Vol. 2 No. 15 · 7 August 1980
pages 7-8 | 3057 words
Music on Radio and Television
Hans Keller
There is no area of human endeavour on which we get a greater variety of opinions than on broadcasting, for the simple reason that everybody not only is but feels involved – as a listener and/or viewer, a broadcaster, or one who hates it all and makes a moral issue of it: I know more than one respectable mind who refuses to have a television set in the house – for his family’s sake and indeed his own. With a fair measure of boredom, then, the reader will expect yet another opinion from me – or rather, not another: by now, it is impossible for any opinion to be new.
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 20 · 16 October 1980
From Humphrey Burton
SIR: I hate to correct somebody with whom it was always a pleasure to work, but Hans Keller it wrong to suggest that there is no liaison between BBC radio and television music departments (LRB, Vol. 2, No 15). As a matter of fact, there is more consultation now than ever before, particularly in the field of opera, where last year over a dozen works were broadcast simultaneously by radio and television. We in television attend quarterly planning meetings with our radio colleagues and generally do our best both to avoid clashes and to encourage joint ventures. Mr Keller’s specific complaint in his article is of separate radio and television broadcasts of the same performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of Bruckner’s Seventh. This is correct and yet misleading. Mr Keller is referring to repeat broadcasts on radio and television. The first television screening was in BBC 1’s Sunday Prom series a few days after the live concert broadcast, and it was well trailed as such at the time.
Mr Keller knows well that scheduling and programme-building are complicated processes. Unlike Radio 3, where music is the prime ingredient, both the BBC television services provide a full range of programmes, including news, drama, entertainment, sport, documentary programmes and films, and so simultaneous broadcasts are extremely difficult to achieve, particularly on BBC 1. Nevertheless we televise the Proms on BBC 1 (The Sunday Prom) because audiences are double or treble those normally achieved on BBC 2. The disadvantage is the absence of stereo: it would not be realistic policy to televise a work like Bruckner’s Seventh on BBC 1 at 8.30 p.m. Later in the 1980s the problem will go away: television will have its own stereo sound-signal – as the Japanese do already and as the Germans will in September 1981.
Humphrey Burton
Head of Music and Arts Television, BBC Television, London W14
Vol. 2 No. 21 · 6 November 1980
From Hans Keller
SIR: I did not suggest ‘that there is no liaison between BBC radio and television music departments,’ and was explicitly aware of what is being achieved in the area of simultaneous broadcasting. While I greatly appreciate Mr Burton’s detailed information, his very letter (LRB, Vol. 2, No 20) is an amusing piece of central evidence for my complaint: that the co-ordination of television and radio music is gravely defective is proved beyond even unreasonable doubt by Mr Burton himself when he remains unaware that purely accidentally Bruckner’s Seventh was broadcast on successive nights on Radio 3 and BBC 2. He thinks, that is to say, that I was referring to what we in the BBC used to call the ‘planned mistake’ of the repeated broadcast of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performance of the work, whereas my complaint was about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performance under Solti on 15 March (BBC 2) and the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance under Jochum on 16 March (Radio 3). The very fact that two such repeats occurred within trumpeting distance without the Head of Music and Arts Television (or anybody else) yet having noticed anything amiss would seem to indicate that, if anything, my criticism was not sufficiently drastic. Let me hasten to add that I greatly appreciate Mr Burton’s serious attention to this problem: perhaps he will stimulate his colleagues on the radio side into comparable concern.
Hans Keller
London NW3
