Voicing world music on Danish radio

ABSTRACT

This article explores Danish world music programming during the 1990s, focusing on the radiophonic voice. Drawing on perspectives from linguistic anthropology, anthropology of sound and postcolonial studies, I examine the radiophonic mediation of the female migrant voice of radio presenter Sveta Rubin within the context of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s world music programming. Throughout the article, I discuss how her voice on air was placed within a matrix of commercial strategies, societal and institutional structures and technological transmission, which facilitated the production and promotion of her voice as exotic and assimilable. By doing so, I elaborate on the complex relationship between radiophonic mediation and agency, showing how the use of the notion of ‘having a voice’ as a metaphor for having agency often ignores the ways with which radiophonic voices, as sounding entities, are constructed, mediated and heard.

KEYWORDS:

• Radio
• voice
• world music
• otherness

Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to Jens Jørn Gjedsted, John Høyer Nielsen, Ole Reitov and Sveta Rubin for finding time and energy to share their radio histories with me. I also express my gratitude to Ole Reitov for kindly lending me his privately recorded cassette tapes, thereby giving me access to otherwise unavailable radio programmes.

Notes on contributor

Kristine Ringsager, PhD, is Assistant Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. She publishes and teaches about the anthropological study of music and politics, primarily focusing on issues of musical affect, agency and representation as related to migration, citizenship and identity. Besides her research on the broadcasting of non-Western music and ‘world music’ within the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, she has done extensive ethnographic research in Turkey, focusing on political and politicised Kurdish musicians’ experiences of censorship, and among visible minority rappers in Denmark, focusing on issues of citizenship, cosmopolitanism and experienced Otherness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The name of the programme Verdens musik was later changed to Verdensmusik (World Music) and in 2000 to Global Beat.

2 The LARM archive (see http://www.larm.fm) is a digital research infrastructure that facilitates access to Danish radiophonic cultural heritage. For information about LARM.fm in English, including contact information, see https://dighumlab.org/larm/.

3 All the interviews quoted in this article were conducted in Danish and translated into English by the author.

4 It also began adding television channels in 1951.

5 An interesting example is the 1931–1932 programme series of radio lectures entitled Exotisk Musik (Exotic Music) that was produced by the Danish musicologist and programme secretary at DR Kai Aage Bruun. The series consisted primarily of translated radio lectures by recognised European musicologists and anthropologists on topics such as Persian music, Chinese music theatre and African songs. Lectures were in Danish and accompanied by recorded ‘music demonstrations’ played on the gramophone (see Ringsager 2018).

6 The programme sometimes included pre-recorded reports from festivals or concerts and interviews with singers, musicians or other actors in the world music scene.

7 Examples of Sveta Rubin’s vocal radio performances are available through LARM.fm (see https://dighumlab.org/larm/).

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this article was conducted as part of the collective research project ‘A Century of Radio and Music in Denmark. Music Genres, Radio Genres, and Mediatisation’ (RAMUND, http://ramund.ikk.ku.dk/) funded by the Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond (Independent Research Fund Denmark).