Radio Broadcast (Nov 1926-Apr 1927)

DECEMBER, 1926 TAKING THE LISTENERS BEHIND THE SCENES 181 „ ^uncer in the East is by no means a facile shaker, but he knows and loves music and possesses a natural dignity which comports with his subject. In other types of broadcasting, theatrical skill and pyrotechnics are more useful, but these qualities must be judiciously handled; the line between entertaining the listeners and enraging all those above the cash-girl level is easily passed over. Genuine wits are few on the air. One thing that is overdone is the "cheerfulness" blather. There is too much insistence on the "happiness" which the next hour will positively generate; one would think that the radio listeners were a mob of melancholiacs. After all this psychoanalysis and dispensing of advice, 1 shall probably receive polite inquiries from announcers, or their doting girl friends and mothers, inquiring where I got my dope and whether I have ever faced a microphone myself. I hasten to forestall these comments by admitting that on the one occasion when I wrote an extended piece for presentation via radio I carefully coached one of the young men in my station and let him read it, and if I had to go through with a big good-will feature on the air I should doubtless collapse during the first ten minutes and fall senseless into the condenser transmitter, leaving the mimeograph boy to carry on the great work of the hour. Taking the Listeners Behind the Scenes I SHALL PROBABLY RECEIVE POLITE INQUI ANNOUNCERS OR THEIR DOTING GIRL ries from friends" B' IN THE pursuit of novelties, why doesn't some station put on a "Behind the Scenes" broadcast, giving the radio audience the wire talk, studio conferences, and other preliminaries, before an event is put on the air? The preparations, sometimes, are more interesting than the actual show. We would hear the command of the control operator to his colleague at the power plant many miles away, " Put on your carrier, Bill, and let's test through" — but the carrier would already be on, and the listeners would enjoy the unwonted intimacy of hearing technical badinage and, if anything went wrong, a damn or two might disturb the calm of an undefiled ether. Next there would be heard the cooing of some beautiful female songster as she entered the studio on the arm of a star announcer, the solicitous inquiries about the health of each by the other, the placing of the microphone, the signal from the control technician to the announcer, and the curtain would rise as usual. All concerned would know they were on the air, but they would carry on their usual business with as little modification through self-consciousness as they could manage. The audience would like it, I am sure. Everyone likes a peep behind the scenes. If the people in a theater were allowed to go back-stage, in two minutes nobody would be left on the house side of the footlights. As it is, many people who listen to a station night after night, drop in to see the studios and the olant in which their entertainment originates. It is not always possible to accommodate them, for in a busy station the studios, when not in actual use for broadcasting, are generally occupied by orchestras rehearsing for their next performance, artists being put through auditions, piano tuners, and so on. But a little back-stage "LEAVING show along the lines suggested would inconvenience no one and might intrigue the jaded listeners as much as a hog-calling contest, cooking lessons, or a lecture on fighting the boll weevil. Radio Soaks In ROADCASTING continues to penetrate the arts and sciences. The newspapers are a good index of its progress. Take the Radio Show Section of the New York Times, issued in September. Besides the articles by radio specialists, there were discussions by six prominent orchestra conductors: Walter Damrosch, Willem Van Hoogstraten, N. Sokoloff, John Philip Sousa, Edwin Franko Goldman, and Joseph Knecht. A few years ago these leaders in their respective divisions of musical art never thought of radio except when they wanted to send a wireless message to some passenger on a ship. Now radio concerns them almost as much as the personnel problems of orchestras, the arrangement of programs, interpretations of symphonies, and other matters of direct consequence in their field. Four metropolitan clergymen, the Rev. Randolph Ray, Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, the Rev. Edwin Keigwin, and Dr. Daniel A. Poling, contribute discussions of radio and its influence on religion to the same issue of the Times. An even more striking item appeared in the New York Herald Tribune of August 1 6th. The music (not radio) critic of the paper, Mr. F. D. Perkins, in reviewing one of the New York Philharmonic Stadium concerts, writes as follows: Saturday night's concert in the Great Hall brought, for the first time in this series, Saint Saens's "Carnival of the Animals," and Mr. Van Vliet did excellent work in his cello solo in "The Swan" in the Saint-Saens's varied zoo — judging by a hearing of the concert by radio in Schenectady. Schubert's C major symphony, as heard by the same medium, had a praiseworthy and spirited performance under Mr. Van Hoogstraten's direction. When music critics base their reviews on what comes to their experienced ears out of a loud speaker, the broadcast program managers and engineers begin to listen for the trumpets of the millennium morn. Microphone Symbols M1 THE MIMEOGRAPH BOY TO CARRY ON R. T. R. DAGG, a broadcast technician of Washington, District of Columbia, objects humorously but not without reason to the symbol for a microphone which appeared on Page 246 of the July issue