1 See Cubitt, Sean, Timeshift: On Video Culture (London, 1991), Chapter 3: ‘Stars Get in your Eyes: How Music Became Visible Again’.Google Scholar

2 See Michael Pickering and Tony Green, Everyday Culture: Popular Songs and the Vernacular Milieu (Milton Keynes, 1987), and Iain Chambers's discussion of ‘everyday life’ in Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Pop Culture (London, 1985).Google Scholar

3 Richard Shusterman, Performing Live (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 4. See also idem, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

4 The idea that television is actively constructing a version of the world rather than simply representing what is ‘out there’ is an idea that has been developed and elaborated in various ways by scholars studying the media. Notable contributions to this trajectory of thinking include The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media, ed. Stan Cohen and Jock Young (London, 1973), and the various writings of Stuart Hall, in particular ‘The Determination of News Photographs’, ibid., 226–43; ‘Culture, the Media and the Ideological Effect’, Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (London, 1977), 315–48; and ‘The Work of Representation’, Representation, Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Hall (London, 1997), 13–74.Google Scholar

5 Experimental television broadcasts had been demonstrated from the late 1920s and into the early 1930s. The first public broadcasts were in Britain. In the USA public broadcasts commenced during 1939 in New York City.Google Scholar

6 These descriptions are from the first Radio Times television supplement, initially distributed only in the London area with the edition published on 30 October 1936.Google Scholar

7 Details can be found in copies of the Radio Times held at the British Library Newspaper Library, Colindale, London.Google Scholar

8 The BBC circulated lists of locations where television could be viewed.Google Scholar

9 Asa Briggs, A History of Broadcasting in the UK, ii: The Golden Age of the Wireless (Oxford, 1965), 611.Google Scholar

10 The figures cited in this section are approximate estimates derived from BBC Handbooks. For a discussion of such figures and attempts to measure the audience see Briggs, Asa, A History of Broadcasting in the UK, iv: Sound and Vision (Oxford, 1979), 239–43.Google Scholar

11 Cited in Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (New York, 1987), 270.Google Scholar

12 ‘The Coming of Television’, Radio Times (23 October 1936), 5.Google Scholar

13 Ernest Thomson, ‘What is this Television?‘, Radio Times (17 May 1946), 3, 23.Google Scholar

14 ‘What You Will See on your Screens’, Radio Times (7 June 1946), 24.Google Scholar

15 Peter Gabriel is quoted by Simon Frith in ‘Making Sense of Video: Pop into the Nineties’, Music for Pleasure (Cambridge, 1988), 205–25 (p. 214). See also Cubitt, Timeshift.Google Scholar

16 ‘Opera by Television: Mr. Coates’ Pickwick’, The Times (14 November 1936), 10.Google Scholar

17 Thomas Hartman and Francis Routh, ‘Today's Music on Television: A New Art Form’, Composer, 82 (summer 1984), 6.Google Scholar

18 Michael Chanan, ‘Television's Problem with (Classical) Music’, Popular Music, 21 (2002), 367–74.Google Scholar

19 I am drawing here on some of the discussion in Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley, 1993).Google Scholar

20 James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995).Google Scholar

21 ‘Correspondence and Gramophone Society Reports’, Gramophone (September 1935), 175.Google Scholar

22 Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven, 2000), 205. For an extended critical discussion of the history and problems of structural listening see Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, ‘Towards a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno and Stravinsky’, Deconstructive Variations (Minneapolis, 1996), 148–76. See also Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell'Antonio (Berkeley, 2004). Philosophical arguments against structural listening can also be found in James Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, NY, 1997).Google Scholar

23 I write more from experience than scholarly citation here. During the early 1970s it was quite common to arrive at a friend's house or flat and find him or her sitting in the dark listening to rock and pop music. I assume we were not that unusual.Google Scholar

24 For a discussion of the ‘ideology of rock’, a belief that rock music emerged independently of commercial interests and consumer culture (before being co-opted) see Frith, Simon, The Sociology of Rock (London, 1978), and Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (London, 1983). For specific commentary on rock and television see Frith, Simon, ‘Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television’, Popular Music, 21 (2002), 277–90.Google Scholar

25 This point is mentioned by Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1992), 1–20.Google Scholar

26 A further irony can be noted here: those sitting in the darkened room listening attentively to the gramophone or classical radio broadcast were still, at this time, a minority when compared to the vast numbers of working-class people who were flocking to the cinemas being built in cities and towns during the 1920s and 1930s. Beliefs about the purity of certain types of musical experience were gaining currency at the very same time as the moving-image media of film and television were growing in popularity and connecting previously discrete sounds and images in ever more numerous ways.Google Scholar

27 Herbert, A. P., ‘Some Thoughts on Television’, Listener (2 September 1936), 421.Google Scholar

28 ‘Television Advisory Committee Comments on Programmes’, 27 April 1937, File T16/207/1, Television Advisory Committee 1935–40, BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham. All BBC archive material cited with permission.Google Scholar

