The purpose of this article is to outline the history of music in television and to examine the influence of television on musical life in terms of the dissemination and composition of music.
II. Concert and recital relays and recordings
III. Opera and musical theatre relays and recordings
LIONEL SALTER (I), HUMPHREY BURTON (II, V), JENNIFER BARNES (III, IV), DAVID BURNAND (VI)
Music in television falls into a number of categories: ‘pure’ (presented in its own right: concerts, serious or light, and recitals); ‘applied’ or supportive (operas and music theatre); features of many kinds, including quasi-educational programmes; and incidental music.
The presentation of pure music is the most contentious and poses the most practical problems. As was the case with earlier mechanical means of reproduction (first gramophone recording, then radio), the advent of television was initially greeted with some hostility by conservative musicians and music lovers; and television executives, concerned with audience size in a mass medium (especially where competition has existed), have always tended to view the presentation of pure music with scepticism. The argument was frequently advanced that diffusion of such material would be better left to radio – unmindful that, until the development of mechanical means, music could not be experienced other than ‘live’ (i.e. in the visible and audible presence of those making the music). In his Chroniques de ma vie (1935–6) Stravinsky cogently expressed the counter-argument:
Obviously one frequently prefers to turn away one's eyes, or even close them, when the superfluity of the players' gesticulations prevents the concentration of one's faculties of hearing. But if the players' movements are evoked solely by the exigencies of the music, … why not follow with the eye such movements … , which facilitate one's auditory perceptions? … Those who maintain that they only enjoy music to the full with their eyes shut do not hear better than when they have them open, but the absence of visual distractions enables them to abandon themselves to the reveries induced by the lullaby of its sounds, [which] is usually what they prefer to the music itself.
The camera, like the observer's eye whose proxy it is, directs its gaze on whichever part of an orchestra is of most interest at the moment: a fixed centre-stalls position would become intolerably unselective and monotonous, and unless the camera were high enough it would see little but the backs of music stands and the tops of players' heads. A fundamental tenet about the relationship between sound and image is that they should always reinforce, never contradict, one another. Most obviously, this means that the camera should not be looking at orchestral instruments which are not playing, or, when one has a solo of significance, at some other. But in more subtle ways the two elements need to correspond; and in the course of time a grammar of presentation has evolved.
Fewer changes of image accord with the tempo and mood of slow-moving music; quicker changes can underline the excitement or agitation of fast movements. These changes of shot should take place only where the musical structure allows, never in mid-phrase: camera cuts are appropriate at starts of clean-cut phrases (in which case they need to be made with precision, neither too early nor – even worse – too late); but, if the music is fluid, dissolves correspond better (slow lingering cross-fades, however, only draw attention to the technique employed); after a series of mixes, a cut can have the effect of a sudden sforzando. A camera tracking in usually suggests an increase in tension or a crescendo, as does a panning or tracking shot across a section of the orchestra (as for a Rossini build-up); quick zoom-ins look melodramatic and should be used only in exceptional circumstances; a zoom-out, at whatever speed, is better avoided, as it gives the impression of retreating or fleeing from the music. Superimposition of images of instruments is usually undesirable musically except, for example, in ostinatos such as in Ravel's Bolero or Holst's ‘Mars’. Some emphasizing of the structure of, for example, a sonata form movement can be achieved by adopting for the recapitulation the same image sequence as in the exposition. All this of course necessitates the director's planning his or her camera treatment from the score. All shots should be musically motivated: those made purely for pictorial effect, or cutaways to members of the audience, detract from concentration on the music and suggest that the director has lost interest in it. Works with colourful orchestration (e.g. Rimsky-Korsakov's Spanish Capriccio) and concertos are the musical forms most adaptable to television, the interplay between soloist, orchestra and conductor in the latter offering quasi-dramatic interest.
A glimpse of the composer's manuscript at the beginning of a performance may help to establish an atmosphere, but otherwise showing lines or a page of the score is of limited value, since a large part of the mass audience will be unable to read musical notation. Associating extra-musical images with a performance calls for the nicest judgment; and juxtaposing reality and pictorialism – two different conventions – produces uncomfortable results. Overtly programmatic works like Dukas' L'apprenti sorcier or Strauss's Don Quixote are rare; and although stock ‘mood’ film could accompany less specifically illustrative music (such as Respighi's Pini di Roma, Smetana's Vltava or Borodin's In Central Asia), the length of the pictorial sequences would need to be matched with that of the musical phrases; and one must be wary of transgressing a composer's intentions (for example, Mendelssohn deprecated any attempt at pictorializing his overture Die Hebriden). The imposition of irrelevant representational images on an abstract work like a symphony or a Bach cello suite merely irritates true music lovers.
Increases in costs and pressure on studio usage have had the effect of diminishing the number of orchestral concerts mounted in studio conditions (where, in any case, the acoustics of all-purpose studios have needed to be adapted by ambiophony or other means); these have largely been replaced by relays of public concerts, whose sense of occasion is preferred by ratings-conscious executives. Solo and chamber recitals, on the other hand, are more easily accommodated in the studio. The smaller scale involved also permits the artists' personalities to emerge; and there is much less need to isolate one artist pictorially from his or her partner(s) except, for example, in a fugato in a string quartet, a solo passage from one member of a sonata duo, or a piano interlude or postlude to a song. Mixing between two different angles on the same performer is nearly always upsetting: superimposing the two is gimmicky and unpleasing. Human interest shots (focussing on an artist's physical exertions, grimaces or perspiration) should not be allowed to override artistic considerations.
While drama on television has long since freed itself from mere relays from the theatre and has developed ways of presentation idiomatic to the new medium, economic constraints and technical considerations have, at the present time, forced a regressive treatment of opera. Arguments that once flourished about studio productions – whether they should be live or mimed to a playback of a pre-recorded performance (either by the cast in vision or by other singers) – are now largely academic. Only opera on film now escapes the confines of the proscenium arch.
To conservative minds, this demotion to reportage from the stage represents only acceptance of a fundamental dichotomy: operas (except those few written specially for television) were conceived for performance in a large building, for which singers had to project their voices with some power and adopt acting techniques meaningful to spectators at some distance from the stage; television, on the other hand, essentially an intimate medium, allows singers a greater range of vocal nuance and calls for a more subtle type of acting. Apart from the necessity for physically plausible casting – generously built, well-nourished women, for example, however lovely their voices, are not acceptable as frail or consumptive young heroines – the close range of television demands smaller gestures, more facial expression, lighter make-up and more mobility. Modern zoom lenses with their formidable telephoto capabilities, as now used in opera house relays, often reveal uneasy compromises in this respect. The limitations of positioning on the stage, too, ensuring that singers can see the conductor in the orchestra pit, do not exist in studio production, where monitor screens can be placed at various points to meet the singers’ eye-lines – although the experience of television has now led many opera houses to follow suit and install monitors in the wings. Stereophonic sound has added to the restrictions imposed by stage relays: the left–right sound spectrum is contradicted by anything other than frontal shots.
The screen's immediacy involves viewers more closely in the action or in the characters' emotions; but for this the work, particularly if it is a comedy, needs to be performed in the audience's own language (subtitles, besides dividing the viewer's attention, are inevitably only summaries lacking textual subtleties) and clarity of enunciation becomes a top priority. Television's ability to focus closely on small but important details of the action, such as Michele lighting his pipe in Il tabarro or the Count pricking his finger on a pin in Le nozze di Figaro, increases their significance.
There are of course difficulties. Singers need to modify their normal vocal projection without sacrificing quality; balance between voices and orchestra calls for sensitive adjustment in the closer perspectives of the studio; and whether from studio or stage, while some ensembles of perplexity (as in Rossini) permit the camera to move from one character to another, reflective and static ensembles (often highpoints musically, as in Fidelio or Die Meistersinger) cannot rightly be disturbed, although they militate against the normal pace of the television medium.
