New Deal Music Radio 3 tonight

Subject: RE: New Deal Music Radio 3 tonight
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Aug 11 - 12:33 PM

however they[roosevelt] had the right idea unlike the idiots in charge of the IMF, Keynesian economics, worked then and will work now, if given the chance, look at Australia in 2009.

Subject: New Deal Music Radio 3 tonight
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 20 Aug 11 - 11:56 AM

I've only just spotted this myself, so apologies for the short notice.

In any event, the BBC Proms intermission talk tonight (Sat 20th) is called A Public Right and Obligation - The Music of the New Deal. The Blurb is below and it sounds as though it will centre round New Deal sponsored classical music, rather than the folk music collecting of the Lomaxes etc.

Even so, I'd have thought it essential listening for anyone interested in any aspect of the musical arts in 1930s America.

Note also that the programme won't be available on Listen Again, which means you'll have to catch the broadcast, either via the radio or the Internet or Freeview.

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Sorry, this programme is not available to listen again. (why?)

Next on:
Today, 21:45 on BBC Radio 3
Synopsis
In the current economic climate some British cultural organisations are looking to America in search of ideas for fundraising. The received opinion is that America is the great shining example of private and philanthropic sponsorship of the arts. But it was not always the case - there was one brief period, a radical blossoming of government subsidy, when President Franklin D Roosevelt initiated centralised arts funding from scratch.

The National Theatre's Nicholas Hytner investigates these five golden years in New Deal America when music and the arts flourished.

Federal funding stimulated the growth of new audiences, boosted music education, kept orchestras from going under and gave a platform for composers from rural and minority backgrounds.

Beginning in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression in America, the Works Progress Administration or WPA established a scheme to get people off the dole and into jobs. Workers in the arts had to prove their skills and then were paid to perform or work behind the scenes. Orchestras and bands went to parks, parade grounds, ladies lunch meetings, factories and churches.

The Federal Music Project was less radical than the Federal Theater Project, Hytner explains. The head of music, was a Russian born classical violinist Nicolai Sokoloff, who wanted the public to be exposed to "cultivated music". The public could also interrogate composers after "laboratory" lectures. Much of the music has been lost but 12 discs of government radio broadcasts were discovered at the New York Public Library during the course of the making of this programme. Funding ended in 1939 due to the war effort and some of the political direction of the theatre projects, which caused unease within the government.
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