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Musicians on Television: Visible, Audible and Ignored

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Keith Negus
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Abstract

This article focuses on the prominent anxieties generated by television broadcasts of musicians from the 1930s onwards. It explores three specific issues: first, a concern that television images of performing musicians are detrimental to the experience of music; second, negative judgments about the consequences of television sound quality; and, third, fears that musical value is undermined by the distracted character of television reception. Focusing on these particular points, the article also raises a series of more profound questions about how various strategies of looking and listening influence our understanding of music.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 131 , Issue 2 , 2006 , pp. 310 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions, which helped me clarify some of the ideas presented here. Special thanks to Katharine Ellis and my Goldsmiths colleague Tony Pryer for their very careful and constructive critiques of an earlier draft.

References

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4 The idea that television is actively constructing a version of the world rather than simply representing what is ‘out there’ is an idea that has been developed and elaborated in various ways by scholars studying the media. Notable contributions to this trajectory of thinking include The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media, ed. Stan Cohen and Jock Young (London, 1973), and the various writings of Stuart Hall, in particular ‘The Determination of News Photographs’, ibid., 226–43; ‘Culture, the Media and the Ideological Effect’, Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (London, 1977), 315–48; and ‘The Work of Representation’, Representation, Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Hall (London, 1997), 13–74.Google Scholar

5 Experimental television broadcasts had been demonstrated from the late 1920s and into the early 1930s. The first public broadcasts were in Britain. In the USA public broadcasts commenced during 1939 in New York City.Google Scholar

6 These descriptions are from the first Radio Times television supplement, initially distributed only in the London area with the edition published on 30 October 1936.Google Scholar

7 Details can be found in copies of the Radio Times held at the British Library Newspaper Library, Colindale, London.Google Scholar

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9 Asa Briggs, A History of Broadcasting in the UK, ii: The Golden Age of the Wireless (Oxford, 1965), 611.Google Scholar

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11 Cited in Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (New York, 1987), 270.Google Scholar

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19 I am drawing here on some of the discussion in Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley, 1993).Google Scholar

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39 Quoted in Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 236.Google Scholar

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45 This raises another set of questions about what realism in sound might be, debates that resurfaced with the additional dynamic range introduced by the CD when compared to vinyl recording. The increased range allowed recording engineers to accentuate the contrast between very quiet and loud passages, leading to complaints being made about how this attempt at sonic realism requires intervention from the listener: if you turn up the volume for the quiet sections, then you might have to jump up to turn down the louder passages later. The complaint here is similar to that made by respondents surveyed about television sound during the 1950s. Full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of the present article, although I would acknowledge the following remarks by Carl Dahlhaus: ‘it is uncertain whether … “musical realism” is an objective entity with an integrity which will stand up to examination, or merely the illusion of an object, generated by verbal usage’ (Realism in Nineteenth Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall, Cambridge, 1982, 10).Google Scholar

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63 See the definition and discussion of ambient music in Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices (London, 1996). See also Mark Prendergast, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance – The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age (London, 2000).Google Scholar

64 For a discussion of the pervasiveness of music in our lives see Kassabian, Anahid, ‘Ubiquitous Listening’, Popular Music Studies, ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (London, 2002), 131–42, and Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening and Other Moodsong (London, 1995).Google Scholar

65 See Stockfelt, Ola, ‘Adequate Modes of Listening’, Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville, 1997), 129–46.Google Scholar