Programmes about, rather than of, music offer television far greater scope, attract fringe viewers who may not be willing to listen to performances as such, and so tend to outnumber programmes in the categories mentioned above. They are of considerable diversity. There have been biographies or studies of individual composers or artists, combining film or still pictures and the relevant background, examples of the music or music-making, and spoken commentary – the last being most effective when the presenter has a charismatic personality; instrumental or vocal lessons either aimed at teaching the viewers themselves or observed at public masterclasses; programmes of solo artists or conductors and orchestras (when unions have not raised objections) in the act of rehearsing, leading to the performance itself; national and international competitions; music quizzes and discussions; and so on. But in all these the mainspring surely needs to be the music itself, and frustration is caused in educated viewers if it is so insensitively handled as to become a background, is faded down under speech or is faded out entirely in mid-phrase.
Apart from its purely utilitarian adoption for programme identifications and signature tunes (e.g. for news bulletins), however, the most extensive use of music in television is indeed in a background, almost subliminal, capacity. It has long been recognized that, without any words intervening, the addition of music can create a particular mood or atmosphere for an image or sequence of images: indeed, a common routine in film and television training schools is to evoke completely opposite emotional responses to the same pictorial sequence by attaching first a lighthearted, then a grave, music track. But in an age when, in general, silence seems abhorrent and music of a sort has become increasingly inescapable everywhere, television programmes – nature programmes, travelogues and features of all kinds, even some plays – have practically incessant music foisted on them, regardless of the fact that it often obscures the narration or dialogue. Much as this relegation of music to aural wallpaper may be deplored, the practice now seems ingrained; producers could, however, set an example by reversing the trend and helping to restore to music something of its true value.
See also Popular music, §I, 2 and Video.
E.G.M. Alkin, C.L.S. Gilford and L. Salter: The broadcasting of Music in Television (London, 1957)
J. Bornoff, with L. Salter: Music and the Twentieth Century Media (Florence, 1972)
H.-C. Schmidt, ed.: Musik in den Massenmedien Rundfunk und Fernsehen (Mainz, 1976)
G. Richter: ‘Gehört die “ernste” Musik ins Fernsehen?’, MG, xxxiv (1984), 242–7
G. Linz: ‘Musikpolitische und musikpädagogische Aspekte des Programmangebots und Anforderungen an die Programm-Macher’, Musik und Gesellschaft: Massenmedien, Musikpolitik und Musikerziehung (Vienna, 1987), 151–68
A. Brunner: ‘Kann und darf man Musik sichtbar machen? Überlegungen zum musikalischen Kunstwerk im Fernsehen’, NZM, Jg.149, no.6 (1988), 23–6
H.-C. Schmidt: ‘Das Fernsehen als moralische Anstalt? Überlegungen zum musikalischen Kunstwerk im Fernsehen, i’, NZM, Jg.149, no.2 (1988), 3–8
R. Cadenbach: ‘“Musikalische Sublimierung führt von allem Sichtbaren weg”: Thesen zu Adornos These zum Musikfernsehen’, Musik befragt – Musik vermittelt: Peter Rummenhöller zum 60, Geburtstag, ed. T. OH and H. von Loesch (Augsburg, 1996), 52–60
The BBC inaugurated the world's first public high-definition television service on 2 November 1936. The pioneer years before the outbreak of World War II in 1939 saw the creation of the BBC Television Orchestra, a 21-piece studio ensemble based at the Alexandra Palace studio in north London. The orchestra worked 24 hours a week; the best players declined to sign up for a permanent engagement because of the lucrative freelance work on offer in London. The conductor was Hyam Greenbaum. The first substantial postwar development occurred in the USA, where as early as 1931 the New York PO's annual contract with CBS had allowed for the eventual televising of its broadcast concerts. On 20 March 1948 the NBC TV network began quarterly transmissions of Arturo Toscanini's long-running concert series, which NBC's radio network had produced since the 1930s. Toscanini's television concerts continued until 1954, when his health and memory began visibly to fail; NBC's cancellation of the series caused considerable offence to the aging conductor and his admirers. The hour-long telecasts (transmitted simultaneously by radio, with commercial announcements between the musical selections) were initially broadcast from NBC's Studio 8H in the Rockefeller Center, New York City, and subsequently transferred to the acoustically more sympathetic Carnegie Hall.
The traditional rivalries of the big networks had sparked off a race to be first in the field once an agreement had been struck with the American Federation of Musicians. CBS trumped NBC by arranging a telecast with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy just 90 minutes before Toscanini's television début. But the Italian made the more lasting impact. Although he was then in his eighties, his vigour and rhythmic vitality remained undiminished. Howard Taubman of The New York Times observed that ‘the music welled out of him with a force that he seemingly could not brook, and one could see him humming, chanting and almost roaring’ and added perceptively, ‘Watching him on television gave you the illusion that a new medium had been found for your comprehension of the music’.
Another great orchestra, the Boston SO, made its television début in December 1949, when Leonard Bernstein conducted a United Nations Human Rights Day concert, also at Carnegie Hall. From the 1950s onwards, the United Nations Organization itself became a regular promoter of televised concerts from its General Assembly Hall. UN Day concert programmes, featuring orchestras and conductors of the first rank, were televised on a worldwide basis until financial restraints and diminishing demand forced their termination in 1992.
Concerts of classical music remained a regular if infrequent feature on American television throughout the 1950s. When, in 1950, the New York PO inaugurated television relays from its outdoor summer season at the Lewisohn Stadium, Variety noted that the new medium was capable of handling ‘cultural longhair programming’ as well as ‘horror-whodunnit’ shows; the close-up shots of Nathan Milstein's bowing and fingering in Brahms's Violin Concerto ‘added to appreciation of the music’. Television, the article added (enjoying the paradox), offered the same benefits as at a prize fight: ‘viewers had a better seat for the proceedings than did ringsiders in the stadium’. In 1958, CBS started national telecasts of Young People's Concerts, four a season, under the dynamic leadership of the New York PO's newly appointed music director, Leonard Bernstein. At the peak of their success, in the early 1960s, they were watched by 25 million Americans (many of them far from young), but televised music was never again to enjoy such popularity.
In Britain, an early postwar BBC telecast (in September 1948, when the potential total viewing audience numbered under 200,000) featured the Vienna PO conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler in Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Symphony, direct from the Royal Albert Hall. But the excessively high light level needed by the early cameras precluded regular outside broadcasts at public events, and most music was performed at Alexandra Palace. There was more classical ballet than music in the early schedules, but such popular works as Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Chopin's Second Piano Concerto were performed in the two tiny studios, with reduced orchestrations. For several years the BBC preferred to take its cumbersome Outside Broadcast equipment (usually, as in the USA, a unit of three cameras) into the Studio 1 sound studio at Maida Vale in west London for Sunday afternoon symphony concerts.
In the early 1950s BBC TV moved to larger premises at the Lime Grove film studios in Shepherd's Bush (also in west London), expanding later in the decade to the custom-built Television Centre nearby at White City. It became possible to mount more ambitious and elegant studio-based music programmes, among them ‘International Concert Hall’, first transmitted in 1960, in which a conventional repertory of overtures, symphonies and concertos was performed by distinguished soloists and conductors. Middle-brow classical tastes had been catered for since 1951 by Eric Robinson's potpourri ‘Music for You’ and (in the 1970s) by ‘André Previn's Music Night’, but the BBC never devised a programme to match the ratings appeal of the American ‘Ed Sullivan Show’, in which leading stars of the pop and classical worlds received equal billing.
