments of change in the recent history of the genre. One of the most important moments was the inscription of ‘Fado, urban popular song of Portugal’ on the representative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011. The presentation text submitted to UNESCO states: Fado is a performance genre incorporating music and poetry widely practised by various communities in Lisbon. It represents a Portuguese multicultural synthesis of Afro–Brazilian sung dances, local traditional genres of song and dance, musical traditions from rural areas of the country brought by successive waves of internal immigration, and the cosmopolitan urban song patterns of the early nineteenth century. (UNESCO n.d.)

This musical genre is ‘usually performed by a solo singer, male or female, traditionally accompanied by a wire-strung acoustic guitar and the Portuguese guitarra’, and its ‘dissemination through emigration and the world music circuit has reinforced its image as a symbol of Portuguese identity, leading to a process of cross cultural exchange involving other musical traditions’ (UNESCO n.d.). As stated in the UNESCO text, emigration and the world music circuit have reinforced the image of fado as a symbol of Portuguese identity, mainly through the so-called novo fado (new fado). It is interesting to note that the emergence of novo fado, mainly after the political stabilization of post-dictatorship Portugal and the transnational music industries, specifically world music, does not necessarily entail a rupture with ‘old fado’, but mainly renewing the presentation and performance of fado. As the Portuguese musicologist and fado expert Rui Vieira Nery affirms, Fado would always be a tempting reality, especially considering the very favourable antecedents that constitute the image of excellence left by Amália [Rodrigues] in the international imaginary and cultural memory. From the end

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Other relevant fado scholars, such as the musicologist Richard Elliot, point out factors that have contributed to the emergence of novo fado: the depolarization of ideological positions surrounding the music following the revolutionary period (i.e. mid-1970s and early 1980s); the potential conflict between national and European identity; the emergence of a world music industry; and the use of new technological opportunities in world music making (i.e. recording, performance, etc.) (Elliot 2010, 162–3). Other studies of novo fado focus on its transcultural dimension (Fonseca 2011, 59–98) or the use of fado in the processes of identity and authenticity construction in migrant communities (Holton 2016; CôrteReal 2010, 87). Since the 1990s novo fado singers and musicians from the younger generations have entered the world music circuit with regular concerts around the world, mixing repertoires, musical instruments, and duets with singers from other musical genres, such as hip-hop and bossa nova. Aware that music categorization has its challenges, present-day novo fado references are different from those of the 1980s and 1990s, mainly due to changes in the transnational music industries with the emergence of new world music circuits as well as the promotion of fado festivals in Portugal and abroad.5 A new generation of female and male fadistas (fado singers) have constructed a more up-to-date image of fado, combining traditional fado repertoire with new musical combinations and a new sense of scenic production. As Nery asserts, A golden rule of these experiences of penetration in the market of World Music is that all of them imply, on the part of their interpreters, more attention to all aspects of the scenic production of the show – from the lighting plot to the clothing – as well as to the internal composition, to the rhythm of the sequence of the programme and to the excellence of all the technical supports. (Nery 2004, 270)

Fado festivals with the main fadistas from new and old generations are very popular nowadays, especially the festival Caixa Alfama in Lisbon that started in 2013 and several festivals throughout Europe, such as Festival Fado Barcelona in Spain. Other locations include Angola (Caixa Benguela, Caixa Luanda), Brazil (Festival de Fado Brasil), Argentina (Festival de Fado Buenos Aires).

5



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As he also states, this new fado is supported by the professional heritage of Amália Rodrigues or Carlos do Carmo, fadistas that had to update their shows’ scenic production in order to enter the international music circuits. For migrant communities the idea of novo fado is very appealing, because it is able to communicate the image of a modern Portugal and is not music for the elderly, as shown, for instance, with the Portuguese community in New Jersey, United States. According to scholar of Portuguese literature and culture Kimberly Holton, in the US context the emergence of ‘second generation lusodescendants fadistas challenges the notion … that fado is “old people’s music”, and that fado performed for immigrant audiences recalls time periods, places and events that young people can’t relate to’ (2016, 219). The main fado radio show, which became a reference for emigrants in France, was Alfama by Amílcar Sanches, who produced it for twenty-two years until 2011. According to Sanches, ‘fado is part of the radio’s mission: ALFA should not live without this part of fado. To deprive ourselves of this genre would surely make us lose many listeners’, and he continues to argue that younger generations of Lusophone descendants have contact with fado through these broadcasts (LusoJornal, 6 April 2011). To the radio director fado also plays a fundamental role: ‘Fado in France is considered as a part of Portuguese identity: Fado is Portugal, Portugal is fado … that’s it!’ (Lopes, interview 2014). According to the fado programmer, ‘fado in France is part of the Portuguese identity. Amália Rodrigues was very well known here and had great names composing music for her, like Alain Oulman or Charles Aznavour’ (Silva, interview 2014). Amílcar Sanches suggested to Armando Lopes (radio station owner) that he invested in a space for live fado concerts in a warehouse (in the radio building), naming it ‘Sala Vasco da Gama’. The live experience, according to Sanches, was critical to the community and the radio. Over the years, Amílcar Sanches introduced the community to fado singers just starting their careers: Today I see that Mariza is an international star, but I remember when I went to Lisbon and nobody knew her. She sang here early in her career, as happened to Ana Moura, Joana Amendoeira, Cristina Branco … Mísia sang for the first time in Paris in a Radio ALFA concert, without musicians, with recorded music. (LusoJornal, 6 April 2011)

When I interviewed Fernando Silva, the fado programmer, he told me that previously there was no high-level hall with regular fado concerts in Paris, and

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Sala Vasco da Gama aimed to solve this problem. On a regular basis, the most notable fado singers from Portugal sang there. This is of major importance because, in the past, there were less people singing fado (in Paris). Now you have some more, especially in pseudo-Portuguese restaurants, but the quality … it’s better not to talk about it. One of the main fado restaurant was in Versailles, called Saudade, and they used to bring some fadistas from Portugal … not always top fadistas, but it was ok. (Silva, interview 2014)

However, Radio ALFA has promoted several fado nights with fadistas living in France. Recently, the presenters of the programme Só Fado (Only Fado) organized the 6ème Nuit de Fado de Paris held on 3 March 2017, only with fadistas living in France. As the presenter Odete Fernandes stated, ‘This proves that we have great artists here, and with them we can have great fado moments with a good artistic quality.’ Experiencing live fado is one of the main objectives of the programme: ‘Usually we take fado to the audience, in their homes, through radio. This time they came to us, to listen to fado here’ (LusoJornal, 8 March 2017). This is one of the major lines of the programming policy: live experiences and the promotion of fado, making Radio ALFA central in the way fado is promoted and listened to: Today fado is considered to be fashionable and I believe that in a few years we will have more fado in Paris than in Lisbon. This is also a result of Radio ALFA’s struggle and of many who take fado to every little place in Paris, like restaurants, for instance. And we have this programme, Só Fado that is directed by three great fado names: Fernando Silva, Odete Fernandes and Manuel Miranda, that make a tireless effort to take fado as far as possible. (LusoJornal, 8 March 2017)

At the moment, the station broadcasts Só Fado on Fridays from 9.00 pm to 11.00 pm with the presenters Odete Fernandes, Manuel Miranda, and Fernando Silva. When questioned about the importance of the programme, Fernando Silva said that it is very popular and important in maintaining the audience, because besides music it also offers interviews with fado singers from both France and Portugal. Of course, this does not prevent fado from being included in other programmes, like Ponto de Encontro. With its concert hall and programming policy Radio ALFA’s structure facilitated a dynamic with Portugal and its most important fado singers, aiming for ‘quality’ and high standards: ‘That’s why we decided to launch a fado web



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radio, ALFA Fado, even before Rádio Amália in Portugal.’6 According to Fernando Silva, ‘The web radio ALFA Fado is the station with more audience, except when Alfa FM broadcasts Portuguese football matches. It is important to say that 50% of ALFA Fado listeners live in France, the other 50 % are from Portugal, Canada, Japan, USA, etc.’ (interview 2014). The radio’s use of fado shows how it seeks to frame a new image of Portugal, which distances itself from the stereotypes associated with folklore and ‘pimba’ music.7 According to the technical director responsible for fado programming, the radio’s two audiences have to be well thought out: ‘On the one hand, you have the older generation aged 70–80 that prefers the old fado (Alfredo Marceneiro, Amália Rodrigues, Maria Teresa de Noronha, among others), while, on the other hand, there is an identification with a more modern fado and new fadistas among the younger generation’ (Silva, interview 2014). Radio ALFA FM and ALFA Fado both broadcast fado singers like Gisela João, Carminho, and Ricardo Ribeiro and promote singers from the migrant community, including Jenyfer Raínho, Diane Santos, and Shina, born in France. When I interviewed some of the second-generation fadistas, they told me that the restaurant circuit was rather important to the new fadistas. Jenyfer Raínho often went with her family to restaurants that had live fado concerts, and she started singing in one of these restaurants, O Beirão, in Saint-Ouen, Paris. In her blog she presents herself as La voix du Portugal en France (‘The voice of Portugal in France’). The new generation of fadistas is also an interesting phenomenon in other Portuguese diasporic contexts, such as Germany, Canada, and the United States (Côrte-Real 2010; Holton 2016).

Conclusion The way migrant communities construct and produce their media space is marked by various contingencies and reveals dynamic processes of identity Rádio Amália (92.0 FM) was founded in 2009 by Luís Montez and was the first radio station in Portugal exclusively dedicated to fado. 7 According to the musicologist Richard Elliot, ‘Pimba is the name given to a form of light music that is often associated with rural areas of Portugal but which in fact has an audience throughout the country. The music is generally uptempo, featuring electronic beats and keyboards mixed with ‘rural’ textures such as the accordion or brass instruments. … Pimba is the dominant form of music in many village festivals and also has a vibrant presence on the streets of Lisbon, often becoming the soundtrack to the festas populares during the summer’. It also includes ‘wordplay and innuendo, often utilizing “earthy” imagery associated with farm animals, countryside festivities, food and drink’ (2010, 135). 6

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and representation, as discussed in the section on the first official radio broadcasts from the Portuguese community in France. The mediascape in the French context constantly changes, as does the Portuguese community, marked by the associative movement. Also, a new generation and new self-image of the community, among other factors, have contributed to the emergence of new projects and ideas for a community radio. As I have discussed, negotiations about the image and representation of this community were important in defining the initial guidelines and programming policy of Radio ALFA, meant to be not a Portuguese radio in Paris, but a radio for the Portuguese migrant community reflecting their reality. As evident from the founders’ discourse, this project intended to publicly present the largest migrant community in Paris and its strengths, while renewing the image created by the previous generations. This is still a major concern today, where the very notion of community tends to be analysed with fluidity and narrow boundaries, allowing the programmes to adapt to different audiences and segments, from first-generation emigrants to Lusophone descendants, from a Lusophone to a French audience. The media representations of expressive practices such as fado, in this context, aim to leverage an image of this renewed community and traditions that are distinct from old memories and a country ‘stopped in time’ mainly associated with first-generation emigrants. Fado, which is considered a symbol of Portuguese identity and, to some extent, tradition, is equally used to contest the idea of a​​ n ‘old Portugal’ in contrast to a ‘modern Portugal’, especially through the mediation and promotion of novo fado. Radio programmes about fado or live performances in the studio or in Sala Vasco da Gama promote the new fadistas who often sing in the world music circuit and enjoy considerable international visibility. The case of fado is, in this context, paradigmatic of the mediation by ethnic minority radio of identity symbols that contribute to the construction of a new image of Portugal and the Portuguese community in France, associated with novo fado and its cosmopolitanism. Fado allows us to put into perspective the various layers of the community, including first-generation emigrants, their descendants, new emigrants, and the French themselves, and how Radio ALFA responds to this complex reality from the perspective of a commercial radio station. The multiple expressions help to maintain this imagined community and to delimit new frontiers inside and outside the group (Shelemay 2011), attending to the community, while at the same time capturing the interest of the French population in this musical genre.



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References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Alonso, Androni, and Pedro Oiarzabal. 2010. Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Branco, Jorge Portugal. 2013. ‘Implantação geográfica dos portugueses em França: evolução observada entre 1990 e 2009 [The Geographical Location of the Portuguese in France: Evolution Between 1990 and 2009]’. Sociologia, Revista da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto XXVI: 209–26. Carmo, Rogério. 2014. Puzzle. Lisbon: Chiado Editora. Cidra, Rui. 2016. ‘Lusofonia, genealogia e crítica: um olhar a partir das histórias cosmopolitas das músicas das diásporas Africanas [Lusophony, Genealogy and Criticism: A Look Across the Cosmopolitan Stories of African Diaspora Music]’. Paper delivered at the Institute of Ethnomusicology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa(INET-MD/CESEM (UNL/FCSH)), 3 March 2016. Cohen, Anthony P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Chichester: Ellis Horwood. Côrte-Real, Maria S. J. 2010. ‘Revendo cidadania: migração e Fado no jogo de identidades nos Estados Unidos [Reviewing Citizenship: Migration and Fado in the Identity Game in the U.S]’. Revista Migrações 7: 73–98. Cottle, Simon. 2000. Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing Cultural Boundaries. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Cunha, Manuel. 2003. ‘Quand le public prend la parole: l’émission des Portugais (1966–1992) [When the Public Speaks: Portuguese Broadcasting (1966–1992)]’. Metamorphoses. Accessed 5 March 2018, http://www.lcp.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/dacu-03a.pdf. Dayan, Daniel. 1999. ‘Media and Diasporas’. In Television and Common Knowledge, edited by Jostein Gripsrud, 18–33. London and New York: Routledge. Elliot, Richard. 2010. Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City. Surrey: Ashgate. Ferreira, Sónia. 2013. ‘Magazine Contacto: The Construction and (Re)production of the Portuguese Diaspora in the Mediascape’. In Diasporic Choices, edited by Renata Seredynska Abou-Eid, 203–9. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Fonseca, Ricardo. 2011. O Novo Fado – Uma Leitura Transcultural [The New Fado – A Transcultural Reading]. Master’s thesis. University of Minho. Hall, Stuart. 1990. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–37. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Holton, Kimberly. 2016. ‘Fado in Diaspora: Online Internships and Self Display among YouTube Generation Performers in the U.S’. Luso–Brazilian Review 53: 210–32.

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Karim, Karim H. 2003. The Media of Diaspora. London and New York: Routledge. Kosnick, Kira. 2012. ‘“Foreign Voices”: Multicultural Broadcasting and Immigrant Representation at Germany’s Radio MultiKulti’. In Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, edited by Lucas Bessire and Daniel Fisher, 179–96. New York and London: New York University Press. Kosnick, Kira. 2007. Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kuhn, Raymond. 1995. The Media in France. London: Routledge. Laureano, Carla. 2011. A Rádio Alfa e comunidade portuguesa em França: Estudo de caso sobre a relação entre media e identidade [Radio Alpha and the Portuguese Community in France: A Case Study on the Relation Between Media and Identity]. Covilhã: University of Beira Interior. Lopes, Fernando. Personal Interview with Author, 6 November 2014. Melo, Daniel, and Eduardo Caetano Silva. 2009. Construção da Nação e Associativismo na Emigração Portuguesa [Construction of the Nation and Associativism in Portuguese Emigration]. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Nery, Rui Vieira. 2004. Para uma história do Fado [A History of Portuguese Fado]. Lisbon: Público. Nettl, Bruno. 2005. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Peterson, Mark Allen. 2003. Anthropology & Mass Communication: Myth Making in the New Millennium. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ‘Radio alfa em Paris está no ar há 25 anos’. 2012. Accessed 6 August 2018. http:// bomdia.eu/radio-alfa-em-paris-esta-no-ar-ha-25-anos/. Riggins, Stephen. 1992. Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective. London: Sage. Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 2011. ‘Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music’. Journal of the American Musicological Society 64: 349–90. Silva, Fernando. Personal interviews with author, 6 November 2014; 7 November 2014; 13 June 2015. Sousa, Helena, and Manuel Pinto. 1999. ‘Lusophony: Communication in the Portuguese Speaking World’. International Communication Newsletter 27 (4): 2–6. Toynbee, Jason, and Byron Dueck. 2011. Migrating Music. London: Routledge. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. UNESCO. N.d. Decision of the Intergovernmental Committee: 6.COM 13.39. Accessed 5 April 2016, https://ich.unesco.org/en/decisions/6.COM/13.39.

2

On Sonic Assemblage: Indigenous Radio and the Management of Heteroglossia Daniel Fisher

This chapter approaches radio broadcasting as a form of sonic assemblage. It does so in order to understand the distinctiveness of two Indigenous-run radio stations broadcasting in the same Northern Australian city, each with different historical origins and distinct instrumental aims. I am interested here in the ways that these stations’ radio signals might be considered as differently stylized and recognizable figures, and explore how radio sounds assume the sonic guise of a social person as DJs and producers assemble and animate different Indigenous political projects with music, recorded voices, and other kinds of sonic artefact. The chapter builds on linguistic anthropological analytic rubrics of animation and addressivity to ask not how a station’s address ‘gives voice’ to a sociologically observable collective subject, but rather to explore how the animation of music, recorded speech, and other sonic artefacts breathe life into a form of valued social person, creating an avatar of that person that itself can do pragmatic, social work (Silvio 2010; cf. Manning and Gershon 2013; Nozawa 2013). In my analysis I draw on two related modes of linguistic anthropological analysis, one building on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to understand ethnographically the ethical and political stances entailed by the expressive deployment of ‘voice systems’ (see Hill 1995; Keane 2016), and the other interested in the animation of media artefacts and the collective constitution of different forms of social person. The latter scholarship revisits Erving Goffman’s (1981) interests in ‘decomposing’ instances of communication, an effort that led him to identify a number of distinct participant roles beyond the common-sense dyad of ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’ to include, for instance, the disaggregated potential contributions of ‘authors’ and ‘animators’ (see also Irvine 1996). This research has been particularly influential in anthropological analyses of anime (Nozawa

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2013), branding (Manning and Gershon 2013) and in efforts to reconsider and decentre the primacy of performance as an analytic in contemporary cultural theory (Silvio 2010). This also has served as a bridge between theoretical work that privileges the performative character of social interaction, and work that seeks to grasp the social life of material forms (Gell 1998; cf. Chen 2012). In part I pursue a methodological argument, one aimed at anthropologists and others invested in the study of media and expressive culture. That argument revolves around the salience of form-sensitive research, and the need to ask after the work that media artefacts do as kinds of social agent.1 Some readers will already see the imprint of Alfred Gell’s (1998) widely read intervention in the anthropology of art, the ways he seeks to place art works and other forms of material culture into forms of social relation. For Gell, rather than relying either on an aesthetic analysis of art works, or on a sociological account of the relations around art objects, he suggests that we consider such objects as kinds of persons, as affecting forms both animating and animated by social relations. Here I ask us to consider songs and the sounds of radio broadcasts as such persons, to include them as interlocutors in ethnographic research, both as a means to gain insight into the ways they matter as form, to assess what kinds of agency and personhood different listeners take from their sounds, and also to better understand the ways they are entangled in a series of social relations – relations that may include an array of extra-human things: images, sounds, and songs, but also radios and phones and computers, roads and cars and airplanes. I ask then that we take into account the material characteristics of forms to see how they may do more than simply enable a social relation between x number of humans, but also as things that might have ‘faces’, or better for the materials I introduce here, forms of voice, and that might be heard as consequential for human lives. This notion of voice as a kind of material agent draws on a broader scholarly literature addressed to the ways that tropes of voice, as ‘agency’ or ‘political power’, can mask the ways that expressivity, authorship, and ownership – qualities often assumed united in liberal conceptions of the speaking subject – are often disaggregated and distributed across a social body; authorized and animated by different institutions; and given shape by institutional practices of mediation and political action (Fisher 2016; Keane 1997; Kunreuther 2014; cf. Goffman 1974, 1981; Irvine 1996). To hear a radio signal as a voice, this is to say, is not to

This is to consider the formal, aesthetic, or material characteristics of media artefacts as ingredient to the character of their circulation (see also Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003).

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Figure 2.1  Map of Australia including the seven states.

presume its status as simple or transparent expression of a prior social agent, but rather to ask how it comes to be heard as such. This broader scholarship on the social constitution of voice and vocal power offers a path to considering radio as a kind of proposition about social agency, a sonic assemblage whose power and form derive from specific material, institutional and sounded histories. My discussion draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the ‘top end’ of Australia’s Northern Territory, conducted with Aboriginal radio producers and listeners without interruption between 2002 and 2004 and continued over the course of further annual research trips from 2012 to 2017. In that work I attended to the social organization and political aims of Indigenous radio and music producers, as well as formal and sonic features of Indigenous radio broadcasting and music production (Fisher 2016). In what follows, I briefly sketch the historical emergence of Aboriginal radio broadcasting in its relation to Indigenous music production, and then contrast two Indigenous Australian

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stations that share broadcast space in a Northern Australian city. I argue that the differences in the assemblage of music, speech, and sound allow us to hear the unfinished character of the Aboriginal voice as a contested space, not simply an intercultural domain but rather a domain in which figures of intra-Indigenous diversity and the intercultural itself do political and pragmatic work.

Indigenous radio and anti-colonial politics Australia has a rich, if somewhat short, history of Indigenous radio production. Beginning in the late 1970s Indigenous activists began creating programmes on local community radio stations and occasionally found slots for this programming on regional outlets of Australia’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This production was made possible by an efflorescence of Australian community radio production that took off in the mid-1970s, following the establishment of a community radio sector in 1975. A wide coalition of progressive Australian activism took to the airwaves in these years, with many of its key protagonists inspired by Italian ‘free radio’ activism of the period and the emerging critiques of cultural imperialism (see, for instance, Tomlinson 1992). Anti-nuclear activism, gay and lesbian rights movements, and an array of other politically active broadcasters joined a burgeoning world of Black Power and land rights activism in turning to radio media, and increasingly film and video, as instruments of cultural activism. By the early 1980s Aboriginal activists and advocates had established dedicated radio stations in Sydney (Radio Redfern), Townsville (4K1G), and Alice Springs (CAAMA radio). The programmers and cultural activists behind these stations and broadcasting initiatives were also responsible in part for the expanding world of Aboriginal popular music, with Country and Western musics, regionally distinct Indigenous genres of rock and reggae, and the remediation of traditional genres of song and ceremonial music. In part the success of these efforts was made possible by then ascendant governmental policies that sought to enable Indigenous self-determination, to create conditions for the more equitable representation on terms that could retain the diversity of Indigenous cultural practices in Australia, giving leeway to local principles through legislation that provided corporate recognition for Aboriginal representative bodies. The Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (ACA) (1976) became the primary legal instrument by which Aboriginal radio stations and media



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organizations took form and became corporate bodies, eligible to receive Commonwealth funds dedicated to Aboriginal media making. This organizational transformation was part of a broader piece in a sea of change in how the Australian state sought to cultivate and elicit an ‘Indigenous voice’, both literally, as musical sound and spoken language, and figuratively, as political representation and social power. The ACA thus joined a number of institutions and policy initiatives dedicated to this project. These included the Centre for the Aboriginal Study of Music, a music education programme at the University of Adelaide, which supported popular and traditional music production and cultivated some of the first Aboriginal rock bands; a grant scheme by the then-new Aboriginal Arts Board, which led to support for recording projects targeting Aboriginal country and rock musicians; and the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS), a nationwide programme to establish and fund remote community video production and radio broadcasting. Aboriginal media thus took shape at the crux of shared interest between Indigenous cultural activists seeking to ‘give voice’ to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests, Indigenous musicians and media makers seeking to find new ways to tell their stories and to revalue the place of Indigenous people in a broader Australian polity, and a Commonwealth effort to create Indigenous corporate bodies able to do the work of representing Aboriginal Australia in its diversity and its cultural singularity (see Fisher 2016; Ginsburg 1994; and cf. Myers 2002 for a detailed account of how this took shape in the world of Aboriginal visual art). Indigenous radio and Indigenous popular music have thus grown in tandem with one another over the past four decades, in a generative co-dependence between radio, music recording and performance that has analogues around the globe.2 This broadcast culture is nonetheless emerged in equal measure through the efforts of Indigenous cultural activists. In Townsville, Uncle Bill Thaiday’s work to establish forms of black representation on the airwaves was crucial to the founding of 4K1G in 1972, one of the very earliest Indigenous broadcasters.3 In Sydney, Radio Redfern grew from the community radio programmes begun by Auntie Maureen Watson and her son, Uncle Tiga Bayles in 1981. Each worked first on the

Think, for instance, of the famous synergetic relationship between Elvis Presley and radio DJ ‘Daddy-O’ Dewey Phillips, or the interdependence of rural radio broadcasting and country performers across the 1940s and 1950s (Guralnick 1995). 3 The use of the terms ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’ is widespread across Aboriginal Australia as a means of marking respect and age gradation. 2

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ABC and as guest hosts on college radio station 2SER and local community radio station Skid Row Radio. By 1984 Radio Redfern operated out of an inner city row house, and was understood as a resolutely black air space, a key instrument in linking up different Aboriginal people together in political struggle. They achieved notoriety and a durable historical reputation for their centrality in the 1988 protests organized around the bicentennial celebrations on Sydney Harbour, celebrations that included a re-enactment of the arrival of the first fleet. Radio Redfern was a key medium in organizing the large protests that greeted this unabashed celebration of colonial settlement. In Alice Springs, activists brought together a similar interest in Aboriginal rights with an interest in radio and music recording as a means to support cultural revitalization. There radio production met concerns over cultural transformation and turned to the recording of Indigenous rock musics, sung in local languages, and to news and request programmes directed to Alice Springs’ Aboriginal residents – all concerned to address a sense of the impending loss of language and culture. Radio projects in both the urban South-East and in central Australia pivoted on the tropic resonance between voice as index of interiority, voice as representational power, and voice as culture. The different sounds of these Indigenous broadcasters relate directly to their institutional histories and the different forms of political and cultural activism they have pursued. In what follows I describe the work of two radio and music projects, one focused on the heteroglossic, cosmopolitan space of Darwin, the other on the culturally distinctive and politically active homelands of the Yolngu people in North-East Arnhem Land, and the diasporic exile of some Yolngu to Darwin’s urban blocks. Each station builds on the trope of giving voice in order to communicate and valorize the work it performs, but each crafts its particular ‘voice’ in ways that are striking in their incommensurability, in the different ways they sound, and the different modes of address they employ.

Darwin’s radio landscape Unlike many other places in Australia, Darwin provides a home to two Indigenous radio stations broadcasting on the FM band. This makes readily apparent something that is only infrequently recognized in the political spaces of Indigenous media advocacy, namely that the broadcasted ‘voice’ of Indigenous Australia is in fact multiple, that these stations and the related Indigenous musics of Northern Australia are themselves diverse and may emerge in forms



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of conversation, even contest, with other Indigenous and/or community, commercial and public broadcasters. Not only do such broadcasters pursue different representational projects, there are also distinctive ‘voices’ and different forms of person (in the sense outlined above) entailed as well. The older of Darwin’s two Indigenous stations, Radio Larrakia (94.5), is Darwin’s Indigenous community radio station. It is one of the multiple operations managed by the Larrakia, including as well the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation, a corporate body established under the ACA in 1997 in order to provide representation to the families of the Indigenous groups who are the socially recognized traditional owners of the country on which the city is located. While the Larrakia have had only partial success in achieving recognition under Land Rights legislation and the Native Title Act, they have in those efforts had resounding success in achieving social recognition, a feat accomplished in part by overtly seeking to represent and ‘look after’ the many different Aboriginal peoples who travel through the city and have come to call its neighbourhoods and suburbs home. The Larrakia Nation’s broadcaster, Radio Larrakia, broadcasts primarily in English and together with the Nation itself emerged in the context of a robust land rights and cultural activist movement in Darwin. In the early 2000s, those Larrakia families who were most directly engaged in its service were at the centre of Aboriginal advocacy and cultural activism, drew on a widely shared, pan-Aboriginal appeal for Indigenous rights, asserting their obligation to ‘look after’ and speak for the many other Aboriginal peoples that travel to and through Darwin, and that have for decades called its neighbourhoods and bush spaces home (cf. Fisher 2012). This has had consequences for the ways this station sounds and the modes of musical address it assembles. The second broadcaster is of more recent vintage. The Arnhem Land Resource and Development Service (ARDS) offers a Uniting Church–supported radio service that broadcasts news, information and Indigenous music in Yolngu Matha, the primary language group of North-East Arnhem Land. This ARDS radio service began its service with Yolngu language news and information broadcasted to the distinctive communities of North-East Arnhem Land. Beginning in 2016, however, the organization began broadcasting in Darwin as well on 89.9 FM, seeking to reach both the large Yolngu population residing in town and the other Aboriginal groups living across the city. It is also an employer for Yolngu speakers, many of whom live in Darwin and whom are hired to perform the exacting work of translating Australian bureaucratic and official policy pronouncement into Yolngu Matha. This broadcaster contrasts markedly with Radio Larrakia in that, while committed to Aboriginal advocacy,

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Figure 2.2  Map of Australia’s ‘top end’, the northern part of the Northern Territory.

its founders asserted that the primary aim of its broadcasting endeavour was to ‘build capacity’ among Yolngu people through making information, specifically that related to health and to developments in Australian politics, available in a Yolngu medium. It was not then founded primarily as a representational project, and neither has it sought to advocate on a pan-Indigenous platform. Rather, it speaks to Yolngu in what we might understand to be metapragmatic terms, mobilizing and informing to enable better decisions and actions by Yolngu people. This too has consequences for the sounds and modes of musical address that Yolngu Radio’s signal carries.

Radio Larrakia Driving through town in Darwin, scanning the FM band on one’s car stereo, and catching Radio Larrakia’s signal, it will be quickly audible that Radio Larrakia



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is not simply another point on the dial, an exchangeable token of audience share as one might apprehend many commercial and even public Australian broadcasters. What marks its difference? What makes its character distinct? In the first instance, the station has a remarkably dynamic playlist. It might be apparent in the great variation over the course of a week’s programming, or in the range of broadcasters’ voices, the genres of music presented, or perhaps in the mix of national Indigenous news and local community reporting and announcements that the station features. It might even be apparent in the imperfections. Attentive listeners might notice that the digital music library the station relies on for its broadcasts has a glitch, a recognizable and frequently recurring hiccup that afflicts each audio file as it is broadcasted. This is most apparent in frustrating listener’s expectations, a skipped record in another era’s parlance. It can also, though, add a beat, making a 4/4 measure over into 5/4 – a result that can be unexpectedly pleasant. Either way, this audible tic serves as a sonic signature, a reminder of where one has landed on the audio spectrum. The station is largely run by volunteers, with a smaller group of DJs and radio trainees earning a small wage, and supplied by a government-funded training programme for Aboriginal young people. The most regular of Radio Larrakia’s programmers speak in prosodically distinct voices. These voices are not produced to boom across the speakers with a deep resonance, nor do they partake of the microphone’s proximity effect as do so many commercial radio voices. Instead, Radio Larrakia’s announcers and DJs often speak softly and earnestly. ‘Uncle Luke’, for instance, presents on weekday mornings, his programming dictated by his interests as well as by frequent requests from across Darwin. His audience address touches on local places, but in distinct fashion. Visitors are recognized and old Darwin families sent greetings, while the Juninga aged care home on Dick Ward Drive, in Darwin’s northern suburb of Coconut Grove, receives dedications more than most others. This latter facility caters largely to Indigenous Australians, many of whom, Luke believed, spent much of their day with the radio tuned into the signal. It’s important to note here that musical genre is not the distinguishing criteria by which the station appeals to an audience. It is instead the presumption of a heterogeneous Indigenous audience, linked by cross-cutting kinship relations and a shared identity as Black Australians. Immediately adjacent to Uncle Luke’s amiable address, you may get the shouted pub rock refrains of the Warumpi band, followed perhaps by the smooth R&B of one of Darwin’s better known and younger performers, Jessica Mauboy. Genre, announcer, and addressee cohere

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in Luke’s appeal to an Indigenous community ordered by extended families, and within an institutional commitment to attaining Aboriginal cultural recognition and political representation. In 2003 and 2004, while conducting ethnographic research on Indigenous media making, I was taught by one of Radio Larrakia’s younger DJs how to make radio. The music playlist varied greatly. Each weekday the afternoons were filled with the programming of this well-known Aboriginal teenager. A young member of a prominent Larrakia family, he had taken to radio programming with some alacrity and had outstripped the training provided in house to the extent that he began to take on duties training new DJs (myself included) and creating community announcements and pre-recorded musical mixes in the small sound studio the station maintained. His programmes were the definition of eclectic. While the backbone of his music programming consisted in Aboriginal rock musics from across Northern Australia, he interspersed these recordings with American hard rock and progressive metal, as well as a range of musics from the global popular music canon. Deftones, Blondie, and the Smiths took pride of a place in his playlists. He was also voracious and soon added Bad Brains and the Kinks, as well as a range of Christian Metal bands from the United States and Australia whose music he appreciated more, he said, than their religious leanings. The lessons he provided spanned production skills, the digital creation of announcements, the use of the station’s then-new digital system for programming upcoming music, and the codes and conventions for taking phone calls and crafting requests between callers and listeners – requests that followed a conventionalized form and that were understood as one of the station’s key raison d’etre (cf. Hinkson 2004). We also spent time using digital software to produce musical beds for community announcements, and interviewing different Aboriginal people who were living in the city’s different bush spaces. These interviews sought to give voice to the many different groups of Aboriginal people who called the city home, extending an imperative felt by many Larrakia to look after Aboriginal visitors to the city by also giving those different peoples a voice on the radio station. This included the interviews and informal, group conversations curated for broadcast, as well as music recording and reporting from different ceremonial events held around the city. In the period of my first fieldwork the station was managed by a nonIndigenous resident of Darwin, a young German man who had an Australian partner and child. The station was also closely associated with one politically active Larrakia family whose members were also well-known participants in



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Darwin’s arts and music scenes. Then located on the grounds of Darwin’s Greek Orthodox school campus, using donated space, the station also made room for some voices and musics from the broader community. This meant a programme dedicated to Torres Strait Island music, another to Greek music and news, yet another to youth programming for the greater Darwin area. But by and large, the programming was directed to Darwin’s broader and diverse Indigenous community, with an emphasis on Larrakia concerns. Amid this diversity of musical sound and the constant voice of this young DJ, the sonic project of securing the station’s identity might be said to have rested equally in the voice of another man, at the time perhaps the most recognizable Aboriginal rock musician in Australia, George Burarrwanga. His voice rang out each day in a single musical track titled ‘Yaka Bayngu!’ – a recording of a live performance from 1999, captured at an Indigenous music and sports festival in the community of Barunga, some four hours to the south of Darwin. While I have analysed ‘Yaka Bayngu’ in detail elsewhere (see Fisher 2016), here I wish to foreground one fundamental aspect of its addressivity, a term I draw from Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) to consider the ways that its anticipated audience inheres in its musical address. The title, ‘Yaka Bayngu’, is a Yolngu Matha phrase that means, broadly, ‘no’. Made from a negation followed by a noun, a ‘no’ (yaka) and then a ‘nothing’ (bayngu), the phrase does double duty in the song. On the one hand, people will say that yaka bayngu is how one puts off requests or questions. A local emphatic negation, not simply a kind of ‘no’ but rather more akin to ‘fuck off ’. Like this latter in Australian (and American) English, the phrase has an iconic status in the intraIndigenous worlds of Northern Australia, such that it can be easily spoken with irony. It can be taken, that is, as a joke. But this iconic status also allows the track to name the identities of its speakers, the Yolngu people, as that ‘Yaka Bayngu mob’. That is, it describes those people who say ‘no’ in this particular language. Further, in the song that finds so much airplay on Radio Larrakia, the term follows requests from others for food, cigarettes, and money. And after the song’s protagonist says Yaka Bayngu, he nonetheless offers the items in question, sharing cigarettes, food, and money and participating in forms of widely recognized social exchange. That this track came to so clearly identify the Larrakia channel in 2003 and 2004 rests largely on the station’s identity at the time as the one place where Aboriginal music might be heard in Darwin, and where Yolngu and other Aboriginal residents of Darwin might hear themselves recognized. It also resonates with the broader aim of the Larrakia Nation to ‘look after’ Aboriginal visitors.

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Radio Larrakia’s sonic signature finds its exemplification in the voice of this celebrity performer, speaking and singing in the language of a visiting group, the Yolngu people of North-East Arnhem Land. There have been many changes over the past two decades. The station acquired territory government funding to build a new, more automated studio in Darwin’s city centre, and has come to rely less on volunteer DJs and the ad hoc programming they often produced. New managers have sought to gain more control over the sound of the station, seeking to give it a more professional reputation and a recognizable ‘branded’ identity. But the fundamental characteristics outlined above are still audible in Radio Larrakia’s signal. ‘Yaka Bayngu’, with its embrace of an Indigenous cosmopolitanism and heteroglossic mode of address, remains a signal feature of Radio Larrakia’s programming.

Yolngu Radio/ARDS The sonic biography of this Larrakia community station can be made more clear by contrasting it with that of Darwin’s second Indigenous radio broadcaster, the Arnhem Resource Development Service (ARDS) radio station, also called ‘Yolngu Radio’. Begun in 2004, the ARDS broadcast has for some time been available on the FM dial both in the settlements and homelands of far NorthEast Arnhem Land. In 2016, however, the station expanded its broadcast reach to include the urban spaces of Darwin, and now sends out a transmission in the city that is readily available, emerging at the left hand of the dial, 88.9 on a digital scanner, and also through a functional online streaming site (https://ards .com.au/yolngu-radio/). Many Yolngu people live in Darwin, some in suburban homes, some in public housing, while still others can be found ‘sleeping rough’ in the bush spaces and parks of the city. Some of these people are in Darwin by choice, there to take in its urban commercial offerings and opportunities for intense sociality. Others, however, are brought to the city for medical care unavailable in their home communities, or for legal proceedings, boarding school, or for the ‘sorry business’ of funerals and mortuary ceremony. Yolngu Radio thus has a large, urban-based Yolngu audience. The station broadcasts in a mix of Yolngu languages and English, but endeavours to privilege Yolngu language in its programming. That information, it was held, was important both for amplifying Yolngu capacities for informed political decision making and action vis-à-vis a broader Australian polity, but needed also to make health care, legal, and local administrative advice



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more readily available to Yolngu people. For one of its founders and perhaps its most vocal advocate, Richard Trudgen, the dearth of understanding of everyday professional, legal, and health information was as important in the disempowerment and disadvantage afflicting Yolngu people as broader features of political marginalization and racialized disenfranchisement (see also Trudgen 2000). ARDS is thus the product of a distinct history of missionization and political advocacy, and might be understood historically as the institutional heir to mission-assisted Yolngu efforts to achieve some recognition of their political and cultural rights as an Australian first nations people. Although Radio Larrakia and ARDS are each nominally Indigenous radio broadcasters, their institutional makeup, their core missions, and their understandings of the audience they seek to reach fundamentally differ, and this difference echoes in the ways their respective broadcast signals sound as well. ARDS, can, on first listen, sound something like Radio Larrakia. The generic musical preferences of the two stations overlap to some extent, as both stations provide ample room in their programming for contemporary Indigenous musics, and each gives some pride of place to the rock and gospel tinged sounds of Arnhem Land Aboriginal bands. But this similarity dissipates quickly. In the first place, the ratio of music to ‘development’ content differs on each station. ARDS privileges messages targeted to Aboriginal people that seek to govern the kinds of lifestyle choices, the ways they care for themselves, for their children, for their communities. Listen further, and one also might hear that ARDS broadcasting is often largely pre-recorded. On-air producers, either live or as pre-recorded avatars, rarely direct the programming. This is not an unusual aspect of radio production more generally, but on other stations there is often the semblance of a DJ, a single voice and personality directing the programme, forward and back announcing the music and otherwise tethering listeners to the station’s signal, often through forms of place-based interpellation (see Berland 1990; cf. Bolton 1999). On ARDS, however, the function of the DJ is largely taken over by community service announcements and pre-recorded greetings and station IDs by celebrity guests. These features might be said to mark the developmental roots of ARDS radio as an NGO programme devoted not to music and sound per se, but to radio as an instrument of Yolngu social improvement and cultural survival. From this perspective, the music instead tethers the exhortations of developmental announcements to a local musical world. While this may sound uninviting to listeners accustomed to at least the simulation of ‘liveness’ and co-presence found in most Euro-American broadcast

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channels, the station in fact has found a large Yolngu audience, and I argue that it is the station’s particular mix of musical sound that is largely responsible for this popularity. Working in Darwin in 2017, I encountered ARDS transmissions in the city as at once a place where Darwin’s Yolngu residents could hear the sounds of gospel music sung in Yolngu language, but also as a place where Yolngu listeners tuned in to hear the sounds of their relatives and of ceremonies playing out in the homelands far to the east of the city. Its musical programming draws intense interest and affective involvement. This is particularly the case by the ways that the station features recordings of Yolngu clan manikay. Manikay is a Yolngu term naming a genre of traditional song most frequently performed in public, ceremonial contexts in Arnhem Land, and today is often recorded and rebroadcasted across the towns, small communities, and remote outstations that populate this Northern Australian region. Manikay recount the actions of ancestral powers, acting in a foundational time widely known in English as ‘dreamings’ or ‘dreamtime’. Known in Yolngu Matha as Wangarr these ancestral figures’ actions gave shape to the landscape and created the forms and relations that constitute the contemporary Yolngu world. Manikay, then, can act as social charters and frequently accompany ceremonial activity, from initiations to funerals to the more public and intercultural performances in cultural festivals.4 As musical artefacts animating broadcast media, manikay are listened to for pleasure, repeatedly. Neighbours and friends in Darwin alternate between YouTube clips and the ARDS radio channel, making gospel songs and clan manikay sound loudly from the opened windows of their houses and flats. But just as often these were listened to in more intimate fashion, with sentiments derived from one’s biography. Darwin is in fact quite far from Yolngu clan homelands in North-East Arnhem Land. For many of my interlocutors in the city, people whose homes and families often live some distance away, these songs have become a means to recollect a range of close and extended kin that people find themselves missing when caught up by life here. For instance, in 2017, my closest interlocutor was also my neighbour, a 41-year-old woman living in Darwin in order to have regular access to dialysis, a medical intervention required to support her failing kidneys. Her listening habits, she said, brought

Toner 2015, Corn 2008, and MacGowan 2007 offer contemporary ethnomusicological accounts of manikay in the terms of, respectively, ritual performance, world music genre, and affecting musical sound.

4



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her extended kin in Arnhem Land closer to her. She was often bedridden, left in a small suburban house without company. When she was able to leave the house, either to sit in the front drive or porch, or to take a city-run shuttle to her medical appointments, she travelled with her smart phone and a small, Bluetooth-equipped loudspeaker that often rested unseen, sending music out from beneath the seat of her portable wheeled walker. Whereas in ceremonial and festival performance manikay entail what Peter Toner has called a dialogic form, anticipating a responsive listener, responding to prior and anticipating forthcoming manikay ‘utterances’ (2015), on the radio manikay offer what Adorno might have termed the miniaturization of this ceremonial event. Conversations with Charlene suggest that what is listened to is not simply music radio, but rather an entire social event, a social occasion given sonic form in ceremonial song. For Charlene, ARDS radio allows her to listen in on her relatives, showing her ongoing stake in social relations by exercising her involvement musically through radio-mediated manikay performance. Further, unlike the mass culture artefacts of concern for Adorno, the distance between the radio studio and the radio receiver is small, such that many listeners have at one time or another been involved in production, and many others know or are related to those behind a radio desk. Charlene herself worked as a Yolngu language translator at ARDS in the past, and remembered and valued the work – though critiques the station for the low pay she felt it offered to translators. And she listens now, she says, not for educational content or news, but for the musical sounds of home. Charlene’s interest in hearing her relatives in Arnhem Land was joined with keen attention to gospel music, which she heard through the ARDS broadcast as well as through a small music library kept on her smart phone. In July 2017, Charlene’s ringtone, the pre-programmed sound that rings out when a phone receives a call, was Evie Tornquist. Her voice sounded out loudly in the midst of one afternoon as we stood in her driveway, talking about a recently deceased relative. I smiled on hearing the sound, and asked who the singer was. Charlene’s response was a mix of happy appreciation, that I had noticed and remarked favourably on her musical ringtone, and incredulity that I did not immediately recognize the singer, who is well known in Northern Australia, and in much of evangelical North America also, for her televised performances and her association with the mass-mediated evangelical work of Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggart, and others.

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Charlene’s publicly cultivated status as observant Christian and its extension via musical media made much sense of the particular address and appreciation of the ARDS signal. The latter seeks to embrace two shared cosmological sensibilities, one attuned to Yolngu Rom and those genres that publicly remember the actions of Wangarr, and the other attuned to the Christian message, activated sonically in the broadcast of gospel music, some in Yolngu language, and some in English. For Charlene, listening to garma manikay and gospel music gave her some sense of company, allowed her to ‘link up’ with her extended family in Arnhem Land. Her phone gave her some proximity to friends and family, but it was also a musical lifeline, one that blurred the lines between a digitally enabled mobile archive held in the circuits of her smart phone and a contemporary form of the transistor radio. This brief ethnographic account can suggest the ways that ARDS radio might not be taken simply in the terms of that social developmental work and educational mission it was founded to pursue. Charlene’s interests in hearing gospel music, Yolngu language, and the voices of family and old friends, and her proximity to ARDS itself as an institution, suggest both the intense sociality and intimate scale that marks radio making and listening here. But if this might suggest a shared foundation for both broadcasters, there remains a significant contrast between these two radio stations. Radio Larrakia began as a community initiative, emerging from a period of intense political activism with an inclusive representational mandate, and the station has long endeavoured to pursue this project in dialogue with neighbours and visitors to the city, employing multiple icons of indigeneity that resonate with a diverse, Indigenous audience. In contrast, ARDS began and continues to operate as a developmental endeavour, an instrument in the transfer of information from one code (professional, broadcasted English) to another (the Yolngu Matha dialects of North-East Arnhem Land). If it now often sounds as if it has been taken over by its Yolngu listeners, turned as much to musical and social as developmental ends, it nonetheless addresses a Yolngu diaspora, rather than a pan-Aboriginal political subject.

Animating the sonic avatar: The politics of an assembled vocality The differences in sonic syntax between these two broadcasters, and the different ways that listeners to Radio Larrakia or Yolngu Radio make the signal their



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own, offer the means to hear these urban Aboriginal worlds as at once fractious and unfinished. In part, these stations’ distinct histories, and the associated differences in broadcast address they pursue, lend insight into an emergent urban Indigenous domain, one populated by diverse peoples, some drawn to the city by choice, for the opportunities for work or the pleasures of consumption it offers, and others drawn there by necessity, for medical care, or by virtue of familial obligation. The ‘voices’ of these stations do sound distinct, but this difference cannot be ascribed solely to the use of different languages or to the different generic aspects of their musical programming. The dominance of garma manikay on ARDS radio, for instance, on its own constitutes a relatively subtle difference: You can, in fact, occasionally hear such manikay on Radio Larrakia as well. In the context of the latter’s broadcast signal, however, such markedly traditional genre may be joined by traditional genres of music performance from other regions, notably the different song traditions of the Daly River region to Darwin’s South-West. Alternatively, the rock musics that one expects to hear on Radio Larrakia also appear in the programming of Yolngu Radio. Simply nominating genre categories is not sufficient to account for the different modes of address and senses of listener expectation associated with the two stations. Rather, I wish here to foreground the syntax of each broadcast signal, the different aims the each organization pursues, and the different presumptions that listeners bring to each signal. I argue here that these differences are in part entailments of the tokens of sound, speech, and music that these stations’ producers differently assemble and animate. This mode of analysis might encourage one to hear in the orchestration of playlists and the interpellative address of distinctive DJ speech a form of branding, the achievement of a recognizable and consistent emplaced character built from these different elements. Jody Berland’s (1990) investigation of the power of the DJ’s voice to ground widely circulating musical (and other) commodities to a particular location through its interpellative address long ago offered an insightful caution to the presumption of radio’s inherent locality, the ways that places may disguise the significance of audiences as themselves exchangeable commodities. But in the situation described here, each station does musical and communicative work in order to animate the voice of a particular collective subject, rather than to pursue the acquisition of audience numbers as market share. The logic of the interpellation at work in these cases must thus be parsed with reference to these distinct Indigenous polities and divergent political situations in which they find themselves.

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In the cases I’ve introduced here, further, these two signals are not replaceable or equivalent tokens of some ideal type. Instead, they are differently constituted assemblages of musico-vocal sound, each presupposing different model listeners in their production. This is to draw on the well-known dialogic approach to language in use of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986), and to extend it to the stylization of these broadcast signals as they might be heard to animate the ‘voices’ of social subjects. In this case neither the Larrakia nor the Yolngu speak into a silent space from the ground of isolated autochthony. Rather, each addresses a noisy, crowded social domain, populated by other Indigenous groups, agents of the state, and a welter of other identifiable social persons – persons that serve as addressees and that thereby also come to inform the signal’s address in the first instance. And in crafting this address, further, these stations also can be heard to contribute to the reproduction of those very polities they aim to represent. Any distinct broadcast signal does not, that is to say, simply give voice to an extant social subject, but rather takes a position, positing the character of that social subject which its signal ought to be heard to index. This perspective on the ways that different radio programmes posit a social world also resonates with the model of intercultural relations as developed by Francesca Merlan (1998, 2005). For Merlan, the intercultural provides a means to understand lives lived amid charged cultural diversity in terms of a dialogic intersubjectivity writ large, foregrounding the relational and emergent constitution of different cultural identities (cf. Daley and Martin 2015; Hastings and Manning 2004; Hill 1995). As helpful as such analytics have been in ethnographic work in Northern Australia, such figures raise further questions when considering that such heteroglossia, in both spoken utterances and the construction of a radio’s voice, takes shape as a metapragmatic norm, that its crafting aims to produce moral order from the tumult and post-colonial complexity of Indigenous urban life itself (cf. Hill 1995; Keen 2016). What kinds of interests and normative positions are enlivened in the remediation and normative valorization (or denial) of such heteroglossia? What differences in the constitution of this Indigenous social world come to matter, and why? This is to underscore that each radio signal introduced here must be understood as itself a proposition about the status of the subject it addresses and the political and ethical project it seeks to advance. Here such propositions are carried out in forms of radio-mediated musico-vocal assemblage, and amplified by a media ideology that presumes the representational character of Aboriginal media (cf. Fisher 2016).



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Approaching Indigenous radio as a practice of assembling and animating sonic avatars allows one to grasp the differing stakes underpinning distinct Indigenous media projects, and to the begin to hear the differing strategies such distinct projects develop. As an institution, Radio Larrakia aims to lend representation to an array of Indigenous and other voices. And insofar as the Larrakia nation retains an interest in ‘looking after’ those many other Aboriginal peoples who now occupy Larrakia country, to do so is also to reaffirm the Larrakia people’s authority in the country on which Darwin sits, an authority that has long been challenged in material terms by white settlers and by different institutions of the settler state. Yolngu Radio, on the other hand, pursues distinct aims, endeavouring to address an urban Yolngu audience using a distinctive mix of manikay, Yolngu language and social development-focused exhortation. Whereas the former has invested in a pan-Indigenous representational project as a means to underscore a distinctly Larrakia authority, the latter invests in a developmental, capacity-building project as it solicits a Yolngu audience. Each broadcast signal must thus be reckoned in terms of a broader, meta-dialogue of Aboriginal media, understood as different normative propositions about what kind of Indigenous subject Aboriginal radio ought to address, and with what sort of voice.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Berland, Jody. 1990. ‘Radio Space and Industrial Time: Music Formats, Local Narratives, and Technological Mediation’. Popular Music 9 (2): 179–92. Bolton, Lissant. 1999. ‘Radio and the Redefinition of Kastom in Vanuatu’. Contemporary Pacific 11 (2): 335–60. Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Corn, Aaron. 2008. Reflections and Voices: Exploring the Music of Yothu Yindi with Mandawuy Yunupingu. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Daley, Cameo, and Richard Martin. 2015. ‘Dichtomous Identities? Indigenous and Non-Indigenous People and the Intercultural in Australia’. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 26 (1): 1–23. Fisher, Daniel. 2012. ‘Running Amok or Just Sleeping Rough? Long-grass Camping and the Politics of Care’. American Ethnologist 39 (1): 161–86.

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Fisher, Daniel. 2016. The Voice and Its Doubles: Music and Media in Northern Australia. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Gaonkar, Dilip, and Beth Povinelli. 2003. ‘Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition’. Public Culture 15 (3): 385–97. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. ‘Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media’. Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 365–82. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Guralnick, Peter. 1995. The Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. New York: Back Bay Books. Hastings, Adi, and Paul Manning. 2004. ‘Introduction: Acts of Alterity’. Language and Communication 24 (4): 291–311. Hill, Jane. 1995. ‘The Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano Narrative’. In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, edited by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, 97–147. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hinkson, Melinda. 2004. ‘What’s in a Dedication? On Being a Warlpiri DJ’. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 15 (2): 143–62. Irvine, Judith T. 1996. ‘Shadow Conversations: The Indeterminacy of Participant Roles’. In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 131–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keane, Webb. 1997. Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kunreuther, Laura. 2014. Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacGowan, Fiona. 2007. Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in Northern Australia. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Manning, Paul, and Ilana Gershon. 2013. ‘Animating Interaction’. Hau 3 (3): 107–37. Merlan, Francesca. 1998. Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics, and Aborigines in a North Australian Town. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Merlan, Francesca. 2005. ‘Explorations towards Intercultural Accounts of SocioCultural Reproduction and Change’. Oceania 75: 167–82. Myers, Fred. 2002. Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Nozawa, Shunsuke. 2013. ‘Characterization’. Semiotic Review 3, https://semioticreview .com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/16/15.



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Silvio, Teri. 2010. ‘Animation: The New Performance?’ The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (2): 422–38. Tomlinson, John. 1992. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Toner, Peter. 2015. ‘Bakhtin’s Theory of the Utterance and Dhalwangu Manikay’. In Strings of Connectedness: Essays in Honor of Ian Keen, edited by Peter Toner, 161–86. Canberra: Australian National University. Trudgen, Richard. 2000. Why Warriors Lie Down and Die. Winnellie: Aboriginal Resource and Development Services Inc.

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Voicing Otherness on Air: Theorizing Radio through the Figure of Voice Kristine Ringsager and Sandra Lori Petersen

Two radiophonic beginnings If Danish radio listeners tuned into the popular music channel P3 under the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (henceforth DR) around 9.00 pm on Wednesday, 7 February 1990, they would hear a male voice presenting the news, sports, and weather followed by the sound of heavy thunder and rhythmic shouting and clapping opening the jingle of the next programme. A male voice overlapping with the sound of the jingle stated the name of the programme, Verdens musik (Music of the World), before a female voice pronounced the phrase ‘musik fra de andre lande’ (music from the other countries) with a Pakistani (or, for the listener, at least foreign-sounding) accent. While the jingle faded, the latter voice welcomed the listeners and introduced herself as Sveta Rubin, the host of the programme for the next hour – a programme that would air, among other things, popular music from South Africa and India, and Brazilian samba performed by a local Danish world music orchestra. Sveta’s voice was soft and light, and on air she pronounced the Danish words carefully and melodically word by word, phrase by phrase, easily comprehensible and unmistakably shaped by a history of migration. Though she appeared to be reading from a manuscript, she came across as present, and between the phrases her calm inhalation was sometimes audible. Touching upon the current political situation in Eastern Europe, where several countries had announced their independence within the past year, and in South Africa, where the apartheid was about to be lifted, she introduced the evening’s first piece of music, the song ‘Third World Child’



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by Johnny Clegg and Savuka. The volume of the music rose again and Johnny Clegg and Savuka took over.1 About two decades later in France the commercial migrant radio station Beur FM aired another female migrant voice, that of Vanessa Nacira Menadi. At 10.00 pm the usual raï music on the airwaves of Beur FM was replaced by a short jingle introducing the call-in programme Confidences (meaning something told in confidentiality). It was followed by Vanessa’s decidedly hoarse voice, welcoming the listeners and making a series of special greetings at a fast pace to ‘people who are hospitalized, the courageous people who work at night, people who are in difficulties and people who are imprisoned’. This was followed by another jingle, where a deep male voice with a heavy echo effect said words like ‘Testimonies … Sentiments … Secrets …’ on top of ambient sounds and added, ‘Vanessa listens to you, every night from 10 till 1 at Beur FM.’ The jingle ended and Vanessa was back on, reading aloud a text she had prepared, which reflected on the theme she had chosen for the programme that night. ‘It is a controversial subject’, she said, ‘it always results in a lot of opinions, when we discuss it’. The theme was female virginity before marriage, the tradition of contributing importance to it, and the consequences of this tradition in the lives of women and men. It was implicitly understood that the importance of virginity as it was discussed here related to North African traditions. Vanessa invited the listeners to call in and share their experiences and thoughts, and then followed with three hours of conversation with listeners calling in and sharing their personal experiences and opinions, only interrupted by a few commercials and jingles.2

Introduction This chapter is about radiophonic voices, in particular the ones of Sveta Rubin and Vanessa Nacira Menadi introduced above, and their social, institutional, and technological mediation. We present descriptions of the beginnings of Verdens musik and Confidences, respectively, alongside each other in the opening of this chapter, because the voices at the core of each of them, the voices of Sveta and Vanessa, share some significant characteristics, while at the same time differing Extract of broadcast, Verdens musik, 7 February 1990. Extract of broadcast, Confidences, 16 February 2012.

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from each other in ways that we find allow us to explore specific aspects of radiophonic mediation. We met Sveta and Vanessa doing research on soundscapes in France (see also Petersen 2017) and musical diversity within DR (see also Ringsager 2018a, b), respectively.3 Sveta and Vanessa live in different countries, originate from different places, and have been engaged by different types of radio stations in different periods of time. Whereas Pakistani-born Sveta from 1990 to 2001 explored world music and introduced this field to her listeners in Verdens musik on DR,4 Algerian-born Vanessa has since 2008 received calls from listeners in her programme Confidences broadcasted on the commercial migrant station Beur FM across France and beyond via the internet. Verdens musik was a weekly radio magazine introducing Danish listeners to world music, and Confidences is a three-hour phone-in programme airing five nights a week, in which listeners discuss matters such as emotions, traditions, and everyday life with Vanessa. Apart from these important differences, however, the two hosts share some central common traits. Most predominantly, they are both women of immigrant background with a public voice due to their profession as radio hosts. Through conversation about our research fields we were intrigued by the parallels between Sveta and Vanessa, both of them being radio hosts inhabiting a double position as ‘other’ in their capacity as women in a male-dominated profession and as members of migrant minorities in a media landscape shaped by the majority populations of their respective countries. However, we were even more intrigued by how differently they seemed to inhabit these positions. These initial discussions convinced us that lining the two hosts up alongside one other and examining their respective voices on air would allow us a glimpse into the rich spectre of possible subject positions that a female migrant voice can produce on air. Furthermore, we assumed that the double otherness of Sveta’s and Vanessa’s voices on the radio might make them particularly well suited for shedding light on some general features of the ways in which subject positions are produced through voices on the radio. Sandra Lori Petersen’s doctoral research on soundscapes on French radio was based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork among radio producers as well as radio listeners. Kristine Ringsager’s postdoctoral research on the broadcasting of musical diversity within DR was based partly on interviews and conversations with former radio presenters, partly on audio material from the LARM.fm archive and from privately recorded cassette tapes. 4 The programme Verdens musik later turned into Verdensmusik (World Music) and in 2000 into Global Beat. 3



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Besides being linked to postcolonialism (see Said [1978] 2003; Spivak 1985), the idea of otherness is associated with early feminism (de Beauvoir [1949] 1997) and Levinas’ ethics of the other (1979). In this chapter we will not discuss the concept further, besides making it clear here that it is about the power of determining what to include and exclude, what is defined as appropriate and inappropriate (Haraway 1992), the common and uncommon, the first and second, or the ordinate and subordinate (Foucault 1977). On a completely different subject, anthropologist Talal Asad notes how notions that have come to form the basis of modern life are difficult to extract as objects of study and are therefore ‘best pursued through its shadows’ (Asad 2003, 16). Asad coins his point with regard to Western secularism and the shadow that allows him to explore this secularism as the practice of Islam. Following Asad’s line of thinking, the otherness of Sveta’s and Vanessa’s voices, both in terms of gender and ethnicity, is the shadow that allows us to examine the figure of the radiophonically mediated voice and the ways in which it respectively reproduces and challenges subject positions and the social hierarchies implicit in these within the social, institutional and auditory spaces of radio. Furthermore, thinking in terms of otherness (and the process of othering) allows us to grasp how power structures condition agency, understood as the capacity to act within as well as against social structures, and to reflect on how historical symbolic meanings frame the possibilities at hand for negotiating identity. Accordingly, rather than being a parallel comparison of Sveta’s and Vanessa’s voices on the radio, this chapter is an examination of the similarities and differences between the ways in which their individual voicings of otherness are asserted, endowed with, or withheld from choices and agency when radiophonically mediated. Anthropologist Amanda Weidman has noted how voice as an analytical category ‘lives a life in two registers’ (Weidman 2014, 38). On the one hand, it is a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments. However, on the other hand, voice is a culturally elaborated metaphor that links the social potentials of vocal address to long-standing tropes of social agency and liberal personhood. In this understanding, ‘having a voice’ is to have agency, and phrases like ‘giving voice’ and ‘taking voice’ are often routinely associated with the politics of identity, the production of difference, the ability of the subaltern to speak or ‘talk back’ and for class, gender, and race politics to ‘back talk’ the dominant (Feld et al. 2004, 342). Studying radio, however, it becomes obvious that an equation of voice and agency, as well as intention and communication, ignores the complexities with

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which voices are constructed, mediated, and heard (Weidman 2014, 41). In the study of radio it becomes clear that voices are bodily produced, material, and sonic phenomena, and also that these phenomena are inseparable from specific technological and institutional mediations. More than mere personal expressions, radio voices gain social life through particular technologies, local linguistic ideologies, and institutional practices. Radio-mediated vocal expressions are thus formed by particular social practices and materials by which radio sounds are produced – sounds that are moreover linked to particular forms of radio transmissions and genre conventions and to specific programmes as well as embedded within larger social, political, and historical contexts (Bessire and Fisher 2012, 21–22). Following this, several questions arise: How do the sounded qualities of the voices of Sveta and Vanessa convey particular subjectivities? Within the specific institutional, technological, and social contexts the two hosts are part of, how can the radiophonic voice amplify the relationship between the medium of radio and agency and identification? How is the production of voice a terrain for negotiations of individual and collective identities and of political, cultural, as well as commercial matters? And in which ways may the study of voice, both understood as a phenomenological concern with the embodied spoken performances of the radio presenters and in a metaphoric sense as a key representational trope for social position, power and agency, bring new aspects to the study of radio? Drawing on perspectives of voice primarily emerging from the fields of linguistic anthropology and anthropology of sound and unfurled through an approach focusing on the practices of the radio hosts, Sveta and Vanessa, we expand upon these questions in the following pages: first, by elaborating on the radiophonic voice related to theoretical aspects of ethnicity and gender; second, by describing how institutional contexts partake in shaping possibilities for agency; and finally, by discussing how technological noises and bodily sounds contribute to the mediation of vocally produced subjectivities.

Othered voices The human capacity to differentiate one voice from another and the ability to recognize that each and every voice is different makes voice one of the body’s first mechanisms of difference (Feld et al. 2004, 341). In that sense, as argued by anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld and his colleagues, voices



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are ‘material embodiments of social ideology and experience’ (Feld et al. 2004, 332). As the social distribution of voice, media scholar Nick Couldry (2010, 119, 120) further points out, can be highly gendered as well as shaped by notions of race and class, among other things, the voice can act as a vital signifier of otherness. To understand the social distribution of voice, however, we need to look at voice as something more than a vehicle for words (or music). Voice contains more than words, and as stated by philosopher Don Ihde, ‘What is said, the discursive, is never present alone, but is amplified within the possibilities of how the voice said it’ (Ihde 2007, 170). In that sense, the materiality of voice both includes the sound itself and the voice as a medium of the spoken language, where linguistic variations can be seen as sonic vocal phenomena with powerful social meanings and effects. Voices have the capacity, Weidman argues, to both embody specific qualities through tone and register – what she terms its ‘iconic properties’ – and to convey particular subjectivities or identities – its ‘indexical qualities’ (Weidman 2006, 13; 2014, 40). As she further points out, words used to describe the timbre of a voice (such as ‘warm’, ‘husky’, and ‘soft’) are seemingly subjective and highly culturally variable. For this reason, they are also extremely socially meaningful aspects of vocal sound, performance, and discourse about voice (Weidman 2014, 40). Disseminated through the medium of radio vocal radio practices, thus, have the potential to give rise to new forms of collective identity, affect, and intimacy. Sociologist Anne Karpf asserts that the radio voice has such a powerful effect on us because it is perceived as belonging to not only its speaker, but the listeners as well (Karpf 2013, 62). Philosopher Mladen Dolar’s notion of the voice indicates how such double ownership might be possible. He conceives of the voice as fundamentally ambiguous: an object that ‘opens up a zone of undecidability, of a between-the-two, an inter-mediacy’ (Dolar 2006, 14). When the body of a speaker is physically present before us, the body comes to inform our way of hearing that person’s voice, but in the absence of the body, Dolar argues, the ambiguity of the voice is left open. This ambiguity is to be found in the spaces between the sound of the voice and the words it shapes, but also within the sound itself, that is, in ‘the infinite shades of the voice, which infinitely exceeds meaning’ (Dolar 2006, 13). Hence, when the human voice is mediated by radio technology, its sonic as well as symbolic potential is amplified – especially as the lack of visual presence of its originator endows it with an ambiguous quality – and it becomes potentially powerful and present.

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Turning to the voices of Sveta and Vanessa, we might accordingly ask how the sounded qualities of their voices convey particular subjectivities. As briefly described in the beginning of this chapter, the voice of Vanessa is relatively low pitched; she is often hoarse and her voice cracks and breaks once in a while. She speaks French with a very light accent, which she combines with the use of Arab and Kabyle words, thus accentuating her Algerian origin. In this way, Vanessa signals to her listeners that they share similar backgrounds: Though Beur FM claims itself a general-interest radio station, it was originally created by and for listeners of North African origin, and themes related to this community are still dominant on the station’s airwaves (Harzoune 2007, 171). These origins are reflected in the station’s name, since beur is French slang for Arab, and used to signify descendants of North African immigrants living in France (Laronde 1988, 685). In contrast to the low-pitched and hoarse voice of Vanessa, Sveta’s voice on air, as mentioned, is rather soft, light, and melodic. It is shaped by her Pakistani accent and careful and relatively slow pronunciation of Danish words. According to herself, her accent was essential to her vocal appearance, as it, at the time of broadcasting, differed from the other presenters of world music programmes (and other presenters on DR’s popular music channel P3 in general). It ‘drew in more listeners’, she argues and continues, ‘my accent is interesting in the sense that it catches people’s attention, without being unclear. Many listeners have told me that it increased their attention’ (personal communication, 3 February 2016). In his study of accented cinema as migrant-produced cultural productions, media scholar Hamid Naficy (2001) has described the use and power of accent to situate the speaker in relation to the listener and the values attributed to (or removed from) a given accent due to its metonymic meaning. Even though all accents from a linguistic point of view are equally important, all accents are not, according to Naficy, of equal value socially and politically speaking. Thus, accents are used to judge not only the social standing of the speakers but also their personality: Depending on their accents some speakers may be considered regional, local yokel, vulgar, ugly or comic, whereas others may be thought of as educated, upper-class, sophisticated, beautiful and proper. As a result, accent is one of the most intimate and powerful markers of group identity and solidarity, as well as of individual difference and personality. (Naficy 2001, 23)

In his argument, Naficy establishes what he terms ‘the preferred “official” accent, that is, the accent that is considered as standard, neutral and value-free’



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(Naficy 2001, 23). In much the same way as whiteness is rendered invisible by its constructed universality (Dyer 1997), this ‘preferred “official” accent’ could be described as inaudible. As noted by media scholar Katie Moylan, however, seemingly ‘less valued’ accents have their own currency (Moylan 2013, 59). In the auditory space of radio, where racial and ethnic differences cannot be seen or visually marked,5 it is in many ways the accent that denotes ethnic and racial difference, as several scholars in migrant radio have shown (see for example Kosnick 2007, 2012; Moylan 2013; Vertovec 1996). It is through accent that racial and ethnic differences are heard, for which reason accent plays a vital role in establishing broadcastings that auditively facilitate intercultural dialogue. The prominent slogan ‘We speak with an accent’ used by the Berlin-based public service radio station Radio MultiKulti (1994–2008) in its promotional material is an excellent example of this (Vertovec 1996; see also Kosnick 2007, 2012). Accordingly, in contrast to voices with a ‘neutral and value-free’ accent, migrant voices – like the ones of Sveta and Vanessa – carry connotations of authenticity and authority in their function of articulating transcultural experiences and perspectives that may work as powerful markers of, for instance, diasporic and/or cosmopolitan processes of identification. In that sense, othering discourses and determining specific positions as subordinate and inappropriate, even if they most often are experienced as painful, may also open a space for agency. However, the sounds of Verdens musik and Confidences are not only racialized and ethnicified through the voices of Sveta and Vanessa, but also gendered. Apart from being the only host with an accent, Sveta also differed from the other hosts affiliated with the world music programming on P3 during the 1990s by being a young woman. The engagement of Sveta can, thus, be interpreted as part of the strategic ‘feminisation’ of DR’s radio as well as television sections at the time, where the number of female hosts and presenters (often much younger than their male colleagues) was intentionally increased in order to attract a broader audience (Pedersen 2004, 10–12; see also Andreassen 2005, 129). French radios generally broadcast fewer female than male voices. As radio host Virginie Bodin points out, when women are engaged as hosts, they often It should be mentioned that today many radio studios have installed webcams enabling the listeners to visually follow the radio transmission from a laptop, smart phone, and so on, just as the internet has expanded the distribution of visual images of, for instance, radio hosts, which previously were made available only through newspapers and magazines.

