Securing the aural border: fieldwork and interference in post-war BBC audio nationalism

Abstract

At the close of World War II, the BBC Director General called for radio that was ‘firmly British in character’. This article tells two stories about how sound was used to produce the nation in the post-war moment. The first story is one of radio fieldwork, listening to how recording technology was used to recover fragments of the nation through the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952–1957). The second story tells of institutional efforts to combat interference through international technical regimes and emphasis on fidelity in transmission. Both tell the same story of how sound was nationalized and nationalizing, constructing a nation free from interference. I frame this as a process of securing the aural border. By tracing and connecting these labours and materialities, this aural history probes how sounds are used to index nations, how listening is conditioned as a national activity, and what gets silenced in the process. Acts of securing the aural border sat at the intersection of cold war techno-politics, international frequency plans, anxieties about mass culture, and post-war multiculturalism. National purification limited representational space at a time of great demographic change, imbuing the nation with particular assumptions about class and race. This article concludes by questioning the politics of wavelengths and technologies, critiquing ways in which national identity has been institutionalized in sound, and thus challenging discourses of national culture.

Keywords:

• Radio
• fieldwork
• interference
• ethnomusicology
• nationalism

Introduction

It is an important continuing objective of British broadcasting that the programmes should be firmly British in character, and should, by reflecting our national environment and characteristics, have the effect of encouraging and consolidating listeners in their feeling for British speech, culture, and institutions.

(William B. Haley, BBC Director General, 1945)¹

It is fun to picture Haley with his radio, listening and fretting and asking himself: How British is it? Is its Britishness firm enough? Or too wobbly? But embedded within this scenario is a set of more serious questions about sound and the construction of nations: How do sounds come to index nationness? How is listening conditioned as a national activity? What labours are involved in performing nationalism through an international medium? What gets left out, excluded, repressed, silenced? This article tells two stories that address these questions; both tell of how sound was at once nationalized and nationalizing; both centre on perceived problems of interference.

The first, and main, story is one of how fieldwork was used to locate the nation, retracing the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952–1957; hereafter the Scheme). The second story is one of institutional efforts to combat interference through international technical regimes and emphasis on fidelity in transmission. The voice of the nation was constructed in terms of purity against outside influence; the management of transnational wavelengths was conceived along lines of national radio manners in tuning out foreign sounds; and an onus was placed on listeners to have high-quality radio sets in order to hear the nation correctly. I frame this as a process of securing the aural border. These practices fed into a much larger programme of delimiting acoustic national identity.² Each served to consolidate and authorize the moral geography of the nation in sound.³

By telling these stories, I aim to contribute to a pair of conversations: first, on how national broadcasting was never just national, but was constantly caught up in a dialectic between the national and international; and second, how the national easily slips across the murky line into nationalism.⁴ I bring sound studies into dialogue with the history of ethnomusicology, listening to how sound was employed to position Britain as exceptional within, or even separate from, the rest of Europe. The nation was produced on multiple levels. Field recordings and wavelengths were both delegated the task of circulating the nation, becoming entangled and flowing together out of people’s radios in post-war Britain. That this was enacted through a medium of porous boundaries makes it all the messier, and all the more interesting.

Locating the aural border

Writers have been indexing sounds and things to nations and nationness since at least the eighteenth century. A theoretical thread – winding back through visual anthropologist Christopher Pinney, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, and semiotician Mikhael Bakhtin – unspools at Goethe’s Italian Journey (1786–1788), which saw him wandering around Italy and marveling at the Italianness of it all. Bhabha terms this ‘national time-space’: an innate nationness that permeates and speaks through people and objects in any particular moment.⁵ Of course, he problematizes this, drawing attention to the ways in which national–historical time is constructed through elisions of doubleness, splits, and social contestations. In particular, he asserts that ‘the language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past’, highlighting the temporal play involved in nation building.⁶

This last point is particularly salient when considering the expediency of traditional musics for nationalist causes. Ana María Ochoa Gautier writes of the contributions of sound reproduction to the construction of an aural public sphere in Latin America.⁷ She charts the development of folklore studies in the region, noting how folklorists worked across academia, mass media, and government, and how folklore was mobilized ‘for specific political and aesthetic ends within early twentieth century processes of nationalization’.⁸ The result is that folklore and media existed in imbrication, with the conclusion that there is not a binary division between tradition and modernity. Instead, they mediate one another, animating a ‘constant relation between sonic transculturation and purification’.⁹ Radio is a key site in such processes, and Ochoa Gautier’s analysis is instructive in assessing the BBC’s definition of an aural public sphere in post-war Britain.

Studying radio means taking account of voice. More precisely, it means taking account of the confluence of voices that exist behind those that are transmitted. I thus follow Josephine Dolan’s argument: ‘… the moment of transmission is not a spontaneous event isolated from the ideological structures of the BBC. Rather it is a highly orchestrated production that is fully located within the complex relationships that play out between the BBC, its personnel, its imagined audience and its empirical audience’.¹⁰ But there is plenty of stuff that can be added to Dolan’s network – stuff that connects and mediates those voices, allowing them to speak to each other. Protagonists in the present study include recording machines and microphones, car batteries and electricity supplies, radio transmitters and receivers, wavelengths and magazines, amongst others.

There is, then, something of an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) bent here: much tracking of sounds; examining the agencies that shaped the sounding nation; understanding the groupings involved in this aural history. But I am no card-carrying ANT. Rather, I benefit from recent work by Georgina Born and Benjamin Piekut, who have discussed, developed, and problematized cultural constructionist theories in relation to music, identifying their shortcomings and prompting ways forward.¹¹ In particular, temporality is identified as a weak point in ANT. Piekut, drawing on Born, argues for consideration of the multiple temporalities in historical networks,¹² which is particularly useful in studying the concept of nation: always reliant on building a present from precise, multiple pasts. These authors suggest ways of redrawing and overcoming the disciplinary borders of studying sounds and their meaning in the world.

From a quite different footing, Philip Bohlman offers a terrific analysis of the multiple functions of borders in music, positing borders as sites of in-betweenness and unknowability.¹³ In-betweenness and unknowability were not of much interest to the BBC; but Bohlman shows what borders can be, which in turn illuminates, in this history, what they were not. I trace the sifting and sorting of selective institutional nationalism by turning, first, to radio’s internationalisms, before locating the Scheme as a site of messy national consolidation. I then attend to the mediations and medialities of radio fieldwork and broadcast. Finally, the BBC’s shaping of listening collectivities takes us to the points at which the Scheme crosses with other means of securing the aural border.

