Aural Nation: Knowledge, Information and Music in Early Australian Public Broadcasting

Abstract

When the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) announced the 2017 schedule for the Radio National (RN) network, all but one music programme had been dropped. Removing music from RN in a time of technological change – there are suggestions RN will become a post-broadcast digital platform by 2020 – reflects a deeper relationship between knowledge, information and the arts at the heart Australian public service media. Using historical examples from early Australian broadcasting this article revisits the notion of radio ‘liveness’ in the context of shifting understandings of knowledge production that emerged when radio was ‘new media’. Radio broadcasting’s ability to serve up events to listeners as if they were present had a critical effect on emerging media forms from broadcast concerts to dramatic news presentations. The article situates radio within the shift from traditional knowledge values, championed by music appreciation’s representation of European art-music, to information programming (including sports and news) presented to a new listening subject that was being formed within broadcasting. With the establishment of local practices to exploit the cultural impact of liveness, conventions emerged in the ABC’s national radio service that shaped its information programming for years to come.

Notes

1. Leigh Edmonds, ‘Wireless Waves as Cultural Glue; Tethering the Bush and the City in Western Australia between the Wars’, Studies in Western Australian History, No. 15, 1994, 99.

2. This article is the result of research conducted as one of a team Chief Investigators for an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP140102514 Cultural Conversations: A history of ABC Radio National). While I was based at Monash University, the project was administered by Macquarie University, Sydney. For a good discussion of the tension between arts and other forms of programming in the later ABC see, Liz Jacka, ‘Arts Programming on ABC Radio, Television and Online’, Report commissioned by the Community and Public Sector Union, March 2004.

3. R.R. Walker, The Magic Spark; fifty years of radio in Australia, (Melbourne; The Hawthorn Press, 1973), 130.

4. Keith Barry, Music and the listener: a guide to musical understanding, (Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1933), 5.

5. Ibid., 47.

6. Roger Covell, Australia’s music; Themes of a new society, (Melbourne: Sun Books 1967), 118.

7. Ibid., 117. Covell emphasises the ‘comprehensive’ nature of the concert-giving as it included booking and touring international performers. For a detailed history of the ABC concerts and music policy see David Garrett, The accidental entrepreneur – how ABC music became more than broadcasting, (PhD diss., University of Wollongong, 2012), http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3680.

8. Theodor Adorno, Current of Music; elements of a radio theory, ed. Robert Hullor-Kentor, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 135.

9. Lesley Johnson, The unseen voice; a cultural study of early Australian radio, (London: Routledge,1988), 166–7.

10. For further discussion of radio and social change as a ‘moment of modernity’ see John Tebbutt, ‘Imaginative demographics: the emergence of a radio talkback audience in Australia’, Media, Culture & Society, 28 no 6 (2006): 858–9.

11. John Tebbutt, ‘The cultural economy of radio and audio industries’ in The Routledge Companion to Cultural Industries, eds Justin O’Connor and Kate Oakley. (London: Routledge, 2015), 183–95.

12. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of perception; attention, spectacle and modern culture, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); Claude Debru, ‘Helmholtz and the Psychophysiology of Time’, Science in Context, 14, 2001: 471–92.

13. R.R. King, ‘Invasion panic this week; Martians coming next’, in: Radio Recall (Washington: Metropolitan Old Time Radio Club, 2013). Available at: http://www.mwotrc.com/rr2013_04/invasionpanic.htm; ‘Another wireless stunt’, The Advertiser, (Adelaide SA), July 7, 1927, 13.

14. ‘Hoax creates alarm’, Observer, July 9, 1927, 18.

15. Ibid., 18.

16. David Goodman, ‘Distracted listening: on not making sound choices in the 1930s’, in Sound in the mechanical age, eds David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 17.

17. For a collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings on media and incisive essays on their context and import see Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media, eds Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2008). Adorno’s early discussion of radio is found in Adorno: Current of Music; elements of a radio theory, 2009. For his discussion on Benjamin’s use of phantasmagoria see Theodor Adorno, ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin’, In: Aesthetics and Politics, (London: Verso, 1980), 110–41. Benjamin’s analysis of phantasmagoria is explored in Margaret Cohen’s, ‘Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria’, New German Critique, 48 Autumn (1989), 87–107.

18. Adorno, Current of Music; elements of a radio theory, 378.

19. John Anderson, ‘Art and the workers’, Worker's Weekly, June 10, 1927, 3. Anderson contributed regularly to early Communist Party publications and spoke about the importance of music and emotions in other forums. See Anderson’s collected publication at The John Anderson Archive: http://adc.library.usyd.edu.au/index.jsp?database=anderson&page=home (accessed January 4, 2018).

20. See Beatrice Tildesley, ‘The Cinema and Broadcasting in Australia’, The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 24 (Dec., 1934), 129–136; ‘Broadcast Programmes’, The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 31 (Sep., 1936), 62–9; ‘Broadcasting in Australia’, The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jun., 1939), 45–54.

21. Tildesley, ‘The Cinema and Broadcasting in Australia’, 135.

22. In this, Tildesley reflected a widespread view of class division within the ABC itself. Technicians, as mechanics and manual workers, were often compared unfavourably with broadcasters’ professionalism. See John Tebbutt, ‘Producing Radio National: history, class and cultures’, paper presented to the Australian Media Traditions Conference, (University of South Australia), February 2018 (unpublished, in possession of the author).

23. Spartacus Smith (pseud.), ‘The Decline of Music’, Sydney Mail, Wednesday November 13, 1929, 10; ’More delusions; haunted by radio’, Australian Worker (Sydney), Wednesday December 31, 1930, 17.

