Classical music on the radio... why Thomas Edison got it wrong
In September of 1926, The New York Times shared a comparison of the radio and the phonograph from the admittedly biased Thomas Edison. ‘The radio is a big and new thing,’ he said, ‘but after the novelty has worn off, the phonograph will reclaim its own.’ While the inventor approved of the radio for sports listening, he believed the distortion of sound made listening to music via radio nothing more than a fad. A century later, his prophecy has proven vastly inaccurate, with classical music as the standard bearer.
The BBC Proms take to the airwaves
One year after Edison predicted music’s disappearance from the airwaves, the BBC began broadcasting the Proms concerts, turning a London concert series into a global one. Financial difficulties had threatened the festival’s survival, so Henry Wood’s opening night in 1927, which featured music by Elgar, Boccherini, Wagner, Grieg and Stanford, was just the boon that they needed. The BBC Symphony Orchestra was then formed just for broadcasts. When war broke out in 1939 and the BBC had to redirect its financial support of the Proms to war reporting, private sponsors stepped in, keeping the festival on air through the Blitz, with interruptions from air raids, and after the destruction of Queen’s Hall in 1941.
The entire BBC transmission system had been reorganised to prevent accidentally guiding enemy aircraft. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 had become analogous with ‘V for Victory’, thanks to the Roman numeral ‘V’ and the matching Morse code of the opening notes. And the show continued in the Royal Albert Hall and then briefly at the Bedford Corn Exchange.
Classical music on the radio... defiance during a time of war
Beyond the Proms, music broadcasts were a signal of culture persevering. Sunday night generally featured live orchestral and chamber music concerts, plus the airing of recorded music. Each Christmas, Harold Darke conducted the Choir of King’s College Cambridge’s A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in a chapel whose windows had been removed and replaced with tar paper and with the broadcast location not announced on air, adding his own setting of In the bleak midwinter to the service in 1945.
England was not the only country that relied on the morale that the radio provided. Switzerland’s broadcasts could be heard across Europe, and there are many German orchestral recordings preserved only from radio archives.
In Russia, the besieged and starving city of Leningrad embodied defiance with the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich. The main orchestra had been evacuated in 1942, and the Leningrad Radio Orchestra was rebuilt from survivors, military musicians and players who had been recalled from the front. Some of the musicians were so weak with hunger that they collapsed during rehearsals, and some died before the concert could take place. But on 9 August of that year, the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony was relayed throughout the city and on loudspeakers aimed at the German lines. Soviet commanders had even launched operations to suppress German artillery during the performance. Concert met propaganda, and the classical airwaves were host to a declaration of cultural survival. That same year the symphony was also performed on the radio in the US.
Classical radio sweeps across America
American classical radio had gone from a luxury for a few cities to something shared by millions every week. The New York Philharmonic had already been on air for a decade when the New York Metropolitan Opera raised the curtain on their own Saturday afternoon broadcasts in 1931, with Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. And shortly thereafter, the NBC Symphony Orchestra was created specifically for broadcasts, led by the celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini. Early in his tenure, Toscanini provided a platform for the premieres of works like Barber’s Adagio for Strings from Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8-H, now the home of Saturday Night Live.
It was Toscanini who described the voice of opera contralto Marian Anderson as one that ‘comes around once in a hundred years’. In April 1939, Anderson had been invited by Howard University to sing in Washington, but was denied the use of Constitution Hall because black artists were not permitted in the venue. An outraged Eleanor Roosevelt, along with Walter White of the NAACP and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes gave Anderson the Lincoln Memorial as a stage, and the concert was aired on NBC. A crowd of 75,000 in person and millions at home heard Ickes’s introduction: ‘In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.’