The stuff of radio

Rudolf Arnheim called it ‘the great miracle of wireless’: ‘The omnipresence of what people are singing or saying anywhere, the overleaping of frontiers, the conquest of spatial isolation, the importation of culture on the waves of the ether, the same fare for all, sound in silence’.¹⁴ Radio was heralded as containing a number of revelatory capacities, not least its ability to collapse distance. Internationalism was the basis of a form of media humanism: an International Broadcasting Union (IBU) was formed in 1925, basing its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, so as to align itself with other international and intergovernmental organizations like the League of Nations. The IBU foundation charter was even signed in the League of Nations building, in a ceremony that, for Andreas Fickers, ‘attested to the vision of broadcasting as an instrument of peaceful purposes’.¹⁵ IBU members heard in radio a means of transcendence: of the nationalisms inherent in national broadcasting, of class and territorial boundaries, in the pursuit of international understanding through techno-political diplomacy.

At the same time, radio developed in what Michele Hilmes calls ‘an era of nationalisms’, and radio as ‘national service’ was the dominant model of inter-war European broadcasting.¹⁶ Traversing these nationalisms and internationalisms, and central to the work of the IBU, were a series of frequency plans, whereby available wavelengths were allocated to national broadcasters. By carving up and portioning out the ether, the IBU sought to counter interference and contribute to European peace.¹⁷ But these technical regimes served to emphasize national broadcasting spaces, and delegitimize international broadcasting.¹⁸

The end of World War II brought a renewed enthusiasm for international broadcasting. Julian Huxley, the first Director General of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), lumped radio in with museums and libraries as ‘servicing agencies for man’s higher activities’, deeming it one of UNESCO’s earliest aims that ‘barriers to free, easy, and undistorted dissemination of news and knowledge between nations’ be removed.¹⁹ Elsewhere, British folklorists marvelled that ‘tuning into almost any wavelength one may encounter a folk song or folk dance tune bearing the stamp of its national character and identifying the country of origin’.²⁰ In each case, the unit of humanism, the thing to be communicated, was the nation. Broadcast sounds were invested with national qualities.

This heady blend of humanism and techno-politics was also a feature of the aesthetics of radio: mass communication fusing with art, social and technological progress combining. Early treatises by Arnheim and by Lance Sieveking speak of building sound pictures, appealing to the listener’s inner eye, welding music, sound, and speech into a single material, and presenting the world to the ear.²¹ This was the ‘stuff of radio’. And the stuff of radio met with what Walter Benjamin terms the ‘spirit of radio’ – putting ‘as many people as possible in front of a microphone on every possible occasion’ – in the development of radio as a means of revealing nations: to one another and to themselves.²²

Radio’s worldliness was synonymous with cities; as was the kind of travel afforded by radio – even built onto radio sets themselves, with European cities just turns of the dial away from each other.²³ Such urbanity marked radio out as a product and representation of modernity, which, for some, amounted to the emancipation of sound from place, while for others it became part of modernity’s broader crisis of experience, with its attendant fears of distraction and alienation, social disintegration, and a loss of listening skills.²⁴ In any case, the cultural forces articulated through radio – modernity, urbanity, internationalism – were perceived particularly keenly as a threat by those concerned with the presentation of nations as coherent and bounded.

Scheming the nation

Constructing a bounded and culturally coherent nation requires a great deal of work. Traditional musics are a good place to start, dreamt as the property and the language of the nation, aged and ageless.²⁵ Conceptions of British folklore had been formalized in the early twentieth century as Cecil Sharp’s notion of an ideal folk society – highly stable, conservative, and rural; unaffected by industrialization, literacy, or urban tastes²⁶ – attained dominance within the folksong revival. Although seemingly untenable after World War II, these opinions continued to hold sway in the post-war moment.

Launched in 1952, the BBC Scheme employed two recordists – Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis – while others were contracted on an ad hoc basis. All reported and sent recordings to sound archivist Marie Slocombe in London, who in turn answered to the Head of Central Programme Operations and project administrator, Brian George. The Scheme was at once a project of preservation and dissemination, the BBC as collector and loudspeaker. Yet despite being nominally a BBC project, the Scheme sat at the intersection of the BBC and two other institutions.

First was the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), the self-appointed custodians of English musical traditions, who seconded Peter Kennedy to the BBC for his post as Scheme fieldworker. Second was the International Folk Music Council (IFMC), founded in London in 1947 with UNESCO affiliations and a distinct European bias in leadership. The IFMC also believed it was contributing to peace, investing folk music with the potential to ‘play its part in the reconstruction of a world tormented by wars and universal catastrophes, divided by irreconcilable (or so seeming) ideologies, and weakened by a collective anguish and an arid materialism’.²⁷

Central to IFMC operations was Maud Karpeles, previously Cecil Sharp’s co-fieldworker and his ongoing champion, who more than anyone worked to secure his theories at the heart of post-war conceptualizations of folk music. Radio was accordingly heard as a great threat, considered the most damaging modern force to notions of folk purity. But the IFMC also attempted to work with broadcasters: on the one hand to make use of recording equipment largely unavailable elsewhere; and on the other hand to stake out a place for folk musics in national broadcasting and international exchange. The Council founded a Radio Commission in 1952, based on the assumption that ‘radio could play a positive role in the creation of suitable conditions for the survival and development of folk music in the changing modern world and folklorists must help it in this great task’.²⁸ Marie Slocombe was appointed as Secretary of the Radio Commission, adding to her role as BBC sound archivist, and committee member of EFDSS.

Many Scheme workers attended the IFMC conference of 1952, held at the EFDSS headquarters, Cecil Sharp House, in London. Radio was on the agenda as one of the conference themes, signalling its significance, as attendees sought to harness the capacities of the medium. Delegates represented governments and broadcasters, museums and record labels. A clutch of ethnomusicologists and folklorists were present, as were UNESCO representatives. All were concerned with the preservation and circulation of traditional musics as a means of shoring up national identities in sound. A mood of post-war optimism, mutualism, and friendly exchange prevailed, but there was also an effort to retain hegemony on the part of British participants.

The conference featured a discussion of defining folk music, leading inevitably to a muddle of opinions on tradition and transmission. Eventually the task was abandoned with the grouchy conclusion that it was ‘impossible at the present stage of knowledge to define folk music to the satisfaction of all scholars’.²⁹ But a provisional declaration was made, asserting, ‘folk music is music that has been submitted to the process of oral transmission. It is the product of evolution and is dependent on the circumstances of continuity, variation and selection’.³⁰ This was met by accusations of western bias, and not accounting for spontaneous creation; but these central tenets – lifted straight from Sharp’s conclusions on English folk song, and glossing over all objections, non-European opinions, and power imbalances – would become the official IFMC definition of folk music, and were baked into Scheme policy.³¹

By holding onto such notions after the war, British folklore was wilfully atavistic. This history of fieldwork is marked by its historicism; the Scheme cleaved closely to earlier dominant models of musical folklore, breaking only with its past through the use of modern recording technologies. Field recordings became a scaffold onto which the nation could be affixed. In this model, sounds were to be exchanged internationally, but only after being filtered through notions of national purity, and indexed to the nation.

