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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: VanCour, Shawn, author.
Title: Making radio : early radio production and the rise of modern sound culture, 1920–1930 / Shawn VanCour.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017035297 | ISBN 9780190497118 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190497149 (oxford scholarship online)
Subjects: LCSH: Radio broadcasting—United States—History—20th century. | Radio broadcasting—Aesthetics. | Radio broadcasting—Social aspects—United States—History— 20th century. | Mass media—Technological innovations—United States—History—20th century. | Popular culture—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PN1991.3.U6 V36 2018 | DDC 302.23/440973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035297
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Making Radio: A Production-Oriented Approach to Early Broadcasting 1
1. Making Radio Time: Managing Broadcasting’s Sonic Flows 15
2. Making Radio Genres: Radiogénie as a Force in Early Program Development 45
3. Making Radio Music: Creating the Radio Sound 69
4. Making Radio Drama: Creating Sound Fictions 97
5. Making Radio Talk: Taming Electric Speech 125
Conclusion: Mediamaking and the Making of Media Labor 157
Appendix: A Note on Sources 165
Abbreviations 169
Notes 173
Bibliography 213
Index 225
Acknowledgments
Intellectual labor, as with any form of creative labor, is the work of many hands—a proposition that holds as true for single-authored monographs as for any other type of scholarly production. The present work was wrought over the course of many years, at multiple educational and archival institutions, and benefited from suggestions and support from numerous individuals along the way.
Initial research for this project began with a doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, benefiting from input from Michele Hilmes, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Ben Singer, and Mary Beltrán, with financial support from the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Graduate School and Department of Communication Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Subsequent research was supported through awards from the Broadcast Education Association, the Dean’s Office at Carleton College, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Carolina. Thanks go to Kenneth Harwood for his generous support of BEA researchers; to my Carleton colleagues Carol Donelan, John Schott, Rod Rodman, and the late Vern Bailey; and, at South Carolina, to Mark Cooper, Susan Courtney, Laura Kissel, Debra Rae Cohen, Julie Hubbert, Heidi Rae Cooley, and Jen and Simon Tarr for their own help and support. A visiting position at New York University and course release from the Department of Information Studies at UCLA made completion of the final manuscript possible, with particular thanks owed to Lisa Gitelman, Mara Mills, Martin Scherzinger, Susan Murray, Terry Moran, Radha Hegde, Dan Streible, and Ron Sadoff at NYU, and to my current colleagues, chair, and dean at UCLA.
Historical research requires close collaboration between the scholar and archivists who manage the raw materials that form the stuff of history. My own research has repeatedly benefited from the expertise and enthusiasm of individuals at a variety of archiving institutions and research centers. At the Smithsonian, Maggie
Acknowledgments
Dennis and Art Molella in the Lemelson Center offered generous time and support, Elliot Sivowitch provided helpful guidance on collection materials, and Kay Peterson helped secure needed illustrations. Chuck Howell, Tom Connors, and especially Michael Henry provided helpful advice and suggestions on materials at the University of Maryland; Chris Hunter helped navigate materials at Schenectady’s Museum of Innovation and Science and secured requested images; and Greg Wilsbacher, Ben Singleton, Scott Allen, and Brittany Braddock at the University of South Carolina provided invaluable assistance with the university’s Moving Image Research Collections. At the Library of Congress, Karen Fishman, Jan McKee, and especially Bryan Cornell helped with collections in the library’s Recorded Sound Research Center, as did Alice Birney with collections from the Manuscripts Division and Jennifer Harbster with materials from the Science Library. Additional thanks to Susan Hamilton at Truman State University, Sherry Byrne at the University of Chicago, and Jeanette Berard and Klaudia Englund at Thousand Oaks Library for assistance with their collections, as well as to the many hard-working reference specialists at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, and New York Public Library for the Performing Arts who made my research experiences at these institutions successful and rewarding. Special thanks, in addition, to David Gleason and Bob Paquette for access to materials from their personal collections; to Ed Gable at the Antique Wireless Association for assistance securing materials from his organization; to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers for use of their materials; to Larry Steckler for use of images from Hugo Gernsback’s radio publications; to Cynthia Powell Barnett for use of materials from the Hennessy Radio Publication Corporation; and to Byron Clark for use of materials from the collection of his late wife, Eleanor Vallée.