Studio production of classical music programmes, a genre that flourished during the 1960s and 70s, encouraged a more fluid visual presentation. Viewers were no longer offered a restricted view of the proceedings: the studio director had at his or her disposal five or six cameras, some mounted on mobile cranes or dollies (wheeled trolleys) that moved alongside the orchestra and could even swoop over it, providing a cubist or multi-angled vision of the performers. The introduction of zoom lenses in the 1960s, replacing the four-lens turret cameras, increased the range of instrumental close-ups, while more sophisticated lighting techniques allowed individual instruments to be spotlit and encouraged the use of different lighting conditions to underline the prevailing mood of the music. Slow movements could be low-key, finales were usually bright and cheerful. The advent of colour television in the late 1960s provided another extra-musical element. For a production of Walton's First Symphony, mounted for the composer's 75th birthday in 1977, the director (Rodney Greenberg) assigned a different colour to each movement; in the Scherzo, marked presto con malizia, a brilliant red was reserved for the percussion, green for the strings and purple for the brass. Split-screen technology provided the impetus in the same era for a visually fascinating performance of Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto, directed for television by Barrie Gavin, in which the screen was divided into nine smaller screens, one for each string part.
Although developing interactive technology may allow future viewers to make their own decisions about what to look at during televised performances, an agreed protocol of camera scripting for complete performances has long been in place. Following a detailed study of the score and (where possible) attendance at rehearsals, the director sets out to visualize (‘story-board’) in advance every moment of the forthcoming performance. Descriptions and instructions are written into the score as a series of numbered shots, which are then transcribed by the director's assistant and passed on to the individual camera operators in the form of annotated cards attached to the cameras next to the viewfinders. Some shots will be static, showing the conductor or soloist alone, or an instrument in close-up; others will involve pans and zooms from one instrument to another or from a group of instruments to the conductor; for climaxes the architecture of the entire studio, hall or cathedral nave may be shown. As many as 1000 of these separate visual events will be incorporated in the camera script for a large-scale symphonic work. The precise moment when one shot succeeds another on the screen is decided at the control panel by the vision mixer (‘switcher’ in American usage), who works either from the director's score or to his or her verbal instruction, selecting the shots from a bank of preview monitors, one for each camera. (In the pioneering days this function was carried out by the director.) As each shot occurs, its number is identified over the intercom by the director's assistant, who also ‘readies’ the next shot.
The music director's interpretative craft is to mirror in images the salient points of the music, its ebb and flow. There are basic rules of visual grammar, such as the need, with cameras positioned all round the orchestra, to avoid ‘crossing the line’: shots should not succeed each other in such a way that conductor and instrumentalists appear to be facing in the same direction. There are also aesthetic criteria concerning the creation of a harmonious sequence of pictures, alternating wide angles with close-ups. But inevitably the director's script treatment is largely subjective, depending upon visual taste as well as musical knowledge. The conductor is often the dominating element in a script. Images of the conductor, full length, mid-shot or close up (the baton in movement, or the conductor's hands, convey the music's pulse and can be as expressive as the face) are intercut with various aspects of the orchestra, which can be represented either in a wide-angle tutti, showing the complete ensemble, or by groups of instruments and by individual players. The conductor will be shown setting and modifying the tempos, providing the players with instrumental cues and with emotional inspiration: the eloquence of a conductor's body language is often the key to a successful transmission. (Bernstein and Karajan had mesmeric camera appeal; Carlos Kleiber and Simon Rattle were among the most charismatic conductors of the late 20th century.)
An effective camera script for a music telecast is one in which the viewer is unaware of the director's visual interpretation; in terms of perceptive priority the eye should never do more than gently reinforce the ear, since otherwise the basic musical purpose of the telecast will have been undermined. The director's dilemma is encapsulated in an essay by W.H. Auden published in The Dyer's Hand (1962): ‘The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition’. Occasionally repertoire with an extra-musical dimension is selected, a notable example being a 1965 performance, directed by Walter Todds, of Strauss's Don Quixote in which Paul Tortelier's interpretation was illustrated by Gustave Doré's etchings of the Cervantes classic. More recently a film of Handel's Messiah directed by William Klein (France, 1999) cut tellingly between specially filmed studio performance, documentary scenes of violence and suffering, a Spanish Passion day and a painting by Bosch.
From its beginnings, televised classical music had a serious drawback: the dry, unflattering acoustic of the studio. Recognizing the problem, BBC engineers invented ‘ambiophony’, a regulated degree of artificial reverberation, but musicians from Benjamin Britten downwards claimed they could never give their best under studio conditions. The poor quality of the loudspeakers in most home television receivers was a further stumbling-block, although simulcasting and, more recently, the advent of stereophonic television, have reduced this problem. As a response to it, types of programme unique to television were developed (mostly by the BBC) in which performance was amalgamated with preliminary exposition in the form of rehearsals, interviews and biographical essays. The veteran director Philip Bate began as early as 1939 with an occasional series, ‘The Conductor Speaks’. In 1953 the conductor and entertainer Vic Oliver offered popular analyses of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet and Francesca da Rimini overtures. From the long tradition that developed may be cited the six-part BBC series ‘Six Pieces of Britain’ (1999), which featured documentation and complete performances of 20th century works such as Walton's Belshazzar's Feast and Britten's Serenade. (See also below, §V.)
Chamber music performances including song recitals transfer more comfortably to the small screen than symphony orchestras. In the ‘golden age’ (from the 1950s to the 70s) there were many distinguished programmes, including cycles of the quartets of Beethoven and Bartók, the piano sonatas of Beethoven played by Barenboim and Strauss lieder sung by Kiri Te Kanawa, accompanied by Solti. Subtitles enhance the pleasure of foreign language art songs.
Until the 1980s the regular performance of classical music on BBC TV was supported by a well-disposed central management. But such music-loving administrators as Huw Wheldon, David Attenborough, Aubrey Singer and Brian Wenham were eventually succeeded by a generation of programme controllers with new agendas. Ratings took precedence over cultural responsibilities: cooking, travel and above all sport were given more air time. In the 1980s, when at least 25% of BBC output had to be handed over to small independent companies, production of classical music programmes in multi-camera studios was wound down in favour of relays of concerts from the summer Promenade season and, exceptionally, from other public venues with satisfactory acoustics, such as the Barbican Hall in London and Symphony Hall, Birmingham. There is undeniably a greater sense of occasion at public events, but the opportunities for creative camera work are severely limited.
Classical music has lost the regular weekly transmissions which it previously enjoyed on BBC-2. In the 1960s the premières of important new works by, for example, Britten and Shostakovich were televised as a matter of course, but today there is little evidence of positive editorial policy towards music, and the busy life of Britain's regional festivals and its major concert halls is no longer reflected by either of the BBC's terrestrial television channels. Concerts are rarely shown on the culturally-orientated Channel 4 (established in 1982), being restricted to an occasional gala event such as Simon Rattle's farewell concert with the CBSO in 1998.
Other nations with long traditions of televising classical music are experiencing similar cultural changes. In the USA, the only surviving regular concert season on network television is that of the Boston Pops. On PBS, the ‘Great Performances’ series schedules only a handful of concerts each year. Austrian Television still produces its world-renowned New Year's Day concerts, which are transmitted to over 50 countries, and it still has a regular slot for classical music, albeit relegated to late evenings. In Germany the second national network, ZDF, has renewed its relationship with the Berlin PO, and promises concert broadcasts as well as ‘more unconventional music productions’, but its output – only 45 programmes in the past 30 years – is very small.
