Conference Agenda

In October of 1939, CBS launched the expensive and ambitious educational broadcast Folk Music of America. Hosted by Alan Lomax and broadcast during school hours, the show introduced children to varied folk musics of America through live performances of folk music, carefully scripted conversations with performers, and twenty newly commissioned settings of folk songs by living American composers. The award-winning show not only imagined a new kind of listening pedagogy, but also characterized itself as an exercise in training democratic citizens: Lomax’s Instructor’s Guide announced that “As one European nation after another has, in recent years, rejected democracy or compromised it, throughout America there has come the realization that our refuge and strength lies in the cultivation of our democratic traditions. This tradition…is nowhere better exemplified than at its musical core—American folk music.”

This paper examines how Folk Music of America sought to generate a listening pedagogy that was not only democratizing—as much broadcast radio education claimed to be—but explicitly invested in Dewey’s model of democracy as a social practice. In Democracy and Education, John Dewey not only claims that democratic population requires an educated populace, but also that democracy is “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living.” Building upon Jonathan Stone’s work on participatory democracy in one of the series' episodes, I examine how Lomax’s listening pedagogy encouraged his audiences to imagine a “mode of associated living” that emphasized racial, class, and gender diversity throughout the series. This work extends beyond Lomax’s explicit interest in Black American folk song. I argue that the most striking episodes quietly integrate Anglo American and African American music, such as an episode on play-party songs that aired more than a decade ahead of Brown v. Board. Lomax models a listening practice that encourages the “freer interaction among social groups” that represent Dewey’s democratic ideal. Further, commissions of concert works by a diverse group of Black American and female composers were central to this goal, for they allowed children to imagine transcending the limited roles to which society consigned them, as archival letters from listeners attest.

Leonard Bernstein’s educational television programs remain among the most famous classical music initiatives of the twentieth century. In the long-running debates over the series’ success in building new audiences, scholars and critics alike have focused on the series’ pedagogic methods. Accounts have explored how emerging conventions in television broadcasting were reflected in the program’s musical aesthetics; the part that the production company’s infrastructure played on the creative process and final outputs; and how these factors influenced Bernstein’s ability to realise his pedagogic ambitions. Throughout these discussions, the audience are typically sidelined – an omission that reflects broader trends in television studies (Turnball, 2012), as well as in music history; or discussed only in general, top-down terms. But as recent research in new reception studies has begun to show, what audiences thought and felt about the cultural products they consumed often diverged from critical narratives.

This paper takes the gap between professional critics and everyday consumers as its starting point. Looking beyond discourses rooted in the concert hall tradition, I ask how the domestic environment in which Bernstein’s television programs were consumed shaped audiences’ viewing experiences, and how this impacted the programs’ reception. For evidence, I draw on Bernstein’s mid-century fan mail collection, which I contextualize with newly collected oral history testimonies from former fan writers. I contrast two letters that document very different responses to Bernstein. The first, written shortly after astronaut John Glenn was broadcast orbiting the earth, framed Bernstein’s performance in language that referenced the space race. The second included a “TV snapshot” (Spigel, 2022) of a toddler watching a Young People’s Concert, which positions the conductor at the centre of family life. Together, these letters open up the messier reception context that the domestic environment created. For many viewers at home, concert hall traditions took a back seat to what Tichi (1999) terms the “TV environment”: on TV, Bernstein’s performances were interpreted within the flow of domestic and familial life. More broadly, this alternative reception history begins to show how decentring the concert hall might open up new perspectives on classical music in the twentieth century.

On November 23, 1931, the radio program Musizieren mit unsichtbaren Partnern (“Music-making with invisible partners”) first aired on the Deutsche Welle radio station. Broadcast to all of Germany every Monday evening until early 1933, the program’s format was simple: musicians in the studio would play a piece of chamber music with one part missing while listeners around the country played the missing part at home. Each broadcast began with an introduction to that evening’s piece and a performance of the whole work, after which listeners were invited to join in using sheet music distributed in advance via radio magazines.

This series of broadcasts was one of many attempts in the Weimar Republic to render the experience of radio more participatory. The program was designed and led by the musicologist Herbert Just, a leading figure in the Jugendmusikbewegung (Youth Music Movement), who shared the convictions of Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Kurt Weill, and others that the radio produced passive listeners disengaged from political and social responsibility. While high art experiments like the Hörspiel Der Lindberghflug, a collaboration between Brecht, Weill, and Paul Hindemith, had limited success in engaging listeners over the airwaves, Musizieren mit unsichtbaren Partnern successfully integrated listeners into radio broadcasts for several years. The program’s success invites a new framework for understanding radio and collective music-making during the Weimar period, especially given Just’s later involvement with National Socialist music education policy. Drawing mainly on material published in radio magazines and music periodicals, this paper will explore the philosophies of performance behind these broadcasts. Given the emphasis placed on communal music-making by the Jugendmusikbewegung, how did Just and his interlocutors understand the value of playing along with other musicians without real-time interaction? What kind of national community and what kinds of connections between individuals can be created when each performer is isolated at home but connected by the shared experience of playing along with the radio?