Throughout its long germination and execution, this project has benefited from insights, encouragement, and research exchanges from numerous scholars, including Mike Adams, Tim Anderson, Noah Arceneaux, Kyle Barnett, Michael Biel, David Bordwell, Michael Brown, Frank Chorba, Cliff Doerksen, David Goodman, Douglas Gomery, David Hesmondhalgh, Lea Jacobs, Dave Jenemann, Michael Keith, Bill Kirkpatrick, Kate Lacey, Jason Loviglio, Anne MacLennan, Alex Magoun, Monteith McCollum, Allison McCracken, Ross Melnick, Cynthia Meyers, John Peters, Elena Razlogova, Eric Rothenbuhler, Paddy Scannell, Michael Schiffer, Philip Sewell, Michael Stamm, Jennifer Stoever, David Suisman, Emily Thompson, Tim Wall, Jennifer Wang, and David Weinstein. Particular thanks, as well, go to Kathy Fuller-Seeley, Alex Russo, Josh Shepperd, Katherine Spring, Jonathan Sterne, and Neil Verma, all of whom read early versions of various chapters and offered helpful suggestions for shaping the larger book project. Portions of this work also
Acknowledgments ix
benefited from comments by audiences at conferences for the Broadcast Education Association, Cultural Studies Association, MeCCSA Radio Studies Network, Popular Culture Association, and Society for Cinema and Media Studies, as well as talks for various symposia, courses, and lecture series at the Hagley Museum and Library, University of Maryland, University of Oregon, Catholic University of America, Binghamton University, University of Wisconsin, Carleton College, and NYU. It has been an additional privilege to work in recent years with the talented researchers and member archives of the National Recording Preservation Board’s Radio Preservation Task Force, whose preservation efforts and educational initiatives offer continued reminders of radio’s vital role in shaping sound history and cultural memory.
At Oxford University Press, my editor, Norm Hirschy, has shown unflagging patience and commitment to this project throughout its various iterations, while my anonymous reviewers offered close readings and thoughtful suggestions for which I am equally grateful. Final thanks go to my family, for nurturing my sound obsessions over the years, and for their unfailing confidence and support in helping me see this project to fruition.
INTRODUCTION
Making Radio: A Production-Oriented Approach to Early Broadcasting
In a 1923 article for the General Electric Company’s national publicity organ, GE Review, studio director Kolin Hager, speaking for GE station WGY (Schenectady, New York), expounded upon what he called a new art of “Staging the Unseen.” In radio, Hager explained, “a new set of conditions. . . . must be considered in the production of music, addresses, plays, operettas, and the many specialties that find a place on broadcast programs.” While performances onstage and in concert or lecture halls were “carried over with a score of [visual] aids that make [them] convincing and delightful,” broadcasting demanded development of production methods that catered exclusively to the ear.1 As the journal’s editors elaborated in their introduction to the article, “The studio management’s problem has been to work out such a technique of practice as will enable a variety of worthy programs to be . . . broadcast with a realism which . . . makes one forget the sense of sight is not being employed.” In the capable hands of this emerging class of professional sound workers, they concluded, the presentational challenges of aural broadcasting were well met, helping radio “evolve, from what might have been a passing fad, [into] a real service as indispensable to the public as other standard methods of communication and entertainment.”2
Written by one of GE’s leading studio directors for the company’s main public relations journal, Hager’s article is unquestionably spin- driven and self- serving. However, such careerist bids by trade workers to legitimate themselves and their medium played a crucial role in shaping early radio institutions and structuring the modes of aesthetic practice pursued by early producers. These discourses point toward an important but largely neglected domain of early twentieth- century
sound historiography: the development of a production culture for aural broadcasting that established defining forms of content and techniques of practice for this new medium of electric sound entertainment. While overlooked in most existing sound histories, broadcasting aesthetics became the key site in which battles for professionalization and cultural legitimation were waged, as producers struggled to define standards of practice and win public recognition for their medium. As the following chapters demonstrate, the programming forms, production practices, and performance styles these workers created established key precedents for network- era productions in the decades that followed. Equally important, as the first successful medium of electric sound entertainment, radio also staged sharp departures from aesthetic norms for the acoustic- era productions that preceded it, establishing new sets of practices and sensibilities that set the stage for subsequent developments in electric phonograph recording and film sound. Perched on the cusp of a new era of electric sound reproduction, early radio workers developed practices of media-making that not only shaped the future of broadcasting, but also facilitated a series of much broader transformations in popular sound culture.