Policy built upon echoes and atavisms was further informed by war and its aftermath, particularly a renewed fear of Americanization. BBC culture had initially developed out of such fear in the 1920s, and this tension became recharged when, in 1943, an American Forces Network was established in Britain, becoming the first break with the BBC’s government-protected monopoly.³² Christina Baade charts how the number of American troops stationed in Britain ballooned through ‘invasion year’ of May 1943 to May 1944, and how the implementation of a separate network posed a direct challenge to the BBC’s self-perceived mission of unifying the nation. The Scheme was part of the response: a salvage project, the nation constructed through musics subjacent to the national, the bottom-up represented from the top-down, a serious fiction.

The BBC ran the Scheme in accord with the logic of public service broadcasting. Monopoly privilege was coupled with certain duties, which – drawing on the work of Paddy Scannell – included: contributing to the democratization of everyday life; providing mixed programming with universal availability; reinventing a sense of national community; offering access to previously restricted events; and opening up communication for marginal social groups.³³ Scannell, writing elsewhere with David Cardiff, highlights how monopoly public service broadcasting is also invested with a sense of national pride, and ultimately links culture with nationalism.³⁴ The BBC did not simply reflect national culture, but produced it. And the Scheme, while hardly a top priority for the post-war BBC, certainly accorded with these nation-building endeavours.

At the close of war, the BBC’s international reputation was at a peak.³⁵ It celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1947 with discourse that it was ‘the leading broadcaster in the world’.³⁶ Post-war overseas broadcasting was focused on ‘the projection of Britain’ and the British way of life to other Europeans.³⁷ But nationalist discourse masked the messy institutional labour behind nation building, and how national culture itself was always contested, under construction and review.

Of particular concern was the need to fit four nations into one overarching national broadcasting system. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland had been precariously termed ‘regions’ – their national identities subordinated to England. BBC producers in London routinely got in trouble with their Scottish counterparts for referring to ‘Britain’ as ‘England’, and broadcast celebrations of ‘England’ were resented by the other British nations.³⁸ Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish producers were keen to assert distinctive national identities through broadcasting. All drew extensively on rural culture, tradition, and music, as well as industry and everyday urban life. And all, ironically, contributed to a composite ‘British’ national consciousness.³⁹

Even within England, regional stations took umbrage with the national culture produced centrally, which frequently presented ‘deep’ – southern – England as the essence of nationness. The North Region, in particular, produced a body of now-canonic urban and industrial documentaries, thanks to a school of writers and producers including A. E. Harding, D. G. Bridson, Olive Shapley, and John Coatman.⁴⁰ Post-war BBC restructuring responded with a push toward regional devolution and greater autonomy of programming. The 1951 Beveridge Report on Broadcasting spoke of introducing ‘federal harmony’ to replace ‘centralizing unity in London’.⁴¹

Yet resources remained greater in London than elsewhere, and centralized endeavours like the Scheme were still deemed necessary. Britishness, whichever way it is sliced, remained a fraught and freighted term. Its tensions were shot through the Scheme: between nations, regions, and ‘national regions’; between a centralized recording venture and a push towards regional devolution; between internal worry of monolithic nationness and attempts to produce the nation at home and abroad.

Bohlman writes of the historical belief that sound recording afforded the collection of fragments of the nation, which could then be reassembled. Recording technology thus ‘engendered a conviction that authenticity was inscribed in these fragments of the past’; that recorded sound could preserve the nation.⁴² But his set of references are recording projects conducted in Central Europe during the First World War, not after the Second. That little comparable work had been undertaken in Britain lent a sense of urgency to post-war field recording. Slocombe wrote that ‘we come all too late in the day with our recording machines … in another ten years’ time there may be nothing left to collect, even in areas which are still surprisingly rich today’.⁴³

And all this was written into a collectors’ brief issued to Kennedy and Ennis. The recordists were instructed to avoid ‘material of doubtful authenticity (e.g. musical hall or popular songs, singers who have been subjected to outside influences, etc.)’.⁴⁴

At the same time, the exigencies of broadcasting complicated the search; collectors were instructed to make recordings explicitly ‘for the purposes of broadcasting’, and were given detailed instruction on sonic suitability:

It must be born in mind that the main purpose of the scheme is to provide material which is acceptable for broadcast purposes from the technical and programme points of view. The main problems which will present themselves to the collector are: (1) is the material offered authentic from the folklore point of view? (2) Is the sound produced likely to be acceptable for broadcasting?

These two criteria should be considered together, and if the value under (1) is considered exceptionally high, a generous interpretation should be given to (2). It might therefore be of value to make a record of an old man with a little voice, if his song is of great folklore interest, even though it appears unlikely that the record itself will ever be broadcast in its entirety.⁴⁵

The needs of preservation and broadcast were not entirely compatible. The fragments of memory would become the fragments of montage. Radio aesthetics would be built into the recordings themselves, shot through with mediality, imagined audience, cultural values. All would become the stuff of radio. The old but not too old. For the purposes of broadcasting.

In the field

The first act was to return to the fieldwork of the past. Karpeles, working temporarily for the Scheme, headed directly to the descendants of singers recorded by Sharp. What she found were the ‘wrong’ kinds of song: ‘the popular songs of Victorian times and not folk songs’.⁴⁶ Kennedy was confronted with the same problem, bemoaning his fieldwork as ‘not easy as everyone sang Child ballads and popular crooners’ songs at once’.⁴⁷ Enacting Scheme policy fabricated a distinction between musics, performing what James Clifford calls ‘artificial aesthetic purifications’: recordists were collecting culture while expecting others not to.⁴⁸

Fieldwork highlighted the contradictions of using broadcast technologies to construct a representation of a culture free from ‘outside influence’. Certainly the Scheme made use of existing traffic in locating performers, often relying on singers writing to the BBC after hearing a broadcast to offer a ‘more antique or correct’ version of a song.⁴⁹ Folk musics were coterminous with modern telecommunications. BBC producers were convinced that recording people in their homes would give a more ‘authentic performance’, avoiding having to ‘transport the singer from his natural environment’.⁵⁰ But such talk paints rural populations as geographically and temporally static – bound to place and stuck in time. The institution saw itself as national unifier, believing that urban and rural populations could only be connected through the inscription and transmission of culture; that is, could only be connected by the BBC.