Practitioners argue that television restores the visual element to the perception of musical performance. Until the advent of radio and recordings the listener was always in the same space as the musicians: unless one kept one's eyes shut, one was willy-nilly taking in the performance visually as well as aurally. Stravinsky is credited with the statement that one listens to music with the eyes as well as the ears. The general music-loving public of today, however, seems not to have accepted this proposition. Audience research measuring the number of viewers of existing programmes suggests that there is no large demand for music on television; nor has the sale of classical music videos, now readily available, been remotely on a par with those of sound-only CDs. The medium itself is no longer widely acknowledged as an important method of transmitting musical experience, despite its immense importance as a historical source for future generations. Conditions may change with the adoption of digital broadcasting, which permits – at least in theory – many more specialist channels, but, for all its considerable past achievements, classical music on television is at present unquestionably a Cinderella among the performing arts.
Television, §II: Concert and recital relays and recordings
L. Pinzauti: ‘Nuova music e televisione’, NRMI, iii (1969), 79–87
H. Pauli: ‘Das Hörbare und das Schaubare: Fernsehen und jüngste Musik’, Musik auf der Flucht vor sich selbst, ed. U. Dibelius (Munich, 1969), 29–40
W. Voigt: ‘Konzertante Musik im Fernsehen’, Rundfunk und Fernsehen [Baden-Baden], xviii (1970), 169–77
M. Gräter: ‘Die Zukunft der Musik liegt im Fernsehen’, World of Music, xiii/4 (1971), 20–31 [interview; in Ger. and Eng.]
M. Gräter: ‘Elektronik als Kompositionselement und Gestaltungsmittel im Fernsehen’, NZM, Jg.133 (1972), 77–82
T. Hartman and F. Routh: ‘Today's Music on Television’, Composer, no.82 (1984), 1–15
A. Swartz: ‘Emissions musicales pour la télévision par câble: la nouvelle technologie/Music Programming for Cable Television: the New Technology’, Revue de l'UER/EBU Review, xxxv (1984), 22–5
M. Portal: Le concert à la télévision (thesis, U. of Paris IV, Sorbonne, 1992)
K.-E. Behne: Bilder-Folgen: Auswirkungen unterschiedlicher Konzeption der Visualisierung von klassischer Musik im Fernsehen (Hanover, 1994)
13 days after the newly formed BBC began its television service in November 1936, selected scenes from Albert Coates's Mr Pickwick became the first opera transmitted on television, in a specially prepared studio production. These excerpts, acting as a preview for the work's première at the Royal Opera House a week later, generated little comment. Only one reviewer mentioned the work, referring to it as ‘televised opera’. He did not describe the production because, he admitted, without a television he was unable to see the broadcast.
From the start, the BBC regularly featured opera in its schedules. In 1936 Stephen Thomas, Dallas Bower and Desmond Davis were engaged as directors for opera on television. Together with Hyam Greenbaum, the conductor of the BBC Television Orchestra, and members of the British Music Drama Opera Company, they formed a group that presented 29 operas until broadcasting was suspended in 1939. The relationship between music, drama and television was one planned in aspiration and conditioned by existing technology. The initial repertory was ambitious. In 1937 the BBC presented 14 operas, all in English, most cut to approximately 30 minutes. All were performed live, but in the case of Hänsel und Gretel and Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde (subtitled ‘A Masque to the Music of Wagner’), singers performed in one studio, while the television cast, making no pretence of singing, performed a type of pantomime for the television cameras in an adjacent studio.
During World War II the USA began its own experiments in presenting opera to what was still a largely élite constituency, those able to afford a television. In 1943, WRGB, the General Electric station in Schenectady, New York, presented the first complete opera telecasts in the USA, broadcasting a double bill of Offenbach's Le mariage aux lanternes and Menotti's The Old Maid and the Thief (originally commissioned in 1939 by NBC for radio). Of the principal American networks, NBC was the most progressive, forming its own opera company in 1949 and, in 1950, inaugurating a programme of operas composed specifically for television. Samuel Chotzinoff was appointed as music director, Peter Herman Adler as conductor and Kirk Browning (who in 2000 continued to direct the Live from Lincoln Center series) as director. Their first complete opera was Kurt Weill's one-act folk opera Down in the Valley, which both Weill and Lotte Lenya helped to revise as a television production. In contrast to the earlier BBC productions, whose style was characterized by adopting sets and backdrops from the theatre, NBC based its sets on the type used in films. Even its earliest productions used several full- and half-sets.
After World War II, television companies around the world began not only to relay opera from the theatre but to create opera productions specially for television and, in many cases, to commission operas for television. While the USA and the UK both committed more resources and produced more operas than other countries, activity extended across Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Canada, Ireland, France and Japan. Politics and media combined, for a time, to provide a potentially fascinating archive in the form of the many operas both produced and composed for the state-owned television stations in former East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR. But television archives throughout the world are characterized by the absence of material that was either never recorded or, having been recorded, was subsequently destroyed. This is particularly the case where political upheaval has altered the relationship between television and the individual, and these Eastern bloc productions are now remembered only through contemporary accounts or in personal recollection.
From the earliest experiments with opera on television, there was a choice, one that is still encountered today: should the cameras move to the opera house and relay a stage production, or should opera move to the television studio to take full advantage of television's resources? A further choice, the filmed opera, has antecedents dating back to the turn of the 20th century, with entirely different techniques reflecting film industry technology. In the beginning, television defined itself as quite separate from film and able to do many things that film could not. In particular, television could present current, topical programmes, broadcast live from the studio. Early efforts to broadcast opera from the opera house were not deemed successful. With the television lights bleaching the lighting design, and the cameras (which often occupied several of the best seats) positioned never quite near enough to the stage, patrons vacillated between being annoyed at the intrusion and pleased to be involved in (and perhaps telecast by) the new technology. A money-making venture in the USA, which encouraged the public to ‘subscribe’ to opera, by watching live opera relays projected directly on to their local cinema screen, foundered for lack of public interest. There was soon a strong sense within the television industry that the studio production would be the most successful format. As Herbert Graf (director of productions at the Metropolitan Opera House, 1936–60, and the director of the first live relay from the Metropolitan, Otello, 1948) wrote in 1951, ‘Of the three ways of telecasting [live relay, studio or film], studio production offers the best chance of realising both virtues of television: participation of the spectator in the actual performance and the use of new artistic and technical methods inherent in the new medium’. Crucial to Graf's reasoning, however, was the live transmission; most of the earliest televised operas had the cast, orchestra and conductor working in the same studio, transmitting live performance. For these productions, generally three or four large cameras, each weighing over 355 kg, remained largely stationary, while different lenses were flipped over the eye of each camera to depict an establishing shot, mid-shot or close-up. The director planned in advance which camera would relay the scene at any one time. An orthicon monitor filmed the results, taking the picture from an in-house television; this would provide a record, though not of broadcasting standard, for the network. Any repeat production required the cast and orchestra to be reassembled, with further rehearsals followed by performance. In short, it observed the production procedure of the theatre, combined with the intimate interplay of characters that the television cameras could provide.
Where American television was concerned, a boycott by the Musicians' Union unwittingly began to dismantle live music on television. Increased use of recorded music during televised programmes made professional musicians fear redundancy. The Petrillo Ban, enforced between 1945 and 1948, asked musicians to boycott the provision of live instrumental music for televised broadcasts, while negotiations tried to establish suitable royalty rates. As no live opera was possible on the US networks, television turned to pre-recorded soundtracks as a temporary solution; in many dramas, comedies and game shows the link with live music was permanently severed.