In mapping the institutionalization of programming and production practices for aural broadcasting and their impact on the nation’s sound culture, this book stages a strategic departure from previous radio scholarship and fills a persistent gap in larger histories of modern sound media. Historical work on radio has been defined by two main waves of scholarship, to which Making Radio remains deeply indebted but which it also works to supplement and challenge. The first wave of radio historiography, inaugurated by Erik Barnouw’s monumental History of Broadcasting trilogy in the 1960s and early 1970s, privileged inventors, policymakers, and broadcasting executives, analyzing the technologies developed for the medium, laws created to regulate it, and economics of what for decades constituted one of the country’s biggest and most profitable entertainment industries.3 The second wave emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, as part of a larger “cultural turn” in media studies that shifted attention to the audiences served by broadcasters and social debates surrounding the medium, mapping the complex interplay of macro-level industrial forces and grassroots cultural forces.4 While they have shed important light on broadcasting’s institutional structures and cultural contexts, too often lost to both top- down and bottom-up approaches has been an important middle ground inhabited by producers such as Hager. Occupying a stratum of broadcasting history below that of entrepreneurial inventors, federal regulators, and corporate executives, but above that of audiences and social pundits, this new class of professional sound workers was responsible for producing the day-to- day programming that filled the nation’s airwaves and made radio more
than just technologies, laws, and accounting figures, while giving its ever- growing publics something on which to project their competing interests and desires. To these programmers, producers, and performers went the task of “making radio” in the fullest sense, developing content and techniques of practice that secured their medium’s larger cultural identity. In the wake of the cultural turn, Making Radio thus proposes a new, aesthetic turn— a third wave of scholarship that moves to the spaces of the studio and writer’s room to explore the pioneering programming forms, production practices, and performance styles through which an emerging group of sound workers struggled to define their professional identities and that of radio itself (see Table A).
While most sound historians have focused on the expansion of the commercial network system in the 1930s as the formative moment in radio’s development, I argue that the network era did not so much innovate as consolidate programming and production practices that had already achieved institutional inertia in the prenetwork period of the 1920s. New stations proliferated during this decade, rising from only 20 to 30 in 1921 to nearly 570 by the end of 1922, peaking just short of 700 in 1927, then stabilizing around 600 in 1928–1929.5 Sales of receiving equipment grew from $60 million to $136 million between 1922 and 1923 alone, reaching $430 million by 1925, and topping $842 million by 1929, while the number of radio households grew with equal rapidity and by 1930 included almost half of the homes in the country.6 Most important for present purposes, however, are the new forms of cultural labor to which this expanding industry gave rise. The prenetwork period spawned new groups of programmers, writers, directors, engineers, and on- air talent, all of whom worked to develop best practices
Table A
Mapping Radio Historiography
Chronology
First wave (traditional)
Second wave (cultural turn)
Production approach (aesthetic turn)
Areas of Emphasis
Inventions/inventors
Industry economics
Regulatory policy
Audiences + critics
Cultural context
Politics of representation
Programming forms
Production practices
Performance styles
Orientation
Top-down
Bottom-up
Midlevel
for broadcasting and win cultural recognition for themselves and their medium. As Making Radio shows, the programming forms, production practices, and performance styles they innovated were often highly contested, developing through a process of extensive experimentation and debate. However, by the mid to late 1920s this process had achieved provisional closure, resulting in standards of practice that continued to inform subsequent network- era productions.7 These included influential structures of broadcast flow developed in response to demands for live, continuous programming streams and techniques for managing listener attention that shaped dominant modes of engagement with that programming. As producers and critics pushed for more conscious cultivation of the medium’s aesthetic properties, ideas of radiogénie helped to legitimate emerging sound genres and instill a soundmindedness in mediamakers and audiences alike. In addition, this decade spawned foundational studio techniques for radio broadcasting, including standard microphone setups and mixing methods for musical presentations; narrational strategies for radio drama; and performance styles for radio music, drama, and talk, all carefully tailored to the perceived demands of radio’s aural mode of address and new instruments of electric sound reproduction.