Recordists were accordingly provided with a battery-operated machine. The inherent politics of this technology were compatible with the Scheme’s anti-urbanity.⁵¹ Other technologies and techniques were quickly adopted. A loudspeaker was used, affording playback to performers who could subsequently offer ‘improved rendering on repeats’; a microphone stand was requested, as Kennedy observed that ‘there is nothing so disconcerting as having to hold a mike up to a person’s face when they are singing’; and there was discussion of using power extensions to keep recording machines in vehicles parked outside, so as to perform a door-to-door recording operation: ‘we can do our jobs so easily without any disturbance to anyone and be on to the next house in no time’.⁵²

Much effort was expended, then, on figuring out best methods and equipment. Machines, microphones, personnel, and techniques were shared across BBC departments recording the various fields of wildlife sound, urban documentary, and folk music. Field recording was paradoxically a studio art, as concerned with controlling and ordering sound as strategies developed in specialist recording spaces. But just as technologies were employed to order the nation, they imposed their own will on the results of the Scheme. The limitations of recording technology informed what the recordists could record, what was sounded and what remained silent, which bits of the nation were shipped to London for preservation and broadcast. Kennedy reported frequent machine trouble, which affected and sometimes scuppered recording trips: ‘23rd June, recording Ned Pearson again. I have been waiting nearly six years to get him really well recorded and now finally I was flawed by machine breakdown at the crucial moment’.⁵³

Further processes of selection and rejection awaited; there was Slocombe in London, listening. Exactly what was deemed suitable ‘for the purposes of broadcasting’ becomes clearer: ‘I’m afraid I have been rather ruthless with this one (partly because of recording quality)’; ‘I’m afraid I don’t think this player is good enough to be broadcast’; ‘Mrs Vincent is so very out of tune – I’m so sorry’.⁵⁴ Slocombe’s job as gatekeeper involved sifting through recordings to find those that ticked boxes of sonic intelligibility, musical proficiency, and more. Vetoes were further applied elsewhere, with senior producers rejecting songs deemed potentially offensive to listeners, cleaning up tradition to accord with the BBC’s take on national character.⁵⁵

Recordists were also attuned to the needs of broadcasting. They carried the Scheme ethos, ‘for the purposes of broadcasting’, around with them, resounding in their ears and into their microphones. A particular form of radio fieldwork emerges. Kennedy wrote of his experimentation while recording dancing to give a ‘changing sound picture’, his practice aligning with the theory of radio experimentalists Sieveking and Arnheim. He emphasized keynote sounds – described by Karin Bijsterveld, drawing on R. Murray Schafer, as ‘sounds that make up the background sound of a sonic environment’⁵⁶ – in his reports, writing variously of making recordings in farmyards ‘with local sound effects’, and coaxing singers to make recordings while fishing ‘in order to record shanties on board with boat effects’. Sonic context was as important as recorded text. He even wrote to a colleague in Scotland advising him not to send further recordings of singers, on the grounds that the Scheme’s focus was to ‘get a wide variety of material, not just in collecting actual songs. You see it is programme material that is required in a general way, sound effects etc.’⁵⁷

Slocombe, reviewing Scheme progress, asserted that much ‘useful material’ had been gathered. She acknowledged that ‘the items recorded have not always been folk music in the purest sense of the term … any material of strong local flavour, or of potential use as incidental background, is thought to be of value’.⁵⁸ Concern with keynote sounds and ‘local flavour’, and prioritizing broadcast needs over self-imposed definitions of tradition show the Scheme’s purifications were difficult to implement in practice. And these medialities were woven into broader radio aesthetics as field recordings reached the public ear.

On the air

The Controller of the Light Programme, Kenneth Adam, wrote in spring 1953 to Brian George requesting a program ‘embodying the results of your folksong researches’. He wanted a show ‘on popular lines … to supply the results of your fieldwork in a lively, interesting and varied way’.⁵⁹ The program As I Roved Out was launched as a companion to the Scheme in September 1953. The Radio Times – the BBC’s print mouthpiece – commented: ‘listeners will be invited to share the adventures and discoveries of these BBC “collectors”’ (Radio Times, September 25, 1953).

BBC broadcasting had been restructured into three domestic programmes at the end of the war. The Home Service offered mixed programming and hosted regional broadcasting; the Third Programme was directed at a ‘highly intelligent minority audience’; and, succeeding the populist wartime Forces Programme, the Light Programme was launched to broadcast ‘popular, but not rubbishy’ material.⁶⁰ The latter station quickly garnered a predominantly working-class audience, although the BBC claimed it was ‘designed to appeal not so much to a certain class of listener, but to all listeners when they are in certain moods’.⁶¹ It broadcast a modified form of light entertainment, developed by the BBC in the inter-war period, and earmarked by Simon Frith as a distinctly British middlebrow culture.⁶² The aim with the three programmes was to guide listeners ‘up the cultural scale’, from Light to Home to Third.⁶³ All three stations made claims on the British character, and, despite its lightness, the Light Programme continued the BBC tradition of infusing entertainment with edification.

Airing on Sunday mornings, As I Roved Out presented field recordings to the listening public in fragments, rarely over a minute in length, alongside chamber orchestra arrangements and studio performances of the same melodies. Spike Hughes – popular entertainer, jazz composer, and opera critic – compèred programmes, while recordists gave accounts of fieldtrips from the studio. Programme content was contested, as producer Harold Rogers sought to square the results of fieldwork with Light Programme populism.⁶⁴

The show’s theme tune was consistent with demands for ‘lively, interesting and varied’ content: a verse of a field recording of Sarah Makem singing ‘As I Roved Out’ – recorded by Kennedy at Makem’s home in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in July 1952 – segued into an arrangement of the same melody for violin, cello, guitar, accordion, and flute. The programme’s house band of BBC-contracted session musicians was led by tango band leader Eugene Pini, and his brother, Anthony, principal cellist in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Studio cosmopolitanism was presented as archetypically national music, as programmes focused on the parts of Britain supposedly free from outside interference. The majority of the first season’s 25 shows were given to counties of rural southern England, with a handful focused on music from northern Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The largely (but also largely not) industrial north of England remained silent, as did Scotland’s central belt.

In bridging fieldwork and light entertainment, these programmes were not simply presenting music, but the activity and experience of finding and recording music. They functioned as audio travelogues through selected regions of Britain; field recordings served as landmarks on the route. The notion of the wandering microphone had developed earlier, in the late 1920s, unifying the diverse sounds of a city or locale, region or nation, through montage.⁶⁵ With the Scheme and its broadcast extensions, the ‘roving out’ was that of the microphone, dependent upon new technologies to situate sounds as cultural heritage, to portray remoteness by dint of connectedness and access.