24. See ‘Too much listening’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), Wednesday January 15, 1930, 17; ’Listening in and out; some radio revelations’, The Argus (Melbourne), Saturday March 22, 1930, 2; ‘Music and drama; true listening’, The Brisbane Courier, Saturday May 3, 1930, 21; ’The art of listening’, The Daily News (Perth), Monday May 22, 1933, 13.

25. ‘Can Noise Inspire Music? Railway Train as Motif for Masterpiece’, The Brisbane Courier, Saturday March 29, 1930, 21.

26. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music’, Cultural Critique, 60: Spring (2005), 134–69.

27. David Goodman, Radio's Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

28. See M. J. Prictor, Music and the ordinary listener: music appreciation and the media in England, 1918–1939. PhD thesis, (Faculty of Music, The University of Melbourne, 2000).

29. Margaret Fisher, Futurism and radio. In: Futurism and the Technological Imagination, ed Günter Berghaus, (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2009), 229–62; Federico Luisetti, ‘Nonhuman Intervals: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Radio Syntheses’, Primerjalna književnost, Reading Live; literature, science and the humanities, 35 no2 (2012), 237–49. Available at: http://sdpk.si/revija/PKn_2012_2.pdf#page=240

30. Joe Milutis, ‘Radiophonic Ontologies and the Avantgarde’, TDR (The Drama Review), 40 no 3, Experimental Sound & Radio, (1996), 63–79; Alan Weiss, Phantasmic radio, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

31. Adorno’s own appreciation of music, following his education as a composer in Germany, was drawn to atonality, a style that attempted a pure music by avoiding resolution in a particular chord or key; atonality aimed to be an unsettling music. This modern style, developed by Arnold Schonberg, was a response to ‘classical’ musical harmony.

32. Adorno, Current of Music; elements of a radio theory.

33. Veit Erlmann, Reason and resonance: A history of modern aurality, (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2010), 283.

34. Theodor Adorno, ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening’, In: The essential Frankfurt School reader, Vol. 1, eds Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt (New York: Continuum, 1978), 270–99; Erlmann, 283.

35. Jonathan Sterne, The audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 182.

36. Ibid., 182–3.

37. Benjamin, The work of art 2008; Sabine Schiller-Lerg ‘Walter Benjamin, Radio Journalist: Theory and Practice of Weimar Radio’, translated by Susan Nieschlag, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 13 No 1 (1989) 43–50.

38. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, (1980), 127–8.

39. Benjamin’s last radio script, produced in exile in 1933 and never broadcast, was in the form of a fantasy criticism where a committee based on the moon reviews human achievement in literature. See Benjamin The work of art (2008), 350.

40. Cohen, ‘Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria’, 94.

41. Johnson, The unseen voice, 167.

42. Paddy Scannell, Radio, Television & Modern Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 83.

43. Paddy, Scannell, ‘The Brains Trust; a historical study of the management of liveness on the radio’. In: Media organization and production ed., Simon Cottle (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 109.

44. Johnson, The unseen voice, 169.

45. Frazer Andrewes, ‘‘They play in your home’: cricket, media and modernity in pre‐war Australia’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 17., 2–3: (2000) 93–110.

46. K. S. Inglis, This is the ABC, (Carlton: Melbourne University Press 1983), 37.

47. Ibid., 36.

48. Ibid., 37.

49. ‘Charles Moses ABC Federal Liaison Officer to reorganise news, weather, markets and talks’ sessions’, Wireless Weekly, October 18 (1935) Vol. 26 16, 11. See also ‘Memo to all states’, September 10, 1935. In: W. Bearup Papers, 1921–1982, Cleary, File: Cleary Unsorted, Box 8, Series 1572. National Archives of Australia;.

50. Wireless Weekly, October 18 (1935), 11. For the impact of the newspaper on early public broadcasting in Australia. See Inglis, This is the ABC, 63–6 and Neville Petersen, News not views: the ABC, the press, & politics, (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger. 1993). Newspapers constrained various public broadcasters including the BBC which gradually gained the right to edit newspaper copy from 1928 and created its own news operation in 1934. The ABC formed an independent news service in 1947.

51. Wireless Weekly October 18 (1935), 11.

52. Ibid.

53. ‘40,000 extra families listened in when was declared’, October 18, Vol. 26 16, 1 and ‘Voice of Mussolini’, October 18, Vol. 26 16, 13 Wireless Weekly (1935).

54. Johnson, The unseen voice, 166–7.

55. ‘Sydney broadcast, arouses distaste of listeners’, Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday October 5, 1935, 18.

56. Sydney Morning Herald (1935) Saturday October 5, 18 Ibid.

57. Scannell The Brains Trust (2003), 100 Ibid.

58. ‘Yellow broadcasting; war news from national stations guns and groans at recital’, The Argus, 1935 Sunday October 5, 24.

59. The Argus (1935) Sunday October 5, 24.

60. ‘Broadcasting of ‘war’ news; action by commission; plain tones in future, no colouring; protest by listeners’. The Argus 1935 Monday October 7, 9.

61. ‘Radio news, Commission’s order, Inquiry ordered’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1935, Monday October 7, 6.

62. The Argus 1935 Monday October 7, 9.

63. Neville Petersen, Who’s news organizational conflict in the ABC 1947–1999, Australian Journalism Monographs, 3&4, May-November, (1999), 8.

64. See Inglis, This is the ABC, 211.

65. Jacka, Liz. ‘“Don't Use the A-word”: Arts by Stealth at the ABC – a Latourean Analysis’, Cultural Studies Review, March 13 1 (2007), 50–69.