The aesthetic norms that emerged during the prenetwork era not only shaped the future of network broadcasting but also established important precedents for neighboring record and film industries. Recent work in the interdisciplinary field of sound studies has encouraged attention to such intermedial affinities and influences yet has often failed to recognize radio’s formative role in shaping these broader transformations in early twentieth-century sound culture.8 While structures of broadcast flow were developed in response to economic and regulatory pressures within the broadcasting industry itself, programmers’ treatment of radio’s sound streams as manipulable objects that could be segmented and rearranged for commercial purposes facilitated a much broader commodification of sound that was equally vital to the success of other sound industries. These programming strategies also negotiated larger cultural tensions between immersive and distracted regimes of aural attention at a time of expanding competition between different sound media across a wide range of listening contexts. Popular radio genres, for their part, although developed in response to the perceived demands and possibilities of radio presentation, also increased broader cultural investments in aural artmaking, while creating new forms of shared sonic experience that shaped expectations for neighboring sound media. Perhaps most important, however, were the studio techniques and presentational styles pioneered by radio workers during this period.
As the nation’s first successful medium of electric sound entertainment, radio predated the widespread deployment of electric phonograph and film sound by at least half a decade and played a central role in defining production and performance
strategies for this new era of electric sound. While technologies of film sound and electric phonograph recording were developed in the same labs and in many cases by the same engineers responsible for radio, electrical transcription was not employed in commercial phonograph recording until 1925, and the film industry’s first successful feature-length sound film was not released until the following year, with most major studios refusing to commit to sound production until 1928.9 Radio, I argue, established important precedents that primed this emergent culture of electric sound entertainment, popularizing aesthetic strategies that would be echoed and consolidated in the practices of neighboring film and music media during the second half of the decade. In mapping these contributions, the following chapters isolate principles of sonic parsimony in both music and drama, which privileged a reduction in the number of performers and inputs to ensure clarity of reproduction; simulation of real-world environments through strategic manipulation of reverberation characteristics; an emphasis on intelligibility over strict fidelity to performers’ relative volume or spatial position; and a shift to new, “natural” styles of singing, acting, and speech that fetishized qualities of vocal performance inaudible in earlier acoustic-era productions. From radio, these sonic strategies quickly spread across neighboring sound industries, undergoing a swift process of cultural generalization. The programming forms, production practices, and performance styles that radio workers developed during this period had both centripetal and centrifugal effects. Programmers, producers, and performers negotiated a series of industry-specific pressures, including top-down pressures from federal regulators, corporate station owners, and early sponsors, as well as bottom-up pressures from expanding audiences and professional critics. Within this context, radio workers strove to shore up the boundaries of their fledgling industry, define their professional identities, and win public acceptance for their medium. However, the standards they adopted also had much broader ramifications for an evolving twentieth-century sound culture. Radio workers developed novel solutions to the technical and aesthetic challenges of electric sound production that were soon echoed in techniques pursued by film and music producers, while retooling public listening sensibilities for a new type of sound that quickly spread across a series of related sound media. As the following chapters show, radio was not merely a symptom but rather a key contributor to these larger transformations in the nation’s sound culture, forming a vital but often neglected link in the twentieth century’s transition from acoustic-era production to a new culture of electric sound.
While many of the norms and practices addressed in this book achieved broader extension, Making Radio does not propose to offer an exhaustive account that encompasses all types of broadcasting and broadcasters. Instead, it conducts a “history of the dominant,” tracing the emergence of industry norms that would
define the future of mainstream broadcasting and have the most direct impact on or affinities with practices adopted for adjacent sound media. It therefore focuses on practices at larger commercial stations that maintained full staffs, courted larger audiences, and enjoyed higher transmitting power that gave them broader geographical reach. 10 While not all of these stations pursued commercial sponsorship, the majority were owned by commercial corporations that used their stations to promote their companies and generate public goodwill. 11 Several, though not all, participated in experiments with “chain” broadcasting during the first half of the decade and formed some of the earliest network stations upon the creation of the National Broadcasting Company at the end of 1926 and the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1927. 12 The larger audiences and broader reach of these stations gave their content and stylistic norms greater cultural influence than alternative programming and production models pursued at smaller, local stations or noncommercial religious and educational stations. While recent years have seen growing work on these alternative broadcasting traditions, to adequately grasp the nature and extent of their deviations from mainstream praxis first demands an understanding of the norms from which they departed.13 The chapters that follow are thus committed to illuminating the emergence of dominant industry practices that provided the baseline for radio production in its US context, formed the unacknowledged foundation for subsequent networkera broadcasts, and established key precedents for the film and music industries upon their own adoption of electric sound technologies in the second half of the decade.