Frith argues that the BBC Sunday reflected a ‘set of assumptions about the place of the weekend in the organization of family life’.⁶⁶ Henri Lefebvre makes a similar point, sketching how the media produce the everyday through use of rhythm. These media rhythms change according to intention and the hour: ‘soft and tender for the return from work, times of relaxation, the evening and Sunday’.⁶⁷ The programme’s theme tune – a field recording melted into a chamber orchestra – encapsulates the process of the BBC shooting squarely for the middlebrow. Fieldwork is transposed into the key of leisure, sonically suitable for the BBC Sunday. Field recordings had to be fragmented to be digestible, to lock into the values associated with domestic listening, to accord with what the nation should sound like.

As I Roved Out slotted into broader folk music programming, soon becoming one of the BBC’s main national vehicles for broadcasting traditional musics. It supplanted Country Magazine (1942–54), a programme on rural life and heritage that featured one folksong per episode arranged by musicologist and collector Francis Collinson. Regional stations also produced many programmes including traditional musics, but few were broadcast across all of Britain, and none claimed to represent the nation in the same way. Peggy Duesenberry details traditional music broadcasting in Scotland before, during, and after World War II, highlighting how Scottish broadcasting shaped musical performance and reception, not least by auditioning musicians and ensembles to test suitability for broadcast. This policy meant that ‘performers deemed too “rough” for the sensibilities of BBC producers had no chance to be heard’.⁶⁸ Slocombe, too, remarked that folk music appeared most often in choral or orchestral arrangement.⁶⁹ The idea of folk music sat awkwardly in BBC musical hierarchies of classical and light, serious and popular.

Field recordings brought their own problems. For Slocombe, the Scheme differed from earlier BBC recording work as it had greater resources, and was a systematic nationwide endeavour.⁷⁰ Yet she relayed to the IFMC how the presentation of folk music ‘in the raw’ and in ‘arranged form’ was subject to much internal disagreement within the BBC: ‘We are still arguing about it.’⁷¹ Scheme recordings nevertheless appeared in programmes with such suggestive titles as: Music of the People, In Search of Music, Folk Song Forum, Primitive Music, Folk Music of the British Isles, and Postmark U.K.⁷² They were a source material – an act of national phonography – translating scattered voices into national sound, constructing tradition as a tidy genre.

In many ways, then, the Scheme was not primarily about any particular programme, but was a nation-building exercise: about contributing to history, and constructing a big sonic stock of ‘Britain’ to be archived and exchanged, at a moment when national identity was somewhat ‘up for grabs’. So while the Scheme and its broadcast extensions were by no means central to general post-war BBC activities, it developed in lockstep with efforts to delimit the nation, to develop programming that was ‘firmly British in character’. It was one of many ways the BBC produced the nation, sitting alongside Third Programme refinement, careful appropriations of other cultures, and singularity through regionalism.

The effort to archive and broadcast a sonic ‘Britain’ did not preclude the archiving and broadcasting of other nations. It was not an act of sonic isolationism, or a block on sounds from other nations within BBC output. Folk music programming included broadcasts of material from the American folk revival, mostly presented by Alan Lomax, who also produced series on Italian and Spanish musics, based on his own fieldwork while in Europe.⁷³ But it was a process of national purification, a clear demarcation of ‘British’ from ‘foreign’, so that the nation became a coherent entity to be projected at home and promoted overseas. This model of securing the aural border was territorial. It joined a history of audio decontamination in Britain,⁷⁴ and whittled ‘national music’ down to an essentialized traditional core, readying it for transnational communication. Representational space was thus severely limited, and this production of nation involved a deliberate avoidance of three intertwined phenomena that challenged the binary of the national and international in post-war Britain: migration, displacement, and multiculturalism.

Karathanasopoulou and Crisell make the point that radio has never been just an observer, distributer, and preserver. In recording culture, ‘the media are also recording themselves’.⁷⁵ An earlier point can be inverted: just as traditional musics were part of modern telecommunications, those same telecommunications were part of traditional musics. Moreover, the sounds archived and broadcast through the Scheme were the product of the medium. So when Jonathan Sterne writes that sounds ‘are not plucked from the world for deposit and transmission’ but ‘come to exist in the first place in order to be reproduced through the network’, this holds true for the Scheme.⁷⁶ Those recorded were singing for the medium – singing to the network.

Scheme recordings were created and broadcast through a tangle of policy makers, producers, archivists, recordists, musicians, imagined and empirical audiences; also recording machines, car batteries, transmitters and receivers, radio sets, historical ideas and their material extensions, and a host of institutional practices and other everyday technologies. The Scheme was an orchestration, an event, collapsing temporalities and employing technologies to organize a national aural public sphere. Radio fieldwork and broadcast, collecting and collectivity, are part of the same creative practice. Scheme recordings are the BBC recording the nation in its own (sound) image. They are the BBC recording itself.

Unifying the radiauds

Radio listening has a distinct history. Even the language used to describe audience members has been contested. Laura Tunbridge charts how the word listener was placed in inverted commas in early issues of the Radio Times, and was jostling with other terms, notably ‘listener-in’, for prominence. Others wanted to be more specific: a 1923 letter from an amateur Wireless Society expressed a preference for the term ‘radiaud’, which would mark the difference between ‘the man who is listening to the street corner orator and a member of the vast unseen audience’.⁷⁷

Logically enough, a number of writers have applied Benedict Anderson’s concept of Imagined Communities to radio, demonstrating how ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ within nations is conceived and performed through broadcast sound.⁷⁸ Yet admission to such communities can be conditional. Frith comments that membership of the BBC’s listening public was contingent on a set of radio manners, which made it possible for people and types of listening to be excluded.⁷⁹ This was even more the case with the production side of broadcasting. The BBC enacted Benjamin’s ‘spirit of radio’ to a degree, but this remained an act of what Andrew Jones terms ‘political ventriloquism’: recordists and producers speak for – and thus silence – the objects of their sonic representation.⁸⁰

We are led back to voice. Michele Hilmes, also drawing on Anderson’s Imagined Communities, posits radio as ‘a machine for the circulation of narratives and representations that rehearse and justify the structures of order underlying national identity’.⁸¹ But she argues against the idea that radio speaks univocally. Questions of social order dictate who speaks and who does not, who is addressed and not addressed, what is said and not said (or sung). At issue is who gets into the nation and who does not.⁸² Constructing the nation through radio means silencing, just as the nation itself is a silencer.