After the invention of video recording in 1958, television relied increasingly on taped or filmed programmes. This allowed producers not only to pre-record the programme for transmission at a later date, but also to record several takes of the same scene and choose the best. In addition, a production could run any number of cameras (usually four to six) simultaneously from different angles and edit the different tapes at a later stage. While this was undoubtedly an advance for drama, its impact on opera and music theatre was more dubious. For studio productions in Europe, which had always based their production methods on film, this had less impact. Italy had shown an early penchant for pre-recorded soundtracks. During the production itself, the singers would mime to their own voices. This method accords visual freedom but introduces incongruity since, even with sophisticated digital editing, lip-synching remains erratic; the visible illusion of singing robs televised opera of much of its intensity. Germany, following the film industry's predilection for casting famous actors to portray visually roles sung by well-known opera singers (as in the 1953 film of Aida, with Sophia Loren on screen and Renata Tebaldi providing the soundtrack), went a step further, withdrawing the voice from a particular singer and reinvesting it in the body of an actor.
Only the UK and the USA remained obdurate, continuing from the early 1950s to the mid-60s to produce their operas as live broadcasts or live studio recordings. Many within the television industry observed that video recording, with its potential for editing and retakes, did not necessarily improve the quality of performance, but rather ensured a fail-safe mechanism for the viability of the production. Tensions arose between the rival demands of sound musical practice and effective television. Such television producers as Lionel Salter for the BBC and Kirk Browning for NBC mourned the loss of the live, single-studio production. So too did Benjamin Britten, who, despite his ambivalence towards television, involved himself in several television productions of his operas, from 1952 until his death. Even after the arrival of video recording Britten experimented with the two-studio system (orchestra and conductor in one, linked to the performers on set in another), before taking a firm stand in 1966 that any further operas must be recordings on video of performances in the Maltings at Snape. In doing so he not only replicated the single studio of the earliest days of live television but in effect created television productions that were relayed, if not from an opera house, from a concert hall with fine acoustics.
Given the quality of work that has been achieved by single- and two-studio productions (Basil Coleman's 1966 two-studio production of Billy Budd for the BBC is an outstanding example), it is surprising that, since the 1970s, the practice of miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack has become standard. Musical works presented on television are increasingly filmed using a single-camera set-up, an approach adopted from films made for the cinema. This method requires a pre-recorded soundtrack, with scenes filmed entirely out of sequence. The BBC's 1992 adaptation of Marschner's opera Der Vampyr as a mini-series (winner of the 1993 Italia Prize), and five of the six operas commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989 and broadcast in 1994 were produced in this way. Trevor Nunn's 1993 filmed version of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess required the singers to lip-synch to a recording the cast had made five years earlier. Nonetheless, there are exceptions: in a ‘real time’ relay in 1993 of Tosca, directed by Brian Large, microphones were hidden in costumes and wigs, while the singers performed live on location. This amalgamation of film, television and stage techniques suggests a further method of collaboration between opera and television.
In 1975 John Culshaw, Head of Music Programmes at the BBC (1968–75), reiterated the television industry's belief that opera and music drama made in a television studio produced a far more innovatory, technically assured broadcast than opera relayed from the theatre. He did not live to see the technical advances involved in broadcasting opera from the theatre, including infra-red cameras, built-in trunking to hide numerous camera cables, and computerized recording equipment. The newly refurbished Royal Opera House in London has included fibre-optics, point-to-point wiring and telephone cables to assist its telecasts. These advances combine to create high-calibre transmissions that, like the earliest studio recordings, retain the live performance. Increasingly, performances such as the 1999 ENO production of Handel's Semele and the ROH production of Verdi's Falstaff, both broadcast live from the opera house with a simultaneous radio broadcast, point the way forward in combining increasingly refined technology with the fundamental musical values of opera and music theatre.
GroveO (L. Salter; also ‘Filming, Videotaping’, B. Large)
H. Graf: Opera for the People (Minneapolis, 1951)
P.H. Adler: ‘Opera on Television: the Beginning of an Era’, Musical America, lxxii/Feb (1952), 29
P. Chayefsky: Television Plays (New York, 1955)
R. Cartier: ‘Producing Television Opera’, Opera, viii (1957), 679–84
G. Campey: ‘BBC: who called those 100 televised operas in 24 years an “experiment”?’, Variety (3 Feb 1960)
P. Black: ‘Opera on the Television Screen’, Opera, xix (1968), 197–201
H. Bertz-Dostal: Oper im Fernsehen (Vienna, 1970–71)
G. Gibson and T. Philips: A Manual of Television Opera Production (Flint, MI, 1973)
J. Ardoin: ‘Love-Hate Relationship: Television Opera’, ON (17 Dec 1977)
L. Salter: ‘The Birth of TV Opera’, Opera, xxviii (1977), 234–9
L. Salter: ‘The Infancy of TV Opera’, Opera, xxviii (1977), 340–44
B. Riley: ‘Camera Angles: three directors share their views on converting opera from stage to home screen’, ON lix/17 (1989–90)
B. Rose: Televising the Performing Arts (Westport, CT, 1992)
J. Barnes: ‘Television Opera: a Non-History’, A Night in at the Opera, ed. J. Tambling (London, 1994), 25–52
J. Tambling: ‘Revisions and Revampings: Wagner, Marschner and Mozart on Television and Video’, ibid., 61–70
P. Wynne: ‘Video Days: a Historical Survey of Opera on Television’, ON, lxii/17 (1997–8), 12–20
The first opera commissioned for television was announced by the headline ‘Menotti tells us about his video opera commission by NBC-TV’, a reminder that at that time in the USA the words ‘video’ and ‘television’ were used interchangeably. Olin Downes, in his review of Amahl and the Night Visitors in the New York Times (30 December 1951), was the first to use the term ‘television opera’ specifically to denote an opera commissioned for television. In his article ‘Menotti's Amahl is historic step in development of new idiom’ he described Amahl as the ‘first television opera’ and predicted that it would claim a place in ‘the annals of video’.
In 1971, 20 years after the transmission of the first opera commissioned for television, the BBC presented the world première of Benjamin Britten's television opera, Owen Wingrave. During the years following Amahl, the genre Olin Downes claimed would enhance both opera and television was perceived differently. The producer of Owen Wingrave, John Culshaw, and several reviewers stressed that it was not a ‘television opera’ but an ‘opera for television’. Between 1951 and 1971, and with over 100 operas commissioned for television worldwide, many came to perceive these works as a group of operas dominated by television techniques. A year after the première of Owen Wingrave, the music-media historian Jack Bornoff argued (Music and the Twentieth Century Media, Florence, 1972) that the decisive factor between an ‘opera for television’ and a ‘television opera’ was that the latter should be a work ‘which could not, under any circumstances, be adapted for the stage’. According to that definition, neither Amahl and the Night Visitors nor Owen Wingrave, the only two operas commissioned for television to enter the repertory, would qualify. Both migrated from the television screen to the theatre, a move that has allowed them to build a performance history.
Nonetheless, Bornoff's criteria continued to preoccupy, if not composers, then certainly those in charge of television programming. In 1989, when Channel 4 decided to commission six one-hour television operas, only operas that could not be transferred to the stage were considered.
