To Flood the Basin with Beethoven

The Promethean Aesthetics of Post-World War II FM Concert Stations in the United States

Authors

  • Tim J. Anderson Old Dominion University Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v5i2.151

Keywords:

FM Radio, US Radio, Classical Music Radio, Popular Music Radio

Abstract

This article focuses on the specific aesthetic formation resulting after the reorganization of the FM segment of the electromagnetic spectrum in the American post-WWII period of the late 1940s and 1950s. FM's distinction in this period was as an emergent alternative space that promoted itself with a rhetoric that emphasized the medium as a more democratic, less commercial mode of communication and musical exhibition. This article looks at a combination of programming guides, trade press and general press sources to understand how this rhetoric manifested itself through programming, ownership, FM audiences and their aesthetic expectations that influenced the development of the much heralded American FM freeform radio formats throughout the 1960s and 1970s

Author Biography

  • Tim J. Anderson, Old Dominion University

    Tim J. Anderson is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University whose research specializes in researching how new media practices and technologies transform and force those institutions and practices to negotiate them in order to make music popular. His work has appeared in numerous journals and book chapters, as well as the 2006 book Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (University of Minnesota Press).

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Published

2011-11-21

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Anderson, T. (2011). To Flood the Basin with Beethoven: The Promethean Aesthetics of Post-World War II FM Concert Stations in the United States. Popular Music History, 5(2), 151-167. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v5i2.151