What was the voice of the nation construed by the Scheme? Scheme logic, its roots in survivals theory, and a hostility toward industrialization served to systematically exclude music from urban centres; many demographics and large parts of Britain fall out of the nation entirely. State-sponsored radio nationalism also works to erase the voices of the nation’s internal others.⁸³ Scheme workers were securing the aural border at precisely the moment when the effects of empire on the imperial center were undergoing significant change.

All of this prompts us to ask again what ‘for the purposes of broadcasting’ actually means. It has a strong sonic dimension, and a clear sense of the musically appropriate; but is it also covering the appropriateness of class, religion, politics, ethnicity, race? As Hilmes has it, the idea that radio would ‘naturally’ unify the nation ‘masked implicit assumptions about exactly which aspects of the “national culture” were inherently more worthy of universal acceptance than others’.⁸⁴ In the case of the BBC, with its moral codes and radio manners, this meant smoothing off or excluding class-bound notions of disorder, immediacy, and noise at the expense of the order and calm of middle-class leisure.⁸⁵ Certain sounds were selected to represent national qualities, used to construct national character, and delimit the nation.

Securing the aural border

Writing on ‘Radio and the Nations’, Arnheim outlined a position of radio idealism: ‘… today a voice singing, teaching, preaching, conquering, going everywhere, coming from everywhere and making the whole world instant participators in everything … Wireless without prejudice serves everything that implies dissemination and community of feeling and works against separateness and isolation’.⁸⁶ The post-war moment, however, saw many keen to assert Britain’s difference, accentuating these very ideas of separateness and isolation that radio had supposedly overcome, and finding other ways to secure the aural border.

Geopolitics became techno-politics. The British government had torpedoed plans for a European Broadcasting Alliance, intended to develop a European consciousness by enabling listeners across the continent to follow international events via a web of interconnected landlines, as the end of war neared.⁸⁷ Shortly afterwards, the government decided that the BBC’s overseas broadcasting was vital to Britain’s cold war foreign policy, and subtly reworked international frequency plans so as not to hinder its own international broadcasting, while superficially continuing with inter-war models of national service broadcasting.⁸⁸ And British policymakers teamed up with their American counterparts to denigrate Soviet jamming of BBC broadcasts, positing the freedom to listen as a universal human right. A UNESCO resolution was adopted in 1948, deeming attempts to control listening a violation of this right.⁸⁹

Domestically, meanwhile, one of a string of Radio Times articles on the matter, titled ‘If Everyone Kept to the Plan’, chastised overseas broadcasters for creating ‘a fine old clamour’ over the airwaves. Making reference to the most recent fixed frequency plan of 1948, the article rounded on the ‘biggest sources of nonconformity in the concert of nations’. Blaming both other European nations – singling out Spain in particular – and the United States, still broadcasting in Germany, the piece ends in exasperation: ‛… those rugged individualists to whom the word “plan” is anathema are creating their sickening quanta of etheric distress.’⁹⁰

Antipathy toward foreign broadcasters had previously been aimed at commercial stations, most notably Radio Luxembourg, perceived as a threat to BBC attempts to uplift and unite the nation.⁹¹ But Radio Luxembourg had been accommodated, reluctantly, into international frequency plans, and British hostilities were dropped.⁹² Instead, the problem was now considered to be international stations that broke with technical regimes, compromising BBC reception and control of national listening.

Radio’s internationalism – a bunch of imagined communities, imaginatively chattering to each other – was being tuned out in pursuit of an enclosed national ether. This was not the same as jamming practices that were used in wars both colonial and cold;⁹³ this was a subtler form of guiding listeners into, and out of, listening situations. British elites were securing the aural border at home, while championing the freedom to listen elsewhere. Do wavelengths have politics? Both the Scheme and the rhetoric of well-mannered wavelength management constituted a version of what the nation was supposed to sound like: free from outside interference, clean, correct.

Carolyn Birdsall’s analyses of radio note the tension between sound as disruption or interruption and the ‘concurrent attempts to contain sound on the basis of community and the national’.⁹⁴ For the BBC, sonic containment amounted to training people how to listen, to determine what it meant to be a listener.⁹⁵ This was framed explicitly in terms of active and passive listening, with a keen awareness that the former was not inherent in the medium, and thus needed continuous performance. Adorno, typically splenetic, was applying his theories of regressive listening to radio in America during the war, declaiming against the medium for inducing ‘spectatoritis’, promoting ‘a retrogressive and sometimes even infantile type of person’.⁹⁶ Back in Britain, a 1952 Radio Times article rails against ‘background listening’, championing ‘listeners by choice’, and conflating passive listening with diminishing mental powers, akin to the weakening of an inactive limb.⁹⁷

Scheme workers also displayed an Adornian impulse to conflate radio listening with cultural regression, albeit with shanties rather than Schoenberg as their exemplar of musical virtue. But this rubbed up against their recording work in contradictory and bizarre ways. Kennedy wrote to Sarah Makem in September 1953 to inform her that her voice was to be used as part of the theme tune for As I Roved Out. He affirmed that the program ‘will help to counteract the harm the radio has done to kill this sort of music-making in the home’. He then signs off: ‘I shall be thinking of you listening in your kitchen on Sunday’.⁹⁸ At no point does the reasoning behind positing passive listening as a fundamentally Bad Thing move beyond the fuzzy and tenuous. And Kennedy’s letter implies that the Scheme really functioned to suggest that there was a right and wrong kind of passivity, or even just a right and wrong kind of music to listen to, passively or not.

True to its roots as an institution founded to establish a market for radio sets, the BBC drilled into its listeners the message that good listening meant owning a good receiver.⁹⁹ The BBC Yearbook of 1952 – the year the Scheme was launched – is full of adverts for radios, and features an essay by eminent music critic Ernest Newman, in which he argues: ‘… what we hear largely depends on our radio set; but I have no hesitation in saying that with a really good set very little is lost by listening to the wireless, while often a good deal is gained’.¹⁰⁰ Radio Times articles of the same year variously held listeners responsible for ‘cleaning up your reception’, celebrated competition between radio manufacturers as ensuring ‘natural’ listening, and blamed listeners as ‘culprits’ for not getting the best transmission.¹⁰¹ Not long afterwards, in July 1954, the Board of Trade’s removal of restrictions on hire-purchase agreements for things like radios placed listening further into a proto-consumer society.¹⁰²