Throughout nearly 50 years of operas commissioned for television, a distinct subplot has emerged. In the early 1950s a group of young American writers began to define what sort of material worked best on television. The name they chose to describe their ideal material was borrowed from the theatre: ‘realism’. By 1955 Paddy Chayefsky, a champion of contemporary realism on television, could not only prescribe what writers should write, but warned against indulging in other styles: ‘Lyrical writing, impressionistic writing and abstract expressionistic writing are appalling in television’. Television's version of realism was not only an ideological but also a pragmatic development as, to begin with, all programmes were broadcast live from the studio. However, the earliest television operas eschewed realism. Between 1951 and 1956, NBC and BBC produced five operas commissioned for television: Amahl and the Night Visitors (Menotti, NBC, 1951), What Men Live By and The Marriage (Martinů, NBC, 1953), Griffelkin (Lukas Foss, NBC, 1955) and Mañana (Arthur Benjamin, BBC, 1956). None of the composers chose a contemporary subject, nor did their operas subscribe to elements of realism as preferred by television. Musically, the operas allied themselves with traditional rather than innovatory structures; each involved set pieces, arias, ensembles and recitatives. However, two aspects of realism remained: the story line was linear and direct and the presentation, governed by the technical resources of the time, was simple. In short, while the operas themselves were not concerned with realism, the camera work presented them in a straightforward, realistic style.
The arrival of video recording in 1958 created new possibilities, in response to which composers of television operas began to choose contemporary subjects, often incorporating electronic music. In keeping with the new technology, a highly experimental style was adopted in the visual presentation. When Salzburg hosted the first International Congress for Music in the Technical Media (1956), a triennial prize for the best television opera was inaugurated. Paul Angerer was awarded the first Salzburg TV Opera Prize for Die Passkontrolle (ÖRF, Austria, 1959), concerning the freedom of the individual. In 1968, Yusushi Akutagawa was awarded the Merit Prize for Orpheus in Hiroshima (NHK, Tokyo), an opera about nuclear war, while in 1977 Raymond Pannell won the TV Opera Prize for Aberfan (CBC, Canada), based on the 1966 mudslide in Wales which killed 144 children and adults. Each opera's subject matter could be described as contemporary realism, yet their production styles were experimental and often surreal, invoking television's newest technological advances. Other composers rejected topical material and chose dramatic episodes from the Old Testament : Arthur Bliss's Tobias and the Angel (BBC, 1960) and Stravinsky's The Flood (CBS, 1962) each included scenes that required the latest television technology, while Menotti's bizarre allegory about death, Labyrinth (NBC, 1963), was the only opera the composer wrote solely for television, to be presented solely on television.
Inevitably, there was a reaction. By the late 1960s and early 70s the television opera returned to realism. During this period certain television commissions stipulated that only a contemporary subject presented in a straightforward style would be acceptable. In 1966, the BBC commissioned a television opera from Christopher Whelen. Some Place of Darkness, a sombre domestic drama set in the present, exemplified all that television required. Yet the composer later allowed that his first idea had been a historic drama, but ‘a BBC edict – crisp and clear – “contemporary plot and modern dress”’, had forced him to abandon his original concept.
Between 1979 and 1988 scarcely any television operas were commissioned in Europe or East Asia, while none was commissioned in the USA and the UK. When, in 1989, Channel 4 announced its intention to commission six television operas, four of the five production companies decided to use film and filming techniques. In effect, they did not develop the relationship between television and opera at all, but returned to a far older species, the opera film. The genre as envisioned in the 1950s, live opera produced in the vernacular, in a television studio, has gradually disappeared. Technological advances have served to enhance a sense of artifice in an alliance that was intended to dispel the charges of opera's élitism and inaccessibility.
While confidence and interest in television opera is waning, there may be cause for optimism. Television is currently reinstating itself as an unique form of communication, able to provide entertainment, news and documentaries quite separate from any other medium. Realism is at the root of the renaissance, but practitioners have revised the original principles. In recent years, several television dramas have removed themselves from their quasi-film-set glamour and returned to the confines of the studio. The camera work is faux-naïf: long takes, abrupt transitions and intentionally jerky panning all create the impression of spontaneity, the drama as a parallel universe. The clues to successful collaborations between commissioning bodies and composers today are found in the television operas of the past. The present generation of composers, whose view of life has been, if not defined, at least informed by television, will bring a further dimension to the genre, readily combining film, television and the most recent innovation, the Internet. Television opera was created to bring opera to a mass audience. It would seem likely that, in the future, what was once a passive ‘mass’ will increasingly involve a collection of individuals gathering to exchange ideas and ideologies. The significance of new technology for the visual arts and music will depend on the interdisciplinary contributions of all involved, whether composers, producers, technicians or inventors.
GroveO (L. Salter)
O. Downes: ‘Menotti opera, the first for TV, has its première’, New York Times (25 Dec 1951)
S. Chotzinoff: ‘NBC music chief sees new approach: what about television opera?’, Musical America, lxxiii/Feb (1953), 23
W. Sargeant: ‘Orlando in Mount Kisco’, New Yorker (4 May 1963)
T. Eastwood: ‘On Writing an Opera for Television’, Composer, no.25 (1967), 4–10
C. Whelen: ‘Thoughts on Television Opera’, Composer, no.24 (1967), 15–17
J. Culshaw: ‘The Making of Owen Wingrave’, The Times (8 May 1971)
D. Mitchell: ‘Map Reading: Benjamin Britten in Conversation’, The Britten Companion, ed. C. Palmer (London, 1984), 87–96
N. Kimberley: ‘Opera on Television: Three New Television Operas’, Opera, xlv (1994), 371–2
J. Barnes: Television Opera: the Fall of Operas Commissioned for Television (diss., U. of London, 1997)
Music documentaries cover a wide variety of television programmes, including biographies and profiles of composers and performers; fly-on-the-wall impressions of such institutions as opera houses and orchestras; travelogues; competitions; workshops; analyses of works (or specific aspects of them); extended surveys of particular periods, and even an overview of the history of music in the Western world.
The dividing-line between documentary and reportage is difficult to define. A true music documentary requires the intervention of a director bringing to the task a critical eye and an interpretative idea, a flair for selecting the musical material, and the desire to tell a story by imposing a non-musical structure on musical material – in short, to provide an authorial voice. Given the collaborative nature of film and television, creativity is usually pooled by a team in which camera operator, writer, researcher, editor and producer each have a part to play alongside the director.
The infant BBC TV service transmitted an occasional didactic series entitled ‘The Conductor Speaks’, directed by Philip Bate, as early as 1939. Postwar development of programmes about music (as opposed to pure performance) did not receive priority in the UK until the end of the 1950s, when the arts magazine ‘Monitor’ (1958–65) included classical music in its remit. Films varied in length from 15 to 50 minutes; the disparate subjects included the life of a string quartet, the general atmosphere of such festivals as Britten's at Aldeburgh and Menotti's at Spoleto, and a satire on the record industry (‘Hi-fi-fo-fum’, with a script by Robert Robinson, directed by John Schlesinger). American television had been quicker to exploit the educative possibilities of the new medium: as early as 1952 Leopold Stokowski gave an illustrated talk on Musorgsky's Pictures From an Exhibition in the Ford Foundation's innovatory weekly ‘Omnibus’ series. In 1954 that series carried an illuminating 30-minute essay by Leonard Bernstein on Beethoven's sketches for his Fifth Symphony. The first page of the score was painted on the studio floor, with each player standing on the appropriate musical staff. Bernstein proved an inspirational communicator who commanded audiences numbering many millions; he contributed a further 25 essays between 1955 and 1962, among them ‘The Art of the Conductor’, ‘The World of Jazz’, ‘The Creative Performer’ (with Glenn Gould and Stravinsky) and ‘American Musical Comedy’. After a further decade in which he gave illustrated lectures in the Young People's Concerts, Bernstein returned to adult education in the 1970s, delivering repeat performances on PBS of his series of Harvard lectures on musical semantics, entitled ‘The Unanswered Question’.
