The BBC and Ultra-modern Music, 1922-1936: Shaping a Nation's Tastes (review)

The BBC and Ultra-modern Music, 1922-1936: Shaping a Nation's Tastes. By Jennifer Doctor. (Music in the Twentieth Century.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. [xiii, 508. ISBN 0-521-66117-X. $80.]

This is a monumental study of a topic of enormous importance. Or topics, one should say straightaway: Jennifer Doctor makes at least two major contributions here, first by laying the foundations for a detailed understanding of how the BBC came to shape (and even dominate) British musical life, and second by offering a startling refutation of received wisdom about supposed British ignorance concerning the Second Viennese School during the interwar years. And as perhaps the most ambitious study to date of the impact of radio on art music and its reception (no pun intended), it represents an important contribution to broader twentieth-century music history.

The cultural implications entailed by the almost overnight popularization of radio in the 1920s make the arrival of the Internet seem tame by comparison. This first truly mass medium came to people directly in the intimacy of their homes (or even workplaces), with no more effort required on their part than to switch on the set, and it reached populations formerly isolated by geography or social status (e.g., housewives and young children). In Britain, not least because of the fateful decision at the outset to grant a single organization a monopoly license, it quickly became a major forum of public opinion and a powerful agent of national cohesion and identity. In all countries, its potential for propaganda purposes, good or bad, was of course enormous: one of the defining images of the mid-twentieth century is of ordinary people huddled round a radio set, listening to Franklin Roosevelt in the depression years or Winston Churchill during World War II.

The implications for music, especially art music repertories formerly fenced off from large echelons of society by social and economic factors, were quickly realized by a cultural elite already fired by a Victorian sense of mission to elevate the tastes of the masses. Although the BBC was committed from the outset to serve as broad a range of tastes as possible and to entertain as well as educate, its policymakers were also shamelessly paternalistic in their belief that, to paraphrase the first director-general, Sir John Reith, the BBC should give the public what they needed, not necessarily what they wanted (p. 28). The promotion of "classical" music was a prime manifestation of this lofty attitude, and nowhere was the cultural mission pursued more zealously or controversially than in the domain of contemporary music, especially the cutting-edge schools of composition then known as "ultramodern"; during the period in question, the BBC promoted the Second Viennese School with particular assiduousness. The fact that during its first few years the BBC could offer only one channel puts program offerings such as an entire evening of contemporary string quartets, one case cited here, into even sharper relief.

Not surprisingly, such policies aroused opposition. This came not just from some ordinary listeners, but from the British musical establishment outside the BBC, much of which was relatively hostile to Continental developments at this time (although Doctor documents a good deal of generally open-minded and well-informed interest in publications such as the Musical Times). Here we come to one of the most important themes of the book. Almost by chance, the music wing of the young BBC came to be dominated by individuals who, for the most part, had not come through the channels of the increasingly nationalistic academic establishment, and who were unusually knowledgeable about, and sympathetic to, new currents in postwar European music. Chief among these were Percy Pitt and Edward Clark, the latter a former pupil of Arnold Schoenberg and intimate of his circle, a connection that would prove crucial. And repertory proved to be just one area in which the BBC clashed with...