Abstract
The first narrative chapter focuses on the BBC Director General William Haley’s ‘pyramid of taste’, sketches a brief prologue of classical music radio in the Twenties and Thirties, before looking in more detail at classical music in wartime Britain and at the key twentieth century inflection points for a modern approach to this genre of radio. It then considers how matters developed after the war was over, examining classical music on the Home Service and the Light Programme in the immediate interwar years, the start of the Third Programme and then the combined output in the remaining years of the decade.
Prologue, the Twenties and Thirties—classical music radio in wartime Britain—after the war was over—classical music on the Home Service and the Light Programme 1945–1946—start of the Third Programme—Classical music radio 1947–1949—assessing the Forties output.
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Notes
- 1.
The BBC orchestras are a research topic in their own right. At one time or another, there were 18 orchestras under the BBC banner and three choral ensembles.
- 2.
Lacey (2013: 38) points out the paradox in using the term ‘audience’ indiscriminately for radio listening and for television viewing. For classical music, however, it is appropriate since television has rarely managed to find a satisfactory way of matching the sound with pictures which add to the auditory experience.
- 3.
Elizabeth Lutyens in a lecture at the Dartington Summer School in the Fifties, where she spoke also of ‘folky‐wolky melodies on the cor anglais’ (Oxford Dictionary of Music, Rutherford-Johnson, T. and Kennedy, M, eds., 2013: 202).
- 4.
The phrase ‘women composers’ is uncomfortable to modern reading, but it reflects the context of the UK classical music scene in these years.
- 5.
See Chap. 4, p. 100.
- 6.
Where the research findings reported in the Daily Listening Barometer (see Appendix B) failed to identify an audience of at least 0.1% of all adults for a programme, it was marked as being ‘below measurable levels’. The audience might have been zero, or it might have been, say, 49,999 (subject to caveats about sample sizes and their extrapolation to ‘actual’ audience levels).
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Stoller, T. (2018). The Forties: A Pyramid of Taste. In: Classical Music Radio in the United Kingdom, 1945–1995. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64710-4_2
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