Televising Taste:  Negotiations of European Classical Music and American Culture in the  TV Performances of Leonard Bernstein, Victor Borge, and Nam June Paik

Kreutzer, Evelyn

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-m7pm-ea61

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Televising Taste: Negotiations of European Classical Music and American Culture in the TV Performances of Leonard Bernstein, Victor Borge, and Nam June Paik

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This dissertation explores how American television portrayed canonical European classical music in the Cold War era. I analyze televisual negotiations of music-cultural hierarchies to complicate common narratives about the postwar decades as a peak moment of polarity between “high” and “low” culture, and between ideologies of consensus and rebellion. Drawing on discourse analysis, archival research, and close readings, I suggest that the classed legacies of European classical music played an important part in American quests for national identity and that they were interwoven with and negotiated through popular media. I further argue that conjunctures of classical music and television occurred in dialogue with middlebrow aspirations for cultural capital, which were attached to European classical music and inscribed into visions of American cultural literacy and citizenship. Yet they also responded to contrary anxieties that popular culture and mass media would diminish “serious” music appreciation and turn audiences into passive consumers. Within the wider historical context of mutual influences between media technologies and music culture, my primary focus rests on three artists who foregrounded classical music on TV: Leonard Bernstein, Victor Borge, and Nam June Paik. By embracing TV’s associations with liveness, domesticity, and mass reception, all three challenged canonical idealizations of musical genius and purist remnants of the classed concert etiquette. Conductor and composer Bernstein drew on early television’s democratic promise to broadcast musical education to the masses. Musical comedian Borge built on the variety show format to play with audiences’ canon familiarity and to parody the social rituals associated with the concert hall. Avant-garde artist Paik drew on participatory media and satellite TV’s global reach to confront the elitist Euro- and Western-centric history of classical music’s cultural disposition. However, despite their subversions of the socio-cultural dimensions of classical music as “high” culture, all three figures drew on music’s appeal as a universal language, which is rooted in Romantic mythology and was reaffirmed in mid-century middlebrow culture. Through an account of three modes of musical mediation on TV during this period—educational, comedic, and participatory—this dissertation addresses larger ideological and historical implications of taste and canon politics, and contributes a new interdisciplinary perspective on the interdependence of music and media cultures.

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