The BBC and Popular Music in World War II by Christina Baade (Review)
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Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II by Christina Baade (review) Debra Rae Cohen Modernism/modernity, Volume 20, Number 3, September 2013, pp. 592-594 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2013.0061 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/525176 [ Access provided at 28 Sep 2021 14:35 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] MODERNISM / modernity 592 Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II. Christina Baade. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 275. $45.00 (cloth). Reviewed by Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina If there is a downside to the emergence as a field of what one might call modernist radio studies, it’s that for the most part its focus and terms of reference still reflect the English depart- ments from which it sprang. While early scholarship that tended, in its reclamation of modernist radio presence, to concentrate on documenting readings, scripts, and broadcasts by literary modernists has been augmented by work more attentive to the lessons of media studies, discus- sions of the spoken word continue—unsurprisingly—to dominate. Yet this word-centeredness drastically distorts our map of the period’s soundscape: on the BBC in the 1930s, for example, spoken word broadcasts (even including schools programs) rarely totaled more than thirty percent of programming; music of various kinds always constituted the vast majority of broadcasting. It is for this reason, among others, that Christina Baade’s Victory through Harmony rep- resents such a valuable addition to current work on the culture of World War II and on radio more broadly; masterfully grounded in original archival research and sophisticated in its treat- ment of musical form, it extends our understanding of BBC propaganda and morale-building beyond the realm of language, tracing the deep national divisions that broadcast popular music both exposed and worked to resolve. Baade’s volume extends a wave of revisionist scholarship by Sonya Rose, Siân Nicholas, Patrick Deer, and others in identifying the national fissures and fractures that underlay the constructed fiction of British wartime unity. Rather than casting popular music as “a compliant soundtrack underscoring People’s War themes of unity and shared sacrifice,” then (11), Baade argues that its deployment by the BBC in the service of morale in fact resulted from, revealed, and helped reshape contests over the proper image of the nation in wartime. Concerns about inclusivity, about gender roles, about the creeping specter of cultural Americanization, became more deeply charged as the war went on, and the emotive potential of popular music—“a spiritual power that can be translated into a dynamic force,” in the words of Music While You Work producer Wynford Reynolds (68)—made it a key locus for the expression and resolution of these tensions. The BBC’s role as musical gatekeeper—on one hand inclined by the high-culture prejudices of its educational mission against popular entertainment, on the other, the largest employer of musicians in Britain (3)—was only made more complex, Baade explains, by the demands of a war that saw most dance band musicians conscripted even as the need to keep morale high prompted a new emphasis on “light” music. Dance music, in the parlance of the BBC, was not in fact “music” at all, falling under the control of the Variety Department—a circumstance that paradoxically made wartime program innovation more possible. After a brief introduction and a first chapter that offers overviews of prewar BBC policy and the growth of dance music as a popular leisure form, Baade’s book hones in on several of these wartime innovations. Each of her brief chapters highlights a different program, musical subgenre, or controversy, beginning with the scramble to provide morale-boosting programming during the Phoney War and the launch of the Forces Programme in 1940. Baade is particularly deft at depicting the pressure that shifts in wartime conceptions of audience put on the BBC hierarchy, causing the Corporation to modify its institutional resistance to the “tap” listening so often rhetorically connected—as Michelle Hilmes has shown—to the American broadcast model. Yet her sketch of “traditional” BBC practices in the 1930s is itself somewhat misleading, both overestimating the extent of programming choice made possible by the Regional Scheme and overemphasizing “the tired businessman listening at leisure in the privacy of his home” book reviews as “the traditional object of the BBC’s address” (48). Though the wartime shift toward group 593 listening (by soldiers, in factories) was undoubtedly significant in terms of the various modes of distraction this listening entailed, in fact listening groups had always been a factor in the BBC’s planning; they were essential to its mission of educational uplift. As Baade recounts, though, the composition of these groups and their expected (and