Topic:- Radio Modernism
Department of English, MKBU
Name: Kàilas Gohil
Roll No: 13
Semesters: 4
Introduction:-
“Radio was, in a way, a very philosophical medium. You could make an argument on the radio, and people listened to it. Television is already harder because people's attention span becomes shorter with television. Cut to a commercial and all that. “
Nowadays radio is shrinking in. Thus it has fallen far short of that. The present generation of men does not even know what Radio is. But in earlier times, men used to get all the information through radio like….. News, Frequent occurrences. Sometimes men have a lot of trouble. And now people gets information immediately. Because the technology has come. There is so little to write about technology. So let's know about Radio.
About Radio
At first the Radio man was God. But now Radio has come with extra large and good equipment. “Radio is the broadcasting of programmes for the public to listen to, by sending out signals from a transmitter”.
“As indicated by its title, this collection, which appeared in an earlier form as a special issue of the Media Studies Journal, seeks to raise the profile of radio as a subject for research. With contributions from academics and practitioners, the volume offers a broad overview of radio in the world, with articles considering the history of radio in Europe and the United States and a section on radio beyond the “Anglo-American” world. Its short, informal articles are succinct and, in most cases, without notes or references.”
“Radio is more powerful the closer we mimic the way we actually speak to each other. That's why Howard Stern is such a great radio talent. People on his show are actually speaking to each other. You might not like what they're saying, but they're real conversations. “
History of Radio:-
Historically speaking, Marconi started radio broadcasting in 1896 with the invention of first wireless telegraph link. It took ten years since then for the first demonstration of radio broadcasting to establish but it was hard to distinguish words from music. Another successful demonstration took place from the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1908. A New York Station transmitted the first radio news bulletin in 1916 on the occasion of the election of US President. By 1927, broadcasting services were started as a major medium of information. Radio broadcasting in India began as a private venture in 1923 and 1924, when three radio clubs were established in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras (now Chennai). The Radio Club broadcast the first radio programme in India in June 1923. The daily broadcasts of 2 to 3 hours consisted mainly of music and talks. These stations had to close down in 1927 for lack of sufficient financial support. It was followed by the setting up a Broadcasting Service that began broadcasting in India in July 1927 on an experimental basis at Bombay and a month later at Calcutta under an agreement between the Government of India and a private company called the Indian Broadcasting Company Ltd. Faced with a widespread public outcry against the closure of the IBC, the Government acquired its assets and constituted the Indian Broadcasting Service under the Department of Labour and Industries. Since then, broadcasting in India has remained under Government control.
Radio Modrenism
The energy and experimentalism of the BBC Features Department in itself gives the lie to any assertion that the BBC, as a site of cultural production, was in any way monolithic; histories of its output need therefore to be similarly flexible, nuanced and grounded in its multifarious cultural contexts and intermedial relationships. Of course, what is often referred to as the ‘Features Department’, referring mainly to its post-war incarnation, did not spring fully formed from the corridors of Broadcasting House. As early as 1928, the Radio Times used a full-page article to introduce its readers to the feature programme: a mixture of music, drama and talk, constituting ‘an original form of expression, peculiar to broadcasting’.1 In the 1920s, such features were a result of artistic experiments in the direction of producing radiogenic drama, as distinct from dramas that were to an extent derivative of the stage. As a result of this formal experimentation, there was, as producer Rayner Heppenstall noted, ‘no short answer to the much-asked question: “What is a feature programme?”’; he himself came up with perhaps the best answer by characterising features as ‘anything put out by a producer in Features Department’.2 It is important to note that although production staff were proud to stake a claim to the feature as ‘purely a BBC invention’,3 other national broadcasters were similarly engaged in pushing the boundaries of radiogenic form (compare, for example, the tradition of German Horspiel).
The generic boundaries of the feature form are fluid and generously adaptable to the meaning a writer and producer intended to be communicated through sound. Practically speaking, features utilise imaginative combinations of speech, drama, music, location recording and sound effects in order to suggest meaning, drawing selectively on, for example, the entire range of possible speech forms and arranging them artfully to prick listeners’ imaginations. Features may look, on the face of it, like documentaries, radio plays, radiophonic engagement with modernist poetry, wartime propaganda pieces,
Features and Cultures
travelogues, social history, journalism, etc, but their modes of communication are protean. In the years before the sustained use of actuality and stereo sound became commonplace, for example, many features contained little location recording and sat more within the parameters of dramatic convention rather than in a format comprised of narrated links and contributor clips intercut with sound. The vernacular of features in the time period covered by this volume created rich imaginative worlds by embracing the fluidity of the in-between, interstitial, territory inhabited by the genre itself—one that straddled the boundaries of realism and drama, fact and fiction.