The horizon for music documentaries was extended by numerous technological advances, among them more portable cameras which needed less light, and by the advent of a generation of directors and programme editors who believed that the medium could be used to make programmes about music, rather than aping such ‘bio-pics’ as the Hollywood treatment of Chopin's life, A Song to Remember. In British television the most significant directorial figure was Ken Russell, who worked for the arts magazine ‘Monitor’ from 1958 to 1964. He began by making imaginative short films that used actors in specially shot scenes interwoven with photographs and contemporary newsreel footage. Russell's documentaries were narrated in forceful style by his editor, Huw Wheldon, the leader of a new school of documentary who had inherited the mantle of John Grierson (1898–1972), the founder of British documentary film making. Among the composers profiled were Prokofiev, Bartók and Elgar, all figures of recent memory. Russell eschewed the use of eyewitnesses and experts (the norm in subsequent decades), preferring to tell his own story; he chose actors with a physical resemblance to his subjects and used silent-film techniques without spoken dialogue. Although scrupulously researched, the early films did not claim to be biographies in the literal sense, but they communicated nonetheless a poetic perception of the composer and were warmly received by the public. A recurring musical thread in the Russell's Elgar portrait (1962) was the use of the Introduction and Allegro over shots of the composer's beloved Malvern Hills, accompanying scenes showing various stages of his life, from boyhood to old age. Seen by three million viewers and many times repeated, ‘Elgar’ sparked off a revival of interest in the then neglected composer's music that has continued unabated.
Early in the 1960s, ‘Profiles in Music’, narrated by John Freeman, offered portraits of leading performers including Yehudi Menuhin. This type of programme has become a staple of long-running television arts series such as ‘The South Bank Show’ (ITV) and ‘Omnibus’ (BBC-1). An early feature on BBC-2 was ‘Mr Copland Comes to Town’ (1964, directed by Barrie Gavin); and Michael Tippett collaborated with another pioneer director, Walter Todds, over the best way to televise one of his compositions. Tippett later spoke powerfully about his pacifism as well as his music in ‘One Pair of Eyes’ (1972, directed by Mischa Scorer). Leslie Megahey's film about György Ligeti, ‘All Clouds are Clocks’ (1977), and Barrie Gavin's study ‘Thirteen Steps Around Toru Takemitsu’ (1983) are outstanding examples of films made in collaboration with their subjects. Undoubtedly the most prolific director in this field has been Tony Palmer, who has 100 documentaries to his name as well as feature films about Wagner and Shostakovich. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the twilight of the golden age of music on television, Palmer won the Italia Prize three times, for compelling studies of Britten, Walton and Stravinsky.
The later television music films of Ken Russell moved into the realm of documentary drama. A study of Debussy (as a lecherous faun) had a script by Melvyn Bragg; a later film about the domestic life of Richard Strauss, to Russell's own script, had the energy of an iconoclastic comic strip: it was amusing, irreverent and occasionally embarrassing. Relatives of both composers complained after the screenings and the films were withdrawn, never to be aired by the BBC. Russell's last film before departing to concentrate on cinematic projects (all his films look well on the big screen) was by general consent his television masterpiece. ‘A Song of Summer’ was a dramatization of Eric Fenby's moving account of the closing years of the life of Frederick Delius. The film had the truth of documentary, provided by Fenby's authentic dialogue, allied to the insight of an exceptionally gifted and sympathetic director.
By general consensus Britain led the field in music-documentary making for some decades, but among notable profiles from elsewhere may be mentioned ‘Goethe and Ghetto: Viktor Ullmann’ (Sweden, directed by Peter Berggren, 1966), ‘Händels Auferstehung’ (Germany, Klaus Lindeman, 1980), ‘Gustav III: Farewell to a Player King’, on the historical reality behind Un ballo in maschera (Sweden, Inger Åby, 1983), ‘My War Years: Arnold Schoenberg’ (Canada, Larry Weinstein, 1992), ‘Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices’ (Germany, Werner Herzog, 1995), ‘Richter: the Enigma’ (France, Bruno Monsaingeon, 1997) and ‘Edvard Grieg and his Landscapes’ (Germany-Norway, Thomas Olofsson, 1999).
A different type of music documentary flourished in the 1960s as a result of technological improvements. With the introduction of 16 mm film, costs were reduced while a new generation of more sensitive outside broadcast electronic cameras made it possible to film musical activities on location at rehearsal rooms, studios and even opera houses. Videotape superseded film telerecording, and the director was able to record for an hour or longer without having to disrupt rehearsals by changing reels; performers became less selfconscious, and a new naturalism evolved. Hybrid programmes combining film and tape were developed to take advantage of these improvements. One of the first, ‘The Golden Ring’ (BBC-1, 1964), videotaped the sessions in Vienna for Decca's recording of Götterdämmerung while a film camera caught the atmosphere backstage. A comic exchange between Georg Solti and his soprano, Birgit Nilsson, developed after a real horse was led into the ballroom studio at the moment when Brünnhilde calls for her horse Grane. Documentaries about recording sessions have been criticized for their lack of critical edge. Some were undoubtedly made with publicity in mind, but no punches were pulled in a later example of the genre, ‘The Making of West Side Story’ (‘Omnibus’, BBC-1, 1984), which revealed increasing tension between the composer and his leading tenor.
A substantial body of work in this field has been made by the independent producer Christopher Nupen, who was trained in the radio features department of the BBC and used his flair for reportage and editing to build up vivid portraits of some of the brilliant young musicians who became prominent in the 1960s. ‘Double Concerto’ documented the preparations for a performance of Mozart's two-piano Concerto k365/316a; the ebullient soloists, seen forging a personal friendship as well as an artistic partnership, were Daniel Barenboim and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Barenboim appeared in several other Nupen films, most notably those on Elgar's Cello Concerto (played by Jacqueline du Pré) and Schubert's ‘Trout’ Quintet (with Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, du Pré and Zubin Mehta).
In a separate development in the 1960s the innovatory arts magazine ‘Monitor’ broke new ground with a studio-based conducting competition in which Boult, Giulini and Klemperer served as judges, and with such features as ‘Do my ears deceive me?’, an investigation of modern music with Hans Keller and Tippett; Colin Davis conducted the LSO. With the advent of BBC-2, in 1964, producers were allocated more air time to develop new programme strands which placed greater emphasis on education. ‘Workshop’ was similar in scope to the innovatory programmes for adults about symphonic music that Leonard Bernstein had pioneered for CBS in the Lincoln and Ford Hours a few years earlier. For BBC viewers, the scholar H.C. Robbins Landon spoke about Haydn and the symphony; the critic Martin Cooper explored the many treatments of Paganini's 24th Caprice; and the conductor Bernard Keeffe orchestrated some of Beethoven's sketches for the ‘Eroica’ Symphony.
A further important strand in music documentary is the ‘blockbuster’ series. The most ambitious and expensive project to date was made by Granada TV for Channel 4 in the 1980s. ‘Man and Music’ was intended to extend over 100 episodes but, sadly, was abandoned before a quarter had been completed. Conceived by the television executive Denis Forman and planned in detail by the music historian Stanley Sadie, the series explored the art of music in its historical context. Six films were on classical Vienna, and four on composers and the courts to which they were attached: Mantua, Versailles, Eszterháza and Weimar. Three programmes each were devoted to Renaissance and Baroque Rome, Georgian London and Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. Each programme was presented by an expert in its subject. A personal overview, inevitably less detailed, and conceived from a more anthropological standpoint, was provided by Yehudi Menuhin in ‘The Music of Man’ (1979), an eight-part series produced by CBC. In 1982 James Galway presented 16 programmes entitled ‘Music in Time’ (directed by Derek Bailey). Over two decades, beginning in 1965, Pierre Boulez made more than 20 programmes on contemporary music for BBC-2 under the title ‘The New Language of Music’ (directed by Barrie Gavin). Other distinguished conductors have examined more specific subjects; examples from the 1990s include Solti's anatomy of the symphony orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas's demonstration of the evolution of the concerto, and Simon Rattle's six-part study of the 20th century, ‘Leaving Home’ (all on Channel 4). Two important series on BBC-2, ‘Great Composers’ (1998) and ‘Six Pieces of Britain’ (1999), admirably combined biography, analysis and performance; the latter was notable for the quality of its camera work and for its imaginative use of lighting.