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appear as the side kick of a male host, who is the main star of the programme (personal communication, 14 March 2013).6 However, one specific programme genre is almost always hosted by women, namely programmes where the host offers advice and support on emotional matters. That indeed is also what Vanessa does; sometimes the nature of the conversations is chatty and light, while at other times it resembles coaching or therapy. Before becoming the host of Confidences, Vanessa worked as a clairvoyant, though she underlines that she is very much inspired by psychology and ‘makes her own version’ of her readings in the field in her work as a host when talking to people about their emotions and personal experiences (personal communication, 10 April 2013). Âllo Ménie presented by Ménie Gregoire can be seen as a predecessor of Confidences and is considered an ‘archetype’ of the programme genre in question. It was aired from 1967 to 1982 on the commercial mainstream station RTL. Just like Confidences, Âllo Ménie was a phone-in programme, and just like Vanessa, Ménie Gregoire was a self-taught host inspired by psychology. She played a key role in popularizing psychology and psychoianalysis in France (Coffin 2015, 115). As the host of Confidences Vanessa thus takes on a typically gendered position in the French radio landscape that invites specific forms of agency related to the emotional, intimate, and even familial life of her listeners. Indeed, listeners relate to her as someone close akin to a friend or even a daughter, sister, or mother. We have pointed out how the gendered aspect of Sveta’s and Vanessa’s appearances on air situates them in particular ways and within particular traditions. If we are to zoom out and consider the broader Western radio context they speak into and which frames the social distribution of their voices, which historical symbolic meanings about the female voice might we then encounter? As mentioned above, especially when a voice is unaccompanied by visual cues, as is the case with radio, we make assumptions and assignments based on various aspects (pitch, timbre, etc.) of the speaker’s voice. Accordingly, historian Christine Ehrick has noted that the human voice is one of the most immediately gendered sound categories, and vocal gender thus plays a main role in the way identity is constructed, expressed, and perceived (Ehrick 2015, 8). In her According to the female radio hosts participating in a seminar on the subject of female voices on French radio during the 2017 fair of radio professionals in France, Salon de la Radio, this situation is beginning to change in what they consider a positive way, as more women are now being aired (Salon de la Radio 2017).

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exploration of everyday complexities framing the role of voice in human society, Karpf (2006) has further described how women’s voices have historically been deemed both too high pitched and, conversely, too deep to be on the radio. As the Bell Laboratories found in 1927, ‘The speech characteristics of women, when changed to electrical impulses, do not blend with the electrical characteristics of our present-day radio equipment’ (Steinberg in Karpf 2006, 146). Female voices were, in other words, simply not suited for radio transmission. Furthermore, women were criticized for conveying both too little and too much personality through their voices, unable ‘to achieve the “impersonal” touch’ (Karpf 2006, 146). Thus, summing up the situation for early female broadcasters, Karpf states that high voice in women was associated with demureness, and low voice with sexuality, so that – in a catch 22 – the voice that escaped accusations of promiscuity wasn’t considered authoritative enough for serious broadcasting. (Karpf 2006, 146)

The tendency to find the male voice more authoritative than the (high or low) female voice has, however, as media scholar Kate Lacey has argued, little to do with the actual physical characteristics that differentiate the voices of the sexes. Rather it is a matter of cultural expectations and, as a result, culturally specific. In Western societies male voices became a signal of authority simply because men traditionally held the most prestigious positions, and it was their voices that could be heard from pulpits and public platforms (Lacey 2012, 127). Hence, our ears have been shaped by a long history of patriarchal structures and inequalities, where male voices have been seen as ‘carrying authority and influence’ (Barnard 2000, 134), whereas listeners often tend to underestimate the significance and value of female speech – be it low or high pitched (Ehrick 2015, 14–15). In terms of radio in particular, Karpf has remarked that although women’s voices of course are heard on air today, the old rationale for marginalizing them as a result of objections against their vocal material continues to be mobilized (Karpf 2013). In that sense, as cultural theorist Rosalind Gill has pointed out, the male voice largely continues to be perceived as the norm against which other (female) voices are judged for their appropriateness, and (in particular deep) male voices, for example, continue to be regarded as ‘somehow naturally right for DJs’ and presented as ‘non-gendered’ (Gill 2000, 148). Returning to Sveta and Vanessa, their voices are, hence, othered in terms of the audible traces of migrancy they carry through accent and multiethnolect as

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well as through their female pitch and timbre. However, in the contexts of the specific programmes they appear in, the intersectional qualities of their gendered migrant voices have their own currency of value, as the othered subject positions vocally produced through radio provide points of identification for the listeners. In following, they have the potential to give rise to specific forms of identification and forms of relations, and the potential of agency that lies herein is, as we shall see, negotiated, amplified, and constrained technologically as well as within the particular institutional contexts they appear in. In the next two sections we, thus, listen in on the different institutional contexts of the two radio programmes hosted by Sveta and Vanessa, the roles of their voices within these programmes and institutions and, accordingly, which frameworks for agency their female migrant voices are ascribed in the institutional landscapes they appear in.

Verdens musik and the institutional framework of DR The programme Verdens musik was, as mentioned, broadcasted by the Danish public service institution DR from 1990 to 2001 and hosted by Sveta, among others. From the late 1980s and during the 1990s world music became a broadcasting phenomenon with an internal status similar to that of jazz and folk music, for instance, something that was closely linked to the commercial music industry’s increasing interest in popular music beyond the West, marketed under the umbrella label ‘world music’ (see for example Stokes 2004) and, moreover, a result of a longer struggle within the European Broadcasting Union initiated by several European broadcasters of popular music beyond Western rock and pop (see Ringsager 2018a). Within the context of DR’s radio programming this new status of world music, among other things, resulted in more DJ programmes and music journalistic world music magazines on the popular music radio channel P3. Previously, world music programmes had been aired by only male hosts, whose voices were characterized by what Naficy, quoted above, refers to as ‘the preferred “official” accent’ (Naficy 2001, 23), and whose knowledge about global music was driven by personal encounters and an enthusiasm for acquiring, understanding, and presenting a world of music to the listeners. Around the turn of the decade the DR management, however, chose to engage Sveta as head of the newly established world music editorial team and as one of the main hosts of the programme Verdens musik. At the time Sveta, who previously had been affiliated mainly to the DR service radio



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programme Indvandrerradio (Immigrant Radio) that broadcasted daily news in different foreign languages, had no expert knowledge on world music (or music in general). However, being the daughter of a Pakistani diplomat, she had lived in several countries around the world, she spoke just as many languages, and she had listened to a lot of the music played on the programme in her childhood. She ‘had it in her blood’, as she has phrased it herself (personal communication, 3 February 2016), and her personal embeddedness in the global world was audible in her vocal performance through her accent. In that sense, as indicated by some of the world music hosts at the time (personal communication, Ole Reitov, 5 February 2016; personal communication, Jens Jørn Gjedsted, 9 March 2016), her lack of more professional expertise on the topics of the world music programmes was, to the management it would seem, somehow counterbalanced by her personal experiences of – and thus authority to speak about – the world. She not only gave voice to the other; she was the voice of the other. The engagement of Sveta can be interpreted in several ways. On the one hand, it could be regarded as an act of inclusion and enhancing diversity – a way of giving ‘voice’ or agency to minority groups in society, thereby adjusting to the growing political awareness of gender equality and, perhaps in particular, migration and the attention to what was described as a need for ‘integration’ occurring at the time.7 Following this line of argument, the auditory ‘integration’ of the ‘voice of the other’, personalized by the individual voice of Sveta, within the soundscape of DR and P3 in particular could be explored for its capacity to create an atmosphere of ordinariness and domestication of difference that, according to cultural scholar Mica Nava, are the distinguishing marks of vernacular cosmopolitanism (Nava 2002, 13). The agency that Sveta was ascribed within the world music programming to some extent seems to embody and sonically manifest cosmopolitan relationalities built on ‘partial mutual affect and sociability that contain shared aspirations for a more just world’ (Glick Schiller 2015, 117), thus adding to the understanding of world music programmes as cosmopolitan practices that through the aesthetic enjoyment of music intended to evoke ‘the human capacity to imagine the world from

During the 1980s and 1990s politicians from across the political spectrum in Denmark increasingly became absorbed in discussing and regulating the private sphere of migrants and refugees. In the early 1990s the term ‘integration’ went from being a term primarily applied in pedagogical contexts or in relation to political, economic, and military integration in Europe to becoming an important notion in describing the annexation of migrants and refugees in Danish society within social and political debates (Olwig and Pærregaard 2010, 17; Rytter and Pedersen 2011, 14–15).

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an other’s perspective and to imagine the possibility of a borderless world of cultural plurality’ (Werbner 2008, 2). The engagement of Sveta can, however, also be understood in a more commercial light, related to a new competitive environment emerging at the time. In 1988 advertising was permitted in audiovisual media in Denmark (though not within the public service institution DR), and about a dozen larger commercial local radio stations expanded to establish fully professional coverage around the country. This forced DR to change its general policy and develop new programme strategies and audience approaches (Jauert 2003). At that time speakers presenting in what linguist Pia Jarvad refers to as ‘Danish with accents’ were rare within the institution of DR (Jarvad 2001, 98), and Sveta was one of very few P3 speakers (and probably the only female speaker) to present music with an accented voice.8 Thus, since Sveta’s voice was quite different from the voices of not only the other world music radio hosts, but also the other P3 hosts in general, her voice had the power to become a strong identity marker of Verdens musik, hopefully attracting more listeners. The American feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks has famously described how ethnic and racial difference within commodity culture ‘becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’ (hooks 1992, 366). This gastronomic metaphor lends itself easily to the radio context, where, for instance, world music programmes represent such spicy, different, and refreshing musical inputs to the otherwise ordinary, traditional, and somewhat ‘pale’ Western dish of the P3 music programming (see also Ringsager 2018a, b). As the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed descriptively adds to hooks’ metaphor, the prevailing fantasy of getting closer to the exotic other through consumption gestures towards the flexible and transformable Western subject, who can move between (eating) places in order to ‘eat the other: to take it in, digest it, and shit out the waste’ (Ahmed 2000, 117). It is, however, only differences that are ‘different, but assimilable’ that have value, Ahmed remarks (Ahmed 2000, 117). Those who cannot be incorporated, neither by the individual nor in the national space, are constructed as abjects and rejected. Anthropologist Kira Kosnick makes a similar point with regard to Radio MultiKulti that aims at being ‘a forum of integration’ by giving immigrants ‘a voice’ and allowing the general German public to become familiar and at The only other P3 radio host at the time with an accent that Ringsager has encountered in her research was the DJ Al Jones. He spoke Danish with a clear US-American accent.

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ease with these voices (Kosnick 2007, 55, 70). However, as Kosnick notes, the framework of what these minority voices are allowed to say is quite limited, and forms of difference that would be difficult for the majority population to accept are generally avoided (Kosnick 2007, 70). In other words, Radio MultiKulti serves the purpose of familiarizing the majority population with the sounds of different ethnic minorities – as long as they do not sound too different. Turning to the voice of Sveta, it could thus be argued that the intersectional qualities of her female migrant voice, along with her less authoritative, yet personal, embedded role regarding the musical subject field, seemed to be the perfect choice of a young, friendly ‘waiter’ able to serve the spicy musical dish of world music to the primarily Danish majority audience of P3. In that sense, Sveta was the host who could mediate ethnic and racial difference in a new, assimilable, consumable, and not ‘too different’ way. However, as Sveta herself asserts, her voice was only considered suitable for broadcasting particular programmes within the P3 format, and, for instance, she ‘couldn’t make P3 hit parade programmes’ (personal communication, 3 February 2016). In that sense, the agency that Sveta was given within DR, and within P3 specifically, seemed to be limited to multi- or intercultural programmes like Verdens musik for which her voice was somehow regarded as appropriate. Hence, the listeners could encounter the exotic embodied in Sveta’s agreeable feminine voice on the specific programmes, where her voice seemed to be regarded as suitable and assimiliable. Within the safe auditive space of the familiar public radio that DR is to most Danes they could receive a rhythmic dose of cosmopolitanism – just as they could tune out of it again, if the voice of the other that Sveta represented should suddenly appear unassimiliable or ‘too different’.

Confidences and the institutional framework of Beur FM Whereas DR is a state-owned and indisputably Danish media whose core listeners are the large Danish middle class, Beur FM has an entirely different position in French society. The station is built on the basis of Radio Beur, originally established in 1981 when then president François Mitterand simultaneously lifted the state monopoly on radio and allowed for non-citizens to form associations, which resulted in the creation of radio stations by a range of ethnic minority groups (Derderian 2004, 75). As described, the content of Beur FM is largely produced by and for French of North African origin, an important part

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of the French population that could be described as a minority experiencing and responding to ethnicized, racialized, or ethno-religious forms of stigmatization of difference (Glick Schiller 2015, 108). Hence, at the origins of Beur FM as a medium are the quite explicit aspirations of a minority group in French society to create a space for agency – through strengthening their internal dialogue as well as their presence in the public debate. Yet, in its mission statement today the station downplays ethnicity and instead describes an almost culturally neutral, generic target audience (Echchaibi 2011, 111–12). On its website Beur FM characteristically attempts to strike a balance between an ethnically defined and general interest profile by presenting itself as a ‘radio of diversity in the image of today’s France’9 – a diversity that importantly remains undefined.10 It is unconstitutional to register race or ethnicity in France, and hence no listener statistics reveal the origins of the listeners of Beur FM. However, it is safe to say that the station broadcasts a range of contents that relate to North Africa as well as to French of North African origin, and during fieldwork Petersen encountered only French of Algerian origin who listened to the programme. When she mentioned the station to acquaintances of other origins, they often knew about it, but never listened to it, since they considered themselves to be outside of its target group. The reasons for this case of what would appear to be a rather typical community radio (though commercial) that insists on being of general interest rather than cater to a specific diasporic community is to be found in the dominant discourse in France, where ‘difference’ – or, in the terms of this article, otherness – is framed as a potential danger to the unity of the Republic. As a result, ‘communitarianism’ – understood as the tendency of a group to identify with each other primarily and only incidentally with the Republic – is considered a threat to the national community (Petersen 2017). In an agency perspective, approaching a general interest profile is an attempt by the

With this formulation it could be argued that the station’s mission statement draws on contemporary popular political lingo, namely the expression ‘coming out of diversity’ (issue de la diversité). The expression was used, for example, in connection with the formation of François Hollande’s government in 2012. In a 2011 interview the sociologist Eric Keslassy comments that the phrase replaced the expression ‘coming out of migration’ (issue de la migration) by the 2000s, when the children of immigrants had children, and the third generation was finally considered French. According to Keslassy, issue de la diversité draws on American inspiration and was incorporated into French, as it ‘corresponds well to [French] culture, where we do not use established ethnic criteria’ (Monnerais 2011, authors’ translation). In a chronicle in the leftist newspaper Humanité Francis Combes and Patricia Latour observe that the expression almost always seems to be used to refer to ethnicity – to French of Arab, Black, or occasionally Asian origins – but never to other kinds of diversity, such as social diversity, for example (Combes and Latour 2015). 10 See Beur FM, Dossier de presse. 9



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station to create a credible voice for itself in the public debate, as opposed to one that can be discarded for its ‘communitarianism’. Vanessa’s voice on the airwaves of Beur FM is surrounded by the characteristic raï music, by the voices of listeners calling into Confidences and other programmes, and by the voices of other hosts who carry more distinct North African accents than hers and who integrate Arab and Kabyle words and phrases in their speech on air just as she does. But in the broader perspective of the French radio landscape they continuously run the risk of being deemed ‘communitarian’, ‘different’, and ‘other’ and thus of being considered incommensurable with republican values (see Petersen 2017). In her programme Vanessa insists on avoiding labels of ethnicity and nationality, instead using the term ‘terrestrials’. In this way, she implicitly negates the notion of a radically different other and offers a form of cosmopolitanism instead. At the same time, she acknowledges a degree of difference between French of North African origin and the majority population in France, when she emphasizes how well she knows ‘the [North African] community’ and how she is interested in breaking taboos that she finds inhabit this community – such as the importance attributed by some to female virginity before marriage, as touched upon in the introductory vignette of this chapter (personal communication, 10 April 2013). This seemingly paradoxical exercise, we suggest, is a way for Vanessa to open up the position she inhabits on the airwaves of Beur FM and address issues of relevance to French of North African origin, while attempting not to be categorized as too other. In this way, she offers her listeners a point of identification that embraces their North African origin and situates them as full members of the French Republic. This performance, which could be described as combining majority and minority identities by shimmering between them, is encapsulated in Vanessa’s employment of the term ‘terrestrial’ and reflected in the ways her listeners talk when they join her in conversations on air and employ the term ‘terrestrial’ rather than ethnic, religious, or national identifiers. In that sense, Confidences could be understood as a space for a practice characterized as what anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller defines as ‘diasporic cosmopolitanism’ (Glick Schiller 2015, 105). Glick Schiller coins the concept and defines it as ‘the sociabilities formed around shared practices, outlooks, aspirations and sensibilities – however partial, temporary, or inconclusive – that emerge from and link people simultaneously to those similarly displaced and to locally and transnationally emplaced social relationships’ (Glick Schiller 2015, 105). In

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a way that is also characteristic of Confidences, which juxtaposes notions of communalism and openness underlining the inclusive potential of the platform Vanessa has in Confidences, while not losing sight of its exclusive properties and the limits it seems to have in its outreach in French society at large.

Technological noises and bodily sounds The two examples elaborated above show how different institutional frames contribute to the way radio voices that are othered within the context of the general media landscape can be endowed with very different meanings and thus facilitate very disparate spaces for agency and for identification. However, different aesthetics of the auditory soundscapes also partake in producing these spaces, and, as Weidman argues, the production of voices (at least partly) through non-human sources such as microphones and digital sound manipulation software can be explored for the culturally specific ideologies of intimacy, sincerity, and authenticity they engender, the aesthetics of voice which they operate, as well as the new forms of subjectivity they give rise to (Weidman 2014, 41). In that sense, the effects of technology are powerful, but always culturally specific in the way they bring new notions of voice as personal and collective agency into being. To media scholar Friedrich Kittler, the very notion of ‘voice’ as associated with directness, authenticity, and truth follows technological recording or transmission (Kittler in Kunreuther 2006, 327). Within the context of radio in particular the radiophonic voice can thus be considered inseparable from its technological mediation, and concrete sound traces of radio technology are always part of what constitutes the radio voice as well as of the sonic figure that is positively associated with directness and so forth. For this reason, we now, finally, consider supplementary elements that contribute to the constitution of Sveta’s and Vanessa’s aesthetics and vocal presences on air, in particular focusing on how technological noises and bodily sounds contribute to mediating the subjectivities their voices produce. These are elements which to a great extent seem to amplify the vocal identifications strategically promoted within the different institutional frameworks. Sveta’s and Vanessa’s voices each have what Roland Barthes (1985) would call their own unique ‘grain’, that is, their individual sounds – but the way they each sound on air is further differentiated by their disparate ways of performing as well as by the contrasting layout and technological dispositions of the studios



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they broadcast from. The sound of the programme Verdens musik is generally speaking smooth and relatively seamless. The programme is tightly scheduled and dominated by the voice of Sveta and the broadcasted music, sometimes also including pre-recorded (telephone) interviews with singers, musicians, or other agents within the world music scene. As previously described, Sveta’s voice is soft and light, and it is occasionally accompanied by the sound of her breath, as she carefully pronounces the words of her written manuscript. Barthes writes that speech – as opposed to written text – reveals an innocence, and that its irrevocability entails a risk to the speaker: the risk of being exposed and of making mistakes (Barthes 1985, 4). When Sveta draws on a written manuscript she minimizes this risk, but she also reveals less of her way of being in the world to her listeners. Besides these performative aspects, the technology that facilitates the programme’s recording and transmission is largely inaudible. The aesthetic sound ideal of Verdens musik – as well as other programmes within the institution of DR – could be described using historian Emily Thompson’s notion of the ‘soundscape of modernity’, where sound is conceptualized as a ‘signal’ and dissociated from space (Thompson 2004, 1). Within this ideal the ‘good sound’ is considered to be clear, direct, and non-reverberant, whereas the sound of the place of production is perceived as a noisy impediment (Thompson 2004, 1, 233–34). As the studios within DR are designed to be inaudible, they allow the voices of radio hosts to travel to their listeners without reverberance. For this reason, the technological traces on the sound of Sveta’s voice are almost unnoticeable, just as Verdens musik in general and Sveta’s voice specifically are relatively free of sounds that indicate its place of recording and in that sense appear undetained by a specific physical space. The radio studio designed to be inaudible can be compared to the ‘nonplaces’ anthropologist Marc Augé (1995) describes as typical of what he calls ‘supermodernity’ (see Kreutzfeldt and Petersen 2016). In such ‘non-places’ the individual is supposedly stripped of its usual multiplicity of identities to be momentarily defined merely as a function of that space (Augé 1995, 101). An airport is a typical non-place, where people from all over the world are turned into passengers, travelling through the airport in order to get from one place to another (Augé 1995, 101). However, one could argue that some travel more seamlessly than others, depending on the international status of their passport, visa rules, and so on. To Augé, the momentary reduction of one’s identity enables the experience of a ‘momentary availability’, but it also entails a certain distance

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and solitude, since complex relations and histories are left behind (Augé 1995, 103). Applied in a radio context, it could thus be argued that as the host of Verdens musik, Sveta invites listeners on board a technologically seamless trip in which they can strip themselves of multiple identities and travel as citizens of the world. She is the pilot who transports listeners across the world, and her passengers need no visas, but can observe a cosmopolitan landscape of sounds from the safe distance their vehicle, Verdens musik, ensures. In contrast to the smooth-sounding Verdens musik, Confidences contains recurrent technical mishaps that have become an integrated part of the sound of the programme, contributing to its relaxed and spontaneous ambience. Vanessa receives callers on air without knowing what their conversations are going to be about, and she puts herself at risk – in Barthes’ terms – in a way that is very different from Sveta’s well-prepared performances. Furthermore, the sounds of her body accompany her relatively low-pitched and often hoarse voice on air: She often gasps for air, sighs, or makes noises of disbelief or understanding. And when listeners call the programme, the conversations they have with Vanessa are shaped by the noisy telephone lines, their emotionally loaded voices, and the phatic speech through which Vanessa and the listener ensure the wellfunctioning of the connection between them (for discussions of the phatic, see Kunreuther 2006, 341; Jakobson 1987, 68). Contrary to the clear, direct, and non-reverberant technological mediation of Sveta’s voice, Vanessa’s voice is accompanied by sounds that stem from the place of production, since the sounds of the studio of Beur FM surround her voice on air. Thus, rather than what Thompson terms the ‘soundscape of modernity’, the acoustic aesthetic of Confidences could be described by a ‘liveliness’ made up of a ‘poetics of spontaneity, accident or technical mishaps’, which, according to anthropologist Laura Kunreuther, also characterizes certain Nepalese FM radio programmes and constitutes the voices here as authentic and transparent to their listeners (Kunreuther 2006, 328, 338).11 In a related way, when the hissing of machines and bodily sounds are integrated into what comes to be considered ‘the voice’ of Vanessa, it produces a ‘liveliness’ that to a great extent enhances Kunreuther describes how her interlocutors in Nepal differentiated between the state-run AM radio associated with absolute monarchy and the commercial FM radio that only began broadcasting after the re-establishment of democracy in 1990 and thus became associated with freedom of speech and democracy (Kunreuther 2006, 327). This differentiation underlines the multiplicity of the constitution of the voice through radio technology. This is how FM voices in Nepal are constituted as authentic and transparent, and technological noise is perceived as an indication of these qualities (Kunreuther 2006, 328).

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Vanessa’s honesty, spontaneity, and straightforwardness to her listeners – as opposed to the smooth-sounding radio hosts of other stations, who are obliged to stick to a specific editorial line. Listeners describe that listening to Confidences is ‘like being in a living room’ (personal communication, 5 December 2012). The variety of technological sounds that figure in the sound of Confidences populates the space of the programme and indicates presences – of Vanessa as well as her listeners – just as the phatic speech and bodily sounds on air contribute to the constitution of the programme as a ‘living room’ in which ‘real’ people meet, sit down, and discuss topics of matter face-to-face. Thus, more than being personal expressions, the voices of Sveta and Vanessa gain social life through particular radio technologies – technologies that to a great extent partake in the construction of subject positions conveyed to the listeners of the programmes and enhance and amplify certain characteristics of the female migrant identities of Sveta and Vanessa largely intended by the institutional programme strategies. Where the noisiness of the technological mediation as well as Vanessa’s radio performances seem to situate her as a ‘real’ person, a ‘real’ migrant woman, whom the listeners ‘meet’ when they turn on the radio, it could be argued that the technologically inaudible mediation and much less spontaneous performance of Sveta to a greater extent position her as an exotic version of an ultra-modern guide, who leads her listeners into a seamless cosmopolitan landscape of sounds.

Conclusion In this chapter we have explored specific radio contexts as unique sites for ethnographic analysis of the mediated voice, aiming to shed light on the various ways in which voices are produced, talked about, shaped, and can shape rooms for agency and for forging relations, and thus why and how the radiophonic voice is a terrain for negotiations of individual and collective identities and of political, cultural, as well as commercial matters. In particular we have explored some of the elements that contribute to producing Sveta’s and Vanessa’s migrant female voices in specific ways on air. Hence, we have sought to amplify the complex relationship between radio mediation and agency, thus complicating the notion of ‘having a voice’ as well as of what radio mediation implies. Bodily organs produce noises – the constant buzz of blood running through the veins, a pounding heart, as well as a cacophony of loud intestinal sounds, just to mention a few – but the live voice is materialized through force. The

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human voice, in other words, comes into being under pressure (Finer 2012, 34), and, accordingly, a voice ‘never simply appears, but is expressed, its shape formed out of resistance’, as Stephen Connor has pointed out (Connor 2004). This description of voice as resistant force relates closely to voice as a metaphor for asserting agency and identity, the sociopolitical position of ‘having a voice’ and using it. Following this line, radio, especially community radio stations, is often celebrated for its capacity to ‘give voice’ to marginalized individuals and communities (Couldry 2010; Gusse 2006; Gordon 2012; Jallov 2012). This power that the voice on the radio seems to be ascribed has been described by performance scholar T. Nikki Cesare as a particular form of ‘dissemination of the body’: ‘The radiophonic voice is the body without organs’, she writes, ‘and breath disseminated across the radio waves is the true liberty’ (Cesare 2004, 24). As shown throughout this chapter, however, the radio voice does not exist merely in ‘true liberty’. Rather, the radiophonic voice is placed within a complex framework of societal structures, institutional and commercial strategies, and technological mediation that complicate the compositions producing and promoting certain subject positions in certain programmes and for certain reasons. In the case of Sveta, we have shown how a space for agency is allocated to her in Verdens musik in spite of her lack of expert knowledge on the subject of the programme and exactly due to her migrant status audible through her accent. Her soft, melodically, and ‘less authoritative’ female voice partakes in serving the exotic dish of world music in a friendly, assimiliable way. The smooth and soundless technological mediation to a great extent partakes in amplifying Sveta as a migrant woman whose ethnicity is linked to interesting musical encounters and a seamless ‘integration’ into Danish airwaves – and, one could assume, into Danish society at large. The listener can, crudely speaking, conveniently tune into Verdens musik and receive a rhythmic dose of cosmopolitanism served by Sveta. Should the voice of the other that Sveta represents suddenly and unexpectedly appear unassimiliable or ‘too different’, the listener can tune out again, no strings attached. However, at the time of the broadcasting of Verdens musik Sveta’s accented voice was probably only considered suitable for broadcasting programmes with a multi- or intercultural profile within DR in general and P3 specifically. In the sense of normalizing and giving a typically marginalized voice such as that of a female migrant access to national media and to the possibilities for agency, thus implies that the potential cosmopolitan intentions of the P3 management should be regarded as closely attached to a marketing strategy of using the specific radio voice of Sveta as a clear signature voice of world music



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programmes. Her gendered migrant voice was believed to have the potential to draw in more listeners. Turning to the case of Vanessa, Beur FM is a well-known station in the French radio landscape, and a large group of loyal listeners regularly tunes into, calls, and participates in Confidences. However, in spite of Beur FM’s aspirations of being a ‘general interest’ station, it does not appear to be able to offer Vanessa a position that reaches the general public. Paradoxically, because Beur FM is believed to cater to a specific ethnicity and therefore considered ‘too other’ by the general French public, Vanessa, unlike Sveta, does not come to represent the exotic other to her listeners. Whereas Sveta is the voice of the other that can accompany the Danish middle class on cosmopolitan ventures, the listeners of Confidences tune into the programme because they consider themselves like Vanessa. Vanessa amplifies this alikeness and in a sense opens it up to listeners outside of the North African community in France by systematically addressing listeners as ‘terrestrials’, thus rejecting ethnic categorization. Both Sveta and Vanessa ‘have a voice’ on air, but it is a voice that appears within a specific institutional framework that allows them to address a particular group of listeners with regard to quite specific subjects. As we have seen, the migrant status and genderedness of Sveta’s and Vanessa’s voices contribute to constituting them as ‘other’ and ‘alike’ in relation to their respective listeners. Each of them can be conceived of as embodying a form of cosmopolitanism, but whereas one is characterized by a seamless smoothness, the other is hooked up with a specific diasporic community and its history. The noises of technological mishaps and bodily sounds come to act as acoustic hooks that ground Confidences in a specific community, whereas the inaudible technology contributes to the seamless smoothness of Verdens musik. We introduced this chapter with two radiophonic beginnings, and through the voices of the hosts of the programmes described we have explored the complex field of meanings that emerges in the space between the individual ‘grain’ of the voice, the institutional framework that surrounds it, and its technological mediation. We have sought to explore the figure of the radio-mediated voice through its shadows in the shape of Sveta’s and Vanessa’s doubly othered female migrant voices in order to offer new perspectives, contributing to the study of radio. As described, Sveta’s and Vanessa’s positions on air are quite different, just as the programmes they host appear in completely different national, institutional, and temporal contexts and have disparate contents and sounds. However, there is a striking semiotic parallel between the ways in which the

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notions of ‘world’ in Verdens musik and ‘terrestrial’ in Confidences are mobilized and contribute to positioning both Sveta and Vanessa on air. It almost seems like, by mobilizing the entire planet, they attempt to draw themselves out of their shadowy position as doubly othered. What does their emergence tell us about radio then? That it is manifold and volatile, that it contains fertile potential for ambiguity, for versions of seamless and grounded forms of cosmopolitanism.

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Music Radio and Nation Building Part Two takes the reader from the Americas (Brazil, Peru, and Canada) to Europe (Finland and Switzerland) in four reflections on how music radio has contributed to nation building. As mentioned in the introduction to this volume, radio has contributed decisively to supporting and developing varying constructions of nation and ideologies of nationalism during the twentieth century and even today. Bringing standard pronunciation, discourses, and musical repertoires to faraway parts of the realm (measured from the broadcasts’ point of origin) helped construct ‘a people’ populating an ‘integral’ geographical area, speaking the ‘same’ language and sharing points of musical reference much more effectively than had been possible via earlier mass media. Each in their way, fascist and democratic regimes developed such ‘constructions’, and they are still important to contemporary media politics, not least in the debates concerning public service radio. As radio studies began to gather speed in the second part of the 1990s several historical studies came to include discussions of such processes (e.g. Hilmes (1997) on the United States and Lacey (1996) on Germany), and more recently early radio’s contributions to nation building have been a concern of several books (Hayes (2000) on Mexico; Neulander (2009) on France; and Hajkowski (2010) on the UK). Benedict Anderson’s conception of nationalism has been important to this work and it is to the chapters in this part as well. He is joined by theoreticians like Friedrich Kittler and Michel Foucault whose concepts of discourse and dispositive help the authors understand the nature of the power struggles that mediated nation building is inevitably part of. While the principles and general strategies of nation building appear to be roughly the same in most countries, the actual initiatives are highly varied and often aimed at specific segments of the populations, and music and sound are

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used in many contrasting ways as well. The first chapter, Pinho and Mendívil’s ‘Broadcasting the New Nation: Radio and the Invention of National Genres in Latin America’, demonstrates how competing ideas of nation used music radio, and especially how local or traditional popular music genres as mediated in specific programmes belonged to ideologies reacting against the hegemony of capitals and European culture. The authors analyse two programme series from the 1930s (Peru) and 1950s (Brazil) introducing popular instruments and genres and using them to invent traditions for future uses. In Brian Fauteux’s ‘The Edufication and Musicalization of Radio: CKUA, “Good Music”, and “Uplifting Taste”’, the question of nation building is less obvious, but still present, as the discussion of national regulations of the relations between commercial and public service broadcasting are important to the case. Fauteux discusses the developments in the public service–like obligations of a Canadian non-state broadcaster from 1927 until today. The intention behind the ‘-ation’ endings is to highlight how the principles of the one and the other become intertwined within the medium of radio. The station’s educational agenda did to some extent dictate what music to broadcast, how to present it, and how to balance programming between being educational and entertaining. Theoretically, this is conceived as an education–music–radio milieu, and as popular music gradually was introduced within this milieu it became a ‘platform for the levelling of cultural hierarchies’. Meri Kytö discusses a specific programme series on soundscapes broadcasted on Finnish national radio in ‘Mediated Soundscapes: Representations of the National in the Soundscape Call-in Programme Äänien ilta’. It is quite an exceptional series reminding us that non-musical sounds may acquire the same functions as music, for example when ‘performed as a narrative of the national past’. The questions posed by Kytö concerns how a programme consisting of recordings of soundscapes and contextualizing talk – the mediation of soundscape recordings – comes to make sense to listeners and also how the programme series contribute to the configuration of the national in soundscape culture. By highlighting the recordings’ need for interpretative frames and the fact that they are made on the basis of dialogue between programme and listeners, the programme points to the ‘classical’ public service listener, the ‘listening citizen’ in order to make soundscape recordings culturally meaningful. At the same time such meanings contribute to the ongoing Finnish nation building by challenging clichés of ‘Finnish silence’ while at the same time creating spaces for remembering and reinterpreting sounds of a common yesterday.



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For Johannes Müske in ‘Dispositives of Sound: Folk Music Collections, Radio, and the National Imagination, 1890s–1960s’ the starting point is sound archives. Like monuments they may support or articulate narratives of national identity. Specifically, sound and music archives may be used to connect notions of, in this case, Swissness with actual music, thus making it ‘Swiss’. As Swiss radio came about in a country speaking four languages, questions of what was essentially ‘Swiss’ became extremely important, not least in competition to German and Italian fascist radio. The answer was double: rooted in landscape and developing modern industries – traditional and modern – though musically, the answer was ‘traditional Swiss popular music’, and Swiss Radio International (SRI) built a huge archive of recordings of relevant music to accommodate this view. Müske’s example illustrates, thus, how Swiss shortwave broadcasting aimed at Swiss and non-Swiss listeners abroad used a specific music archive to articulate contemporary narratives of Swissness. The chapters presented here are all based on archive research and involve surviving broadcasts and written materials. Also, they demonstrate that even though radio as such has contributed and does still contribute to nation building, the attempts at nation building discussed here highlight the contested nature of such endeavours. The Charango programmes of the 1930s did not succeed in changing the national agenda, while the soundscape programmes present nuanced narratives about Finland, challenging but in no way overwriting strong, commercially based accounts.

References Hajkowski, Thomas. 2010. The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayes, Joy Elizabeth. 2000. Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920–1950. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hilmes, Michele. 1997. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Lacey, Kate. 1996. Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Neulander, Joelle. 2009. Programming National Identity: The Culture of Radio in 1930s France. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press

4

Broadcasting the New Nation: Radio and the Invention of National Genres in Latin America Marcio Pinho and Julio Mendívil

Good evening, my friends. No Mundo do Baião (In Baião’s World) by the Brazilian Music Department of Rádio Nacional (National Radio) intends, with strict folk honesty, to explain and spread the North-Eastern rhythms, the moulders of a genuine Brazilian music, which deserves and must have priority of wide spread in our broadcasting. In No Mundo do Baião we will have the opportunity to listen to: côco (an orchestra plays some seconds of each rhythm)  – it seems like a Royal coconut pudding1 – toada (orchestra), frevo (orchestra), maracatu (orchestra) and naturally – what? The baião, of course (orchestra). (The orchestra stops and a guitar starts to play the baião rhythm). Oh God, it is a really smooth rhythm! This is baião, is it or isn’t it, Humberto Teixeira? Yes, Paulo, it is. The rhythm of the country guitar is the true and primitive North’s baião. The true and primitive North’s baião, here it is. Humberto, you, who are the doctor of baião, would be able to tell me: Where was baião born? Baião, Paulo, is as ancient as the North-Eastern countryside, its home. (No Mundo do Baião broadcasted on 17 October 1950)2

This is the introduction to the first episode of the programme No Mundo do Baião broadcasted during prime time on 17 October 1950 by the then main

‘Royal’ is a brand of alimentary goods commercialized by the company Standard Brands, which sponsored the show. All quotes from Spanish- and Portuguese-language oral and written sources have been translated by the authors.

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2

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Brazilian radio station Rádio Nacional. The excerpt is a good outline of the content of the programme: the idea of nationalizing the genre baião through different discursive strategies, among them the affirmation of baião as ‘truthful’ and ‘legitimate’ by the use of terms like ‘genuine Brazilian music’, ‘strict folk honesty’, and ‘true and primitive … rhythm … as ancient as the North-Eastern countryside, its home’. The intention here is also to monumentalize the genre by giving popular music played on folk instruments an orchestral character. Similarly, until the end of the 1930s the radio programme La Hora del Charango (Charango Time) based in the Peruvian city Cuzco aimed to make the small Andean instrument a cultural symbol of the entire Peruvian nation. Inspired by local intellectuals from the old Inca capital, the programme intended to establish a new template for national identity through ‘charango nationalization’. It would act as an alternative to the identity represented by the high social classes in Lima, which constituted the Hispanic Creole, a cultural centre for the entire country (Lloréns Amico 1983, 84). These two examples were part of a common occurrence in Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century: constant (re)negotiations over which conceptions of nation should prevail in the two countries. In this chapter, by examining the discourses of both programmes, we want to analyse how the radio was used by cultural actors to promote new national identities in Brazil and Peru, respectively. In order to achieve our goal we first need to clarify a few central concepts in our argumentation. We apply the ideas of Benedict Anderson (1991), Homi Bhabha (1990), Eric Hobsbawm (2000), and Thomas Turino (2003), among others, who understand the concept of nation as a construct that emerges in a particular place during a particular period of time, invoking an earlier (and often ‘invented’) historical period and becoming a ‘built’ or ‘fabricated’ entity. According to these thinkers, the ‘configuration’ of each nation emerges through processes that strengthen the idea of a united and uniform nation. It can happen both unconsciously thanks to popular artists and more consciously, thanks to intellectuals – and in many cases also supported by governmental policies. Nevertheless, in both Brazil and Peru there was (is), obviously, a strong dispute over which characteristics would prevail in these nations. In both countries the habits, costumes, cultures, and ‘traditions’ of the capital (Rio de Janeiro and Lima, respectively) dominated initially. Later on, strong regional movements emerged in areas far away from the capitals, and they sought to play prominent roles in their respective regions.



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Since the beginning of the twentieth century regional movements have established themselves within art forms such as literature and painting (i.e. indigenism and modernism); however, in both our examples we focus on popular music. Its importance is highlighted by musicologist Melanie Plesch: As it is clear, the discursive construction of a nation requires the creation of symbolic values to sustain itself. Music, with its powerful appellative strength and its extraordinary capability to the expression of collective assertive feelings, occupies a detached place in the values set. (2008, 2)

The idea of ‘musical nationalism’, as developed by Thomas Turino, is also crucial to our work. He defines musical nationalism as ‘any use of music for nationalist purposes’, that is, ‘music used to create, sustain, or change an identity unit that conceives itself as a nation’, and which could be related to ‘creating, sustaining, or transforming national sentiment’ (Turino 2003, 175). The main topic of this chapter is popular music genres broadcasted by the radio. When we speak of music genres, we embrace definitions (initially proposed by Fabbri (1981) and then discussed and developed by Negus (1999); Holt (2007); and Brackett (2016) among others) that consider a genre to be a set of events governed by socially accepted rules. This way, our analysis embodies both the sound structures and the aspects which, although not musical, are essential to genre reproduction. And so we analyse not just the musical aspects of the programmes, but their entire content. We will point to general parallels and programme host comments concerning genres and established theories on ‘nationalism’ and ‘discourse’. As a consequence of the periods analysed, there is a preponderance in various nationalism theories (in general the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) of print material as the main medium for the formation of the nation, for example in the writings of Benedict Anderson (1991).3 Anderson discusses how the mass production and circulation of printed material enabled a simultaneity of experience in a dispersed population. For example, he argues that the newspaper, based on an idea of continuity where it introduces the entire nation to news from different places at various times, supports the notion of a community created by auto-identification among the members, including the places where they live and their histories. More recently,

Anderson is our main source here, as he uses cultural studies as a reference for his thesis, opposing classical studies on the subject by, for example, Ernest Gellner (1983), who linked nationalism and industrialism, and Eric Hobsbawm (2000), who linked nationalism to economic issues.

3

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some researchers explored the ‘creation’ of ‘imagined communities’ through radio. Michele Hilmes worked on the development of radio’s influential narratives of national definition in the United States (Hilmes 1997). Following Anderson’s idea of ‘print capitalism’ (novels, newspapers, and printing presses), Marissa Moorman proposed the concept of ‘sonorous capitalism’ to ‘shift attention … to vinyl records, radio, and recorded sound’ as consumer goods (Moorman 2008, 141). According to Peter Wicke, radio broadcasting was a very important means of disseminating nationalistic discourses during the Third Reich in Germany (Wicke 2001, 90). Joy Elizabeth Hayes has analysed the role of radio within nationalism in the twentieth century, specifically in Mexico. She puts forth important theoretical considerations and argues that two social implications came from the development of the radio medium: ‘the creation of a new mode of mass-mediated intimacy and the formation of a new kind of collective space’ (Hayes 2000, 23). We intend to use the concept of radio as a medium able to spread nationalist ideas as well, and we will address the subject via the work of the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, whose ideas focus on new technical media like photography and the gramophone, which appeared in the late nineteenth century. Approaching radio and nationalism through Kittler will lead us to some important considerations on the subject. When dealing with the different aspects of ‘discourse’ we will focus mainly on Bourdieu’s idea of social distinction, which offers a matrix for understanding questions of national identity linked to issues of status, as negotiated within the social field. Again, we also invoke Kittler, whose concept of media allows us to analyse structural aspects of the discourse beyond its symbolic representation. Building on the discourse theory of Michel Foucault, who restricts himself to discussing the role of writing, Kittler in his book Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (1990) extends the Foucauldian ‘discourse’ to embrace not just the written media, but others as well.4 According to Kittler, since the beginning of the twentieth century the production of knowledge has been conditioned by media networks (Aufschreibesysteme) and thus by the devices which produce, distribute, and reproduce knowledge. Kittler distinguishes between three different forms of media networks: the ‘symbolic’, which reproduces ‘reality’ in a discursive way,

It is important to note that almost all characteristics of sound events stated by Kittler concern the gramophone. However, obviously, many of the issues addressed by Kittler following the invention of the gramophone are closely related to radio, as it is a medium for the transmission of sound, both live and recorded. And so we explore not just the importance of radio, but in some cases also the invention of the gramophone.

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the ‘real’, and the ‘imaginary’, both of which use media and digital technologies to codify and fix the ‘real’ beyond the discourse. Whereas writing represents letters only (symbolic) and not the sounds of language, technical media like radio and television can reproduce sounds and images (the ‘real’), permitting manipulation and transformation (the imaginary) of codified information (Kittler 1999, 15). In this sense, Kittler says, representations constructed by media technologies – technical and digital  – do not reproduce, but create discourses. According to Kittler, media technology represents a main tool in the construction of new collective identities in the modern world. The two programmes studied here were broadcasted in the first half of the twentieth century, which was when radio became the main medium. In Brazil and Peru, as in all other Latin American countries, radio received continuous government funding in the hope that the signals would eventually reach the entire nation. In addition, radio speakers were strategically placed in public squares in small towns. In Brazil the government nationalized Rádio Nacional and bought new transmission equipment which was able to broadcast using shortwave frequencies, making the radio programmes available even in other countries.5 This in turn made radio the main instrument for the transmission of ideas and information, granting it the important role as a vehicle of discourses on nation building. Also, it is important to understand that the majority of the Brazilian and Peruvian population was illiterate when these programmes were aired.6 Thus, radio constituted the only medium of information for this part of the population.

La Hora del Charango and No Mundo do Baião The establishment of radio as a mass medium made the Peruvian government want to spread images of the nation through the radio. These images were based on the idea of a Hispanic nation which emphasized the mestizo character of a supposedly homogeneous Peruvian culture, though with the prevalence of When Rádio Nacional began to use the new equipment in 1942, it became one of the five most powerful radio stations in the world. ‘The equipment had antennas directed to USA, Asia, and Europe, but the most important thing to Rádio Nacional was the wide coverage within its own domain’ (Vicente 2006, 33). 6 According to a 1940 population census, 57.6 per cent of the Peruvian population was illiterate (CICRED 1974, 308), and in 1950 50.6 per cent of the Brazilian population could neither read nor write (IBGE 2000, 24). 5

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a Spanish or European musical heritage (Lloréns Amico 1983, 83). Regarding music, the government opted for a European image, which promoted genres borrowed from Europe (e.g. waltz and polka) as sounding representations worthy of a national status. However, this intention could hardly satisfy the aspirations of the Andean cultural groups, whose culture was fully excluded from the Hispanicoriented part of the nation and considered inferior to those from the old world. The radio programme La Hora del Charango, broadcasted from Cuzco since 1937, was born as a response to the elite in Lima and their Hispanic Creole view of the nation. Conceived by cultural promoter and broadcaster Humberto Vidal Unda, La Hora del Charango intended to make the small five-stringed Andean

Figure 4.1  A Bolivian charango with armadillo-shell resonator and a Peruvian charango with box-shaped resonator (photo by Julio Mendívil).



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chordophone a national symbol representing the Hispanic and Andean fusion. In traditional Andean music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the charango is related to romantic courting and the power of love both in Indian and mestizo traditions (Turino 1983, 82). Likewise, it was related to the notion of the rebellious Indian, personified by the legendary interpreter Pancho Gómez Negrón. In this way, the charango also functioned as a symbol of cultural resistance to an alienation process by Spanish-oriented Peruvians. According to Vidal Unda, this was a consequence of increased radio presence. He states: The name of the charango, that small guitar the cholos7 … carry on their backs every day to pour out their feelings, to cry their pain, or to shout the eureka of their joy, has been chosen as the symbol of these broadcasts. Another name could of course have been chosen, such as ‘the Peruvian hour’, ‘the hour of Cuzco’, or something along those lines, but the charango was preferred because it is humbler and perhaps more cholo. (Humberto Vidal, quoted by Mendoza 2008, 93)

The musical elite in Cuzco played traditional Andean mestizo music on Western instruments like the piano and guitar. According to Vidal Unda, this elite also used the radio as a means of disseminating alien musical cultures, while La Hora del Charango broadcasted popular Andean genres such as huayno and yaraví played on the charango or other traditional or popular instruments to counteract the proliferation of foreign genres like waltz and jazz. Additionally, poems and stories read in Quechua was a way of promoting a Peruvian Andean identity.8 Presented as a cultural opportunity to recover and spread this tradition, the programme stimulated the creation of new artistic languages, for example the charango tipi style. Performers such as Gómez Negrón developed a refined, double-stringed melodic style of playing the charango, although initially in Indian traditions it was solely an accompaniment instrument. The appearance of the charango player Julio Benavente, who adopted the style of Gómez Negrón, on the programme La Hora del Charango became essential to the popularization and acceptance of new styles, even giving them a national presence. In this way, the medium that Vidal Unda has regarded as alienating was used to broadcast to the entire country an Andean identity as an alternative to the musical identity proposed by the coastal capital.

Cholo is the term used by Peruvians to designate modernized or Westernized Indigenous persons in urban areas. It can be used as an affirmative term, but also as an insult. 8 Quechua is considered the Inca language, because it was used as lingua franca during the Inca Empire. 7

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No Mundo do Baião was broadcasted for the first time in October 1950 and ran for four months.9 It was the second programme in a series sponsored by Standard Brands do Brasil, a US company that still trades in nourishment products. The series was called Cancioneiro Royal (Royal Songbook), and every programme contained commercials for Gelatina Royal (Royal Jelly), Pudim Royal (Royal Pudding), Fermento Royal (Royal Leaven), and Molho Saroma (Saroma Sauce). The programme reverberated throughout Brazil. Rádio Nacional was the most important broadcasting station in Brazil, and baião became an enormous success all over the country. No Mundo do Baião was presented every Tuesday at 21.00, prime time, by Paulo Roberto, a renowned host from the station. The programme was presented ‘with the precious collaboration of Humberto Teixeira, the doctor in baião’ and of ‘Zé Dantas, the real North countryman, who will fill the show with poetry and good humour’. It also collaborated with ‘the conductor and arranger, Guio de Morais, of Rádio Nacional’s big orchestra and choir’ (programme broadcasted on 10 October 1950) conducted by Ércole Varetto. The programme ‘always starred the singer and accordion player that everybody loves, Luiz Gonzaga’ (programme broadcasted on 24 October 1950). Gonzaga was also referred to as ‘the ambassador of countryside music in the republic’s capital’ (programme broadcasted on 10 October 1950). Every episode lasted thirty minutes and contained various pieces of music, sometimes played on the instruments typical of the genre (accordion, triangle, zabumba (a bass drum), gonguê (a coconut double bell), and guitar) and sometimes with orchestral arrangements (there was always a complete orchestra available to play the pieces presented on the programme). Stories were told at the beginning of each song, both in the form of comic episodes (acted by Zé Dantas and sometimes also by Paulo Roberto) and more sentimental and lyrical texts written by Humberto Teixeira.

Broadcasting the real In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Kittler relates different media (phonography, cinematography, and typing) to Lacan’s axiomatic registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. In other words, to Kittler, perception and Most No Mundo do Baião programmes were originally recorded on acetate discs, which became part of the Rádio Nacional collection. This collection includes many live recordings of programmes broadcasted by the station as well as some items, scores, and scripts. It was donated in 1972 to the Museum of Image and Sound of Rio de Janeiro, where it is publicly available.

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mediation of the external world changed profoundly with the invention of the new technological media. Written language is associated with the symbolic: Linguistic signs demand decoding, as they are based on series of signifiers. But with the invention of the gramophone the ‘real’ took over from the symbolic, as it was able to record undifferentiated sounds without editing. This made it possible to reproduce a whole series of sounds, allowing particular sounds to be heard in different places and at different times (and in the case of radio transmissions it also allowed sounds to be heard at the same time by different persons in different places). This led Kittler to identify the real with the physiology of a voice. The possibility of sound reproduction, including its transmission through the radio, increased (or at least enhanced) the spectrum of possible aspects that could be handled/represented/addressed when dealing with the cultural conception of a nation. Timbre plays a main role in this scenario. In Peru the charango gained relevance and only appeared as a solo instrument after the invention of the microphone. And La Hora del Charango, by trying to give the instrument a national presence through the performances of Julio Benavente, was essential to the spread of its timbre throughout the country. Similarly, in Brazil the accordion was strongly associated with foreign music (such as tango, waltz, and boleros). But No Mundo do Baião was always trying to associate the instrument with the North-Eastern region, particularly the eight bass key accordion. Gonzaga’s father, Januário, played the eight bass key accordion and was constantly referred to in the programme as a ‘typical’, ‘authentic’ baião player, a synonym for ‘purity’ and ‘tradition’. With the huge success of Luiz Gonzaga and baião throughout the country, the accordion quickly became very popular, to the point of being considered a ‘national craze’, as it was the preferred instrument among the youth for almost a decade. Everybody liked to play the songs of Gonzaga, and the association between accordion and North-Eastern Brazilian music became very intense (Castro 1991, 197–8). Although presented within these discourses as traditional, both instruments were de facto modern. Not just in terms of their morphology, but also in terms of the rhythms they produced. The way both instruments were played, everything was stylized by modern technology, though the discourses stressed their ‘purity’, ‘backwardness’, and ‘authenticity’. It is interesting to note that both the charango and accordion acquired a strong iconic meaning as local instruments, something that was regularly stressed in the respective programmes, even though both have European origins. Any foreign elements, that is, elements from other countries, but also elements from other regions of the country, were consequently denied. Reflecting other contemporary

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discourses, the instruments went through a process of ‘naturalization’ during the two radio programmes, much like the genres, becoming something that fit nationalist discourses. For example, when presenting the rhythm xote, which in Portuguese is pronounced just like the word schottisch, the presenter Paulo Roberto of No Mundo do Baião announced: ‘Here we can hear the light and gracious xote rhythm. The North-Eastern xote has nothing in common with the schottisch, which is a refined and posh dance from Central Europe’ (programme broadcasted on 24 October 1950).10 In the same way, Vidal Unda remarked when presenting the small chordophone that it was a guitar, in this case a ‘cholo’ guitar. The possibility of listening to and transmitting the spoken voice also raised the question of accents in everyday language. The strong accent of people from the North-Eastern part of the country was intentionally applied in No Mundo do Baião, especially in the sketches conducted by Luiz Gonzaga and Zé Dantas. Gonzaga frequently speaks with a (slightly softer) North-Eastern accent, but when Dantas speaks the accent is generally more exaggerated, revealing to us that it is used deliberately. In the first episode of the programme Dantas was presented and invited to talk about the events of childbirth in the countryside in the NorthEastern part of the country. Dantas, who was a physician, began to explain in a formal tone and without a noticeable North-Eastern accent. But he was soon interrupted by the host who told him: ‘No no no no no, Zé Dantas. You’ve got it all wrong. You are talking like a doctor; this is no good. I want you to tell us about the country customs as if you were a country bumpkin.’ And then Dantas began to speak with a very strong accent in a linguistic variation of Portuguese commonly attributed to the Brazilian North-Easterners containing plenty of grammatical mistakes compared to the high-culture language (programme broadcasted on 17 October 1950). This demeanour once again reflects the search for a representation of ‘purity’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘backwardness’. Dantas also used particular words and expressions from the North-East, which also helped to identify the language of the region. These expressions were used in the Brazilian programme by Dantas, who was always inventing different country bumpkin characters. The same expressions were used by Gonzaga, when he adopted a persona, and by Paulo Roberto and Humberto Teixeira when explaining expressions and words unknown outside the North-East, but contained in songs performed in the programme. In a similar way, As this is a transcription of the recorded broadcast and we do not have any original, written material from the programme, the terms xote and schottisch are presented here based on what we believe the broadcaster was talking about; however, his pronunciation, as stated before, was the same for both words.

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the speakers on La Hora del Charango adopted a Cuzco accent laced with Quechua expressions or even the full Quechua language during transmissions. In doing so, Vidal Unda stressed his local identity and projected it onto the whole nation as an alternative to the hegemonic Lima accent. This contextualization of local words and expressions together with descriptions of Cuzco and the Brazilian North-East were used to create an atmosphere and to help transmit an image of these regions to listeners beyond the actual regions. This is pointed out by Kittler when he points to the voice’s power to generate an auditory memory through the sounds and frequencies broadcasted (Kittler 1999, 30–1). A main priority of No Mundo do Baião was to create and shape images visualized by the public while listening to baião: [Guitar playing in the background]. This guitar sound will help the listener to build a typical country scenario. We enter a rustic country street market where it is possible to hear natural voices of a street market [voices added in the background], and here Zé Dantas will tell us something about the North-Eastern healer, a kind of improvised doctor. (Programme broadcasted on 24 October 1950)

Similarly, in the case of the Peruvian programme, the sounds of the charango were related to Indigenous characters, typical Andean dress, and local culture as one unit unconnected to the official Peru. In the examples we have been discussing genres and instruments are part of the acoustic environment, and therefore the contextualization of the songs was vital to creating and transmitting the scenarios which the programme wanted the listeners to visualize when the speakers referred to huaynos or baião. In order to make the scenarios concrete, to make them recognizable or known, it was crucial to describe both the Brazilian North-East and Peruvian Andes as regions, with all their peculiarities, distinguishing them from other parts of the respective countries. On the other hand, in order to acquire the status they were pursuing it was also essential to mark their cultures as national cultures. We will deal with this paradox in the second part of the chapter.

The market of symbolic goods Discourses about genres and instruments function as regional, but also as expressions of a national culture. For this reason their potential as symbolic

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goods is interesting to analyse. In ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’11 Pierre Bourdieu studies how the ‘field of cultural production’ works.12 He highlights, among other things, how the ‘agencies of consecration and legitimacy’ in such fields work, for example, the importance of the ‘position’ of the authors within them. No Mundo do Baião and La Hora del Charango developed discursive and sonic strategies for promoting a regional form of cultural capital that should be able to compete with other national conceptions of cultural capital in both countries. In the case of No Mundo do Baião, the fact that it was broadcasted in prime time by Rádio Nacional, the main Brazilian station at the time, was per se a way of consecrating the programme. In order to give legitimacy to the content of the programme, recurrent attempts were made to demonstrate the participants’ profound knowledge as both musicians and producers. The specialists were constantly placed in distinctive positions within their fields. To make this clearer, we have transcribed some examples here. For instance, Humberto Teixeira was introduced in the following manner: Host: behind the scenes, always hidden from the public, another important personage, Humberto Teixeira, doctor in baião and master of costumes and popular North-Eastern trends. Teixeira: I’ll tell Paulo Roberto lots of things about the North-Eastern countryside. He’ll convey to the listeners all the recollections that I have in the old treasure chest of memories. (Programme broadcasted on 10 October 1950)

The titles ‘master of costumes and popular North-Eastern trends’ and ‘doctor in baião’ accredit Teixeira to speak about the North-East with authority and to transmit it. Something similar occurs with Zé Dantas: Dantas: Dear friends who are listening to No Mundo do Baião. Now we have the pleasure to introduce to you a successful North-Eastern artist who is now having his debut on the radio of Rio de Janeiro. This artist is called José Dantas or Dr.

The article ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’ (‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’) by Pierre Bourdieu, originally published in 1971, was translated into many languages. However, as we did not manage to find a complete translation of the text in English, we use the title and some terms found in the abbreviated version of ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’ from 1984. Other terms and phrases have been translated by us from the Portuguese version of the work titled ‘O Mercado de Bens Simbólicos’ from 1999. 12 The author analyses the ‘restricted production’, but at some point he indicates that his theory could also be applied to ‘middle-brow art’ (Bourdieu 1993, 17–23). We believe that the popular music field works in a similar way – as we can see in the works of Thornton (1996), Hitzler and Niederbacher (2010), and Coulangeon (2005) – so we have applied his ideas here. 11



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José Dantas. For many years José Dantas, Dr. José Dantas, was a physician in the countryside, where he was born. Nobody knows the North-Eastern countryside like he does. He knows the soul of the countryman and how they live, how they suffer, how the countryman sings. Zé Dantas is here to present his first performance in No Mundo do Baião. (Programme broadcasted on 17 October 1950)

The conversation about Luiz Gonzaga also calls for in-depth analysis: Good evening, dear friends. We are together again in No Mundo do Baião. And inside this world Luiz Gonzaga is really renowned. Gonzaga is a genuine countryman of Cariri, an old hoe man, cow keeper, national army bugler, forró accordionist, and nowadays this great popular artist is admired by all. When Humberto Teixeira introduced Luiz to this marvelous world of rhythms, the baião world naturally trusted him, but didn’t properly evaluate the role that Luiz would represent as an authentic ambassador of countryside music. Together they broke routines and taboos about the impossibility of bringing folklore to the large urban centers, but the history of baião is alive and thrilling proof that both made a new mark on the evolution of Brazilian popular music. And the history of baião is indeed the history of Humberto and Luiz as we will hear now. (Programme broadcasted on 31 October 1950)

Besides praising Gonzaga and asserting baião as ‘a new mark in the evolution of Brazilian popular music’, the host naturalizes baião’s history as being the history of Humberto and Luiz. This is at variance with what was said two weeks earlier (excerpt transcribed at the beginning of the chapter), when it was stated that ‘baião … is as ancient as the North-Eastern countryside, its home’. It is possible for the programme participants to create baião’s history by highlighting what is most important at that moment: If the idea is to identify baião as a rhythm born in the North-East, that is, as something immemorial, the discourse points in this direction. On the other hand, if the intention is to demonstrate the importance of Gonzaga and Teixeira to baião, the discourse is modified. However, the cited discourse also unites both definitions when asserting that Gonzaga and Teixeira ‘broke routines and taboos about the impossibility of bringing folklore to the large urban centers’. In other words, the baião heard on Rádio Nacional is claimed to be the same traditional baião that always existed in the North-East. These are the inner conflicts and contradictions intrinsic to discourses aspiring to build a genre history. A similar case of discourses changing the social status of traditional or popular genres can be seen in the history of the Andean musical genre huayno in Peru.

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Whereas until around 1920 the huayno was, for the Peruvian urban elite, an ‘abhorrent music’ form (Gibson 1920, 15) or the quintessential expression of a bucolic life (Alviña 1929, 320), in the mid-twentieth century the huayno became a cultural icon of Andean identity in Peru, mainly due to the monumental work of anthropologist and writer José María Arguedas, who launched a campaign to establish an image of the huayno as a dignified cultural product with historical value. Arguedas argued: In the huayno has remained all the life, every moment of pain, of joy, of terrible struggle, and all these moments in which the people found the light and the access to the big world … . Just like a hundred years ago, the Indio and the Mestizo still find today in this music the whole expression of their spirit and all their emotions. ([1940] 1977, 7)

Arguedas regarded the huayno as a metaphor for the history of the Andean people, proposing it as an emblem of cultural hybridity that combined Andean and Spanish musical elements, but was dominated by Andean values. In this sense, the huayno, according to Arguedas, ceased to be something ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ in the view of Peruvian intellectuals and became a symbol of an ‘ancestral’ Andean culture. In the same way, La Hora del Charango presented the small chordophone as a traditional instrument which linked contemporary Andean culture with its musical past. For this reason, the charango appeared on the programme as a heroic symbol of cultural resistance against the penetration of foreign musical genres like jazz or Argentine tango, and its sonority appeared as a magic power which could act as a cohesive force for the Andean people: When the government decided to present several cities in this country with radio receivers and loudspeakers, it was surely in the belief that it was making this gift to the popular majorities who, naturally, do not have the means to purchase on their own these modern instruments that are already in social life … . Since the municipality had the good idea of placing the loudspeakers that the government had presented to the people of Cuzco in the main square, we have witnessed a tremendous reality  – so tremendous that only the blind and the deaf can deny it. The greatest influx of people to the programs broadcast through those loudspeakers takes place on Monday nights, when Radio OAX 7A broadcast the famed La Hora del Charango. (Vidal Unda quoted by Mendoza 2008, 105)13

This image of the charango as a cultural icon was a clear reduction of charango traditions in Peru. At the same time, Jaime Guardia from Ayacucho had consolidated the charango as a solo instrument in Lima. Guardia played alone or with his trio La Lira Pausina and defined an Ayacucho style, which

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It is also important to consider the musical treatment given to the music in both programmes. In the case of baião, the orchestration of Brazilian popular songs was a recurring element. It was extended by Rádio Nacional’s management in 1943, and gradually an orchestra and an arranger became available to the station’s main programmes for their productions and recordings. Bourdieu criticized such ‘adaptations’, which could ‘provide the illusion of being worthy of a legitimate consumption despite remaining more accessible than the cultural goods that in fact belong to the legitimate order’ (Bourdieu 1999, 144–45). According to testimonies given at the time and to actual studies on the topic, the elaboration of these orchestral arrangements was directly related to a nationalist idea. ‘Giving to Brazilian music an orchestral treatment resembling the ones given to foreign compositions’ (Saroldi and Moreira 2005, 61) was something that probably developed from attempts to promote the samba. As Henrique Foréis Domingues, better known by his alias, Almirante, a central figure in Brazilian popular music and an important producer at Rádio Nacional, states: Today we want to show all the art a samba arrangement could contain. Samba, this rhythm that has been treated unfairly by some snob critics who just see value in foreign music, is, as a musical genre, as good or even better than American fox, Argentinean tango, Napolitanean song, or Viennese waltz. The point in question is that these musics are apparently better because they are musically treated in a more elevated way than our popular song. It boils down, however, to a matter of dressing, of presentation. (Quoted in Cabral 1990, 187)

The idea of ‘treating music in a more elevated way’ was disseminated to all repertoires broadcasted via Rádio Nacional, and also to La Hora del Charango, but in different ways, as we will see soon. In the Brazilian case, the station had 17 arrangers and more than 180 musicians under contract in 1956 (Cabral 1978 quoted in Barbosa and Devos 1985, 63–4). The arrangers could thus choose from numerous timbre combinations, from folk group formations to symphonic orchestras. In general, the arrangements played by the orchestras were based on the symphonic jazz style consolidated in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. In the case of No Mundo do Baião, songs with orchestra arrangements were written mainly for the flute, clarinet, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones, trumpet,

became very popular throughout the Peruvian Andes (Arguedas 1977, 21–3). Nevertheless, La Hora del Charango neither mentioned Guardia nor the Ayacucho style nor any other Peruvian charango style during its transmissions, because the projected image of the programme referred exclusively to the Cuzco tradition of the instrument.

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trombone, violin, viola, cello, bass and drum, piano, and guitar. Depending on the intended cultural connotation, different instrumentations were used for different pieces, for example ‘Canção do Aboio’ (broadcasted on 16 January 1951), which featured the flute, oboe, English horn, bass clarinet, piano, guitar, bass, and a vocal trio. In the case of charango traditions, supporting the soloist career of Julio Benavente, La Hora del Charango also reinforced a new performativity concerning this instrument. Up until then the charango had been considered an Indigenous instrument for accompanying singing, a primitive chordophone that permitted minimal harmonization with three chords. However, with the Julio Benavente style, the charango appeared as a concert instrument, an instrument which could be listened to in a contemplative way. At this time, different attempts were made to develop instrumental music on the charango, linking the instrument to an idea of high culture (Mendívil 2014, 338).