The birth of BBC Radio 3
After the war, the BBC Third Programme gave classical music a dedicated home on air. In addition to commissioned works from major composers like Britten, sound collages from Radiophonic Workshop enabled creators such as Delia Derbyshire to go beyond the role of composer or studio musician into that of sound builder. The Third Programme also aired radio plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Dylan Thomas. Eventually, music took over, with the evenings becoming BBC Classical, and in 1967 the genre was given room to grow on the new station Radio 3.
This followed the trend worldwide. Rather than trying to prove its worth, as it passed the mid-century, classical radio was able to reinvent itself. FM stereo had transformed the listening experience from mono to stereo. The distortion Edison so keenly identified was no longer such an issue. Dedicated music networks emerged. And radio became the primary home of new music.
The power of live broadcasts... music meets politics
Live concert broadcasts continued, some of which are records of American cultural touchstones. For example, in November 1963, the weekly airing of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on WGBH was interrupted by conductor Erich Leinsdorf to announce the assassination of President John F Kennedy, with the audience’s shocked gasps now archived for all time. Just a few years later, on Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon. From the spacecraft, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders shared the moment of Earthrise on radio airwaves with a biblical reading. FM stations provided their own music framing for the broadcast. On some it was the carol O Holy Night, on others it was JS Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’ or Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
Across Europe, classical broadcasts were used to bring countries together, with the help of the formation of the European Broadcasting Union. The Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concerts became pan-European events – something that would have been unthinkable during World War II. Their evening service Notturno is a partnership with BBC Radio 3, which is just one example of how EBU Classical Music Group allows stations across the continent to share their resources.
But by far the biggest change leading up to the 1980s was the takeover of studio recordings rather than live orchestras. Record labels were in an arms race when it came to the vast libraries of classical music at their disposal, and stations quickly took in the new resources. While the fidelity that Edison had claimed should be paramount was at its best, the exciting imperfection of live performances was somewhat lost in the day-to-day programming.
Classical music on the radio... state support vs public ownership
The state-supported radio model of the BBC has proven globally to be the largest distributor of the classical canon. In Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, cultural ministries and public institutions pair it with their own regional musical styles – the local classical; In Japan, NHK has a strong commitment to Western classical music. In Russia and China, classical music has long been a part of their prestige content – a form of cultural elevation with strong state support.
That being said, in the US public radio has held tightly to the tradition that the BBC and NBC created, where classical music is part of a larger ecosystem of cultural services. By the late 1990s, in the US there were only about 40 commercial classical stations. Eventually these were subject to format changes, and some, like Classical KING in Seattle, became non-profit. The music is technically content, but it’s treated more like a continuously curated environment. Unlike other music genres, the playlists are not subject to the input of consultants. The onsite music director is personally choosing what airs.
As state support continues in the UK and across continental Europe for classical radio, the UK does boast one independent classical station, which launched in September 1992. Classic FM emphasises accessibility and entry points for non-specialists. Often airing single movements rather than full symphonies, and keeping well known pieces in heavy rotation, the station has succeeded in being ‘something different’ in a format that, to some observers at least, does come across as very homogeneous. Whereas BBC Radio 3 generally continues within the long form, focused on historical framing and not shying away from longer works.
Classical radio... bringing people together
Public classical stations in the US tend towards a middle ground. While on paper they can be perceived as similar in structure to BBC Radio 3, they are actually funded by public support rather than government funding in any federal sense, and are shaped by commercial listening habits. Assuming most listeners are not specialists, they avoid sounding academically intimidating. But they do hold a structured respect for the music – most often airing full works, and continuing to partner with local institutions for live performance broadcasts whenever possible.
When Thomas Edison dismissed radio music as a passing fad, he was missing its ability to bring people together. Not just in terms of the music itself, but in the shared nature of a broadcast. This effect was convincingly portrayed just one year before the inventor gave his prediction, by none other than the deaf and blind Helen Keller. By putting her hand directly on the diaphragm of her radio she experienced a New York Symphony broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She wrote, ‘The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me.’ And as the fad has yet to pass, it will continue to do so for us all.
