By David Schulman | From the November/December 2025 issue of Strings
“This tune is going out to Marconi,” Joe Strummer used to sing.
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Guglielmo Marconi is a household name in Italy. The man known as the inventor of radio has close to 5,000 Italian streets named after him. More than are named for Antonio Stradivari. Or Verdi. Or Paganini.
Marconi is the subject of a recent biopic from Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI. Its subtitle translates as “The Man Who Connected the World.” The movie shows Marconi, in 1937, trying to persuade fascist government officers that his discoveries should be used for the good of all humanity. Some would say he was better at science than politics.
The Marconi biopic also dramatizes Italy’s first national radio broadcast, in October 1924. A glamorous announcer greets her audience, gathered around their newfangled radio sets. A hush seems to fall across the country. Then, live music: a string quartet. It’s tender, sweet, a bit sad. And the music played for the debut of Italian broadcast radio was, curiously, not Italian. They played Haydn.
Radio became a mass medium quickly. In 1922, within two years of Marconi’s first successful audio broadcast, the BBC started in London. German public radio started the next year and soon launched radio symphony orchestras in Leipzig and Berlin. The NHK Symphony was founded in 1926—the major broadcast orchestra in Japan.
“This tune is going out to Marconi,” Joe Strummer used to sing, “to all corners of the globe.”
By the time he sang that lyric in 2001, the Clash was defunct. Strummer was leading his last band, the Mescaleros, and working as a deejay for BBC World Service.
This tune is going out to Marconi,
to all corners of the globe.
There is no hut in the Serengeti
where my wavelengths do not probe . . .
The BBC had an unbeatable funding stream from the start: a little tariff on the sale of every radio set (and later, every TV) sold in Britain. In 1930, the BBC Symphony Orchestra was established. Along with other enduring broadcast obsessions—true crime, serial drama, sports, propaganda—it was natural to put classical music on the airwaves. A lot of it. Today the BBC has no fewer than five standing radio orchestras.
National radio orchestras remain big across the globe: Albania, Brazil, Japan, South Korea. Also Russia—and Ukraine. The ensemble originally named the “Palestine Broadcasting Service Orchestra” performs today as the national radio orchestra of Israel, rebranded the Jerusalem Symphony. And most European countries—including Marconi’s Italy—still have at least one national radio orchestra. The Netherlands and Romania have four each. Germany has more than ten.
The US government never opted in. Yet for-profit American broadcasters foresaw big advertising money (and prestige) as radio boomed in the 1930s. It was never simply art for art’s sake.
In 1937, a few months after Marconi’s death, Arturo Toscanini was lured out of retirement to lead the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra’s debut was the dawn of a golden era for classical music in America, with radio orchestras serving as a democratizing force carrying culture coast to coast, and, ultimately, worldwide. Cue the strings?
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It all started Christmas night 1937. Toscanini conducted Vivaldi and Brahms from New York’s Radio City, studio 8-H. Audience members read this message on their programs:
Since the modern microphone is extremely sensitive, your co-operation in maintaining strict silence during the music is urgently requested.
The NBC Symphony was a Cadillac of orchestras. Led by both Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski, it was also the top-paying orchestra in the US. It broadcast live from Carnegie Hall, with an all-star roster of players: cellists Leonard Rose and David Soyer; violist William Primrose; violinists Josef Gingold and Oscar Shumsky. And Harry Lookofsky, who worked also as concertmaster for Paul Whiteman at ABC and recorded string jazz on the tenor violin. The NBC Symphony’s weekly radio concerts introduced Americans to new music by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Prokofiev—as well as not-so-old-at-the-time pieces like Verdi’s Hymn of the Nations and Holst’s The Planets.
Meanwhile, in 1939, Nazi Germany’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, issued an order: The Berlin Philharmonic would perform a series of radio broadcasts on Germany’s national RRG network. These concerts were called Musik zur Dämmerstunde—“Music at the Time of Twilight.” Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted some of these, and many other German radio concerts throughout World War II, in repertoire almost entirely by German composers.