While aesthetic analysis has long been a core concern of related fields of media study, it remained largely absent from the economic and policy-driven work of first-wave historians, and in second-wave historiography was limited mainly to studies of culturally contested representations of gender, race, and class. As Christopher Anderson and Michael Curtin note in their work on the cultural turn, these second-wave concerns with politics of representation have encouraged serious analysis of entertainment programming that was once dismissed as unworthy of attention, revealing “complicated narrative and rhetorical strategies [that] express a surprising range of meanings in response to their historical contexts.”14 Neil Verma, however, has rightly observed in his work on network-era drama that cultural approaches often ignore basic questions of style, illuminating social tensions and debates refracted in broadcast texts but lacking any “standard argot with which to perform routine interpretive tasks like describing scenes, explaining segues, or grappling with patterns in
dialogue.”15 Making Radio affirms the need for closer attention to stylistic norms, though emphasizing techniques developed during the prenetwork period and drawing connections with parallel tendencies in neighboring sound media. In addition, while Verma privileges analysis of the texts themselves, this book places equal weight on their institutional contexts and the work routines developed within them; rather than reverse engineering production practices from their resulting radio texts, it takes these practices as themselves primary objects of analysis and seeks to understand the institutional pressures and logics behind them. Combining new work in industry studies and creativity studies with long-standing traditions in film and music studies, this production-oriented approach offers a better understanding of why certain aesthetic choices were pursued over others, while circumventing otherwise insurmountable problems of access to early program recordings.
Production studies have gained considerable traction in recent industry studies work and offer a valuable means of recuperating the aesthetic agenda. Most prominent in this vein is John Caldwell’s work on “production culture,” which employs sociological methods to achieve a more fine-grained analysis of industrial practices than traditional political economy approaches. “While film and television are influenced by macroscopic economic processes,” Caldwell explains, “they also very much function on a microsocial level as local cultures and social communities in their own right,” with internal value systems and sense-making strategies that determine what texts get made and how those are produced.16 Understanding these communities, as Timothy Havens, Amanda Lotz, and Serra Tinic explain in their own account of this approach, demands attention to the ways that “knowledge about texts, audiences, and the industry form, circulate, and change” to in turn influence dominant sets of production practices.17 Production practices must be understood within their larger institutional contexts and connected to the types of textual forms they authorize or foreclose. As David Hesmondhalgh notes, industry studies “at its best . . . links dynamics of power in the cultural industries with . . . questions regarding the kinds of texts that are produced by cultural industry organisations,” integrating macrolevel structural analysis with micro-level analysis of production practices and media texts.18 In its lesser forms, production studies may become fixated on internal power struggles within the industries in question, losing sight of their structuring institutional constraints or aesthetic outcomes. At its best, however, such work can offer valuable insights into the creative processes that shape popular cultural texts and help us understand the role that larger institutional contexts play in structuring these processes of cultural production.
