Radio Within and Across Borders. Music as national and international in interbellum Danish radio

Special section: RadioMusic. Papers from the LARM conference ‘Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media and Cultural Memory’ Copenhagen, 14–15 November 2013

Abstract

Politically, Europe was dominated by both renewed national movements and tendencies towards internationalism in the decades following World War I. As a new and strong medium, radio became a tool for supporting nation-building in individual countries and for developing international relations, for example through the International Broadcasting Union (IBU). In this article I look at this apparent paradox by investigating a few aspects of the Danish music repertoire and the principles for radio transmission. I demonstrate how the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) practised both principles in their programming without seeing it as a problem in any way. The enormous amount of music, which radio made it possible to listen to, contributed to this – not least because the music always became more or less contextualized thanks to radio’s many metatexts. In this way music in early radio contributed to a certain understanding of the modern, the ‘other’, and the new, making them less strange. At the same time radio articulated a well-known, ‘homely’ music background as the basis for understanding the new.