Conclusion Through our analysis in this chapter we have shown that the radio played a decisive role in discussions about nationalism, at least in Latin America. Regional musical movements looking for assertion as national cultures used the radio to spread their ideas as sound. Here the great influence of intellectuals as producers of programmes should be noted, contextualizing songs, performativities, places, characters, and expressions of their regions, projecting them onto the whole nation. Nevertheless, attempts were made at genre naturalization by relating the present (the 1930s and 1950s) with imagined pasts, using new technologies to project this past onto the future. In this sense, the construction of tradition does not appear as a return to the past, but a construction of new identities. The definitions and histories of a given genre vary depending on what aspect had to be highlighted at the given time. ‘Authenticity’ is ‘artificially’ produced, and ‘rusticity’, ‘backwardness’, and ‘humbleness’ are mediated via ‘modern’ technologies. Through the ideas of Kittler we have analysed not just the content broadcasted, but also radio’s performative forms, its importance as a medium of production, distribution, and reproduction of knowledge. Beyond transmitting ideas, the form and possibilities of the radio medium have also been investigated. This led us to important considerations about the dissemination of discourse as a ‘real’



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category and its consequences, that is, the relevance of accent and timbre as possible aspects of discourses propagated by the ‘new’ medium. Both cases also show that, as Geertz asserts, nationalist intellectuals played a very important role in the transformation of the symbolic framework through which people experienced social reality. Discussing and building abstractions like ‘tradition’, ‘national language’, and ‘national spirit’, nationalist intellectuals anticipated an imagined community even before the state appropriated it as ‘ideology’ (Geertz 1973, 239). As we have shown, popular music represents a social field within which musical instruments and genres are used to construct social distinction. Through media these constructions were intended to reach a national dimension. In the case of baião, No Mundo do Baião helped to spread the genre throughout Brazil, and in the Peruvian case, La Hora del Charango failed to popularize the instrument outside the Cuzco area. This happened only later with the influence of the Chilean movement Nueva Canción (Mendívil 2001, 39).

References Alviña, Leandro. 1929. ‘La música incaica: Lo que es, y su evolución desde la época de los Incas hasta nuestros días [Inca Music: What It Is and Its Evolution From the Inca Times Until These Days]’. Revista Universitaria XIII (2): 299–328. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2nd edn). London: Verso. Arguedas, José María. 1977. Nuestra música popular y sus intérpretes [Our Popular Music and Its Performers]. Lima: Mosca Azul & Horizonte Editores. Barbosa, Valdinha, and Anne Marie Devos. 1985. Radamés Gnatalli: O eterno experimentador [Radamés Gnatalli: The Eternal Experimentalist]. Rio de Janeiro: Funarte. Bhabha, Homi. 1990. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’. In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson, 112–41. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. ‘O Mercado de Bens Simbólicos [The Market of Symbolic Goods]’. In A economia das trocas simbólicas [The Economy of Symbolic Exchanges], edited by Pierre Bourdieu, 99–179. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Brackett, David. 2016. Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cabral, Sergio. 1978. Pixinguinha: vida e obra (Pixinguinha: Life and Works). Rio de Janeiro: Funarte.

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Cabral, Sérgio. 1990. No Tempo de Almirante: uma história do rádio e da MPB [The Age of Almirante: A History of the Radio and Brazilian Popular Music]. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves. Castro, Ruy. 1991. Chega de Saudade: a história e as histórias da Bossa Nova [No More Blues: The History and the Stories of Bossa Nova]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. CICRED Series. La Poblacion del Peru [The Population of Peru]. 1974. Accessed 15 July 2017, http://www.cicred.org/Eng/Publications/pdf/c-c41.pdf. Coulangeon, Philippe. 2005. ‘Social Stratification of Musical Tastes: Questioning the Cultural Legitimacy Model’. Revue Française de Sociologie 46: 123–54. Fabbri, Franco. 1981. ‘A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications’. In Popular Music Perspectives, edited by David Horn and Philip Tagg, 52–81. Gothenburg and Exeter: International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gibson, Percy. 1920. Coca, alcohol, música Incaica y periodismo [Coca, Alcohol, Inca Music and Journalism]. Arequipa: Tipografía Sanguinetti. Hayes, Joy Elizabeth. 2000. Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920–1950. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hilmes, Michele. 1997. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Hitzler, Ronald, and Arne Niederbacher. 2010. ‘Leben in Szenen’. In Formen juvenile Vergemeinschaftung heute. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Wissenschaften. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 2000. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, Fabian. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. IBGE. ‘CensoDemográfico 1950/2000 [Population Census 1950/2000]’. In Tendências Demográficas no período 1950/2000. Accessed 15 July 2017, https://www.ibge.gov.br/ home/estatistica/populacao/censo2000/tendencias_demograficas/comentarios.pdf. Kittler, Friedrich. 1990. Discourse Networks: 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lloréns Amico, José Antonio. 1983. Música popular en Lima: criollos y andinos [Popular Music in Lima: Coastal and Andean Music]. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Mendoza, Zoila. 2008. Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mendívil, Julio. 2001. Todas las voces: artículos sobre música popular [All the Voices: Articles about Popular Music]. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional de Perú y Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.



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Mendívil, Julio. 2014. ‘Huayno’. In Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World, vol. 9 (Genre: Caribbean and Latin America), edited by John Shepherd and David Horn, 386–92. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury. Moorman, Marissa Jean. 2008. Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times. Athens: Ohio University Press. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge. Plesch, Melanie. 2008. ‘La lógica sonora de la generación del 80: Una aproximación a la retórica del nacionalismo musical argentino [The Sonorous Logic of the Generation of ‘80: An Approach to the Rhetorical of Argentinean Music Nationalism]’. In Los caminhos de la música: Europa y Argentina [The Ways of Music: Europe and Argentina], 55–110. Jujuy: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy. Saroldi, Luiz Carlos, and Sonia Virgínia Moreira. 2005. Rádio Nacional, o Brasil em sintonia [Rádio Nacional: Brazil in Tune]. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: University Press of New England. Turino, Thomas. 1983. ‘The Charango and the “Sirena”: Music, Magic and the Power of Love’. Latin American Music Review 4 (1): 81–119. Turino, Thomas. 2003. ‘Nationalism and Latin American Music: Selected Case Studies and Theoretical Considerations’. Latin American Music Review 24 (2): 169–209. Vicente, Eduardo. 2006. A Música Popular sob o Estado Novo (1937–1945) [Popular Music under Estado Novo (1937–1945)]. Relatório Final de Iniciação Científica [Final Report of undergraduate research]. Accessed 30 July 2017, http://www.usp.br/ nce/wcp/arq/textos/37.pdf. Wicke, Peter. 2001. Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

5

The Edufication and Musicalization of Radio: CKUA, ‘Good Music’, and ‘Uplifting Taste’ Brian Fauteux

Ken Regan, the former CEO of CKUA Radio in Edmonton, Alberta, maintains a collection of emails and messages sent by listeners and musicians that express praise for the station and its support for local and independent musicians. One of these messages that Regan mentioned to me during an interview is from John Wort Hannam, a folk artist from Alberta, who has ‘never had a commercial hit but is well known because of CKUA playing his music and his songs’ (Regan 2015). Regan attributed CKUA’s ability to foster connections with local artists and listeners to the station’s pursuit of the ideal of radio as an instrument for providing a voice for the community, and he cited the founding principle of CKUA: to serve the community as the first educational broadcaster in the country (Regan 2015). Today, the station continues to broadcast from Edmonton, Alberta (Canada’s most northern metropolis with a population of over one million), and as of 2016, from a studio in Calgary, Alberta, as well (300 kilometres south of Edmonton). CKUA can be heard on sixteen FM frequencies in different cities or regions across the province of Alberta. It is licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC, Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator) as a commercial undertaking but with unique licence conditions, which include a specialty format and restrictions pertaining to advertising and sponsorship. In 2014, the station removed a requirement that stipulated 6.5 hours of formal educational programming would be broadcasted per week (CRTC 2014). However, the station’s musical programming remains informed by the educational mandate that has helped to define the station since its inception as Canada’s first public broadcaster in 1927.



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Educational radio may refer, somewhat broadly, to listener-supported, community, and/or public stations that have educational mandates, histories as educational broadcasters, and/or connections to educational institutions such as a college or campus radio stations (see Fauteux 2015). In this chapter I explore the education-oriented constellation of music and radio. I use the example of CKUA to argue that the programming of popular music by educational radio constitutes a case that involves a history in which radio was influenced by educational pursuits; in other words, an ‘edufication’ of music radio. This process has shaped the treatment of music by not only CKUA but other stations that have sought a balance of educational and entertainment programming, such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s national public broadcaster. These stations, and the intermingling of education and entertainment, create a platform for disseminating music that aims to ‘uplift’ the tastes of listeners. CKUA transmits cultural and musical aspects of the educational institution to faraway audiences. While my argument can be situated within ongoing discussions and debates about theories of mediatization, I am primarily concerned with how education and music have intertwined as radio has developed, not as a dichotomy but as an interrelation. In turn, I open up the streams of edufication and musicalization within the radio milieu. My interest in the ‘education–music–radio’ milieu acknowledges the prominent influence of an educational mandate on CKUA and, importantly, a set of related broadcasting policies and cultural practices that are tied to educational goals and pursuits. By exploring the intermingling spheres of education and entertainment it becomes apparent that an education–music–radio milieu is a platform for the levelling of cultural hierarchies, the simultaneous reinforcement and breaking down of assumptions about the ‘seriousness’ of music genres, the enrichment of public life through showcasing local music, and the justification of a station’s relevance to its own listening community. Through an analysis of CKUA’s archival materials I suggest that the station’s music programming complicates the divide between educational and entertainment (or ‘serious’ and ‘light’) programming – an issue raised in the early days of crafting music policy for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (Doctor 1999; Scannell 1981) and one present as ‘jazzed’ versions of classical songs aired on American radio stations in the late 1920s and into the 1930s (Wurtzler 2007, 199) – and reflects, in musical ways beyond formal educational programming, the station’s long history as an educational broadcaster. Although

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the nature and definition of CKUA’s educational mandate has changed over the years, it now informs the station’s treatment of local music as a public good and radio as a means for building community, particularly against a consolidated and centralized radio industry.

Edufication and musicalization Popular music reaches listeners as a mediated form. Its format and context can communicate tactility and a perceived warmth (vinyl records), mobility (smart phones and streaming music services), or a sense of community and comradery (a live performance at a music festival). On the mediation of music, Georgina Born writes that music is bound up ‘in the broader institutional forces that provide the basis of its production and reproduction, whether elite or religious patronage, market exchange, the arena of public and subsidized cultural institutions, or late capitalism’s multi-polar cultural economy’ (Born 2005, 7). Our reception of music is shaped by the institutions that produce and transmit sounds (such as a university radio station and its distinct policies and internal mandate). Related to mediation are theories of mediatization that account for moments of historical and technological change in media communication and the ways that these changes affect other aspects of our social and cultural world (Hepp 2013, 38). Contemporary society is absolutely permeated by media, as Hjarvard (2008) argues, in which ‘the media may no longer be conceived of as being separate from cultural and other social institutions’ (105) and media institutions have achieved a degree ‘of authority that forces other institutions  … to submit to their logic’ (106). There are competing perspectives with regard to how and where to locate processes of mediatization. For instance, Couldry and Hepp identify two traditions of mediatization research, that of the institutionalist and the social-constructivist tradition (2013, 196). Hjarvard and Petersen (2013), working in the tradition of Raymond Williams and the notion that culture is ordinary, advance a helpful perspective within the study of mediatization, one emphasizing that the nature of cultural change, due to media’s growing authority and integration ‘into nearly all cultural practices’, is dependent on context (2). In this case, attention must not only be paid to music on the radio in a broad sense, but music and educational radio in the province of Alberta. However, with respect to the particular relationship between radio and music that is explored below, I



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encourage a deconstruction of mediatization theory, especially as described by Hjarvard (2008) above, by considering the two-way processes that exist with respect to media and culture. Working ‘to develop analytical strategies at lower levels of abstraction’ and to ‘develop a more detailed understanding of the mediatization processes as they unfold’, Michelsen and Krogh (2017) advance the idea of heterogeneous milieus of music radio in order to ‘grasp the meetings and negotiations between music(al life) and radio’ (522, 525). This notion is apt, given its attention to additional actors and institutions that contribute to the changes in cultural life that mediatization theory seeks to understand. Michelsen and Krogh provide the examples of national media policies and advertising industries. How, then, are radio formats or programming strategies determined by the station’s sense of itself, especially in relation to other broadcasters and media outlets and in relation to listener demographics and demands? In the case of CKUA in Alberta, an ongoing understanding of the station as an educational institution has formed a specific set of broadcasting policies and internal station philosophies that determine its musical programming. Michelsen and Krogh call attention to the ways that ‘radio and music(al life) have influenced and influence each other in intricate ways’ (2017, 521) and challenge definitions of mediatization that assume the ‘media/communication component dominates the other, weaker component in some way or another’ (2017, 523). Such definitions fail to address ‘the two-way, even if asymmetrical, distribution of power between the analytical components in question’ and the authors suggest that there ‘are concrete situations where it would, in fact, be more precise to speak of relations’ and that we might speak of ‘integration instead of influence’ (2017, 523–24). The discussion below explores the two-way relationship between educational institutions and radio throughout the history of CKUA. I use the term ‘edufication’ to call attention to the processes by which the education of listeners through the new medium of radio, and the development of educational programming for a general public, shaped the station’s development and its role in Alberta culture and music(al life). Writing on CKUA’s early drama programming, Howard Fink explains that there were ‘few consistent North American parallels to CKUA’s rich mix of cultural and educational programming’ (1987). He adds that Canada did not ‘enjoy a similar variety of programs nationally until the [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] began to offer them towards the end of the [1930s]’ (Fink 1987). CKUA’s blend of education and cultural programming, including

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music, was an important influence on the national public broadcasting sector that was emerging in the 1930s. Also developing at CKUA were ideas about how musical programming could be educational, reflecting the integration of education and entertainment within a milieu of education–music–radio. CKUA’s history is also marked by the musicalization of educational radio in which musical life, and the technological developments in the production and performance of music, shaped the medium and influenced ideas about how and why radio programming can be educational. Pontara and Volgsten explain that musicalization can be ‘characterized by an ever-increasing presence of music in culture and everyday life’ (forthcoming). It is a phenomenon connected to changes in technology as well as cultural processes at a given historical moment. Two central aspects of musicalization provided by the authors include ‘the ubiquity of media representations and mediated cultural discourses on music’ and an increasing influence of ‘musical dramaturgy’ (music’s increasing presence in different kinds of mediatized narratives) on other areas of culture and on everyday life (Pontara and Volgsten, forthcoming). Musicalization can account for the place of music in structuring radio programming as well as the everyday lives and habits of listeners. As I detail below, a discourse of radio’s educational role begins to increasingly emphasize music’s educational value, particularly as the radio announcer becomes a more integral component of the music-station–listener relationship throughout the 1960s (as evident in histories of CKUA and in station-generated discourse). A particular milieu of education–music–radio has roots in early educational broadcasting and, today, influences CKUA’s uniqueness against a centralized commercial radio landscape in Canada. CKUA, in its programming of popular music from a wide variety of genres and with a strong focus on Alberta music and culture, upholds the founding mission of serving the wider community through education and culture, which was formed in the station’s first years at the University of Alberta.

CKUA and the edufication of radio The use of radio by the University of Alberta for educational purposes can be linked to the mission of its first president, H. M. Tory in 1908, who recognized the ability of a provincial university to promote and engage in province-wide informal education (Corbett 1950, 5–6). The Canadian adult educator E. A.



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Corbett described the director of the university’s Department of Extension, A. E. Ottewell, carrying ‘in his battered Ford car the first moving pictures that thousands of Alberta children and grown-ups had ever seen’, as well as a ‘magic lantern’, slides, books, pamphlets, and ‘a great understanding of the economic and domestic problems of life on a prairie farm’ (Corbett 1950, 6). By 1927, radio technology was being built and designed on a number of college campuses and its use was growing around the world. At this time, the University of Alberta did not have the money required to develop its own station, but a request was made for a $7,000 grant to hire a lecturer in the Department of Extension (McCallum 1967, 16). Deceptively, this money would be used to develop and launch CKUA. With the station in operation, educational, cultural, and musical programming was broadcasted from the university to the wider community, including lectures and live musical performances. By the end of the 1930s, lectures and recorded music, ‘particularly symphonic music, became the station’s mainstay for lack of money to finance more ambitious programs’ (Walters 2002, 81). In 1943, the station continued through the summer months for the first time ever. However, live programming was in decline with the university only producing three live programmes a week: on science, home economics, and agriculture. Recorded music accounted for two-thirds of the station’s original programming (Walters 2002, 82). In 1945, the station’s licence was transferred to Alberta Government Telephones (a public utility until 1958 when it became the Alberta Government Telephones Commission, a crown corporation) and the station was moved from the university to downtown Edmonton. The university was given a period of at least three hours of programming a day. It used these hours to continue with its regular programming that included radio talks and ‘an hour each afternoon and evening devoted to ‘good music’ (‘good’ referring to classical music) (Walters 2002, 87, 102). The station’s commitment to education was also solidified through its participation in the ‘National Radio Forum’, a joint project of the Canadian Association for Adult Education and the CBC. In the late 1940s, CKUA expanded its educational endeavours by offering a series of programmes about test pieces for students taking music conservatory examinations (ACCESS Alberta 1977, 1). The station’s broadcast guide from October 1947 included a map of all the ‘places that listen to the Department of Education’s Correspondence School Broadcasts’ (CKUA 1947, Figure 5.1). Fourteen original educational programmes were produced by CKUA each week and were broadcasted on CKUA, CJCJ in Calgary, and were also sent to CFGP in Grand Prairie, just over 400 kilometres north-west of Edmonton, to

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Figure 5.1  A map illustrating the numerous places that listen to Alberta’s Department of Education’s correspondence school broadcasts. This is included in a CKUA Broadcast Guide from October 1947. Image courtesy of the University of Alberta Archives Accession #2006-204.

be played the subsequent week. The following year, the station’s programme guide included an article by Kathleen N. Lardie (1948) titled ‘Radio and the Classroom’. Lardie explored reasons why some teachers had yet to successfully implement radio in the classroom. Her article indicated how at least some



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educators wanted education to become heavily influenced by the new medium of radio and that the medium was in the process of working to actually exert this influence. Lardie explained, ‘Radio education will never be adopted until there is better understanding by parents and teachers of radio’s great power, as well as trained personnel to produce and utilize radio broadcasts effectively and adequate budgets to purchase necessary equipment for the reception and production of radio broadcasts’ (Lardie 1948). Lardie implored teachers to become ‘alert’, ‘progressive’, and ‘modern’, for these are the teachers who know that radio is ‘an instrument that can bring rural and urban communities, to rich and poor, to the physically fit and the disabled, to the home and the school’. These teachers were described as aware of radio education as ‘history in the making’ and they taught radio programmes with ‘an interested attitude’ in a ‘healthy climate’ (Lardie 1948). CKUA’s use of radio to bring the university to the wider community in its early years had inspired the use of radio in Alberta’s high school sector after the station had moved from the university campus to downtown Edmonton in 1945. The effective use of radio was judged by the instructor or orator’s ability to use the medium in an engaging and active manner. Thus, there were ways that broadcasting for the purpose of education shaped the sound of radio broadcasting. An evaluative document titled ‘Suggestions for the Preparation and Presentation of Radio Talks’ was shared with CKUA ‘radio speakers’ in 1943 in order to help the many speakers who had not received instruction in ‘radio script-writing, or the presentation of such material’. The document noted characteristics for both ‘Good’ and ‘Poor’ radio talks. ‘Good’ talks included an informal, friendly beginning; frequent use of the devices of direct address: personal pronouns (‘you’ not ‘I’), questions, repetitions, and so on; emotional appeals; active, action verbs; and simple words. ‘Poor’ talks were judged by cold formal introductions; long and complex sentences; passive verbs; and a tendency to cover too much material (‘Suggestions …’ 1943). A similar rhetoric of prescribing listening and speaking techniques was practised by the BBC in 1930. As Jennifer Doctor describes, the BBC published a handbook that taught listeners ‘good listening’ practices, such as ensuring that the radio set was in good working shape and choosing radio programmes as carefully as one would choose which theatre to go to (1999, 36). Evidently, within the larger sphere of non-commercial radio in the 1930s and 1940s, specific ideas about effective speaking and listening were bound to aspirations about radio’s potential as an educational medium. Further, this example indicates the relevance of analysing

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the influence of education on radio. Principles of education, including ideas from elocution studies, that were taken up by radio advocates helped to define what radio was, or could be. A discourse of education continued to shape CKUA’s development and direction in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956, a ‘Radio Broadcasting Report of the Senate Committee, University of Alberta’ reflected on the university’s programming since 1925 and claimed that regular radio broadcasting ‘has been one important means of implementing “an essential part of the basic philosophy on which the University was built”’. Another example was a 1958 proposed promotional letter sent from CKUA radio director Guy Vaughan to the station’s vice president, Dr W. H. Johns. The promotional material said, ‘In this modern world of ever-increasing demand for the well-educated man or woman, it does not pay to remain behind. Mother and Dad realize this only too well and are ever urging Brother and Sister to lay a solid background, to meet tomorrow’s high educational demands in all fields of endeavour’ (Vaughan 1958). The letter claimed that the University of Alberta, ‘YOUR UNIVERSITY’, and its Radio Service, was realizing ‘the crying need for the well-educated man or woman of tomorrow’s world’. Between 1974 and 1994 CKUA was under the control of the newly formed Alberta Educational Communications Corporation (ACCESS), a crown corporation formed to assume control of provincial educational broadcasting. The move to ACCESS granted CKUA a ‘breather’ by the CRTC, which, as of 13 July 1972, was under order to enforce a directive from the federal government to ban provincial governments and their agencies from holding broadcast licences. ACCESS, as an independent corporation not directly controlled by a provincial government, could hold the licence and ensure that a definition of ‘educational programming’ that was established during provincial-federal negotiations over educational television was met (Walters 2002, 180). This lessened the university’s involvement with the station, although it would continue to supply ACCESS and CKUA with weekly programmes produced on campus by its radio and television department. CKUA ended its formal relationship with the university in the early 1980s (Walters 2002, 220). The mid-1980s saw an economic recession in Alberta and CKUA felt pressure to deal with the province’s deficit by considering a move to broaden its appeal with a larger group of ‘mainstream’ Albertans (Walters 2002, 226, 237). A new funding model was developed with a ‘new publicly accountable body’ [that] would raise one-quarter of the funds from private sources and corporate sponsorship and



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government would provide the balance’ (Walters 2002, 245). A three-year business plan released in 1988 established CKUA as ‘the preeminent provincial FM radio service’ in the areas of adult cultural and information radio that displayed the talents of Albertans and in the areas of ‘“classical, jazz, blues, and folk music programing”. Gone was the formal education mandate’ (Walters 2002, 251). The emphasis on the FM band is significant given its superiority for musical high fidelity than that of AM radio. Also of note is that the genres of rock and alternative are not emphasized by CKUA in the late 1980s, although these musical styles would become more prominent in station discourse shortly thereafter. Although the station was moving away from a more direct engagement with ‘formal’ education, its history as an educational broadcaster was informing its treatment of more ‘popular’ musical programming, indicating the intertwining of education, entertainment, and music. This move also echoed the station’s early goal of bringing the university to the people. In 1994, ACCESS would privatize and move to sell the CKUA radio network to the CKUA Radio Foundation so that it could operate ‘as a self-sustaining public broadcaster under a charitable organization’ (Walters 2002, 270–73). The objective of the new organization ‘would be “to use radio broadcasting on a notfor-profit basis to provide programming which makes educational instruction broadly available for post-secondary credit courses and enhances and promotes a better understanding and appreciation of the arts, music, literature, history and culture”’ (Walters 2002, 274). In 1997, the station would go off the air for five weeks due to mismanagement of funds by station management. Listeners, staff members, and members of the arts community launched a ‘Save Our Station’ coalition and soon the station was back in operation (Walters 2002, 311). As of 2002, CKUA ‘had one of the few Group 3 Specialty broadcast licences in Canada’. The station was required to broadcast at least six and a half hours of ‘formal educational programming per week’ (Walters 2002, 350). CKUA was becoming, according to Ken Regan, a ‘broadcasting hybrid’ with a commercial radio structure and a public radio format (Walters 2002, 351). Despite changes to the station’s operation, the idea of radio as a form of education in CKUA’s early days played an important role in shaping its programming. From an educational station on the university campus to a broadcasting hybrid in downtown Edmonton, the station’s history and legacy as one founded on the goal of bringing the university to the larger community has had a lasting role on the station’s programming of less-than-mainstream and local popular music. Radio was an important medium for democratizing education by bringing the university to the general public; as was music as it became an important vehicle

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for shaping the minds and cultural lives of Alberta listeners. Of course, this raises an important question of how to reconcile entertainment programming with an educational broadcasting mandate.

Musicalization and uplifting taste CKUA’s history indicates numerous ways that music and entertainment programmes have been strategically positioned as having educational value (more on this below). However, the poles of entertainment and education, or at least ideas about entertainment and education, have also been at odds within the world of educational and non-commercial radio. To consider the BBC by comparison, its music policies of the 1920s worked to negotiate the competing spheres of education and entertainment. The BBC initially emerged as an educational institution ‘rather than an entertainment facility’ although there were ways that an ‘idealized concept of entertainment’ worked to ‘widen listener’s intellectual and cultural horizons and to heighten their critical perceptions’ (Doctor 1999, 26–7). In 1974, the director of ACCESS Radio, J. W. Hagerman, wrote a letter to Danny Henry of the Committee on RV-FM, who was soliciting advice on how to establish a university-community FM radio station at the University of Toronto. Hagerman told Henry, ‘We operate under a definition of educational broadcasting laid out in a directive to the CRTC from the Federal government, and I suggest you avoid it like the plague. You will have difficulties enough without it!’ (Hagerman 1974). At times, CKUA listeners expressed frustration with the station sounding too popular. David J. Lewis, a listener and professor of psychiatry, wrote to the station in September 1974 to say, ‘I have also noticed that the kind of popular music that you have been purveying has been becoming more and more like the standard product pouring out of your competitor’s wave lengths’ (Lewis 1974). Regardless, the blend of educational and entertainment programming that CKUA would work to balance can be contextualized within the cultural, musical, and political shifts that the station and listeners have undergone over CKUA’s long history. As far back as the Aird Report from 1929 – the Royal Commission that examined Canadian broadcasting argued the need for a public broadcasting sector, and set in motion the development of the CBC – non-commercial broadcasting was believed to be able to balance education and entertainment: ‘The potentialities of broadcasting as an instrument of education have been



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impressed upon us; education in the broad sense, not only as it is conducted in the schools and colleges, but in providing entertainment and of informing the public on questions of national interest’ (The Aird Report quoted in Walters 2002, 48). The intertwining of entertainment and education was written into official documentation on the development of non-commercial radio broadcasting in its earliest years. After five years of operation, CKUA would install a new transmitter and build its own lines to the football field and the University Hospital recreation ‘“Hut” from which point weekly programs of popular music were picked up’ (McCallum 1967, 23). ‘Hut concerts’ were intended for veterans of the First World War who were still receiving treatment at the hospital. These concerts, as well as the Music Hour, the Homemaker’s Hour, and the Old Timer’s Dances ‘were the sugar coating on the educational prescription’ (McCallum 1967, 24). CKUA would continue in this tradition, finding effective ways to treat music seriously and in service of its listeners’ development as citizens and cultural consumers. Over its history, CKUA has moved farther from the University of Alberta, geographically speaking, but also with respect to its educational mandate and operations. That said, the station has been persistent in its treatment of music as a form of education and this philosophy informs the station’s emphasis on music and culture in Alberta today. CKUA has included popular genres in its music programming over the years, such as rock and alternative, and it has simultaneously and convincingly argued that knowledgeable announcers and hosts have the ability to raise the aesthetic taste of its listenership by making ‘informed’ musical selections from a diversity of musical styles and sounds. By integrating ideas of education with music, CKUA’s development also reflects the musicalization of educational radio by which the drive to educate listeners about music and ‘uplift’ taste became educational goals. A particular milieu of education–music–radio, then, demonstrates how both educational institutions and musical life shaped radio and its relationship to listeners in Alberta. The period between 1956 and 1968 has been referred to by some writers and CKUA staff members as the station’s ‘golden age’. Defining aspects of this period include a decision to ‘eschew the popular route’ in radio broadcasting (i.e. to focus on underserved genres such as folk and blues) and to hire announcers with ‘a depth of knowledge and passion for music’ (Walters 2002, 131, 133). Importantly, this ‘golden age’ is largely defined by the station’s musical programming. The musicalization of educational radio throughout the 1950s and 1960s at CKUA is marked by a transformation of on-air education by ideas about music’s ‘quality’

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and ‘value’ and its ability to improve a listener’s taste. Throughout the 1950s, the university continued ‘its programs of “ideas and good music”’. Its most popular programme was the daily Music Hour, a variety of classical works, and by ‘1956 was believed to have had the “longest continuous career of a radio program in Canada”’ (Walters 2002, 122; Figure 5.2). CKUA has emphasized the fact that its radio hosts are not bound by a commercial format radio logic that involves the DJ prescribing and promoting hit songs. Long-time CKUA announcer and record producer Holger Petersen (whose Natch’l Blues has been on the air since 1969) featured CKUA’s music in his contribution to A Sound for All Seasons (1987), a short book commemorating CKUA’s sixtieth anniversary. Petersen noted that one of the station’s most significant contributions is its ‘legendary’ record library, which ‘is probably the most extensive one in Canada’ (1987, 30). He added that this library includes ‘every kind of music, including approximately 428 discs of Beethoven music and 190 by Duke Ellington. In this sixtieth year, the total count approaches 55,000 items. No wonder the announcers (not DJs, thank you) have a tradition of being knowledgeable music freaks, vinyl junkies, and electric-music experts’ (1987, 30). CKUA encourages a different sort of listening experience, according to Petersen. Listeners are treated ‘as intelligent, open-minded adults. The content has substance. The music is presented for enjoyment and cultural

Figure 5.2  A month of scheduled programming by the University of Alberta’s Music Hour. Image Courtesy of the University of Alberta Archives Accession #2006-204.



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enrichment by an announcer who probably knows the name of every musician on the session and who tells you something about the music instead of the sponsor. The process is a lifelong education for announcer and listener alike’ (1987, 30). Throughout the 1960s (CKUA’s ‘golden age’) the programming practices and personalities of announcers reflected notable shifts in popular music culture that went along with ‘the social, political and musical revolution that was happening at the time’. Folk and rock were taken seriously as political and cultural forces, ‘a host of talented singer-songwriters and groups outside the mainstream were becoming available on recordings; and acid rock was bubbling up from the underground’ (Walters 2002, 133–34). As Bernard Gendron charts, the mid-tolate 1960s also saw the emergence of a ‘serious’ rock press and professional rock critic (2002, 190). In her thorough history of CKUA, Marylu Walters writes that ‘audio artist’ and ‘missionary’ may be the best terms for describing ‘the new breed of announcer that populated CKUA in the 1960s’ (2002, 141). One example she provides describes an announcer who played ‘Michelle’ by the Beatles, a daring move since ‘CKUA never played any popular music’ (a point indicating the subjective hierarchies within the category of ‘popular’, including what does or does not count as popular to different people) (Walters 2002, 143). In 1964, the year before ‘Michelle’ was recorded and released, one CKUA listener wrote to the station to express her satisfaction towards the station’s presentation of ‘material of excellent quality and in good taste and who are not victims of “Beatlemania” and other forms of mass hysteria’ (Pretty 1964). However, mirroring the Beatles’ move to a more ‘serious’ form of rock music from 1965 to 1966, one CKUA announcer dedicated an hour-long programme on the Beatles, ‘providing analysis of “some of the more cerebral work that wasn’t played on other stations”’ (Walters 2002, 144). Evidently, treating popular music seriously establishes new cultural hierarchies within entertainment programming. These hierarchies and taste-based dispositions are formed and policed, recalling Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of cultural capital and distinction (1984, 1993) and the ways in which this has been explored with respect to connoisseurship (Straw 1997) and hipness in popular music formations. New hierarchies establish new power dynamics whereby some music is judged to be superior to others. However, within a major city radio market, with most frequencies devoted to fairly rigid programming practices dictated by format rules and record industry connections (Berland 1990, Percival 2011), CKUA’s privileging of lengthy discussions about music, an emphasis on an announcer not the DJ, and the large and diverse record library, adds significant variety to the radio dial.

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In the 1980s, a programme titled Musical Compositions featured announcer and musician Tommy Banks, ‘your host and musical guide’, who explained the form and structure of popular music to listeners. On a show from 16 November 1981, Times in Music, Banks explained rhythm and time signatures in popular music. He informed listeners that the backbeat ‘occurs on the second and fourth beats of the measure’ and it is ‘the natural place to clap when you’re listening to pop music that came from jazz, blues, and rock n roll’. Musical education, then, has been understood by CKUA as something announcers engage in as they carefully select music. The example of Musical Compositions indicates that listeners were also being educated on the structure of popular music itself.

Music and the ‘middlebrow’ listener The listener, then, is imagined to be more than a ‘fantasy consumer’, the already established fan of a particular genre who is ready to purchase the next album conforming to their already established tastes. This idea can be traced back to the 1930s, as made evident by Guy Vaughan, who, speaking on-air for the station’s thirtieth anniversary, pointed to the musician and choirmaster Vernon Barford’s ‘Musical Lecture Recitals’, which ‘proved immediately popular’ in the early 1930s and had listeners express appreciation for the fact ‘that they had learned more about music through those lectures – than they had in a lifetime previously’ (CKUA Radio Station 1957). The station certainly catered to listeners with an established taste for ‘higher’ cultural fare well before the proliferation of the 1960s radio announcer with ‘excellent’ taste. The University of Alberta’s Music Hour was promoted throughout the 1950s as a place to hear Chopin, Puccini, and Mozart, describing itself as an outlet for ‘serious’ and ‘good’ music. From the late 1950s, promotional material for the Music Hour explained, ‘In every family, there is always someone, who likes good music. Why not make it a good habit then of listening to this recorded program of the world’s greatest music’ (Vaughan 1958). Outside of classical music, the station had found a musical–educational role for itself as enabling the transformation of taste for listeners who preferred popular music in the 1940s. CKUA’s March 1947 programme guide included an article titled ‘Music for Your Ears’, which was reprinted from Pic magazine and focused on the subject of ‘middlebrow music’. By arguing that middlebrow



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music presents an avenue to higher cultural forms, the article indicated that the divide between high and low culture or educational and entertainment programming was not so clear (Figure 5.3). Keir Keightley has explored the idea of middlebrow music through ‘easy listening’ and ‘mood music’ between 1946 and 1966. He writes that the ‘mood music theme LP’ reconfigured ‘aspects of

Figure 5.3  Middlebrow music featured in CKUA’s Broadcast Guide, March 1947. Image Courtesy of the University of Alberta Archives Accession #2006-204.

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classical music for an adult audience in a popular music context’, a trend that was evident in a major 1953 profile of mood music in the New York Times (Keightley 2008, 319). One example that Keightley provides is that of Bernice Judis, the manager of WNEW in New York City, who explained that radio acted as ‘a kind of “aural wallpaper”’ that appealed to ‘unconscious listening’ by which easy listening music could be listened to while carrying out other tasks such as working or reading (2008, 317). Although radio listeners could alter their tastes by absorbing music through background or unconscious listening, the act of listening to middlebrow music on the radio was also discussed in ‘Music for Your Ears’ as an active practice that engaged with a listener’s ongoing evaluation and reflection on subjectivity and taste. The article featured comments from the American composer and playwright Meredith Wilson who said that ‘middlebrow’ does not mean ‘“not as good as highbrow”. My first fling at middlebrow was several years ago when I worked out a music form which I called “chiffon swing” – something for folks who frown upon hot jazz and shy from over-arranged productions. I was aiming at something light and easy to listen to. In short, middlebrow music’ (‘Music for Your Ears’ 1947). Comments from popular orchestral conductor Andre Kostelanetz explained that middlebrow music is different to different people at different periods in their musical development. For example, to one whose chief musical interests are the songs of Tin Pan Alley, middlebrow music might consist of the melodies of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin. The works of these composers would be the bridge to the next ladder to broader musical interests. (‘Music for Your Ears’ 1947)

The announcer, through strategically programming middlebrow music, could build ‘a musical bridge to span differences of taste, education, and environment, and to reach the opposite shore of a wider musical understanding’ (‘Music for Your Ears’ 1947). Kostelanetz emphasized that the ability for middlebrow music to accomplish this feat had to do with widespread dissemination through the ‘valuable service’ of radio. Further, David Rose ascribed the quality of middlebrow music to ‘musical education’. Through motion pictures, ‘background or “mood” music’ had attuned ears to music once reserved for ‘a privileged few’ (‘Music for Your Ears’ 1947). These comments featured in the 1947 CKUA programme guide emphasize the role of radio as increasing and enhancing one’s musical taste, knowledge, and education through musical



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programming – in this case, middlebrow musical programming. Further, middlebrow music exemplifies the station’s goal of bringing ‘good’ music (both classical and popular in this case) to a wide variety of listeners through the accessible medium of radio. And it is this approach to musical programming that CKUA used in the mid-1970s to continue to justify its entertainment programming as educational.

Music programming for the foreground format As mentioned earlier, the CRTC enforced a federal regulation that prevented provincial governments or their educational institutions to hold a broadcast licence in 1972 (although this practice was technically in violation of federal regulations for a number of years prior). What enabled CKUA to carry on despite this regulation was a directive that allowed an independent corporation, not directly controlled by a provincial government, to hold the licence; but it had to meet, in some way, a definition of ‘educational programming’ (CRTC 1974). CKUA refocused and legitimized its programming as educational upon a licence renewal in 1974. It would use the CRTC-defined ‘foreground format’ for its music programming to distinguish itself from commercial AM format radio. The foreground format might include a lengthy exploration of a particular genre or feature a number of recordings by a musical group or a single composer. However, the inspiration behind the foreground format can be located in stationgenerated discourse from decades prior. In 1944, before the station even applied for an FM licence (which it did in 1947), a radio committee of the University of Alberta Programme Committee discussed the nature of both educational and entertainment programming. In its first meeting, ‘The Committee agreed that the fundamental purpose underlying all programmes should be educational, but that these educational features should as far as possible be presented in an entertaining manner’ (‘Radio Committee …’ 1944). Evidently, the committee was promoting the intertwinement of education and entertainment. The committee specifically addressed its musical programming, stating that ‘there should be a definite carryover from one programme to the next. A series of Bach’s preludes and fugues, or of Beethoven’s symphonies, which could continue over a period of several weeks, was suggested. A short talk on the life of the composer and his music might introduce the first programme of the same series’ (‘Radio Committee …’ 1944). These suggestions reflect the description of the foreground format in the 1970s.

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Within the foreground format is the continued intermingling of education and entertainment. At the time of the station’s 1974 licence renewal, Larry T. Shorter, the president of ACCESS, addressed the CRTC and said that an educational program must lead somewhere; this is another way of saying it must be structured … . I don’t mean to rehash the form vs content argument that has pervaded the arts for centuries, but I must mention that music, painting, the plastic arts, the dance, all of our language arts – written, spoken and visual – depend heavily upon structure. Even extemporaneous jazz, of which I am an unrepentant fan, depends upon internalized chord, tonal and rhythmic structures. (CRTC 1974)

Shorter returned to the station’s emphasis on taking music seriously and the influence that this might have on its listeners. He explained that ‘CKUA has perhaps become best-known as a serious music station’ and that this means the station ‘takes all music seriously and programs in every genre, but with catholic taste’. By taking music seriously, the station’s musical programming leads somewhere, according to Shorter, ‘to knowledge of terminology, knowledge of facts, knowledge of musical conventions, and on through interpretive skills, towards true appreciation, which really means to understand – not merely to like’ (CRTC 1974). The station defined and defended its popular musical programming as educational by arguing that ‘serious’ programming can uplift listeners. Further, Shorter’s remarks emphasize the significant role of the radio announcer, the programmer, and the station’s music library as vehicles for increasing the listener’s musical knowledge and cultural capital, and as such, he argued, entertainment is education. CKUA’s licence renewal in 1976 renewed the station until 1978 (two years instead of the standard four) so that the CRTC could observe the relationship between ACCESS and the Alberta government (Walters 2002, 206). The decision reminded CKUA that its programming ‘must nevertheless be “designed to furnish educational opportunities” and must also be “distinctly different from general broadcasting available on the national broadcasting service or on privately owned broadcasting undertakings”’ (CRTC 1976). New FM regulations were also concerned with FM stations distinguishing themselves from AM stations and they would do so, in part, by devoting 25 per cent of their programming time to foreground format programmes (Walters 2002, 206–7). The CRTC also defined the ‘foreground format’ at this time, as laid out in Section 12(1) of the Radio (F.M.) Broadcasting Regulations, highlighting that ‘the intrinsic intellectual



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content of the matter being broadcast is entirely related to a particular theme or subject’ and ‘the duration of the presentation, including interruptions, is at least fifteen minutes’ (CRTC 1976). And this commitment continued throughout the 1980s. A Promise of Performance from a licence application from 1989 noted that the percentage of time to be devoted to foreground format programming was 67 per cent (CRTC 1989). The ACCESS group sold the station to the non-profit CKUA Radio Foundation in 1994, the group that owns the station to this day. Also in 1994, a ‘CKUA Members Questionnaire’ expressed interest in hearing more from styles such as alternative and independent music, despite genres like classical, folk, and blues still being among the most preferred by listeners and donors. One listener response to the survey wrote in ‘alternative popular’ as ‘would go out of my way to listen to if possible’. Under the survey question, ‘Do you have any other funding ideas?’ one person wrote: ‘People want more quality popular music with intelligent announcers without the ads’ (CKUA 1994). A fax dated 11 October 1994 from John Gormley to Rick Lewis, titled, ‘Replies to CRTC questions’, includes Gormley’s response to a number of concerns of the CRTC in terms of the station’s commitment to educational programming. The questions had originally come from Rod Lahay, the chief licensing analyst of the Prairie Region in Broadcast Operations. Two of the questions included the station’s increased reliance on advertising and whether this would compromise the alternative nature of programming; and the station was asked to prioritize its mission: What was most important: special interest, educational, or news and public affairs? In response to the second question, Gormley wrote, ‘It is difficult to prioritize the programming mission of CKUA … the Foundation is strongly committed to educational programming, which includes a broad matrix of programming which raises the aesthetic taste of the public and which also provides formal educational programming.’ He added that ‘as a percentage of programme schedule, Special Interest music accounts for the significant portion of the cultural and arts focus of the programming on CKUA and is the main element in raising the aesthetic taste of the public.’ CKUA was also asked to provide a definition of educational programming, to which it said, ‘The Foundation considers educational programming as broadcasting which advances the purposes of education, defined for the purposes of a registered charity as being activities which train the mind, raise the aesthetic taste of the public, or improve the sum of communicable knowledge in an area which education may cover’ (Gormley 1994). In his response, he mentioned raising the aesthetic taste

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of the public at least three times, emphasizing the station’s mix of educational and entertainment programming. The differences between education and entertainment are dissolved in Gormley’s statements, subsumed under the banner of aesthetic taste. The station’s educational mandate has shifted and changed over the years but it is a significant guiding principle that roots the station in the Alberta music community. Today, due to the fact that most commercial radio stations in Canada play very few, if any, local artists, raising the aesthetic taste of the public can now be understood as connecting Alberta listeners with Alberta artists.

Conclusion CKUA’s philosophy as stated in the Promise of Performance from 1994 highlights its ‘conviction that music is a major window to culture’ (CRTC 1994). Through music, according to the station, listeners are educated ‘about the value of other cultures and societies as well as their own’. Importantly, and in recalling the brief anecdote at the beginning of this chapter, the Promise of Performance added that ‘CKUA has always pioneered new music and new artists and was promoting Canadian musicians well before any official CRTC regulations came about in that regard’ (CRTC 1994). A year after this Promise of Performance, operations manager Ken Davis sent a fax to CKUA announcer and television personality Terry David Mulligan, which informally described the CKUA listenership as having a weekly reach of around eighty thousand, of which ‘most are upperincome, with at least a Bachelor’s degree under their belt’ and ‘demographic research also indicates they are strong audiophiles, inclined to purchase sophisticated audio systems and high-tech toys’ (Davis 1995). There is a way in which this fax raises essential questions about the association of class with education and the potential barriers that this might raise with respect to access and the appeal of the station to listeners who may not be upper income or educated (this also recalls the earlier discussion of cultural hierarchies in popular music culture). This is a worthy critique of much of public and noncommercial radio. However, the longer history of CKUA indicates many ways that the station has sought listeners without formal education, working to build important bridges between rural communities and the physical space of the university, and between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The influence of education on radio in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s helped to establish a framework and



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structure for integrating ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ music while also making notions of cultural hierarchies, and the potential for overcoming them, convenient tools for thinking about what music radio is. CKUA has been an important force for ‘raising the aesthetic taste of the public’ alongside other factors in culture, society, politics, and technology. Education exerted an influence on CKUA as it developed, shaping Western Canadian musical culture, which later informed the ways that CKUA’s musical programming was imagined to be, and justified as, educational. We can consider, then, the dual processes of edufication and musicalization of radio, which have aided in emphasizing the intertwining of the spheres of education and entertainment on the airwaves (Figure 5.4). By considering the larger factors shaping the programming practices of the station, as well as its ongoing reflexivity with respect to acknowledging and enforcing

Figure 5.4  Promotional material for CKUA that features both education and entertainment. Image Courtesy of the University of Alberta Archives Accession #2006-204.

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the station’s role within social and cultural life, a particular milieu of education– music–radio emerges. CKUA’s approach to programming music is tied to a particular station culture that is a changing and moving entity, one evolving with respect to trends and trajectories in the cultural life of Alberta. The forces of musical life and music radio are tied by mutual dependence. CKUA’s particular milieu of education–music–radio stands in opposition to commercial format radio’s eschewing of local music and culture. Education– music–radio and its connection to listeners across boundaries and borders of location and taste is a force worth emphasizing. As Doctor notes, with regard to the BBC in the 1920s, the corporation ‘was responsible for bringing art music for the first time to the entire British population, on a daily basis and in an easily accessible and affordable format – a phenomenon that could never have been even dreamed of just a few years before’ (1999, 14). With commercial format radio’s dominance in most radio markets, at least in most of North America, an educational approach to entertainment programming is rarely exercised. In other words, radio’s full potential is rarely exercised. CKUA today, as a broadcasting hybrid, operates in tandem with a specialty licence. This is a very unique arrangement for a very unique station.

References ACCESS Alberta. 1977. ‘Planning for Change: A White Paper on ACCESS Radio CKUA’. Alberta Educational Communications Corporation. Berland, Jody. 1990. ‘Radio Space and Industrial Time: Music Formats, Local Narratives and Technological Mediation’. Popular Music 9 (2): 179–92. Born, Georgina. 2005. ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’. Twentieth-Century Music 2 (1): 7–36. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. CKUA. 1947. Broadcast Guide. October. CKUA. 1994. ‘CKUA 1994 Members Questionnaire’. CKUA Radio Station. 1957. ‘30th Anniversary, Script for Anniversary Programme’. CKUA. Corbett, E. A. 1950. ‘A Brief History of Adult Education in Canada’. In Adult Education in Canada, edited by J. R. Kidd, 2–10. Toronto: Garden City Press. Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2013. ‘Editorial: Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments’. Communication Theory 23 (3): 191–202.



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CRTC. 1974. ‘Text of Remarks by Larry T. Shorter’. Public Hearing, Vancouver, 12 March 1974. CRTC. 1976. ‘Decision CRTC 76-715’. CRTC, Ottawa. CRTC. 1989. ‘Application Concerning an FM Broadcasting Transmitting Undertaking, CKUA’. 10 October. CRTC. 1994. ‘Application Concerning an FM Broadcasting Transmitting Undertaking, CKUA’. 9 September. CRTC. 2014. ‘Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2014-319. CKUA-FM Edmonton and Its Transmitters – Licence renewal and amendment’. CRTC: Ottawa. Davis, Ken. 1995. ‘CKUA Radio Network Fax’. Fax to Terry David Mulligan. 27 November. Doctor, Jennifer. 1999. The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauteux, Brian. 2015. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Fink, Howard. 1987. ‘CKUA: Radio Drama and Regional Theatre’. Theatre Research in Canada 8 (2). Accessed 16 October 2017. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/tric/ article/view/7364/8423. Gendron, Bernard. 2002. Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gormley, John. 1994. ‘Replies to CRTC questions’. Fax to Rick Lewis. October 11. Hagerman, J. W. 1974. ‘Letter to Danny Henry of the Committee on RV-FM’. November 20. Hepp, Andreas. 2013. Cultures of Mediatization. Malden: Polity Press. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. ‘The Mediatization of Society: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural Change’. Nordicom Review 29 (2): 105–34. Hjarvard, Stig, and Line Nybro Petersen. 2013. ‘Mediatization and Cultural Change’. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 29 (54): 1–7. Keightley, Keir. 2008. ‘Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–1966’. American Music 26 (3): 309–35. Lardie, Kathleen N. 1948. ‘Radio and the Classroom’. CKUA Broadcast Guide. October. Lewis, David J. 1974. ‘Letter to Station Director J.W. Hagerman’. 27 September. McCallum, Joe, ed. 1967. CKUA: And 40 Wondrous Years of Radio. Edmonton: CKUA. Michelsen, Morten, and Mads Krogh. 2017. ‘Music, Radio and Mediatization’. Media, Culture & Society 39 (4): 520–35. ‘Music for Your Ears’. 1947. CKUA Program Guide. March. Percival, Marc J. 2011. ‘Music Radio and the Record Industry: Songs, Sounds, and Power’. Popular Music and Society 34 (4): 455–73. Petersen, Holger. 1987. ‘CKUA’s Music’. In A Sound for All Seasons, edited by Alberta Educational Communications Corporation, 30–2. Edmonton: ACCESS Network.

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Pontara, Tobias, and Ulrik Volgsten. ‘Musicalization and Mediatization’. In Dynamics of Mediatization: Institutional Change and Everyday Transformations in a Digital Age, edited by Olivier Driessens, Göran Bolin, Stig Hjarvard, and Andreas Hepp. Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming. Pretty, Cecil H. 1964. Letter to CKUA. 29 February. ‘Radio Broadcasting Report of the Senate Committee’. 1956. University of Alberta. Radio Committee of the University of Alberta Programme Committee. 1944. Report. Regan, Ken. 2015. Personal Interview with Author, 5 November. Scannell, Paddy. 1981. ‘Music for the Multitude? The Dilemmas of the BBC’s Music Policy, 1923–1946’. Media, Culture & Society 3 (3): 243–60. Straw, Will. 1997. ‘Sizing Up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture’. In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley, 3–16. New York: Routledge. ‘Suggestions for the Preparation and Presentation of Radio Talks’. 1943. CKUA, The Station of the University of Alberta. ‘Times in Music’. Musical Compositions (radio programme series). 1981. CKUA, Edmonton, 16 November. Vaughan, Guy. 1958. ‘Promotion’. Letter (draft) to Dr. W.H. Johns. 2 June. Walters, Marylu. 2002. CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Wurtzler, Steve J. 2007. Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media. New York: Columbia University Press.

6

Mediated Soundscapes: Representations of the National in the Soundscape Call-in Programme Äänien ilta Meri Kytö

During the last five years the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE has been broadcasting a call-in programme on environmental sounds, eleven shows in total. The three-hour live programme called Äänien ilta (Evening of Sounds) is aired on a Sunday evening slot, and with approximately 220,000 listeners per show it is considered a popular event among both listeners and critics. The programme consists of callers’ narratives on their personal and sometimes intimate experiences and memories of both current and past sonic phenomena. The callers request recorded sounds they would like to hear in the programme. Some requests are selected and met with the help of the YLE sound archives and present-day soundscape recordings produced as part of soundscape archiving projects outside YLE. The host of the programme, Jukka Mikkola, discusses the sound requests and stories connected to them together with the callers and studio guests representing soundscape research, sound art, and sound design. Äänien ilta falls somewhere between more conventional radio programmes such as music call-in shows, citizens’ forums, and studio conversation programmes. The radical idea of dedicating three live hours to environmental sound recordings, call-ins, and brief commentaries is exceptional. The sound recordings played are often quite long samples without dramatic structure, not just short sound effects to feed a sonic curiosity. The audience can listen attentively to the sounds together with the host and studio guests, possibly unlike everyday situations, and thus attach personal and communal meanings to them via the public broadcast. For soundscape and radio scholar Heikki Uimonen – a regular guest in the programme – ‘this sharing of collective and personal sound memories and narratives not only sustain socio-cultural history on sound but

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also feeds back by evoking and constructing new memories for radio listeners’ (Uimonen forthcoming).1 Soundscape as a mode of acoustic communication is most dependent on the context (Truax 2001). Compared to other modes  – speech and music  – the semiotics of soundscapes require interpretation, a listener with contextual knowledge. This gives soundscape recordings the potential of inclusive listening. The quirkiness of the programme lies in the aesthetic absurdity of listening to mundane sonic phenomena and then putting effort into spoken textual description and finding ways to relate the meanings, histories, feelings, and affects to the listening audience. In this chapter I want to explore two aspects of the programme. First, how does the programme build an understanding of technology-mediated soundscape experiences, and second, how is this experience framed for the ‘listening citizen’ in configuring the national in soundscape culture? To establish relatability, the programme addresses the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006) of Finnish-speaking listeners. I argue that as an imagined community the listeners feel solidarity towards the ones who they take as belonging to the same community. The point of critique is the context of the national and how social memory (Boym 2001, Järviluoma 2009) is being performed as a narrative of the national past, even though the programme in itself is not advertised as a show for nostalgic reminiscence. I will look into the ways in which the national is being publicly negotiated through highly context-reliant soundscape recordings and critique the ‘national soundscape’ by discussing it within the context of intangible heritage. As a thematized and pre-planned radio programme, Äänien ilta also offers a glimpse into the practices of YLE radio broadcasting culture. For the analysis I use three sets of materials from the programmes: the programmes themselves, the requests received, and the ‘playlists’ reported after the individual shows. The eleven shows (ÄI1–11 2012–17) have been archived and are accessible online. Requests (R1–10) consist of the paper archive of the programme host Jukka Mikkola: two folders of printed emails, phone calls, shout box comments, and feedback received by the programme. Playlists (PL1–11) consist of the exhaustive lists of recordings played on the shows.

This chapter is based on a keynote lecture held by myself and Heikki Uimonen, ‘Radiogenic Sound Cultures in Call-in Programmes and the Question of National Narrative’, at the conference Music, Sound, Radio: Theorizing Music Radio on 25 May 2017 in Copenhagen. I would like to thank Heikki for our many discussions on the subject and access to his article manuscript on the radiogenic aspects of the programme (Uimonen forthcoming) with which I am conversing in this chapter.

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Besides being a regular listener of the programme, I have appeared as a studio guest in the programme twice and been part of a research programme on soundscapes, Transforming Finnish Soundscapes (Uimonen, Kytö and Ruohonen 2017), which worked closely with Äänien ilta, providing it with field recordings and a theme for two shows. Having been a commentator in the studio, I also have first-hand experience of how the show is run and helped provide content for the show.

The mediated soundscape Listening to soundscape recordings (minimally edited field recordings of a documentary nature) enables us to hear through other people’s attention, so to speak. As a practice and an act of the person doing the recording, it changes his or her relationship to the lived environment. Comparing this technologically mediated relation to another practice, that of taking photographs, the practice of recording involves personal agency, immersion into the environment and heightened attention, producing in the end an object or a commodity, if you will (see Truax 2001, 205–16). The soundscape – the heard sonic environment – itself is often partly mediated in contemporary experience. We hear the streamed audio while riding a bus, the amplified speech during a lecture or the neighbour watching television in our quotidian life, and when making a field recording in spaces and situations like these the technologies become part of the field recordings as well. The ubiquitous, heard presence of mobile or stationary audio technology does not only transfer to field recordings, creating layers and extensions of auditory spaces, but also makes the perception of the technologically mediated environment more complex. But as is common in the history of domestication of technologies, this relationship with recording technology has become more and more normalized and part of everyday mediated agency (Peteri 2006; Kilpiö et al. 2015; see also Quiñones et al. 2013). Post-phenomenologist Don Ihde theorizes four different modes of human–technology–world relations: embodiment relations, hermeneutic relations, alterity relations, and background relations (Ihde 2001). If analysed as a human–technology–world relation, listening to a soundscape recording broadcasted live would fall into the category of embodiment relations as an augmentation of perceiving reality, though it could just as well pertain to the category of hermeneutic relations, where we are interpreting the world (its sonic

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manifestation) differently due to technology and are aware of how this alters, frames, and constrains it. Listening to a recording, we hear how the microphone is directed, we can imagine the recordist’s pose and presence, the affects they might experience in the situation, and what they want us to focus our attention on. Musing oneself with the perception of the recordist and how we too can thus embody and experience the environment through an instrument (Ihde 2001, xvi) is understanding that the technical devices and their infrastructures transform our perceptual capacities. In this sense, the Äänien ilta programme resembles a ‘sound mirror’: Instead of the implied objectivity and neutrality of a machine, it reflects an image of sound to the listener, framing reality and making us more intensely aware of it (Truax 2001, 190). According to Uimonen (forthcoming), this adds yet another dimension to the show: ‘The sound recording and its airing frames the soundscape and represents this selected piece of sonic environment to the radio listeners’. The listeners of the programme seem to be well aware of the representational nature of the soundscape recordings, understanding the technological possibilities and what can be done with them. Some of the requests explain how the recordings could be manipulated, for example a request asking for an edited mix of an approaching train and a swarm of bees (ÄI4 2013) or this request describing a rich collage of sounds: A sound memory from the summers of my childhood and adolescence is a combination of lapping of waves, the sound of the old motor boats, the landing and departing inland waterway boat with its whistles, and screams of joy from the nearby beach. Also, the collage includes the sound of a light aircraft, since you wouldn’t hear this in bad weather. (ÄI4 2013, trans. author)

The impossibility of listening to certain (unrecorded) soundscapes and technological possibilities enabling them was discovered by one caller. Her first request was a purring cat for allergy sufferers. Her second request was sounds of a sauna and löyly (sauna steam), a wife’s present to her husband, who had to remove his hearing aid before bathing (R8 2015). Like music, environmental sounds or individual sound objects can be listened to attentively and intellectually, but also affectively and in a multisensory fashion (Kytö 2016). The requests can roughly be categorized as ones that evoke past embodied experiences and ones that emphasize an aesthetic or informative interest. Some wish that a scent could also be included, describing how the memory of an experience is very much multisensory. ‘Oh, if only you could add the scent



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of resin’, asked a woman in her request for a forestry machine sawing wood (R1 2012), while another listener requested ‘summer rain on asphalt, and the smell to go with it’ (R2 2012). The level of attention given to the accurateness of the played sounds is high. Many aired sounds have received feedback (phone calls or written letters) describing inaccuracies. For example, the different models of Zetor farming tractors have prompted many comments during the shows. Another case was when a fanning mill got mixed up with a threshing machine (R3 2012). Even though the sound source of a recording was correct, the recording situation, including the activities connected to it and the context in which it takes place, means that some sounds do not correspond perfectly to those recalled by the listeners. This, of course, is a feature and not an error in the recording, as sound recordings cannot be mimetic of personal sensory experience and memories can fade and change. Comparing the recorded sounds to the ones recalled from memory is nevertheless a theme of recurrent conversation in the programme.

The context of the national The staple of the requests are connected to agricultural life. Memories of childhood summers in the countryside are among the experiences the listeners most frequently want to relive through soundscape recordings. Other popular requests, at times overlapping with the childhood memories, are sounds understood as ‘extinct’. These are sounds that can no longer be heard in everyday situations due to infrastructural changes and the fact that outdated machines and gadgets have been replaced with newer ones. The programme has also played plenty of contemporary and urban soundscapes as well as sounds known from media (e.g. voices of announcers, jingles, and historical time signals). Each show has a theme (see Table 6.1), which binds the content together, although there are some recurring requests from one programme to another, regardless of theme. To do justice to the programme, I must emphasize that the prevalent form of address and conversation in the programmes is not in any way explicitly nationalistic. At the same time, though, it is difficult to ignore the somewhat explicit ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) of the themes of the programmes  – four of which carry the word ‘Finland’ or ‘Finnish’  – and in the ways sounds are verbalized and articulated in them. Methodological nationalism understands the core of society to be part of the nation-state. This somewhat rigid notion of national identity resonates with the

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Table 6.1  Themes and duration of Äänien ilta programmes 2012–17 Title The Finnish Soundscape (Suomalainen äänimaisema), 1h 43’ The Wonderful World of Sounds (Äänien ihmeellinen maailma), 1h 39’ 3. Sounds Tell Stories (Äänet kertovat), 1h 37’ 4. Sounds from the Everyday (Arkiympäristön ääniä), 1h 37’ 5. Frightening Sounds (Pelottavat äänet), 1h 34’ 6. Machines and Contraptions (Koneet ja laitteet), 1h 33’ 7. Transforming Finnish Soundscapes (Muuttuvat suomalaiset äänimaisemat), 2h 14’ 8. What Does It Sound Like in Our Pockets? (Miltä taskussamme kuulostaa?), 2h 17’ 9. Transforming Finnish Soundscapes (Muuttuvat suomalaiset äänimaisemat), 2h 25’ 10. What Is the Most Popular Sound in Finland? (Mikä on Suomen suosituin ääni?), 2h 27’ 11. What Does Travelling Sound Like? (Miltä matkailu kuulostaa?), 2h 27’ 1. 2.

Year of broadcast 2012 2012 2012 2013 2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2016 2017

News and weather forecasts interrupting the programme are not included in the total duration times.

metaphor of the ‘container model of society’ by sociologist Ulrich Beck (1999). This model comprises the governance of the nation-state over the societal space, the presumed homogeneity of that contained space, and the notion that nation-states see themselves as evolved and bordered societies. As such, they are autonomous and reasonably stable beings that give meaning to themselves, as containers. Citizenship in these kinds of nation-states has been built as permanent residence and the rights and duties that come with it: still, nonmoving, staying the same. Change in the form of globalization upsets this idea of homogeneity: The everyday practices of civil societies are not as uniform and as consistent as they seem to have been, because the continuous movement of people, objects, and information makes them more diverse (Lehtonen 2013, 15.) To conceptualize national identity anew, cultural studies researchers like Stuart Hall (1999, 24) and later Mikko Lehtonen (2004) have written about a different metaphor: nationality as clusters of relations. Here nationality does not get its meaning from itself, but from relations to others. Nationality does not have an original character or principle, a stabile centre or a reason. Instead a person’s identity is formed in constant negotiation with others. In this line of thought, what is interesting is not the borders of identity, but the relations it has



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with others. These relations articulate borders as both dividing and connecting, and they are not on the edges of the imaginary container, but in the core of the very subject they structure and dismantle (Lehtonen 2004, 13–14).

The contents of the first and ninth programmes What was played in the programmes then? As examples of played content I will discuss two programmes in more detail, namely the first and the ninth. The first programme, themed The Finnish Soundscape, contained twelve recordings (see Table 6.2), while the ninth programme, Transforming Finnish Soundscapes, included twenty-six recordings (see Table 6.3). Looking at the duration of the programmes (1 hour 43 minutes and 2 hours 25 minutes, respectively), it is evident that the time slot for the programme increased by thirty to forty-five minutes after the first six programmes. It should also be noted that these durations have been edited for content other than the call-in programme itself (e.g. news bulletins on the hour, weather forecasts, and sports reports). The contents of these two programmes can be listened to in resonance with the most requested sounds, all played in the tenth programme, The Most Popular Sound in Finland (ÄI10 2016). Between 2012 and 2015 the most often requested sounds are that of a thresher machine, a horse–powered reaping machine, steam engine–powered vehicles, a Zetor tractor (model 24A), Wickström engines (a four-stroke internal combustion engine used on fishing boats), a cream separator, ‘singing’ telephone lines (a result of metal telephone wires strung between telephone poles making Table 6.2  Playlist of the first Äänien ilta programme, The Finnish Soundscape (2012) Recording

Place

Year

Rural summer day, sparrows Audience at a Paul Anka concert Calling for a boat (a story and calls) Pottu-Olli and the echo (a story) The bells of the Turku Orthodox Church Elk hunting (battue) Stereo test, YLE Announcements at a railway station Wolves howling Stamping letters Milking a cow At the railway station pier

Haapakylä Helsinki Leppävirta Nurmes/phone call Turku s/s Helsinki Tampere Ähtäri Helsinki Lammi Helsinki

1981 1959 1963 s/a s/a s/a 1972 s/a 1994 1966 1974 1958

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Table 6.3  Playlist of the ninth Äänien ilta programme, Transforming Finnish Soundscapes (2015) Recording Ordering calls for VHF taxi At a store: Elanto milk shop, Prisma supermarket Hobbies: volleyball, yoga Road crossing warning bell Horse eating hay Sharpening of a scythe Playing payazzo (arcade game) At a bank: PYP main office, KOP main office, SKOP office Firing up a wooden stove, a coffee bean grinder Long-distance train WC Rain on a shingle roof Heartbeat of mother and foetus Zetor tractor (1957) Military drill Speech synthesizers: ‘Synte 2’, ‘Ove 3’, ‘Commodore 64’ Soundscape from an underground railway station and interview with composer Tapani Rinne Garden tractor (1952) Prisma supermarket (binaural recording) Neiti Aika (speaking clock) Telephone exchange Parking lot at the UPM paper factory (binaural) On a tram Turning a crank and starting a car (Buick 29/41 121) Musical organ at Kariniemi Park Last radio announcement by retiring Kaisu Puuska-Joki

Place

Year

s/s Helsinki/Kouvola

s/a 1968/2015

Helsinki/Lahti Hyrylä Vihti Lohja Vihti Helsinki

1969/2015 1969 1971 1988 1971 1958/1958/1970

Vaasa/Vesivehmaa

1969/1960

s/s Kesälahti Bratislava Vihti Upinniemi Helsinki/Turku/ Helsinki Vantaa

1985 1987 1974 1982 1974 1979/1972/1987

Vihti Turku Helsinki Kyrsyä Kuusanniemi

1993 2015 1960 1971 2015

Helsinki Kesälahti

1968 1982

Lahti s/s

2015 1972

2015

a distinctive humming sound on cold and quiet winter days and nights), hand milking, scythe sharpening, and thunder. Presented as lists like these, it is probable that the sounds recorded are not very informative for readers not familiar with the sound sources and their cultural, social, economic or political contexts. At the same time, though, this demonstrates the importance of description in soundscape studies, the



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‘symbolic’, and the cultural relatedness of meaning. Soundscapes, reminiscence, and change present in these programmes are connected to technological and infrastructural changes. Memories of technology include traffic-related sounds like railway stations, communication technology like post offices and stereo tests, or the lack of technology like hand milking. The emergence of the service society – starting in the 1930s, accelerating in the 1960s, and resulting in what is commonly referred to as the present-day self-service society – is audible in the contexts of the recordings. The construction of the welfare society after the Second World War and the accelerating urbanization that followed produced generations of families with roots in the countryside. Slowly the sounds of farm work changed from arduous heavy duty into childhood leisure time and romanticized manual labour. Some of the requests have not passed the studio producer’s desk, like the request to hear the Hornet fighter plane’s lift-off rumble, ‘lifting the spirits for defending the fatherland’ with a marking in capital letters, ‘EI’ (‘no’) (R3 2012). Another frequent request, on the other hand, was considered appropriate in the context, namely the much discussed farming tractor, Zetor 25A. To the proposer, it stands for ‘strength and tenacity’, a ‘sound that Finland was rebuilt with after the wars’, as he wrote in his text message sent to the second programme (R2 2012). Some requests were rejected because of the meandering storytelling of the caller. For example, the studio mixer wrote a note during the second programme warning that ‘this story might turn into a eulogy of country life and gilded memories’ (R2 2012), commenting on the talkative nature of the caller. Yet other call-in requests were rejected because the caller had had a bit too much to drink. Many forms of nationalism in contemporary society are very mundane, even banal. In his book Banal Nationalism (1995) social psychologist Michael Billig states that one of the most taken-for-granted beliefs in the Western world is the belief in separate nations. In Billig’s view, language, territorial borders, and human attributes should not be understood as grounds for separating nations from one another. Instead, separation is grounded in the everyday situations where we are reminded and remind others that we share the same national identity. This happens in subtle choices of words, for example using pronouns like ‘we’ and ‘they’. Besides face-to-face communication, these articulations are made on the television, sports news, political speeches, and, of course, the radio. For Billig, the national is a rhetorical imagery of ‘our’ sameness, lateral to ‘their’ sameness. The persistent myth of the so-called Finnish yhtenäiskulttuuri (‘culture of uniformity’), where everybody shares the same values and ideals in every cultural

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field, is explained at times as the particularity of the Finnish language, ethnic similarity, national temperament, or geographical isolation (which have been proven a fallacy). The thought of such a ‘uniform culture’ is an ideological frame of thought, the making of which has required various restricting manoeuvres and keeping a blind eye on the multiple cultures and differences within and influences from outside the nation-state. Literary scholar Olli Löytty states that even though this might be thought of as the universal need of communities to strengthen the feeling of togetherness – especially understood as a pressure for uniformity among Finns – this thesis of the Finnish yhtenäiskulttuuri should not be understood as a description of the current state of affairs, but as hegemonic parlance aiming to produce the phenomenon it describes (Löytty 2004, 46). This normalcy of yhtenäiskulttuuri parlance generated discussion at the 2016 Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in Sydney, where Äänien ilta was the topic of the paper presented by Heikki Uimonen. Sound artist Nigel Helyer pondered that a radio programme based on sharing collective meanings attached to given sounds would be unlikely in his home country, Australia. Likewise, curator Yang Yeung commented that a public service radio in her home country, Hong Kong, airing nostalgic sounds might be interpreted as the hegemonic voice of the powers-that-be and thus seen as oppressive. These comments underline the normalcy of the hegemonic ‘us’ in Äänien ilta, as if the audience of the programme was that of a smaller community radio and not that of a national radio channel.