29 TV Light Entertainment Memos 1937–51, T12/230/1, BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham.Google Scholar

30 Quoted in Murray Forman, ‘One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount’, Popular Music, 21 (2002), 268.Google Scholar

31 Quoted ibid.Google Scholar

32 Herbert Graf, Opera for the People (Minneapolis, 1951), 222.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 219–20.Google Scholar

34 John Culshaw, ‘The Outlook for Video Music’, Gramophone (September 1970), 399.Google Scholar

35 Leppert, The Sight of Sound, xx.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., xxi.Google Scholar

37 The Broadcasting of Musicians on Television, BBC Engineering Monograph 40 (London, 1962), 7.Google Scholar

38 Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination and Culture (Oxford, 1990), 153.Google Scholar

39 Quoted in Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 236.Google Scholar

40 Quoted ibid., 273.Google Scholar

41 This point was well illustrated with humorous extracts by Richard Witts in a Saul Seminar, British Library, 4 November 2003, ‘Talking About “Talking About Music”: The Presentation of Music on BBC Radio and Television’.Google Scholar

42 Frith, ‘Look! Hear!‘, 279–80.Google Scholar

43 ‘Trade Winds and Idle Zephyrs’, Gramophone (November 1936), 263.Google Scholar

44 ‘The Sound in Television Programmes’, BBC Audience Research Report (8 February 1954), VR/54/54, BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham. Based on a survey of a viewing panel of just under 500 people (644 sent; 481 received).Google Scholar

45 This raises another set of questions about what realism in sound might be, debates that resurfaced with the additional dynamic range introduced by the CD when compared to vinyl recording. The increased range allowed recording engineers to accentuate the contrast between very quiet and loud passages, leading to complaints being made about how this attempt at sonic realism requires intervention from the listener: if you turn up the volume for the quiet sections, then you might have to jump up to turn down the louder passages later. The complaint here is similar to that made by respondents surveyed about television sound during the 1950s. Full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of the present article, although I would acknowledge the following remarks by Carl Dahlhaus: ‘it is uncertain whether … “musical realism” is an objective entity with an integrity which will stand up to examination, or merely the illusion of an object, generated by verbal usage’ (Realism in Nineteenth Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall, Cambridge, 1982, 10).Google Scholar

46 It is clear, for instance, from looking through back copies of this journal or, to take two further examples, Popular Music and Journal of Musicology.Google Scholar

47 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, 2003). For various approaches to listening and audio cultures see The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford, 2003); Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, 2004); and Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1999).Google Scholar

48 R. Murray Schafer sets up a distinction between a pre-industrial or rural ‘hi-fi’ soundscape and a more industrial and urban ‘lo-fi’ soundscape. See The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT, 1994), 43.Google Scholar

49 ‘Benjamin Britten Talks to Alan Blyth’, Gramophone (June 1970), 29.Google Scholar

50 Jeremy Tambling, ‘Introduction: Opera in the Distraction Culture’, A Night in at the Opera, ed. Tambling (London, 1994), 1–24 (p. 15).Google Scholar

51 Michael Talbot, ‘A Venetian Operatic Contract of 1714‘, The Business of Music, ed. Talbot (Liverpool, 2002), 10–61 (p. 25).Google Scholar

52 Johnson, Listening in Paris (quotation from p. 1).Google Scholar

53 For a recent discussion of the issues entailed here see Lury, Karen, Interpreting Television (London, 2005).Google Scholar

54 David Sinclair, review of Bob Dylan at Wembley Arena, The Times (17 November 2003), 17.Google Scholar

55 For just two examples of work illustrating this see Morley, David, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London, 1992), and Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London, 1994).Google Scholar

56 See Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, and Lury, Interpreting Television.Google Scholar

57 John Walsh, ‘Tales of the City’, Independent (16 October 2003), 7.Google Scholar

58 Andy Gill, ‘Blood on the Tracks: A Critic's Obsession’, Independent (3 March 2004), Review section, 12.Google Scholar

59 John Robert Brown, ‘The Vision Thing’, Classical Music (12 April 2003), 43.Google Scholar

60 Christopher Whelen, ‘Thoughts on Television Opera’, Composer, 24 (1967), 17.Google Scholar

61 BBC Internal Memo from ‘Tel. P.M.‘ (16 November 1936), File T16/207/1, Television Advisory Committee 1935–40, BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham.Google Scholar

62 Andrew Lamb, ‘British Light Music: Sound Good, Feel Good’, Gramophone (November 2002), 34–8.Google Scholar

63 See the definition and discussion of ambient music in Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices (London, 1996). See also Mark Prendergast, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance – The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age (London, 2000).Google Scholar

64 For a discussion of the pervasiveness of music in our lives see Kassabian, Anahid, ‘Ubiquitous Listening’, Popular Music Studies, ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (London, 2002), 131–42, and Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening and Other Moodsong (London, 1995).Google Scholar

65 See Stockfelt, Ola, ‘Adequate Modes of Listening’, Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville, 1997), 129–46.Google Scholar