desired) listening modalities changed dramatically during the war. A particularly compelling chapter treats the institution and development of the Music While You Work program, which “came to represent the BBC’s capacity for innovative broadcasting and its organizational strengths” (194). Aimed primarily at the new female factory workforce, the program was introduced during the post-Dunkirk production drives with the aim of stimulating productivity, bringing mostly live dance music into factories on a twice-daily schedule. Baade is intent on arguing, however, that if MWYW was ever merely a crude adjunct to Taylorist discipline, it quickly became something more complex. By “referenc[ing] flexible modes of listening and the bodily mechanics of leisure,” it “created a communal, humanized space” in which a listener’s responses to music could render her bodily experience individual, even on a factory floor, all while simultaneously “promoting a sense of unity among listeners” (62, 81). Launched at the same as MWYW, Radio Rhythm Club, the BBC’s first dedicated outlet for jazz and swing, demanded by contrast an engaged and “education-minded” listener (106), one who was assumed to be, like most swing fans, young and male. Yet it too served as a site for negotiating national identity. As a rare site for the serious investigation of black cultural produc- tion, Baade argues, RRC functioned as a “a compelling example of democracy in action” (130), played out not only in the program’s antiracist (if often essentialist) sentiments and integration- ist practice, but also in its “polyvocality,” its diversity of musics, guests, and formats, including gramophone concerts, talks by musicians, connoisseurs, and critics, debates, live performances, and even jam sessions (112). Baade’s careful examination of the decision-making regarding this and other individual shows, illuminating the key shaping role of producers such as MWYW’s Reynolds, RRC’s Charles Chilton, and Cecil Madden of the Empire Entertainments Unit, goes far to substantiate the recent scholarship of David Hendy, who argues that the BBC was far less monolithic, far more influenced by the interests and innovations of individuals, than is usually recognized. Yet Baade also makes clear the reactivity, even skittishness, of the Corporation in the face of outside criti- cism as it sought first quickly to develop programming that would “please, reassure and cheer large swaths of the public, particularly listeners engaged in war service,” and later to reconcile such efforts with its position as national cultural arbiter (134). Such challenges—as with the perceived need to tame recalcitrant female working bod- ies—often centered around issues of gender, and indeed several of Baade’s chapters focus on the various ways in which popular musicians (and the BBC’s presentation of them) had to ne- gotiate hegemonic standards of wartime masculinity. As Baade explains, dance band musicians were often seen as “shirkers” even as they played through the Blitz; bandleaders embraced by the BBC were those who cultivated personae that registered their patriotism and masculinity, whether by referencing their earlier service (the dependably middlebrow Jack Payne), playing for the troops (the more musically adventurous Geraldo), or fusing athleticism and discipline (the straight-tempo bandleader Victor Silvester of the BBC Dancing Club). Similarly, the military setbacks of 1942 provoked scapegoating of sentimental music, espe- cially that of American-influenced “crooners,” whose performances were deemed insufficiently virile, sapping the forces’ will to fight. While such music was in fact immensely popular with the troops and certain iconic performers like Vera Lynn were impossible to ban from the airwaves, the BBC responded to criticism by creating a Dance Music Policy Committee charged with vetting songs, arrangements, and performers for “robustness” (75). The episode intriguingly reveals the lag between the BBC’s willingness to broadcast more popular music as an aid to MODERNISM / modernity 594 morale and its actual comprehension of popular music aesthetics: the DMPC initially set about its task by focusing on sheet music rather than sound, in line with the “high modernist notion that performers were conduits for compositional intensions, rather than shapers of musical meaning” (144). Baade is especially adept here at parsing the DMPC’s distinction “between slush and healthy sentiment” (141) in relation to the elements of breath control, portamento, and Americanized accent (147–48); as elsewhere, her explanations are helpfully supported by the snippets of musical examples on the book’s companion website. Gendered anxieties surfaced again in 1944, Baade explains, when the fusion of Overseas and Forces Networks meant that civilians could, newly, hear what the troops overseas had been enjoying for years—the strategic but anomalous use of female hosts (or in BBC parlance, com- mères)—and be aghast at what they deemed a sapping effeminacy. But by then things had changed for good, at least in terms of the BBC attitude towards popular music.