The medium might be the message The fact that the channel broadcasting the programmes is Radio Suomi (‘Radio Finland’) of course influences how the message is perceived and not only because of its name. Radio Suomi, one of several YLE channels and thus funded by the Public Broadcasting Tax, aims to be the country’s leading channel. It targets an audience of adults aged 30+, offering sports, news, and current affairs in the morning and at noon, and during the day its selection of music is in the more traditional part of the popular music spectrum: Finnish schlager and nostalgic rock (Hujanen and Ala-Fossi 2017, 155). Within this setting Äänien ilta fits as a speciality programme. The sociopolitical character of YLE’s broadcasting has been to address ‘the citizen’, understood as a key aspect of its relationship to the audience. The citizen is primarily a representative of the aforementioned



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yhtenäiskulttuuri and only secondarily a representative of his or her locality. The content aired can be defined as aiming for a certain universalism: There should be variety in the programmes, but at the same time they should address ‘everybody’ in the audience. The ideology of the state radio to enlighten – inform and educate – its citizens is explicit. This includes discussing the chosen topics with a clear, understandable discourse that anyone can follow and understand. The ideology of the so-called folk enlightenment still runs deep in discussions of Finnish nationality – as begun by the nineteenth-century Fennoman statesman J. S. Snellman’s reading of Bildung  – and it has been an undercurrent in YLE policies since the 1920s (see for example Kurkela et al. 2010, 7–8). The inclusion of the Swedish-speaking and Sámi minorities has been seen as part of the pluralism of the content. Different values, demographics, areas, and opinions are to be made audible and brought into dialogue with each other, thus serving the political agenda of equality and neutrality guiding the YLE content (Hujanen and Ala-Fossi 2017, 158–9). When the monopoly status of YLE was dissolved, after both commercial and public local radio stations began to broadcast in 1986, the broadcasting company has made it its mission to differentiate itself from the commercial actors in the field by emphasizing the role of public service in democracy, social belonging, and freedom of expression, while at the same time adapting convenient models from the commercial field (Hujanen and Ala-Fossi 2017, 139). This mission struggles at times with a stereotype view of public service radio as being only for the elderly. In a post titled ‘YLE answers: Radio Suomi is a channel for all Finns’ Mika Ojamies, the YLE head of communications, responds to an opinion piece in a regional newspaper, in which the writer suggests that more traditional music be played, as ‘most of the listeners are retired’. Ojamies tries to correct this interpretation by referencing the latest survey numbers, which demonstrate that adults aged 65+ only make up 41.5 per cent of the listeners, less than half (Radio Suomi 2017). The impression that Radio Suomi is a channel for the elderly might still influence Äänien ilta listeners’ perception of their co-listeners and their impression of the people with whom they are sharing the sonic horizon. Addressing all YLE listeners as ‘Finns’ also emphasizes the fact that the channel is offered to the citizen, according to the YLE agenda. Another aspect in the context of the medium is the host of the programme. Jukka Mikkola has been running another show, Avaruusromua (space junk), since 1990. This late-night music programme has been YLE’s window to experimental, electronic, and ambient music. The Sunday evening slot at Radio

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Suomi is usually occupied by Kadonneen levyn metsästäjät (‘The hunters of the lost record’, a pun on the translation of the adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark). In addition to the avant-garde vibe the host brings to the programme and the fact that the slot is usually reserved for nostalgic music call-in shows, the Sunday night slot appears to be popular with people who have a habit of listening to the radio while driving. Radio Suomi is one of few channels that one can listen to while driving longer distances without feeling the need to switch between strictly formatted music radios. It has also been described as a neutral choice for families driving with kids, as arguing about the genre of the music played on the radio ‘doesn’t heat up the backbenchers’, as a colleague of mine once said. Who are our imagined co-listeners? According to media history scholar Kate Lacey, listening to a programme empathetically is ‘listening out for things in common, for the things that unite’ (Lacey 2013, 165). This kind of empathetic listening is encouraged not only by the frame of YLE policies, heavy with the weight of yhtenäiskulttuuri, but by the contextual modality of soundscape recordings. In Äänien ilta, when callers make requests for sounds to be played and talked about, we listen to the dialect of the caller, perhaps make an estimate of their age and try to pick up small sonic clues and prosody to enhance our understanding of who the caller is and what they want to relate to their soundscape. The listeners comprise a larger group than the ones who take the time to suggest sounds and ultimately phone in and get through. Empathetic listening in this context forms a frame of inclusiveness. In her book Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (2013) Lacey discusses the history of political listening and how listening can be said to construct the citizen. Theorizing radio listening, Lacey states that politics itself is made possible only by the listening attention of another: Listening constitutes ‘a kind of attention to others (and otherness) and, importantly, being attended to that is the prerequisite both of citizenship (as distinct from community) and of communicative action’ (Lacey 2013, 165). Here the public space is equally or more about listening than it is about speaking up or finding a voice. A public is then contingent on there being people willing to actively listen to others, who are not part of a pre-given collective ideal of the community (Lacey 2013, 172). Lacey writes: The right to free speech, then, is intimately bound up with the responsibility to listen, a responsibility that is shared between the speaker and the listener. … The speech act alone is static; only the presence of an active listener introduces the dynamic, introduces the element of intersubjectivity. (2013, 168)



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When writing about listening, Lacey is of course talking about listening to speech, not music and probably not to soundscapes either. Even though the Äänien ilta programme includes a fair amount of talking, it is – if interpreted this way – an exercise in intersubjective citizenship and democracy. Listening to mostly non-musical and non-verbal sounds that demand a novel and dynamic listening position from the audience – ventilation hum at a paper factory car park, a spinning wheel-rotated drill at a dentist or bees building their nest  – makes it possible to transcend the hegemonic frame of yhtenäiskulttuuri and its relation to the national narrative.

Social memory, national memory, and heritage During the programmes memory is constructed through public reminiscence of sounds. The callers of Äänien ilta are seemingly undulating between social memory and national memory. Social memory or collective memory is the ‘playground … of multiple individual recollections’ (Boym 2001, 54), whereas national memory takes its shape from a grand narrative. ‘Unstated background narratives’ of different generations in communication situations (Connerton 1989, 3) and common landmarks of ‘reminiscence of individuals within a shared social frame of reference’ (Boym 2001, 53) act as conceptual tools for understanding social and national memory, the only difference being that national memory aspires to a shared narrative. In her article on the soundscape memories of inhabitants of Skruv, a small village near Malmö in Sweden, soundscape scholar Helmi Järviluoma argues that people most often remember things by relating them to their own life (Järviluoma 2009, 146). Järviluoma adds: The everyday frames of reference of shared social memory … relate to our individual memories in ways that may be vague and ambiguous, leading to several disparate narratives. They resemble pleats in the fan of memory, rather than the plots for story lines towards which the ‘national memory’ so often aspires. This is why social memory is not the same as national memory, although they may share images (or sounds) and references. (Järviluoma 2009, 139)

Järviluoma states that discussions on collective memory have recently moved in a direction which emphasizes agency, temporal dimensions of memory, and the fact that social identities are formed throughout history – a step away from the previous theories, which are often unnecessarily static in configuring both

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methods and memory itself (Järviluoma 2009, 140). This is why soundscape descriptions of change and the past seem to gain relevance in the present. One example is the threshers and calling to a switchboard: When a certain technology has ceased to exist or become obsolete, when it is not that easy to use anymore or more convenient ways of doing things, using new technology, have emerged, our sensory memories of that past technology are brought to the fore. The effect that ubiquitous digital technology has on soundscapes is also connected to the broadened opportunities it offers the auditory agency of the callers. Both Heikki Uimonen and Jukka Mikkola recognize the influence of Canadian soundscape pedagogy on the Äänien ilta programme, which attempts to inspire radio audiences to listen to their environment attentively. They have also asked whether public service radio should be responsible for taking care of our sonic cultural heritage, in view of the transforming contemporary soundscape, and if so, how they should go about doing so (Uimonen and Mikkola 2017, 30). When talking about intangible cultural heritage, we should bear in mind that it is most often a tool of policy for political intervention in cultural forms rooted in the post–Second World War cultural property rights legislation. As a property in that sense, the soundscape is an example of ‘immaterial commons’, and it is made up of access relations produced and reproduced by those with access to the environment heard (see Venäläinen 2016). The heritage views of national cultures ‘tend to be conservative and traditional, and not to take in the diverse mix that now makes up all Western nations. It also tends to isolate and to ignore the dynamic relationships being forged across cultures internationally, sometimes from the basis of diasporic thinking’ (Khan 2005, 139). As Littler and Naindoo (2005, 2–3) claim, ‘What is circumscribed as “heritage” is historically specific, culturally contingent and philosophically debatable.  – [Medieval] heritage proclaimed the “lineage” of particular groups – their worth and power – at the expense of others.’ We should think of heritage not as an immutable entity, but as a discursive practice, shaped by specific circumstances, through histories, interests, patterns, collisions, and politics (Littler and Naindoo 2005, 1–2). This has also been one of the leading principles of the Äänien ilta programme: to broadcast historical sounds to radio listeners, but also to understand that things – like sounds – have different meanings for different people at different times (Uimonen forthcoming). However, this principle has neither been univocal nor unambiguous.



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Conclusion Äänien ilta builds an understanding of technology-mediated soundscape experiences through hermeneutic and embodied relations. The listeners are well aware of the representational nature of the soundscape recordings and understand the opportunities recording technology offers. These experiences are framed by social and national memory emphasized by YLE politics resonating with yhtenäiskulttuuri. At the same time, the ‘listening citizen’ is given the opportunity to transcend the hegemonic listening position by practising empathetic listening and giving attention to otherness – an exercise in intersubjective citizenship and democracy. Talking about soundscape – verbalizing one’s experience and perception – is a complicated task to begin with. Finding the accurate or suitable vocabulary, establishing the correct emphasis on cultural, social, and aesthetic aspects of sound, communicating this in sentences that are intelligible, and conveying the message to the public require special cultural skills. There also needs to be relevance and a motive for talking about sound. Programmes like Äänien ilta can be seen as a forum for developing a discourse and a frame of interpretation for listening to soundscapes. As this chapter was written in the wake of the centennial celebrations of the independence of the state of Finland, I will take a moment to discuss the national in this festive context. The sheer abundance of commercial banality in the branding of #Suomi100 products that ‘tell the story of Finland’ (SuomiFinland100 2017) has made me think about how important it is to widen the stories of the national when it comes to soundscapes (or anything for that matter). The narrative of silence (of wilderness, of people) is a national cliché seen as something ‘unique’. Not that there would not be relaxing calmness in the woods during good weather and not that pauses in verbal communication in social settings are not considered a problem, it is a vast exaggeration to suggest that this would in any way be unique to a nation. In politics the virtues of silence are given anti-immigrant connotations used by populist right-wing politicians, and silence is being used as a branding device within tourism. For example, a motion proposing the maintenance of silent reading rooms in Espoo city libraries (Juvonen 2016) quickly developed into an accusation against Espoo’s immigrant youth, who spend their leisure time there, but fail to understand the sonic etiquette of silence, seen by the accusers as an inherently Finnish value (Länsiväylä 2016; Kääriäinen and Sannemann 2016). And another example: The

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centre for promoting tourism, Visit Finland has adopted the theme ‘Silence, please’ rooted in the 2010 nation branding report (Maabrändiraportti 2010). The vision of the silence-loving nation sold to the visitor is described as follows: ‘Take in the sound of quiet. Hear yourself think. … Finns have an inherent yearning to nature, and escaping to the countryside or wilderness is a national way of relaxing’ (Visit Finland 2018). The ways in which Äänien ilta contributes to an understanding of the ‘national soundscape’ should be considered in this specific context. It offers a platform for discussion challenging the monotonality of the silence narrative. The soundscape competences of the listeners, their ability to interpret sounds from a given cultural context, are crucial to how sounds are related to the national. The more the contextualization slides towards the narratives of national memory, the more the social memory is bound up with yhtenäiskulttuuri, excluding those generations and demographics not included herein. Äänien ilta could provide a broader framework for voicing a more multifaceted discourse on sonic understanding in relation to place. The latest Äänien ilta programme had a slightly newer take on the issue of social cohesion and national relatedness under the theme of sounds of travelling. ‘Do you miss the hum of crickets in the Greek archipelago? Do the church bells of Venice arouse warm memories? … The 11th Äänien ilta listens to faraway lands, not forgetting the exotic soundscapes in Finland.’ Thus sounded the introduction to the programme (ÄI11 2017), which played a list of recordings most of which were from abroad: a tourist bus in the Canary Islands, the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean recorded in Gambia, the bells of the Kremlin in Moscow, the Beijing main railway station, a bird park in Singapore, various recordings of the ‘Please mind the gap’ announcement at the London Underground, a Shinkansen bullet train in Tokyo, and a call for prayer in Istanbul. The narrative arch of the programme ended with a recording of an airplane landing in Helsinki-Vantaa Airport.

References ÄI1–11. 2012–17. Äänien ilta. Call-in programme at Radio Suomi, Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE. Producer: Pertti Ylikojola. All programmes together with the list of recordings played in them are available online. Accessed 15 November 2017. http://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2013/04/11/aanien-illoissa-kuunnellaankadonneitakin-aania. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. Revised edition. London: Verso.



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Beck, Ulrich. 1999. What Is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1999. Identiteetti. Tampere: Vastapaino. Hujanen, Taisto, and Marko Ala-Fossi. 2017. ‘Radio’. In Suomen mediamaisema, edited by Kaarle Nordenstreng and Hannu Nieminen, 138–64. Tampere: Vastapaino. Ihde, Don. 2001. Bodies in Technology. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Juvonen, Arja. 2016. ‘16.02.2016 Valtuustoaloite Espoon kaupunginvaltuustossa: Hiljaiset tilat takaisin espoolaisiin kirjastoihin’. Accessed 24 March 2018. https:// www.arjajuvonen.fi/ajankohtaista&vuosi=2016. Järviluoma, Helmi. 2009. ‘Soundscape and Social Memory in Skruv’. In Acoustic Environments in Chance & Five Village Soundscapes, edited by Helmi Järviluoma, Meri Kytö, Barry Truax, Heikki Uimonen and Nora Vikman, 138–53. Tampere and Joensuu: TAMK and University of Joensuu. Kääriäinen, A., and J. Sannemann. 2016. An Interview about Change in Entresse Library Soundscape. Interviewer: Meri Kytö. Espoo 19 February 2016. The Changing Soundscapes of Public Libraries project. Khan, Naseem. 2005. ‘Taking Root in Britain. The Process of Shaping Heritage’. In The Politics of Heritage. The Legacies of ‘Race’, edited by Jo Littler and Roshi Naidoo, 117–26. London and New York: Routledge. Kilpiö, Kaarina, Vesa Kurkela, and Heikki Uimonen. 2015. Koko kansan kasetti. C-kasetin käyttö ja kuuntelu Suomessa. Helsinki: SKS. Kurkela, Vesa, Markus Mantere, and Heikki Uimonen, eds. 2010. Music Breaks in. Essays on Music Radio and Radio Music in Finland. Tampere: University of Tampere. Kytö, Meri. 2016. ‘Asumisen rajat: yksityinen äänimaisema naapurisuhteita käsittelevissä nettikeskusteluissa’. In Äänimaisemissa, edited by Helmi Järviluoma and Ulla Piela, 53–70. Helsinki: SKS. Lacey, Kate. 2013. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity. Länsiväylä. 2016. ‘Hiljaiset huoneet’ halutaan takaisin – Kirjastoista tullut äänekkäitä nuorisotiloja. 16 February 2016. Accessed 25 March 2018. https://www.lansivayla.fi/ artikkeli/365572-hiljaiset-huoneet-halutaan-takaisin-kirjastoista-tullut-aanekkaitanuorisotiloja. Lehtonen, Mikko. 2004. ‘Johdanto: Säiliöstä suhdekimppuun’. In Suomi toisin sanoen, edited by Mikko Lehtonen, Olli Löytty and Petri Ruuska, 17–36. Tampere: Vastapaino. Lehtonen, Mikko. 2013. ‘Miten tutkia liikkuvaa maailmaa?’ In Liikkuva maailma, edited by Mikko Lehtonen, 7–29. Tampere: Vastapaino. Littler, Jo, and Roshi Naidoo, eds. 2005. The Politics of Heritage. The Legacies of ‘Race’. London and New York: Routledge.

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Löytty, Olli. 2004. ‘Erikoisen tavallinen suomalaisuus’. In Suomi toisin sanoen, edited by Mikko Lehtonen, Olli Löytty and Petri Ruuska, 39–62. Tampere: Vastapaino. Maabrändiraportti. 2010. Nation Branding Report. Finland Promotion Board. Accessed 24 March 2018. https://toolbox.finland.fi/research/maabrandiraportti/. Peteri, Virve. 2006. Mediaksi kotiin. Tutkimus teknologioiden kotouttamisesta. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Quiñones, Marta García, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi, eds. 2013. Ubiquitous Musics. The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. PL1–11. 2010–2016. Playlists of Recordings Played in the Äänien ilta Programme, edited and published in Muuttuvat suomalaiset äänimaisemat, 303–9. DOI: 10.26530/OAPEN_624254 R1–10. Requests 2010–16. Written Suggestions from the Listeners of the Äänien ilta Programme. Archives of Jukka Mikkola. Radio Suomi. 2017. ‘Yle vastaa: Radio Suomi on kaikkien suomalaisten kanava’. Accessed 15 November 2017. https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2017/11/07/yle-vastaaradio-suomi-on-kaikkien-suomalaisten-kanava. SuomiFinland100. 2017. ‘Finland 100 Products and Services Tell the Story of Finland’. Accessed 19 December 2017. http://suomifinland100.fi/news/finland-100-productsand-services-tell-the-story-of-finland/?lang=en. Truax, Barry. 2001. Acoustic Communication. Second edition. Westport, CT: Ablex. Uimonen, Heikki. Forthcoming. ‘Radiogenic Sound Cultures in Call-in Programmes’. In Sound, Media, Ecology, edited by Milena Droumeva and Randolph Jordan. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Uimonen, Heikki, and Jukka Mikkola. 2017. ‘Tahtoisin kuulla lehmien käsinlypsyä sinkkiämpäriin. Radio Suomen Äänien ilta radiogeenisena ohjelmana’. In Muuttuvat suomalaiset äänimaisemat, edited by Heikki Uimonen, Meri Kytö and Kaisa Ruohonen, 23–52. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Uimonen, Heikki, Meri Kytö, and Kaisa Ruohonen, eds. 2017. Muuttuvat suomalaiset äänimaisemat. Tampere: Tampere University Press. DOI:10.26530/OAPEN_624254 Venäläinen, Juhana. 2016. ‘Kuuloyhteisistä kuuntelunvapauteen. Kaikupohjien äänimaisemien kestäville käyttökulttuureille’. In Äänimaisemissa, edited by Helmi Järviluoma and Ulla Piela, 34–52. Helsinki: SKS. Visit Finland. 2018. ‘Silence, Please’ theme page. Accessed 25 March 2018. http://www .visitfinland.com/travel-trade/marketing-finland/silence-please/. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’. Global Networks 2 (4): 301–34.

7

Dispositives of Sound: Folk Music Collections, Radio, and the National Imagination, 1890s–1960s Johannes Müske

‘I did not know that Count Arco had such a beautiful voice!’ – the German empress was astounded when she and her husband witnessed one of the first successful music radio performances, that took place in April 1907 in Berlin and Nauen, bridging a distance of about 40 kilometres. Georg von Arco, technical director of Telefunken, and his teacher, Professor Adolf Slaby, operated the ‘wireless telegraphy’ experiment. After the exchange of a few words to confirm that the radio transmitters would work properly, von Arco played a gramophone recording, and so the Kaiser and his entourage would listen to Caruso’s voice transmitted over the ‘ether’ from the sender in Nauen to the Telefunkenhaus in Berlin (Kuisle and Leitmeyr 1988). From the very beginning of radio – and long before civil radio was established in the 1920s – playing records instead of talking into a microphone to test the transmission anticipated the possibility to use sound archives for radio broadcasting. The invention of radio broadcasting was one of a number of new media technologies with respect to recording, archiving, and disseminating sound that arrived in the late nineteenth century and invented wholly new global flows of information. Since the 1920s, radio broadcasting has played a pivotal role in the creation of discourses that invoked the existence of imagined communities, that is, nations (Anderson 1983; Hilmes 2012); the radio created ‘a shared simultaneity of experience’ (Hilmes 2012, 351) and, through radio, the nation not only found a voice, but also a musical expression. ‘The form of radio sound’ can be useful to analyse ‘the narratives, sentiments and images of national imaginary’, as Bessire and Fisher note (2013, 370).

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In doing so, radio should not be misunderstood as an object or a ‘singular technology or technique’ but rather ‘it acquires its objectness through wider formations of meaning, politics, and subjectivity’ (Bessire and Fisher 2013, 364). This is especially true for international radios with their function as an ‘acoustic business card’ for their respective nation-state. After the invention of civil radio broadcasting, radio stations created production archives to make programming more efficient, a practice that started to flourish in the 1950s with the invention of the magnetic tape. However, the practice of collecting and storing folk music was not invented by the radio and dates back to the days of phonography in around 1900, when ethnographers started to literally record culture on wax cylinders and found phonogram archives. This chapter investigates sound archives as dispositives of politics of national identity through sound, and the role that sound archives play in such contexts – like monuments, among other things, ethnographic and radio collections of folk music are powerful resources for the promotion of national discourse: collecting is ‘a crucial process of Western identity formation’ (Clifford 1988, 220). Two case studies examine folk music collections that were gathered by ethnographers and by the radio. Based on Foucauldian theory, this chapter scrutinizes the material fixation of culture by means of technology as a conditio sine qua non of the formation of ethnographic knowledge about culture and cultural politics of identity. In particular, the intertwining of folklore studies and the radio in the construction of national musical styles will be examined. Sound collections in their institutional contexts are elements of a dispositive which governs what sounds become elements of a national discourse by being silenced or highlighted, for example, by being disseminated via radio. At the centre of this chapter is the archive – both as an institution that collects and, in a metaphorical sense, as ‘the law of what can be said’ – the precondition for the formation of discourses. I will focus on a stunning parallel of folklore studies as well as radio broadcasting: the gathering and using of sound collections for cultural politics. As archiving is a cultural technique that enables interested actors to physically and symbolically appropriate fugitive culture, recording technologies that are ubiquitous in everyday culture are most important in the analysis of the media and the fabrication of sense perceptions. If we agree with discursive theory that archives are powerful institutions and that, in a metaphorical sense, the archive is the ‘system that governs the appearance of statements’ (Foucault 1972, 129), we then have to analyse the elements of



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the archive, that is, the material basis and the procedures which control and organize the production of discourse. While the theory of discourse developed and inspired by Michel Foucault chiefly focuses on the discourses emerging from large bodies of written literature, this chapter will add the views from a culturalanthropological analysis of technology1 and the anthropology of the senses2 that take into account the profoundly altered mediascapes (Appadurai 1996, 33–5) that have emerged in the twentieth century. With respect to sound, it has to be asked what discourses emanate from the accumulations of audiovisual materials in ethnographic and broadcasting archives. Further, and following Foucauldian theory, as the archive orders and controls discourse, sound collections are elements of this dispositive – thus we must investigate the criteria by which some sounds are recorded, preserved, passed down, and disseminated while others are not. In what follows, I will first give a brief sketch of the concepts of the archive and the dispositive used as a theoretical framework for my analysis. Second, I will take a closer look at ethnographic sound collections founded in around 1900 by folklorists and anthropologists,3 among others,4 and will give emphasis to the institutions and spirit in which the wax cylinders and

Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung, cf. Hengartner and Rolshoven 1998, Schönberger 2007, and also Bausinger (1961) 1990. 2 There are some good reasons to distinguish the two terms ‘anthropology of the senses’ and ‘sensory anthropology’ (cf. Pink and Howes 2010). However, for reasons of practicability, both terms will be used synonymously here. Anthropological research on the senses challenges the widespread assumption that the senses are pre-cultural, transparent ‘windows on the world’ (cf. Classen 1997, 402). Anthropology has, for instance, investigated the acoustic organization of culture (e.g. Erlmann 2004; Feld 1982) or how taste permeates social relationships (Stoller 1989). In recent years, several handbooks and compendia have been published; for a review and overview of the development of the research field, see Bendix 2005; Classen 1997; Herzfeld 2001; Pink 2009; Samuels et al. 2010. In this context, sound has become an especially broad field of research, and scholars of various disciplines focus on issues such as the acoustic environment, sound art, or the acoustic media (sound studies), see, for example, Bull 2013; Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012, Papenburg and Schulze 2016; and Sterne 2003 and 2012. 3 Folklorists and anthropologists cannot be sharply distinguished in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century; in fact, many anthropologists would consider themselves ‘folklorists’ working on cultural forms that they considered ‘folklore’, such as myth, musical forms, song, or non-elite expressive forms; nonetheless ‘folklorists’ would focus more on formal patterns, while ‘anthropologists’ would reflect the role of cultural expressions within communities, see Brady (1999, 3) for further references. 4 In around 1900, the academic disciplines of musicology and dialectology were also interested in building ethnographic collections, sharing an interest for foreign and often endangered cultures and dialects; see, for example, the collections gathered in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany during the First World War under the auspices of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission (officially founded later, in 1920, as the Sound Department (Lautabteilung) of the Prussian State Library); the disciplines, that is, university chairs involved, covered a broad range of disciplines: Oriental languages, English language, Comparative and Indo-Germanic linguistics, Romance languages, Indian and Mongolian languages, African languages, and music documentation (Lange 2017, n.pag.). 1

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other recordings were gathered – as these collections are one important, ‘scientifically approved’ foundation for the emergence of national styles of traditional music. Third, I will focus on the processes of valorizing folk music collections as a resource of national identity through amplification via the radio. Fourth, and continuing with Foucauldian theory, it will be asked whether ethnographic and radio archives can be seen as dispositives that react to certain urgencies. The research is based on archival and ethnographic studies on heritage and cultural policy in the realm of audiovisual and ethnographic archives.5

The archive as dispositive The basic function of a sound archive (as for many ethnographic archives) is different from a classical paper archive. In contrast to state or other official archives, sound archives, lacking historical sources, had to start collecting actively and mostly do not consist of disabled registries no longer in use and thus sorted out to be archived. This means that sound archives mainly do not collect files that are offered to them accidentally by others; instead, sound archivists actively choose the records that will fill the shelves, which is the case for both scientific sound archives and radio archives.6 According to Foucault’s famous definition of the archive, archives cannot only be seen as institutions, but, in a metaphorical way, the archive is ‘the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (Foucault 1972, 129). Here, archive does not mean the sum of all texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor [does it mean] the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and

For further information, see Müske (2015) and the homepage of the research programme ‘Broadcasting Swissness: Musical Practices, Institutional Contexts’, and the ‘Reception of Traditional Popular Music: the Acoustic Construction of “Swissness” on the Radio’ at Zürich University. (http:// www.isek.uzh.ch/de/populärekulturen/forschung/projekte/drittmittelprojekte/swissness.html.) 6 Of course, both radio archives and sound archives for scientific or cultural heritage uses also take in, to some extent, collections that are offered to them by other institutions, for example, when radio archives or programmes are shut down, or scientific projects are finished. This has increasingly been the case in the last two to three decades, as audiovisual collections from the early nineteenth century are becoming obsolete and need to be digitally preserved. 5



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preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation. (Foucault 1972, 128–9)

Rather, archives are complex ‘systems that establish statements as events … and things’ (Foucault 1972, 128). The archive ‘differentiates’ the discourses and ‘specifies them in their own duration’ (Foucault 1972, 128), and it also limits the number of discourses. To summarize, the archive can be read as a system that orders statements and transforms these statements into discourses with a specific meaning and temporal validity; it is ‘the general system of the formation and transformation of statements’ (Foucault 1972, 130; emphasis in original). As media technologies have fundamentally changed since the turn of the twentieth century, not only written texts but media texts of all kinds – and particularly audiovisual collections – must be included in discourse analysis. In this sense, folk music collections are elements of archives that govern what can be said musically of a nation, and what cannot. For instance, through the very collection and centralized allocation of the recordings, cultural elements are drawn from the peripheries of the empires or national states to the centres and appropriated7 as belonging to a certain country, as will be elaborated on later. If the archive governs the appearance of statements, it constitutes a dispositive that is in control of the discourse. With respect to folklore, Foucauldian theory on the archive can be applied to analyse the institutionally organized accumulation of folklore recordings as a dispositive that fulfils the strategic function to control national discourses. The archive is ‘a transcendent dispositive which a priori governs the possibility of all parlances [Redeweisen]’ as the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst writes (Ernst 2002, 18, my emphasis), or as Foucault would clarify in an interview: What I’m trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogenous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus.8 The apparatus itself

The complex implications of such ‘cultural appropriations’ and the colonial spirit in which they were carried out cannot be discussed here; for a thorough discussion, see Brown (2003) and Jackson (2010). 8 In accordance with Bussoni (2010), I use the English translation ‘dispositive’ instead of ‘apparatus’ proposed by Agamben (2009). 7

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is the network that can be established between these elements. (Foucault 1978: 119–20, cited in translation in Agamben 2009, 2)

The dispositive is a formation ‘that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency’, that is, a ‘dominant strategic function’ and is supported by ‘certain types of knowledge’ (cited in translation in Agamben 2009, 2). The strategy of the dispositive remains anonymous, or unconscious, however, some of its elements like institutions and tactics can be described. Who did gather what kind of knowledge in the many museums and collections that emerged in all ‘civilized countries’ in around 1900, and why – if the materials are elements of a certain dispositive, what urgency would it respond to?

Collecting folk music with the phonograph: Linking sound to the national (1890s–1930s) Prior to the electrification of media, and well before their electronic end, there were modest, merely mechanical apparatuses. Unable to amplify or transmit, they nevertheless were the first to store sensory data: silent movies and stored sights, and Edison’s phonograph … stored sounds. (Kittler [1986] 1999, 3)

When ‘something ceases not to write itself ’ (Kittler [1986] 1999, 3) sensory data are stored. In this section, I will investigate the history of the phonograph as a technology that helped to tie traditional music to ethnic groups and nations by collecting folklore. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, media theorist Friedrich Kittler expands on the analysis of the visual media in the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ so famously analysed by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin [1936] 1969). Two aspects are highlighted in Benjamin’s essay: First, mechanical ‘process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction’ (Benjamin [1936] 1969, 220). Before the invention of the phonograph, for example, it was only possible to reproduce sounds by performing them, which required certain skills like playing an instrument or commanding musical notation. With the phonograph, sound reproduction becomes independent of instruments and the ability to play them. Second, ‘technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself ’ (Benjamin [1936] 1969, 220). The existence of the work of art, which was once unique, becomes ubiquitous



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with mechanical reproduction. As Benjamin scrutinizes, mechanical reproduction not only displaces the ‘use value’ of the original and creates a new ‘exhibition value’, but also the sheer existence of reproducible works calls for the exploitation of the things recorded, for example, through commerce or other means of dissemination such as circulating reproductions through publishing. Susan Sontag has pushed this argument even further in her essays on photography, and noted that ‘photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at’ (Sontag [1973] 2005, 1). In 1877, a needle and tinfoil changed our notions of what is worth listening to. Edison’s phonograph made an old dream possible: to record and reproduce sound at will. While extensive works have been published on the invention of the phonograph as an entertainment medium (Gelatt 1955; Katz 1998), it has only recently been analysed as a scientific instrument9 by scholars in folkloristics, the history of science or neighbouring fields (Brady 1999; Lange 2017; Lechleitner 2005; Stangl 2000). As Erika Brady points out in her groundbreaking study A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography, the technology was discovered shortly after its invention by the ethnographic disciplines and became irresistible to the students of culture, despite the fact that the sound quality was relatively poor and that it was often characterized as an unnatural or even ‘monstrous’ machine in field situations (Brady 1999, 27ff.). Ethnographers made use of the phonograph for field research as early as 1890, only one year after Edison and his competitors Bell and Tainter had presented wax cylinder phonographs to the public at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. And since there was no affordable technology available for decades, wax cylinder phonographs were in use in some ethnographic archives until the 1950s, when the magnetic tape recorder replaced them. Coming back to Susan Sontag, the analysing of what is worth being recorded will give us insights into societal values – some sounds have ‘ceased to not write themselves’. Folk music, or traditional music and sounds, are among the first sonic traces that have been recorded, preserved, disseminated and passed down to our times. The scholars interested in folklore found their subject in collecting and preserving dialects and traditional music – but how did they proceed in safeguarding the culture of ‘the others’ (Fabian 1983), and how would they know what heritage was desirable? Fewkes uses this term for the phonograph in an article in Science (Fewkes 1890). For more on the term ‘scientific instrument’ or apparatus and the manifold definitions, see Warner (1990).

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Recording folklore did not come out of the blue, but was heavily rooted in romantic-nationalist ideas that had been already established in the nineteenth century. As the folklorists and cultural anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs write, one influential thinker was the German philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Herder laid the theoretical foundations for the linkage of poetry and the nation by creating a conception of tradition as constitutive of vernacular literature and national identity. Poetic … tradition, as Herder saw it, is nevertheless always under duress in the modern world, requiring the intervention of intellectuals to preserve it for the health of the nation. (Bauman and Briggs 2003, 163)

In his work, the collecting and preserving of ‘folk’ poetry merged with the idea of rescuing traditional culture from vanishing and, by doing so, serving the needs of the nation. Herder’s Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs) (1778–9) ordered European popular songs according to national goals and inspired many other collectors such as the Brothers Grimm10 or the founding of festivals of folklore, such as the Swiss Unspunnenfest, celebrated since the early nineteenth century. The Volksgeist needed to be searched and collected – and was found, or, better, constructed by not only the Bartoks, Smetanas, and other composers of national operas and music11 but also ethnographers. The ethnographic sound archives perfectly reflect this spirit. In around 1900, both in the United States and in Europe, it was widely held among scholars of culture that the Native American population or European peasant culture was dying out or would be erased soon. Folklorists did not want to miss the last opportunity to ‘Save, Save the Lore!’ (Brady 1999, 52). Before traditional regional culture was ‘washed away’ by the ‘storm tide of international civilization’ (Hoffmann-Krayer 1908, 241) – a stance that can be found in many publications

For example the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen and von Arnim’s and Brentano’s song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn are well-known examples of how Herder’s theorizing was scientized and professionalized throughout the nineteenth century by scholars of philology. Herder, the Brothers Grimm, and others created, edited, and published their collections not only for the sake of scholarly research, but also ‘because they belong to our national literature’, as Jacob Grimm would write to Achim von Arnim regarding the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Bauman and Briggs 2003, 218–19). For more on the work of Herder and his influence on the Brothers Grimm and others, see Bauman and Briggs 2003, 163–225. 11 The concept of ‘musical nationalism’ (Nationalmusik) cannot be discussed here. For further reading, see for example Dahlhaus 1980. I am grateful to Thomas Järmann for this information. 10



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of this era – folklorists would record these voices before they fell silent for good.12 The first ethnographer to use a phonograph in the field was Jesse Walter Fewkes, a Harvard-trained zoologist who ‘undertook a series of experiments’ to see if the phonograph would help ‘in preserving the languages of this continent’ – with the result that ‘the necessity of work with the phonograph … is imperative’ (Fewkes 1890, 267, 269). He and his assistants brought home a collection of some thirty wax cylinders from his first expedition to the Passamaquoddy (Brady 1999, 52–6). While Fewkes stopped recording in 1891 and turned his interest to other fields, more folklorists and anthropologists were to follow his path. In 1900, the phonograph had become more affordable, more reliable, and usable as a recording and reproduction device. The first institutional ethnographic sound archive was founded in 1899 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences which would serve as a blueprint for many archives to follow (including the Berlin Phonogram Archive, founded in 1900 by Carl Stumpf, who was followed by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, one of the pioneers in the development of the methodology and field of ethnomusicology).13 Modern recording technologies became a helpful opportunity to systematically collect, safeguard, and build ethnographic archives – while an additional value of the collection efforts can be seen in the help to institutionalize scientific disciplines like folklore and anthropology through professionalizing ethnographic methods. Like Fewkes, many of the early ethnographers were trained in physiology, psychology, or other sciences, and by using expressions like ‘experiments’ or ‘exact research and correct methods’ they alluded to the natural sciences and claimed that, in analogy to established taxonomies of nature, an exact taxonomy of cultures was also possible (e.g. Weinhold, see footnote 12). Accordingly, the ethnographic cylinder collections are indexed not only according to their provenience (collectors or projects), but especially according to ethnic, regional, or national criteria.

To achieve this goal, the early folklorists needed to build institutional structures. See, for instance, the call of one of the founding fathers of folklore studies in Germany, Karl Weinhold, who insisted (years before folklore or anthropology had developed institutions like archives or university chairs) that folklore ‘can only lift off, become a science, and avoid dilettantism through exact research and correct methods. It is of crucial importance to found elaborate collections: all and every material has to be searched, gathered as purely as possible, and recorded authentically, like the natural scientists do – written and on photograph, wherever possible. … It is high time to start collecting!’ (Karl Weinhold 1891, 1–2). 13 Most recently, the Lautarchiv at the University of Berlin has been the object of a research project, see Lange 2017; Scheffner 2007. Other ethnographic sound archives founded in this period are the following: the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (1900), the Lautarchiv in Berlin (1915), Paris (1901), Zürich (1909), St. Petersburg (1926), or Washington, D.C. (1928). See, for example, the histories of the Phonogram Archives in Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, which are all listed in the register of the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme (www.unesco.org.). 12

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A pioneering example is the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv which was founded in 1899 by the physiologist Sigmund Exner (1846–1926), a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences – with not one single recording in stock. The archive served to equip scientific expeditions with the Archiv-Phonograph; the first expeditions to the Balkans, the Isle of Lesbos, and Brazil date back to as early as 1901 (Exner 1903, 15). In order to establish the institution as a scientific repository, the archive offered to lend the recording technology to the scholars going on expeditions in exchange for the recorded materials, of which they would produce copies both for the researchers and for the archive.14 Impediments like the total weight of the equipment (approximately 120 kilograms) did not halt the devotees of folklore, and the first plates15 were soon ingested by the Phonogrammarchiv, ordered as follows: Overview of the phonotyped recordings. A. Expedition Rešetar: A Croatian song. Various tales recorded in the dialects of the CroatianSlovenian borderlands. A folk song of these regions. B. Expedition Kretschmer: A collection of folk and love songs by the people of Lesbos. C. Expedition Wettstein: a) Language of the Guarani Indians. Religious song and a short tale. b) Portuguese language from S. Paulo. D. Recordings made in the laboratory. (Exner 1903, 30–1)

The laboratory recordings involved foreign languages and the languages and dialects of the Danube Monarchy: spoken samples of Czech, Romanian, Silesian, and so on; miscellanies; and ‘voice portraits’ of important persons (Exner 1903, 30–1). Of course, the Phonogrammarchiv reserved the first call The possibility of copying the recordings was seen as the main benefit of the technology, as Sigmund Exner, director of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv would write to Oskar von Miller, director of the Deutsches Museum (German Science Museum, Munich), who had asked for information in advance of founding of a sound archive; 17 December 1913; Deutsches Museum, administrative files (Verwaltungsakten, 1832/2). 15 The Archiv-Phonograph was a custom-built model which used Edison recorders and wax plates instead of wax cylinders. 14



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numbers for the Austrian emperor (Franz Joseph’s voice portrait would join the stock later, in 1903). From 1899 through 1950, over 4,000 wax cylinders and gramophone recordings have been recorded for ‘eternal’ preservation (Vienna Phonogrammarchiv 1999: n.pag. [2], quotation marks in the original). The structure of this collection is, as for every collection, open to restructuring and additional incoming objects (te Heesen and Spary 2001). In, Vienna, as in many other phonogram archives, the phonograph was in use until the 1930s. The Vienna Phonogrammarchiv, as well as other ethnographic audio archives that were often affiliated with national academies or libraries, aimed at appropriating and preserving the music and voices of the entire empire, not only including the people and peoples at home, but also the voices of world regions with which they were in contact. The sounds of the ‘folk’ resp. ‘natives’ collected at home and abroad were inventoried as completely as possible, accompanied by detailed metadata about the recordings (Protokollblätter), and were organized according to existing disciplinary criteria (e.g. dialectology, ethnomusicology, etc., see Lechleitner 2005, 101).16 The ethnographic collections produce connections between cultural expressions and certain ethnic groups or nations. By the very practice of giving a cylinder recording a title like ‘A Croatian song’ the folklorists reproduce strategies that had been employed almost a century earlier by Herder and others. At the same time, the wax cylinders are a new technology and differ from songs on paper, since they create a direct link – the storage medium with a stable signature – to the music, being the material witness of the ephemeral, that is, culture: The archived materials provide the evidence that there exist close references between the ethnic/national and sound, for example, dialects, certain instruments, or musical styles. Once established, the ‘typical’ cultural styles are ready to be valorized and circulated in other contexts, such as national cultural policy and its acoustic leading medium: radio.

Music radio and politics of national identity: Broadcasting ‘Swiss’ music as ‘spiritual defence’ (1930s–1960s) Media ethnographies have emphasized the role of the radio in broadcasting national imaginaries as a medium of identity politics, or how news and other A full list of the editions of the historical recordings (1899–1950) can be found online, www .phonogrammarchiv.at/wwwnew/edition_dhtm#CD-Edition. A catalogue was published in 1922.

16

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symbolic representations of the nation are acoustically circulated through the radio to ‘evoke the newsworthy and sentimentally “engineer” the nation’ (Bessire and Fisher 2013, 370). In doing so, radio people could build on the national musical styles that had already been invented by folklorists and others. Empirically, it is difficult to trace how folkloristic categories of national musical styles have made their way into radio broadcasting, but individual biographies provide evidence that such ideas circulated among radio personnel.17 In the following, a closer look will be taken at the using of the archive to ‘translate’18 a certain concept of national identity into ‘Swiss music’. Specifically, the chapter investigates the Swiss international shortwave radio as an example of the execution of cultural politics through sound. When civil radio broadcasting started in the 1920s, national musical styles were already established and ready to be applied for programming. An audience accustomed to listening to music at home via the phonograph was awaiting the latest recordings, produced by an international entertainment industry. Providing a better sound quality than recorded music, and not being too expensive, listening to music at home via the ‘ether’ instantly became popular. Consequently, administrations in post-war Europe and the United States sought to regulate the radio and to establish structures in which a few licensed radio producers would broadcast for a public of millions of radio listeners in as early as the 1920s.19 The nationalization of the radio is mirrored in brands such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) or the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). It formed the precondition for the dissemination of ‘national’ programmes aired both nationwide and internationally.20

Emblematic figures in folk music are witnesses of the close conjunctions between the two realms, like, for example, Hanny Christen or Hanns in der Gand in Switzerland or John and Alan Lomax in the United States who founded and contributed to folklore collections and worked for or collaborated with the radio. Interviews with folk musicians who participated in radio productions in the 1950s and 1960s show that they used song books and other popular collections of Swiss folklore published since the nineteenth century for their compositions and arrangements (Broadcasting Swissness project archive). 18 Concerning the concept of ‘translation’, see Callon (1984) and Latour (1996). 19 Radio as a medium envisioned as an ‘apparatus of communication’ (Kommunikationsapparat) with programmes produced and distributed by anybody for everybody were without a chance, cf. Brecht ([1932] 1999). 20 For example Germany (1923), Great Britain (1927), and Switzerland (1931) nationalized the radio, and even in the United States radio broadcasting was regulated by legally taking radio technology and radio programmes from firms and wireless amateur clubs and handing them over to privately owned, public, or semi-public institutions that were given exclusive licences and frequencies (however, radio amateurs were compensated with some less important frequencies). 17



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Since the beginnings of the radio, programmes were designed to ‘uplift’ the masses and to sell other products, like radio receivers or consumer goods, by offering information and entertainment. Even if radio programmes might often be driven by commercial interests, radio constructed a ‘symbolic universe’, and the broadcast representations ‘possessed the power to create a phenomenon greater than themselves’ (Hilmes 2012, 351–52). By the 1930s, radio in Europe was increasingly shifting in the direction of propaganda and had to ‘sell’ political messages. Especially in National Socialist Germany, as well as in other totalitarian regimes in Europe, the radio was soon co-opted [Gleichschaltung] by the Ministry of Propaganda and filled with attractive entertainment programmes that more or less subcutaneously spread the desired messages. As radio waves cross borders, stations in non-allied or neutral countries, like Switzerland, had to counteract this with a ‘first class program’ (Swiss Federal Council (Schw. Bundesrat) 1938, 1006) if they did not want to lose their listeners to foreign propaganda. In response, the Swiss Federal Council launched the programme of the Spiritual Defence (Geistige Landesverteidigung), a set of both ideologies and activities that lasted until the early 1960s. This national cultural movement had already existed since the 1930s and had been borne by diverse cultural-political actors. In 1938, it became the official cultural-political doctrine aiming at promoting and defending ‘Swiss’ values and culture, both inwardly and outwardly (Swiss Federal Council (Schw. Bundesrat) 1938; see also Mooser 1997). Cultural institutions and foundations were funded with federal money to support Swiss literature, national exhibitions displaying folklore and technology (like the Swiss National Exposition in Zürich, 1939), or folk festivals – as well as the radio. In fact, radio was conceived of as being one of the key elements in promoting Swiss values (Swiss Federal Council (Schw. Bundesrat) 1938, 1005; cf. Reymond 2000). In Switzerland, radio meant easy participation in Swiss culture for everybody, including those in remote regions or with limited access to cinemas, theatres, newspapers, or formal education in reading. Internationally, radio reached beyond the nation at home – and shortwave radio, in particular, could serve as a medium of promoting national values beyond national borders. In 1935, the shortwave service (since 1978: Swiss Radio International, SRI) was founded as a part of the SBC to distribute radio programmes internationally.21 The founding From the 1990s, SRI broadcasts were also transmitted via satellite; in 2004, SRI was closed down and replaced by the website Swissinfo.ch (est. 1999 by the SBC). The history of SRI has been most recently investigated by two research projects in Switzerland, see Hengartner, Müske et al. 2016; Ruppen Coutaz 2016.

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of SRI took place at a time when many countries were establishing shortwave stations, among them Radio Moscow (1929), the British Empire Service (1932), or the Voice of America (1942).22 Being reflected between the uppermost layers of the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth, shortwaves can reach remote parts of the globe. Like all shortwave radios, SRI programmes reached out to Switzerland’s own citizens abroad and to the interested international audience, broadcasting information, and Swiss music against the ‘Nazi soundscapes’ (Birdsall 2012). The problem was: What was ‘Swiss’? Swiss culture and values could hardly be defined by linguistic representations, because there are four official languages in Switzerland (French, German, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romanic since 1938, with the launch of the Spiritual Defence). Instead, according to the Swiss Federal Council, Swiss culture was to be found in a particular blend of traditional folk culture and modernity: ‘We must show the world that we are a country not only of industry, trade, and tourism, but also of outstanding culture, and of ancient, rooted to the soil, and unique civilization’ (Swiss Federal Council (Schw. Bundesrat) 1938, 1011). ‘Swiss’ character is denoted here on the one hand as very modern and linked to ‘industry, trade, and tourism’. On the other hand, it is traced back to a premodern past, evoking images of peasant culture and of the Alps, untouched by modern civilization. This doctrine formed the cornerstone of SRI’s mission as a radio station; not only was it fundamental for the founding and developing of SRI in the 1930s, it was still at work twenty years later,23 when the Spiritual Defence developed from an anti-fascist/antitotalitarian societal orientation into an anti-communist ‘Western’-oriented ideology (Imhof 2010). SRI broadcasted for an international and national audience abroad and had to represent Switzerland in the world as a country being both traditional and modern. However, SRI’s mission was even more complex since it also had to produce programmes for the Swiss at home, supplying the domestic telephone radio (Telephonrundspruch) with music.24 Consequently, the programmes had to include

Stations were often funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the case of SRI, the radio did not receive public funding before 1964. Instead, as an enterprise unit of the SBC, the station was funded by its subscribers, similar to fees or taxes. In exchange, the station had to offer certain information and entertainment services. 23 The above cited quote could still be found in official Swiss Radio documents in 1957 and 1958, serving as a raison d’etre for SRI. 24 The Telephonrundspruch worked via a terrestrial cable network and was founded in 1931 to reach remote mountain valleys with bad receiving conditions. In its heydays in the early 1970s, around 22



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music from all parts of Switzerland that simultaneously satisfied the ideology of the Spiritual Defence and the taste of a very diverse audience at home and in the international radio ‘ether’. Radio station officials soon discovered they could use traditional Swiss popular music to programme interesting broadcasts and ‘sell’ the news and information about Switzerland (Schweizerische Rundspruchgesellschaft 1958, 46). Swiss music was needed for weekly programmes about Switzerland (e.g. Swiss music, Schwizerdütsche Heimatobe). These requirements became even more demanding in the 1950s when programmes were expanding quickly – the broadcasts consisted of up to two-thirds of music – while budgets did grow slower, since the television era was already dawning. Radio needed a lot of actual music. In this complex situation, a solution was provided by the invention of the magnetic tape which was implemented across the SBC in the 1950s. Until the early 1950s, radio programmes were normally broadcasted live. Now, tape recording enabled new ways of coworking at the radio: It increasingly became everyday practice to record music on tape for later use and to copy and exchange tapes with no loss of sound quality across the entire SBC. SRI produced 40 hours of programmes per day in six languages, and most of these programmes, like the news, were produced not by SRI but by other business units of the SBC, the regional studios (see Figure 7.1): some of the domestic programmes would be copied, modified, and reused for the International Shortwave Service. With respect to music, tape copying and programme exchange enabled SRI as an institution of the SBC to get access to the musical productions of all its studios. Concretely, at SRI, the responsible archivist, Basel-based musicologist Fritz Dür (1920–90), began to create a new collection of ‘Swiss music’ for programming. Letters to SRI show that radio listeners in Switzerland and abroad really wanted to hear current folk music in a traditional style (e.g. Ländler, polkas, or other dance music), as well as light music with traditional stylistic elements, for example, traditional melodies arranged for big band orchestras, with jazz and classical elements. Since this kind of music, often referred to as folk music, was not always available on commercial recordings, all of the SBC’s regional radio studios produced the music on their own to be exclusively used by the radio. The folk musicians in Switzerland could draw

440,000 subscribers listened with special telephone radio receivers to six programmes offering news and entertainment in the three main Swiss languages. It was shut down in 1997 and the programmes Classic, Jazz and Pop are still distributed online today as music-only radios.

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Figure 7.1  Organization of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation 1940s–1960s. Six studios with regional affiliations produced programmes for three national broadcasters (Landessender Beromünster, Monte Ceneri, and Sottens) and the International Shortwave Service SRI in Schwarzenburg (Schweizerische Rundspruchdienst 1941, 15; Foto Zentralarchiv GD SRG, JB 1940/1941).

on a rich inventory of folk music collected since the first folklore festival in Unspunnen (1805). The radio, for example, funded a radio orchestra for light music and hired professional folk musicians to record the latest compositions and arrangements. A most fascinating example is provided by the folklorist Hanny Christen. She collected from the 1940s through the 1960s approximately 12,000 songs, working with local folk musicians across Switzerland. Christen also collaborated with the radio studio in Bern delivering the traditional folk melodies to the radio where the songs would be newly arranged and recorded by professional folk musicians. The collaboration lasted until 1960, when Christen resigned after differences with the responsible radio editor (DelorenziSchenkel 2006).25

See the Swissinfo-feature ‘The original Swiss folk music’ about legacy (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-1xNSBPFFKQ).

25



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Some of the recordings made it into the archives of SRI.26 In 1957, Dür and his colleagues began to gather actual recordings on magnetic tape from all six Swiss radio studios (Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano, and Zürich, see Figure 7.2). By 1967 they had copied approximately 7,600 pieces. Remarkably, Dür’s collection of ‘Swiss music’ does not only contain the yodel and alphorn, but also traditional dance music, current big band 27

146 131 481 525 2511

882

1233 1709

Studio Zürich - 33% Studio Basel - 22% Studio Lugano - 16% Cédric Dumont (ZH) - 12% Studio Bern - 7% Shortwave Service - 6% Studios Genf & Lausanne - 2% Other (e.g., industrial rec.) - 2%

Figure 7.2  The Dür Collection at SRI, proveniences.27

For example, ‘Vieille danse suisse’. Musique du Folly, Veyvey (1954, Arr.: Carlo Boller); song collected by Hanny Christen (https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/sammlungduer/vieille-dansesuisse). 27 Proveniences: the original SRI productions account only for approximately 6 per cent of the collection and cover genres not represented by the other studios, that is, mainly yodel and choirs; the German-speaking studios (Zürich, Basel, and Bern) are over-represented, though music from the French (Geneva, Lausanne) and Italian (Lugano) parts of the country are well-represented nonetheless. Note that, for example, Rhaeto-Romanic Switzerland (Graubünden) is covered by studio Zürich (see Figure 7.1), meaning the cultural diversity of the recordings is greater than the provenience of the studios might indicate. The Dumont provenience denotes light music/orchestral dance music (big band), directed by Cédric Dumont and produced in Zürich. Musical genres might be categorized differently, thus, no numbers are appearing. 26

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1% 2% 1% 1% 2% 3% 11% 41% 13%

25%

Dance tunes (e.g., Ländler, Polka, Dance Orchestra) Vocal folk music Other instrumental folk music Yodel Brass (e.g., marches) Character songs (e.g., worker's songs) Classical orchestra music Jazz Chamber music (classical, salon) Religious music

Figure 7.3  The Dür Collection at SRI, musical styles.

music, classical music, and even jazz from all parts of Switzerland (see Figure 7.3). Personal musical preferences might have been guiding Dür and his colleagues to some extent; however, the composition of the collection reflects the musical work of the decade produced by the radio, since the studios produced the programmes independently, and Dür could only copy tapes that were already existing in the regional archives. In the late 1960s, folk and traditional dance music became less popular, and the collection was used less frequently for programming on SRI. In the 1970s and 1980s, the songs were rediscovered for the production of the anthology Musica Helvetica which  received worldwide attention through a transcriptions service. Since  1997, the collection is safeguarded by the Swiss National Sound Archives.



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Dispositives of sound (and silence): Archives and the control of national discourse Recording and archiving technologies pervade the practices of collecting culture: through the very collection and centralized allocation of the recordings, cultural elements are drawn from the peripheries of the empires or national states to the centre and appropriated as belonging to a certain country. The previous sections have shown how cultural policy provides a framework for national identity politics through sound via music radio. In this sense, folk music collections are elements of archives that govern what can be said musically of a nation, and what cannot. As Foucault notes, ‘The archive of a society, a culture, or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively’, nor is it possible to describe the archive in its totality (Foucault 1972, 130). Consequently, if some elements of a dispositive change, different statements and discourses will appear. Statements that emerge from the collections of wax cylinders and magnetic tapes in the Austrian Phonogrammarchiv are, for instance, ‘the Croatian language belongs to the Habsburg Monarchy’. In the era of the empires the music and voices of all ethnic groups of the monarchy materially gathered on phonographs in the archives of the Imperial Academy of Sciences indicate that Austria symbolically appropriated all nations in its territories under one multiethnic umbrella. A different statement derives from the Dür radio collection. In the case of the radio collection of ‘Swiss music’, the union of the nation was at stake. The strategic function of the archive dispositive in Switzerland during the Geistige Landesverteidigung was the control of the belonging of cultural elements to the nation. Only ‘Swiss’ music was ingested into the Dür collection to be disseminated via radio broadcasts which distributed the message that both traditional yodeling and modern light music represent Swiss national values. The archive here controls what sonic elements become statements in the discourse of ‘Swissness’. Displaying certain sounds at national exhibitions and broadcasting them through the national and international radio ‘ether’ privilege certain statements. At the same time, paradoxically, recording the voices of the ‘others’ transforms them into a state of what Ernst denotes as ‘latency’ (Ernst 2002, 18) – literally, as audiovisual materials only ‘speak’ for the duration of their performance; since cultural expressions archived in a collection are now being framed as ‘folklore,’ they are transformed from something meaningful (and therefore politically dangerous) into something historical and harmless. The efforts to safeguard

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the ephemeral by fixing it on data storage devices and storing it in shelves also meant a silencing of the voices of the others. As the Spiritual Defence clearly shows, the belonging of cultural elements to a nation is not ‘naturally’ given, because the idea of the nation, and with it the idea of a national identity, is ideologically ambivalent. In the view of actors such as the Swiss Federal Council or other institutions, the nation was in need of being promoted and strengthened, since it does not emerge only because it is invoked all the time, but through certain and visible signs and events: ‘Traditional histories do not take the nation at its own word, but, for the most part, they do assume that the problem lies with the interpretation of “events” that have a certain transparency or privileged visibility’ (Bhabha 1990, 3). By putting voices into a state of latency or silence, the archive also serves the homogenization of the national identity and the oblivion of unwanted cultural identities. As the French historian Ernest Renan wrote in What is a Nation? at the end of the nineteenth century, The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew … . Ethnographic considerations have therefore played no part in the constitution of modern nations: France is [at once] Celtic, Iberic, and Germanic. Germany is Germanic, Celtic, and Slav. … The truth is that there is no pure race and that to make politics depend upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera. (Renan, cited in Bhabha 1990, 11 and 14)

Historical distance reveals that Renan is both right and wrong here; indeed, ethnographic knowledge is marginal compared to historical knowledge about ‘grand’ events in the past, yet ethnography played a role throughout the twentieth century – as an endeavour that aimed at systematically collecting ‘threatened’ cultures, by applying the most advanced research techniques of the time. The ethnographic endeavour has its share in the transformation of national cultures into premodern traditions or ‘folklore’ that nobody would have to be afraid of. Folk music collections helped to stabilize ‘modern’ nation-states by highlighting certain aspects of national culture and silencing unwanted voices. The permeation of our everyday world with media technology has recently been captured with the concept of mediatization (e.g. Michelsen and Krogh 2017) which emphasizes that media ‘become an integrated part of other institutions



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like politics, work, family and religion, as more and more of these institutional activities are performed through both interactive and mass media’ (Hjarvard, cited in Michelsen and Krogh 2017, 522). Technology is conceptualized here as ‘crosssectional dimension’ of our lifeworld (Schönberger 2007) which goes beyond a technological determinism promulgated by classical media theory which has argued that media determine the sensory organization of a society. In contrast, ethnography stresses that through their affordances and growing availability, media are offering ‘new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds’ (Appadurai 1996, 3). Folk music research, collecting, and the radio are inextricably intertwined, and further scholarship could be devoted to the analysing of how leading individuals in folklore studies and in the radio have contributed to national radio broadcasting, and to the question of how a dispositive may change with growing mediatization. A fruitful endeavour could be to investigate the role of today’s digital technologies in the rediscovery and valorization of forgotten collections under the conditions of neoliberal (research) policies throughout Europe. With some historical distance, perhaps future research will discover what archives govern our digital times and to what urgencies the contemporary cultural heritage industries are answering.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to Thomas Hengartner (Zürich) and Sabine Eggmann (Basel), with whom I have worked together on various projects concerning sound archives, cultural heritage and property, and the history of folklore studies. I also thank my reviewers for their helpful remarks. Of course, only the author is responsible for all erroneous thoughts. This research was made possible by generous grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF No. 141800) and the Scholar in Residence programme (2017) at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. The author has conducted interviews with archivists at sound archives in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland during his dissertation research as well as with radio staff and folk musicians in the course of his post-doc project. Sincere thanks are given to all. The following collections have been of special help: Archive of the Deutsches Museum, Munich (historical administrative files (Bestand Verwaltungsakten)), Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, Bloomington, Archives of the SBC, Bern (Collection Swiss Shortwave Service / Swiss Radio International),

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Archives of the Swiss Folklore Society, Basel (historical administrative files) and Swiss Federal Archives (administrative files concerning Swiss Radio International).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anonymous. n.d. Memory of the World International Register Nomination Form. Austria – the Historical Collections (1899–1950) of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv. Accessed 30 September 2017. http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/ MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/mow/nomination_forms/austria_historical_ collections_vienna_phonogrammarchiv.pdf Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Richard, and Charles S. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bausinger, Hermann. (1961) 1990. Folk Culture in a World of Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bendix, Regina. 2005. ‘Introduction: “Ear to Ear, Nose to Nose, Skin to Skin” – The Senses in Comparative Ethnographic Perspective’. Etnofoor 18 (1): 3–14. http://www .jstor.org/stable/25758082. Benjamin, Walter. (1936) 1969. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–51. New York: Schocken Books. Bessire, Lucas, and Daniel Fisher. 2013. ‘The Anthropology of Radio Fields’. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (1): 363–78. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurevanthro-092412-155450. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Birdsall, Carolyn. 2012. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Brady, Erika. 1999. A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Brecht, Bertold. (1932) 1999. ‘Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat: Rede über die Funktion des Rundfunks [The Radio As Means of Communication: Talk about the Function of the Radio]’. In Kursbuch Medienkultur: Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard [Course Book on Media Culture: Major Theories from



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Brecht to Baudrillard], edited by Claus Pias, Lorenz Engell, Oliver Fahle, Joseph Vogl and Britta Neitzel, 259–63. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt DVA. Brown, Michael F. 2003. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bull, Michael, ed. 2013. Sound Studies. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. Bussolini, Jeffrey. 2010. ‘What Is a Dispositive?’ Foucault Studies 10: 85–107. http:// dx.doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i10.3120. Callon, Michel. 1984. ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’. The Sociological Review 32 (1): 196–233. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1984.tb00113.x. Classen, Constance. 1997. ‘Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses’. International Social Science Journal 153: 401–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2451.1997.tb00032.x. Clifford, James. 1988. ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’. In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, edited by James Glifford, 215–51. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1980. Die Musik Des 19. Jahrhunderts [Music of the 19th Century]. Vol. 6 of Neues Handbuch Der Musikwissenschaft [New Musicological Handbook], edited by Carl Dahlhaus. Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1980–95. Delorenzi-Schenkel, Silvia. 2006. ‘Ein klingendes Zeitportrait. Die Tonbänder von Hanny Christen [A Sounding Period Portrait. The Tapes of Hanny Christen]’. Memoriav Bulletin 13: 36–9. http://memoriav.ch/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ bulletin13.pdf. Dür Collection Online. Accessed 5 January 2018. https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/ sammlungduer. Erlmann, Veit, ed. 2004. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity. Oxford: Berg. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2002. Das Rumoren der Archive: Ordnung aus Unordnung [The Rumbling of the Archives: Order out of Disorder]. Berlin: Merve. Exner, Sigmund. 1903. ‘II. Bericht über den Stand der Arbeiten der PhonogrammArchivs-Commission, erstattet in der Sichtung der Gesammt-Akademie vom 11. Juli 1902 [Second Status Report on the Work of the Phonogramme Archive Commission, prepared for Meeting of the Gesammt Academy of 11 July 1902]’. In Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Beilage zum Anzeiger der mathematischnaturwissenschaftlichen Klasse [Imperial Academy of Sciences, Supplement to the Newsletter of the Mathematical-Scientific Class] 39, 1–31. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Fewkes, Jesse Walter. 1890. ‘On the Use of the Phonograph in the Study of the Language of American Indians’. Science 15 (378): 267–9. Accessed 10 August 2017. https://doi .org/10.1126/science.ns-15.378.267-a. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1978. Dispositive der Macht: Über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit [The Dispositive of Power: On Sexuality, Knowledge and Truth].Translated by Jutta Kranz. Berlin: Merve. Gelatt, Roland. 1955. The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity. Philadelphia: Lippincott. te Heesen, Anke, and Emma C. Spary. 2001. ‘Sammeln als Wissen [Collecting as Knowledge]’. In Sammeln als Wissen: Das Sammeln und Seine Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung [Collecting as Knowledge: Collecting and Its Importance in Science History], edited by Anke te Heesen and Emma C. Spary, 7–21. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Hengartner, Thomas, and Johanna Rolshoven, eds. 1998. ‘Technik – Kultur – Alltag [Technology – Culture – Everyday Life]’. In Technik – Kultur: Formen der Veralltäglichung von Technik – Technisches als Alltag [Technology – Culture: Routinization of Technology – Everyday Technology], edited by Thomas Hengartner and Johanna Rolshoven, 17–49. Zürich: Chronos. Hengartner, Thomas, Johannes Müske and Forschungsgruppe Broadcasting Swissness. 2016. Die Schweiz Auf Kurzwelle: Musik – Programm – Geschichte(n) [Switzerland on Short Wave Radio: Music – Programmes – History/-ies]. Zürich: Chronos. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1778–9. Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs). Leipzig: Weygand. Herzfeld, Michael. 2001. ‘The Senses’. In Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society, edited by Michael Herzfeld, 240–53. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Hilmes, Michelle. 2012. ‘Radio and the Imagined Community’. In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, 351–62. London: Routledge. Hoffmann-Krayer, Eduard. 1908. ‘Wege und Ziele schweizerischer Volkskunde. [Ways and Goals of Swiss Folklore]’ Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 12: 241–60. Imhof, Kurt. 2010. ‘Das Böse: Zur Weltordnung des Kalten Krieges in der Schweiz [Evilness: On the World Order of the Cold War in Switzerland]’. In Expansion der Moderne: Wirtschaftswunder – Kalter Krieg – Avantgarde – Populärkultur [The Expansion of the Modern: Economic Miracle – Cold War – The Avant Garde – Popular Culture], edited by Juerg Albrecht, Georg Kohler and Bruno Maurer, 81–104. Zürich: gta Verlag. Jackson, Jason B. 2010. ‘Boasian Ethnography and Contemporary Intellectual Property Debates’. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 154 (1): 40–9. Katz, Mark. 1998. ‘Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900– 1930’. American Music 16 (4): 448–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/3052289. Kittler, Friedrich A. (1986) 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press.



