• DOI:10.1080/713669737
• Corpus ID: 192078695

Being Beastly to the Germans: Music, censorship and the BBC in World War II

@article{Mackay2000BeingBT,
  title={Being Beastly to the Germans: Music, censorship and the BBC in World War II},
  author={Robert J. Mackay},
  journal={Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television},
  year={2000},
  volume={20},
  pages={513 - 525},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:192078695}
}

• R. Mackay
• Published 1 October 2000
• History
• Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Modern war demands that the enemy be seen as the standard-bearer of barbarism. It follows that his ‘culture’ is held to be tainted and consequently becomes a target of disparaging propaganda. Thus in Britain was the spirit of militarism sought and found in German music and attempts were made (as in the 1914 Promenade Concerts season) to ban its performance. By 1939, as war again threatened, the potential for cultural warfare had been greatly increased by a signiŽ cant technological and social… 

Modern war demands that the enemy be seen as the standard-bearer of barbarism. It follows that his ‘culture’ is held to be tainted and consequently becomes a target of disparaging propaganda. Thus in Britain was the spirit of militarism sought and found in German music and attempts were made (as in the 1914 Promenade Concerts season) to ban its performance. By 1939, as war again threatened, the potential for cultural warfare had been greatly increased by a signiŽ cant technological and social development: the establishment of radio broadcasting, together with the acquisition of the listening habit by the great majority of the population [2]. In terms of reaching the public the BBC had become the country’s most important cultural provider and with it a signiŽ cant actor in British social and cultural life. Music bulked large in its output and, indeed, was at the heart of its arts policy. It had promoted excellence through its own orchestras, it had encouraged composers by the commissioning of new works and, above all, it had opened up a world of high art in music to a whole generation that had little experience of it. If music were again to become a sector in the ‘culture front’ of war, then the role of the BBC would be pre-eminent in it. This is not, however, to assume that the BBC welcomed the allocation of such a role to it by the government. For the Corporation had a very Ž rm idea of what it was trying to achieve in its music output. The criteria for selecting what was broadcast were that the music had to be the best of its type (‘serious’, ‘light’, ‘dance’, etc.) and performed at the highest possible level. In short, ‘artistic excellence’ was the key measure of acceptability. A ‘nonmusical’ role for broadcast music would have painful implications for this policy; its basic tenets would be challenged by the imposition of political criteria such as strengthening the national war effort and weakening that of the enemy. When war came, no change in music policy was announced by the BBC. On the speciŽ c issue of the broadcasting of music by German composers, the Corporation rather went out of its way to dismiss the suggestion that it intended to institute a ban. Questioned by the Daily Herald, the Director of Music, Sir Adrian Boult, said that the BBC contemplated no ban on any musical work by reason of its nationality. ‘The BBC’s concern’, he said, ‘is to provide good musical programmes’ [3]. The editor of Musical Record was quick to praise: ‘We are grateful to the BBC for refusing to acknowledge the distinction of race which temporarily af icted the “Proms” in 1914. We want to nonsense of that kind’ [4]. Public image and reality did not match, however. While it is true that there was no blanket ban on German music, within days of the start of the war music programming was being subjected to a ‘racial’ Ž lter. By July 1940 a formal blacklist of ‘alien