Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

Carpentier worked in radio broadcasting for more than twenty years, during the golden age of radio in the 1930s through the 1950s. He was a pioneer in thinking about the wireless reproduction of sound and music and worked collaboratively with many noted musicians and writers of his time. This chapter charts Carpentier’s poetics of sound as he formulated it in his articles on radio and radio scripts. It also studies two soundscapes that would appear in Carpentier’s posthumous memoir Recuento de moradas, and in his novel Concierto barroco. The chapter concludes by saying that the intermedial mingling, in his fiction of visual and soundscapes lent to Carpentier’s realist aesthetics a unique quality of verisimilitude.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen’s relationship to audiovisual art forms. Given Bowen’s own relative lack of interest in film, one may wonder why adaptation should be included in an overall analysis of her work and its impact. One argument is largely commercial: be it through television, film, or radio, dramatisations of Bowen’s works contribute to increased public scrutiny of her fiction. For those already familiar with Bowen’s fiction, adaptations revitalise readings of her fiction. How her texts correspond to traditions and tropes of other media tells us much about the interplay of genres – from novel of manners and social satire to spy story or historical fiction – as they manifest themselves in the traditions of those media. Ultimately, an adaptation is also an interpretation and analysis of its source text. This examination of adaptations focuses on The Last September and The Heat of the Day, two of Bowen’s most-read works. These adaptations are the best known and most accessible audiovisual adaptations of her fiction.

An examination of Meredith Monk’s 1976 opera Quarry in the context of her other works of music theater and film, as well as selected music compositions from the full span of her career. The analysis reads the opera alongside scholarship on the "post-memory" generation (characterized by its distance from the Holocaust), as well as on photography, monuments and "counter-monuments," and other memorial art.

Radio, television, film, the phonograph, wire recorders and mechanical instruments are but some of the technologies that Arnold Schoenberg wrote about or utilized during his lifetime. Infinitely curious and inquisitive, Schoenberg invented all sorts of things, some of which, including a typewriter for musical notation, belie his interest in technology. Rather than provide a broad survey of Schoenberg’s engagement with technology, this chapter focuses more specifically on how Schoenberg interfaced with technology as a means of presenting artistic ideas, particularly musical ideas. Though Schoenberg’s views on technology may appear ambivalent or, at times,even contradictory, something approaching consistency emerges when his writings about technology are considered in the context of his writings about how the musical idea is transmitted from composer to listener.

While stand-up comedy is conventionally thought of in terms of liveness and live performance, it is also the case that recorded media – such as radio and television – have a long, intertwined relationship with stand-up. Beginning from a historical perspective, this chapter outlines how recorded comedy media drew on live forms from its inception, taking inspiration from music hall and vaudeville. Recorded stand-up remains a fundamental component of contemporary recorded media, via stand-up specials on platforms such as HBO and Netflix. But the grammar of recorded media offers challenges to the pleasures associated with stand-up – especially in terms of liveness – and this chapter therefore explores the particularities of stand-up on radio and television, and its ongoing relationship to the live forms that predated it and continue alongside it.

This chapter argues that the spoken word had special significance in the Russian literary tradition due to censorship and other constraints on the printed word, and also because of the cultural chasm between a small, educated elite and a weakly literate majority. It begins with Baroque rhetoric in the eighteenth century before examining the role of oral performance and rhetoric in the Romantic era. It then shows a reinvigoration of literature’s oral dimension from the reform era of the 1860s through to the early twentieth century, as writers became public readers of their work and the educated elite sought to render a popular ‘voice’ in literary form. Following a repressive hiatus in the Stalin period, the spoken word had its heyday in the postwar era: guitar poetry, a popular form of urban folklore, entered the field of literature, while poets achieved national fame as performers as well as published authors.

This chapter explores several legal opinions (pl. fatāwa) from the minority theological and legal tradition known as Ibāḍism, as represented by the work of the modern Ibāḍī jurist Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ (d. 1401/1981). The Ibāḍiyya are usually regarded as the inheritors of the early Khārijite movement and are thus neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī. Important Ibāḍī communities are today found in Oman and in smaller numbers in North Africa (Jerba Island in Tunisia, the Jabal Nafūsa mountains of Libya and the M’zab valley in Algeria). Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ was the most prominent figure of the so-called ‘Ibāḍī Rennaisance’ (al-Nahḍa al-Ibāḍiyya) of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Ibāḍī community in M’zab sought to find a place for themselves in their Sunnī-dominated environment, leading to an upsurge of Ibāḍī legal and theological scholarship. The fatwās excerpted here discuss the lawfulness of television and radio, eating the meat of non-Muslims, Pepsi and Coca Cola, smoking and various drugs.

Just a century separates the practical origins of radio transmission in 1895 and the first smartphone in 1997: a century which saw the rapid extensions of experimentation into widespread applications. The wireless revolution would transform almost every aspect of human interaction and society, from finance and business to political propaganda and the control of crime. Communication ceased to be a matter of space, and wireless communication was a revolution with as important transformative impact as any in history.

Modernist art music of the interwar period takes its place among other early Australian musical modernisms. It developed within an antipodean modernity transformed by new technologies of transport and communication. Mobility – the movement of people, scores, print journalism and recordings – is central here. Using a conceptual framework informed by transnational historical approaches and expanded understandings of the unsettled and contested concept of modernism, this chapter provides a more generous reading of this musical moment long obscured by the concerns and anxieties of a young nation negotiating its complicated ties to Britain and continental Europe while searching for a distinctive culture. After tracing the emergence of a modernist musical discourse in Australia’s popular press, this chapter looks at the output of a group of composers and various forms of modernist musicking to reveal a transnational community of Australian musicians who actively participated in what can be understood as a modernist music world.

This chapter explores the development of youth music media and music festivals in Australia, and the synergies between them. This includes the national expansion in the 1990s of public youth radio station Triple J, and its ABC television counterparts rage and Recovery, in parallel with a new wave of music festivals like the Big Day Out, Homebake and Livid. This infrastructure and these events were central to a period of transition for Australian popular music. Local alternative scenes developed into a translocal industrial sub-sector, marketing a distinct national identity and incorporating urban and regional youth audiences. Cultural institutions and practices established during this time, such as the modern music festival and the celebration of ‘homegrown’ Australian artists, continue to be influential. This chapter draws on secondary texts and scholarly literature to map and connect these developments, which are analysed using scene theory.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.