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Kuisle, Anita, and Peter A. Leitmeyr. 1988. ‘“Neuentdeckung”. Zur Geschichte der drahtlosen Telephonie in Deutschland [‘New Discovery’: On the History of Wireless Telephony in Germany]’. Kultur & Technik [Culture and Technology] 12 (1): 56–9. Lange, Britta. 2017. ‘Archive, Collection, Museum. On the History of Archiving Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University’. Translated by Benjamin Carter. Journal of Sonic Studies 13. Accessed 30 September 2017. https://www .researchcatalogue.net/view/326465/326466. Latour, Bruno. 1996. Der Berliner Schlüssel: Erkundungen Eines Liebhabers Der Wissenschaften [The Berlin Key: Explorations of a Science Lover]. Translated by Gustav Rossler. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Lechleitner, Gerda. 2005. ‘“Capturing” Sound: The Phonograph in (early) Folk Music Research’. Traditiones 34 (1): 101–10. Accessed 30 September 2017. https://doi. org/10.3986/Traditio2005340108. Michelsen, Morten, and Mads Krogh. 2017. ‘Music, Radio and Mediatization’. Media, Culture & Society 39 (4): 520–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716648494. Mooser, Josef. 1997. ‘Die Geistige Landesverteidigung in den 1930er Jahren: Profile und Kontexte eines vielschichten Phänomens der schweizerischen politischen Kultur in der Zwischenkriegszeit [Intellectual National Defense during the 1930s: Profiles in and Contexts for a Complex Phenomenon in Swiss Policital Culture during the Interwar Period]’. Schweizerische Zeitschrift Für Geschichte [Swiss Historical Periodical] 47 (4): 685–708. http://edoc.unibas.ch/dok/A5256970. Müske, Johannes. 2015. Klänge Als Cultural Property: Technik Und Die Kulturelle Aneignung der Klangwelt [Sounds as Cultural Property: Technology and the Cultural Appropriation of Sounds]. Zürich: Chronos, 2015. Papenburg, Jens Gerrit, and Holger Schulze, eds. 2016. Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pinch, Trevor J., and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. Los Angeles: Sage. Pink, Sarah, and David Howes. 2010. ‘The Future of Sensory Anthropology/the Anthropology of the Senses’. Social Anthropology 18 (3): 331–40. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00119_1.x. Reymond, Marc. 2000. ‘Das Radio im Zeichen der Geistigen Landesverteidigung, 1937–1942 [Radio during the Period of Intellectual National Defense, 1937– 1942]’. In Radio und Fernsehen in der Schweiz: Geschichte der Schweizerischen Rundspruchgesellschaft SRG bis 1958 [Radio and Television in Switzerland: The History of the Swiss Broadcasting Company SRG until 1958], edited by Markus T. Drack, 93–114. Baden: Hier und Jetzt. Ruppen Coutaz, Raphaëlle. 2016. La Voix De La Suisse à L’étranger: Radio Et Relations Culturelles Internationales (1932–1949) [The Voice of Switzerland for Abroad: Radio and International Cultural Relations (1932–1949)]. Neuchâtel: Éditions AlphilPresses Universitaires Suisses.

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Samuels, David W., Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello. 2010. ‘Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology’. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 329–45. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-022510-132230. Scheffner, Philip. 2007. The Halfmoon Files – A Ghost Story [documentary film]. Berlin: Pong GmbH. Schönberger, Klaus. 2007. ‘Technik als Querschnittsdimension: Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung am Beispiel von Weblog-Nutzung in Frankreich und Deutschland [Technology as Cross-Sectional Dimension: Cultural Technology Research on Weblog Use in France and Germany]’. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde [Folklore Periodical] 103: 197–221. Schweizerischer Rundspruchdienst. 1941. ‘Zehn Jahre Schweizer Rundspruch [Ten Years of Swiss Broadcasting]’, supplement. In Jahresbericht des Schweizerischen Rundspruchdienstes für das Geschäfts jahr 1940/1941 [SBC Yearbook for 1940–1941], edited by Hans Rudolf Schmid and Friedrich Lehnis, 15. Bern: Schweizerische Rundspruchdienst. Schweizerische Rundspruchgesellschaft. 1958. Jahresbericht über das Geschäftsjahr 1957/58 [SBC Yearbook for 1957–1958]. Bern: Schweizerischer Rundspruchgesellschaft. Sontag, Susan. (1973) 2005. ‘In Plato’s Cave’. In On Photography. New York: Rosetta Books. Stangl, Burkhard. 2000. Ethnologie Im Ohr: Die Wirkungsgeschichte Des Phonographen [Ethnography on the Ear: The History of the Cultural Impact of the Phonograph]. Vienna: WUV-University-Verlag. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Sterne, Jonathan, ed. 2012. The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Swiss Federal Council (Schw. Bundesrat). 1938. ‘Botschaft des Bundesrates an die Bundesversammlung über die Organisation und die Aufgaben der schweizerischen Kulturwahrung und Kulturwerbung’ [Message from the Federal Council to the Federal Assembly on the Organization and Tasks of Swiss Cultural Preservation and Cultural Propaganda]. Bundesblatt 50: 985–1033. Accessed 30 September 2017. https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/viewOrigDoc.do?id=10033812. Warner, Deborah Jean. 1990. ‘What Is a Scientific Instrument, When Did It Become One, and Why?’ The British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1): 83–93. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400044460. Weinhold, Karl. 1891. ‘Zur Einleitung’. Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde 1: 1–10.

Part Three

Music Radio: Genre and Mediation The historical development of music and musical life is saturated with mediainfused processes – from the significance of print to the distribution of musical compositions and, thus, the emergence of the work concept (Goehr 1992) to present-day practices of individualized mobile listening by way of MP3 players and streaming services (Bull 2005). From the perspective of media studies, mediatization theory provides one avenue for conceiving this relation, highlighting the importance of both media technologies and media institutions throughout various ‘non-media’ contexts of society (Hjarvard 2008). However, as has been noted by among others Couldry (2014), one might ask whether media’s influence in various contexts of social practice may reasonably be conceived as uniform and linear, or whether for example processes of mediatization would not have to reflect back upon the meaning and function of the media involved. Alf Björnberg pursues this avenue of enquiry in his contribution to the present volume, focusing specifically on the relevance of the concept of mediatization in the context of the historical study of the relationship between music and radio and offering, in this respect, the concepts of radiofication and musicalization as supplements. In doing so, he details on the one hand how, for example, particular aspects of radio production and programming historically have given rise to types of programming such as ‘the radio rhapsody’ or ‘lyrical musical suite’. That is, music radio genres developed in part from earlier forms of music and performance but influenced by the technological medium and illustrating, thus, an ideal of radiogenicity. On the other hand, he also demonstrates how ‘radio programming practices increasingly adopt syntactical characteristics specific for music’, manifesting thus a process of musicalization. Hereby, the media primacy inherent in the concept of mediatization is challenged, and Björnberg points in this regard to a theoretical conception of the relation between radio and musical life of greater nuance, entailing reciprocal or multidirectional processes of mediation.

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This perspective is shared by Michelsen in his discussion of ‘Music Radio’s Mediations of the Music-Cultural High/Low Divide before the 1980s’. While referring only in passing to the notion of mediatization, Michelsen is interested in the historical development – from the early twentieth century up until the deregulation of radio broadcasting in Western Europe in the 1980s – by which music radio manifests itself as a factor in musical life, particularly with respect to the cultural hierarchy entailed in the distinction of popular and art music. In order to develop a nuanced understanding of both music radio’s mediations and the musico-cultural high/low divide, a combination of assemblage theory and the Foucauldian notion of the dispositive is invoked, emphasizing the decentred heterogeneity of both phenomena. While music radio, as Michelsen shows, implies a social multiplicity ranging from micro-socialities (e.g. in the context of programme production) to macro-socialities (e.g. relating to institutional organization), the notion of the dispositive allows for a similarly nuanced conception of the cultural landscape (of particular disciplinary means and actions) which these socialities unfold and contribute to uphold or challenge (through the process of assemblage). Integral to Michelsen’s discussion is the generic distinction of popular music and art music and its relation to more specific (or simply alternative) categories such as jazz. The handling of this relation (e.g. organizationally) provides one prominent example of how the high/low divide was mediated by organizational terms and programming practices allowing for a simultaneous consolidation and negotiation of the common musico-cultural hierarchy. Similar issues of mediation are at stake in Krogh’s discussion of processes of abstraction in the intertwinement of genre and formats in radio production. That is, processes by which notions of genre and format are assembled (coined, distinguished, and/ or associated) by way of, for example, audience research, programming policies, technological and organizational means of production, personal involvement, and so on. Whereas format radio has often been linked to strategies of rationalization, Krogh investigates how notions of genre and format may come to provide the sense of predictability implied in a rationalized pursuit of cost efficiency. Of key importance is in this respect the way processes of abstraction (as an aspect of the ongoing assemblage of genres and formats in contexts of format radio production) afford a virtual generality (implied in the notion of formats and genres as musico-generic assemblages). This virtual generality may, in turn, explain the experience among, for example, programmers and management in format radio production of a sense of predictability.



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In a certain way, this sends us back in the direction of the issues raised by the two formerly mentioned contributions to this part. If, as Krogh claims, processes of abstraction may account for a sense of predictability in format radio production, and if this sense is conceived as a teleology (i.e. the projection of a certain temporal or historical logic), then one might ask whether the historical logics implied in the radio medium’s influence on musical life as discussed by Björnberg or in music radio’s mediation of the high/low divide as discussed by Michelsen would not also have to be produced somehow – for example, in the various acts and ongoing processes of mediation detailed by the two authors. In this respect, there is a common ground for dialogue among the chapters hinging on the key notions of genre and mediation.

References Bull, Michael. 2005. ‘No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening’. Leisure Studies 24 (4): 343–55. Couldry, Nick. 2014. ‘When Mediatization Hits the Ground’. In Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age, edited by Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz, 54–71. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. ‘The Mediatization of Society: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural Change’. Nordicom Review 29 (2): 105–34.

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Mediatization–Radiofication–Musicalization Alf Björnberg

In recent years, the concept of mediatization has attracted increased scholarly attention, and a growing body of literature has been devoted to attempts at definition of this concept as well as various forms of critique of the concept and its use. The purpose of this chapter is not to contribute to the epistemological examination of this concept and its applicability in media and communication studies in general. Instead, my aim is to discuss the usefulness and relevance of the concept of mediatization in the context of the historical study of the relationship between music and radio, and also to suggest two other concepts which, I would argue, may prove useful for the elucidation of certain aspects of this relationship. The first of these two concepts, radiofication, may be seen as an attempt at a specification of what mediatization may entail with regard to music in the context of the specific medium of radio. The second concept, musicalization, articulates a reversal of the regularly taken-for-granted causality involved in the interaction of music and media: in addition to investigating the ways in which music may be said to have been ‘mediatized’, it may be worthwhile to explore in what respects it would be relevant to argue that the media (including radio) have been ‘musicalized’. The empirical basis for the discussion is mainly derived from historical research focusing on music programming in Swedish public service radio; however, the tendencies identified are arguably applicable in varying degrees also to other national contexts, as well as to non-public service (commercial) radio.1

The chapter also draws on results obtained within the currently ongoing research project Everyday Devices, funded by the Swedish Research Council (see https://kultur.gu.se/english/research/Research_ Projects/project-title/Everyday+Devices:+Mediatisation,+Disciplining+and+Localisation+ of+Music,+in+Sweden+1900-1970).

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Mediatization As a point of departure, I will quote from recent literature on the concept two definitions of ‘mediatization’. According to Fornäs (2004, 16) mediatization refers to an ‘increasing media presence in all possible societal and life spheres’, while Krotz (2009, 24) defines mediatization as ‘the process whereby communication refers to media and uses media so that the media in the long run increasingly become relevant for the social construction of everyday life, society and culture as a whole’. One notable aspect of both of these definitions is the wide and not very precise indication of exactly what is affected by mediatization: ‘all possible societal and life spheres’; ‘everyday life, society and culture as a whole’. In a recent article, Ekström et al. (2016) suggest a number of denominators common to previous (more or less explicit) definitions of mediatization, arguing that the concept has been used as a synthesizing formula to cover interrelated processes such as the growth in number, diversity and reach of communication media; their multiplying efficiency in terms of speed, storage and penetrating capacity; the increasing portion of people’s daily lifetime spent on media uses; the growing influence of media institutions and industries and the allegedly growing general significance of media texts and technologies in widening spheres and fields of life, society and culture. (Ekström et al. 2016, 1091)

Also in this enumeration, a discrepancy may be observed between the first four of the determinants mentioned and the fifth: the former appear mainly as quantitative indexical and in principle quite measurable indicators of mediatization, the study of which has for quite some time mainly been the domain of media and communication studies. In contrast, the fifth determinant, resonating with Krotz’s definition above, implies a radical opening up of the field of media studies to a wide range of disciplines not previously concerned with this field: all scholarly disciplines concerned with various aspects of ‘widening spheres and fields of life, society and culture’, including, when it comes to the cultural and social sphere of music, musicology, or the general field of music studies. Critiquing the biases of previous mediatization scholarship, Ekström et al. further specify three ‘tasks’ for future mediatization studies: (1) ‘historicizing research by means of longitudinal studies or cross-temporal comparisons’; (2) ‘differentiating and specifying the currently too general talk of mediatization’;

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and (3) the development of empirical methods ‘to measure and comparatively assess the level or speed of mediatization in different time–space contexts’; that is, to enable ‘some kind of quantitative measurability’ (Ekström et al. 2016, 1098; emphasis in original). From the point of view of music studies, focusing on ‘the mediatization of music’ appears close at hand as one possible suggestion in direction of the differentiation and specification called for by Ekström et al. For almost a century and a half, profound changes in musical practices have been connected with the implementation of media – here, more specifically, sound reproduction media, such as the gramophone, the radio, and so on.2 Although of course the mediatization of music does not start with the introduction of sound reproduction media, it arguably makes sense to speak of the impact of such media on musical practices as a significant qualitative shift in the processes of mediatization of music, due to the transcendence afforded by such media of previously necessary restrictions imposed on the musical event: the presence of music maker(s) and listener(s) in the same space at the same time. In media and communication studies, the mediatization of music has attracted some attention; for an overview from an institutional perspective of the consequences of mediatization for music, differentiated according to musical genre, see, for instance, Krämer (2011). However, within music studies, the mediatization of music has relatively recently come into the focus of scholarly attention; for a long time, music studies were implicitly based on the live concert situation, despite the fact that since the early decades of the twentieth century, the bulk of music listening globally has taken place with the participation of sound reproduction and/or broadcasting media. An early survey of the mediatization of music from a cultural-historical bird’s eye perspective is presented by Chanan (1995). A small scale but valuable contribution to this field is constituted by Brown’s (1998) paper on the ‘work of phonography’: the author’s argument here is that in rock music, as a genre where the individual piece of music is not conceived via the medium of notation, the recording, rather than any score or abstracted ideal structure, constitutes the musical work. As recording technology has acquired an increasing significance for the ways in which music

As pointed out by Sterne (2003), a paradigm shift in the development of sound reproduction technology took place in the nineteenth century, when previous attempts at technological emulation of sound production (speech) were abandoned in favour of technological emulation of the physiological mechanism involved in the human perception of sound (hearing), regardless of the origins of the sounds reproduced.

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is produced as well as consumed, regardless of genre, the recording’s status as work is also increasingly relevant within the European art music conservatory tradition, as argued in an extensive study of classical recordings by Simonsen (2008). Sterne (2003) maps out the cultural history of sound reproduction and the historical development of ‘audile technique’, the argument being that attentive directed listening precedes sound reproduction technologies and is developed as specialist competences in conjunction with technologies such as the stethoscope and the electric telegraph, and also historicizes the notion of ‘fidelity’ of sound reproduction in relation to the ‘original’. Katz (2004) presents a historical overview of what he terms the ‘phonograph effect’, that is, the changes in musical practices afforded by recording media, summarized in the keywords tangibility, portability, (in)visibility, repeatability, temporality, receptivity, and manipulability. However, one characteristic common to all of these studies is their primary focus on recording media, which raises the question of to what extent they may also be relevant for the historicization of the relationship of music and broadcasting media.

Mediatization as radiofication By suggesting the word ‘radiofication’, it is not my intention here to propose a term fully operationalizable as an analytical tool; however, in response to the request for ‘differentiation and specification’ advanced by Ekström et al., it might be helpful as a reminder that the specific instance of ‘mediatization’ at issue here concerns the interaction of music and radio in the context of music radio. ‘Radio’ in a Scandinavian context has historically until quite recently been equivalent to public service sound broadcasting. The distinctive features of this medium include the predominant quality of ‘liveness’ (cf. Ytreberg 2017); the mass distribution of programme content from a centralized source to a dispersed listenership; nevertheless, a predominance of an individual mode of address directed at the individual listener; financing by way of licence fees, not advertising revenues; in conjunction with this, more or less detailed regulation of programme content by means of a charter between the broadcasting organization and the government. Furthermore, from the point of view of listeners, one pertinent characteristic of radio has been the central role the medium has played for the temporal structuring of the everyday life of listeners.

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My point of departure here is thus public service broadcasting, leaving recent web-based remediated forms subsumed under the concept of radio aside.3 Examples in the following will be taken from previous work on the history of public service music broadcasting in Sweden (Björnberg 1998). ‘Radio’ as a medium, with all the characteristics gradually associated with the concept over time, did not appear as a fixed entity at the time of the start of broadcasting. As pointed out by Lacey (2008, 25), The challenge, then, is to remember to ask when, and how, and why does radio come to ‘mean’ what it means to all the various different players in all their different contexts, at each historical moment?

One consequence of the introduction of radio, often commented upon in contemporaneous debates, was the increased occurrence of ‘distracted’ listening habits – leaving the radio set constantly on as a provider of background sound, to which the listener could ‘tune in’ momentarily – rather than the attentive listening to particular programme items actively sought for, which broadcasting gatekeepers advocated. Insofar as this is taken as an indication of mediatization effects on modes of music listening brought about by radio, Michelsen and Krogh argue that this is not necessarily true: Historically, radio has established tap listening, music as background, as a practice common to most households from the 1930s onwards. To the chagrin of radio heads this function became one of radio’s primary functions when it became domesticated, and radio has worked that way ever since: as a signal you could focus on or not according to whim or context. This could serve as a very clear example of mediatization, but the process has a history … radio – contrary to many mass media critics – did not introduce background listening as such … . Radio took the phenomenon of background music from the aristocracy and bourgeoisie and turned it into an element of daily life for the middle and working classes. (Michelsen and Krogh 2017, 529)

A crucially important point made by Michelsen and Krogh is thus that radio did not ‘invent’ distracted background listening. However, the last sentence in the quote indicates in what sense it might still be argued that a significant ‘mediatization effect’ was involved: the new medium of radio did in fact Thus, my focus here is on ‘steam radio’, a retronym created in Sweden in the late 1950s, as a response to the advent of the new medium of television, emphasizing the old-fashionedness of the radio medium.

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provide much larger social groups with the means for a new kind of music use which previously had been the prerogative of a privileged few. This is perhaps indicated by the rhetorical figure, recurrent in early Swedish broadcasting discourse, referring to radio as a most welcome means to remedy ‘the boredom of the countryside’, a phenomenon familiar to many citizens of this still predominantly agricultural, comparatively sparsely populated nation with a climate characterized by long and dark winter seasons. In a similar but contrasting manner, although not as often commented upon as distracted background listening, it appears clear that the new sound reproduction media (gramophone and radio) also afforded a concentrated ‘structural’ mode of listening to music, which likewise had previously not been an available option for others than those belonging to a well-situated minority.4 Paraphrasing the last sentence quoted above, it could thus be argued that ‘radio took the phenomenon of concentrated structural listening to music from the aristocracy and bourgeoisie and turned it into a potential element of daily life for the middle and working classes’. In contrast to established modes of listening to music as an inherently social practice, this seems to have furthered more solitary listening practices enabled by the potential for the dissolution of music listening from social context which was provided by the new sound reproduction media. One kind of evidence of a gradual transition from social to solitary listening with regard to social acceptability is provided by illustrations in Swedish journal and magazine advertisements for sound reproduction hardware and software. Examining this kind of source material, I have not come across one single illustration from the 1920s depicting a solitary listening situation; such illustrations seem not to appear until the mid-1930s (cf. Björnberg 2012).5 In addition to this, in advertisements as well as editorial material in journals and magazines, there also appears to be empirical evidence already in the 1920s of developing more or less differentiated patterns of ‘situational listening’. The new media thus appear to have enabled ‘functional music’, that is, ‘instrumental music’, in the sense of ‘music used instrumentally for specific purposes’, such as mood regulation, physical exercise, motoring, and so on. Still, in relation to Chanan (1995, 41ff.) quotes excerpts from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) indicating the potential for the absorption of the listener emerging in an early encounter with sound reproduction (gramophone) technology. 5 It has even been argued that sound reproduction media was a necessary prerequisite for the full establishment of the notion of the autonomous ‘musical work’ (Volgsten 2015). 4

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actual practices of listeners to the radio and the gramophone, such evidence is at best circumstantial rather than conclusive, thus illustrating the paradoxical situation of negotiating the poverty of the record when it comes to finding traces of the audience, for example, when compared with the enormous wealth of information in terms of the sheer volume of the output (even accounting for the selectivity of archives in this regard). (Lacey 2008, 28)

Turning thus from listeners to the far more exhaustively documented practices of programme producers, a prominent theme in programming policy discussions around Swedish public service radio from the early 1930s onwards was the ideal of ‘radiogenicity’ (Sw. radiomässighet): A ‘radiogenic’ programme item was one which utilized the affordances provided by the technological medium to produce sonic-dramatic constructs which would have been impossible or at least very difficult to reproduce in a live onstage situation. The result of such deliberations was the favouring of multi-source, montage-style programmes, regarded as most adequately realizing the ideal of radiogenicity. One designation proposed for this kind of programme was that of the ‘radio rhapsody’; one of the first productions in this genre was the widely acclaimed 1914 in memoriam, which was broadcasted in September 1934 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Similar programme genres were launched in the 1930s and following decades under designations such as ‘potpourri’, ‘lyrical-musical suite’, or ‘sound composition’. Basically, these constituted various variations on the same basic concept as the German genre of the Hörspiel. However, from early on in Swedish broadcasting history, a contrasting type of programming was practised which could also be characterized (although at the time, it rarely was, at least not in any positive sense) as ‘radiogenic’: programming utilizing music to provide the listeners with a continuous flow of agreeable sounds. The first recurring programme item of this kind was Grammofontimmen (Gramophone Hour), which was launched in 1928 and featured a one-hour sequence of non-stop gramophone music. Following the basic principles of public service paternalism, the music on this programme featured a carefully balanced mixture of ‘artistic’ and ‘popular’ music, with each programme generally tracing an overall trajectory from the former to the latter. Grammofontimmen gradually evolved into a long-standing media ritual, broadcasted each weekday afternoon at 5.00 pm well into the 1970s. For a long time, it was the only programme of its kind on Swedish airwaves, with the possible exception of the live transmissions of dance music from restaurants

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and similar venues on late Wednesday and Saturday evenings (the difference between these programme formats was that whereas Grammofontimmen presented non-stop music, live dance music transmissions included those announcements made in the live context; in both cases there was no intervening radio presenter talk). However, with the gradual changes of programming principles introduced in the years following the end of the Second World War, similar programme items gradually appeared in other timeslots of the weekly radio schedule. For instance, in 1946, non-stop gramophone music on weekday mornings was introduced, followed the same year by the non-stop (live or gramophone) music programme Musik under arbetet (Music during Work), aired on weekdays the hour before lunchtime and modelled on the BBC’s Music While You Work.6 This kind of musical radiogenicity could be regarded as an indication of the recognition on the part of radio producers of the suitability of the formats typical of the popular music of the period for the purposes of radio programming: the segmented flow constituted by a succession of ‘regular length’ items of music provided a means to an affectively meaningful ‘filling out’ of time passing.7 Whereas each such item formed a finished and closed entity, the succession of similar items could in principle be extended indefinitely. However, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, such programmes featuring a non-stop flow of music were confined to specific timeslots in the schedule, alternating with other items featuring distinctly different modes of presentation of broadcasted music. In general, this period in the history of Swedish broadcasting can be described as characterized by extended negotiations between ‘media logics’ (specifically, ‘radio logics’) and ‘music logics’ (specifically, ‘concert logics’). The art music division of the broadcaster – in the broadcaster’s 1957 Annual Report proudly declared to be ‘Sweden’s largest music institution’ – was to a large extent modelled on existing concert institutions; it annually published a ‘general programme’ for each season, listing public concerts featuring the broadcaster’s orchestral resources, as well as broadcasts of these and a large number of other notable programme items. In several respects, a similar concert logic also applied to popular music

A neologism capturing these changes in programming practices, first recorded in 1949, was the word skvalmusik, literally meaning ‘music pouring’. 7 Notions of what constituted the ‘regular length’ of a piece of popular music had of course been shaped through the interaction of radio programming and the playing time of the ‘standard’ 10˝, 78-rpm shellac disc. 6

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programming in this period, for instance, with regard to the recruitment of radio producers (who were remarkably often recruited among professional dance musicians), the recruitment of new talent (based on recurring nationwide audition tours), and the still to a large extent prevailing privileging of live music over gramophone music. As already stated, this ‘concert logic’ also applied to the overall programming structure of Swedish public service radio, insofar as ‘flow’ programming was consigned to carefully delimited slots in the schedule, rarely extending for more than one hour at the time. In the early 1960s, however, the situation changed quite rapidly and dramatically, as a direct consequence of the unexpected (and, from the point of view of the public service broadcaster, very unwelcome) competition from pirate radio on Swedish airwaves. According to Kemppainen (2009, 133) pirate radio engendered ‘a paradigm shift inside the public service regime … the whole idea of radio, the balance between information and entertainment, started to change around 1960’ (cf. Björnberg 2009; SmithSivertsen 2017), and Sweden provides the perhaps most pronounced example of this shift. In March 1961, the pirate broadcaster Radio Nord started its transmission of round-the-clock programming, primarily featuring popular music. As a defensive countermove, explicitly presented by the SR CEO as an attempt at ‘competing the [Radio Nord] enterprise to death’, the public service broadcaster in May of the same year launched a new channel called Melodiradion (Melody Radio), featuring 12 hours a day (6.00 am to 6.00 pm) of popular music interspersed with amiable DJ chat.8 Although presented in the broadcaster’s publications as a well-deliberated and planned change of programming principles, in reality the launching of the new channel amounted to a sudden, slightly desperate, defensive measure taken in response to pirate competition; in this respect, as well as with regard to its general format, Melodiradion constituted a parallel to and predecessor of the BBC Radio 1 channel, established in 1967. As the probably single most significant change with regard to radio-related mediatization throughout the history of Swedish music broadcasting, the launching of Melodiradion constituted a significant step in the process of change in music programming from ‘event’ to ‘flow’, that is, an increased degree of ‘radiogenicity’ in music programming

The rapid launch of Melodiradion was enabled by the fact that the Swedish network of FM transmitters, which was under construction at the time, until then had been silent during daytime hours. Radio Nord was closed down in June 1962 due to legislation changes.

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– or ‘radiofication’ of popular music. Previous formats featuring a non-stop succession of popular music had been confined to well-demarcated time slots in the radio schedule, which consequently could stand out as ‘quasi-concert’ events. With Melodiradion a similar but not identical kind of flow, consisting predominantly of music, in addition to verbal commentary of a decidedly noncommittal nature, was extended to the bulk of the radio day.

Musicalization The argument so far has been that there is ample historical evidence supporting the view that the potential afforded by sound reproduction technologies (broadcasting and recording media) has had far-reaching consequences for the ways in which music has been produced, distributed, and consumed, that is, the ways in which music may be said to have been mediatized. To avert any simple technological determinism, it should be stressed that these changes do not follow in any automatic way from the technological properties of these media, but often appear as quite unexpected outcomes of the patterns of practice evolving from the interaction of music and media in the context of everyday life (as exemplified, in a radio context, by the contrary tendencies touched upon above towards, on the one hand, a distracted mode of everyday background listening and, on the other, a concentrated mode of solitary listening). Also, it may be questioned whether the unidirectional causality implied by the notion of ‘mediatization of music’ constitutes an exhaustive account of the dynamic relationships between music and media. Reversing the terms, it may thus be asked to what extent and in what respects these relationship may be analysed in terms of processes of ‘musicalization of the media’. The concept of musicalization has been suggested in a recent article by Tobias Pontara and Ulrik Volgsten as an overarching concept for ‘an ever-increasing presence of music in culture and everyday life’ (Pontara and Volgsten 2017, 248). The authors discern two primary aspects of this: on the one hand, ‘the discursive aspect of musicalization’, which refers to ‘the ubiquity of media representations and mediated cultural discourses on music and music-related matters in modern society’, and, on the other, ‘an increasing influence of what could best be described as a kind of “musical dramaturgy” on other areas of culture and on everyday life’ resulting in ‘a continuous soundtracking of culture and everyday life’ (Pontara and Volgsten, 250; emphasis in original). The notion

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of ‘soundtrack’ implies a focus on cinema, television, video games, and other audiovisual forms of multimedia.9 As pointed out by Pontara and Volgsten, this musicalization is of course to a large extent interlinked with processes of mediatization, as sound reproduction media have provided previously unprecedented means for the wide dissemination of music in post-Edison society. The authors devote a thorough discussion to the questions of in what respects and to what extent musicalization may be regarded as conditioned by mediatization (in a quantitative sense) or a part of mediatization (in a qualitative sense), but also as a ‘relatively autonomous phenomenon’ in relation to mediatization. At present, my ambition is not to contribute further to this discussion; however, one principal reason for my finding the concept of musicalization productive in connection with music radio is that the concept indicates ‘ways in which music becomes an important resource for how media texts and cultural messages are constituted’ (Pontara and Volgsten, 252). The authors claim that one concomitant of mediatization, arguably not very self-evident, is that media texts in general – those media texts which, according to the quote from Ekström et al. above, have acquired an ‘allegedly growing general significance’ – to an increasing extent tend to be structured in ways analogous to the ways music is typically structured. Paraphrasing the quote mentioned, ‘musicalization’ may thus be suggested as ‘a synthesizing formula to cover interrelated processes’, such as increased exposure time to musical sound, the ‘soundtracking’ of everyday life, but also a tendency towards increasingly structuring various kinds of media content according to ‘musical’ syntactical principles – that is, principles derived from and homologous to those characteristic of music – with regard to flow, rhythm, repetition, and recapitulation. According to Pontara and Volgsten, common-practice tonality is a vital precondition for music’s ability to function as a resource for the structuring of media texts: Western tonal music has a teleological syntax that makes it a highly effective means to unify and dramatize almost every possible situation and course of action. … The syntax of tonal music has a strong tendency to endow the narratives and representations it underscores with a sense of finality and inevitability. (Pontara and Volgsten 2017, 254)

Cf. the ‘aestheticization of the everyday’ effected by means of listening to music from portable media players (Bull 2000; 2007).

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In this context, the authors also speak of different forms of ‘musical dramaturgy’, where a specific musical dramaturgy is constituted by three distinct yet closely interconnected elements: (1) the affective impact of the musical and protomusical qualities, (2) the specific musical syntax it embodies, and (3) the semiotic properties that accrue to it through long-standing signifying practices and conventions. (Pontara and Volgsten, 262)

The choice of words in these quotes (‘the narratives and representations it underscores’; ‘musical dramaturgy’) seems to indicate that Pontara and Volgsten’s primary interest is directed towards media texts typical of the audiovisual multimedia contexts of cinema, television, and computer gaming, rather than the mundane practices of music radio. However, as they also indicate, several distinct kinds of ‘musical dramaturgy’ are possible, associated with different kinds of ‘specific musical syntax’. In order to elaborate on this last point, the tripartite distinction between different modes of musical syntax construction suggested by Richard Middleton appears to offer a helpful framework. This distinction involves what Middleton terms the ‘narrative’, the ‘epic’, and the ‘lyrical’ mode: In contrast to the narrative category, which privileges difference, there is what we can call an ‘epic’ mode, where the focus is on repetition and varied repetition; and in between comes a ‘lyrical’ category (marked by symmetrical open/closed and binary structures), in which processes of difference are grasped partly in terms of relationships of equivalence (phrases perceived as Gestalten, as monadic wholes, related to each other symmetrically, that is, analogically). (Middleton 1990, 216)

In order to clarify further, two matters should be pointed out. First, the pertinent characteristic of Middleton’s narrative mode is that of long-term tonal (melodic/harmonic) progression, while that of the epic mode is shortterm repetition of small units of musical syntax. Typical examples of these modes would be the extended movements of nineteenth-century symphonic music (‘narrative’) and what Anne Danielsen (2010, 4) has termed ‘groovedirected music’ (‘epic’), respectively. Insofar as it is at all meaningful to speak of ‘general syntactical characteristics of the popular song’, I would argue that these consist precisely in a general predominance of Middleton’s lyrical mode of syntax construction: the symmetrical binary combination of units at medium levels of musical syntax (phrases) into larger units, which are grouped

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into a limited number of well-demarcated musical sections, such as ‘verse’ and ‘chorus’. Secondly, it should be observed that the lyrical mode ‘comes in between’ primarily in a strictly information–theoretical sense, concerning the amount of new or original musical–syntactical information per unit of time, which is related to the amount of repetition and the information content of the units repeated. In another sense, the lyrical may be described as the most ‘purely musical’ mode, in contrast to both the narrative mode and the epic mode, which point ‘outside’ the boundaries of the individual song: towards the completion of a linear narrative, or towards the contextual framing of a musical process characterized by large amounts of short-term repetition, respectively. Thus, the teleological properties of musical syntax referred to by Pontara and Volgsten are variably characteristic of different types of musical syntax, and arguably not a prominent feature of the predominant modes of musical syntax construction in most (popular) music radio contexts. In terms of Middleton’s three syntactical modes, such long-range teleology is a significant characteristic of ‘narrative’ mode, whereas in the ‘lyrical’ and ‘epic’ mode it is counterbalanced by a focus on repetition and varied repetition of syntactic units of varying extent. In terms of these categories, (popular) music radio may be described as characterized by a ‘lyrical’ predominance (i.e. closed structures, repetition of medium-sized units) on the micro-level of the individual song, but an ‘epic’ predominance (i.e. open structures, potentially infinite repetition) on the macro-level of programming schedules recurring from day to day. Radio programming in general necessarily assumes a repetitive character, already by its alignment with the recurring temporal cycles of day, week, month, and year. Over the time span of public service radio history, a general tendency may be observed towards an increasing predominance of repetitivity in programming – a shift of emphasis from ‘event’ to ‘flow’ – which also implies that the divergence between public service and commercial music radio programming has tended to decrease. The significance of music in this context is related to the particular role repetition plays, to varying degrees, in all modes of musical syntax construction: music provides a unique means for making the experience of repetition pleasurable. This, I would argue, is the basic precondition for the predominant ways in which music radio has been shaped, providing a model example of a general ‘musicalization of the media’ (specifically: of the medium of radio) complementary to its role in processes of ‘mediatization of music’.

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The future of music radio In recent years, media digitization and concomitant changes with regard to practices for the consumption of music has led several scholars to discussions of whether music radio increasingly appears to be outdated, a medium of the past whose relevance in present-day mediascapes is steadily diminishing. In this context, it may be noticed that such premonitions are not a new phenomenon; for instance, there was a noticeable wave of 1980s pop songs expressing nostalgia for radio, such as Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’; Queen’s ‘Radio Ga Ga’, and Starship’s ‘We Built This City’. At the time, such songs clearly appeared to articulate a response to perceived mediascape changes, such as the introduction of music video and ‘narrowcasting’ music video channels. Starkey (2016, 663) argues for the possibilities for survival of radio in the digital age, claiming that ‘the essential characteristics of radio that guaranteed its survival 50 years ago relate to the ways in which it may be consumed’ and that these characteristics still provide valid reasons for the continuing relevance of the medium: Radio’s ability to provide a soundtrack to the performance of mentally undemanding, repetitive or mundane tasks saved it from extinction in the 1950s and 1960s, and – most importantly – may well save it again in this multiplatform digital age of exponentially increasing media proliferation. … Most importantly … radio still benefits from its ability to be consumed passively. (Starkey, 664, 669)

Tacchi (2009, 174) supplements this argument with a discussion on the importance of radio for the management of the ‘affective rhythm’ of everyday life for the listener: ‘It is precisely its affective quality that makes radio sound appropriate as a domestic accompaniment, the ways in which it aids mood creation and maintenance.’ This potential of music radio is of course not limited to the domestic environment, as indicated by Stachyra (2015) in her analysis of the affordances of radio listening in the workplace: Radio communication uses many rituals: jingles and self-promotion serve this purpose as much as popular DJs’ personal ways of presenting music and unique styles of talking. The entire programming of commercial radio is based on the concept of a ritual, where news, music, talk, phone-ins, time signals and so on recur in an unchanging order. … For listeners, radio in the workplace is an element of a repeatable ritual of everyday working life; radio with its repetitiveness provides a certain framework for the activities they undertake. (Stachyra 2015, 273, 281)

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Stachyra’s argument is that radio, by virtue of its ritual character, effects the creation of a ‘liminal space’, where the repetitiveness inherent in radio programming – which, as I have argued, is understandable as a trait of ‘musicalization’ in general syntactic terms – plays a vital part in contributing to the ritual nature of the situation. It seems clear that the word ‘radio’ may here be taken to signify ‘the radio format’ – specific modes of organizing programming as a series of items of (popular) music sequentially ordered and interspersed with other items of sonic information – rather than a strictly technological term (diffusion by means of modulated electro-magnetic waves) or the specific organizational structures of (public service or commercial) broadcasting. Although Stachyra explicitly refers to commercial radio, the format she describes appears strikingly similar (except for the presence of commercial advertising) to that featured on public service daytime radio, at least in a Swedish context. Expressed in the terms used by Lacey (cf. quote above), this is what radio has ‘come to mean’ to present-day users. What’s significant here for the use value of the medium seems to be both the quasi-individual communication, the familiar ritual inherent in the repetitivity of macro-level programming, and the degree of well-balanced uncertainty resulting from not knowing exactly what song comes next. As Simon Frith (2003, 97) has commented on the specific values of radio listening: What seems to be involved in radio listening … is a constant movement between predictability and surprise. … It’s as if we were happy to let someone else have the burden of choice.

Conclusion ‘Radiogenic’ music programming, as described above, is characterized by a predominance of affectively saturated, non-verbal but also verbal sonic communication, by uninterrupted flow, and by salient patterns of repetition, both on the micro-level of the individual song and on the macro-level of radio programming from day to day. This kind of programming is the outcome of a gradual shift throughout broadcasting history, whereby the form of appearance characteristic of ‘radio music’ changes from singular event to continuous flow. The analysis of this change in terms of an increasing degree of mediatization of music lies close at hand, and in a sense it amounts to something of a truism: in the context of radio, music does undeniably constitute a major kind of media text. A concomitant result of this process, however, is that radio programming

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practices increasingly adopt syntactical characteristics specific for music, that is, a process of musicalization of the specific medium of radio, and in a quantitative sense, one of the most significant instances of musicalization of the media. Above I have posed the rhetorical question regarding to what extent previous studies of mediatization of music in relation to recording media may also be relevant for the study of the relationship of music and broadcasting media. A preliminary conclusion would be that the effects of the interaction of music with broadcasting and recording media, respectively, have several traits in common, in both cases mainly being related to the emancipation from previously existing social and material restraints affecting the conditions for music listening afforded by the sound reproduction media. Somewhat more interestingly, the areas where mediatization effects differ between these two types of media have to do with their differential characteristics with regard to their involvement with the manipulation of musical artefacts (phonograms), the balance between individual choice and externally imposed prescription, and, perhaps most saliently, the significant element of experienced human communication inherent in a broadcasting context. The mainly theoretical and historical discussion presented in this chapter has focused on general characteristics and tendencies of change with regard to structural aspects of music radio programming and its functions in everyday use contexts. In order to investigate other relevant aspects of ‘the allegedly growing general significance of media texts and technologies in widening spheres and fields of life, society and culture’ (cf. above), other methods, such as various forms of ethnography, are clearly needed in future research aiming at the disentanglement of the complex web of relationships indicated by the concepts of mediatization, radiofication, and musicalization.

References Björnberg, Alf. 1998. Skval och harmoni: Musik i radio och TV 1925–1995 [Tapped Music and Harmony. Music in Radio and Television 1925–1995]. Stockholm: Norstedts. Björnberg, Alf. 2009. ‘The Soundtrack of Sales: Music in Swedish Radio Commercials’. In Music in Advertising: Commercial Sounds in Media Communication and other Settings, edited by Nicolai Graakjær and Christian Jantzen, 223–36. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press.

Mediatization–Radiofication–Musicalization  209 Björnberg, Alf. 2012. ‘Moderna människor med mobil musik: om rörligt musiklyssnande före transistoriseringen [Modern People with Mobile Music: On Mobile Listening before Transistorization]’. In Senmoderna reflexioner: festskrift till Johan Fornäs [Late Modern Reflections: Festschrift Johan Fornäs], edited by Erling Bjurström, Martin Fredriksson, Ulf Olsson and Ann Werner, 125–36. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/ diva2:496579/FULLTEXT01. Brown, Lee B. 1998. ‘Documentation and Fabrication in Phonography’, Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Aest/AestBrow.htm. Bull, Michael. 2000. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Bull, Michael. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Routledge. Chanan, Michael. 1995. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music. London and New York: Verso. Danielsen, Anne 2010. ‘Introduction: Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction’. In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, edited by Anne Danielsen, 1–16. Farnham: Ashgate. Ekström, Mats, Johan Fornäs, André Jansson, and Anne Jerslev. 2016. ‘Three Tasks for Mediatization Research: Contributions to an Open Agenda’. Media, Culture & Society 38 (7): 1090–108. Fornäs, Johan. 2004. Moderna människor: folkhemmet och jazzen [Modern People: The Welfare State and Jazz] . Stockholm: Norstedts. Frith, Simon. 2003. ‘Music and Everyday Life’. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 92–101. New York: Routledge. Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kemppainen, Pentti. 2009. ‘Pirates and the New Public Service Radio Paradigm’. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 7 (2): 123–34. Krämer, Benjamin. 2011. ‘The Mediatization of Music as the Emergence and Transformation of Institutions: A Synthesis’. International Journal of Communication 5: 471–91. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. ‘Mediatization: A Concept with which to Grasp Media and Societal Change’. In Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, edited by Knut Lundby, 21–40. New York: Peter Lang. Lacey, Kate. 2008. ‘Ten Years of Radio Studies: The Very Idea’. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 6 (1): 21–32. Michelsen, Morten, and Mads Krogh. 2017. ‘Music, Radio and Mediatization’, Media, Culture & Society 39 (4): 520–35.

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Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Pontara, Tobias, and Ulrik Volgsten. 2017. ‘Musicalization and Mediatization’. In Dynamics of Mediatization: Institutional Change and Everyday Transformations in a Digital Age, edited by Olivier Driessens, Göran Bolin, Stig Hjarvard and Andreas Hepp, 247–69. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Simonsen, Tore. 2008. Det klassiske fonogram [The Classical Photogram]. NMHpublikasjoner 2008 (2). PhD thesis, Norwegian Academy of Music. Smith-Sivertsen, Henrik. 2017. ‘The Story of Svensktoppen: How the Swedish Music Industry Survived the Anglophone 1960s and Invested for the Future’. In Made in Sweden: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Alf Björnberg and Thomas Bossius, 37–47. New York: Routledge. Stachyra, Grażyna. 2015. ‘Radio in the Workplace: A Liminal Medium between Work and Leisure’. Media, Culture & Society 37 (2): 270–87. Starkey, Guy. 2016. ‘Radio: The Resilient Medium in Today’s Increasingly Diverse Multiplatform Media Environment’. Convergence 23 (6): 660–70. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tacchi, Jo. 2009. ‘Radio and Affective Rhythm in the Everyday’. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 7 (2): 171–83. Volgsten, Ulrik. 2015. ‘Work, Form and Phonogram: On the Significance of the Concept of Communication for the Modern Western Concept of Music’. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 46 (2): 207–32. Ytreberg, Espen. 2017. ‘Towards a Historical Understanding of the Media Event’. Media, Culture & Society 39 (3): 309–24.

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Formats, Genres, and Abstraction: On Musico-Generic Assemblages in the Context of Format Radio Production Mads Krogh

Musical genres and radio formats are intimately connected in the history of music radio. Often viewed as hallmarks of rationalization, formats have appropriated genres in the alignment of programming procedures and listener segments (Weisbard 2014; Rossman 2012; Ahlkvist 2001). Concurrently, format radio has been seminal to the formation of genre cultures (Shuker 2016; Frith 2012; Negus 1999). Indeed, it may be argued that the phenomena of genre and format are not only connected but deeply intertwined. In this chapter, I aim to discuss this intertwinement. Following recent developments in format and musical genre theory (Born 2011; Sterne 2012; Drott 2013; Brackett 2016), I argue that both genre and format should be regarded as distributed phenomena, which are assembled within complex and heterogeneous milieus of music-radio (Michelsen and Krogh 2017), and I suggest the concept of musico-generic assemblages as an overarching term. In doing so, I seek to nuance understandings of genre and format, highlighting their common generality as musico-cultural phenomena (hence the term musico-generic), while paying particular attention to their role in music radio’s rationalization of programming on the basis of listener segmentation. If genres and formats are invoked in contexts of radio production as means of optimizing efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control – cf. Weber’s idea of rationalization (Ritzer 2013, 29–31) – then these effects should be regarded as emerging from the aforementioned work of musicogeneric assemblage. Accordingly, I explore the particular importance of processes of abstraction, that is, the combined operation of singling out, conceptualizing, and systematizing musico-cultural features pertaining to particular genres or formats. As an aspect of musico-generic assemblages, such processes are key

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to the production of teleologies or, less theoretically, a sense of predictability in programme production. I begin by considering select definitions of radio format and musical genre, arguing for the distributed character of both phenomena. Then I turn to recent inspirations in musical genre studies from assemblage theory as developed by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Manual DeLanda, and Jane Bennett. Next, I consider the notion of milieus of music-radio before suggesting the idea of musico-generic assemblages. This, in turn, leads me to consider the significance of processes of abstraction to such assemblages and, finally, to address the issue of predictability in the context of music radio production. Throughout the chapter I will be mostly concerned with the ontological affinity of the phenomena of format and genre. The difference of particular genres and formats along with general distinctions of these terms should be regarded as relative to or, indeed, emerging within the aforementioned heterogeneous milieus of music-radio as well as in other milieus throughout musical life. Moreover, such distinctions may, I think, be attributed to the processes of abstraction that I return to below. I should also mention that the collective research project ‘RAMUND  – A Century of Radio and Music in Denmark: Music Genres, Radio Genres, and Mediatisation’ forms a seminal background for this chapter and explains its share of examples relating to Danmarks Radio (The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, henceforth DR).1 However, in accordance with the theoretical thrust of the paper, examples are used throughout to illustrate theoretical points rather than to manifest an empirical inquiry.2

Definitions of format In the context of radio, a format may be defined as ‘a way of organizing the total output of a radio station according to market segmentation of listeners’ (Garner

RAMUND (2013–18) was directed by Morten Michelsen and funded by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication. I would also like to acknowledge the 2014 Montreal conference Music and Genre: New Directions, organized by Georgina Born, Dave Brackett, and Mimi Haddon. This brought my attention to genre constructions in the realm of digital music information retrieval and, in particular, the case of The Echo Nest, to which I return below. Furthermore, I wrote this chapter during a stay as academic visitor at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. The visit was hosted by Georgina Born, whom I thank for fruitful discussions and support. 2 For supplementing perspectives on examples pertaining to DR see Krogh (2018). 1



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2003, 461). This implies ‘a complex set of rules for programming, including style and range of music selections, size and origin of playlist, quotas for musical repetition, numbers of current and past hits and their usual sequence’ (Berland 1990, 181) along with ‘announcer style, timing of program and commercial material, and methods for listener feedback and quality control’ (Greve 1996, 39). Formats associate ‘listener demographics, advertising content and revenue, and internal administrative and technical relationships’ in the workings of a station, so that a ‘major change in any one of these is inconceivable without a resulting change in all of them and in the relationships amongst them’ (Berland 1990, 181). As such, formats have marked US commercial radio since the advent of Top 40 in the 1950s, with an increase in formatting activities from the early 1970s onwards not least by genre specification (Simpson 2011, 8–9; see also Weisbard 2014, 14). Meanwhile, the concept of format radio along with specific formats such as Top 40, MOR (middle of the road), CHR (contemporary hit radio), or AOR (album oriented rock) spread from the United States to other geographical and less (overtly) commercial contexts such as the realm of European public service broadcasting – for example, the activities of DR from the early 1990s onwards. I would like to emphasize the wide range of elements listed in the patchworked definition of formats just cited and the way elements are viewed as interdependent. If, as Berland claims, sonic, technological, demographic, commercial, political, organizational, and scientific matters are interrelated in format radio production; then this, in turn, means that innovations in audience research, scheduling or broadcast technology, initiatives of political (de)regulation, demographic changes or, indeed, musical trends may afford new formats to emerge or old ones to be reformatted. To exemplify, David Brackett argues that improved precision in the measurement of taste among demographic groups was a significant factor for the increase in formatting activities in US commercial radio in the early 1970s – making country and soul radio in particular attractive to providers (2016, 284). Similarly, he explains the crisis for AOR in the early 1980s as the combined result of changing standards in audience research and the advent of punk and new wave (2016, 298–9). Of course, various elements are also shared by formats. There may be partly overlapping musical repertoires  – as among more and less specialized formats like Urban Contemporary and Top 40  – but also, for example, common conditions of media infrastructure, that is, formats in a media technological sense (cf. Sterne 2012). Indeed, in the context of radio networks or broadcasting corporations, various formats may rely on the same organizational, media technological,

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scientific, political, and commercial setup. This, however, does not make such commonalities into conditions somehow outside the constitution of individual formats. On the contrary, and as just noted, formats affect the institutional and technological environments in which they form, not to mention music culture and repertoires  – for example by guiding artists’ work, music production, industry marketing, and so on. As such, formats should not be regarded as merely content being channelled by an infrastructure of media technology, institutions or, for that sake, political, economic, or sociocultural terms. In fact, these elements which feature in the patch-worked definition of formats above may themselves be regarded as heterogeneous and composite phenomena. To illustrate, consider this definition of radio by Dubber: Radio consists of shows, stations, schedules, studios, managers, sales reps, presenters, producers and technicians. It includes and connects with political economies, legislation, a broad range of technologies, the physical properties of radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum (and our ability to harness those waveforms), promotional cultures, music industry integration, local and regional as well as national characteristics and manifestations, brands, celebrities, real people’s lives (audiences, interviewees and radio workers alike) and – importantly – other media. It is different in different places, at different times, and within different contexts. More importantly, it is often different from one instance to another, even within the precise same geographic locale, legal framework, political climate and period in history. (2014, 13)

Even the particular media technologies, which afford broadcasting in the form of FM or AM waves or digital files for download or streaming, are enmeshed with ‘contexts of … reception, the conjunctures that shaped their sensual characteristics, and … institutional politics’ (Sterne 2012, 11). Thus, what could be taken as a general condition for radio formats’ development entails, again, on closer inspection, an equally complex array of interrelated elements.3 This is one important reason why I find it relevant to talk about formats as distributed phenomena, existing across or, as assemblage theory would have it, in the co-functioning of various elements within ‘an ontologically heterogeneous field’ (Bennett 2010, 23) without being reducible to any of these in particular.

While Sterne is particularly concerned with the MP3 format, his point is, in my view, applicable to a wider range of media formats. Moreover, his concept of conjunction comes very close to the notion of assemblage (2012, 96n8). On the complexity and compositeness of the phenomenon of music, see Born (2005).

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In this perspective, not even human agents should be acknowledged agential primacy in the production of radio formats  – as illustrated by the increased significance over recent years of computer-based music information retrieval and selection algorithms in the world of online-radio. Among the prominent companies in this realm was Rdio, which relied on data analysis and selection algorithms provided by The Echo Nest, which also supplies operators such as Spotify, MTV, BBC, and, previously, Raditaz and MOG.4 However, even before online radio, software solutions played an important role in formatting  – for example the Radio Computing Systems’ so-called Selector scheduling software introduced in 1979 (Dubber 2014, 36) – and the general point is that with the idea of formats as distributed phenomena comes the assumption, that so too is the agency involved in their creation, maintenance, development, and so on. I return to this assumption after having made a few remarks on genre (however, on the concept of distributive agency, see Bennett 2010, 31–4).

Definitions of genre Definitions of genre in music research literature share obvious features with the format definitions quoted above. First and foremost, a tendency to list arrays of heterogeneous elements. This is evident in two canonical definitions: Franco Fabbri’s description of genres as ‘set[s] of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules’ (Fabbri 1981, 52) which may concern formal and technical, semiotic, behavioural, social, ideological, economical, and juridical matters (1981, 54–9); and Stephen Neale’s definition of genres as ‘systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject’ (Neale 1980, 19).5 However, the listing of elements may be considerably extended as illustrated by Drott: A genre … is to be understood as a dynamic ensemble of correlations, linking together a variety of material, institutional, social, and symbolic resources: repertories, performance practices, distinctive formal and stylistic traits, aesthetic discourses, forms of self-presentation, institutions, specific modes of technological mediation, social identities, and so forth. These correlations in The Echo Nest was acquired by Spotify in April 2014. However, the company’s webpage continues to display a wider list of clients (http://the.echonest.com, accessed on 2 March 2017). 5 Actually, Neale’s definition concerns film genres. It is, however, widely used in music studies (cf. Negus 1999; Toynbee 2000; Hesmondhalgh 2005; Holt 2007; Lena 2012). 4

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turn give rise to an array of assumptions, behaviors, and competences, which taken together orient the (individual) actions and (social) interactions of different ‘art world’ participants: composers, performers, publishers, audiences, critics, music industry personnel, arts administrators, and music scholars (among others). (2013, 9)

Drott emphasizes the ‘flexible, pragmatic’ implication of this definition compared to earlier notions of genre as ‘a stable class of objects’ (9). This hints at an aspect of irreducibility beyond simply the fact of ontological heterogeneity noted in the context of format definitions above. According to Drott, correlations have to be ‘continually produced and reproduced’ (2013, 10). This makes genres inherently unstable  – groupings, rather than groups, performed by various agents in various institutional contexts. Furthermore, even committed attempts at reproduction will always differ from what is being reproduced if only by that very quality (as particularly evident in retro and traditionalist genres, where reproduction is deliberately framed as such, cf. Lena 2012, 46–51). Drott’s point corresponds to French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s so-called law of genre, which states that any trait of a text may be taken as a generic mark, while simultaneously such denomination constitutes an outside of nonparticipation and, thus, a potential for transgression of the instantiated boarder. As such, the very act of defining a particular genre by reference to a certain correlation of elements will implicitly destabilize the group being defined. In Derrida’s words, genre ‘participation never amounts to belonging’ (1992, 230), which conversely means that genres are irreducible to fixed correlations of texts, conventions, institutional affiliations, and so on.6

Perspectives from assemblage theory In the efforts by various scholars over recent years to substantiate this nonreductive and processual view of genre, important inspirations have come from assemblage theory. Thus, Brackett notes that the notion that a genre, at a given point in time, articulates together notions of musical style, identifications, visual images, ways of moving and talking, and myriad other factors is akin to the idea of the assemblage. In contrast to the

Derrida’s law is referenced by for example Brackett (2016, 3) and Haworth (2016, 21).

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notion of organic totalities, assemblages, according to the philosopher Manuel DeLanda, are ‘wholes characterized by relations of exteriority. … The exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy for the terms they relate.’ [2006, 10–11] Thus, in the study of genre, the components … that may characterize a genre at a given point in time may also participate in other genres at the same time, or in the past or the future. The components are not part of a seamless, organic whole, and their meaning in a particular genre formation derives from their relations and interactions with each other over time. (2016, 10, emphasis in original)7

Brackett’s note on the way elements may participate in various genres corresponds to the overlap that I remarked upon in the context of formats. Furthermore, the assertion that ‘relations are external to their terms’ (to quote Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 55) restates the point I made on formats as distributed phenomena: While wholes are, of course, dependent on their components, they do not exhaust their potentials (this is what makes them external) and, conversely, they are not reducible to any elements in particular. I take these conjunctures to indicate that both genres and formats may reasonably be considered as assemblages, as would indeed have to be the case considering Deleuze’s assertion that assemblages are ‘the minimum real unit’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 51). They assemble across ontologically heterogeneous fields (re Bennett) or milieus, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 323), from where they draw their elements. Thus, ‘the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 69) which, in turn, makes assemblages events as much as entities. Or – to quote again – ‘true entities are events’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 66). I would like to dwell shortly on the notion of milieu that I just mentioned, because it entails an equivocality, which is productive for present purposes. In its French origin, milieu means both surroundings, medium and middle (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, xvii). That is, it points to both the surroundings or, if you will, environment from which assemblages draw their elements; the distributed or multiply-mediated quality of their co-functioning; and the way they emerge ‘in-between’ components without exhausting their potentials. An obvious problem for the analytic description of assemblages is that there are no necessary borders to what may be considered their environment, just as elements can be specified indefinitely.

For another implication of assemblage theory in musical genre studies, see the work of Georgina Born, who is also referenced by Brackett (Born 2005, 2011, 2012, 2015).

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For the topic of this chapter, this means that there are no limits to the extent to which songs, artists, social relations, institutional affiliations, and so on may be considered in the delimitation of a format or genre. This not only complicates analytic endeavours, not to mention efforts at definition. It also indicates a provisionality in the description of genres and formats, which mirrors the irreducibility and incompletion of their formation (i.e. the ‘eventness’ of assemblage). The understanding of milieu as middle should, I think, remind us about this provisionality. That is, ‘a state of in-betweenness … from where movements, differences and connections … emerge and may be traced. Assemblage theory thus inspires a mode of engagement which challenges ideas of origin, causalities and reduction without pretending to be final or exhaustive’ (Michelsen and Krogh 2017, 9). As illustrated, I have addressed this issue in an article co-written with Morten Michelsen. We discuss the relationship of music, radio, and mediatization, challenging the way theories of mediatization often anticipate a distinction between media (technologies and institutions) and the spheres of cultural life which are being mediatized (i.e. saturated by media logics). As a means to dispense with this anticipation and, instead, direct analytical attention to the distributed and, thus, intertwined assemblage of the phenomena of music and radio, we suggest the notion of heterogeneous milieus of music-radio (the hyphen implying the in-between state just noted). Such milieus are certainly pertinent to the assemblage of not only music radio but formats and genres as well, and within such milieus we should enquire into the interweaved state of genres and formats, that is, the way these phenomena are associated, differentiated, mutually translated, or  – in the parlance of Deleuze – de- and re-territorialized. For example, think about the processes of quantitative audience research, whereby listeners’ music preferences are mapped as a prerequisite for scheduling. If genres are often imbued with issues of identity and musico-cultural belonging, whereas formats tout categories of consumers (Weisbard 2014, 2), then audience research may play a key part in ‘sorting out’ identity issues from musical repertoires in order to ‘allow’ their mergence. This may be done by surveys inquiring, for example, familiarity or preference with respect to various songs without allowing listeners to communicate the complexities of, for example, genre-based musico-cultural identification.8 This example is derived from a Danish study of listener preferences (Jensen 1994), which played a key role in DR’s implementation of format radio in the early 1990s. However, the focus on familiarity

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Hereby listeners’ sense of music as a part of their everyday lifeworld is, so to say, reduced to specific parameter-based measures for the purpose of programming, just as genre affiliations are in a certain sense dismantled, their significance evaded in order for them to work in a context of format radio production. Of course, translations may also work the other way, as in cases where formats appeal to listeners’ identification. This tendency is, for example, illustrated by DR’s P3 (channel 3), whose long-time slogan reads Det du hører  – er du selv (What you hear – is who, you are), despite the fact that P3 is a hard-formatted contemporary hit radio channel. In any case, the difference of formats and genres – in terms of identity politics or other issues – are not given, but rather assembled, that is, emergent within milieus of music-radio.

Musico-generic assemblages In bringing perspectives from assemblage theory to the discussion of formats and genres, I suggest the notion of musico-generic assemblages as an overarching term. One reason for this is the intertwinement of the two phenomena, which not only means that their difference is continually created (i.e. negotiated, transferred, and so on), but also that they may on various occasions  – in contexts of, for example, radio production or research literature – be equated. To illustrate, Charles Kronengold, in an article from 2008, discusses exchange theories in disco, new wave, and album-oriented rock, noting that ‘to speak of AOR as a musical genre is to recognize that groups began making records with an eye to this format’ (emphasis in original, 45). This illustrates a deliberate equation, while similar, though implicit, indecision commonly characterizes the use of other labels such as country, RnB, or hip-hop. Another reason for my suggestion is, as noted, that I want to focus on the shared generality of the two phenomena. That is, the way both formats and genres are indeed musico-generic terms or, if you will, phenomena pertaining to various pieces of music, instances of production, performances, and so on. In keeping with assemblage theory, one way to explain this generality is to say that formats and genres are distributed not only across heterogeneous ontological fields (cf. Bennett) but beyond particular situations or contexts of, and preference and, in a wider sense, the utilization of a limited number of parameters in surveying is not specific to this Danish case.

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for example, radio production. I have already noted the problems entailed in delimiting milieus – for example for the description of genres – and a similar argument could be made with respect to the concepts of situation and context. This indicates that the sense of genres and formats as being distributed beyond a particular situation should be understood as figuring in situ, so to speak – as a sense of these concepts invoking assumptions rather than actual (or actualized) associations. So, for example, for a radio station to take up the notion of AOR as a format for programme production implies both an assumed equivalence with other stations using the same format and assumed affiliations with rock culture in a wider sense. Of course, such equivalence and affiliations do not have to be merely assumed. In the course of radio production or stations’ development of programming policies, channel profiles, and so on, equivalence and affiliations may be deliberately sought and affirmed  – for example, by the assistance of consultants traversing various stations, by the consultation of trade journals, or by the acquisition of data on other stations’ broadcasts. But since any format or genre may potentially imply an infinite number of elements (as noted above), my point is that formats and genres always imply some associations which are not substantiated – assumed but not affirmed, traceable but not yet traced, virtual rather than actual – and I think this implied or, if you will, immanently virtual generality is a characteristic of musico-generic assemblages. The English sociologist John Law makes a similar argument in commenting on the way claims are made in the social and natural sciences. He talks about ‘method assemblage’ as the process by which scientists substantiate their, often general, claims about reality in order to produce knowledge (or ‘realities’ in the words of Law; 2004, 13). For this purpose, method assemblage invokes repertoires of theory, prior studies, surveys, experiments, scientific publications, instruments, measures, allies in the form of colleagues, institutions, and so on. This so-called hinterland extends indefinitely, even into the realm of everyday mundanities not specifically connected to science (such as media technologies necessary for the circulation of scientific publications), and it is important that the hinterland is both manifest, enacting a ‘topography of reality possibilities, impossibilities, and probabilities’ (Law 2004, 160), while itself being enacted in the course of knowledge production. As such, method assemblage entails a differentiation of references which are called forth or made present (‘presented’ for example in the form of scientific papers); made manifestly absent (e.g. as explicit omissions); or simply repressed (e.g. as a kind of ‘otherness’ in the context of what is being studied; Law 2004, 85). The difference between presence



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and absence – between statements, data, or depictions ‘in-here’ and represented realties ‘out-there’ (Law 2004, 42)  – is crafted, as an immanent feature of the scientific method assemblage. Furthermore, the legitimacy of scientific facts derives from the constellation of presence and absences and, in this respect, from the promise that further references could be made and further enquiries will ‘add up’. My suggestion, when talking about musico-generic assemblages, is that the immanent but virtual generality of formats and genres works in much the same way. But while Law talks about method assemblage as the enactment of hinterlands entailing presence and absences, I will attempt instead to talk about processes of abstraction as an aspect of format radio production.9

Musico-generic abstraction as the production of teleologies Above, I used an example of a survey enquiring about listeners’ familiarity with and preference for a certain musical repertoire, though without allowing respondents to communicate any further experience of or relation to the music in question. As a representation of listeners’ relationship with music this survey entails abstraction – that is (1) a singling out of certain features within the complex context of listeners’ music appreciation and, in a wider sense, their musical lifeworlds; features which are (2) conceptualized or submitted to symbolization by way of the parameters used in the survey; and (3) systematized by implication of further conceptual frameworks. In the actual case, which underlies my example (Jensen 1994), a range of music analytical and social parameters (such as tempo, power, rhythm/melody, age, and lifestyle of respondents) were added to those of familiarity and preference in the research agency’s efforts to derive patterns from the quantitative data provided by the survey. I draw this tripartite understanding of abstraction from Winther, who elaborates the three steps as follows (by implication of US pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey): 1. Singling out. Abstraction first identifies and emphasizes a single predicate, part, stage or object of a complex whole, whether the whole be material, ideal or both.

In making this connection of virtuality and abstraction I lean towards Deleuze (cf. Adkins 2016).

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2. Symbolizing. Abstraction conceptualizes the predicate (etc.) as belonging to a single kind – a concept, a sign, a mathematical object or function, in short, a symbol. 3. Systematizing. Abstraction associates (James) and relates (Dewey) the single symbol to a system of symbols, a system that is fallible, disunified, and one among many. A particular symbol classification includes laws, causal regularities, and judgments. (Winther 2014, 3)

The range and heterogeneity of elements (material and ideal) and symbols (concepts, mathematical objects, symbols, and so on), implied in this conception of abstraction, suits the assemblage theoretical framing of this chapter. The same goes for the preliminary character and incompleteness of the resulting abstractions. Moreover, Winther notes that both the making and use of abstractions are contextual and interest-driven. That is, they may be regarded as relative to or, indeed, emerging within environments or milieus of, for example, media production. As such, another, contextually different, example from the realm of music radio could be the data analysis performed by The Echo Nest on behalf of corporations such as Spotify, the BBC, and Rdio. The Echo Nest combines computerized, so-called machine listening to vast musical repertoires with an online search of blogs, social networks, band websites, and so on for keywords and values connected to music culture (Eriksson 2016). The combined result of these efforts is the singling out of stylistic patterns (digital marks of for example timbre, beat, energy, danceability; Patch 2016, Vanderbilt 2014, Morris 2015) combined with musico-cultural communalities, which are conceptualized, for example, in terms of genre labels. Thus, a new pattern may issue the addition of a new label to the so-called Every Noise at Once map, which (at the time of writing) systematizes more than 1,500 genres in a graphic outline.10 For end suppliers of music, for example, in the form of digital radio, such systematization makes ‘the world of music’, which The Echo Nest claims to oversee (Anon 2013), manageable, for example, for the purpose of offering broadcasted solutions tailored to segments or individual listeners. As in the survey mentioned above, this process of abstraction entails, of course, a massive reduction of the complexity of ‘the world of music’. A third and somewhat similar example may be found in the coding of music, which even before the age of digital radio afforded scheduling and, thus, the

Cf. http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html, accessed on 2 March 2017.