The NBC Symphony played its last concert in 1954. The last American radio orchestra, The Symphony of the Air, went quiet in 1963. Since then, American classical music radio has mostly meant—to use an anachronism—needle-drop shows: a deejay playing commercial recordings. Outside of cities like New York (WQXR) and Chicago (WFMT) that sustained commercial classical stations, classical music became a niche offering on the airwaves, heard mostly on low-budget public radio and community radio stations.
When I was 16 or so, I played in a youth orchestra with other kids who were listening to Joe Strummer and the Clash. One of them, a year younger than me, somehow had a deejay slot on our local college radio station. It was a classical music needle-drop show, and he invited me to cohost.
One shift, as the on-air light came on, I leaned into the mic to announce the name of a conductor known for his Wagner. Spooked by an umlaut, I blurted out a double take: Karl Böhm-Böhm.
Lots of amateurs were on the classical air back then. There were exceptions, of course, like Karl Haas, a pianist whose family had fled fascist Germany. Every show, he had the courage and humility to play his theme music live: the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata. Haas could make any room with a radio sound cozy as a parlor.
“He likes to tell about the letters he gets from farmers who tune into his show on their transistor radios while driving their tractors,” said President George H.W. Bush, in 1991. Bush was in high spirits at the White House, presenting Haas with an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Let me just recall some words of Thomas Jefferson,” the president said. “‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of the day.’”
I listened to Adventures in Good Music on WILL in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, when I was in grad school in the 1990s. WILL was among several hundred public radio stations that also aired NPR’s daily classical music program, Performance Today, highlighting live concert recordings from around the US. It could serve as background music, but there were interviews too. Once, a charismatic young virtuoso was asked to name the performer who inspired her most. Without hesitation, she waxed rhapsodic about Michael Jordan.
By late 2000 I’d found my way to a temp job writing scripts for Performance Today at NPR headquarters, in DC. The show had a staff of about 17 and regularly aired “perf chats,” recorded in Studio 4A. The show was mixed then using an array of big reel-to-reel tape decks on wheels; watching the directors and engineers in the control room, it could feel like chamber music. In 2000 NPR’s Cultural Programming Division was awarded the National Medal of Arts, along with Maya Angelou, Barbra Streisand, and Itzhak Perlman.
Then came September 11, 2001. Just before our morning staff meeting, television monitors showed airliners crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, not far from NPR. In the chaotic next days, the Emerson String Quartet gave a memorable (and intense) live performance near ground zero in New York. The concert recording went out to the nation on Performance Today.
By then, audience research consultants already had led stations to become increasingly cautious in their classical programming, and sometimes to drop it altogether. But 9/11 fundamentally changed the public radio math. NPR closed its Cultural Programming department in 2002. Performance Today, now with about a quarter of the staff, was passed to rival public radio network APM. And for almost 25 years, Fred Child continued hosting with vigor and humor—what APM calls “the most-listened-to classical music radio show in America.” At press time, he’s intending to step down this fall.
Around 2010, several of the biggest American commercial classical stations were sold or dramatically transformed. KING-FM in Seattle, WQXR in New York, KDFC in San Francisco, WCRB in Boston—the deals were complex, and sometimes diminishing, but switching to public radio kept classical music radio on the air. Today KUSC is the No. 3 station in Los Angeles and can claim to be the biggest American station in both public radio and in classical music. Echoing the early days of radio, KUSC airs concert broadcasts by the L.A. Philharmonic, now led by Gustavo Dudamel, a Venezuelan emigré.
Personally, I caught a lucky break after Performance Today, thanks to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—which in 2002 still made grants to independent producers. I pitched Musicians in their Own Words, a series of first-person audio portraits. I edited these in a way made newly possible by digital audio technology. To leave more time for performers and music, I cut out my own voice.