The longstanding significance of the creative innovation of early feature writers including Tyrone Guthrie, Lance Sieveking and Mary Hope Allen is acknowledged by the post-war
head of features Laurence Gilliam in his 1950 book BBC Features. He discusses the important origins of the Features Department in the form of the Research Unit which in the 1920s explored the dramatic and artisitic possibilities of the medium; that unit developed into the Features Unit which, together with the Drama Unit, formed a department under the leadership of Val Gielgud. After the war, the Features Unit was granted the autonomy of a Department, which was led by Laurence Gilliam until his death in 1964, soon after which it was disbanded. Institutional origin myths reveal only so much, however; perhaps features are best understood as products of creative encounters within ‘contact zones’ made possible by the BBC, ‘where cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other’.4 These ‘cultures’—plural—include artistic, social and political dimensions that are entangled in multiple ways with those of modernism.
The title of this collection also seeks to embrace ‘radio modernisms’, plural: it champions the expansive conception of modernism which includes the people and the words of the early twentieth-century literary movement but also radio as a technology, a site of cultural production and impactful on the individual’s experience of daily life.5 Radio in itself is multiply expressive of many modernities that can be examined through a number of lenses which relate to perceptions and experiences of individual and collective identities (e.g. race, class and gender). The expansive conception is also open to the inherent intermediality of artistic and cultural practices. We adhere to the temporal extension of modernism beyond the Second World War and into the 1950s—the so-called ‘golden age’ of radio when many mid-century writers were deeply engaged with experimentation within broadcast forms. In 1952, Gilliam wrote that ‘the flow of new imaginative creation for radio shows no sign of drying up. It is a heartening thing to find this, among the youngest of art-forms, attracting the creative effort of some of the best of our contemporary writers’.6
In navigating the cross-currents of interest amongst scholars from different disciplines, we have sought to ensure that each author’s contribution to this collection has the best chance to speak meaningfully beyond disciplinary boundaries—that is, where possible, engaging with a programme in terms of sound, as a cultural event from a specific moment in time, as team creation, as something heard in its original domestic context and as a cultural work that may have attracted a certain canonical pedigree. This combination of the particular, the contingent and the contextual extends through this special issue.
Conclusion:-
This article explores the modernism of pre-war radio in terms of the framing device of the schedule, rather than exceptional texts or ‘features’. It suggests the flow of broadcasting could be experienced as a montage of remediations that invited reflexive engagement with the conditions and contradictions of modernity. The schedule thus appears not only as a site for the mediation of modern experience and a new sensorium, but as a modernist text in its own right that produced, and was expressive of, a pervasive and insistent vernacular modernism.
• Work cited:-
Pease, Edward C., and Everette E. Dennis, eds. 1995. Radio: The forgotten medium. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Dinsman, M. Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Department of English, MKBU
Name: Kàilas Gohil
Roll No: 13
Semesters: 4
Introduction:-
“Radio was, in a way, a very philosophical medium. You could make an argument on the radio, and people listened to it. Television is already harder because people's attention span becomes shorter with television. Cut to a commercial and all that. “
Nowadays radio is shrinking in. Thus it has fallen far short of that. The present generation of men does not even know what Radio is. But in earlier times, men used to get all the information through radio like….. News, Frequent occurrences. Sometimes men have a lot of trouble. And now people gets information immediately. Because the technology has come. There is so little to write about technology. So let's know about Radio.
About Radio
At first the Radio man was God. But now Radio has come with extra large and good equipment. “Radio is the broadcasting of programmes for the public to listen to, by sending out signals from a transmitter”.
“As indicated by its title, this collection, which appeared in an earlier form as a special issue of the Media Studies Journal, seeks to raise the profile of radio as a subject for research. With contributions from academics and practitioners, the volume offers a broad overview of radio in the world, with articles considering the history of radio in Europe and the United States and a section on radio beyond the “Anglo-American” world. Its short, informal articles are succinct and, in most cases, without notes or references.”
“Radio is more powerful the closer we mimic the way we actually speak to each other. That's why Howard Stern is such a great radio talent. People on his show are actually speaking to each other. You might not like what they're saying, but they're real conversations. “
History of Radio:-
Historically speaking, Marconi started radio broadcasting in 1896 with the invention of first wireless telegraph link. It took ten years since then for the first demonstration of radio broadcasting to establish but it was hard to distinguish words from music. Another successful demonstration took place from the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1908. A New York Station transmitted the first radio news bulletin in 1916 on the occasion of the election of US President. By 1927, broadcasting services were started as a major medium of information. Radio broadcasting in India began as a private venture in 1923 and 1924, when three radio clubs were established in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras (now Chennai). The Radio Club broadcast the first radio programme in India in June 1923. The daily broadcasts of 2 to 3 hours consisted mainly of music and talks. These stations had to close down in 1927 for lack of sufficient financial support. It was followed by the setting up a Broadcasting Service that began broadcasting in India in July 1927 on an experimental basis at Bombay and a month later at Calcutta under an agreement between the Government of India and a private company called the Indian Broadcasting Company Ltd. Faced with a widespread public outcry against the closure of the IBC, the Government acquired its assets and constituted the Indian Broadcasting Service under the Department of Labour and Industries. Since then, broadcasting in India has remained under Government control.