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effectuation of programming policies. At DR, scheduling was automated in the mid-1990s by introduction of the so-called MusicMaster software. For this to work, music had to be loaded into a database and coded according to parameters (e.g. sound, power, theme, genre), according to which playlists could then be generated. This meant that employees in the DR discotheque had to single out relevant parametric features in each addition to the database (i.e. degrees or values for each parameter), which means that musical repertoires were subjected to a process of abstraction in order to make them fit the system prescribed by automated scheduling. Even in the establishment of so-called playlist committees, which was another important aspect of the mid-1990s DR efforts at formatting, a kind of abstraction was performed. These committees consisted of experienced music employees and functioned as a kind of ‘surrogate consumers’ in the sense discussed by Ahlkvist (2001). That is, expert listeners with an ear for ‘what the station’s listeners hear in a record’ (347). This is a highly selective form of listening, singling out certain properties to be conceptualized by reference to programming policies, channel profiles, and so on. Furthermore, the idea of collective evaluation was explicitly to cancel out personal idiosyncrasies based in, for example, genre cultural affiliations. This again illustrates how selective listening and, in this respect, abstraction was prompted by means of organization.11 What cuts across these examples as an inherent feature of abstraction is, on the one hand, a mobilization of listeners, musical repertoires, experienced music employees, or – with the broadest possible term – ‘the world of music’. It is within and by way of this ‘world’ that specific features are singled out as characteristic of a particular format or genre, and I use the term mobilization to emphasize how this enrolment of ‘sources’ is an important aspect of the authority acknowledged to particular abstractions emanating from the process (even if only virtually, that is, as a ground to be potentially called upon, for example, in the case of critique or ‘failure’ to achieve expected goals in programming). This mobilization is performed by way of survey techniques, tools of musical analysis, instruments of scheduling, means of organization, policy papers, and so on – that is, components of radio production which according to Law’s concept of method assemblage are also mobilized in the process. On the other hand, abstraction also implies a kind of ‘drawing away’ – which is, in fact, the literal

See Hennion and Méadel (1986) for discussion of a similar case.

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meaning of the term’s Latin root, abstrahere. That is, a distancing from the world of concrete particulars (listeners, songs, etc.) and into conceptual, systematic accounts of these, which may circulate in the form of reports, ‘clocks’, consulting services, software solutions, data packages, and so on. These various kinds of ‘outcome’ possess a certain autonomy,12 in the sense that they can easily be distributed beyond the context on which they rely – their context(s) of mobilization. This indicates why abstraction implies a generalization in accordance with the (immanent but virtual) sense of generality discussed above. Abstractions’ potential for dissemination, that is, their ready implementation in ever new contexts or situations, suggests that they may also be representative of contexts beyond those in which they were generated. This implication is invoked by any consideration of their relevance. Another way of saying this is that in addition to actually mobilized associations, abstraction invokes a virtual mobilization, creating a sense of validity which extends beyond current grounds. For this reason, abstraction should also, in my view, be regarded as seminal to the aforementioned generality of musico-generic assemblages. I think the processes and, indeed, examples of abstraction discussed above may be regarded as characteristic of format radio production, which makes abstraction a dimension of format assemblages  – a key aspect of their co-functioning. Furthermore, issues of genre figure with various degrees of prominence in all the examples (most directly, of course, in the example concerning The Echo Nest). In every case, genre is managed in a context of format radio or, as I suggested with respect to the music preference survey, translated into an element of format radio, which, of course, is merely to restate the intertwinement of format and genre assemblages. Processes of abstraction afford the aforementioned sense of immanent virtuality (‘beyondness’), which means they prompt the generality of musico-generic assemblages. I suggest this generality implies teleologies, in the sense that abstractions afford a dissemination of assertions also in a future tense. That is, anticipations of what future encounters of a certain genre or format may entail. This point is, I think, compliant with Georgina Born’s suggestion that genre is ‘understood as a radically contingent and material process – one that is, however, oriented to the production of teleology and thus the erasure of its own contingency’ (Born 2011,

In fact, leaning towards Latour (1999, 98–108), I consider autonomization to be a seminal aspect of abstraction  – along with mobilization and, at least, two other processes, those of allying and promotion. To develop this processual nexus is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter.

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384) – though it should be remarked that Born makes her suggestion in a rather different institutional context. Namely, that of artists projecting themselves into new markets across established constellations of aesthetic expressions and identity formations.13 This takes me back, finally, to the intention of challenging established views of the role of genres and formats in music radios’ rationalization of programme production, which I stated in the introduction of this chapter and which I will address briefly. If genres and formats play a main role in rationalizing programme production, it is because they are perceived as providing predictability, which according to George Ritzer is a key component in rationalization as conceived by Weber (Ritzer 2013, 29–31). Ritzer additionally points to the pursuance of efficiency, calculability, and control as other key components, and at least efficiency and control (e.g. in the scheduling of music for maximizing audience share at minimum costs) could be said to follow from predictions (e.g. of what audiences will prefer). I find this notion of rationalization compliant with research on format radio. To illustrate, consider Ahlkvist’s critical note, that programmers are commonly depicted ‘as relying on research, consultants and trade publications in an effort to rationally reduce uncertainty about which records are viable for attracting a specific target audience’ (2002, 194);14 or regard Fairchild’s claim that ‘the dominant economic and political ideologies which have governed the evolution of radio broadcasting around the world in recent decades’, and which he subsumes under the notion of ‘corporate rationalization’, were ‘intended to make entertainment and advertising markets more stable and predictable. … The fear of the unheard and the unknown has resulted in a commercial radio market that is supposed by many to be a model of cost-effective efficiency’ (2012, 3). While various authors within this research field have defined and differentiated formats and genres differently – for example as a matter of eclectic music industrial categories touting styles and audiences (formats) versus vernacular musicocultural groupings (genres) (cf. Weisbard 2014) – I have argued that the identity of and distinction between the two phenomena should be regarded as relative to processes (of translation or reciprocal de- and re-territorialization) within milieus of music-radio. However, if both formats and genres are hypercomplex, irreducible In particular she references David Brackett’s 2005 analysis of ‘Isaac Hayes’s cross-over soul version of Jimmy Webb’s 1967 middle-of-the-road ballad, “By the time I get to Phoenix”’ (2011, 383–4). 14 Ahlkvist notes this by reference to Berland (1990, 1993), Negus (1992, 1993, 1999), Rothenbuhler (1985, 1987), Rothenbuhler and McCourt (1992), and Turner (1993). 13

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assemblages of innumerable elements, as I have argued in following recent genre and format theory and by developing the concept of musico-generic assemblages, then these phenomena are also inherently contingent and beyond prediction in any ordinary, mechanical, or absolute sense of the word. What may instead explain the prominence of formats and genres in efforts at rationalization in contexts of radio production is the sense they provide of predictability, that is, a sensed teleology (immanent but virtual), crafted by way of musico-generic abstraction.

In conclusion It has been the aim of this chapter to consider the intertwined state of formats and genres in the context of music radio. This intertwinement is not one of distinct phenomena engaged in mutual development. Rather, formats and genres are continuously differentiated in processes of translation  – or in Deleuzian parlance, de- and re-territorialization  – as emergent phenomena within heterogeneous milieus of music-radio. They acquire their potency as means of rationalization in programme production through processes of abstraction. That is, processes whereby generality (as a basis for predictability) is produced by acts of singling out, symbolizing, and systematizing musico-cultural features in terms of musico-generic labels or systems. Hereby, ‘the world of music’ is at once mobilized to afford the generation and legitimization of genre labels and formats; and distanced, that is reduced to manageable reference points for the concrete dissemination and forward projection of these labels and formats into ever new situations of radio production. To understand genre and format as musico-generic assemblages, as I have suggested, means enquiring about this complex processual nexus – the co-functioning by which these phenomena are assembled and which may explain their effects. I think such an enquiry may further the current pursuit in format and musical genre theory of non-reductive, distributed, and processual accounts.

References Adkins, Brent. 2016. ‘Who Thinks Abstractly? Deleuze on Abstraction’. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30 (3): 352–60. Ahlkvist, Jarl A. 2001. ‘Programming Philosophies and the Rationalization of Music Radio’. Media, Culture & Society 23 (3): 339–58.



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Ahlkvist, Jarl A., and Robert Faulkner. 2002. ‘“Will This Record Work for Us?” Managing Music Formats in Commercial Radio’. Qualitative Sociology 25 (2): 189–215. Anon. 2013. ‘How We Understand Music Genres’. The Echo Nest Blog, 7 June. Accessed 9 December 2016. http://everynoise.com/EverynoiseIntro.pdf. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press. Berland, Jody. 1990. ‘Radio Space and Industrial Time: Music Formats, Local Narratives and Technological Mediation’. Popular Music 9 (2): 179–92. Berland, Jody. 1993. ‘Radio Space and Industrial Time: The Case of Music Formats’. In Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, edited by Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Sheperd and Graeme Turner, 104–18. New York: Routledge. Born, Georgina. 2005. ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’. Twentieth-Century Music 2 (1): 7–36. Born, Georgina. 2011. ‘Music and the Materialization of Identities’. Journal of Material Culture 16 (4): 376–88. Born, Georgina. 2012. ‘Music and the Social’. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 261–74. London: Routledge. Born, Georgina. 2015. ‘Making Time: Temporality, History, and the Cultural Object’. New Literary History 46 (3): 361–86. Brackett, David. 2016. Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oakland: University of California Press. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2002. Dialogues II. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge. Drott, Eric. 2013. ‘The End(s) of Genre’. Journal of Music Theory 57 (1): 1–45. Dubber, Andrew. 2014. Radio in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity. Eriksson, Maria. 2016. ‘Close Reading Big Data: The Echo Nest and the Production of (Rotten) Music Metadata’. First Monday 21 (7): no page. Fabbri, Franco. 1981. ‘A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications’. Popular Music Perspectives 1: 52–81. Fairchild, Charles. 2012. Music, Radio and the Public Sphere: The Aesthetics of Democracy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frith, Simon. 2012. ‘Music and Everyday Life’. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 149–58. London: Routledge.

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Garner, Ken. 2003. ‘Radio Format’. In The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Vol. 1: Media, Industry, and Society, edited by John Shepherd, David Horn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver and Peter Wicke, 461–3. London: Continuum. Greve, Henrich R. 1996. ‘Patterns of Consumption: The Diffusion of a Market Position in Radio Broadcasting’. Administrative Science Quarterly 41 (1): 29–60. Haworth, Christopher. 2016. ‘“All the Musics Which Computers Make Possible”: 1 Questions of Genre at the Prix Ars Electronica’. Organised Sound 21 (1): 15–29. Hennion, Antoine, and Cécile Méadel. 1986. ‘Programming Music: Radio as Mediator’. Media, Culture & Society 8 (3): 281–303. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2005. ‘Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above’. Journal of Youth Studies 8 (1): 21–40. Holt, Fabian. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jensen, Jens. R. 1994: Sådan kan de li’ det, sådan vil de ha’ det [That’s How They Like It, That’s How They Want It]. Radioens udviklingsenhed, København: DR. Krogh, Mads. 2018. ‘Non/linear Radio: Genre, Format and Rationalization in DR Programming’. In Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio, edited by Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Iben Have and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, 67–90. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Kronengold, Charles. 2008. ‘Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and AlbumOriented Rock’. Criticism 50 (1): 43–82. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. London: Harvard University Press. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Lena, Jennifer C. 2012. Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Michelsen, Morten, and Mads Krogh. 2017. ‘Music, Radio and Mediatization’. Media, Culture & Society 39 (4): 520–35. doi: 0163443716648494. Morris, Jeremy W. 2015. ‘Curation by Code: Infomediaries and the Data Mining of Taste’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 446–63. Neale, Stephen. 1980. Genre. London: British Film Institute. Negus, Keith. 1992. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold. Negus, Keith. 1993. ‘Plugging and Programming: Pop Radio and Record Promotion in Britain and the United States’. Popular Music 12 (1): 57–68. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. New York: Routledge. Patch, Nick. 2016. ‘Meet the Man Classifying Every Genre of Music on Spotify – All 1,387 of Them’. thestar.com, 14 January. Accessed 9 December 2016. https://www .thestar.com/entertainment/2016/01/14/meet-the-man-classifying-every-genre-ofmusic-on-spotify-all-1387-of-them.html. Ritzer, George. 2013. The McDonaldization of Society. London: Sage.



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Rossman, Gabriel. 2012. Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rothenbuhler, Eric. 1985. ‘Programming Decision Making in Popular Music Radio’. Communication Research 12: 209–32. Rothenbuhler, Eric. 1987. ‘Commercial Radio and Popular Music: Processes of Selection and Factors of Influence’. In Popular Music and Communication, edited by James Lull, 78–95. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rothenbuhler, Eric, and Tom McCourt. 1992. ‘Commercial Radio and Popular Music: Processes of Selection and Factors of Influence’. In Popular Music and Communication (2nd ed.), edited by James Lull, 97–114. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Shuker, Roy. 2016: Understanding Popular Music. 5th edtion. London: Routledge. Simpson, Kim. 2011. Early ‘70s Radio: The American Format Revolution. London: Continuum. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press. Toynbee, Jason. 2000. Making Popular Music. Musicians, Creativity and Institutions. London: Arnold. Turner, Graeme. 1993. ‘Who Killed the Radio Star? The Death of Teen Radio in Australia’. In Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, edited by Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd and Graeme Turner, 142–55. New York: Routledge. Vanderbilt, Tom. 2014. ‘Echo Nest Knows Your Music, Your Voting Choice’. Wired, 17 February. Accessed 9 December 2016. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/echo-nest. Weisbard, Eric. 2014. Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Winther, Rasmus G. 2014. ‘James and Dewey on Abstraction’. The Pluralist 9 (2): 1–28.

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Music Radio’s Mediations of the Music-Cultural High/Low Divide before the 1980s Morten Michelsen

From the beginning until the deregulation and general acceptance of commercial radio in Western Europe in the 1980s, public service radio has been able to follow two different and parallel cultural strategies modelled from a high/ low cultural divide. In music radio, one has offered a mixed bag of popular music genres while the other insisted on art music as the main reason for broadcasting. This difference became organized and institutionalized in variety departments and in music departments. Despite the well-established cultural hierarchy of this distinction, there is hardly any doubt that individual actors, institutions, and political bodies through a series of policy changes advanced popular music in the sixty-year period in question. One reason for this might be early radio’s firm consolidation of a light music repertoire and an aesthetic in between the two poles (cf. Frith [1983] 1988; Scannell and Cardiff 1991; Michelsen 2018a), a repertoire that soon turned out to be the bread and butter of daily music radio. In this way, a consolidation and a negotiation of the common, music-cultural hierarchy appear to have been at work at the same time. Rather than mapping these developments in historical detail, I would like to suggest a theoretical framework for understanding the complex cultural processes that constitute Western European public broadcasting corporations’ involvement with cultural hierarchies. By analysing music radio as a Deleuzian assemblage I intend to stress the unclear borders, the ever-changing content, and the fragility of such structures. Also, I will draw on Georgina Born’s comprehensive model of four planes of social mediation, a model developed



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for analysing musical events as assemblages. And by viewing the actual high/ low divide as a Foucauldian disciplinary dispositive, I intend to highlight its regulative and ordering qualities with regard to musical, ethical, and social aspects. I call on these theories in order to better grasp these complex processes of music-cultural change through becoming aware of the mediations through time and space between the details of the everyday and the general trajectories as they are related within assemblages. Also, assemblage theory contributes to pointing to the interrelations between subjects and objects and to the agency of both. Concretely, I will argue that the high/low divide is much more complex and more contested than is often assumed due to the restricting logic of binaries.

Music radio as assemblage In the introduction to an article on musical mediation Georgina Born argues for constructing an ontology of music where music is basically a distributed object. By this she means that music not really (or rather, not only) have the characteristics of an object, but also those of a subject. In general, she argues for conceiving of music beyond regular dichotomies like subject/object, individual/ collective, and production/reception (2005, 8), and that music’s meanings have no privileged place of origin. This leads her to state that music is perhaps the paradigmatic multiply-mediated, immaterial and material, fluid quasi-object, in which subjects and objects collide and intermingle. It favours associations or assemblages between musicians and instruments, composers and scores, listeners and sound systems – that is, between subjects and objects. (Born 2005, 7)

The basic model for this is the distributed network where the innumerable aspects of music gain their specific characteristics in relation to or mediated by other aspects. But distributing what music is in this way is not enough as it only takes in mediations among musical objects and subjects. To Born it is necessary to include music’s broader social mediation and transcend theories of mediation as, for example, proposed by Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion whom she considers too focused on the microsocial levels (2005, 14). To this

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end, and taking inspiration from Will Straw’s scene theory, she has developed a model consisting of four planes of social mediation.1 In the first plane music produces the intimate microsocialities of musical performance, music ensemble and installation site: the social and corporeal interactions and intersubjectivities set in motion among performers and audience and other participants. (2013, 32) [The second plane concerns] music’s capacity to animate imagined communities, aggregating its adherents into virtual collectivities and publics based on musical and other identifications. These are musically imagined communities that … may reproduce or memorialize extant identity formations, generate purely fantasized identifications, or prefigure emergent identity formations by forging novel social alliances. (2011, 381) Third, music mediates wider social relations, from the most abstract to the most intimate: music’s embodiment of stratified and hierarchical social relations, of the structures of class, race, nation, gender and sexuality, and of the competitive accumulation of legitimacy, authority and social prestige. (2010, 232) Fourth, music is bound up in the large-scale social, cultural, economic and political forces that provide for its production, reproduction or transformation, whether elite or religious patronage, mercantile or industrial capitalism, public and subsidized cultural institutions, or late capitalism’s multipolar cultural economy – forces the analysis of which demands the resources of social theory, from Marx and Weber, through Foucault and Bourdieu, to contemporary analysts of the political economy, institutional structures and globalized circulation of music. (2010, 232)

Although distinct for analytical purposes and even though there is a clear difference between the first two and last two planes (being related more to musical practices and to social formations, respectively) the four planes are always present and intermingled in different ways and proportions. In this way conceiving of the musical object as a constellation of heterogeneous mediations, as ‘an aggregation of sonic, social, corporeal, discursive, visual, technological and temporal mediations’ (Born 2011, 377) she turns to the concept of assemblage

Born has argued for this model in a series of articles. In each article, the wording is slightly different. For each plane I have chosen the most detailed description. See Born 2010, 232–5; 2011, 378; 2012, 266–8; and 2013, 31–5 for presentations of the four-plane model, and laid out in a three plane format in Born 2005, 7.

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as developed by Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda as an overriding concept for keeping together the four planes of mediation. The original French meanings of the concept (agencement meaning a construction, an arrangement, a layout (Nail 2017, 24)) point to the temporariness and frailness of assemblages. Its inherent dynamism and openness as a ‘structure of a space of possibilities’ characterized by capacities rather than properties (DeLanda 2006, 29) is important as it supports the need to continuously ask questions concerning the relations between the many elements of the assemblage. It is a major point to both Deleuze and DeLanda that the elements taking part in assemblages might be basically heterogeneous in their relations while retaining their relations, and this co-functioning despite difference is central for grasping the complexity of what is analysed. Questions of causality are also addressed, often by pointing to the apparent contingency among the elements. In an article Mads Krogh and I have discussed music radio as an assemblage and give a series of brief, concrete examples of such assemblages at both the micro- and macro-planes. At a more general level we argue that to speak of milieus of music-radio is, on the one hand, to indicate the specific focus of our analytic enquiry – i.e. the assemblage of specific phenomena: music and radio; on the other hand, to emphasize how the identity and relation of these phenomena are contingent due to their emergence (territorialization and de-territorialization) ‘in between’ an array of elements. Both music and radio are the non-reducible and non-linear effects of a co-functioning. (2017, 12)

Questions of dynamics and (non-)causality are central here. When analysing assemblages like music radio, asking about stability and change (territorialization and de-territorialization) points towards historiographical concerns, and asking about contingency is central as it highlights the problematics of causality which often results in a realization of co-functioning, that is, ‘an emergent effect of assemblage, which can never be fully explained with reference to its elements respectively’ (2017, 8), but which can be studied as concrete practices and products. As for Born, multiplicity is a keyword for understanding what assemblage is. All in all, what is analysed is a huge flickering entity where the relations between elements are constantly renewed in sometimes unclear ways and where the totality is constantly changing in order to keep up its cohesion. The multiplicity of assemblages makes it necessary to reach beyond traditional, systematically descriptive practices, which are obviously inadequate, and suggests other strategies for analysing such hyper-complex, cultural phenomena.

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Music radio’s social mediation Building on this I would like to sketch music radio as a four-plane musico-social assemblage. The microsocialities of music radio unfold in at least three major areas: programming, radio ensembles, and listening practices. Here, programming is mainly a production category and includes diverse practices concerning the planning and execution of individual music programmes and the analytical questions concern the play list – what music is played, how the music is presented (what discourses, characteristics of the presenter’s and other participants’ voices, what radiophonic space(s), characteristics of the programme flow, and other radiophonic tricks), what is the context (the individual programme’s contribution to the general schedule (the daily and weekly flow)). In different ways Carin Åberg (2012) and Golo Föllmer (2013) address this plane based on the analysis of the results of the microsocial practices, and Hennion and Méadel (1986) study what goes on in radio studios from an ethnographic perspective. Radio ensembles (e.g. big bands, dance bands, piano trios, symphony orchestras, light music orchestras, choirs) have always been extremely important to public broadcasting institutions. In the beginning they delivered almost every note of music broadcasted, and only from the 1960s onwards did commercial recordings become the main source for radio-mediated music. Despite being employed by these huge institutions, most musicians have been able to resist (at least partially) the pressure of radiogenic and administrative logics and hold on to many of the logics and practices pertaining to actually playing music and functioning in musical ensembles – theoretically demonstrating how Born’s first and fourth planes are identifiable despite their intertwinement. In some cases the ensembles have functioned as independent states within the state of the organization. This means that a lot of microsocial activities known from musical life ‘survive’ in the radio ensembles having relayed music as their primary obligation, and they are quite different from the microsocialities of programme production. Observation and interviews would probably be the primary ways of attending to this. Listeners’ practices are concerned with how actual listeners go about their radio listening and other uses of radio. Listening in/out (Lacey 2013, 3–21) might be one conceptual perspective, places and spaces for listening another and non-radiogenic listening strategies taken from, for example, discotheques, cafes, or low dives a third. These three microsocial universes each in their own way relate to the other three planes being intercut in different ways depending on



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the historical situation by, say, problematics of organizational policies, gender, and audiences. Music radio’s imagined communities are imagined by at least two distinct groups: the one producing or being responsible for actual programmes and programme policies, and the other listening to programmes and programme flows. While production groups are concrete, non-imagined, communities, they imagine the communities they produce for. Nowadays, most broadcasting organizations use focus groups and other complex media research techniques to help what I would consider constructing or ‘imagining’ the specific segments they ‘aim’ their programmes at. Earlier on, it was a much more speculative affair, and some producers did not care much for such considerations. Despite the different intentions in programmes and programming it would be hard to ignore each programme’s inscribed listener, either as an ideal type or as a more or less varied community, because radio is conventionally thought of as a medium for communication. In such ways programmes afford listening positions that do not necessarily correspond to the actual listeners or to the communities imagined by the listeners. Imagined communities related to (music) radio have the most diverse roots, often traversing the second and third planes of Born’s model. For example, in the early years, when writing letters to the radio, Danish listeners explained who they were by referring to their place of origin or living, their profession, class, education, gender, or age, thus using their general social position to enter the imagined communities of radio. In more recent phone-in programmes most of the categories are still relevant. Imagined communities based on musical taste were of course important as well. You could opt in (‘I am a jazz fan’) or out (‘I do not like classical music’). This can be seen in the letters pages in radio magazines (Larsen 2018) and later on, youth magazines. It was not only radio who imagined communities and listeners who regarded themselves as part of communities in different ways, listeners also imagined radio. Not what was broadcasted, but those who were broadcasting. The many radio voices of course came from bodies, and the looks of bodies and the character of the persons of these bodies were often imagined (and mediated by popular magazines). In such ways radio afforded supplementary and more intense ways of imagining the public sphere through sound. I will argue that public discourses on radio practices and programming contribute to the second plane as well. Apart from radio itself it is what defines and holds together these imagined communities. Public service broadcasting has

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always been contested, although in historically different ways, and the immense amount of texts offering criticism has contributed to defining how radio in broad terms is perceived. Texts by journalists, professional commentators, radio professionals, and ordinary listeners have appeared in the many listeners’ magazines, in debates and reviews in dailies, and in radio programmes. Also, yearbooks, reports, tutorials, memoirs, and slowly research articles and books have appeared, all of them contributing to the ever-changing constellations of imagined communities related to radio. Music radio’s wider social relations are innumerable. It is not a densely populated research area, but several researchers have made important contributions to it. Interestingly, some of the early, major contributions to the sociology of music were concerned with music radio in relation to culture and society in general (Adorno 2009; Silberman 1954). As television came about research on music radio became marginal, Barnard (1989) and Scannell and Cardiff (1991) being the quite late and major exceptions, and interest was only rekindled around the turn of the century in monographs by, for example, Jenny Doctor (1999) Brian Currid (2006), Heiner Stahl (2010), and Christina Baade (2012). Kate Lacey (2013) has widened the field by studying radio in a listening perspective and as sound in general. It is important to continuously be aware of the dialectics between the assemblages of music radio and musical culture in general.2 One concept to grasp this relation could be mediatization which is mainly concerned with how media come to dominate other societal areas (see Michelsen and Krogh 2017 for detailed discussions of this). Another could be mediation which would then stress the circulation between the assemblages (Couldry 2008, 380). Music radio has contributed crucially to the organization of musical culture ‘outside’ radio via its choices and priorities in individual programmes and in the overall programme structure, via what has been said and written by radio personnel. And not least, in making the high/low dispositive work so well within modern culture. At the same time the dispositive was not created by radio  – it was ‘imported’ into radio when listeners, politicians, and radio personnel began to reflect upon what radio should be. I will return to this below and use the high/ low dispositive to demonstrate how the music radio assemblage ‘functions’.

This division is of course mainly established for analytical reasons, and in some cases the distinction will be hard to maintain as music radio may also be construed as an integral part of musical culture in general.

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It goes without saying that radio also contributed to the changing articulations of other unequal social relations like gender, class, and race. Most of the time radio supported the status quo very effectively as it is quite an intimate medium because its sounds, music, and words are in your living room, in your car, or close to your ear when listening to your transistor. Sometimes, though, it helped mediating and even articulating critiques. While affording individual identity work to its listeners radio also articulated ideas of the nation and what it was in terms of pointing to appropriate music, central symbols, important individuals, and correct language. Music radio’s institutional forms include the organization of broadcasting institutions, the radio industry in general, other branches of the music industry, and questions of technology and legislation. The necessary and continuous debates about principles of public service are essential to this plane. Music radio may be understood as a consequence of a broadcasting cooperation in that its general policies, its practical organization, and its management set the frames for music broadcasting. Despite the dominance of public broadcasting corporations in Europe in the period in question, the commercial radio industry from the French périphérique radios to the pirates and later on legal commercial stations (in the UK from 1973) is important as well. A special instance is the UK and the US armed forces networks. All these stations had different music policies (mainly light and popular music on record presented in a less formal manner) that influenced the public broadcasters in different ways. Radio’s relations to other parts of the music industry have always been up for debate, basically, because radio was and is the most efficient billboard for the products of the industry. Publishers and record companies have used all kinds of tricks to have their music played while the public broadcasters have tried in different ways to be fair, to rise above the competition. Despite this, music’s economic form has always been present. With radio being the largest single workplace for musicians, musicians’ unions have a say as well, not on programming but on what it is to be a musician working for the radio. Radio technology is a huge area that includes broadcasting (networks for national and international relays, the introduction of FM after the war, the advent of stereo in the 1960s) and receiving (car radios, transistor radios, tuners, and stereo sets). Some of the technology is regulated by national laws and supranational agreements, for example, broadcasting frequencies. Also, laws regulate who is allowed to broadcast and how the public service corporations are to be administered. Following such laws different countries have different ways

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of agreeing on how to realize the public service ideals (e.g. the BBC charter, in Denmark contracts between DR and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs). For music a major consequence of these regulations is an (mainly abstract) insistence on diversity and a set quota for national music (in Denmark the latest quota is 43 per cent, the highest percentage ever (DR 2014, 8)).

High/low as a disciplinary dispositive When broadcasted radio became popular in the 1920s the high/low divide was already well established (Levine 1988, Wicke 1998, Scott 2008), and in Europe it became a precondition for radio’s assemblage and for ‘doing’ radio: for the programming policies and for the individual programmes. It has long been considered a commonplace that one of Reithian radio’s main purposes was to educate its mass audience and raise its moral standards (Hendy 2013). Also, that the most important means for doing this was lectures and classical music. It might be less of a commonplace that Reith and his fellow European broadcasting director generals accepted that many sorts of entertainment including copious amounts of light music were necessary in order to satisfy the listener tired after a full day’s work and in order to fill the many broadcasting hours of the day (Michelsen 2018a). Also, tap listening was quietly accepted as an adequate mode of listening for such radio content. It is helpful to think of the sociocultural, regulative figure of high/low as a Foucauldian, mainly disciplinary, dispositive and analyse it accordingly. Foucault is not very clear about what a dispositive is, so I rely on Raffnsøe et al.’s summation (2008, 215–25). The dispositive is not an overriding principle but rather the sum of certain practices and discourses contributing in some way to the construction, maintenance, and transformation of the dispositive in question. Like the assemblage, the dispositive consists of a series of elements whose interrelations in what is a heterogeneous whole give the dispositive its specificity. But in Raffnsøe et al.’s reading the dispositive’s higher degree of specificity becomes apparent when they stress its dynamic and concrete historical dimensions: ‘During its creation the dispositive becomes part of a larger context and fills a general function that it helps selecting and forming during its construction’, and they even claim that ‘dispositives only open to analysis in concrete, historical investigations which demonstrate a dispositive’s appearance, its distribution in social space, and its interplay with other



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dispositives’ (218, 219, my translation). When analysing disciplining processes it is important to Foucault to uncover patterns in the relations of power  – patterns that are produced by the mutual influences of different actions and leaving traces in the institutions involved. Foucault distinguishes between three modalities of the dispositive: ‘law’, ‘discipline’, and ‘dispositives of security’. In this context the disciplinary dispositive is the most important because the disciplinary modality intervenes with the daily existence of its objects being individual bodies, molding them so that they can be expected to function in a desirable fashion in the future. Just as the law deals with its surrounding world, so does discipline, although now in a prescriptive fashion, aiming to eliminate the unwanted and to prevent it from occurring at all. (Raffnsøe et al. 2016, 280)

The disciplinary dispositive constitutes a normativity and a rationality with the power to make individual bodies accept and function within it. This power is far from omnipotent; it is strong, but always contested. In his brief, definitory article ‘What is an Apparatus?’, Agamben stresses the dispositive as a heterogeneous network and as appearing ‘at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge’ ([2006] 2009, 3). It is these characteristics of the dispositive that I think sit well with the many different notions of high/low. Admittedly, the concepts of assemblage and dispositive are interrelated in many ways, both with regard to their etymological and conceptual history and with regard to their present-day uses (Legg 2011). As mentioned Foucault developed the term ‘dispositive’, and his remarks have been the object of interpretation, not least by Deleuze ([1989] 1992) and Agamben ([2006] 2009), each in their way. In English the former has been associated with the concept of assemblage, the latter with the concept of apparatus. Common to both concepts is that they are used in trying to name and understand extensive and complex, heterogeneous social and societal phenomena. Such phenomena are dynamic and have unclear borders – for example expressed in the terms re- and de-territorialization. Among the differences are that apparatuses (dispositives) tend towards order (i.e. by having a direction, intervening, re-territorialization) while assemblages have a tendency to remain open and unstable. These characteristics are only tendencies which are always counterbalanced and thus never fulfilled. In this context, when applying the two concepts, the intention is to stress different ‘gazes’ or ‘machines which make one see and speak’ (Deleuze [1989] 1992, 160) – or in this case, hear – to music radio and high/low,

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respectively. The first in order to analyse sixty years of changes in practices and mediations within the institution and in the programming. The second as a sort of intervention into the first, to some extent determining the changes in the first, but, as I will show, not being forceful enough to implement its hegemonic pull. When wanting to analyse the high/low as a disciplinary dispositive in a historical perspective, a first question would be what belongs to the dispositive. Contributing to its emergence in the early nineteenth century was the establishment of art as a separate societal area developing in a bourgeois public culture guided and guarded by a principle of autonomy. In music, composers and musicians, critics and scholars (among others) contributed to the slowly more marked distinctions between high and low. Their institutions (i.e. conservatories, specialist magazines, university departments), which were established or grew in importance during this period, helped fortifying the positions. Through programming concert societies gained influence, and the concert halls and opera houses being built or redecorated helped underline the sacrality of art music, while most publishers sold both the popular music of the day and the (un-arranged) works of what were to become canonic composers. All of this continued into the twentieth century where record companies continued the policy of the publishers, and public service radio and television became the main outlets for the consolidation (and challenging) of the divide. Some record companies launched special labels for art music and charged more for such recordings (Osborne 2012, 49), but more importantly, the advent of radio helped the copyright system enter its next stage, which among other things resulted in more or less law-like tables for how much royalties certain categories of musical works were to receive  – art music of course receiving the most. The disciplinary aspects in relation to music unfolded in many ways. A certain way of conducting yourself in relation to ‘serious’ music was developed. You were expected to pay for a ticket, to dress in certain ways, to know when to remain silent and when to applaud, and to be able to converse about the music afterwards. There was always an educational perspective as specialists explained what the music was all about in programme notes or Konzertführer. This might give food for conversation and for internalizing the many codes as it offered ways of listening to music and to the imagination of sound and space in general (Michelsen forthcoming). This was related to the theorization of culture as the best that mankind has thought and said and lead on to phrenologically based theories resulting in the highbrow/lowbrow distinction (Meisel 2010, 3–10).



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As Lakoff and Johnson taught us many years ago, many metaphors are spatially oriented, for example, along an up/down axis (1980, 14–21). This would make the high culture/low culture an orientational metaphor, and not least it opens for a lot of related orientational binaries like art/commerce, art/ popular, rare/common, aesthetic/vulgar, worthy/unworthy, moral/immoral, good/bad, and so on. According to the situation some of the meanings implied by one or more of these spill over into the high/low binary. It may also explain why high/low has been so long-lived and so important to the developments of Western cultural life (cf. Stallybrass and White 1986, 2–3). Thinking of the high as morally good, aesthetic, and non-commercial art and the low as its direct opposite is easily mapped onto social and gendered binaries like rich/ poor or male/female. When such meanings were joined together and used for mapping the practices, the objects, and the tastes in the cultural sphere, it slowly turned into quite a powerful dispositive. It was often challenged, for example, by the avant-garde movements, or temporarily ignored, probably in the low dives, but it has become the tenor of roughly 200 years of cultural and not least musical history.

High/low as mediated within and through music radio As mentioned, music radio and musical life in general were often intertwined. The high/low divide was integrated into musical life, and as radio unfolded it brought about new situations within the dispositive. The dispositive soon came to influence radio on all four Bornian analytical planes, but let us, for analytical purposes, begin with the third plane which explicitly addresses such problematics when mediated by radio and which in a way matches the idea of a disciplinary dispositive well. From this position we may see the dispositive radiate towards the other planes and in turn be influenced by these processes. This I sketch out using a few examples. By juxtaposing many different kinds of music within one pervasive medium (Scannell and Cardiff 1991, 182) relations between high and low became negotiated in new ways. On the one hand, discourse was sharpened and borders fortified, on the other radio’s and musicians’ everyday practices allowed for many compromises. Radio took in the dispositive and used it to invent itself as – among other things – music radio presenting itself and its content as examples of and templates for good taste. Indeed, radio needed high culture to

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legitimate itself as more than a medium for the masses, and it needed to stress an identity different from just being the mediator of concerts, plays, and literary readings. To that end a radio-based concept of quality was developed that was not bound to high art but to professionalism with regard to performance and thus less genre-dependent. The Danish director general even applied this to Louis Armstrong and argued that within jazz this was high quality (Holm 1939, 181). In this way, two different conceptions of quality coexisted: One mainly for everyday radio and one for radio’s artistic and educational programmes – and as an argument for spending quite a lot of money on symphonic orchestras, conductors, and star soloists. The dogma of performance quality had an effect on certain popular music genres (the ones that performance-wise did not stray too far from that of classical music) making the divide feel less absolute, while other genres were decidedly low and not suited for radio (or anything else). So when radio came about and gathered music genres, it made the hierarchy more visible/tangible, but is also made ways of negotiating the hierarchy necessary in order to exist within it. The performance criteria were one way of doing this. And because separate departments (and because the employees’ habitus) took care of different genres, different ways of managing these criteria became possible. So within the rigidity of the high/low hierarchy of Born’s third plane it was possible on the first plane to devote yourself to playing or producing light music and popular music and develop a deeply professional take on it. The educational ethos was double as well in that it changed the static of the high/low situation by promising a dynamic in a continual educational process for the individual and for ‘the people’ while also acknowledging that ‘the people’ as a democratic constituency had different tastes which had to be represented. The performance quality argument was needed in order to let some of the not-so-good music on the air at all. In this way the high/low dispositive was combined with radio at the third plane of music radio’s wider social relations as a disciplining of radio. High/low did not only affect music radio at the third and fourth level, it also had a huge influence on the actual music programming and the presentation of the music.3 In this way, radio (maybe in order to become accepted by the right people) quickly became a part of the cultural regime while

The auditive sources for this are not many until the late 1960s. Before that we have to make do with written introductions for announcers preserved in archives, concert hall programmes, and press releases as written up by newspapers and magazines.

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also broadcasting music for not-so-acquired tastes. It was still a united audience, even though more specialist music was played after 10.00 pm and the day was planned according to specific interest groups. At the institutional plane all the corporations employed several orchestras (the largest consisting of about 100 musicians), and in the 1950s a few even established studios for the production of electronic music (NWDR/Köln, RTF/ Paris, and RAI/Milan). Avant-garde music became a major concern for music departments all over Europe, and its success would hardly be imaginable without radio as a patron of the arts and its economic support and public-making. This consolidated art music as a sphere to itself, away from everyday music, and it fitted well with the scathing critiques of mass culture and popular culture from the whole political spectrum of intellectuals. While it might have been hard for the untrained to hear and explain the difference between, say, Johann Strauss and Beethoven, nobody could help notice the enormous difference between, say, Stockhausen and The Beatles in 1963. On the other hand, radio supported (and led?) jazz’ cultural trajectory from the low towards the high as variations of modern jazz and the newly founded radio big bands became part of radio’s art music profile during the 1960s. After the Second World War the BBC was the first to challenge the idea of a unified music audience with the introduction of the Home Service (mainly talk radio), The Light Programme (light music), and The Third Programme (high culture) in 1946. This challenged the idea of radio as basically educational, as listeners might avoid most things educational by simply not tuning in to The Third Programme (or the Home Service for that matter). The structure underlined a difference that previous planning had tried to avoid. Instead of mediating between high and low, which at least to some extent was the intention of Reithian radio, this first step in the direction of segmentation insisted on differentiation and on the implicit hierarchy in listeners’ educational and thus their social status (Barnard 1989, 24). The disciplinary dispositive did its work at several planes, as popular music programming continued in a direction of its own by developing music-based service radio (e.g. traffic radio) and youth radio (e.g. chart shows) while art music programming accepted its role as radio for the select few.4 This division slowly spread to the rest of Western Europe. After the war, French national radio introduced dual programming with Le Programme National having a ‘cultural’ profile in contrast to Le Programme Parisien. Through the 1950s and the 1960s Le Programme National developed into France Culture which had a distinctly highbrow profile. In Germany broadcasting organizations

4

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As a consequence of the separate frequencies for art music, other genres came to dominate the other frequencies used by the national corporations. They offered popular music as well, but actually, alternative genres of popular music had always been there for most Northern Europeans to tune into because of the French périphérique radios (Radio Luxembourg among them), because of the armed forces networks, and later on, because of pirate radios sailing the seas. Especially the last ones made the national corporations (and the national politicians) grudgingly accept that designated popular music frequencies had become a cultural necessity. Sweden was first in 1961, then Denmark two years later, The Netherlands in 1965, and the BBC only in 1967. Youth became one group among others specifically served by these programmes and by relatively new programme formats like chart shows. This formal acceptance of popular music, including music for youth, as worthy of a whole programme to itself by national broadcasting corporations, was a major symbolic adjustment of the balance between high and low, but one whose effect would only develop in the following decades. This is also an example of how Born’s third plane morphs into the fourth plane as state-concessioned cultural institutions slowly came to accept youth and its music. To complicate matters, just as radio had helped create a distinction between jazz as dance music for many and specialist music for the few from the 1930s to the 1950s (Scannell and Cardiff 1991, 189–92; Mortensen 2010, 47–55) radio was instrumental in establishing a similar high/low distinction within the new youth music of the 1960s, namely that between pop and progressive (or rock). As ‘progressive’ music slowly took shape during the mid-1960s (the Beatles’ evolution being the archetypal example), and as the popular music press began to comment on the divide (Lindberg et al. 2005), the new programmes began to compartmentalize the music in different programmes (even though it did not happen completely, for example, in the chart shows). Together with the music press radio programmes quite swiftly constructed a history and a canon of the ‘progressive’ music together with ways of interpreting what the new music ‘meant’ (both necessary when opting for becoming ‘serious’), the new music was presented and discussed in programme formats akin to the ones

WDR and NDR (located in the British zone) copied the BBC from the mid-1950s onwards and used a separate frequency to broadcast what was perceived as high cultural programmes including music. SDR slowly followed suit and began to plan the evening schedules on the two programmes with focus on either popular music or highbrow cultural programmes. The latter became a radio outlet for, among others, Adorno (Dussel 2010, 209–10).



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used for jazz and classical music (debate and journalistically informed), and soon specialized hosts were employed to take care of the programmes. Last but not least it became a regular feature to relay live events, something which was not common to the pop music of the day. With such changes related to Born’s first and second planes this new, ‘serious’ popular music (rock, jazz, folk) had become quite strong by the 1970s. By defining pop as the new low, teaming up with jazz and challenging art music as the only legitimate music, it readdressed the balance between high and low, and thus, in the decades following the 1970s contributed to qualitative changes in the dispositive as its disciplinary character and its varied uses as a cultural, disciplinary ‘tool’ slowly became less important in a ‘polyhierarchical but still centred’ musical culture (Laermans 1992, 256).

Conclusions It has not been my intention to account for histories of high and low within music radio, only to show how this in itself complex dispositive is something distinct from radio and music radio because of its long history and its extremely broad effects on the cultural landscape and a part of music radio because it has been integral to the thinking of radio and music radio and to the many practices developed by hosts and producers  – and listeners. In order to show these processes I have chosen to conceptualize music radio as an assemblage being analysable thanks to Born’s four planes of mediation. It means that the dispositive as a relatively stable figure together with several other dispositives influence and maybe for a time dominate certain processes within the hypercomplex, flickering and unstable assemblage, but also that the dispositives change because of their contact with the assemblage. My argument has been of a theoretical and methodological character led by the question of how to analyse complex, cultural phenomena in a sweeping gesture from micro- to macro-planes, but it has also shown that national broadcasting corporations, when focusing on the programming activities, appear as quite open assemblages despite their administrative closedness and a long tradition for institutional history. By analysing music radio through the lens of a disciplinary dispositive the many sounds of the two multitudes of music and radio come together in structuring and being structured by each other while being disciplined in various ways by the high/low divide.

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References Åberg, Carin. 2012. Radioanalys. Att undersöka lyssnare och program [Radio Analysis. Investigating Listeners and Programmes]. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Adorno, Theodor. 2009. Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Agamben, Giorgio. (2006) 2009. What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1–24. Baade, Christina L. 2012. Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Barnard, Stephen. 1989. On the Radio: Music Radio in Britain. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Born, Georgina. 2005. ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’. Twentieth-Century Music 2 (1): 7–36. Born, Georgina. 2010. ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135 (2): 205–43. Born, Georgina. 2011. ‘Music and the Materialization of Identities’. Journal of Material Culture 16 (4): 376–88. Born, Georgina. 2012. ‘Music and the Social’. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (2nd edition), edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 261–74. New York and London: Routledge. Born, Georgina. 2013. ‘Introduction – Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience’. In Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, edited by Georgina Born, 1–70. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Couldry, Nick. 2008. ‘Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling’. New Media & Society 10 (3): 373–91. Currid, Brian. 2006. A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. (1989) 1992. ‘What Is a Dispositif?’ In Michel Foucault: Philosopher, edited by T. J. Armstrong, 159–68. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Doctor, Jennifer Ruth. 1999. The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DR. 2014. DRs Public Service Kontrakt for 2015–2018. Accessed 15 April 2017. http:// kum.dk/kulturpolitik/medier/medieaftaler/. Dussel, Konrad. 2010. Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte. 3rd edition. Konstanz: UKV Verlagsgesellschaft. Frith, Simon. (1983) 1988. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Cambridge: Polity Press.



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Föllmer, Golo. 2013. ‘Theoretical-Methodical Approaches to Radio Aesthetics: Qualitative Characteristics of Channel-Identity’. In Electrified Voices: Medial, Socio-Historical and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer, edited by Dmitri Zakharine and Nils Meise, 325–41. Germany: V&R Unipress. Hendy, David. 2013. Public Service Broadcasting. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hennion, Antoine, and Cécile Méadel. 1986. ‘Programming Music: Radio as Mediator’. Media, Culture & Society 8 (3): 281–303. Holm, Emil. 1939. Erindringer og Tidsbilleder fra midten af forrige Aarhundrede til vor Tid, bind 1 og 2 [Memoirs and Period Pictures from the Middle of the Previous Century to Our Times]. Copenhagen: Berlingske Forlag. Lacey, Kate. 2013. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Laermans, Rudi. 1992. ‘The Relative Rightness of Pierre Bourdieu: Some Sociological Comments on the Legitimacy of Postmodern Art, Literature and Culture’. Cultural Studies 6 (2): 248–60. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Larsen, Charlotte Rørdam. 2018. ‘Radio, Music and the Provinces: The Danish State Broadcasting Corporation’s Creation of Musical Provinces’. In Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio, edited by Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Iben Have and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, 283–308. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Legg, Stephen. 2011. ‘Assemblage/Apparatus: Using Deleuze and Foucault’. Area 43 (2): 128–33. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Lindberg, Ulf, Gestur Gudmundsson, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet. 2005. Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers & Cool-Headed Cruisers. New York: Lang. Meisel, Perry. 2010. The Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Michelsen, Morten. 2018a. ‘Negotiating Musical Hierarchies: Music Programming and Genre on Inter-War Danish Radio’. In Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio, edited by Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Iben Have and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, 309–44. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Michelsen, Morten. forthcoming. ‘Radios, Sounds, Imaginaries: Music, Space, and Broadcasting in the 1950s’. In Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mads Walther-Hansen and Martin Knakkergaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michelsen, Morten, and Mads Krogh. 2017. ‘Music, Radio and Mediatization’. Media, Culture and Society 39 (4): 520–35.

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Mortensen, Tore. 2010. Fortællinger om jazzen: Dens vej gennem statsradiofonien, Danmarks Radio og DR [Stories about Jazz: Its Path Through the State Broadcasting Corporation, Danmarks Radio and DR]. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag. Nail, Thomas. 2017. ‘What Is an Assemblage?’ SubStance 46 (1): 21–37. Osborne, Richard. 2012. Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Raffnsøe, Sverre, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, and Morten Thaning. 2008. Foucault. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. Raffnsøe, Sverre, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, and Morten Thaning. 2016. ‘Foucault’s Dispositive: The Perspicacity of Dispositive Analytics in Organizational Research’. Organization 23 (2): 272–98. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. 1991. A Social History of British Broadcasting, Volume One 1922–1939: Serving the Nation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Scott, Derek. 2008. Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Silbermann, Alphons. 1954. La musique, la radio et l’auditeur, Étude sociologique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Stahl, Heiner. 2010. Jugendradio im kalten Ätherkrieg: Berlin als eine Klanglandschaft des Pop (1962–73). Berlin: Landbeck. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wicke, Peter. 1998. Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik. Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag.

Part Four

Music Radio Convergences If radio, as David Hendy remarks, is ‘an extraordinarily dynamic medium – changing too quickly to let us “see” it properly’ (2000, 6) – then what about its relations to other media or non-media contexts of musical life? Are these relations determining in the sense that radio acquires its dynamic identity and historical development by interaction with other media, institutional contexts, and so on? Or are such relations as indeterminable as radio due to the basic dynamism and distributed character of any medium as well as other phenomena? Furthermore, should radio’s inter-mediational dynamics be conceptualized in terms of remediation, media differentiation, or convergence or perhaps at the level of technology, practice, format, institution, or culture? And should it be differentiated according to contexts of everyday use, programme production, or as intertwined with cross-sectional cultural, commercial, political, or academic agendas? Questions galore, which however only affirms the challenge of ‘seeing’ radio properly or, in other words, of doing radio studies. Eric Weisbard brings up this disciplinary challenge in his contribution to this volume, discussing music radio’s function as ‘a circulatory medium’ between diverse groups of listeners and professional environments, focusing in particular on the connection of format radio to broader historical tendencies in American culture including the recent election of President Trump. Radio studies should, according to Weisbard, beware of theoretical evasions of the historical specificities of ‘race, gender, class and regional roots of musical affiliation’ pertaining to radio formats and musical genres. To this end, he advocates a wide array of literature on American popular music to be considered – its various lineages followed across disciplinary and institutional and mediational divides. To augment our historical understanding of music radio formatting implies, in other words, an augmentation of ‘our conception of what radio scholarship itself consists of ’.

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Rallied to this course might be archive materials (such as programme director memos), popular magazine writings, radio entrepreneur and artist memoirs along with scholarly work in disciplines such as media, literary and popular music studies, cultural history, African-American studies, and so on. To navigate this immense field – accommodating, thus, the empirical challenge inherent in the proposed augmentation – Weisbard considers ‘how notions of the sentimental and the vernacular shaped both content and writing style’, a distinction closely related to that of format and genre. This in turn allows for radio studies to reflect back on a wider culture-historical context to qualify, for example, our understanding of how principles of format radio collided with notions of vernacularism in the election of President Trump. The second chapter in this part, Ariane Holzbach’s ‘MTV and the Remediation of FM Radio’, picks another route into questioning the identity or delimitation of radio and, thus, of radio studies. Specifically, she details the relation of FM radio and the 1981 launch of the MTV drawing on the concept of remediation as developed by Bolter and Grusin (2000). MTV was launched into a media environment marked not only by FM radio and cable television but also AM broadcasting, videogames, VTR, satellite television, and more. An environment whose configuration of radio and television cultures afforded the music video channel’s launch and immediate success. Nevertheless, the particular remediation of ‘FM logics’ performed by MTV (in terms of programming dynamics, VJ discourses, and institutional advertisements) may be explained by reference to the specific status of late-1970s FM radio, what Holzbach terms its ‘leader role in music culture’. The particular dynamics of FM music radio and in particular formats such as AOR and Top 40 offered opportunities to MTV for distinguishing itself, that is, for appropriating radio in order to construct its own identity as a recognizable television channel. Conversely, in the hypermediacy of MTV, radio was recast as a has-been medium to be plucked for its virtues. As such, it is, of course, noticeable that FM music radio has survived and continues to offer an attractive source of remediation. The latter point is made by Andreas Lenander Ægidius in his chapter entitled ‘Music Radio as a Format Remediated for Stream-Based Music Use’. By stream-based music the author refers to ‘curated flows of music’, which in todays’ digitized mediascape may be encountered in the form of, for example, streaming services, where they are nevertheless often labelled as radio. The combined case of Spotify and Apple Music, which is detailed by the chapter, proves this point, and Ægidius suggests consequently to conceptualize music radio as a contributing format in the



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context of stream-based music use. This leads him to consider the relation of the concepts of media (mediality) and format and to combine the format theory developed by Jonathan Sterne with the theory of remediation. In this way, the chapter proposes yet another route to accommodating the extraordinarily dynamic medium that radio is: an updated conceptual and analytical frame for understanding music radio on digital premises though in a historical perspective and a manner sensitive to its changing sociocultural, practical, and technological multiplicities.

References Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hendy, David. 2000. Radio in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Format, the Literature of American Popular Music, and Mr Crump Eric Weisbard

In Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (Weisbard 2014), I explored format and genre by looking at how commercial radio stations, and the artists and record labels they worked with, cut and pasted the social and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s onto different FM channels. To stick with that Microsoft Word metaphor, the destination formatting proved different from the source formatting. Often radical expressions of identity transmogrified into a mainstream presentation overlapping with other mainstreams. I viewed centrist music as an active agent rather than a bland reification, formats as amoral but inclusive forces that worked against often exclusionary genre ideals. Also, I wanted my case studies of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, A&M Records, Elton John, WMMS, and the 2000s to let the format rubric pull together writing familiar to R&B, country, rock, music industry, or cultural studies scholars in isolation, but often not so familiar across the lines of genre and subfield. My work may live outside the topical concerns and methods of others in this book. A background in rock criticism, American cultural history, and the mixture of academic and non-academic presenters gathering annually since 2002 for the Pop Conference has made me something of an off-the-cuff theorizer of popular culture examples and heuristically amassed archives. From this vantage, it’s relevant to come at big questions from persuasive partial answers, such as how Guthrie Ramsey (Ramsey 2003) on Afromodernism connects us to a reader of the black lifestyle magazine Ebony in the 1970s experiencing Quiet Storm R&B, or how Diane Pecknold’s work in the Country Music Association archives (Pecknold 2007) provides insight on a fan of the syndicated, pseudotraditional television ‘barn dance’ Porter Wagoner Show absorbing the broadening category of pop-country.

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Meanwhile, I am at work on a new volume, which looks at the literature of American popular music by surveying important books over the past two centuries, from novels, biographies and even how-to guides to criticism and academic writing. In this context, aspects of my format/genre dichotomy have resurrected as a new dichotomy: between sentimental views of cultural uplift and management and vernacular views of cultural authenticity and embodiment. So this chapter will seek to do three things. First, reflect on how sources used in my book are important for radio studies if it is to take up what I consider to be the most important aspect of work on format: radio’s function as a circulatory medium between at times quite different, at times overlapping communities of listeners, working professionals functioning as intermediaries, and musicians whose songs both respond to and reshape these cultural parameters. Second, suggest how those sources connect to the broader literature of American popular music, a literature whose value, I’ll insist, often lives less in nuanced theory or social science than in idiomatic, provisional rejoinders to emergent cultural formations. And finally, I’ll raise a provisional perspective of my own, considering how the issue of President Trump in our present finds answers in our past. After all, to embrace serendipity, a century ago W. C. Handy, a popularizer and publisher more rooted in sentiment and format than vernacular and genre, took up a tune about a political boss that went ‘Mr Crump don’t allow no easy riders here’. From that came the ‘Memphis Blues’. Crump to Trump: we are still reckoning with the consequences.

Grounding categories Guthrie Ramsey, Jr’s Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop, published in 2003, was a book as important for what it modelled as for what it achieved. Putting aside the Bud Powell dissertation, later published as a book, required by the ‘jazz-centrism’ of his University of Michigan graduate music programme, Ramsey engaged his full musical training, not some musicology reduction. That training included playing gospel in churches and also watching his family interact with music – dad ‘the resident spoon virtuoso’, neighbour brought in to dance a mean James Brown. Ramsey, Sr passed away, the family mourned in ‘home-cooked’ cultural space to the Gap Band’s ‘Yearning for Your Love’, and Ramsey, Jr realized the subject he needed to write about surrounded him.



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That personal first chapter set up a second, ‘Disciplining Black Music’, no less agile, as Ramsey conceptualized ‘an interdisciplinary musicology of postwar black musical style written from “the bottom up”, or so I would like to think’ (34). The disclaimer was not incidental: Ramsey was as wry as he was accomplished. His family members became central to his scholarship, Rosses on his mom’s side arriving in Chicago from the South, where the Ramseys already lived, the flow of regions, races, and rhythms comprising an ‘Afromodernity’ that spoke to Marshall Berman’s urban and literary study All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (Berman 1982) as much as Tera Hunter’s explorations of workingclass black women in Jim Crow Atlanta (Hunter 1997). Ramsey understood that ethnicity was Birmingham Centre bricolage (Hall and Jefferson 1976) but insisted on blackness as a singular variant, granted postmodern individualism but held to ‘collective sensibility’ as actual practice, hailed Amiri Baraka’s R&B theorizing while critiquing his future father-in-law’s unease with Christianity and commercialism, his notion of pure blackness. When Ramsey defended vernacular for its ‘elasticity’ he knew the term was under siege. Revitalizing the study of vernaculars emerged as Race Music’s focus. A chapter on blues contrasted as Afromodern Dinah Washington’s sexy but still respectable presentation, R&B progenitor of bounce Louis Jordan, and Cootie Williams fighting off bebop pretence to make ‘Round Midnight’ a hit record. Family members told stories for a chapter on collective memory and ‘community theater’; jazz itself in their Southern parlance referred not to music but Northern urbanity. Elsewhere, modernism became the subject, as ‘critiqued, teased, and taunted’ by black musical texts that refused to divide into art, pop, and folk. Ramsey made every sequence in the black music story a study in conflict and tension, not what he damned as ‘the cultural “smoothening” that Alain Locke did in The New Negro’ (113–15; Locke 1925). Now how does this relate to radio programming? Take one step, using Adam Green’s book Selling the Race (Green 2007), and you can easily see how Dinah Washington resembled the cover models of Ebony magazine, which launched in Chicago in the post-war era Ramsey was rooted in. Recall as well that blackoriented radio stations originated in these late 1940s, starting with WDIA in Memphis but including such prominent Chicago DJs as Mississippi transplant Al Benson. Also at that moment, Billboard renamed its black music charts rhythm & blues – linguistic wit to suggest an interplay of sounds rather than a fixed genre. All of that was Afromodernism, all of that was format: culture segmented in a manner that Baraka grew up with in Newark, R&B his baseline

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for the ‘changing same’ of black music. It was no less an anchor for Ramsey, who cited this line from historian Barbara Savage’s work on radio: ‘If race is a construction, as some have argued, then in the twentieth century, the mass media is its primary building site’ (44). R&B and black-oriented radio predated Top 40 hits programming, though the two approaches would increasingly merge in the 1970s on FM radio under the industry term urban contemporary. For critic Nelson George, writing in the 1980s (George 1988), this made urban contemporary ‘the death of rhythm and blues’, the black bourgeoisie not so much selling as selling out the race. Such tensions, Ramsey noted in in his book, were foundational to a seminal 1980s text, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, where Samuel Jackson played an urban DJ, Mr Señor Love Daddy, and Bill Nunn played Radio Raheem, constantly blasting out of his boom box rappers Public Enemy – known for their lyric ‘radio stations I question their blackness’. So the history of format radio was a black music history, a study in Afromodernism, a particular story that emerged discursively in maverick academic and journalistic work and kindred cultural texts. How can such a story engage the macro story told by global radio scholars steeped in cultural theory generally, but less inclined to filter in vernacular framings, literary interpretations, and racial difference? Let’s add a second book to the discussion, Diane Pecknold’s The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Pecknold did not write the flashiest sentences, but research gleanings stuffed her paragraphs and her findings had a sneaky radicalism. Nobody had looked through the Country Music Hall of Fame archive for the business papers of the Country Music Association, the most important trade organization in American popular music. For Pecknold, getting her PhD in history after working for indie rock concert bookers Billions, business was no monolith: it reflected people, who cared about status and aesthetics alongside profits. Parallel to her business history, she teamed with another historian, Kristine McCusker, on the edited collection A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (McCusker and Pecknold 2004). Country people weren’t a thousand remakes of Hank Williams: to consider gender, class, and race, those supporting the music with those making it, was to tell that history anew. The two-tiered approach pioneered the history of music formats and made country the most gender-inclusive genre of popular music scrutiny ever. A Boy Named Sue stepped beyond the historical reclamation of Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann’s Finding Her Voice (Bufwack and Oermann 1993). Gender, from this revisionist vantage, was not just framings of femininity



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and masculinity but how those were ‘used to establish and defend the stylistic and institutional boundaries separating country music from pop, rock ‘n’ roll, folk, and other genres’ (McCusker and Pecknold 2004, xx). Authors contributing to A Boy Named Sue made those boundaries their focal point. Jocelyn Neal, a musicologist by training, delivered an ethnography of country dance halls, finding ‘diverse communal identities’ even in an era of ‘Achy Breaky’ post-disco line dance, TNN’s Club Dance and Clear Channel stations (2004, 129). Co-editor McCusker’s chapter explored how Jeanne Mueunich turned into ‘Sunbonnet Girl’ radio barn dance singer Linda Parker in the 1930s, weaving middle- and working-class notions of womanhood in a commercialized youth version of ‘the sentimental mother’ (2004, 32). Unlike Ramsey, here the ties to format analysis were overt. Pecknold’s The Selling Sound showed how commercialism – and anxiety about commercialism – structured and motivated country as much as the music itself. Looking at 1920– 47, she found ‘Hillbilly music was above all a creature of radio’ (Pecknold 2007, 15) and documented the disdain aimed at it by Tin Pan Alley and progressive reformers; advertisers validated by comparison. With Acuff–Rose publishing and country charts, the music earned segment-of-pop status by the 1950s, raising new fears of crossover along with the same old scorn, now ASCAPsponsored. ‘I think that when they refer to country and western music as trash, they are referring to the American people as trash’, Little Jimmy Dickens wrote in testimony to Congress that Pecknold unearthed (110). She had chapters on the Country Hall of Fame as an industry effort to add respectability to the genre, on politicians courting and Robert Altman ambiguously depicting in his 1975 film Nashville, the audiences proliferating after the format boomed. But her key chapter followed the creation of the CMA in the late 1950s and its woman-led work steering radio stations to become all-country, using a new rhetoric: ‘It will be sophisticated, it will not be “hokeyed” up, it will be a tight Top 40 format, but with country music.’ And: ‘We are all going to get rich with this’ (164). Considering Ramsey’s work next to Pecknold’s suggests the need to keep rooted, however rerouted and mediated, categories of identity audible within our narrative syntheses. In each case, personal anecdotes reveal communal feelings of disempowerment and emboldening whose conduit, in part though never in full, became commercial processes such as formats. With both country and R&B, models of separate programming predated Top 40 tightness. Yet both worlds embraced formats. Afromodernism attempted to reconcile black South and North, country and city, church and nightclub. Country, as an industry

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centred around barn dance and then fulltime radio stations, positioned bluecollar listeners as middle-class consumers, Southern-rooted whites whose migrations staked their claim to be the national normal, Okies from Muskogee, Main Street, U.S.A. I can synthesize this with easy language about groups claiming the centre, multiple mainstreams. But specific history accented each version. Formats were not just a stepping stone to multinational divisions and global flows of sound and celebrity. They inflected contemporaneity with friction, funk, and folklore.

Vernacular perspectives and sentimental claims The impact of race, gender, and region on format and genre, registering in a Ramsey family history and a Gap Band song, the mourning for a Sunbonnet Girl and the gloating of a CMA-sanctioned memo, can get lost, I fear, in radio studies translation. Should we be operating as social scientists or humanists? Albert Murray was Ralph Ellison’s closest ally in the literary project of conceptualizing the blues as African American equipment for living. Murray denounced ‘social science fiction’ in The Omni-Americans (Murray 1970), aware of the damage the pronouncements of experts had done to the black community. The same theme would later be taken up rigorously by historian and Thelonious Monk biographer Robin Kelley in his article ‘Looking for the “Real” Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto’ (Kelley 1997). It’s hardly a leap to see how blathering on format and genre runs the risk of resembling those psychographic consultants offering lifestyle analyses to 1970s station owners. Always claiming a new analytic gimmick, these early versions of digital humanities gurus earned the eye rolling of such adept programmers as John Gorman, blue-collar rock radio pioneer at Cleveland’s WMMS. Gorman’s memos to staff about when to introduce the band Rush into the mix (early 1970s), when to take them out again (early 1980s), how to position the station as more adventurous than one rival, more consistent than another, resembled airy pronouncements. But they rooted in identification: this song appealed to a Coventry college crowd, that one to the morning show listeners who still liked Polish jokes. And for Gorman, winning rock fans who punched out at 5.00 pm on Fridays to DJ Kid Leo playing ‘Born to Run’ mattered more than getting new wave rock on the air. Gorman’s playlists were his art form, striking because art of that kind had barely existed before.



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My point is not to challenge academic analysis of culture but to prioritize work that has demonstrated a similar artfulness in response to new forms that require new interpretive strategies. Susan Douglas, for example, in her pivotal essay ‘Why the Shirelles Mattered’ (Douglas 1994), was writing not only as a communications scholar but as a baby boomer remembering her girlhood, trying to evoke the ambiguities of girl group records. These were not the outright anthems of resistance that male rock critics cherished, but precisely because they were compromised and confused statements they became a bridge to more radical feminist identities. To get at this, Douglas made her writing both a primary and secondary source: blurring those boundaries was the methodological contribution. She wrote that girl group records ‘gave voice to all the warring selves inside us struggling, blindly and with a crushing sense of insecurity, to forget something resembling a coherent identity’ (87). And that ‘white girls like me owe a cultural debt to these black girls for straddling these contradictions, and for helping create a teen girl culture that said, “Let loose, break free, don’t take no shit”’ (95). Notice the ideas here, but also notice the language, which provides Douglas’s authority. Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, a work in progress, is my attempt to parse this history, with individual entries on important authors, artists, or topics that proceed in the order of publication date for the book that launched the career, discourse, or method. As I have read, going back to William Billings’s The New England Psalm-Singer (Billings 1770) and its role in the twentieth-century effort to embed American popular music in musicology, the issues I am raising in this chapter for radio format research have found many counterparts. Radio scholars see a divide between American radio, paid for by commercials and splintered across multiple channels, and the European model of a smaller number of government-sponsored stations heard nationally. The United States mixed democracy and capitalism in radio and much else, producing the admixtures that arrived back in Europe after the Second World War as ‘Americanization’, or what Reinhold Wagnleitner has called Coca-Colonization (Wagnleitner 1994). These were cross-continental conversations that had begun much earlier, however. In the aesthetic battle of Alexis de Tocqueville and Walt Whitman, excerpted in the 1950s collection Mass Culture (Rosenberg and White 1957, 36), the French aristocrat’s portion said democracy would produce mediocrity, lacking the infrastructure for elite art; Whitman’s section by contrast stressed infrastructure itself as art: ‘Our republic is, in performance, really enacting today the grandest arts, poems, &c., by beating up the wilderness into

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fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery.’ US popular music clanked down new forms: think Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize and the is-he-literature? debate. Music writing often followed the same impulse: preemptive verbiage that linecut more traditional scholarship. Simon Frith, interdisciplinary academic and former rock critic, used his book Performing Rites (Frith 1996) to stress ‘low theory’ – writers like Ebony’s Phyl Garland (Garland 1969), author of the first book on soul, rather than her formal inheritor Ramsey at University of Pennsylvania, record reviewers rather than musicologists. But researching I have found that many in ‘high’ places felt insecure, too. Origins matter for writers as much as their musical subjects. America’s popular music literature includes blues novels by Gayl Jones (Jones 1975) and folk ballads mysteries by Sharyn McCrumb (McCrumb 1990), memoirs by groupie Pamela Des Barres (Des Barres 1987) and industry figures Carrie Jacobs-Bond (Jacobs-Bond 1927) and Clive Davis (Davis 1975), glossy prose by Gilbert Seldes (Seldes 1924) and Tom Wolfe (Wolfe 1965), schools of genre criticism and genres of school criticism (aka disciplines). Writing, like a hit tune, found the hook in whatever worked. The provisional status of popular music authors – for reasons of identity, funding, or creative obsession – shaped and continues to shape their output. Lasting books about American popular music function as a literature in both the scholar’s sense of a body of connected argument and the bookstore patron’s sense of evocative writing. Taken up together, past looming over the present, they complicate our tendency to fetishize the new as progress. Questions asked of music in a single era register across genre lines and listening publics. Over the whole span of pop, central concerns recur regardless of prevailing sounds. Underlying it all, I have found a story not yet told in full: the twentieth-century rise, peaking in the 1970s, of vernacular perspectives over sentimental claims and then the subsequent critique of such vernacular approaches. So, for example, as rock and soul countercultures crested, the preoccupation across popular music writing became transgressive populism, ordinary culture as extraordinary. Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones)’s Blues People (Jones 1963) took a funky black perspective to critique white and also black middle-class views, extended by Garland on soul and Nelson George on R&B, Ishmael Reed novels (Reed 1972) and August Wilson plays (Wilson 1985). Rock criticism came together in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History (Miller 1976), Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train (Marcus 1975) and writing by Ellen Willis (Willis 1981), Robert Christgau (Christgau 1981), Lester Bangs (Bangs 1987), and Robert



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Palmer (Palmer 1981), all brash next to jazz or classical criticism. Lawrence Levine (Levine 1977) brought folk laughter into American cultural history, Charles Hamm (Hamm 1979) vaunted songs, Bruno Nettl (Nettl 1983) tracked the upstart field ethnomusicology, and George Lipsitz (Lipsitz 1990) invented popular music ethnic studies. Yet a crisis loomed, with Reagan and Thatcher in power, social backlashes propelling punk and rejecting disco, and modernization yielding to deindustrial postmodern. Much built up from ragtime to rock and roll went kablooey: musicians playing instruments, for example, or the purchases of working people and youth driving new music markets. From this failed-populism vantage, hegemonic taste assumptions, even countercultural ones, became as questionable as the credo that Top 40 was inferior to rock. Genre definitions were up for grabs, as reflected in 1990s–2000s ‘alternative’, ‘indie’, or ‘poptimist’ rock writing and the overtly post-soul perspectives of hip-hop critics. Cultural studies provided an academic counterpart to these shifts in journalism: Birmingham methods via Dick Hebdige (Hebdige 1979), adapted into rock criticism by Simon Frith (Frith 1981), folklore by Robert Cantwell (Cantwell 1984), new jazz studies by Robert O’Meally’s cohort at Columbia (O’Meally 1998), feminist musicology by Susan McClary (McClary 1991), African diasporics by Paul Gilroy (Gilroy 1993), ethnomusicology by Steven Feld (Keil and Feld 1994), hip-hop by Tricia Rose (Rose 1994), metal by Robert Walser (Walser 1993), minstrelsy by Eric Lott (Lott 1993), cultural formations like the Popular Front by Michael Denning (Denning 1996). Clearly, there are many ways to come at popular music, but I want to emphasize one more category. Often, the qualities that link sounds to social shifts and prove enduring are illustrated first by writers under no obligation to fact: the authors of novels, plays, poetry, even comic books. Within this most literary strand of popular music literature, the desires of Sister Carrie (Dreiser 1900) meet those of her later peers in Rolling Stone prodigy Cameron Crowe’s novel and film Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Crowe 1981). Variations of ethnicity that scholars have been slow to capture glimmer in Los Bros Hernandez’s comic Love and Rockets (Hernandez and Hernandez 1982) or Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeater (Hagedorn 1990). Literary evocations can romance the music itself, like ‘City of Refuge’, a short story by Rudolph Fisher in the 1920s anthology The New Negro (Locke 1925), which gave Duke Ellington the idea for ‘Harlem Air Shaft’. If music, in Jacques Attali’s formulation (Attali 1985), prefigures social change, the creative imagination prefigures reported and archival studies.