This attention to production processes in industry studies closely parallels corresponding tendencies in the neighboring field of creativity studies. As R. Keith Sawyer observes, recent years have witnessed a decisive “shift in creativity research
from a focus on creative products to a focus on the creative processes that generate them,” as part of a sociocultural turn that privileges attention to internal dynamics of production communities and the contextual forces that shape their creative labor.19 Seeking to bridge the gap between creativity studies and industry studies, Phillip McIntyre summarizes this new approach to creativity as a shift from the “older, Ptolemaic, or person-centered view” that emphasizes Romantic notions of genius and personal inspiration, to “a more Copernican conception, where the individual agent is still seen to engage in creative activity but is now constituted as part of a much larger structured system in operation.” Understanding these systemic structures, he argues, requires close study of external forces impacting “the production, dissemination and reception of creative products,” as well as the internal “formal and aesthetic structures . . . embedded in bodies of knowledge” that producers employ “when they undertake creative actions.”20 Here, McIntyre echoes the views of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who sought to demonstrate the role that larger production and distribution systems play in structuring an artist’s professional values and sensibilities and shaping his or her aesthetic choices.21 However, as Sawyer notes, more recent sociological conceptions of creativity have encouraged not only new understandings of forces shaping the activities of individual artists but also attention to practices of “group creativity” and the complex forms of communication and collaboration these entail.22 The following chapters treat modes of sonic production developed by early radio workers as forms of group creativity, mapping the systems used to coordinate group actions within early broadcast stations and privileging shared structures of knowledge over individual innovation. While new to radio historiography, this production-oriented approach has deep roots in film studies and has been recently embraced by music scholars, as well. Within the field of film studies, David Bordwell has demonstrated the value of historical poetics, which analyzes the “principles according to which the work is composed,” as well as “how and why . . . these principles [have] arisen and changed in particular historical circumstances.”23 This determination of “how and why” Bordwell construes in his later work as an analysis of “problems and solutions,” where problems include everything from challenges of new technologies to basic stylistic or storytelling goals, and solutions are driven in part by personal initiative but also by larger institutional norms and schemas.24 While offering ready-made solutions to common problems, established schemas are often contested during periods of technological transition, with the “coming of sound” in the late 1920s through early 1930s offering one of Hollywood cinema’s most prominent examples. Rick Altman, James Lastra, and Helen Hanson, for instance, richly document debates over preferred miking and mixing strategies during and immediately following this period, while work by Donald Crafton, Allison McCracken, and Jennifer Fleeger has illuminated
9 debates over preferred acting and singing styles—in both cases emphasizing production practices and qualities of vocal performance whose radio precursors are elaborated in subsequent chapters.25 Attention to the institutionalization or disruption of dominant production norms has similarly swept the field of music studies, from Paul Théberge’s analysis of electronic musicmaking, to Mark Katz’s work on hip-hop production, to Susan Horning’s study of recording engineers.26 As Horning notes, “Through surviving recordings, we can listen to how music changed, but we have little understanding of the process” through which that music was produced, or the “different concepts of sound recording and different ideas about how the studio should be used” that guided production practices during moments of technological transition.27 A full understanding of dominant production styles, in short, requires attention not only to the content of sonic texts but also to the professional knowledges and practices that authorize and sustain these productions.
The chapters that follow argue that attention to production processes and the rationales behind them is every bit as important for radio history as for other areas of sound historiography. Indeed, the proliferation of production studies for radio’s companion sound media makes it increasingly pressing to perform a similar study for radio itself. While developed by members of early broadcasting institutions in response to the perceived challenges and goals of radio production, production processes for aural broadcasting also provided the foundation for many parallel practices in film and music production highlighted by scholars in these areas. A productionoriented approach to broadcasting aesthetics not only enables better understanding of the sonic forms and stylistic strategies pursued for radio itself but is also an essential tool for mapping the medium’s affinities with related spheres of sound practice, thus offering important insights into much broader transformations in early twentieth-century sound culture.
Radio’s “No- Sound” Archive
The general neglect of prenetwork-era radio programming in prior histories may stem in part from its apparent scarcity within the historical record. In preparing his study of golden age network radio, for instance, Verma points toward a wealth of surviving program recordings from later decades, basing his reconstruction of aesthetic practices on a sample consisting of several thousand episodes.28 Prenetworkera recordings, by contrast, are limited to only a handful of air checks and recreations made days or sometimes years after the original broadcast.29 Such programming possesses what historian Amanda Keeler has called a “no-sound” status that demands reconstruction by means other than direct listening.30 Fortunately, there remains an abundance of alternative sources to aid in this task, many of which
in fact prove of even greater value for a production- oriented approach than the programs themselves.