At stake was the issue of fidelity: listeners were assured that ‘we can take it for granted that what the BBC is delivering to us is a transmission with a very high standard of realism’.¹⁰³ Good listening in these terms becomes being faithful to the truth of the signal, being a good consumer. Radio manufacturers had been bludgeoning audiences with this message since before the war. Philips Radio invented the ‘King of the Ether’ for use in an advertising campaign, who sent musicians down from his kingdom to ‘charm mankind with their melodious strains’. After witnessing his artists suffer through the inadequacies of a (not that) decrepit machine, he sends down an audio army who proceed to lay siege to the old radio, before wheeling in a state-of-the-art Philips model – all ‘mono knob operation’, ‘reading desk dial’, and ‘cathode ray tuning indicator’. The King of the Ether finally attaches a letter of admonishment to the ruins of the old machine: ‘What do you mean by letting my best artists perform in an eight years old [sic] radio!! They can’t play there! Good music can only be reproduced by modern stereophonic radio! I command you not to bother my artists any more with old and out-of-date receivers – or else’.¹⁰⁴

The very idea of fidelity has by now been established as the workings of various media industries; and the association of new technologies with the ideology of progress and sonic perfection stretch back to the beginnings of sound reproduction.¹⁰⁵ But the BBC was particularly invested in the notion of fidelity: it had to retain the faith of its listeners in accord with its monopoly privilege and public service mission, and it was able to subsume projections of active listening and good consumerism into this faith. Monopoly depended upon good signal; interference was a technical and a political problem. Acknowledging that not everyone could afford a new radio, the BBC introduced very high frequency (VHF) to sound broadcasting in 1954, simultaneously encouraging listeners to keep the faith, and combatting the problem of sonic interloping from foreign stations.¹⁰⁶

The Scheme, the hostility toward rogue frequencies, and responsible reception through consumer-citizenry combine to present a picture of how the BBC worked to sound the nation in the post-war moment. Field recordings become music to reveal the nation; national collectivity was delimited through the tuning out of radio internationalism; active listening, through consumption, is required to hear the nation (but not any others) properly. Each of these processes worked to define an acoustic national identity. The moral geography of the nation was authorized through sound, binding audience, public, listening, citizenship, landscape, and polity together.

Politicizing technology

In asking after the politics of technologies, it remains important to trace the specific moments at which they have been politicized, mobilized, or presented as politically neutral to achieve particular goals. In the case of the Scheme, its broadcast outputs were celebrated in the pages of the English Dance and Song magazine, relaying that ‘the real star of these programmes is the recording machine … it is indeed a tremendous debt we owe to the inventors and perfectors of recording machines. For how many of us has our first, and perhaps, our only contact with traditional singing been through a gramophone record or spool of tape’.¹⁰⁷ In this account, radio reappears as contact zone, bridging populations, unifying the nation. But this could only be achieved through presenting technology as a vanishing mediator.¹⁰⁸ Having completed its work, technology disappears completely. The review concludes: ‘Is this not giving back to the people their own music, not as interpreted by trained musicians, but exactly as produced by themselves?’¹⁰⁹

In essence, the editor is making the same claim as Rothenbuhler and Peters when they write of ‘an unbroken chain from the sound in the living room to the original sound as recorded’.¹¹⁰ But the editor is making an additional claim: that the sound in the living room is the same as the sound of live performance, as though the listener is eavesdropping not on the recording process, but on traditional spaces of music making, on the nation. In this account the whole network vanishes, leaving only the singing voice and the attentive ear. This works by the logic of what Jones terms ‘phonographic realism’: that cultural workers must operate as recording machines in order to be socially effective; that recording technologies were objective in their representation of life and culture; that turning attention, and technologies, toward subaltern voices was inherently progressive.¹¹¹ Like Jones, I would problematize these declarations, arguing that sound recording technologies – and the use thereof – are far from objective, but that the discourse of objectivity that attends recording serves a purpose of removing the taint of class inequality.

I write this at a time when political discourse on immigration in Britain revolves around adherence to ‘British values’. Notwithstanding the fuzziness and further silencing involved in such practices, it seems pressing to attend to those historical moments when audible dimensions of national identity have been institutionalized, probing the gap between the discourse of national culture and the actualities of its construction.¹¹² If nationness is a cultural artifact, then it can be subject to the same constructionist analyses as other artifacts.¹¹³ What emerges from the aural history presented here is that the Scheme was undergirded by a preservationist impulse to maintain social segmentation and division.¹¹⁴ This fed into the BBC’s production of the nation, and the broader aural public sphere; but such ideas problematize the notion of field recordings as heritage objects. Sound studies, by refusing to take ‘discourse about sound in its own terms, but rather interrogate the terms on which it is built’, has much to offer in engaging with these problems.¹¹⁵

The Scheme wound down in 1957 with the sense that the work of collecting the nation’s music was completed. But the mediality and selectivity of the Scheme had to be glossed over in order for field recordings to index the nation. The BBC’s sounding nation has as much to do with institutional organization and modes of capturing and representing sounds, as with the voices and musics of the populace. The collecting and representation of a national culture free from interference involved much discursive and physical work. And, as has long been the case, nationalism was dependent upon internationalism.

Technologies are important to these stories because artifacts can outlive those who create and use them. This is largely so with sound recordings, which continue to store and carry political practices as they themselves are stored and carried. By securing the aural border, and imbuing the nation with phantom objectivity, the BBC constructed a form of sonic nationness, which remains a source material.

For nationalism. For the medium. For the purposes of broadcasting.

Notes on contributor

Tom Western is finishing his PhD in music at the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on histories of field recording and sound archiving. He spent four months working at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, thanks to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and won the British Forum for Ethnomusicology prize for best student paper in 2013. He has presented at conferences internationally, and has published elsewhere in the journal Twentieth-Century Music.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to my supervisors, Simon Frith and Katherine Campbell, for their guidance, and to Carolyn Birdsall, Florian Scheding, and the reviewers and editors of Sound Studies. Thanks, also, to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my PhD research [grant no. AH/J50015X/1], to Jessica Hogg and Katie Ankers at the BBC Written Archives Centre, and to Janet Topp Fargion at the British Library.

Notes

1. William Haley memo to C(N), C(H), C(P), C(Eur.S), A/C(O.E.), 26 Jan 1945. R34/420. BBC WAC.

2. Kun, “The Aural Border”; Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 103.

3. Revill, “Music and the Politics of Sound,” 597.

4. Badenoch, Fickers, and Henrich-Franke, Airy Curtains; Lacey, “Radio in the Great Depression”; Bohlman, Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe.

5. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 206.