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So if my first point is that we cannot talk through the differences between genre and format in radio without looking deeply and specifically at the diverse race, gender, class, and regional roots of musical affiliation, connecting scholarship of those multiple strands, my second point is that even our conception of what radio scholarship itself consists of has to be augmented. The literature of American popular music, the perspective I bring to radio studies, has mixed three types of writing: heroic efforts at compilation and archiving; the taste-setting language of literary voices who have extended from fiction to slick magazine writers; and genre partisans operating in a separate sphere and so speaking mostly to themselves. Academic work has taken up all three categories, substituting a disciplinary focus for the genre focus and facing similar scepticism about the topic’s legitimacy. We need to work with all of these lineages. With American radio studies, a much less fully formed literature, that might mean, specifically, pushing the Radio Preservation Task Force, a force for compilation and archiving, to work on better documenting such material as the programme director memos of rock radio station WMMS, my basis for a chapter in Top 40 Democracy. For literary and critical voices one might prioritize passages in the writings by the likes of Nik Cohn or Hagedorn, listening from UK pirate stations and immigrating to the United States from the Philippines, hearing music radio fresh as outsiders to American assumptions. And in seeking genre or disciplinary perspectives, a goal might be to relate the memoirs of figures such as New York City programme director Rick Sklar, or the analysis of former Radio & Records editor Ken Barnes solicited by Simon Frith, with the perspective of Susan Douglas and such counterparts as Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio in The Radio Reader (2002). For me, a helpful way to navigate the vastness of the potential literature out there has been to consider how notions of the sentimental and vernacular shaped both content and writing style. By sentimental, I mean a notion of women’s culture in particular, with emphasis on feeling, tears, and the domestic sphere, but also political identification with the downtrodden, aesthetic faith in cultural uplift and managerial staging. Sentimentality has been associated with Victorian True Womanhood, melodrama and parlour-oriented ballads about Home and Mother. But it could also be strikingly modern, shaping twentiethcentury romantic notions and popular art forms. Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint (Berlant 2008) referred to ‘the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture’ in its subtitle and featured a revelatory genealogy of the novel and musical Show Boat, whose sentimental nationalism connected as



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teary Americana unequal traumas of race, gender, class and Jewish religion. Vernacular, by contrast, favoured male perspectives, public nightlife over parlours, embodiment over identification, cynicism about the arts as cultivation and uplift and a cult of authenticity. Here, a different scholar’s usage is helpful. Michael Denning’s recent Noise Uprising (Denning 2015) called the arrival of electrical recording, more or less at exactly the moment Show Boat appeared, a ‘Vernacular Music Revolution’ (2015, chapter 2), felt worldwide from New Orleans jazz to Egypt’s Umm Kulthum. Denning equated this with European vernacular languages spread by printing; an unleashing of accented voices or ‘decolonization of the ear’ (2015, 9). Increasingly in the twentieth century, sentimental interpretations of American popular music succumbed to mocking by modernizers. Stephen Foster wrote blackface ditties, yet aspired to sentimental weepers and was valued for that: friend Robert Nevin wrote in The Atlantic (Nevin 1867) that ‘his art taught us all to feel with the colored man the lowly joys and sorrows it celebrated’. Irving Berlin ragged ‘Swanee River’ metaphorically in ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, which Gilbert Seldes called ‘utterly unsentimental’ in his 1924 The Seven Lively Arts. Assertions of civilizing sentiment yielded to louder claims. Langston Hughes (Hughes 1926) insisted: ‘Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand’. Constance Rourke (Rourke 1931) challenged how ‘“folk” is draped with quaintness and sentiment’. Dorothy Baker’s jazz novel Young Man With a Horn (Baker 1938), the first such, associated sentimental and commercial: ‘There is music that is turned out sweet in hotel ballrooms and there is music that comes right out of the genuine urge and doesn’t come for money’ (10). Vernacular ideals rose as sentimental affiliations fell because they rejected turning popular culture into high culture, scorned bourgeois values as a Genteel tradition, elevated contemporary African-American innovation and freed prose to slang and shimmy. For Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (Hurston 1935), the vernacular critiqued Harlem Renaissance respectability politics. For Seldes or Tin Pan Alley chronicler Isaac Goldberg (Goldberg 1930), it was a melting pot in sound. Woody Guthrie built his memoir (Guthrie 1943) and Jelly Roll Morton his belatedly issued oral history recording with Alan Lomax (Lomax 1950) around vernacular address. Jazz critics used the concept to institutionalize: the subtitle of Marshall and Jean Stearns’s Jazz Dance is The Story of American Vernacular Dance (Stearns and Stearns 1968). Gilbert Chase, urging musicology to embrace

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popular styles in America’s Music (Chase 1955), thundered: ‘The American musical vernacular has been on the march through all these generations, and even our most academic composers are catching up with it, or being caught up by it’ (xix). Historian Lawrence Levine stressed folk vernacular in his 1977 Black Culture and Black Consciousness: African American secular song, he wrote, ‘cut through the sentimentality that marked most popular music’ (273). Just as early writing on popular music was never purely sentimental, the writing of the 1920s to 1970s was not purely vernacular: these were modes that writers relied on but also questioned and supplemented with other modes. For example, if you compare multiple editions of a classic book, often, as with Chase’s America’s Music, Charlie Gillett’s Sound of the City (Gillett 1970), and Bill Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. (Malone 1968), later editions pull back on vernacular stridency, allowing for soft shell pop of the kind that commercial radio played. But if the sentimental was only purged in part by the vernacular, much smart writing on American popular music began to contemplate purging the vernacular – especially after Ronald Reagan made folksiness a right-wing powerplay. The Birmingham Center writers, favouring working class subcultures, considered belief in a counterhegemonic vernacular simplistic and connected populism to what Stuart Hall called ‘the great moving Right show’ (Hall 1979). Simon Frith opposed vernacular rockism, writing in one essay, ‘It makes better sense to define pop as the sentimental song’ (Frith 2001, 102). Sociologist Tia DeNora analysed Music in Everyday Life (DeNora 2000) as anything but vernacular: more, the managed emotions of professional women using sentiment as a tool. This quick survey suggests something of how ideas of sentimental and vernacular have pulled at each other over time, vernacular impulses purging the sentimental, then cultural studies and post-counterculture impulses purging the vernacular. Considering this tension has much to offer the study of radio formats. The format/genre dichotomy builds on one that popular music studies cut its teeth on: rock versus pop, the core question Frith always addressed. But there are many versions. In country studies, Richard Peterson called it ‘hard core and soft shell’, contrasting a Roy Acuff with a Vernon Dalhart, a Loretta Lynn with Olivia Newton-John. Keith Negus’s important studies Producing Pop (1992) and Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (1999) found similar issues marring A&R judgement at rockist British record labels, pushing American record labels by contrast to keep hip-hop’s ‘street’ origins at an indie remove to avoid crossover taint, or marring Peter Manuel’s scholarly judgement of salsa as it transitioned from grassroots, indie label scene to major label support and pop aspirations.



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If, as I have been asserting, radio cannot be theorized apart from diverse identity categories and diverse forms of expertise, my heuristic device of concentrating on the sentimental and vernacular may serve to shuffle the interpretive deck. In reconsidering the sentimental, we alert ourselves to how assumptions about gender and sexuality shape valuations of authentic taste, as in A Boy Named Sue. In reconsidering the vernacular, we hold onto a concept of race music: African American identity, a diasporic blend to begin with, served as what Paul Gilroy called modernity’s counterculture (Gilroy 1993) and Henry Louis Gates called signifyin(g) (Gates 1988). From these perspectives, the decision by adult contemporary programmers to admit that their primary listeners were women, often now working women, directly connected to the power ballad’s sentimentally charged message of uplift: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And the return, again and again, of the black American note even Gilroy wasn’t sure he approved of, that he sometimes denounced as ghettocentricity, becomes a core textural element. Vernacular blackness anchored R&B radio, its repetition part of the ritual, its transferal into crossover formats and white appropriations no less hallowed. The interplay of sentimentality and vernacular can be told as the imbrication of American popular music with American commercial music. American radio, from this perspective, became the place where those two stories most actively fused.

W.C. Handy as format, Charley Patton as genre When Simon Frith read the galleys of Top 40 Democracy, he wrote me that he quite liked it but wondered if there was still interest in radio. Simon is not alone. One challenge faced by those who consider radio central to music and media is that in an era of streaming, there is something antiquated about a practice that still basically turns on punching a button on a car appliance. If digital utopianism weren’t enough to deal with, many music writers insist that we are also now ‘post-genre’, with listeners breaking away from the communities that stratified rock, soul, and country in the past. Are we conducting a history class when we talk about radio, the music played there, and the cultural map that process provided? Worse, many who admit that formatting is still powerful see it as invidious, divisive, leading to Fox News brainwashing Donald Trump supporters with untrue ideologies. So I want to end with a final set of arguments about formats in the twentyfirst century. Formats endure beyond technological shifts because the divisions

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of race, class and gender, region and nation, that I am insisting we need to keep studying are too entrenched for an iPhone to disrupt them away. Radio was never really about radio, it was a method of communicating culture that discovered music to be a fantastic medium. Trust the format in the sense of the playlist, not the format in the sense of the device or protocol. In other words, while as Jonathan Sterne adeptly demonstrated in his study of the MP3 format, an enormous number of cultural assumptions go into the creation of an accepted technological approach, that process results in more invariant forms of material culture. The playlist, by contrast, altered weekly by a radio station that then reported its heavy rotation winners to a trade publication for cataloguing in a chart, a process that continues today in only slightly altered form as, for example, Spotify’s Rap Caviar, turned on an almost gleeful ephemerality. Consider what that playlist summons, not in the spirit of musicology’s close reading of a case study but in the spirit of a novel about the jazz age, a memoir – or better yet, a memo – by a record label executive. Use notions of the sentimental and vernacular the same way a programmer tries to figure out what songs are novel enough to add and what songs resist burn out and become recurrents, then cherished catalogue. This is not an exact science and it will not be taxonomized by social science. But it can be evoked, particularized, crossed over between categories. That said, I have a caveat. We need to understand, as we write our encompassing histories or grapple with specific periods, that resistance to format is as powerful as format. Formats normalize, centre, drain ideology out of culture. Resistance to that radicalizes, decentres, adds stress and noise. One force is not, inherently, more commercial or more artistically or politically effective. They push against each other all the time. And this too involves genre and format, vernacular and sentimental. Notions of cultural uplift are in the main format notions, sentimental styles. Notions of cultural embodiment are in the main genre notions, vernacular styles. As I note in Top 40 Democracy, the format system solidified circa 1973, just as post-Fordism froze ordinary people’s wages permanently. The gains in those wages allowed for multiple mainstreams. But the gains subsequently in elite income tested formats representing group progress or symbolic democracy. Formats would forever carry a politics of memory around their origin as a moment of recognition for a new group entering the consumer mainstream. This came to then increasingly clash with the celebrity superstar as brand only loosely connected to an origin –Jennifer Lopez as ‘Jenny from the block’ and so on. Also challenging format programming was a new segment, call it



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yuppie or hipster or NPR, college educated and omnivorous but anti-popular, theoretically progressive but no less elite. One part of this conjunctural shift moved format radio from liberal to neoliberal regulation, so that the 1996 Telecommunications Act allowed for chains of radio stations, like Clear Channel, on a scale never before seen. Yet other trends, like the arrival of YouTube by 2006 and its accompaniments, broadband internet and iPhones, represented a shift that worked against top-down media pushes. Far from proving an invincible monopoly, Clear Channel changed its name to I Heart Radio, then I Heart Media and currently faces bankruptcy for its shrinking set of stations. Talk radio, meanwhile, the template for Fox News, owed its explosive growth to two factors. First, just as format radio itself owed to the need to put something on AM radio after television took the best programming away, talk radio derived from the need to put something on AM radio after FM took the best programming away. Second, the deregulatory trends that made for radio chains removed the Fairness Doctrine, eliminated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1987 with prodding by President Reagan. In many ways, talk radio followed Top 40 principles, making a small number of topics its ‘heavy rotation’, then shifting to something else. Many successful talk jocks were former DJs, including Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. The power I ascribe to radio in my book, to define normal and mainstream by repetitive presentation, applies to how talk radio and its television inheritor shifted discourse to the right while claiming the centre. While many of us find the effect of right-wing talk radio to be propagandistic and terrifying, the concentration of particular audiences by format segmentation is not inherently conservative. For example, the other major growth segment in radio alongside talk, also taking advantage of AM, was Spanish language radio, much of it a mix of songs and banter aimed at Mexican Americans. This had a blue-collar address, well described by Inés Casillas in her book Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (Casillas 2014), which shows how DJs from such stations led the massive immigrant marches of 2006. We need to be careful about recognizing the differences between a Trump campaign and a Fox News or Rush Limbaugh feed. The first seeks to disrupt format, the second seeks to adapt it. While the questions posed by popular music and the formats that popularize it have remained strikingly consistent, the dominant answers shift in particular eras. As scholars, I hope we can become more aware of the usefulness of the literature outside our disciplinary literatures. I’d speculate that in the global imagination, the United States represents vernacular and genre, so it’s possible

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that what I am arguing for is the continued relevance of certain American paradigms. So back to Mr Crump. W.C. Handy amassed and defined a great cultural catalogue. Born in Alabama in 1873, he formed in the modernity of Jim Crow lynch law and Beale Street respite, using the secular music his pastor father despised to pursue status as a bandleader catering to whites. At about 30, he heard the blues in Mississippi. At about 40, in Memphis, he had a sheet music hit with a loose version of those blues – a street song about political boss ‘Mr Crump’ became ‘Memphis Blues’. But Handy sold the copyright prematurely (Handy 1926). So he wrote more hits, set up Pace–Handy publishing, held on barely as sheet music faltered, turned himself with longevity into a figure regarded as his memoir’s title: Father of the Blues (Handy 1941). Got the rights to ‘Memphis Blues’ back, too. Guitarist Charley Patton, who Handy biographer David Robertson (Robertson 2009) said thought to join Handy’s Mississippi band but couldn’t read music well enough, defined Delta blues as vernacular expression. By contrast, Handy’s compositions, inserting blue notes into ragtime, tango passages into 12 bar verses, were compromised but versatile. He valued himself ‘a trouper’, saw the value in minstrel hokum without minimizing Orange, Texas, where whites routinely shot up passing train cars of black entertainers. His memoir’s material on the music business said more than his Southern journeys about the blues spirit he personally embodied, the mainstream space he carved out. When he heard that 12 bar about the Southern crossing the dog, Handy led a Knights of Pythias band, a black fraternal organization for secular advancement in segregated America. Handy was a father of format, just as Charley Patton was a father of genre. Mr Crump got to know Handy, and appreciated ‘Memphis Blues’ as a boost to business. Yet Patton and his Delta blues would come to romanticize not just a city but a nation, a race, or more precisely a nation seeking to define itself as racially mixed, a leader in global multiculturalism. Part of that romance was the idea that Patton and the Delta blues’s embodied vernacular was less compromised than Handy and the Tin Pan Alley blues’s commercialized uplift. Our doubts about such claims are more than valid, as a line of progress is revealed as a circling back, as Mr Crump becomes President Trump, branding himself a voice of the people, a vernacular, an alternative to politics as usual. Can we break out of such cycles, at long last? I strongly doubt it. But radio studies, like popular music studies, needs to acknowledge friction, funk, and folklore. Even virtual formats experience static.



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References Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baker, Dorothy. 1938. Young Man with a Horn. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Bangs, Lester. 1987. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Billings, William. 1770. The New-England Psalm-Singer. Boston: Edes and Gill. Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oermann. 1993. Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown. Cantwell, Robert. 1984. Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Casillas, Inés. 2014. Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy. New York: New York University Press. Chase, Gilbert. 1955. America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. New York, Toronto and London: McGraw–Hill Book Company, Inc. Christgau, Robert. 1981. Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the ‘70s. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Crowe, Cameron. 1981. Fast Times At Ridgemont High: A True Story. New York: Simon and Schuster. Davis, Clive, and James Willwerth. 1975. Clive: Inside the Record Business. New York: William Morrow and Company. Denning, Michael. 1996. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso. Denning, Michael. 2015. Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. New York and London: Verso Books. Denora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Des Barres, Pamela. 1987. I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. New York: William Morrow. Douglas, Susan. 1994. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, 83–98. New York: Three Rivers. Dreiser, Theodore. 1900. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Pantheon. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Frith, Simon. 2001. ‘Pop Music’. In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street, 93–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garland, Phyl. 1969. The Sound of Soul: The Story of Black Music. Chicago: H. Regnery Company. Gates, Henry Louis. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. George, Nelson. 1988. The Death of Rhythm & Blues. New York: Pantheon. Gillett, Charlie. 1970. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldberg, Isaac. 1930. Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket. New York: John Day Co. Green, Adam. 2007. Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guthrie, Woody. 1943. Bound for Glory. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Hagedorn, Jessica. 1990. Dogeaters. New York: Pantheon Books. Hall, Stuart. 1979. ‘The Great Moving Right Show’. Marxism Today 23 (1): 14–20. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson and Co. Hamm, Charles. 1979. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Handy, W.C. 1926. Blues: An Anthology. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. Handy, W.C. 1941. Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. New York: Collier Books. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hernandez, Jaime, and Gilbert Hernandez. 1982. Love and Rockets. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Hilmes, Michele, and Jason Loviglio, eds. 2002. Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio. New York and London: Routledge. Hughes, Langston. 1926. ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’. The Nation, June 23. Hunter, Tera. 1997. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1935. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co. Jacobs-Bond, Carrie. 1927. The Roads of Melody: My Story. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Jones, Gayl. 1975. Corregidora. New York: Random House. Jones, LeRoi. 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow. Keil, Charles, and Steven Feld. 1994. Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Kelley, Robin D.G. 1997. Yo’ Mama’s Disfunctional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, 15–42. Boston: Beacon Press. Levine, Lawrence. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Lipsitz, George. 1990. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Locke, Alain, ed. 1925. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. Lomax, Alan. 1950. Mister Jelly Roll. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malone, Bill. 1968. Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-Year History. Austin: University of Texas Press. Marcus, Greil. 1975. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. New York: E.P. Dutton. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCrumb, Sharyn. 1990. If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. New York: Scribner. McCusker, Kristine M. 2004. ‘“Bury Me beneath the Willow”: Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance, 1932-1935’. In A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, edited by Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold, 3–23. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McCusker, Kristine M., and Diane Pecknold. 2004. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Miller, James, ed. 1976. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Rolling Stone Press/Random House. Murray, Albert. 1970. The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey. Neal, Jocelyn R. 2004. ‘Dancing Together: The Rhythms of Gender in the Country Dance Hall’. In A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, edited by Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold, 132–54. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Negus, Keith. 1992. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London and New York: Routledge. Nettl, Bruno. 1983. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Nevin, Robert P. 1867. ‘Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy’. Atlantic Monthly 20: 608–16. O’Meally, Robert G., ed. 1998. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Palmer, Robert. 1981. Deep Blues, New York: Viking. Pecknold, Diane. 2007. The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ramsey, Jr., Guthrie. 2003. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reed, Ishmael. 1972. Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Robertson, David. 2009. W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues. New York: Knopf. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Rosenberg, Bernard, and David Manning White. 1957. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. New York: The Free Press. Rourke, Constance. 1931. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. Seldes, Gilbert. 1924. The Seven Lively Arts. New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers. Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. 1968. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Macmillan. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. 1994. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Weisbard, Eric. 2014. Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willis, Ellen. 1981. Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wilson, August. 1985. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. New York: Plume. Wolfe, Tom. 1965. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

12

MTV and the Remediation of FM Radio Ariane Holzbach

Pictures came and broke your heart Put the blame on VTR ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ The Buggles, 1979 The very first music video aired by Music Television (MTV) on its inaugural day may be understood as an intentional statement. ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ was neither new nor particularly popular. Indeed, it had been released two years earlier by the Buggles, then a relatively unknown British rock group. So why was it chosen by the music channel to be the first one? Much more than a song, the Buggles’ music video works for MTV as an invaluable piece of discourse. It describes the supposed death of the radio era at the hands of some brand new media, like television and the video tape recorder (VTR). From the perspective of MTV, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ is about the replacement of radio in the US context by alternative audiovisual technologies that could offer both the music experience and something more. I will show how, from its inception, MTV adopted and modified some of the main FM radio features, applying them to television and selling itself as a new television channel. Given that pop music was highly disseminated and influenced by FM radio at that time (Sterling and Keith 2008), it can be said that the music channel somehow wanted to reformat FM broadcasting in order to build its own image as a television channel. Thus, MTV took advantage of the radio’s image as an ‘old medium’ by remediating it so that it would reinforce its own characteristics as a new medium in US television culture. Proposed by Bolter and Grusin (2000) in line with the tradition of media studies as conceived by Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan 1964; McLuhan and

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McLuhan 1988), the concept of remediation discusses how the emergent new media relate to the previous ones. The authors define remediation as a complex process in which the new medium appropriates and modifies the characteristics of the old media in order to become a consolidated cultural artefact. In order to accomplish this, the process always affects the previous media, encouraging reconfigurations in them. The concept of remediation has been productively used in discussing different subjects, particularly those that involve the popularization of different new media technologies, such as digital television, MP3, digital cinema, and so on. My focus in this chapter is specifically on how MTV remediated, in its inaugural moments, the programming structure of FM radio and some elements linked to the sounds of the FM top 40. In this context MTV’s first schedule, the first video jockeys’ (VJs) speeches, the first institutional advertisements, and all of the programming dynamics ‘remediated’ the FM logic to legitimate MTV’s initial image as a youthful and cool television space. To do this, MTV benefited from a complex historical environment in which a great number of new media technologies flourished, such as cable television (and its specific audience), videogames, VTR, and satellite television. Therefore, I will analyse the first schedule aired by MTV in its inaugural moment on 1 August 1981, specifically the first four hours of programming. This content was collected in full on MTVTheFirst24,1 a YouTube channel created by an anonymous MTV fan in July 2011 which, unfortunately, was removed from YouTube some years later. Before its removal, I downloaded all the material provided by this channel to my computer so I could analyse the entirety of the music videos, the advertisements, the first VJ comments, and other content, including some programming gaps, in order of appearance. In fact, it is important to note that new media like YouTube offer new ways to access media material of the past. These media platforms decontextualize the content they broadcast, but are still a significant media environment for observing phenomena that would be impossible to see in any other way. YouTube, specifically, is the biggest audiovisual archive in history (Ghel 2009) with many characteristics of digital culture: The content is not necessarily perennial and is highly dependent on participatory culture (Jenkins 2008). Some authors (Kaplan 1987; Denisoff 1988; Banks 1996, McGrath 1996; Holzbach 2017) have already highlighted that it is extremely difficult to get

The MTVTheFirst24 YouTube channel was at http://migre.me/8HGHK. Last accessed in April 2012.

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MTV’s initial dynamics and other information about the music channel’s behind-the-scenes because MTV does not readily volunteer this kind of material. Throughout this research I have tried, unsuccessfully, to enlarge the corpus of analysis. However, the first hours of MTV programming were carefully planned to communicate clear, new, and youthful identity, as I will argue over the following pages.

The concept of remediation MTV was launched on 1 August 1981 as a cable television channel in the United States. Fifteen days later Billboard magazine published an article analysing the first days of the music channel. In a very celebratory style reporter Laura Foti presented MTV as follows: Imagine a top 40 radio station broadcast from coast-to-coast with programming found nowhere else on the airwaves. Now add video to complete the passage, and you begin to get an idea of what Warner Amex’s MTV Music Television cable channel has up its sleeve. … Although much of what is seen on MTV is established hits by well-known artists, the channel also will be a forum for new acts and songs. ‘We’re broader than any single radio station,’ Pittman says. ‘We’ll be emphasizing new music because our audience is the trendsetters.’ Pittman, former program director for WNBC–AM New York, points out that radio stations traditionally have been unwilling to give new acts a chance. ‘MTV will have definite benefits for radio stations,’ he says. ‘We’ll be breaking the music for them. The exposure helps the music industry as a whole, because it’s really lost its luster lately. MTV will be innovative and creative, and get people recharged about music.’ (Foti 1981)

Both Laura Foti and Robert Pittman, one of the founders of MTV, emphasized that in order to attract the ‘trendsetters’ the music channel was developing a kind of Top 40 radio on television with the music that FM radio was supposedly not able to provide. There were more than just good intentions behind this decision. When MTV debuted, it did not reach the most important US markets, like New York and Los Angeles, making it difficult to attract both publicity and the music industry. At the same time, the music channel had only a few music videos to broadcast, most of which belonged to British rock groups – like the Buggles – because the format was much more popular in the UK than in the United States (Banks 1996). At that time, these British

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rock groups were mostly unknown in the US market, so when MTV started to broadcast their music videos, it was quickly recognized as a space for musical novelty. Actually, a few authors like Banks (1996), Goodwin (1992), and Lewis (1991) have already suggested some connections between radio culture and the programming dynamic developed by MTV, but they have only looked at some aspects inspired by the music channel. In this chapter I intend to go further and suggest a deeper and more conscious relation built by MTV in its first few days. In this way, the channel not only borrowed some features from FM radio, but also made efforts to be seen literally as a radio station with images that would offer new songs and a supposedly more optimized experience. One of Marshall McLuhan’s most famous reflections is on the effects of media technologies. According to him, all new media need to improve what humans do with media in order to build their own legitimacy in any given media environment. Especially his later work, Laws of Media, published after his death in 1981 by his son Eric, develops this argument. In a very provocative style McLuhan tries to convince us that ‘every’ artefact – including media – works through an evolutionary process in which the oldest one works as a reference for the newest one. The latter in turn legitimates itself, in any given cultural context, guided by four universal laws that should form a ‘tetrad’. The new artefact, then, should (1) enhance, intensify, make possible, or accelerate some cultural phenomenon that already exists; (2) push aside or turn obsolete an old artefact; (3) retrieve earlier actions and bring them into play; and (4) reverse its own original features when pushed to the limits of its potential (McLuhan 1988). Although Eric and Marshall McLuhan point out that the four laws must be considered simultaneously, many researches emphasize just one or a few of them to understand a couple of media particularities. This occurs especially with Bolter and Grusin (2000), who notably pay attention to the ‘first’ law in order to develop the concept of remediation. The concept first appeared in the book Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), in which Bolter and Grusin try to understand the visual particularities of new media like computer games, digital photography, digital art, and so on, and how these technologies are encouraging deep reconfigurations in all media contexts. The authors’ arguments were developed in the US context exclusively for visual media. However, it became a popular concept in media studies in general, notably in research interested in



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comparative media studies (e.g. Graham 2004; Peirce 2010; Kirkland 2009; Scott and White 2003; Siegel 2002). Although the phenomenon of remediation can be identified in new media (including ‘old’ media like photography, cinema, radio, and television), it has potentially been under development over the last three or four centuries, since remediation takes into account the human cultural desire to represent reality. According to Bolter and Grusin (once again, inspired by McLuhan’s argument), the desire to represent reality has been deeply present in the Western world since the seventeenth century, when innumerable techniques of perspective, light, and shade were developed by artists especially within visual media (such as painting) so they could reflect this human desire. Since then the search for ‘reality’ has been the driving force behind media development and it is one of the reasons why connections have been established between different media. For instance, when photography was born, it remediated painting in order to become a more ‘realistic’ medium. When cinema emerged, it remediated photography in order to become a more realistic medium, and when television was born, it did the same with cinema. Finally, computer games remediated both television and cinema. In any case, it is essential to note that all new media try to explicate reality in an improved version compared to previous media. It is precisely for this reason that previous media are frequently encouraged to reformat and update their own features (Bolter and Grusin 2000). Remediation is linked to two other concepts that are heavily related to the human desire to represent reality: immediacy, or transparent immediacy, and hypermediacy. The former consists in the media’s effort to give the audience a ‘sense of presence’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000) or the feeling that they are inside the media content. Immediacy’s main goal is to develop strategies for erasing the media to give the viewers the feeling of having a live experience. Because of immediacy, most of the current media try to give the audience a feeling of immersion, in the sense that the media content seems so close to the viewer that the media themselves become almost invisible or transparent. Immediacy is common, for instance, in new media such as computer games and 3D cinema. Hypermediacy, in turn, is the opposite of immediacy. It consists of the strategy developed by the media in which a single medium can offer a multimedia experience. It is the potential of developing a heterogeneous and multimedia experience through a single medium’s materiality. Hypermediacy can be highly developed in computers and televisions, among other media. Websites like

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YouTube are hypermediated, meaning that in a single space – for example, the website’s home page – it is possible to find texts, photos, and videos, sending a message to the spectator. Bolter and Grusin emphasize that the relation between immediacy and hypermediacy is dialectic: On the one hand, immediacy tries to erase the media to offer only the content to its audience, while hypermediacy, on the other hand, constantly reinforces the media’s presence in order to bring about the multimedia experience. Immediacy and hypermediacy are thus complementary strategies of the concept of remediation and together constitute ‘the double logic of remediation’ (Boulter and Grusin 2000, 2). Remediation, in turn, is a useful analytical tool that allows us to observe, from MTV’s point of view, how the music channel has built a conscious strategy of differentiation in the television landscape using FM radio conventions. Still, remediation encourages us to look at the music channel in relation to other media, instead of seeing it as an entirely new media.

Presenting the case: The birth of MTV from the perspective of remediation As Banks (1996) has persuasively argued, the consolidation of MTV must be understood in reference to the music industry. He points out how, in the beginning of the 1980s, MTV helped the US music industry, especially because it made lots of exclusive agreements and other transactions with the biggest record labels in order to monopolize the broadcasting of music videos. In a complementary way, it could be suggested that the relationship to FM radio played an equally important role during the early days of MTV: By remediating some of the most recognizable elements associated with FM radio, it allowed viewers to identify MTV more easily as music television. At this point, some brief remarks on the consolidation of a few elements of FM are necessary in order to emphasize how they were reformatted by MTV later on. Originally, in the US market, the FM content was basically made up of duplications of the AM schedules. It was only in the 1960s that FM radio started to become popular by consistently using music programming as a strategy to build its own identity as a new medium (Sterling 1971; Sterling and Keith 2008). At first, some FM stations in the United States became specialized in broadcasting jazz and classical music, genres that were difficult to find on AM stations. At the end of the 1960s, however, FM had already incorporated some of



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the AM music formats, including the Top 40, automatic programming, and easy listening. Accordingly, two main factors contributed to building FM’s identity through music: the birth of stereo and the consolidation of rock culture. In 1958 music albums recorded in stereo began to be sold, which promoted the search for sound quality and encouraged the development of stereo sound in 1961, then exclusively on FM waves (Huff 1991). Additionally, at the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s the great popularity of rock groups in the US music industry was specifically responsible not only for helping to promote pop songs on FM radio, but also for giving a youthful identity to many FM stations, which is clear, for example, in formats such as AOR (Killmeier 2001; Kronengold 2008). In these cases, the DJs’ behaviour, the playlists, the music news, and the advertisements were developed in consideration of the growing and powerful young audience. During the 1970s US FM radio experienced a period of strong popularity, causing FM to surpass the AM audience for the first time in 1979. In 1981 when US FM radio was a consolidated mainstream medium, MTV was created. Its first schedule, then, presented new, avant-garde artists who had never dreamt of becoming part of the big US FM stations of that time (Rothenbuhler and McCourt 1987). MTV then started to build a youthful and cool identity as a medium that, reportedly, wanted to be ‘better than radio’, and this strategy was partly responsible for MTV’s success in its first days. MTV’s clash with FM radio can be seen in a larger context in which radio and television were part of a massive reconfiguration of the existing media. It is symptomatic to note, for instance, that Variety magazine, an important media news reference, published dozens of reports about clashes between different media between 1981 and 1984. For instance, the magazine talked about the ‘decline’ of the jukebox, the spectacular growth of cable television, the emergence of the ‘satellite era’ in broadcasting networks, the decline in the number of AM radio listeners, the importance of stereo sound in ‘saving’ AM broadcasts from diminishing, the efforts made by FM radio to attract new listeners, the emergence of the VCR, and the struggle between the Betamax and the VHS video formats.2

These reports were published in Variety in the following editions, among others: 2 December 1981 (‘Cable Green Light in Twin City Burbs’); 2 December 1982 (‘Jukebox Biz Is in a Fatal Decline’); 20 January 1982 (‘Cable TV Chatter’); 31 March 1982 (‘Young Adult Radio Webs Multiply on Music Bases; Satellite Era Cues Growth’); 16 June 1982 (‘Radio Nets Gag on Youth Format; Supreme Court Votes to Hear Betamax Case’); 18 August 1982 (‘In-Depth Report about Falklands Via Videocassette’); 25 August 1982 (‘Can Stereo Save AM Band? What’s New on the Bird? NAB Sesh Seeks Answers’); 15 June 1983 (‘Format Change for Album Radio’); 4 January 1984 (‘Home Video Profits Fuel Las Vegas Trip’).

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In 1982 Variety compiled all these media changes on its front page, where a headline stating ‘New Technologies Change Old Ways’ affirmed that show business may never be the same. The distribution revolution continued throughout 1981, and the new technologies associated with cable television and home video came even closer to providing showmen with the so-called millennium of a box office in the living room. (Silverman 1982, 1)

In this context, MTV was a direct consequence of reconfigurations that occurred in US radio as well as in television culture. The latter, in particular, changed a lot in the 1980s with the consolidation of US cable television, which had become popular in the 1970s (Jaramillo 2002; Mullen 2002). Channels like HBO, CNN, and ESPN were launched in the mid-1970s to offer a very specialized and consolidated schedule (TV series, journalism, and sports) in order to attract specific audiences (Mullen 2002). Accordingly, MTV inaugurated a new phase in cable television culture, as its programming was predominantly formed by a non-consolidated television genre. In fact, music videos only constituted a small part of some network schedules until the birth of MTV. Right after the music channel’s debut, music videos started to be seen as legitimized television content around the world, while other cable channels like The Weather Channel, Discovery Channel, and Arts and Entertainment were launched, thus helping to consolidate a heterogeneous content that until then had practically no space on TV broadcasting channels (Chris 2002). Keeping these developments in mind, the music channel remediated FM radio, notably in order to attract young people aged 12–34 years (Banks 1996) as part of a large and growing cable television culture. MTV thus developed remediation strategies, which can be observed in two ways: (1) through its oral discourse, which can be seen in the VJ banter and in its institutional advertisements, and (2) in its programming dynamic.

MTV, remediation, and oral discourse This is it. Welcome to MTV: Music Television. The world’s first 24-hour stereo video music channel. Just moments ago, all the VJs and the crew here at MTV, collectively, hit our executive producer Sue Steinberg over the head with a bottle of champagne and behold, a new concept is born: the best of TV combined with the best of radio. Your favorite tunes are never too far away any time you tune in. I’m Mark Goodman and I’ll be here this time every weeknight with the latest



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concert information and music news. Now, starting right now, you’ll never look at music the same way again. We’ll be right back to introduce the other VJs, and the other folks who are gonna be with us on MTV.

This was the first presentation of MTV made by a VJ. After a long twentyminute introduction,3 including the transmission of the first two music videos,4 VJ Mark Goodman (a former New York radio DJ) presented the music channel with the speech above. These words had deep symbolic importance because they summarized everything the music channel wanted to be in its early days. First, it pointed out that MTV intended to be ‘the best of TV combined with the best of radio’, a clear allusion to radio culture. Second, the speech introduced the word ‘VJ’ for the first time, a neologism inspired by the word ‘DJ’. The VJ embodied and adapted many features developed by DJs and is still one of the most important features of MTV today. At that time, the VJ worked as a link between the channel, the music, and its audience. Finally, these words also emphasized that MTV was the ‘first 24-hour stereo video music channel’, which meant that it was drawing attention to the main technological improvement made by FM radio (stereo sound would be introduced on AM radio in the following year). Together these two contributions – the VJ and stereo sound – were solely responsible for a large part of MTV’s image being shaped in its first four hours on air. Mark Goodman, who was the only VJ on air during this period, constantly emphasized the closeness between FM radio and MTV in his comments and behaviour. He talked to the audience in a very youthful and informal way – sitting on a table accompanied by a racket and a tennis ball – behaving like a DJ, not like a journalist on a television news channel. Still in the first hour of programming Mark made another clear allusion to FM radio: ‘We all are so excited about this new concept in TV! We’ll be doing for TV what FM did for radio!’ Considering that MTV was ‘music television’, the VJ was referring to the ‘music revolution’ that FM had secured in radio culture. The desire for an

The first few moments of MTV were quite different from what the references usually describe. Instead of the speaker John Lack saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll!’, the first moments showed some real, pre-recorded images of the launch of the space shuttle Columbia on 12 April 1981, only four months earlier. The images were shown for sixteen minutes and narrated by a supposed NASA official. Then, at 12:01 am, the iconic image of an astronaut holding an MTV flag appeared, accompanied by the words of John Lack above. After that, the first music video, the first institutional ad, and the second music video were aired. Only after all this did the five VJs present themselves and programming officially begin. 4 The first two music videos were ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ and ‘You Better Run’ performed by Pat Benatar. The first VJs, in order of appearance, were Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn, J. J. Jackson, and Nina Blackwood. 3

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improvement to radio was also clear in another of Mark’s statements. One of the most representative pieces of discourse occurred after the thirty-seventh music video, ‘Passion’, performed by the British singer Rod Stewart. Mark stared into the camera and said, ‘That is Rod Stewart on MTV, Music Television. The music you’re seeing is the latest music form created by the artist: video music. And we’ve got it for you 24 hours a day right here on MTV’. When Mark emphasized the novelty of the music video, he also said that it represented an improvement over FM radio, since the ‘latest music form created by the artist’ was both the music and something else: the images. Besides Mark Goodman, the jingles and the institutional advertisements emphasized the relation between MTV and FM radio, notably the efficient use of stereo sound. At that time, MTV and other cable channels improved their sound quality using FM waves. To do this effectively the viewer had to have both stereo sound equipment and an FM receiver at home, connected to the television. Then, when watching MTV, the viewer had to turn on the television to see the images and the stereo to hear the sound. This multimedia experience was strongly urged, for instance, in the first institutional advertisement broadcasted by MTV right after ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. In one minute the piece described the history of sound from the invention of ritual songs to the radio, the phonograph, the television, and cable television. The advertisement climaxed when the speaker said that music ‘exploded in quality and in popularity when stereo sound was invented’. At the end it stated, ‘The power of sight, the power of video, the power of sound: MTV, Music Television’. Stereo sound was one of the music channel’s main strategies for attracting ‘listeners’. Another institutional advertisement explained the advantages of watching MTV in stereo. While showing some music video images, the speaker stated: You are watching Music Television, MTV, your first video music channel in full stereo sound. If you’re not listening to MTV in stereo, you’re only getting half of the picture. To get the full sound potential call your local cable company for a stereo hook up into your FM receiver. Why settle for only half of the picture, when you can have it all? Music Television: MTV.

This advertisement transformed video enjoyment into an experience intrinsically linked to listening. In other words, it said that both MTV and music videos depended on stereo sound to offer the complete experience. One last important advertisement related to stereo sound was shown during the VJ’s speech. At the beginning of the second hour Mark Goodman ‘taught’ the viewer how to watch MTV in stereo. Mark explained that if the viewer did not



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want to lose the FM dial in which the MTV sound was located, the viewer could send the music channel a letter and receive, for free, the ‘MTV dial sticker’ that would help the viewer locate MTV’s dial on the radio. More than merely a plus for MTV’s dynamic, stereo sound was an essential part of viewers’ first experiences of the channel. On the one hand, listening to the music videos through stereo sound was an amazing experience of immediacy that offered more vividness to the television experience. The sound quality provided by this multimedia engineering had no comparison in earlier television and, consequently, brought sound to the foreground in the television experience. On the other hand, MTV built its strategy of differentiation in an actual space of hypermediacy in which heterogeneous media – FM radio, stereo sound, and also television – together offered a distinct music television experience. This strategy can be seen in one of the first advertisements for MTV published in Billboard magazine (MTV 1981). Accordingly, the ‘complete’ MTV experience consisted of the presence of television plus stereo sound. The latter, in turn, can be seen as a remediation of FM radio technology building more on an experience of hypermediacy than on one of immediacy. Since it was impossible to make the multimedia technologies disappear, the sound quality of the songs was always explicitly connected with the media.

Remediation and the MTV programming dynamic Several studies of MTV maintain that its first programme schedule basically consisted of an endless ‘flow’ of music videos sometimes interrupted by VJ banter. An analysis of the first MTV programme reveals that, at least in its first moments, music videos were the most important elements of the music channel; however, they were just a part of a bigger scenario. In addition, programming also included jingles and institutional advertisements, sponsored advertisements, music news, and the VJs, who connected and gave both coherence and cohesion to all these elements. Even though some adjustments were made to the MTV schedule later on, the need for including other elements besides music videos is undeniable, especially considering the constant decline in the presence of music videos on MTV worldwide that has occurred since the 1990s. From the perspective of radio, it is important to note how these elements were similar to the content of FM broadcasting. If the music video was equivalent to music and the VJ was equivalent to the DJ, then the rest of the content would develop the same features. As in MTV, the content of FM was basically formed

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by music and the DJ, but it also included jingles, music news, and sponsored advertisements. Although it did not have the institutional advertisements (at least as a rule), this element developed almost the same features as jingles; likewise, institutional advertisements often tried to reinforce the MTV brand. Because of this, we will hereafter refer to jingles and institutional advertisements as just ‘jingles’ in order to simplify our analysis. The way these five elements were organized in the programming also showed a clear inspiration from FM radio. As Sterling and Keith (2008, 163) point out, in the beginning of the 1980s US mainstream FM radio programming followed the structure of ‘two to four songs in a row, followed by sets of perhaps three to five commercials and minimal DJ chatter’.5 In its early moments MTV developed a very similar structure, where music videos replaced songs. The first hour of MTV programming was broadcasted as shown in Table 12.1. Similar to what FM broadcasting did for songs, MTV structured its programming by mixing music videos with various other elements. The next three hours followed the same structure: Two to five music videos were broadcasted and then interrupted by the VJ or by one, two, or three sponsored advertisements. The latter was generally formed by youth-oriented products, like bubble gum, soft drinks, and video games, in addition to non-governmental social institutions.6 Jingles, conversely, were thrown into the programming and often broadcasted in between music videos. The grouping of the elements probably was not larger because, according to Banks (1996, 34–5), MTV’s premiere had no more than 125 music videos and 30 per cent of the available commercial time sold.7 The programming logic chosen by MTV brought about a sense of immediacy clearly inspired by the FM dynamic, although this was not declared by the broadcaster. To be legitimated as a new and necessary product in a media environment, MTV tried to hide the fact that it embodied many FM conventions by selling the idea that it came naturally, considering that MTV would be ‘better than radio’ because it was formed by the music plus the images. In fact, the music videos could have been broadcasted in any order and through any other dynamic, but

This formula changed a lot through the 1980s, when FM culture also changed, as briefly discussed earlier in this chapter. Meanwhile, at that time the AM formula was basically this: ‘song – commercial spot – DJ talk – song’ (Sterling and Keith 2008, 163). 6 In order of appearance, the sponsored advertisements were The Bulk (school binders), the film Superman II, Dolby Noise Reduction System, Mountain Dew (soft drink), Interfaith Hunger Appeal, Chewels (bubble gum), Andron Colony, Atari Games, The Movie Channel, Dolby Noise Reduction System, The Movie Channel, Nickelodeon, The Movie Channel, the Leukemia Society of America, Dolby Noise Reduction System, and the Foster Grandparent Program. 7 The whole list can be found at http://migre.me/8OrCm. Accessed in June 2017. 5



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Table 12.1  Programme units during the first hour of MTV aired on 1 August 1981 Start

End

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15

23:59:34 0:00:02 0:03:32 0:04:31 0:07:33 0:09:01 0:10:57 0:11:13 0:13:31 0:13:41 0:17:22 0:18:10 0:19:07 0:29:26 0:29:36

0:00:02 0:03:32 0:04:31 0:07:33 0:09:01 0:10:57 0:11:13 0:13:31 0:13:41 0:17:22 0:18:10 0:19:07 0:29:26 0:29:36 0:33:08

Jingle Music video Jingle Music video VJ Sponsored ad VJ Music video Jingle Music video VJ Sponsored ad Music video Jingle Music video

Content

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

0:33:08 0:33:24 0:34:00 0:34:31 0:34:40 0:39:20 0:40:18 0:43:32 0:43:42 0:44:14 0:45:05 0:45:30 0:45:59 0:46:28 0:52:30 0:53:06

0:33:24 0:34:00 0:34:31 0:34:40 0:39:20 0:40:18 0:43:32 0:43:42 0:44:14 0:45:05 0:45:30 0:45:59 0:46:28 0:52:30 0:53:06 1:01:17

GAP VJ Sponsored ad GAP Music video Sponsored ad Music video Jingle VJ Music news VJ Sponsored ad Jingle Music video Jingle Music video

Quantity 1 1 3 1 1 2 3 2

1 1 2 1

1 2 2

when MTV consciously chose the dynamic of FM, it showed that the remediation process is highly dependent on consolidated conventions of previous media. In the analysed period only one piece of music news was broadcasted, albeit with a special role. Just like on FM stations, notably on those that followed the AOR format, the VJ did a presentation of the music news item and then

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called the reporter. The latter then talked for one minute about the return of the Ramones, who had been on tour in Europe for a long time and were returning to New York, the band’s hometown. During Mark’s presentation he emphasized that this piece of music news would just be the first, since MTV’s intention was to ‘cover the whole country from coast-to-coast’ in order to give the viewer the best possible information about music. Considering the short FM waves, which could hardly reach such a large country, the music channel was once again trying to become an optimized version of FM radio. The dynamic of MTV’s music video programming probably represented the channel’s most significant break with what FM stations were doing at that time with their music programming, particularly the Top 40s and AOR. As previously mentioned in this chapter, for many reasons MTV broadcasted a great number of music novelties. Although some of them could not be considered new hits – for instance, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ was released in 1979 – they were actually a novelty for the majority of the viewers and were mostly ignored by FM stations in the United States. Indeed, MTV’s music references were different from the FM ones, notably because the artist/music, in order to be shown on the music channel, had to have a music video. This, incidentally, influenced another radio idiosyncrasy that was remediated by MTV: the way the music channel worked with song rotations. Many radio music formats, like the Top 40 and AOR, divided the songs into three categories: They could be broadcasted in ‘heavy rotation’, in ‘medium rotation’, or in ‘low rotation’. If the song was a huge success (or the band/record label was really powerful), it would probably be aired many times a day in heavy rotation. If, on the contrary, the song was not a great hit, it would be aired in low rotation. MTV initially appropriated the rotation format, but in a different way. Instead of classifying songs into one of these three categories, the music channel considered and valued the artists above all. Thus, for instance, Rod Stewart appeared five times in five different music videos in the first four hours of MTV programming, the US rock group REO Speedwagon appeared four times in four different music videos, and The Pretenders appeared three times, accordingly.8 On the other hand, bands like Talking Heads, Blotto, Juice Newton, and Fleetwood Mac appeared only once each during the whole period Rod Stewart songs in order of appearance: ‘She Won’t Dance with Me’; ‘Sailing’; ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’; ‘Passion’; ‘Ain’t Love a Bitch’; REO Speedwagon songs in order of appearance: ‘Take It on the Run’; ‘Keep on Loving You’; ‘Don’t Let Him Go’; ‘Tough Guys’; and The Pretenders songs in order of appearance: ‘Brass in Pocket; Message of Love’; ‘Talk Of The Town’.

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analysed.9 Perhaps this occurred because it was the only way the music channel found to vary the songs, considering the few music videos it possessed. If so, this was not a conscious strategy developed by MTV to remediate FM, but it definitely helped the music channel build an environment in which the artists’ visual aspect became extremely important for the enjoyment of music. While FM stations usually picked only one or two songs by each artist to broadcast for a while – which raised the profile of the song itself – MTV deconstructed this format to value the artists themselves; after all, the images of the artists did constitute the great novelty of MTV compared to radio broadcasts. In this sense, the artists – or their visual performance – became as important as music for MTV. The music channel, then, put music and video together in the name of one single enjoyment.

Conclusion ‘Have you seen the new Michael Jackson song?’ (One ten-year-old to another on a Manhattan subway quoted in Cocks, Time 1983) The clever little boy’s comment above marked the beginning of a long article published by Time magazine when MTV was growing in popularity in the United States. The title of the article – ‘Sing a Song for Seeing: Rock Videos Are Firing Up a Musical Revolution’ – reinforced the meaning of that comment: ‘Rock videos’ were somehow changing the music experience. When the little boy asked his mate if he had seen the Michael Jackson song, he naturally considered that songs could not just be heard, but also seen. The visual experience – Michael Jackson’s performance in one of his music videos broadcasted on MTV – was an essential part of music enjoyment. Therefore, the Time article suggests that MTV was able to become an institutionalized music channel notably because of the differentiation strategy it developed. In this way, MTV remediated some US FM radio features in order to build its own meaning as a recognizable television channel. This process occurred both in the oral discourse and in the programming dynamic broadcasted in Talking Heads with the music video ‘Once in a Lifetime’; Blotto with the music video ‘I Wanna be a Lifeguard’; Juice Newton with the music video ‘Angel of Morning’; and Fleetwood Mac with the music video ‘Tusk’.

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MTV’s first moments. In its oral discourse MTV developed a large number of declared strategies to supposedly offer a distinct musical experience in reference to FM radio. To do so the music channel built a television environment that hierarchically connected an experience of hypermediacy with, secondly, an experience of immediacy. MTV’s programming dynamic, in turn, was built through an experience of immediacy that embodied many FM structural conventions along with some unconscious strategies for deconstructing elements of FM radio identity, like the song rotation format. Finally, it is necessary to reinforce that, after MTV, the musical experience became more and more connected with the visual images of the artists. Listening to music, after all, is no longer just listening, but is experiencing music videos, visual records, visual performances, and all kinds of visual media products, which are now deeply connected with the experience of sound.

References Banks, Jack. 1996. Monopoly Television: MTV’s Quest to Control the Music. Bolter, CO: Westview Press. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ‘Cable Green Light in Twin City Burbs’. Variety, 2 December 1981. ‘Cable TV Chatter’. Variety, 20 January 1982. ‘Can Stereo Save AM Band? What’s New on The Bird? NAB Sesh Seeks Answers’. Variety, 25 August 1982. Chris, Cynthia. 2002. ‘All Documentary, All the Time? Discovery Communication Inc. and Trends in Cable Television’. Television & New Media 3 (7): 7–28. Cocks, Jay. 1983. ‘Sing a Song of Seeing’. Time, 26 December. Denisoff, R. Serge. 1988. Inside MTV. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. ‘Format Change for Album Radio’. Variety, 15 June 1983. Foti, Laura. 1981. ‘MTV Cable Channel Exposing New Acts’. Billboard, 15 August: 3, 58. Ghel, Robert. 2009. ‘YouTube as Archive: Who Will Curate This Wunderkammer?’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (1): 43–60. Goodwin, Andrew. 1992. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Graham, Stephen. 2004. ‘Beyond the “Dazzling Light”: From Dreams of Transcendence to the “Remediation” of Urban Life’. New Media & Society 6 (1): 16–25. Hilderbrand, Lucas. 2009. Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.



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Holzbach, Ariane Diniz. 2017. A Invenção do Videoclipe: A História por Trás da Consolidação de um Gênero Audiovisual [The Invention of the Music Video: The History behind the Consolidation of an Audiovisual Genre]. Curitiba: Appris. ‘Home Video Profits Fuel Las Vegas Trip’. Variety, 4 January 1984. Huff, Kelly. 1991. ‘FCC Standard-Setting with Regard to FM Stereo and AM Stereo’. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 68 (3): 483–90. ‘In-Depth Report About Falklands Via Videocassette’. Variety, 18 August 1982. Jaramillo, Deborah. 2002. ‘The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos and the Construction of a Quality Brand’. Journal of Communication Inquiry 26 (1): 59–75. Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press. ‘Jukebox Biz Is in a Fatal Decline’. Variety, 2 December 1982. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1987. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, & Consumer Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Killmeier, Matthew A. 2001. ‘Voices between the Tracks: Disk Jockeys, Radio, and Popular Music, 1955–60’. Journal of Communication Inquiry 25 (4): 353–74. Kirkland, Ewan. 2009. ‘Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations’. Games and Culture 4 (2): 115–26. Kronengold, Charles. 2008. ‘Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and AlbumOriented Rock’. Criticism 50 (1): 43–82. Lewis, Lisa A. 1991. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. McGrath, Tom. 1996. MTV: The Making of a Revolution. Philadelphia: Running Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. 1988. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. MTV. 1981. [Advertisement]. Billboard, 1 August: 40. MTVTheFirst24. YouTube Channel. Accessed 24 April 2012. http://migre.me/8HGHK. Mullen, Megan. 2002. ‘The Fall and Rise of Cable Narrowcasting’. Convergence 8 (22): 62–83. Peirce, L. Meghan. 2010. ‘Remediation Theory: Analyzing What Made Quarterlife Successful as an Online Series and Not A Television Series’. Television & New Media 12 (4): 314–25. ‘Radio Nets Gag on Youth Format’. Variety, 16 June 1982. Rothenbuhler, Eric W., and Tom McCourt. 1987. ‘Commercial Radio and Popular Music: Processes of Selection and Factors of Influence’. In Popular Music and Communication, edited by James Lull. Newbury Park, NJ: Sage. Accessed 1 November 2017. http://bit.ly/M1gt3d. ‘Satellite Era Cues Growth’. Variety, 31 March 1982. Scott, K. D., and A. M. White. 2003. ‘Unnatural History? Deconstructing the Walking with Dinosaurs Phenomenon’. Media, Culture & Society 25 (3): 315–32.

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Siegel, Greg. 2002. ‘Double Vision: Large Screen Video Display and Live Sports Spectacle’. Television & New Media 3 (1): 49–73. Silverman, Syd. 1982. ‘Show Biz Never the Same Again: New Technologies Change Old Ways’. Variety, 13 January 1982. Sterling, Christopher H. 1971. ‘Second Service: Some Keys to the Development of FM Broadcasting’. Journal of Broadcasting 15 (2): 181–94. Sterling, Christopher, and Michael Keith. 2008. Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ‘Supreme Court Votes To Hear Betamax Case’. Variety, 16 June 1982. ‘Young Adult Radio Webs Multiply On Music Bases’. Variety, 31 March 1982.

13

Music Radio as a Format Remediated for Stream-Based Music Use Andreas Lenander Ægidius

I begin this investigation of music radio as a format with a few assumptions and questions based on a preliminary comparison of the traditional concept of broadcasted music radio and radio as featured in music streaming services. Music streaming and music radio seem related. What do they have in common? They are both curated flows of music, which I equate to streams of music. Radio is prominently placed in the main section of the Spotify user interface. Apple employs radio hosts for their streaming service, Apple Music. Broadcasting and streaming usually rely on playlists, which govern their flow. Any given flow in the form of a radio show or an accessed stream is traditionally constituted and regulated by a playlist. Music content from any given delivery technology, for example CD, vinyl, or music file, is played with a varying degree of planning ranging from freestyle choice of the radio host to commercially strict playlist order. Usually, music directors or programme managers with mandate to decide what music to play during the day managed the playlists of radio stations (Shuker 2013, 121–2). In this manner they curated the flow. In today’s streaming services automatically and manually curated playlists are presented alongside the users’ own playlists. When viewed as formats the concepts of radio and playlists can be interrogated as being remediated for the digital music era. In rudimentary terms, the format is the form used to present music content. Here I will focus on file formats and list formats. Based on my initial assumptions the list format constitutes the order of playback of the music files within both traditional broadcasted radio that utilizes digital equipment and in the music streaming services. Alongside this simple regulation of digitized music content the list and file formats constitute complex reformulations of previous concepts of music media and music technology. The contemporary music streaming services conveniently remediate both radio

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and playlists to re-commodify the interaction with music content. The central positioning of radio-like functions in the streaming software interfaces indicates that the concept of radio is relevant among users of music streaming services. How is the music radio found in music streaming services different from traditional broadcasted radio? To answer this I will conceptualize music radio as a contributing format in today’s stream-based music use. With this, I aim to investigate if the concept of radio as a digital format could add to the further studies of the sociocultural, practical, and material multiplicities of music radio. I also aim to further develop the theoretical notion of the format within media studies and sound studies. I exemplify this theoretical contribution with two brief case studies of how radio is incorporated into or remediated to fit as functionality or a feature in the streaming software. Based on the cases I discuss the positions of the concept of radio as a contributing format in the streaming services as both an incorporation of traditional broadcasted radio complete with different radio stations and human hosts (in Apple Music) and as remediated to serve as functions within streaming music software use (in Spotify’s iterations on playlist variants).

Remediation of radio How digitization and the internet have influenced the concept of radio has been analysed and discussed by many scholars. I single out Freire (2007) who questions the concepts of digital radio by analysing the consumption of audio material online in the United States. She focuses on the discourses around the remediation of radio for digital audio services. Bolter and Grusin define remediation as the representation of one medium in another and argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the digital media (2000, 45). Referencing Bolter and Grusin (2000) Freire (2007) investigates how the remediation of radio also entails more than recreating a better version of previous media. Bolter (2007) sums up this point in reference to what he terms technical choices and ideological positions: Remediation is, above all, the borrowing and refashioning of the representational practices of one media or media form into another, and such practices are constituted as a combination of technical choices and ideological positions. The measure of these practices is not a standard dictated by any essential features of a technology; it is instead their ability to capture the ‘real’ with reference to some cultural standard. (Bolter 2007, 201)



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The manner in which the remediation is utilized, its successfulness in terms of realness, is what Freire (2007) judges through the discourses around radio in audio streaming services. Without employing the same attention to discourses this chapter can be seen as a continuation and update of Freire’s analysis of the remediation of radio in the face of online audio streaming. Her cases include Pandora.com and Last.fm. She argues that these services rely on several discourses of radioness in order to frame their activities and structure the expectations for the media form (Freire 2007, 111). Freire documents: ‘The use of the concept of radio in discourses surrounding an emergent media form that stakes a claim on radio, and to draw attention to the strategic uses of this claim’ (2007, 102). In this way the concept of radio is put to work as an organizing metaphor for emergent media or new listening modes (2007, 102). Freire’s (2007) historical charting of conceptions of radio is useful as an offset for a further theoretical conceptualization of radio and as a format in the streambased music use. The field of music streaming services is diversified since their period of launch around the middle of the 2000s. But several conditions are the same. The reliance on the concept of radio or drawing on radioness in different ways is still an essential aspect of how radio functions as a format that provides radio-like functions alongside other technical as well as cultural remediations and innovations not covered in this chapter. I mainly include examples based on actual music streaming services that do not present themselves as online radio as is the case with Pandora Radio and Last.fm. Today radioness seems less of a requirement and more of an option although the concept of radio still works as a bid in the quality differentiation between players in an emerging market (Ægidius 2017). As an example of this I will relate how Spotify recognizes its own radioness in different ways. Spotify explicitly promotes itself to marketers from other brands as an alternative to traditional radio. In the United States they place their Spotify Free services in the top ten of most listened to broadcasted radio stations in several states (Spotify 2016b). In Europe they similarly want to help marketers navigate what they describe as changing landscapes in which music streaming is mainstream and Spotify Free offers unique audience reach (Spotify n.d.). We should question the referenced study as it is directed towards marketers and steers Spotify into a competition about ad-value with traditional broadcasted commercial radio. But it indicates that Spotify generally see themselves as a marketable product similar to radio while also making available radio-like functionalities to its users.

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It is relevant to discern whether the use of the concept of radio in streaming services is actually more akin to incorporation than a remediation. Freire adds that the remediation also reflects back on the media being remediated. Remediating radio for stream-based music use means we come to understand the differences between radio and streaming in order to grasp the refinements proposed in the act of remediation (Freire 2007, 102). Freire implies that new online music services that look to employ a kind of radioness to promote their product will have to claim that they are better than traditional broadcasted radio: ‘They must establish the suitability of that comparison by asserting their fundamental radioness’ (Freire 2007, 102). This seems to hold true for the streambased radio services, Pandora and Last.fm that she analysed. Whether this is still the case calls for a further empirical investigation that goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Among others Loviglio and Hilmes (2013) have also explored the evolution of the concept of radio in the digital era. In broad terms their anthology captures how radio is moving from being predominantly a mass medium to being conceived as a collection of digital niches (Loviglio and Hilmes 2013, 14). I take this to point to the fact that each remediation of radio refines its functions and scope setting it up as a niche apart from other remediations of radio. In this sense the cases presented below detail a few among many niches of digital music streams that utilize the concept of radio. I aim to complement rather than contradict existing approaches within current radio studies and sound studies.

Technologies, media, and format as theoretical and analytical foci In order to approach the conception of music radio as a format in itself I find it helpful to distinguish between technologies, media, and formats. And furthermore, the concept of format I wish to base this theoretical discussion on is different from the usual nomenclature of radio formats that typically determine the genre or type of content, whether it is music radio, speech radio, a radio quiz, top 40, or a radio documentary (Freire 2007, 99). This chapter is concerned with the sociocultural implications of technology or media formats as opposed to the content-oriented formats that are often called programme formats. I will briefly consider internet radio to show the interchangeability of the concepts of delivery



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technology, medium, and format before I move on to consider radio as a format in more detail. Several internet streaming services are calling themselves radio because they remediate traditional radio in some way. I have already mentioned Pandora Radio. Slacker Radio and Tunein Radio are examples of internet radios that also incorporate access to podcast networks. On the internet the country code top-level domain for the Federated States of Micronesia is .fm (IANA n.d.). The connotations with radio make .fm, as well as .am, valuable domain names for internet-based music sites. A notable example is Last.fm that has a website associated with their radio-like broadcasts among many other corporate or independent radio stations or music services. I will briefly exemplify internet radio in Apple’s music software iTunes because it leads me to evaluate radio as media before moving on to radio as a format.1 File formats such as .m3u and .pls among others support the listing of thousands of streams. iTunes defines internet radio as a type of media. The other media types that can be managed with iTunes are music, film, television series, podcast, and apps. They are all downloadable as files that can be stored on devices for offline use. Apple Music, the music streaming service by the same company that develops and supports iTunes, is not listed as a media type but counts instead as one way among many to access music. Despite their many similarities regarding functions and origins, the internet radio, podcasts of traditional broadcasted radio, and Apple Music are separate formats within the iTunes software. They are labelled and depicted as media types or a separate feature, meaning that they do not interconnect in the software. However, the delivery technology for all concerned media types is typically a compressed music file. The following specific web address, the URL, is cited from within the iTunes software: http://stream.klassikradio.de/klassikrock/ mp3-192/itunes/play.pls. The URL states the level of compression in bitrate (192) and file format of the music files (.mp3) that are listed in a playlist format (.pls) made available for iTunes specifically by the German radio company Klassik Radio. In iTunes the internet radio is symbolized with a transmitting radio tower icon. You cannot download radio shows or their playlists, so it is not meant as access to archival collections of past radio programmes. Via iTunes the internet radio streams are forward listening only much like traditional broadcasted radio, which is underlined by use of the radio tower icon. The Internet radio is also accessible through Windows Media player 12 and Windows’ music streaming service Groove in collaboration with iHeartRadio (Microsoft, n.d.).

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radio stream might feature on the website of the broadcasting radio station in which case the listening practices might be quite more complex (Brügger 2015, 240). The actual stream is just that, a stream of a certain bitrate not meant for download. iTunes also allows the user to access a stream in the form of a manually inserted URL, which adds the stream to a user-defined playlist. In iTunes the concept ‘internet radio’ comprises a large subdivided playlist. It is a list of categories of streams for accessing streams of music files. The stream of music files separates internet radio from all the other media types that iTunes continuously supports.2 Separating the different files and streams of files that iTunes can manage as media types makes sense as a usabilityfeature that helps the user understand the different workings of the software. But the concept of media leaves me wanting when trying to nuance the inner workings of the software and how the form of the media regulates the use of its content. This leads me to propose a change in theoretical and analytical focus.

A change in theoretical frame and analytical scale from medium to format Our habitual use of the concept of the medium must be the starting point for a shift in focus towards formats. The American media historian Jonathan Sterne discusses the definition of media by stating that ‘the mediality of the medium lies not simply in the hardware, but in its articulation with particular practices, ways of doing things, institutions, and even in some cases belief systems’ (2012, 10). With the term mediality Sterne points to the quality of an artefact as a medium and the complex ways in which communication technologies refer to one another in form or content (2012, 9). We talk of media as being invented and developed and the concept of the medium and its plural the media has come to detail a multitude of different types of hardware platforms and institutions. They all influence each other with particular degrees of mediality, through our understandings of the hardware and software in use and the institutionalization of some practices and policies and not others. To complicate matters further, the process of digitization leads the Danish media scholar Niels Ole Finnemann

The many media types or formats supported by iTunes has been criticized for introducing unnecessary complexity, even a sense of an increasingly bloated software (McElhearn 2016).