In his work on early television broadcasting, Jason Jacobs shows the value of written documentation for research not only on the content of early programming but also for studies of aesthetic norms, with “scripts, studio plans, policy memos, committee minutes, and so on” enabling reconstruction of the “ghost text” of the missing program and its salient stylistic features.31 For a production-oriented approach, such documents serve not only as important proxies for original programming but also as key sources in their own right. As Josephine Dolan observes, while broadcasting’s “written or visual archives are [often] positioned as secondary at best . . . merely stand[ing] in for the absent record of radio/broadcasting,” the documents they contain in many cases helped to shape underlying production processes.32 Scripts, production notes, and policy documents provided the raw materials and established guiding principles for the final broadcast, while also shaping more intangible elements such as the aesthetic sensibilities of production workers. Close analysis of these documents enables reconstruction of stylistic norms for prenetwork-era broadcasting while illuminating the production processes and institutional pressures behind that programming in ways that the recorded sounds alone never could. Period trade presses shed additional light on the larger industrial rationales and constraints guiding early production strategies, with popular radio magazines in turn offering a space in which those strategies could be rendered legible to audiences, and critics’ columns in period newspapers working to either legitimate or challenge them. These sources are used throughout the following chapters to provide a detailed analysis of programming practices and production strategies, the institutional factors shaping them, and producers’ ongoing struggles for professional recognition and cultural validation of their creative choices.
Making Radio’s investigations are divided into five chapters, moving from macrolevel analysis of early programming strategies and genres (the “what” of broadcasting) to micro-level analysis of production techniques and performance styles (the “how”). At both levels, I argue, radio workers developed creative strategies that laid the foundation for subsequent network-era practices and facilitated parallel shifts in filmmaking and music production. Chapter 1 addresses the programming strategies developed by station directors during the 1920s, arguing their importance for defining enduring principles of broadcast flow and facilitating broader shifts in ways of thinking about sound and managing listening attention. Chapter 2 continues this macro-level analysis of programming forms by considering early writers’ efforts to
develop radiogenic sound genres, showing how these workers helped to legitimate radio as a medium that could make unique and valued contributions to the nation’s sound culture. Chapters 3 through 4 move from macro-level analysis of programming forms and strategies to micro-level analysis of production techniques and performance styles pursued for broadcast music, drama, and talk. Studio directors and control room engineers, these chapters argue, developed specialized miking and mixing strategies in response to the perceived demands of their medium’s instruments of electric sound reproduction, popularizing techniques that would be reinforced by the music and film industries during the second half of the decade. Radio singing, acting, and speaking underwent a similar process of professionalization during this period, with on-air talent cultivating new styles of vocal performance whose impact ultimately extended well beyond radio itself.
Chapter 1’s analysis of programming strategies treats these as products of a live, continuous streaming model distinctive to a broadcasting system in which private license holders vied for preferred frequency assignments and fought to win audience shares in the face of competition from other, surrounding stations. Regulatory demands for live entertainment created a forced separation between radio and neighboring recording media, transforming radio into a new studio art, while the need to attract and hold listener attention pushed programmers to develop orderly and predictable programming patterns that included regular weekly programs, stripping of daily features, and stacking of similarly themed features into larger programming blocks. Successful implementation of these strategies, the chapter argues, required complex systems of temporal accounting managed through the bureaucratic tool of the programming log, which helped broadcasters plan, track, and evaluate their daily output. Announcer’s continuity and program listings in daily newspapers in turn helped guide period listening practices and naturalize these emerging rhythms of radio time. While developed as solutions to institutionally specific challenges, programmers’ strategic segmentation and concatenation of radio’s temporal streams also facilitated a broader commodification of sound that was central to the success of all commercial sound industries, while their efforts to adjust public listening habits responded to larger struggles to manage listener attention across an expanding range of different sound media and listening contexts.
Adopting a cultural/pragmatic approach to genre, chapter 2 argues that the formal qualities of the genres that filled early program schedules were subjects of extensive debate within the burgeoning broadcasting industry and represented strategic responses to both top-down institutional pressures and bottom-up cultural pressures. To illustrate these debates and the aesthetic strategies they yielded, the chapter offers a detailed case study of the musical variety genre, which dominated early program schedules and underwent a series of calculated transformations that
highlighted the importance of emerging concepts of medium appropriateness embedded in the idea of radiogénie. Faced with growing competition from other stations and discouraged from pursuing more specialized forms of content by regulatory mandates to serve the general public interest, early stations embraced musical variety as a privileged genre with broad appeal. In response to criticisms that such programming lacked unity and distinction, producers pursued several noteworthy changes to the genre, from inclusion of a program host as central unifying figure, to experiments with themed programs, to the soon-dominant “continuity program,” which used dramatic frame stories to bind together an otherwise diverse array of musical offerings. Embraced by industry pundits and cultural critics alike, continuity programs were celebrated as one of the nation’s first distinctly radiogenic programming forms. This concept of radiogénie was of critical importance, facilitating radio’s professionalization and legitimation as a distinctive sphere of cultural production that could make meaningful and valued contributions to an expanding field of early twentieth-century sound art.
