Early music expert, former Radio 3 controller and Proms director Nicholas Kenyon examines how once little-known repertoire became part of our musical lives through its coverage by the BBC
Over the last hundred years, the BBC has had a huge impact on our musical tastes. As well as its continual broadcasts, the BBC’s role in running orchestras, promoting concerts and taking over the Proms had led to a major influence on the music we hear. Its well-known support for contemporary music is one aspect of the corporation’s commitment to broadening the repertory. I have become interested in researching the BBC’s involvement in another area, that of early music – those rich centuries of musical development before the middle of the 18th century which are now such a regular feature of our cultural life. These days, a huge range of music across a millennium is available to us at the flick of a switch or the click of a mouse, so it’s easy to forget that so much music from Machaut to Monteverdi and beyond wasn’t ever heard 100 years ago. It took the persistence of scholars, editors, performers and broadcasters to bring it back to life for new generations.
What part did the BBC play? When the BBC started a century ago, it had a complex agenda in this, as in every other area of serious and popular music-making. While reflecting what was going on in the musical world, at the same time it was pushing its own agenda for development in its self-appointed, top-down way, in line with its first director-general John Reith’s mission to ‘inform, educate and entertain’.
The early structures of broadcast music were dominated by two classical genres – song recitals with piano and extensive orchestral concerts, alongside much dance and popular music. We can find isolated broadcasts of earlier music, some from the regional stations of the British Broadcasting Company (as it originally was) – for example, a relay of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas from Newcastle in 1924 under conductor Edward Clark, and a performance of Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses in Vincent d’Indy’s version in January 1928 from the Daventry station, conducted by the BBC’s director of music Percy Pitt. What on earth must these have sounded like? They seemingly had little follow-up. The most regular series of Baroque music on the air was the JS Bach cantatas which became established on Sundays from May 1928 and had a quasi-religious importance in the schedule.
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