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to consider the computer as a meta-medium capable of simulating every other media before it (2011, 82). This makes it more pertinent to ask how the computer remediates and thereby tries to refine other media and how the binary code, the software, and the screen change our experience of those media. Sterne proposes a different scaling for the analysis of formats: Mediality happens on multiple scales and time frames. Studying formats highlights smaller registers like software, operating standards, and codes, as well as larger registers like infrastructures, international corporate consortia, and whole technical systems. (2012, 11)

What is important is the establishing of a wide and flexible analytical frame that can grasp the dimensions and rules, those initially conceived as well as those actually used that can be alike, diverge, or fluctuate between different states defined by the artefacts characteristic as a medium. Format theory ‘invites us to ask after the changing formations of media, the contexts of their reception, the conjunctures that shaped their sensual characteristics, and the institutional politics in which they were enmeshed’ (Sterne 2012, 11). Format theory is formulated alongside medium theory. This means that we should not forget what we have learnt from the study of media and in a wider sense from communication studies but investigate the embedded ideas and routines that run across them (Sterne 2012, 17). The concept of format covers a number of definitions that explain shape, design, or structure of a given content in both analogue and digital artefacts. From paper in A4 format over conventional genre formats in television or radio to music in the CD format and data files in the binary format (Oxford, n.d.). Sterne (2012) uses the MP3 format’s cultural history as a foundation for assessing the cultural value of music’s current digital formats. Once the format is determined it ‘denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a technology can operate’ (Sterne 2012, 7). He then supplies more examples that show how mundane formats are and how they ordinarily have controlled and still control how we use media. Size is only one aspect of a format since size might vary as well as other parameters: A record player might play different formats both LP, 45 and 78. A tape deck player can only play tapes of the same size, but it might have mechanisms to cope with different alloys of tape material. A Word document is specifically formatted to the text editing software

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Word but several other types of software can edit and format the designated file format (.docx). MP3 is in the same way a standard format that different software can process but the use is still regulated by different dimensions: Most crucial dimensions of format are codified in some way – sometimes through policy, sometimes through the technology’s construction, and sometimes through sedimented habit. They have a contractual and conventional nature. The format is what specifies the protocols by which a medium will operate. (Sterne 2012, 8)

Formats specify the materiality of media technologies that are then negotiated through the infrastructure, the software, and the use. In this way Sterne changes the focus from medium to format. He bases this on an analysis of communication and representation as seen through the general history of compression. In the case of the MP3 format the goal was optimal combination of efficiency in transmission and aesthetic experience. Exactly the compressed file format underlines that the technical and sensual form of content is as important as the delivery technology (Sterne 2012, 6). Format theory is an interdisciplinary approach and Sterne tentatively finds it useful for his study of the media history of the MP3 format and its meaning.3 This does not imply that format theory should only be used to study media history. Therefore it should be equally possible to investigate radio as a format historically as a certain formatting of audio content to be broadcasted and as a format determining the interactions with contemporary remediations of radio. Sterne actually does the former lending a criticism from the German media scholar Friedrich Kittler (1994) about radio as a mature medium. The radio has become so ordinary that we no longer perceive it as a technical medium. Considering the compressed audio format as a creature of policy as well as economy and culture, Sterne shows how the initial research in data compression technologies in the 1980s was motivated by the development of standards for digital radio (2012, 130). He then relates the conditions of the convening industries to a similar condition in medium theory. He cites Kittlers’ concern about radio as a mature medium meaning a medium with a high saturation that makes it disappear at the juncture of high technology and triviality. We can criticize the industry for managing technological change in

It is worth noting that Sterne does not advocate format theory. In an interview he adds to this position that the formulation of format theory can be seen as a nose tweak of the different traditions of media studies that he finds are not capable of handling the mess that media consists of (Lovink 2014, 3).

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order to control markets but only to the extent that we fail to imagine alternatives in which case extension of the already existing media and formats seems only natural (Sterne 2012, 131). Such a critical stance can lead us to study whether the music streaming services, or we, the users, are capable of imagining alternatives. By interrogating radio as a format we might be able to investigate involved claims and notions further and rescue radio from its perceived triviality.

Radio as a contributing format When the music streaming services incorporate traditional radio or remediate radio in different ways, their actions mirror previous actions of the communications industry that ultimately regulate technological change and controls markets. Apple Music and Spotify do seem to offer new and exciting means for interacting with music. Conceptualizing radio as a format can show how radio works primarily as a contributing format within their music streaming services. This should not be taken to mean that the concept of radio is reduced. Rather radio is refined and especially the constituting playlists play an important role as structuring and perhaps even enabling formats in the music streaming services. As already mentioned in regard to internet radio, playlists are actual technical formats, whether humanly or algorithmically managed, which establish radio as a function in the streaming services. Just as Sterne eloquently summarizes the role of the MP3 format so the playlists play the role as cross-media formats that operate like catacombs under the conceptual, practical, and institutional edifices of media (2012, 16). Sometimes the playlists are labelled radio, which then performs as a contributing format in the software. But music radio moves between platforms, software, and formats making it a multi-platform and a multi-format concept, as I will illustrate with two cases. The cases are illustrated with screen captures of portions of the user interface of the relevant music streaming service.

Case: User-generated playlists in Spotify based on a proprietary radio show in Apple Music – The Alligator Hour with Joshua Homme This case briefly investigates how traditional music radio shows are reassembled as playlists without the host’s speech part. The purpose is to discuss how the

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digital formats are easily interchangeable and afford cross-media practices or more specifically cross-software practices. Although in this case the sonic presence of the radio show host, his voice, is lost in translation. Apple Music features several radio shows with more or less prominent hosts (Apple n.d.). Apple Music’s own stations are slotted together with internet radio stations within iTunes, although not as the media type internet radio but as a sub-category to the media type Music. This means you can freely listen to Apple proprietary radio station, Beats 1, alongside the global radio station BBC World Service and the local station Radio24syv. Apple Music plays on the remediation of music radio; should you choose to listen to a radio show that is not free, for example episode 21 of The Alligator Hour, you are prompted to subscribe and thereby ‘tune in to the Apple Music frequencies’. The Alligator Hour with Joshua Homme is in every way a typical radio show centred on a host who interviews guests and thematically selects music. Although the show is no longer running, the users of Apple Music have access to the different episodes of the radio show as well as playlists compiling only the songs played in each episode. Individual users who seemingly move between the one or more music streaming services then recreate his music curation as playlists in Spotify. Figure 13.1 shows the graphical representation of the playlists that pop up when searching for the ‘Alligator Hour’ in Spotify. Only by clicking on the playlists will the names of the users who have compiled and shared the playlists be shown. The four playlists depicted all feature several hundred tracks and the first of the playlists underlines this in its title: The Alligator Hour with Joshua Homme (All Tracks). The same user has even made individual playlists for each episode of the radio show. A further comparison shows that the playlist order of the episode playlists is the same although songs missing in Spotify have been left out. The three other users each only have one playlist supposedly containing all the songs played in the radio show. This detailed remediation of a radio show as playlists in another music streaming software indicates a high level of engagement (whether that of a fan or an employee). Keeping the name from the original radio show as the name of the playlist suggests that the playlist creator wants to maintain the realness of the radio show and its prominent host in the playlist, whose voiced presence is unfortunately not available in the form of a separate audio file. It should be technically possible and his voiced part of the original radio show could have been included in the playlist had other



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Figure 13.1  The four top results of my search for Alligator Hour in the music streaming service Spotify.

copy techniques been applied, for example tape cassette recording or stream ripping. Radio to playlist remediation of this kind also serves another purpose of cross-platform marketing. The user behaviour of the aforementioned and assumed individual private user can be contrasted with the user behaviour of user profiles owned by media institutions. This extends the radio to playlist remediation, based on a recently added option in Spotify with which users are allowed to adjust the metadata of their playlists (Spotify 2016a). BBC Radio and Zane Lowe, the famous radio host that left BBC for Apple Music, both feature as users of Spotify. They have created and shared playlists for others to listen to. Zane Lowe has five public playlists while BBC Music Playlists feature 130 playlists. BBC Music Playlists is clearly a corporately managed user profile. Its playlists mirror the regular radio stations of BBC as well as selected artists, genres, and events. In their description each playlist features a deep link to BBC’s internet-based software, iPlayer Radio, and the programme, artists or event mirrored by the playlist. The playlist functioning as a promotional link and the concept of radio are used to link the old and the new radio institutions. The digital formats are made easily interchangeable and can be seen as contributing to a heightened sense of user-friendliness as well as brand awareness given that the user can switch between Spotify playlists and the BBC live broadcasts.4

The same deep linking is used by other brands to link their products with music. For example, Nike that advertises its Nike+ Run Club by linking to its app from playlist descriptions. And this is only seen from within Spotify. I have not investigated the use of links into Spotify from the same companies’ websites or marketing campaigns.

4

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Case: Analysis of the differences between the Spotify radio function and their daily mix playlists My second case shows variations in playlist formats that are more or less radiolike. This could indicate an ongoing negotiation of the usefulness of radio as a contributing format in Spotify. While Apple Music has traditional radio and multi-format radio shows with accompanying playlists Spotify has different types of playlists that vary. These variations are more or less radio-like. The case exemplifies how radio is recycled and remediated in music streaming services. I will focus on variations in graphics and the afforded interactions as the visual elements and input options recall the concept of radio in different ways. Drawing from cultural studies Morris (2012) has researched the adjusting of music files to make them fit users’ music collection. The metadata of music files downloaded online or ripped from physical delivery technologies are adjusted to seem more like a commodity than an unidentifiable music file. I will borrow the term re-commodification from Morris (2012) to describe similar practices involved in Spotify’s iterations on the playlist format as either radio or autogenerated playlists. Spotify Radio is prominently placed in the top left of the Spotify software main menu, as shown in Figure 13.2. When using the Spotify Radio functionality the user is given options to interact with the music stream besides the typical start, stop, and skip located at the bottom of the interface atop the progress bar. When clicking the thumbs-up icon, a song is liked and therefore kept in the playlist that shows songs played by the radio station (see Figure 13.3). The liked songs are also added to an automatic playlist called Liked from Radio that collects from interactions with all radio stations in Spotify. Disliked songs are immediately skipped and removed from the radio’s playlist. The production and regulation of a playlist as radio station is presented effortlessly to the user who chooses the playback and supplies inputs regarding the optimization of the list and the generation of the list. In this way the radio as playlist playback becomes a radio function, in that it plays constantly until turned off but it is only music radio with no speech. Speech as representative of the agency of a radio host is redundant in Spotify. And here I do not account for all the varied roles a radio host can be tasked with from curating, socializing, branding, and so on. Instead, the algorithms of Spotify silently sets up the radio-like stream according to the users’



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Figure 13.2  Radio prominently placed in the upper left corner of the Spotify user interface.

Figure 13.3  Clicking the rightmost thumbs-up icon saves the played song to a playlist in Spotify.

wishes and lets the user correct the stream adjusting the content by linking or disliking the played songs. This means that Spotify can expend the need for a radio host as the user takes on the responsibility of self-curating the station to fit with the terms provisioned by the initial setup of the specific radio stream. Any other radio stream is immediately available as an omnipresent feature in the Spotify main menu and equally the radio specific interface presents genre-generic options in cases where an album, an artist, or a specific track is not selected to be the point of departure for the instantaneous joint curation of a radio station. Spotify Radio is conveying a sense of radioness by showing the content of the playlists inside typified radio signal waves. In this sense a radio signal is

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Figure 13.4  Radioness evoked by the graphics in the user interface of Spotify Radio.

emitting from the genre mosaic, the album cover, and the single cover for each of the three radio stations shown in Figure 13.4. So radio is ongoing curation of the radio stream to determine what comes next will be to your liking. But it is only one among different ways to find, discover, listen, and collect music within the Spotify software. The radio is in this sense a contributing format based on the concept of music radio with enhanced interactive features that allow for instantaneous and easy modification of the radio stream so that it fits with the users’ preferences. The underlying protocols, file formats, and list formats are hidden from view so as to not obstruct the user experience and secure compliance with the licence agreements with the music industry by preventing stream ripping. Such socioeconomic and infrastructural ramifications of design and format choices are more easily discerned with the application of a theoretical framework provided by format theory for analytical purposes (Ægidius 2017). The functionality named Your Daily Mix has a more proximate access to the users’ collection given the saving of favourite songs to the main collection playlist in Spotify, named Your Music. The Daily Mix functionalities shown in the bottom part of the user interface, shown in Figure 13.5, are similar to the Spotify Radio interface. But instead of thumbs-up or -down, as shown in Figure 13.5, in this case clicking the leftmost heart icon saves the current song to the users’ general unsorted main collection playlist, Your Music. But clicking the rightmost remove icon does not allow the user to remove the song or artist from the playlist.



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Figure 13.5  The control functions of Your Daily Mix user interface in Spotify.

Figure 13.6  Clicking either heart or remove in Your Daily Mix user interface in Spotify.

Instead, the remove function lets the user decide; whether a song or the artist’s entire catalogue should be part of their daily mix (see Figure 13.6). Unlike Spotify Radio, Your Daily Mix gets access to the main collections. What happens in radio appears to want to stay in the radio. This seems to keep the affordances of radio on par with traditional broadcasted radio listening albeit expanded to include user calibration of the content of the stream. On the other hand, Your Daily Mix appears to be Spotify’s evolution of the radio feature, which offers a sense of increased functionalities. They suggest a few mixes based on your previous listening while including what could become new discoveries (Spotify 2016c). This is similar to the rationale behind their radio function. But they vary at the point of inception as the Daily Mixes are set up as automated playlists based on tracking and analysing the users’ actual listening habits. I find this evident in their playlist artwork that mirrors the typical fourcover mosaic that is auto-generated for the users’ own playlists (see Figure 13.7). A superimposed graphical layer depicts a smart wavy stream of music and the official Spotify logo promising that they (the algorithms) will do the work of stream curation for you. The most radio-like functionality of Spotify Radio appears to be the fact that the music ‘stays in the radio channel’. Your Daily Mix might appear as a radio station but it is based on interactions similar to that of the playlists. The differences seem minute. This goes to show how the similarities between radio functionality and playlist functionality establish near redundant ways of listening within the Spotify software. These different takes on the remediation

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Figure 13.7  The graphical representation of Your Daily Mix in Spotify.

of radio based on the playlist suggest how Spotify is utilizing the immediate radioness of playlists as one of many conceptual developmental iterations, trying to develop formats that suit its users best. The remediation seen as refinement of the concept of radio or technical mechanisms of the playlists serves as a re-commodification of formats. Moving to an institutional level of analysis I could suggest analysing the role of format redundancy in the following manner. The music streaming services supply different product types or variations all based on the playlist supposedly in order to accommodate more user scenarios to achieve user habituation in the increased competition among digital music niches.

Conclusion These cases make clear that remediations of radio still can and should be analysed despite the naturalization of the concept of radio. Apple Music and Spotify do seem to offer new and exciting means for interacting with music. Conceptualizing radio as a format shows how radio appears to hold a significant position as a contributing format in the streaming services as both an incorporation of traditional radio (in Apple Music) and as remediated within streaming music use (in Spotify’s iterations on playlist variants). Although the broadcasted radio station Beats 1 works in much the same way as traditional broadcasted radio inside Apple Music, it only contributes to the palette of the music streaming service. The same goes for the radio function in Spotify that sits beside the Daily Mixes as yet another contribution to the ease of organizing the stream of music



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likely striving for user habituation using radio as a supplement ingredient. But in both Apple Music and Spotify the radio remediated for stream-based music use is prominently placed in the interfaces of the respective software, and this could indicate that the users value the contribution of the radio format within the music streaming services. As mentioned earlier, the specific ways the radio format is incorporated or radio is remediated in various ways could be further investigated as one aspect of the quality differentiation between the music streaming services. For the purpose of theorizing I have focused on the smaller scale to begin with, but further investigation of radio as a format should also consider the wider influences of the formatting of radio and reformatting between the walled gardens of the music streaming services, although they visit each other as brands, for example the BBC in Spotify with links that lead out of Spotify. Format theory also frames the mess of interactions, policies, and infrastructures that Freire (2007) sorts out as different discourses. But there is more to the workings of the format than the discourses that regulate how we perceive radio or streaming in different contexts. Focusing on formats does not hinder the inclusion of legal aspects like those analysed by Freire (2007). On the contrary, format theory is meant to pry open the lid of the medium and investigate cultural, physical, and political implications of infrastructures. This it does with a different scaling more akin to that of science and technology studies than that of traditional medium theory. The radio functionality can be seen as a contributing part of the general emphasis in corporate and technical discourses of the stream services as easy to use. This argument takes the music streaming services to be the work of the tech industry. Their push into the music industry or increased collaboration with partners in the music industry appears to be underlined by the tech industry’s focus on usability and user-friendliness. From a usability standpoint it is almost commonsensical that radio should be used to increase the user-friendliness of the ‘new’ music streaming services. Broadcasted radio is familiar to most music listeners and this garners a media logic by which we accept and can readily understand and use music streaming as a radio with all of its connoted meanings and inferred practices. Although in the case of Spotify there appears to be neither a place nor a need for the radio host, the users might draw on discourses of radioness and radio as an organizing metaphor. But it is the software functions formatted as radio that dictate how we can actually make use of the streaming services and how our use is regulated by the representations of the concept of radio set forth by the music streaming services.

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Consequently relations of power are negotiated through concepts of radio, user-friendliness, and increasingly multi-format music use. With radio as a contributing format we could determine that the music streaming services are using radio as a supplement ingredient. And this should be studied further. I have not touched upon the influence of direct or smart marketing. Such business practices entail music companies and individual musicians paying marketing companies for song placements on playlists or promotion of individual songs directed towards preferred audiences. Investigating these business practices at an institutional level could assist further evaluation of radio as more than supplement. The adaptation of business practices of the broadcasted radio era in the music streaming business could point to the concept of radio as an underlying yet main economic ingredient in the music streaming models. To gauge this effect Wired Magazine recently probed the data-mining hit-making powers of Spotify’s playlists (Pierce 2017). Amid talk of transparency and incorruptibility invested partners still need to slice the pie. Similar attempts to follow the money could be made with a theoretical framework that allows for a holistic analysis encompassing and linking the file formats, their role in the formation of new music listening habits, and the governing institutions and policies.

References Ægidius, Andreas. L. 2017. Håndteringen af musikfiler i krydsfeltet mellem downloading og streaming: En undersøgelse af hverdagens digitale musikbrug og remedieringen af musikformater [The Use of Music Files at the Intersection between Downloading and Streaming Practices]. PhD thesis, University of Southern Denmark. Apple. n.d. 2017. ‘Apple Music – Radio’. Accessed 17 November. https://www.apple.com/ dk/apple-music/. Bolter, Jay D. 2007. ‘Digital Essentialism and the Mediation of the Real’. In Moving Media Studies: Remediation Revisited, edited by Heidi Philipsen and Lars Qvortrup, 195–210. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Bolter, Jay D., and Richard A. Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brügger, Niels. 2015. ‘Hvad er webradio? Fra digital radio til webradio’. In Radioverdener: Auditiv kultur, historie og arkiver, edited by Erik Granly Jensen, Jacob Kreutzfeldt, Morten Michelsen and Erik Svendsen, 229–43. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Finnemann, Niels Ole. 2011. ‘Mediatization Theory and Digital Media’. Communications 36 (1): 67–89. doi:10.1515/comm.2011.004.



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Freire, Ariana M. 2007. ‘Remediating Radio: Audio Streaming, Music Recommendation and the Discourse of Radioness’. The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 5 (2–3): 97–112. doi:10.1386/rajo.5.2&3.97/1 IANA. n.d. Delegation Record for .FM. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Accessed 16 May 2013. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/fm.html. Kittler, Friedrich. 1994. ‘Observations on Public Reception’. In Radio Rethink: Art, Sound, and Transmission, edited by Diana Augaitis and Dan Lander, 75–85. Banff, Alta., Canada: Walter Phillips Gallery. Loviglio, Jason, and Michele Hilmes, eds. 2013. Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era. New York: Routledge. Lovink, Geert. 2014. ‘Reflections on the Mp3 Format: Interview with Jonathan Sterne’. Computational Culture 4. Accessed 13 December 2017. http://computationalculture. net/reflections-on-the-mp3-format/. McElhearn, Kir. 2016. ‘15 Years of iTunes: A look at Apple’s Media App and Its Influence on an Industry’. MacWorld. Accessed 16 November 2016. http://www.macworld. com/article/3019878/software/15-years-of-itunes-a-look-at-apples-media-app-andits-influence-on-an-industry.html. Microsoft. N.d. ‘Groove Music’. Microsoft Store. Accessed 17 December 2017. https:// www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/groove-music/9wzdncrfj3pt. Morris, Jeremy W. 2012. ‘Making Music Behave: Metadata and the Digital Music Commodity’. New Media & Society 14 (5): 850–66. Oxford Dictionary of English. N.d. Part of the Apple Programme Package. Pierce, David. 2017. ‘The Secret Hit-Making Power of Spotify Playlist’. Wired, May. Accessed 6 November 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/05/secret-hit-makingpower-spotify-playlist/. Shuker, Roy. 2013. Understanding Popular Music Culture. 4th edtion. Abingdon, OX; New York: Routledge. Spotify. 2016a. ‘Customization of Playlists (Cover and Description Box)’. Accessed 13 December 2016. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/ Customization-of-playlists-cover-and-description-box/idc-p/1299154 - M69770. Spotify. 2016b. ‘The New Audio: Reaching the Spotify Listener in the US. Insights for Brands’. Accessed 13 December 2016. https://brandsnews.spotify.com/ us/2016/06/14/spotify-tns-study-us/. Spotify. 2016c. ‘Rediscover Your Favorite Music with Daily Mix [Press Release]’. Accessed 13 December 2016. https://news.spotify.com/uk/2016/09/27/rediscoveryour-favorite-music-with-daily-mix/. Spotify. n.d. ‘The New Audio: Researching the Spotify Listener in Europe’. Insights for Brands. Accessed 13 December 2016. https://spotifyforbrands.com/uk/insight/thenew-audio-tns-study/. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Notes on Contributors Andreas Lenander Ægidius, PhD in media studies, is a research assistant at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. His PhD dissertation is applied format theory and a qualitative analysis of The Use of Music Files at the Intersection between Downloading and Streaming Practices: A Study of Everyday Digital Music Use and the Remediation of Music Formats (2017). His research interests focus on digital music formats, digital music business, cultural intermediaries, format theory, software studies, and sound studies. Alf Björnberg is Professor of Musicology at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests include popular music, music and the media, and music analysis. He has published work on music video, the history of music broadcasting in Sweden, the cultural politics of the Eurovision Song Contest, music and high-fidelity culture, and the history of popular music in the Scandinavian area. His most recent publication is the co-edited Made in Sweden: Studies in Popular Music (2017). Brian Fauteux is Assistant Professor of Popular Music and Media Studies in the Department of Music at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research focuses on popular music, radio studies, and music scenes. He is currently researching the value of music in the digital age as understood through the satellite radio service, SiriusXM. His first book, Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio (2015), explores the history of Canadian campus radio, highlighting the factors that have shaped its close relationship with local music and culture. Daniel Fisher is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, United States. His research in Aboriginal Northern Australia proceeds in two, related domains that bring together music, media, and the close ethnography of an urbanizing Northern Territory. The first looks to the successes of Aboriginal media production in order to understand its ramifications across Australia’s North. The second explores filmic and audio media making as political practices keeping in sight the broader ontological entailments of musical forms and media technologies in the everyday lives of his interlocutors. These closely knit endeavours provide the focus for his first monograph, The Voice and Its Doubles: Music and Media in Northern Australia (2016).

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Iben Have is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She studies audio and audiovisual media from an interdisciplinary perspective across media studies, sound studies, and digital humanities. Her most recent publications are Digital Audiobooks: New Media, Users, and Experiences (2016) and Tunes for All: Music on Danish Radio (co-editor, 2018). She is founder and chief editor of the online journal SoundEffects and co-manager of the radio archive LARM.fm. Ariane Holzbach is Assistant Professor at Federal Fluminense University in the Section of Media Studies, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her research interest focuses on media history, audiovisual, and television studies in connection with analogue and digital culture. She has published on the relation between digital culture and television genres, on children’s television content, and on media history in connection with digital culture. She is author of A invenção do videoclipe: a história por trás da consolidação de um gênero audiovisual (The Invention of the Music Video: The Story Behind the Consolidation of an Audiovisual Genre) (2016). Mads Krogh is Associate Professor at Aarhus University at the School of Communication and Culture, Section for Musicology, Denmark. His research interests centre on popular music culture and, in particular, issues of genre, mediation, and practice. He has pursued these interests in publications on Danish and Scandinavian hip-hop culture, musical censorship, format radio, music as a material practice along with issues of globalization and localization, drawing inspiration from cultural sociology, assemblage theory, and actor network theory. His research appeared in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Popular Music and Society, and Popular Music History. Meri Kytö is a postdoctoral researcher in music studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her dissertation (2013) investigated articulations of private and common acoustic spaces in urban environments, especially Istanbul. She has published on cultural intimacy in film sound design, sonic resistance during the Gezi Park protests, acoustic communities of football fans, online frustration of neighbourhood noise and apartment home acoustemology, and edited five books on soundscape studies. Currently she is writing on sensory agency of technology and the digitalization of the sonic environment. Julio Mendívil is a Peruvian author, musician, and ethnomusicologist living in Austria. Mendívil is Full Professor of ethnomusicology at the University of



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Vienna and Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. His main research topics are the music of the Andes and Schlager music from the German-speaking area. He has published several articles in musicological and academic journals in Europe and Latin America. His most recent publication is the book En contra de la música (2016). Morten Michelsen is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in the Section for Musicology. His research interests focus on popular music, sound studies, and the cultural history of early music radio. He has published on the relations between radio and musical life, on Danish rock culture, and on the history of Anglo-American rock criticism. Michelsen was head of the research project A Century of Radio and Music in Denmark, and his most recent publication is the co-edited Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio (2018). Pedro Moreira is Invited Adjunct Professor in the Arts Department at the Lisbon School of Education, Lisbon Polytechnic Institute, Portugal. He completed his postdoctoral research on music, radio, and migration in 2017 with a grant by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). His research interests focus on radio and popular music in the Portuguese dictatorship and in lusophone migration contexts, as well as music education and community music. He has published on the relations between radio and popular music during the Portuguese dictatorship, as well as about migration and music in the Portuguese community in France. Johannes Müske, PhD, is currently Scholar in Residence at Deutsches Museum, Munich, and teaches folklore/cultural studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research fields include culture and technology studies, labour studies, cultural heritage, popular music and radio history, media ethnography, and the anthropology of the senses. Research and teaching stations at the Universities of Hamburg, Zurich, Indiana University Bloomington, LMU Munich. He has co-edited a book on the history of Swiss Radio International (Die Schweiz auf Kurzwelle, 2016), and is currently co-editing the book Fixing and Circulating the Popular – Ethnographies of Technology, Media, Archives and the Dissemination of Culture. Steen Kaargaard Nielsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Musicology, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests cover a broad range of music and musicking, often linked by a

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prominent interest in phonographic music, both historical and contemporary, and the cultural practices and processes involved in its production and use. His latest publication is a co-authored monograph on the earliest Danish sound recordings, Danmarks første lydoptagelser – Edisons fonograf i 1890'ernes København [The first Sound Recordings in Denmark – Edison’s Phonograph in Copenhagen in the 1890s] (2017). Sandra Lori Petersen is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her doctoral thesis was on the mediation of relations through soundscapes in French phone-in radio programmes and explored the constitution of relations through listening, sound aesthetics and materialities. Thematically it touched upon intimacy and distance, the constitution of personhood, communities and multicultural spaces. In collaboration with the fields of building acoustics and psychoacoustics her latest project ‘What is Neighbour Noise?’ explores when the sounds of others are experienced as disturbing noise by inhabitants of multi-storey houses, implying notions of home and sleep and collaborating. Marcio Pinho is a PhD candidate at the Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. His main research interests are popular music, cultural studies, and the social history of Brazilian music. He has published on Brazilian popular music, and the book chapter ‘Antonio Carlos Jobim: The Author as Producer’ in Producing Music, co-written with Dr Rodrigo Vicente, is in press. Kristine Ringsager is Assistant Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, Department of Communication and Psychology, Section of Musicology. Her research centres on the anthropological study of music and identity, primarily focusing on issues of politics, musical affect, agency, and representation as related to migration, citizenship, and humanitarianism. She has published on minority rappers in Denmark with an interest in issues of citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and experienced otherness; on the use of hip-hop and urban culture in social work; and on the broadcasting of non-Western music and ‘world music’ within the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. Eric Weisbard is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, USA, and author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (2014). He has organized the annual Pop Conference



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of academics and non-academics since it began in 2002, editing three volumes of conference presentations. As a music critic he was music editor of the Village Voice, a senior editor at Spin, edited the Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995), and wrote about Use Your Illusion for the 33 1/3 series. His current book project looks at the literature of American popular music.

Index Ægidius, Andreas L.  6, 10, 250, 291–308 A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (McCusker and Pecknold)  256–7 A Sound for All Seasons (Petersen)  132 A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Brady)  169 Äänien ilta (Evening of Sounds)  98, 145–60 Åberg, Carin  234 Aboriginal Arts Board  53 Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (ACA)  52–3 Aboriginal voice  29 accent  70, 76–7, 79–81, 82 n.8, 85, 90, 110–11 ACCESS Alberta  125 actor-network theory  4, 9, 10 addressivity  49, 59 Adkins, Brent  221 Adorno, Theodor W.  2 n.1, 7, 9, 63, 236 advertising in audiovisual media  82 affective rhythm  206 Agamben, Giorgio  167 n.8, 168, 239 agonistic-antagonistic mode  19 Ahlkvist, Jarl A.  211, 223, 225, 225 n.14 Ahmed, Sara  82 Ala-Fossi, Marko  154–5 Alberta Educational Communications Corporation (ACCESS)  125, 128–30, 138–9 Alberta Government Telephones Commission  125 Alberta music community  140 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (Berman)  255 The Alligator Hour with Joshua Homme  299–301 Alonso, Androni  34 Alviña, Leandro  114

American popular music function, books about  260 America’s Music (Chase)  264 Ames, Kate  5–6 Amico, Lloréns  102 Andean mestizo music  107 Anderson, Benedict  11–13, 34, 97, 102–3, 103 n.3, 104, 146, 163 Andreassen, Rikke  77 announcers and DJ of Radio Larrakia  57 anthropology/anthropological  2, 5, 8–9, 18–19, 32, 35, 165 n.2, 171, 171 n.12 linguistic  28, 74 of media  28 of senses  165, 165 n.2 of sound  74 Appadurai, Arjun  34, 165, 183 Apple Music  291–2, 295, 299–301 archive as dispositive  165–8 archives  64, 99, 145–6, 163–8, 170–4, 179, 181–3, 250, 274 Arguedas, José María  114, 115 n.13 Arnheim, Rudolf  2 Arnhem Resource Development Service (ARDS) radio station/Yolngu radio  55, 60–4 Aroney, Eurydice  5 Asad, Talal  73 assemblage music radio as  231–3 musico-generic  190, 211–26 sonic  49–67 theory  9, 19, 190, 212, 214, 216–19, 231, 312 The Atlantic (Nevin)  263 Attali, Jacques  261 audile technique  196 audio formats  6 audiovisual collections  167

Index Augé, Marc  87–8 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)  52 autonomy, principle of  240 Avaruusromua (space junk)  155 Baade, Christina L.  2 n.1, 5 n.3, 6, 236 baião  109, 111, 113 Baker, Dorothy  263 Bakhtin, Mikhail  29, 49, 59, 66 Banal Nationalism (Billig)  153 Bangs, Lester  260 Banks, Jack  274, 276, 278, 280, 284 Barber, Karin  5 Barbosa, Valdinha  115 Barnard, Stephen  2 n.1, 79, 236, 243 Barry, Andrew  19 Barthes, Roland  86–8 Bauman, Richard  170, 170 n.10 BBC radio. See British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Beck, Ulrich  150 Benavente, Julio  116 Bendix, Regina  165 n.2 Bennett, Jane  212, 214–15, 217, 219 Berland, Jody  2 n.1, 6, 61, 65, 133, 213, 225 n.14 Berlant, Lauren  262 Berman, Marshall  255 Bessire, Lucas  2 n.1, 28, 74, 163–4, 174 Beur FM  71 Confidences and institutional framework  83–6 content of  83 diasporic cosmopolitanism  85 Vanessa’s voice on  85 website  84 Bhabha, Homi K.  102, 182 Bijsterveld, Karin  165 n.3 Billboard magazine  275, 283 Billig, Michael  153 Billings, William  259 Birdsall, Carolyn  176 Björnberg, Alf  7, 189, 193–208, 311 Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (Crow)  11 Blues People (Jones)  260 Bolter, Jay D.  9–10, 10 n.4, 250, 273, 276–8, 292

317

Bolton, Lissant  61 Born, Georgina  4–5, 9–10, 14–15, 18–20, 28, 122, 211, 212 n.1, 214 n.3, 217 n.7, 224–5, 230–2, 232 n.1, 233–5, 242, 244–5, 268 Born’s model for social mediation  14, 15, 230, 231–3 Bottomley, Andrew J.  10 Bourdieu, Pierre  104, 112, 112 n.11–112 n.12, 115, 133, 232 Boym, Svetlana  146, 157 Brackett, David  4, 6, 103, 211, 212 n.1, 213, 216, 216 n.6, 217, 217 n.7, 225 n.13 Brady, Erika  165 n.3, 169–71 ‘branded’ identity  60 Brazilian Music Department of Rádio Nacional  101 La Hora del Charango (Charango Time)  102 ‘musical nationalism’  103 No Mundo do Baião (In Baião’s World)  101–2 Briggs, Charles S.  170, 170 n.10 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  17–18, 121, 127, 130, 142, 200–1, 215, 222, 238, 243–4, 299–301, 307 broadcast licence  137 Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS)  53 Brothers Grimm  170 Brown, Lee B.  195 Brown, Michael F.  167 n.7 Brügger, Niels  296 Bufwack, Mary A.  256 Bull, Michael  165 n.2, 189, 203 n.9 Burarrwanga, George  59 Bussolini, Jeffrey  167 n.8 cable television culture  280 Cabral, Sergio  115 Callon, Michel  174 n.18 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)  121 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)  120

318 Index Cancioneiro Royal (Royal Songbook)  108 Cantwell, Robert  261 Cardiff, David  2 n.1, 13, 17, 230, 236, 241, 244 Carmo, Rogério  38 Casillas, Inés  267 Castro, Ruy  109 Cesare, T. Nikki  90 Chanan, Michael  195, 198 n.4 charango  106–7, 109, 114 Chase, Gilbert  263–4 Chen, Mel  50 Chignell, Hugh  5 childhood memories and listeners  149 Cholo  107 n.7 Chris, Cynthia  280 Christgau, Robert  260 CICRED Series  105 n.6 Cidra, Rui  40 CKUA Radio  120–42 and ACCESS group  128–9, 139 adult cultural and information radio  129 approach to programming music  142 broadcasting policies  123 CKUA Broadcast Guide  127 CRTC and  139 drama programming  123 education and radio, two-way relationship  123–4 educational and entertainment programming  121, 123, 130, 141 education-music-radio milieu  142 and edufication of radio  124–30 golden age  131, 133 licence renewal  138 Music Hour  132, 134 Musical Compositions  134 musicalization and uplifting taste  130–4 philosophies  123, 140 promotional material for  141 serious music station  138 sixtieth anniversary  132 Times in Music  134 voice for community  120 Classen, Constance  165 n.2 Clear Channel  267

Clegg, Johnny  70–1 Clifford, James  164 Coca-Colonization  259 Cocks, Jay  287 codified information  105 Coffin, Judith G.  78 Cohen, Anthony P.  12, 34–5 symbolic anthropology  35 collective memory  157 Combes, Francis  84 n.9 commercial radio stations  18, 29, 46, 140, 253 communitarianism  84–5 community radio  17, 27–8, 39, 46, 52–5, 84, 90, 154 . See also Beur FM; CKUA Radio; Radio ALFA; Radio Larrakia; Yolngu radio/ARDS community(ies)  1–20, 27–9, 31–46, 52, 58, 61, 64, 84–5, 120, 127, 265 building  2 concept  34 imagined  11, 13, 15–16, 40, 46, 103–4, 117, 146, 163, 232, 235–6 music radio  14–15, 20 musical  12 complexities of music radio  3, 211, 213–14, 225–6, 230–1 complexity (cultural)  9–11, 14, 16, 19, 29, 34, 66, 73–4, 79, 89–91, 177, 239, 245, 274, 296 Confidences (call-in programme)  71 and institutional framework of Beur FM  83–6 listeners discussion  72 loyal listeners  91 sounds of  77 technological sounds  89 thematic contents  77 Vanessa in  86 Connerton, Paul  157 Connor, Steven  90 conventional radio programme  145 Cooper, Martin  6 Corbett, E. A.  124–5 Corn, Aaron  62 n.4 Côrte-Real, Maria S. J.  42, 45 Cosmopolitanism  46, 60, 81, 83, 85, 90–2

Index Coulangeon, Philippe  112 n.12 Couldry, Nick  75, 90, 122, 189, 236 Country Music, U.S.A. (Malone)  264 Crisell, Andrew  14 cross-media formats  299 Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in Sydney  154 Crow, Graham  11 Crowe, Cameron  261 CRTC  120, 128, 130, 137–40 Cultural Associations community  37 culture and radio  17–18 culture of uniformity (yhtenäiskulttuuri)  153 Cunha, Manuel  36–7 Currid, Brian  15, 236 Dahlhaus, Carl  170 n.11 Daley, Cameo  66 Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR)  70, 72, 72 n.3, 76–7, 80–3, 87, 90, 212, 212 n.2, 213, 218 n.8, 223, 238 advertising in audiovisual media  82 engagement of Sveta Rubin  80–2 machine listening  222 MusicMaster software  223 playlist committees  223 policy change and new programme strategies  82 radio programming  80 Verdens musik and institutional framework  80–3 Danmarks Radio. See Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) Darwin’s radio landscape  54–6 Davis, Clive  260 Davis, Ken  140 Dayan, Daniel  32 Deaville, James  2 n.1, 5 n.3, 6 DeLanda, Manuel  212, 217, 233 Deleuze, Gilles  212, 217–18, 221 n.9, 233, 239 Delorenzi-Schenkel, Silvia  178 Denisoff, R. Serge  274 Denning, Michael  261, 263 DeNora, Tia  231, 264 Derderian, Richard L.  83

319

deregulation  18, 27, 190, 230 Derrida, Jacques  4, 216 Des Barres, Pamela  260 Devos, Anne Marie  115 Dialektik der Aufklärung (Horkheimer and Adorno)  2 n.1 dialogic/dialogue  2, 9–10, 19–20, 63–4, 66, 77, 84, 98, 155, 191 digital radio  222–3, 292, 298–9 discourse  2, 7–8, 16, 31–3, 35, 39, 46, 77, 84, 97, 102–5, 109–11, 113, 116–17, 128, 159, 163–5, 167, 181–3, 241 Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (Kittler)  104 dispositive(s)  97, 164–8, 190, 236, 238, 241 disciplinary  231, 238–41, 243, 245 of sound  99, 163–84 distinction  17, 40, 104, 117, 133, 190, 204, 212, 218, 225, 230, 236 n.2, 240, 244, 250 DJ and audience  57 Do the Right Thing (Lee)  256 Doctor, Jennifer Ruth  121, 127, 130, 142, 236 Dogeater (Hagedorn)  261 Dolar, Mladen  75 domestic telephone radio  177 Douglas, Susan  14, 259, 262 DR. See Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) Dreiser, Theodore  261 Drott, Eric  4–5, 211, 215–16 Dubber, Andrew  3, 9, 214–15 Dueck, Byron  32 Dür Collection at SRI  179–80 Dussel, Konrad  244 Dyer, Richard  77 Ebony magazine  253, 255 Echchaibi, Nabil  84 The Echo Nest  222 educational and entertainment programming  121, 137 educational broadcaster. See CKUA Radio educational radio  121–2, 124, 131

320 Index education-music-radio milieu  98, 121, 124, 131, 142 edufication  120–42 Ehrick, Christine  78–9 Ekström, Mats  194–6, 203 Ellington, Duke  132 Elliot, Richard  42, 45 n.7 epic mode  204–5 Eriksson, Maria  222 Erlmann, Veit  165 n.2 Ernst, Wolfgang  167, 181 ethnicity/ethnic  2, 13, 17, 27, 32–3, 40, 46, 73–4, 77, 82–4, 84 n.9, 85, 90–1, 154, 168, 171, 173, 181, 255, 261 ethnographers  169 ethnomusicology  28, 32, 34, 171, 173, 261, 312 European Broadcasting Union  80 Exner, Sigmund  172, 172 n.14 expressive culture  32, 40–1, 50 Fabbri, Franco  4–5, 103, 215 Fabian, Johannes  169 fado  28–9, 31–46 Fairchild, Charles  225 fantasy consumer  134 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Crowe)  261 Father of the Blues (Handy)  268 Fauteux, Brian  98, 120–42 Feld, Steven  73–5, 165 n.2, 261 female and male voices  79 The Female Complaint (Berlant)  262 female migrant identities. See Sveta Rubin; Vanessa Nacira Menadi Fermento Royal (Royal Leaven)  108 Ferreira, Sónia  32, 34 Fewkes, Jesse Walter  169 n.9, 171 Finding Her Voice (Bufwack and Oermann)  256 Finer, Ella Jean  90 Fink, Howard  123 Finnemann, Niels Ole  296 The Finnish Soundscape (first Äänien ilta programme)  151 Finnish yhtenäiskulttuuri  153–6, 159–60 Fisher, Daniel  2 n.1, 19, 28–9, 49–67, 74, 163–4, 174, 311

FM (frequency modulation)  6, 17, 31, 37–8, 54–6, 60, 71, 83–6, 120, 129–30, 137–8, 214, 237, 250, 256, 273–88 Föllmer, Golo  2 n.1, 18, 234 Fonseca, Ricardo  42 format  1, 3–11, 83, 122, 133, 137–40, 142, 190, 200–2, 207, 211–26, 244, 249–50, 253–68, 275, 278–9, 286–7, 291–308 foreground  137–40 radio  190 theory  6–7, 236, 251, 297–8, 298 n.3, 304, 307 Fornäs, Johan  194 Foti, Laura  275 Foucauldian disciplinary dispositive  231 Foucauldian theory on archive  164–7 Foucault, Michel  73, 97, 104, 164–8, 181, 232, 238–9 Freire, Ariana M.  9–10, 292–4, 307 French radio landscape  91 French RTL (Radio Télé Luxembourg)  8 Frith, Simon  2 n.1, 3–4, 17, 207, 211, 230, 260–2, 264–5 Frow, John  5 frustrating listener’s expectations  57 gaining identity  28 Gaonkar, Dilip  50 n.1 Garland, Phyl  260 Garner, Ken  212–13 Gates, Henry Louis  265 Geertz, Clifford  117 Gelatt, Roland  169 Gell, Alfred  29, 50 Gellner, Ernest  103 n.3 Gendron, Bernard  133 genre  1–20, 29, 41, 43, 52, 57, 62, 64–5, 74, 78, 102–3, 106–11, 113–14, 116–17, 129, 131, 134, 137–9, 189–91, 195–6, 199, 211–26, 244, 254, 257–8, 261–2, 264–8, 294 defined  5, 215–16 impact of race, gender, and region  258 and mediation  2, 189–91

Index musical  3–4, 6–7, 9, 15, 41–2, 46, 57, 113–15, 195, 211–12, 217 n.7, 219, 226, 249 national  101–17 theoretical development  5 theory  4, 5 n.3, 226 George, Nelson  256, 260 Gershon, Ilana  49–50 Ghel, Robert  274 Gibson, Percy  114 Gill, Rosalind  79 Gillett, Charlie  264 Gilroy, Paul  261, 265 Ginsburg, Faye  53 giving and taking voice  73 Glick Schiller, Nina  81, 84–5, 149 Global Beat. See Verdens musik (Music of the World) Goehr, Lydia  189 Goffman, Erving  49–50 Goldberg, Isaac  263 ‘Golden Oldies’ programmes  16 n.5 Gonzaga, Luiz  113 Goodman, Mark  281–2 Goodwin, Andrew  276 Gordon, Janey  27, 90 Gormley, John  139–40 gospel music/songs  61–4 Graham, Stephen  277 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler)  108, 168 Gravesen, Dana  5 n.3 Green, Adam  255 Greve, Henrich R.  6, 213 Grusin, Richard A.  9–10, 10 n.4, 250, 273, 276–8, 292 Guattari, Felix  217 Guralnick, Peter  53 Gusse, Isabelle  90 Guthrie, Woody  263 habitual listener  15 Hagedorn, Jessica  261–2 Hagerman, J. W.  130 Hajkowski, Thomas  97 Hall, Stuart  35, 150, 255, 264 Hamm, Charles  261 Handy, W. C.  254, 265–8

321

Haraway, Donna  73 Harzoune, Mustapha  76 Hastings, Adi  66 Haworth, Christopher  4–5, 216 n.6 Hayes, Joy Elizabeth  5 n.3, 97, 104 Hebdige, Dick  261 Hendy, David  6, 9, 16, 238, 249 Hengartner, Thomas  165 n.1, 175 n.21, 183 Hennion, Antoine  2 n.1, 8–10, 223 n.11, 231, 234 Hepp, Andreas  122 Herder, Johann Gottfried  170, 170 n.10, 173 heritage  2, 43, 105–6, 146, 157–60, 166, 166 n.6, 169, 183 Hernandez, Gilbert  261 Hernandez, Jaime  261 Herzfeld, Michael  165 n.2 Hesmondhalgh, David  215 n.5 heterogeneous milieus of music radio  123, 211–12, 218, 226 heteroglossia  29, 49–67 highbrow  136, 240, 243 n.4, 244 n.4 Hill, Jane  49, 66 Hilmes, Michele  2, 13, 15, 97, 104, 163, 175, 262, 294 Hinkson, Melinda  58 Hitzler, Ronald  112 n.12 Hjarvard, Stig  7, 122–3, 183, 189 Hobsbawm, Eric J.  102, 103 n.3 Hoffmann-Krayer, Eduard  170 Holm, Emil  242 Holt, Fabian  4, 103, 215 n.5 Holton, Kimberly  42–3, 45 Holzbach, Ariane Diniz  10, 250, 273–88, 312 hooks, bell  82 Horkheimer, Max  2 n.1 host voices  19 Howes, David  165 n.2 huaynos  109, 111, 114 Huff, Kelly  279 Hughes, Langston  263 Hujanen, Taisto  154–5 human-technology-world relations  147 Hunter, Tera  255 Hurston, Zora Neale  263

322 Index hybrid broadcasting  129 hybrid radio  39 hypermediacy  250, 277–8, 283, 288 identity, national  99, 102, 104, 149–50, 153, 164, 166, 170, 173–82 identity, production of, construction of  31, 34, 40–1, 116 Ihde, Don  75, 147–8 imagined communities  235 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Anderson)  11–12, 146 Imhof, Kurt  176 immediacy (transparent)  277 Indigenous radio  49–67 and anti-colonial politics  52–4 individual listeners  19, 28, 196, 222 Indvandrerradio (Immigrant Radio)  81 interdisciplinarity  3, 19–20 interface  6, 291–2, 299, 302–4, 307 intermediary  254, 315 International Shortwave Service  177 intimacy with listeners  18 iPlayer Radio  301 Irvine, Judith T.  49–50 Italian ‘free radio’ activism  52 iTunes  295–6, 300 Jacobs-Bond, Carrie  260 Jakobson, Roman  88 Jallov, Birgitte  90 Jaramillo, Deborah  280 Jarvad, Pia  82 Järviluoma, Helmi  146, 157–8 Jauert, Per  82 Jefferson, Tony  255 Jenkins, Henry  274 Jensen, Jens. R.  218 n.8, 221 Jerslev, Anne  5, 7 Johnson, Mark  241 Jones, Gayl  260 Jones, LeRoi  260 Juvonen, Arja  159 Kääriäinen, A.  159 Kadonneen levyn metsästäjät  156 Kaplan, E. Ann  274

Karim, Karim H.  34 Karpf, Anne  75, 79 Katz, Mark  169, 196 Keane, Webb  49–50 Keightley, Keir  135–6 Keil, Charles  261 Keith, Michael  273, 278, 284, 284 n.5 Kelley, Robin D. G.  258 Kemppainen, Pentti  201 Khan, Naseem  158 Killmeier, Matthew A.  279 Kilpiö, Kaarina  147 Kirkland, Ewan  277 Kittler, Friedrich  7–8, 10, 86, 97, 104, 104 n.4, 105, 109, 111, 116, 168, 298–9 Klassik Radio  295 Kosnick, Kira  32, 77, 82–3 Krämer, Benjamin  195 Kreutzfeldt, Jacob  87 Krogh, Mads  1–20, 123, 182–3, 197, 211–26, 233, 236, 312 Kronengold, Charles  219, 279 Krotz, Friedrich  194 Kuhn, Raymond  37 Kuisle, Anita  163 Kunreuther, Laura  50, 86, 88, 88 n.11 Kurkela, Vesa  155 Kytö, Meri  18, 98, 145–60, 312 La Hora del Charango (Charango Time)  102, 105–8, 112 Lacey, Kate  2 n.1, 9, 18, 79, 97, 156–7, 197, 199, 207, 234, 236 Laermans, Rudi  245 Lakoff, George  241 Lange, Britta  165 n.4, 169, 171 n.13 Länsiväylä  159 Lardie, Kathleen N.  126–7 Laronde, Michel  76 Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation  55 Larrakia Radio. See Radio Larrakia Larsen, Charlotte Rørdam  235 Latin America, national genres invention  101–17 Latour, Bruno  174 n.18, 224 n.12 Latour, Patricia  84 n.9

Index Laureano, Carla  37 Law, John  220–1 law of genre  216 Laws of Media (McLuhan)  276 Lechleitner, Gerda  169, 173 Legg, Stephen  239 Lehtonen, Mikko  150–1 Leitmeyr, Peter A.  163 Lena, Jennifer C.  4–5, 11, 215 n.5, 216 Levinas, Emmanuel  73 Levine, Lawrence W.  238, 261, 264 Lewis, David J.  130 Lewis, Lisa A.  276 licence, broadcast  137 Lindberg, Ulf  244 Lipsitz, George  261 listeners  14–15, 17 in abroad  177 action and preferences  6 and childhood memories  149 CKUA  133 cooperation of  14 Danish radio listeners  70, 72, 83, 235 frustrating listener’s expectations  57 ‘good listening’ practices  127 habitual  15 imagined co-listeners  159 individual  19, 28, 196, 222 interests and uses  18 intimacy with  18 listening to Confidences  89, 91 ‘middlebrow’  134–7 musical knowledge  138 principle of segmentation  18 radio in workplace  206 relationship with music  221 satisfy  131, 238 segmentation  211–13 strategies for attracting  282 survey  139, 221 Swiss and non-Swiss  99 trip  88 twentieth-century  17 women  265 Yolngu listeners  62, 64 listening, concentrated  18–19 listening, tap  197, 238 listening in/listening out  234

323

Listening Publics: The Politics and Listening in the Media Age (Lacey)  156 Littler, Jo  158 Liveness  61–2, 196 Locke, Alain  255, 261 Lomax, Alan  174 n.17, 263 Lopes, Fernando  36, 39–40, 43 Lott, Eric  261 Love and Rockets (Hernandez and Hernandez)  261 Loviglio, Jason  262, 294 Lovink, Geert  298 n.3 Lowe, Zane  301 loyal listeners  91 Löytty, Olli  154 Lusophone-French Association of Audiovisuals  38 ‘Lusophony’ concept  39–40 lyrical mode  204–5 Maabrändiraportti  160 Macaulay, Kirsty  6 MacGowan, Fiona  62 n.4 machine listening  222 The Magic Mountain (Mann)  198 male and female voices  79 Malone, Bill  264 Manikay, Yolngu radio/ARDS  62–5, 67 Manning, Paul  49–50, 66 Marcelin, Louis Herns  11 Marcus, Greil  260 The Market of Symbolic Goods (Bourdieu)  111–16 Markman, Kris M.  7 Martin, Richard  66 Mass Culture (Rosenberg and White)  259 McCallum, Joe  125, 131 McClary, Susan  261 McCourt, Tom  225 n.14, 279 McCrumb, Sharyn  260 McCusker, Kristine M.  256–7 McElhearn, Kir  296 n.2 McGrath, Tom  274 McLuhan, Eric  273–4, 276 McLuhan, Marshall  273–4, 276 Méadel, Cécile  2 n.1, 8–9, 223 n.11, 234 mediality  296–7

324 Index mediated soundscapes  147–9 mediating genres  2 mediation  1–20, 29, 40, 46, 50, 71–2, 74, 86, 88–91, 98, 108–9, 122, 189–91, 230–45, 249 concept of  9, 14 social (Born)  14–15, 230–2, 234–8 mediatization  7, 9, 14, 20, 121–3, 182–3, 189–90, 193–208, 218 of music from cultural-historical bird’s eye  195 as radiofication  196–202 theory  7, 121, 189 Meisel, Perry  240 Melo, Daniel  34 Melodiradion (Melody Radio)  201–2 memory, social/national  146, 157–60 ‘Memphis Blues’ (song)  268 Menadi, Vanessa Nacira  70–4, 76–80, 85–6, 88–9, 91–2 Mendívil, Julio  8, 15, 98, 101–17, 312 Mendoza, Zoila  107, 114 Merlan, Francesca  66 Michelsen, Morten  1–20, 123, 182–3, 190–1, 197, 211, 212 n.1, 218, 230–45, 313 micro- and macro-social radio imaginaries  14–15 ‘middlebrow’ music  17, 134–7 Middleton, Richard  204–5 migrant communities and radio  31–46 media  28–9, 31–46, 71–2, 77, 80, 89–91 Mikkola, Jukka  145–6, 155, 158 Miller, James  260 minority radio  27–9, 46 Monnerais, Thomas  84 n.9 montage-style programmes  199 mood music  135–6 Moorman, Marissa Jean  104 Mooser, Josef  175 Moreira, Sonia Virgínia  115 Morris, Jeremy W.  6, 222, 302 Mortensen, Mette  5, 7 Mortensen, Tore  244 The Most Popular Sound in Finland  151 Moylan, Katie  77 MTV. See Music Television (MTV)

Mullen, Megan  280 Murray, Albert  258 ‘Music – Sound – Radio: Theorizing Music Radio’ (conference)  2 music communities  12–13, 15 Music for Your Ears (programme)  134–6 Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (Negus)  264 Music Hour, University of Alberta’s  132, 134 Music in Everyday Life (DeNora)  264 music programming for foreground format  137–40 music radio as assemblage  231–3 community building  3 complexities of  3 convergences  249–51 as format remediated for stream-based music use  291–308 future of  206–7 genre and mediation  189–91 high/low as a disciplinary dispositive  238–41 and nation-building  2, 97–9 and politics of national identity  173–80 social mediation  234–8 social relations  236 studies  1, 9, 19–20 Music Television (MTV)  215, 250, 273–88 agreements and transactions  278 birth of  278–80 cable television culture  280 consequence of  280 first presentation of  280–1 Goodman, Mark  281–2 and oral discourse  280–3 programming dynamic  283–7 programming strategies  283–6, 288 remediation of FM radio  273–88 VJ  281–4 Music While You Work  200 Musica Helvetica  180 musical dramaturgy  124, 204 musical genres  4, 6–7 and radio formats  211–16 musical nationalism  103, 170 n.11 musicalization  120–42, 189, 193–208

Index music-cultural high/low divide  230–45 MusicMaster software  223 musico-generic assemblages  219–21 Musik under arbetet (Music during Work)  200 Müske, Johannes  8, 16, 99, 163–84, 313 Myers, Fred  53 Mystery Train (Marcus)  260 Naficy, Hamid  76–7, 80 Naidoo, Roshi  158 Nail, Thomas  233 narrative mode  204–5 nation  2, 12–13, 15, 34, 38, 53, 61, 97–8, 101–17, 153, 159–60, 163, 167, 170–1, 173–5, 181–2, 265–6, 268 nation building  1–2, 16, 97–9, 105 and music radio  2, 97–9 nation state  34, 149–50, 154, 164, 182 national genres  101–17 national imagination  163–83 National Radio Forum  125 nationalism  12, 97, 103–4, 116, 149, 153, 262–3 national  15–17, 27–8, 33–4, 42, 57, 84, 90, 98–9, 103–4, 106–7, 109, 111– 12, 116–17, 123, 131, 145–60, 164, 166, 168–83, 214, 238, 244 Nava, Mica  81 Nazi soundscapes  176 Neal, Jocelyn R.  257 Neale, Stephen  5, 215 Negrón, Gómez  107 Negus, Keith  4–5, 103, 211, 215 n.5, 225 n.14, 264 Nery, Rui  42 Nettl, Bruno  33, 261 Neulander, Joelle  97 Nevin, Robert P.  263 The New England Psalm-Singer (Billings)  259 The New Negro (Locke)  261 Niederbacher, Arne  112 n.12 No Mundo do Baião (In Baião’s World)  101–2, 105–8, 112 Noise Uprising (Denning)  263 novo fado (new fado)  41 Nozawa, Shunsuke  49–50

325

Oermann, Robert K.  256 Oiarzabal, Pedro  34 Olwig, Karen Fog  81 n.7 O’Meally, Robert G.  261 The Omni-Americans (Murray)  258 online radio  6, 215 online streaming services  10, 299 oral discourse  280–3, 287–8 Osborne, Richard  240 Otherness  70–92, 156, 159 Palmer, Robert  260–1 Papenburg, Jens Gerrit  165 n.2 Parnet, Claire  217 Patch, Nick  222 Pecknold, Diane  253, 256–7 Pedersen, Marianne Holm  81 n.7 Pedersen, Vibeke  77, 81 n.7 Peirce, L. Meghan  277 Percival, Marc J.  133 Performing Rites (Frith)  260 Peteri, Virve  147 Petersen, Holger Petersen, Line Nybro  5, 7, 122 Petersen, Sandra Lori  28–9, 70–92, 314 Peterson, Mark Allen  31–2 phonograph/gramophone  8, 18, 104, 104 n.4, 108–9, 163–4, 168–74, 181, 195–6, 198–201, 282 Pierce, David  308 Pinch, Trevor J.  165 n.2 Pink, Sarah  165 n.2 Pinto, Manuel  40 pirate radio  37, 201, 244 playlists  213, 266 algorithms for generating  1 automatic  302 committees  223 of The Finnish Soundscape  151 format  295 internet radio  299 in online radio  6 of radio stations  291 in Spotify  302 of Transforming Finnish Soundscapes  151 user-generated  296, 299–301 Plesch, Melanie  103 Pontara, Tobias  124, 202–5

326 Index popular music studies  2 n.1, 4–5, 19, 250, 264, 268 Porter Wagoner Show  253 Portuguese community broadcasting for  37–41 fado, identity, and experience  41–65 and radio in France  35–7 Portuguese migrant community  28 Povinelli, Beth  50 n.1 Pretty, Cecil H.  133 print capitalism  104 Producing Pop (Negus)  264 production culture  31 production of teleologies  211–12, 221–6 programme formats  294 Protokollblätter  173 Pµrregaard, Karsten  81 n.7 Quechua  107 n.8 Quiñones, Marta García  147 Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Ramsey)  254 radio archives  166 broadcasting  163 definition of  212, 214 educational  121–2, 124, 131 and family sentiments  62–3 formats  6–7, 212–15, 294–6 impact on musical life by  3 Indigenous  49–67 magazine  72 mediated vocal expressions  74 minority  27–9, 46 music  7 programmers  31 rhapsody  189 studies  1–2, 5–6, 12, 16, 19, 27, 63, 77 n.5, 87, 97, 178, 234, 249–50, 254, 258, 262, 268, 294 Radio ALFA  31–46 broadcasting for Portuguese community  37–41 programmes with public interaction  40 Radio and the Classroom (Lardie)  126 Radio Computing Systems  215

Radio Eglantine  37 Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century (Bessire and Fisher)  28 Radio Larrakia  56–60 announcements and interviews  58 announcers and DJ  57 government funding  60 music and news  57 social exchange  59 ‘Yaka Bayngu!’  59 and Yolngu radio/ARDS  61 younger performers  57–9 Rádio Nacional  101–2, 105, 108, 112–13, 115 Radio Nord  201 The Radio Reader (Hilmes and Loviglio)  262 Radio Redfern  54 The Radio Studies Journal/Journal of Radio & Audio Media (Hayes and Gravesen)  5 n.3 Radio Suomi (Radio Finland)  154–6 radiofication  189, 193–208 radiogenic programme  199, 207 radiogenicity/radioness  10, 189, 199–202, 293–4, 303, 306–8 radiophonic beginnings  70–1 radiophonic voice  74, 86, 89–90 Raffnsøe, Sverre  238–9 Ramsey, Guthrie  253–8, 260 RAMUND research project  ix–x, 212 real broadcasting  108–11 re-commodification  302, 306 recorded sound requests  145 recording and archiving technologies  181 Reed, Ishmael  260 Regan, Ken  120, 129 remediation  9–10, 52, 66, 249–51, 273–88, 292–4, 298, 300–1, 305. See also Music Television (MTV) Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin)  276 Reymond, Marc  175 Riggins, Stephen  32–3 Ringsager, Kristine  19, 28–9, 70–92, 314 Ritzer, George  211, 225

Index Roberto, Paulo  108, 110, 112 Robertson, David  268 Rolling Stone Illustrated History (Miller)  260 Rolshoven, Johanna  165 Rose, Tricia  261 Rosenberg, Bernard  259 Rossman, Gabriel  3–4, 5 n.3, 7, 211 Rothenbuhler, Eric W.  225 n.14, 279 Rourke, Constance  263 Rubin, Sveta   70–4, 76–83, 86–92 voice  82 Ruohonen, Kaisa  147 Ruppen Coutaz, Raphaëlle  175 n.21 Rytter, Mikkel  81 n.7 Salon de la Radio  78 n.6 Samson, Jim  4 Samuels, David W.  165 n.2 Saroldi, Luiz Carlos  115 Scannell, Paddy  2 n.1, 13, 16–17, 121, 230, 236, 241, 244 Scheffner, Philip  171 n.13 Schönberger, Klaus  165 n.1, 183 Schulze, Holger  165 n.2 Scott, Derek  238 segmentation  5–6, 17–18, 40, 46, 97–8, 211–13, 222, 235, 243, 255–6, 266–7 Seldes, Gilbert  260, 263 The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Pecknold)  256–7 Selling the Race (Green)  255 sentimental/sentimentalism  108, 250, 254, 258–66 serious music  7 The Seven Lively Arts (Seldes)  263 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman  12, 34–5, 46 shortwave stations  176 Shuker, Roy  211, 291 Siegel, Greg  277 Silbermann, Alphons  236 Silva, Fernando  34, 37–8, 43–5 Silverman, Syd  280 Silvio, Teri  49–50 Simonsen, Tore  196 Simpson, Kim  4, 213 Sister Carrie (Dreiser)  261 situational listening  198 Skovmand, Roar  17

327

Smith-Sivertsen, Henrik  201 social distribution of voice  75 social imaginary  14–15 social memory  157 songs and sounds of radio broadcasts  50 sonic assemblage  49–67 sonic avatar  64–7 sonic signature  57, 60 sonic syntax  64 sonorous capitalism  104 Sontag, Susan  169 sound archive  166–8 Sound of the City (Gillett)  264 sound studies  1–2, 18–19, 28, 58, 292, 294, 311 sounding minority radio  27–9 Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (Casillas)  267 soundscape  72, 72 n.3, 81, 86, 98–9, 145–60 of modernity  87–8 national  146, 160 soundtracking of everyday life  203 Sousa, Helena  40 Spary, Emma C.  173 Spiritual Defence (Geistige Landesverteidigung)  173–80, 182 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  73 sports radio  5–6, 222, 304 The Alligator Hour with Joshua Homme  299–301 and Apple Music  250, 299, 307 and The Echo Nest  215 n.4 free services  293 graphical representation of playlists  299–300, 306 missing songs  300 official logo  305 playlist in  302, 308 Rap Caviar  266 user interface  291, 305 user-generated playlists in  299–301 Your Daily Mix  302–6 Stachyra, Grażyna  206–7 Stahl, Heiner  236 Stallybrass, Peter  241 Stangl, Burkhard  169

328 Index Starkey, Guy  206 Stearns, Jean  263 Stearns, Marshall  263 Sterling, Christopher H.  273, 278, 284, 284 n.5 Sterne, Jonathan  6, 296–8, 298 n.3, 299 format theory  7, 297–8, 304, 307 Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Herder)  170 Stokes, Martin  80 Stoller, Paul  165 Straw, Will  133, 232 streaming  6, 10, 60, 189, 214, 250, 265, 291–5, 299–302, 306–8 Stumpf, Carl  171 subject position  72–3, 80, 89–90 supermodernity  87 Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC)  174, 177 Swiss music as spiritual defence  173–80 Swiss Radio International (SRI)  99, 175–7 The Symbolic Construction of Community (Cohen)  12 symbolic goods  111–16 Tacchi, Jo  9, 206 Taylor, Charles  14 te Heesen, Anke  173 technological noises and bodily sounds  86–9 Teixeira, Humberto  101, 108, 110, 112–13 theorization of media formats  6 Thompson, Emily  87 Thornton, Sarah  112 n.12 Toner, Peter  62 n.4, 63 Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (Weisbard)  253, 262, 265–6 Toynbee, Jason  4–5, 32, 215 n.5 Transforming Finnish Soundscapes (Uimonen, Kytö and Ruohonen)  147, 151 Truax, Barry  146–8 Trudgen, Richard  61 Turino, Thomas  34–5, 102–3, 107 Turner, Graeme  225 n.14

Uimonen, Heikki  145–6, 146 n.1, 147–8, 154, 158 Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Born)  28 Unda, Vidal  106–7, 110–11, 114 uninviting sound  61 uplifting/uplift  120–42, 175, 254, 262–3, 265–6, 268 Vanderbilt, Tom  222 Variety magazine  279–80 Vaughan, Guy  128, 134 Venäläinen, Juhana  158 Verdens musik (Music of the World)  70–1, 91–2 and institutional framework of DR  80–3 sound of programme  87 Sveta in  80–3, 87–8, 90 Vernacular Music Revolution  263 vernacular/vernacularism  81, 170, 225, 250, 254–6, 258–68 Vertovec, Steven  77 Vicente, Eduardo  105 n.5 ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’  206, 273, 281 n.4, 282, 286 Vienna Phonogrammarchiv  172 vocality, assembled  64–7 voice  13, 16, 18, 27–9, 49–50, 53–4, 57, 65–7, 71–92, 109–11, 120, 156, 163, 172–3, 181–2, 235, 262, 300 differentiation  74 of family and friends  62–4 figure of  70–92 and human society  79 of social subjects  66 ‘voice systems’  49 The Voice of Lusophony  31 Volgsten, Ulrik  124, 198 n.5, 202–5 Wagnleitner, Reinhold  259 Walser, Robert  261 Walters, Marylu  125, 128–9, 131–3, 138 Warner, Deborah Jean  169 n.9 Weidman, Amanda  73–5, 86 Weinhold, Karl  171 n.12 Weisbard, Eric  4, 5 n.3, 7, 211, 213, 218, 225, 249–50, 253–68, 314

Index Werbner, Pnina  82 White, Allon  241, 277 White, David Manning  259 Wicke, Peter  104, 238 Williams, Raymond  122 Willis, Ellen  260 Wilson, August  260 Wilson, Meredith  136 Wimmer, Andreas  149 Winther, Rasmus G.  222 ‘wireless telegraphy’ experiment  163 Wolfe, Tom  260 world music programming  80–1 Wurtzler, Steve J.  121 Yaka Bayngu  59 YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Company)  145 Äänien ilta (Evening of Sounds)  145–60

funded by Public Broadcasting Tax  154 monopoly status of  155 Yolngu Matha  55, 59, 62, 64 Yolngu radio/ARDS  60–4 availability  60 dominance of garma manikay  65 family sentiments  62–3 gospel music/songs  61–4 language  60 Manikay  62–5, 67 and Radio Larrakia  61 traditional song  62 translators  63 urban-based Yolngu audience  60 voices of family and friends  62–4 YouTube clips and  62 Young Man With a Horn (Baker)  263 Ytreberg, Espen  196

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