Moving from macro-level considerations of programming strategies and genres to more fine-grained analysis of studio operations, chapter 3 picks up where chapter 2 left off by exploring efforts to define production techniques and performance styles for musical broadcasts. Producers and performers during this decade grappled with a wide array of new sound technologies, from microphones to mixing boards. Working to institutionalize preferred skills and knowledges for their industry and win public acceptance for their medium, these radio workers developed techniques of practice for a new studio art and new type of electric sound defined by five basic principles. A principle of acoustic plasticity, or pliability of acoustic space, encouraged manipulation of sound through addition or reduction of reverb to simulate different sonic environments, while efforts to maintain satisfactory signal-to-noise ratios yielded a new “close-up sound” whose compressed dynamic range eliminated a key source of structural tension on which many traditional musical forms relied and encouraged greater valuation of formerly inaudible sonic details. A principle of sonic parsimony stressed the reduction of sonic inputs to avoid muddying the final mix, while a principle of aural intelligibility favored a consistently clean and evenly balanced foreground sound over strict fidelity to real-world spatial relationships. Finally, an aesthetic of sonic restraint gained ascendancy during this period, with forceful concert hall performance styles displaced by more subdued, microphone-friendly alternatives. These same principles would be embraced by members of the music recording industry during the second half of the decade, representing a much broader shift in production practices and listening sensibilities that would ultimately extend well beyond radio.
Turning to dramatic programming, chapter 4 argues that similar principles informed production techniques and performance styles for early experiments with sound drama, which bore striking affinities with methods pursued for sound film productions of the late 1920s and 1930s. While radio historians have traditionally viewed dramatic series as an innovation of the network era, this chapter argues that sound dramas were highly valued and actively pursued throughout the prenetwork period, with producers and critics casting the ability to construct compelling aural fictions as the ultimate test of radio’s aesthetic legitimacy. By the middle of the decade, clear rules had emerged governing narrative structure, use of music and sound effects, and preferred acting styles, rooted in four key principles with direct parallels in early sound cinema. These included privileging a “natural” delivery style that echoed the aesthetic of restraint discussed in chapter 3, an emphasis on thinning the mix that reinforced music productions’ principle of sonic parsimony, and foregrounding dialogue to privilege intelligibility of speech over strict fidelity to realworld acoustical experience. At the same time, drama producers also established a principle of dialogue reduction that stressed the minimization of cumbersome verbal exposition through systems of musical cues and sound effects tailored to the electric microphone. While film scholars have observed the use of similar strategies in sound cinema productions, this chapter emphasizes their pursuit in radio from a remarkably early date, as well as their affinities with principles of radio music production discussed in chapter 3.
Turning from drama to talk, chapter 5 considers emerging forms of radio speech in formats ranging from scheduled talks to professional announcing. As a medium for electric voice amplification, radio played a pivotal role in facilitating broader shifts in early twentieth-century oratorical style but also provoked severe cultural anxieties surrounding those changes. Severing voices from their bodily referents and bringing distant, unknown others into the intimate space of the home, radio sparked significant debate over preferred modes of vocal comportment and established powerful new disciplinary regimes to regulate on-air speaking styles. As the public faces of radio, members of a new class of professional announcers were celebrated as exemplars of preferred forms of radio speech but also formed the focus for debates surrounding the radio voice’s potentially threatening powers and abuses. The regimes of vocal discipline pursued by these figures emphasized special care in enunciation, controlled rate of speech, and proper modulation that were justified as responses to perceived demands of the radio microphone. In addition, these radio voices were required to strike a delicate balance between formality and informality for a medium whose one-to-many mode of address and intimate reception contexts unsettled traditional boundaries between the public and private spheres. While
