Between Exoticism and Ethnomusicology: Musical Representations of Greenland and India on European Interwar Radio

ABSTRACT

In this article, I investigate how colonized cultures were presented to “home” radio audiences through sound (music, speech, sound montages) during the inter-war years. The focus is on how a small group of broadcasts containing musical representations of the colonies of Greenland and India afforded the imaginative work and temporary imagined communities to Austrian, Danish, and British radio listeners in relation to the spatiality and otherness of distant peoples and locations. I suggest a typology of four modes of musical representation in broadcasts reaching from the European tradition of musical exoticism to the use of recordings of indigenous music.

Biography: Morten Michelsen is a popular music scholar and professor of musicology at Aarhus University. His research interests include popular music and mediation, music radio and sound studies, historical radio studies, questions of taste and music criticism, and popular music historiography. 2013–2018 he led the research project A Century of Radio and Music In Denmark (www.Ramund.ikk.ku.dk) and contributed to other large research projects concerned with radio. Among his recent publications on sound, music, and radio are three anthologies on music radio, including Tunes for All? (Aarhus University Press, 2018) on Danish music radio and Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (Routledge, 2019) on international music radio.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The UK Radio Times may be found at https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/ and the Danish programme schedules at https://www.larm.fm/. British newspapers may be found at https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/, the Danish at http://www2.statsbiblioteket.dk/mediestream/. All data bases are “works in progress,” and some of them have limited access.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Morten Michelsen

Morten Michelsen is professor of musicology at Aarhus University. Among his publications are ‘Music, Radio and Mediatization’ (2017, with Mads Krogh) and two anthologies on music radio: Tunes for All? (Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2018) on Danish music radio and Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (Bloomsbury, 2019) on international music radio.