Popularizing the classics: radio's role in the American music appreciation movement, 1922-34.

Analysing radio's role in a broader early 20th-century American music appreciation movement, this article examines a push for inclusion of classical content on broadcast schedules of the 1920s and 1930s and documents critical objections to programming strategies pursued by commercial broadcasters during this period. While music appreciation advocates embraced radio's potential for cultural uplift, they also criticized broadcasters for giving the classics inadequate representation, violating the structural integrity of these works, and offering listeners explanations of this music that encouraged inappropriate modes of aesthetic engagement. If radio promised to spread classical music throughout all quarters of American society, critics during this period also expressed concerns that strategies used to popularize these works would degrade them and subvert the taste culture whose dominance they might otherwise assert. For classical music lovers, radio thus presented the biggest boon and greatest threat to music appreciation that the nation had ever known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]