This book tells the history of classical music on UK radio between 1945 and 1995. It begins therefore before the launch of the Third Programme on Sunday 26 September 1946, and continues beyond the launch of Classic FM on Monday 7 September 1992. These events were not just bookends for the period; they are often regarded as totemic encapsulations of the two approaches of classical music radio—sometimes complementary, sometimes warring—of high art vis-à-vis popular culture. The BBC’s classical music output was broadcast on a variety of channels, and was rarely as rarified as it is often regarded, or as some of its proponents wished it to appear. Commercial radio’s provision of classical music was never as slight and meretricious as its critics wished to paint it. Nor was either sector immune from some of the supposed characteristics of the other. It has been the fusion of the two which has been so potent for cultural entertainment provision in its own right, and as a signifier for how culture and its consumption has developed in modern UK society.
History is built upon the foundations of previous scholarship. For this study, two five-volume works dominate their own general fields: Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, from the sixteenth century to the present day; and Asa Briggs’ History of British Broadcasting from the early Twenties to 1974 (effectively, for radio, just the BBC). Specific to this study is Alex Ross’ survey of twentieth-century music, The Rest Is Noise; Humphrey Carpenter’s history of the Third Programme and Radio 3, The Envy of the World; Nicholas Kenyon’s study of the BBC Symphony Orchestra up to 1980; and my own history of Independent Radio, Sounds of Your Life. The full bibliography at the end of the book lists some of the many other relevant works.
The importance of this new study is that, unlike existing scholarship in this field, it reviews the whole range of radio output, not just the relatively contained provision on the Third Programme and later on Radio 3. Since most of the previous discourse has addressed classical music on UK radio as comprising merely the output of the Third Programme, and subsequently of Radio 3, this has tended to perpetuate the fallacy that this aspect of radio broadcasting was merely the preserve of the well-educated, higher class elite. On the contrary, for most of this period there was a richer, multi-channel offering of surprisingly broad appeal. In the years before 1970, the Third Programme was never the major provider of this type of radio; the Home Service, the Light Programme and then the Music Programme were much more significant in terms of quantity of output and audiences. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Radio 3 offering was accompanied by a demotic classical music provision on Independent Local Radio (ILR); and eventually radically augmented—even overtaken, in some respects—by the success of Classic FM from 1992 onwards.
Further, this history is informed by an original analysis of the actual output across 50 years—albeit on a sample basis—and of the audiences for this genre of radio. It cannot escape some institutional history, but that is not its focus. It seeks rather to broaden the previous narrow preconception of what this genre of broadcasting comprised, which itself reflected educational and class assumptions, by addressing the programmes and their listeners more than the institutional and political infrastructure. As such, the book represents the first comprehensive, longitudinal narrative of classical music broadcast on UK radio in the second half of the twentieth century, relating to the changing political, social and economic circumstances of those decades. It describes and analyses the wide range of services which offered this style of music, describing a far broader spectrum than previous discourse had addressed.
The wide relevance and appeal of this topic is demonstrated by quantitative audience data. Across the whole of the period between 1945 and 1995, there has existed a consistent potential audience for classical music radio of between 5 and 6 million adults, for whom the happy conjunction of an easy, cheap reception technology and an aspirational production resource meant that in varying degrees they were consistently able to indulge their taste for the greatest of all art forms without cost or restriction.
Popular music on the radio was one of the defining features of the second half of the twentieth century, whether splashing in the early shallows with Perry Como or the Billy Cotton Band Show, saluting the arrival of pop culture with skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll, encapsulating the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, stumbling into the punk counter-revolution of the Eighties or falling for the sleight of hand of Cool Britannia as the century ended. Other more substantial musical art forms found their welcome on and onto the radio more constrained, with jazz, folk, country and world music held outside the British broadcasting mainstream and steered apart from the cultural tides.
But classical music in these years flourished as never before, thanks almost entirely to its prominence on the UK radio wavelengths, and that is hugely informative too of the social and cultural history of the long post-war half-century.
Shape of This History
The period 1945 to 1995 was a telling historical one for Britain, with a nation forged in the wars of the Empire eventually coming to terms with a post-imperial existence; working through a complete change of economic status, from memories of being the world’s manufacturer to becoming eventually merely its banker; and by way of a post-war renaissance, and then the cultural ferment of the Sixties, achieving a position of considerable cultural eminence. For UK broadcasting, this is when television became dominant, when radio reinvented itself in both the public and private sectors, and when old and new electronic media pointed towards the obsolescence of the printed page (It is an open question, and not yet one for the historian, whether broadcasting is now contemplating its own potential obsolescence, in the digital age of the twenty-first century). In music, successive technological innovation through the LP, audio cassette and CD, and latterly—too recent to be treated as ‘history’—on to MP3, streaming and music file sharing, expanded geometrically the opportunities for listeners to hear in their own time and place what had once been available only by public or personal performance, or latterly the broadcasting of that performance.
For classical music on UK radio, those 50 years were characterised by a series of high points, when classical music services were broadcast across a number of different channels, offered highbrow and middlebrow content, provided links between elite and popular output, and were accessible to a broad range of potential listeners. Each of those then provoked a reaction from the self-appointed intellectual elite, concerned at the diminishing of what they regarded as ‘high art’ in the interest of mass appeal, and reflecting the class-based assumptions of British society during these years.
The history of post-war classical music radio in the UK falls remarkably neatly into individual calendar decades. This narrative will follow that pattern. This initial Introduction takes as its title Theodor Adorno’s reference to ‘the music we are accustomed to call classical’,1 and looks at the main themes which run through the 50 years, and the emergence of the concept of ‘classical music’ in the nineteenth century and the taxonomy . It continues by examining that the taxonomy and then establishing a definition for ‘classical music’, extending that to the ‘classical music radio’, and concludes by reviewing the sources and metrics for this study.
The first narrative chapter, Chap. 2, 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.
Chapter 3 looks at the efforts made by the elite to defend their view of classical music as high art. It considers the extent to which a ‘new Britain’ had emerged at this time, the pattern of classical music radio in the early years and rising conservatism and high-brow retrenchment. The reorganisation of classical music radio in the mid-Fifties, a subject of intense debate among the intelligentsia if little among the general listening public, then leads into a report of the changing senior personnel taking responsibility for this output.
The Sixties are the subject of Chap. 4. Beginning with a review of the state of classical music radio in 1960, the narrative goes on to assess the impact of William Glock as Controller of Music at the BBC, the developing output in the first years of the Sixties and then the institution of the Music Programme, a daytime service of classical music radio which seems largely to have vanished from historical consciousness. The chapter continues with an examination of the later years of the decade, before considering the report, Broadcasting in the Seventies , which changed the whole BBC approach to the provision of radio, including a move to a genre-specific Radio 3 for classical music alone.
The Seventies are covered in Chap. 5, a decade that saw the end of the BBC’s monopoly over radio which had existed since 1922. This examines the arrival of Radio 3 and the White Paper An Alternative Service of Radio Broadcasting which paved the way for the arrival of competition in the form of ILR. It describes how ILR progressed in its early years, and considers ILR’s programming approach. It concludes by sketching the clouds which began to gather over BBC radio’s attitude towards its in-house orchestras.
Chapter 6 continues the narrative of the BBC musicians’ strike and its impact. It analyses BBC classical music output in the years up to 1984 and the apex of ILR classical music output over the same brief period, including consideration of aud...