The Wizardry of Wireless

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 4, 9 August 1929, Page 2

The Wizardry of Wireless

+ To What will it Develop?

RAP, like stained glass, can be appreciated only from within. No one can possibly know what radio means until he possesses a set. Certain things you can prognosticate beforehand: you know that you are going to hear music, that people will talk to you, and that you will get the weather and the news. But this is only the dry bones of the matter. The subtle influence of radio, once you are one of the brotherhood of listenersits wizardry-is.a thing you could never have imagined. Take music first. You imagined you had certain definite tastes in music. You just would not listen to jazz. Now you have to! Because if your wireless is a new toy you can’t stop turning it on; and if it is an old toy, that cunning little devil inside you called boredom sometimes makes you listen, even to jazz, because you've nothing better to do. What happens? Before very long you find yourself exClaiming, grudgingly perhaps, "By George, that’s a good tune!" But

radio-magic is equally potent to convert the lowbrow. I know a youth who now listens with intense delight to music which in pre-radio days he would just have dismissed contemptuously as "classical." | And-which is the point of the thing-he has by no means fore+ sworn jazz. THE truth is that radio-magic bids fair to abolish those odious aesthetic class-distinctions altogether. There will soon be no such thing as mighbrow or lowbrow. May it ring the death-knell of that bugbear of a phrase. "classical music," and of those other labels, "light music," and "sacred music"! If it is .good, it is music. If it is bad, it is not music. And good music may range from a Bach cantata through the champagne-like waltzes of Strauss or Lehar to a love-song in the latest revue. . You naturally thought, before yo invested in a radio set, that you would

doa great deal of picking and choosing. Not’a bit of it. There was a lady I heard of recently, a dear old Victorian lady. She is of the kind who in a literal sense enjoy bad health. She turned on her radio at bedtime one evening, hoping she might hear some soothing message suitable to the decline of day and the oncoming shades of night. Instead, she found herself plunged into the midst of-vaudeville! In a few minutes she was smiling, a little later giggling, and presently a peal of quite juvenile laughter brought her startled companion hurrying upstairs to her bedroom. The result of it all was that she slept that night as sound as a bell. BUT the chief magic of radio is to give one that sense of kinship With one’s fellows, which I am quite sure all listeners have experienced The spinster living alone in a London flat or buried alive in some cottage in the heart of the country, is not the aniy "lonely listener.’ In a sense, we

— =_-_ ~~ -* we are all of us lonely listeners. We live in a little world of our own. Our horizons are really very limited. We know nothing of the man next door. of the people in the flat below, still less of our fellow-beings in distant towns and shires. And, knowing nothing of them. we fend to think nothing of or about them. We English are not a very companionable race. We prefer empty carriages on the railroad ‘and scowl at others who come crowding into the vacant seats. But in a railway carriage let one traveller make a joke, and the man who was deliberately taking up more than his room is found to be shuffling-back into his fair space, there is laughter, and with laughter, courtesy and good humour. ‘ In that extraordinary overcrowded journey of modern life it is the Wizard Radio who tells the story, cracks the joke, sings the song; and one evening of wireless makes the whole world kin. -By Wilfrid Rooke Lev, in "Radio Times." \