6. Ibid., 203.

7. Ochoa Gautier, “Sonic Transculturation,” 807, 813.

8. Ibid., 814.

9. Ibid., 820.

10. Dolan, “The Voice That Cannot Be Heard,” 69.

11. Born, “On Musical Mediation”; Born, “The Social and the Aesthetic”; Piekut, “Actor-Networks in Music History.”

12. Piekut, “Actor-Networks in Music History,” 206–07.

13. Bohlman, “Analysing Aporia.”

14. Arnheim, Radio, 14.

15. Fickers, “Visibly Audible,” 419.

16. Hilmes, “Transnational Radio in the Global Age,” iii–iv.

17. Lommers, Europe – On Air, 75–97.

18. Spohrer, “Threat or Beacon?”, 32–33.

19. Huxley, UNESCO, 59–60.

20. Kennedy, “The Director Writes,” 77–78.

21. Arnheim, Radio, 30–32; Sieveking, The Stuff of Radio, 15–26; Scannell, “The Stuff of Radio,” 1–26.

22. Benjamin, “Reflections on Radio,” 391.

23. Fickers, “Visibly Audible,” 413, 432.

24. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 17, 21–22.

25. Bohlman, Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, xxiv.

26. Porter, “Europe,” 217.

27. IFMC, “General Report,” 22.

28. IFMC, “Report of the Radio Commission,” 53.

29. IFMC, “General Report,” 12.

30. Ibid., 12.

31. Sharp, English Folk Songs; IFMC, “Definition of Folk Music,” 23.

32. Frith, “Pleasures of the Hearth,” 24–25; Baade, Victory Through Harmony, 176–80.

33. Scannell, “Public Service Broadcasting,” 135–66.

34. Scannell and Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, 10.

35. Nicholas, The Echo of War, 1; Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 2.

36. Briggs, Sound and Vision, 163.

37. Ibid., 138–40.

38. Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 155–56; Nicholas, The Echo of War, 231.

39. Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 135–228.

40. Scannell, “The Stuff of Radio”; Scannell and Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, 151–52.

41. Beveridge, quoted in Briggs, Sound and Vision, 383.

42. Bohlman, Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, 44.

43. Slocombe, “Round Britain with a Recording Machine,” 12–13.

44. Brief from Head of Central Programme Operations, 16 May 1952. R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

45. Brief, 16 May 1952, original emphasis. R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

46. Maud Karpeles report to Marie Slocombe, 10 May 1952. Box 16. BBC Reports. PK BL.

47. Peter Kennedy report to Marie Slocombe, June–July 1954 and June–July 1955. Box 16. BBC Reports. PK BL.

48. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 4, 232.

49. S. M. Wheatley report to Marie Slocombe, 22 October 1952. R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

50. Timothy Eckersley memo to Marie Slocombe, 12 February 1954. R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

51. Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, 28–39.

52. S. M. Wheatley report to Marie Slocombe, 22 October 1952; Peter Kennedy report to Marie Slocombe, 4 February 1954; Peter Kennedy letter to Marie Slocombe, 2 August 1953. R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

53. Peter Kennedy report to Marie Slocombe, June–July 1954. Box 16. BBC Reports. PK BL.

54. Marie Slocombe memos to Peter Kennedy, 10 February 1956 and 7 March 1956. Box 17. BBC Sound/R.P. Library. PK BL.

55. Timothy Eckersley memo to Marie Slocombe, 7 July 1955. R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

56. Bijsterveld, “Introduction,” 15.

57. Peter Kennedy report to Marie Slocombe, 7 June 1952, 25 May 1952, June–July 1954. Box 16. BBC Reports. PK BL. Peter Kennedy letter to Hamish Henderson, 17 October 1955. Box 11. Hamish Henderson. PK BL.

58. Marie Slocombe, “Review of Scheme from April to December,” 21 November 1952. R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

59. Kenneth Adam memo to Brian George, 13 March 1953. R46/26/1. BBC WAC.

60. Briggs, Sound and Vision, 52, 55; Nicholas, The Echo of War, 50–53.

61. Briggs, Sound and Vision, 83; Nicholas, The Echo of War, 275.

62. Frith, “Pleasures of the Hearth,” 28.

63. Briggs, Sound and Vision, 76.

64. Gregory, “Roving Out,” 223.

65. Birdsall, “Sonic Artefacts,” 139–41.

66. Frith, “Pleasures of the Hearth,” 34, 41.

67. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 57.

68. Duesenberry, “Fiddle Tunes on Air,” 100.

69. Slocombe, “Radio Report,” 25–26.

70. Slocombe, “British Broadcasting Corporation, London,” 60.

71. Ibid., 60.

72. Marie Slocombe, “Review of Scheme from April to December 1952” and “Stock Recording: Folk Music, 1956,” R46/658/1. BBC WAC.

73. Western, “The Age of the Golden Ear.”

74. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 41–65.

75. Karathanasopoulou and Crisell, “Radio Documentary and the Formation of Urban Aesthetics,” 173.

76. Sterne, The Audible Past, 226.

77. Tunbridge, “Singing Translations,” 72.

78. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7; Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 104–06; Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 6, 114.

79. Frith, “Pleasures of the Hearth,” 34, 42.

80. Jones, Yellow Music, 109, 123–36.

81. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 12–13.

82. Bohlman, Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, 6.

83. Ibid., 12.

84. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 17.

85. Frith, “Pleasures of the Hearth,” 32.

86. Arnheim, Radio, 229, 232–33.

87. Lommers, Europe – On Air, 15–16.

88. Spohrer, “Threat or Beacon?”, 46–47.

89. Ibid., 44.

90. Hunter, “If Everyone Kept to the Plan,” 5.

91. Spohrer, “Threat or Beacon?”, 32.

92. Lommers, Europe – On Air, 173–76; Spohrer, “Threat or Beacon?”, 48.

93. Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria,” 329–35.

94. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 17.

95. Frith, “Pleasures of the Hearth,” 29.

96. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” 213.

97. Cundell, “Listening to Music,” 5.

98. Peter Kennedy letter to Sarah Makem, 15 September 1953. R46/26/1. BBC WAC.

99. Scannell and Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, 5.

100. Newman, “The Impact of Radio on Music,” 142.

101. Hunter, “How You Can Improve Reception This Winter,” 5–-6; McLanachan, “How to Get the Best from Your Set,” 11.

102. Kynaston, Family Britain, 400, 664.

103. McLanachan, “How to Get the Best from Your Set,” 11.

104. The full eight-minute advertisement for the ‘Ether Symphony’ is available (and well worth viewing) at http://vimeo.com/89,092,972 (last accessed October 11, 2015).

105. Sterne, The Audible Past, 215–86.

106. Briggs, Sound and Vision, 9.

107. “As I Roved Out,” 75.

108. Sterne, The Audible Past, 218.

109. “As I Roved Out,” 75.

110. Rothenbuhler and Peters, “Defining Phonography,” 260.

111. Jones, Yellow Music, 107–09.

112. Born, “For a Relational Musicology,” 238.

113. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4.

114. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 15.

115. Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader, 9.