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Musicians in their Own Words features ended up slotting nicely into four- to seven-minute segments on NPR’s news shows. CPB also liked the series for the Public Radio Exchange—a distribution platform then about to launch, now called PRX. It let deejays at local stations handpick features to air for their audiences. Creative border-crossers were the stars of Musicians in their Own Words: Regina Carter improvising jazz on Paganini’s violin. Renée Fleming singing in a much lower range with guitarist Bill Frisell. Tan Dun telling the story of hearing Bach for the very first time as young man in China—a revelatory experience possible only after the Cultural Revolution ended.
But the performer whose voice has been ringing in my memory the most lately is a former violinist, a musician whose records Joe Strummer often played on the BBC. The Guglielmo Marconi of rock ’n’ roll: Bo Diddley.
In 2007, I interviewed Bo, then 79, for NPR, one of his last before the stroke that ended his career. Of course, we had to talk about the “Bo Diddley Beat”:
Boom-dah-boom, da-boom. Da-boom Boom!
That rhythm later powered hits for Buddy Holly, Elvis, the Supremes, the Who, U2, George Michael, and many others. Bo talked about playing the violin when he was young. He talked about working on a violin concerto when he was old. He hummed his theme, a mock-serious riff with a burbling flourish at the end.
“But I didn’t see too many black dudes in those orchestras . . .”
He was an inventor at heart and searched for ways to amplify his guitar. He hot-wired his mom’s radio set and blew it up. Bo Diddley was also a keen observer of American mass culture. And he said one thing that day that really stuck with me:
“We are a nation of slow understanders.”
It felt to me like a line from a classic blues tune: an ambiguous line that contains multitudes. A line you want to bend toward justice. A line you want to deliver, slowly, into a microphone. Even if you can’t really understand it.
I admit, I was late to hear the news that CPB would be completely shut down. A few days after the announcement, I talked with friends from 25 years ago at Performance Today. One of them—who ultimately played a prominent role in shaping NPR’s most famous podcast and online offerings—pointed out an overlooked but important casualty of CPB’s closing: the “umbrella” music licensing payments.
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One of the things CPB had done for years was pay music licensing fees that cover the hundreds of local stations across the US. It cost a relatively modest $9.6 million a year. This gray, almost invisible support made it possible for American public radio stations to sound the way they do. It made it possible for networks and stations to air wide-ranging classical music shows. It made it possible for stories edited with multiple music clips to air on news programs. Amateur radio shows on community radio stations rely on this umbrella license. National classical music shows do, too, and I sure relied on it to produce Musicians in their Own Words.
The lack of umbrella licensing is one reason why the sound world of podcasts is far more limited than radio—podcasters usually need to pay for “stock” music from libraries or negotiate with rights holders to license rights to specific recordings. Not long ago, one big pod production house made a multi-hour documentary on a fallen music megastar—but had to avoid using a single clip of his music.
Several big foundations recently pledged more than $36 million to keep reeling public stations from going dark. For public radio, it was encouraging news. And it was about three percent of the evaporated CPB funding.
I’m not sure where it ends. I’m left thinking about former violinist Bo Diddley:
“We are a nation of slow understanders.”
If you want, we can imagine that we’re driving together, stuck in traffic. You flip on the radio and, curiously, there’s classical music. It’s a bit nostalgic, almost like the Symphony of the Air. They’re playing a dystopian operetta that, against all odds, has the makings of a huge popular hit. Its melodies are jagged, ironic, infectious. And for a moment, you could swear it’s got the Bo
Diddley beat . . .
Böhm-dah Böhm, Dah Böhm, Dah Böhm-Böhm!
The lead characters are Strummer, Weill, and St. Cecilia. The string section plays softly. “Everything is dying, dying,” Cecilia sings. “Everything is dying.” It’s kind of catchy. And at least for us, there are those beautiful cellos.
David Schulman’s compositions include “Extinctions,” a requiem for lost bird species scored for chorus and electric violin. His radio documentaries include Alone with J.S. Bachfor Australia’s ABC RN, winner of a special mention from the Prix Italia. More at quietlifemotel.com and schulmancreative.com
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