Abstract
AbstractThis article explores music’s role in radio drama. While musical aspects of early experimental radio dramas have often been explored, the music that figures in the Anglo-American radio play tradition has remained under-theorized. Borrowing interpretative tools from audiovisual discourses can help to elucidate some of the subtleties of the medium, but methodological inadequacies soon become apparent. As exemplars of modern radio dramatic technique, the BBC’s complete adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories (1989–98) are explored, their music interwoven into the drama with consistent levels of subtlety. I draw primarily from Michel Chion’s application of the ‘acousmatic’, showing how the ambiguity concerning the location of the enveloping solo violin music – Holmes’s instrument – offers twists and turns to the agency of the unfolding narrative. I examine further how a sustained technique of intertextual allusion creates what I call a paradiegetic space, in which pre-existing music, heard within the dramas, provides a parenthetical narrative that unravels in parallel with the primary narrative, reflecting back on its themes, changing its meanings and moreover challenging our preconceptions about radio’s particular acousmatic zone.
Highlights
This article explores music’s role in radio drama
While musical aspects of early experimental radio dramas have often been explored, the music that figures in the Anglo-American radio play tradition has remained under-theorized
As exemplars of modern radio dramatic technique, the BBC’s complete adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories (1989–98) are explored, their music interwoven into the drama with consistent levels of subtlety
Summary
Neil Verma’s Theater of the Mind comes perhaps closest, with its virtuosic exploration of the stylistic changes in ‘old-time’ radio drama – the 1930s thematization of psychological plots, the 1940s plots about information transmission, and so on.[2]. The series serves our reflection well and will raise fundamental questions about music in radio drama, so neglected in academic study Using these 60 shows as my case study, in the present article I will first explore and unpack prevalent notions of diegesis, some of which will prove useful,[22] but will establish Pierre Schaeffer’s term ‘acousmatic’ as pertinent,[23] considering how its accompanying concept of ‘visualization’ can work even without vision. This will lead me to question the ubiquitous violin music in the series and explore the different narrative positions that it represents, considering how it frames the dramas. While most of the ‘tricks’ discussed here can, and do, find clear analogies in film, some of them are germane to radio and work differently in this medium, where the imagination provides the images
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