More concerned to entertain than to edify is the musical travelogue. Among the earliest examples of the genre were two by the celebrated film maker Richard Leacock. In ‘A Musical Journey to Israel’, made for the American ‘Omnibus’ series, Leonard Bernstein is seen conducting the opening of the Frederic R. Mann auditorium in Tel-Aviv in 1957. Ten years later, ‘Journey to Jerusalem’ showed him conducting Mahler's Second Symphony on the slopes of Mt Scopus after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. Isaac Stern was accompanied by a film camera when he made a historic visit to China: From Mozart to Mao (1981, director Alan Miller) was shown first in cinemas, and won an Academy Award. The BBC got to China first however, with ‘The Red Carpet’ (directed by Geoff Haydon) an account of the LPO's 1973 tour when the cultural revolution was in full swing. A decade earlier David Attenborough had directed ‘Orchestra to the Orient’, a spirited account of the LSO's 1964 tour in Japan. For the Mozart bicentenary in 1991, André Previn retraced the composer's musical journeys around Europe in ‘Mozart on Tour’, directed by Robin Lough. Judged by box-office standards, the most successful of all such films was François Reichenbach's ‘L'amour de la vie’ (1969), an affectionate study of Artur Rubinstein. More recently the growth of interest in traditional and non-Western musics has been reflected in travelogues including the three-part ‘Music Journeys’ (Channel 4, 1998) and a feature on the Afro-Cuban All-Stars (1998).
Two notable documentaries among Tony Palmer's achievements outside the realm of classical music are the ‘Omnibus’ film ‘All my loving’ (1968), which placed rock and roll in the social context of the late 1960s, and the 17-part history of American popular music ‘All you Need is Love’.
Televised masterclasses, rehearsals and competitions might more usefully be defined as documents rather than documentaries. Great teachers like Jascha Heifetz and Paul Tortelier both entertained and edified musically minded viewers in the early 1960s; other notable television teachers have included Daniel Barenboim, Julian Bream, Jacqueline du Pré, Carl Ebert, Geraint Evans, Yehudi Menuhin and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. In the 1990s the masterclasses given by the judges of the Young Musician of the Year and Cardiff Singer of the World competitions were equally illuminating. Although watching a video can never replace individual tuition, masterclasses and conducting lessons are an educational tool of lasting value for students. The competitions themselves became regular features of the BBC TV landscape in the last two decades of the 20th century and are also shown or imitated in many other countries.
H. Burton: ‘Music for Television’, Contrast, iv/2 (1965), 36–42 [pubn of the British Film Institute]
F. Pellizi: ‘Ethnomusicologie et radio-télévision’, Diogène, no.61 (1968), 91–123
S. Chapin: ‘Leonard Bernstein: the Television Journey’, Television Quarterly, xxv/2 (1991), 13–19
B. Rose: Televising the Performing Arts (Westport, CT, 1992)
D. Janke: Music up here: Presenting Musical Life on Television: a Pilot Project on Issues of Representation and Identity (Ottawa, 1993)
Incidental music in television fulfils the same functions as in film and the theatre, even if the effect has to be achieved through musical shorthand. Thus television music can establish atmosphere as well as time and place, or delineate character, push the action forward, accompany scene changes, add to the dramatic impact and the emotional intensity of a scene, or provide continuity across edits.
Many film composers born since the 1920s developed their craft working in television, including Jerry Goldsmith (e.g. ‘The Twilight Zone’) and John Williams (‘Wagon Train’, ‘Checkmate’, ‘Lost in Space’). While composing music for television and for the cinema are broadly similar activities, there are significant differences brought about by television's smaller budgets, tighter production schedules, shorter programme durations and poorer sound replay. These conditions have several effects on the music track. Although stereophonic and ‘surround sound’ systems are beginning to become popular in the home, the composer has to be aware that the sound quality of television is inferior to that of the cinema, especially in terms of bass response and overall clarity. This can either be countered by careful scoring or be remedied in the recording and mixing process.
Modest productions tend to demand smaller ensembles, often combined with or supplanted by samplers and synthesizers. While the result can often be a ‘cheaper’ sound, the dramatic imperative does not always demand a large orchestra. Christopher Gunning demonstrated this point to great effect in his music for Dennis Potter's Karaoke (1996), which features a solo saxophone with an accompaniment of sampled instruments. Small budgets often lead to the use of ‘production music’ (sometimes referred to as ‘library music’ or ‘mood music’), comprising pre-recorded cues appropriate to certain types of action, atmosphere or setting. This is not dissimilar to the approach exemplified in Ernő Rapée's Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924), an anthology of ready-made moods for the silent-movie accompanist. However, it is often even cheaper to clear rights to existing recorded music, classical or pop, rather than commissioning an original score from a composer.
Television intensifies the narrative compression already observed in the cinema in comparison with the theatre. For instance, the short opening titles and closing credits of television programmes present a particular challenge to the composer attempting to establish an appropriate atmosphere through music. The medium of television also demands the creation of appropriate signature tunes at these points, as well as the short ‘hooks’ derived from them which are used to punctuate episodes, not only in terms of dramatic action and scene structure, but also for the purposes of advertising breaks on commercial channels. In the cinema and theatre the audience is expected to be seated and attentive throughout, but television demands immediately identifiable themes to call viewers to their armchairs. Memorable signature tunes of this kind include those for ‘The Avengers’ (Laurie Johnson), ‘Bonanza’ (Jay Livingston and Ray Evans), ‘Hawaii Five-0’ (Leith Stevens), ‘The Persuaders’ (John Barry), ‘Thunderbirds’ (Barry Gray), ‘Mission Impossible’ (Lalo Schifrin), ‘The Untouchables’ (Nelson Riddle), ‘Batman’ (Neal Hefti), ‘Dr Kildare’ and ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ (Jerry Goldsmith), ‘Star Trek’ (Alexander Courage), ‘Dr Who’ (Ron Grainer), and ‘Agatha Christie's Poirot’ (Christopher Gunning). The signature tunes for the more frequently broadcast soap operas, situation comedies and news and current affairs programmes have their own equally recognizable qualities.
As in the cinema, there has been an increased use of popular music in television programmes and advertising in recent years; while this provides both entertainment and ready-made socio-cultural references (and leads in turn to increased sales of the recorded music so used), it inevitably reduces the range of musical expression.
The convergence of sound and music is evident in television, just as sound design in the cinema is increasingly subsuming the music track. This, together with the trend towards one-stop production houses that offer clients the whole range of digital audiovisual services, is changing the patterns of commissioning music for television, and traditionally trained freelance composers may find fewer work opportunities in the medium as a result.
See also Advertising, music in; Commercial; Film music and Incidental music.
H. Jelinek: ‘Musik in Film und Fernsehen’, ÖMz, xxiii (1968), 122–35
P. Tagg: Kojak: 50 Seconds of Television Music (Göteborg, 1979)
D. Briscoe: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: the First 25 Years (London, 1983)
A. De Lachica: Music in the News (Austin, 1992)
R. Prendergast: ‘Music for Television: a Brief Overview’, Film Music: a Neglected Art (London, 1992)
J. Fry: Television Music: the Intended and Interpreted Meanings (Carbondale, IL, 1994)