Radio Modrenism
The energy and experimentalism of the BBC Features Department in itself gives the lie to any assertion that the BBC, as a site of cultural production, was in any way monolithic; histories of its output need therefore to be similarly flexible, nuanced and grounded in its multifarious cultural contexts and intermedial relationships. Of course, what is often referred to as the ‘Features Department’, referring mainly to its post-war incarnation, did not spring fully formed from the corridors of Broadcasting House. As early as 1928, the Radio Times used a full-page article to introduce its readers to the feature programme: a mixture of music, drama and talk, constituting ‘an original form of expression, peculiar to broadcasting’.1 In the 1920s, such features were a result of artistic experiments in the direction of producing radiogenic drama, as distinct from dramas that were to an extent derivative of the stage. As a result of this formal experimentation, there was, as producer Rayner Heppenstall noted, ‘no short answer to the much-asked question: “What is a feature programme?”’; he himself came up with perhaps the best answer by characterising features as ‘anything put out by a producer in Features Department’.2 It is important to note that although production staff were proud to stake a claim to the feature as ‘purely a BBC invention’,3 other national broadcasters were similarly engaged in pushing the boundaries of radiogenic form (compare, for example, the tradition of German Horspiel).
The generic boundaries of the feature form are fluid and generously adaptable to the meaning a writer and producer intended to be communicated through sound. Practically speaking, features utilise imaginative combinations of speech, drama, music, location recording and sound effects in order to suggest meaning, drawing selectively on, for example, the entire range of possible speech forms and arranging them artfully to prick listeners’ imaginations. Features may look, on the face of it, like documentaries, radio plays, radiophonic engagement with modernist poetry, wartime propaganda pieces,
Features and Cultures
travelogues, social history, journalism, etc, but their modes of communication are protean. In the years before the sustained use of actuality and stereo sound became commonplace, for example, many features contained little location recording and sat more within the parameters of dramatic convention rather than in a format comprised of narrated links and contributor clips intercut with sound. The vernacular of features in the time period covered by this volume created rich imaginative worlds by embracing the fluidity of the in-between, interstitial, territory inhabited by the genre itself—one that straddled the boundaries of realism and drama, fact and fiction.
The longstanding significance of the creative innovation of early feature writers including Tyrone Guthrie, Lance Sieveking and Mary Hope Allen is acknowledged by the post-war
head of features Laurence Gilliam in his 1950 book BBC Features. He discusses the important origins of the Features Department in the form of the Research Unit which in the 1920s explored the dramatic and artisitic possibilities of the medium; that unit developed into the Features Unit which, together with the Drama Unit, formed a department under the leadership of Val Gielgud. After the war, the Features Unit was granted the autonomy of a Department, which was led by Laurence Gilliam until his death in 1964, soon after which it was disbanded. Institutional origin myths reveal only so much, however; perhaps features are best understood as products of creative encounters within ‘contact zones’ made possible by the BBC, ‘where cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other’.4 These ‘cultures’—plural—include artistic, social and political dimensions that are entangled in multiple ways with those of modernism.
The title of this collection also seeks to embrace ‘radio modernisms’, plural: it champions the expansive conception of modernism which includes the people and the words of the early twentieth-century literary movement but also radio as a technology, a site of cultural production and impactful on the individual’s experience of daily life.5 Radio in itself is multiply expressive of many modernities that can be examined through a number of lenses which relate to perceptions and experiences of individual and collective identities (e.g. race, class and gender). The expansive conception is also open to the inherent intermediality of artistic and cultural practices. We adhere to the temporal extension of modernism beyond the Second World War and into the 1950s—the so-called ‘golden age’ of radio when many mid-century writers were deeply engaged with experimentation within broadcast forms. In 1952, Gilliam wrote that ‘the flow of new imaginative creation for radio shows no sign of drying up. It is a heartening thing to find this, among the youngest of art-forms, attracting the creative effort of some of the best of our contemporary writers’.6
In navigating the cross-currents of interest amongst scholars from different disciplines, we have sought to ensure that each author’s contribution to this collection has the best chance to speak meaningfully beyond disciplinary boundaries—that is, where possible, engaging with a programme in terms of sound, as a cultural event from a specific moment in time, as team creation, as something heard in its original domestic context and as a cultural work that may have attracted a certain canonical pedigree. This combination of the particular, the contingent and the contextual extends through this special issue.
Conclusion:-
This article explores the modernism of pre-war radio in terms of the framing device of the schedule, rather than exceptional texts or ‘features’. It suggests the flow of broadcasting could be experienced as a montage of remediations that invited reflexive engagement with the conditions and contradictions of modernity. The schedule thus appears not only as a site for the mediation of modern experience and a new sensorium, but as a modernist text in its own right that produced, and was expressive of, a pervasive and insistent vernacular modernism.
• Work cited:-
Pease, Edward C., and Everette E. Dennis, eds. 1995. Radio: The forgotten medium. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Dinsman, M. Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
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