Shownotes Transcript
Do we come on you unaware? You're set untended? Do you put down your paper to lift up an ear? Suspend what you were about to say? Or stay the fingertip that could snapshot the traps of night between us? Were you expecting us? You're dialed deputized to let us in at 30 minutes after 10 along the seaboard on the east?
9:30 inland by a thousand miles, a mountain's half past eight, and dinner dishes still uncleared on shores that face Japan. In either case, good evening, or good afternoon, good morning, or good night. Whichever best becomes the sector of the sky arched over your antenna.
We wish a thousand words with you concerning magics that would make a Merlin turn pistachio with envy. The miracle, more ordinary now, of just such business as this between your ears and us and ocean tides of ether.
We mean the genii of radio, kowtowing to Aladdins everywhere. As flashy on the run as light, and full of services to ships at sea, and planes in air, and people in their living rooms, resembling you. All this by way of prologue, listener. And prologue should not be prolonged. Let our announcer do what he's engaged to do. Announce what this is all about.
It's worth making this point. What we're doing ain't new. We did not invent the wheel. It may seem like we did because podcasting is relatively new. And so when you're neck deep putting together a story, you might say, oh, let me try this out. I don't think I've ever heard anyone do that before. But really, the truth is, all of us, writers, producers, editors, showrunners, and
and I don't want to forget reporters at radio stations too, every one of us is standing on the shoulders of greats. So many wrote, produced, and cut tape long before us. That will take care of overtures and prologues for tonight. You'd think that we were warming up to something slightly mighty in the way of melodrama, magniloquent with love and hate, with sacrifice and sin, repentance, and with sound effects.
Or else you'd think that we were mobilizing to make way for an epic chronicling a war. But no. But neither. As we said before, we're here to talk of radio. We? You wonder at the pronoun we? Yes. Well, radio's collective. No one in it's indispensable. The proof begins right here. Just watch and see how neatly your narrator is dispensed with.
Come, take it from me, you. Speak on. Of us and radio. It's taken, and we speak. Let's start by setting forth that it is good to swig some fancy every now and then. A nip or two of wonderment to jag the mind. It's good to send your thoughts excursioning if only as a form of exercise, especially in days like these.
The fashion now is to wonder on such things as whether civil war will come to China once again, or Europe have enough to eat this winter, or how much longer Franco will hang on in Spain, and will the rats of Nuremberg be executed, every one, and had we better share the atom bomb. At times like these when the heavens crackle with shortwave details of new atrocities just come to light,
There's little appetite for contemplations on the majesty of man. And yet, it serves a momentary antidote to think away from crises. To think that even for man's monkeying with mania and murder, he's still a noble article. Bound round by marvel.
From time to time, I'll feature work from the early days of NPR or a curious radio art piece from the 1970s and 80s. But today, I'm going back even further. On this episode of Sound School from PRX and Transom, I want to take a short walk into the deep radio past with two producers who are champions of old radio. First up, Julia Barton. Hi, Rob. It's Julia. Hi, Julia.
Julia was a VP and executive editor at Pushkin Industries. She earned a Nieman Journalism Fellowship in 2023, and she spent a year at Harvard rummaging around old radio archives and taking a deep dive into radio broadcast history. That's how she stumbled across this radio piece we've been listening to. It was written and directed by a radio legend, Norman Corwin. It's called Seems Radio is Here to Stay. Hearing it is like,
I don't know, it's like finding a party that started 75 years ago and is still going on. And it just makes you feel good about radio, you know, on a medium that by then was saturated with advertising and was mostly used to sell toothpaste and cake mixes. And this moment is a reminder that it's
It's actually a miracle. Let's observe. We speak now of the innards of this radio, the dials, filaments and microphones, the crystals, coils and rheostats and rectifying tubes and towers that inject the sky. And there where you sit listening, the sentinels inside your set letting past that only which it pleases you to hear.
Let's see the gods do better. Dare they vie with engineers of radio? It is to laugh. Seems Radio is Here to Stay is a play that aired on April 24th, 1939 on the Columbia Workshop Program, sort of a CBS showcase of great work that was kind of experimental in radio. And Corwin was only 28 years old when he wrote this.
I think the title, which is kind of awkward, Seems Radio Is Here To Stay, is an ironic reference to a pretty common belief that I ran across in the archives. A common belief that radio was going to be just a fad. But obviously by 1939, the fad was pretty established. Radio was a huge deal, but I think it wanted to be an even bigger deal. So...
CBS put out a call for, you know, scripts that celebrated radio. And Corwin was like, I'm going to do that. Do you remember what it was that Whitman said about the miracles? Come in, Walt Whitman, and refresh our memories. Come in and bring with you a snatch of music of the spheres. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.
and the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery and the cow there was a moment a brief moment in the early days of radio where people believed and believed passionately that the medium would be the great equalizer an educational medium for the masses through the mysterious ether radio could deliver the voices of what at the time was considered high art into homes across the country
Corwin captured that thinking in Seems Like Radio Is Here to Stay by weaving through the broadcast the work of Walt Whitman, Beethoven, and Shakespeare. Now, mother, what's the matter? Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended. Mother, you have my father much offended. Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue. Why, how now, Hamlet, what's the matter? This Hamlet was not advertised tonight, and yet a multitude is listening. You?
More than they seated at the Globe in London, incidentally. And none sits in the balcony. Corwin worked on more than a hundred radio programs from the 1930s through the 1950s. Later in life, in the 1990s, he produced radio plays for NPR. He's often referred to as the poet laureate of radio. Studs Terkel called him the Great Bard.
A writer at Transom described Norman Corwin this way, young readers and writers need to know what he did and how he performed such consistent miracles. Those miracles, as she put it, is found in his writing. Corwin manages to combine the plain, almost simplistic style of writing that's necessary for audio storytelling with something more literary.
Or as he said himself on Transom back in 2001, quote, my kind of radio is that which takes into account the intelligence of my audience. I do not believe in talking down. The mildest microphonic whispering like this. Hello, Antipode. Those spinning round the globe not once but seven times within the twinkling of a mouse's eye.
And on its way, mark well the point, unswerved by all four winds, dissolving in no mist and never tangled in the jungle's undergrowth. Nor can the frowning Himalayas range on range, but even momentarily intimidate our whispering.
He wrote the whole thing in two weeks, but it still wasn't finished on the day it was supposed to air.
So they rehearsed on the day of broadcasting. That was kind of a thing. They assembled the actors and they would go through the script before it went out live on the air. And it was during a break in rehearsal, Corwin says, that he wrote the last section, which is, in my opinion, some of the best writing I've ever encountered about radio. This microphone is not an ordinary instrument, but it looks out on vistas wide and deep.
My voice commingles now with northern lights and asteroids and Alexander's skeleton with dead volcanoes and with donkey's ears. It swims with minnows and it's in the sphinx's jaw. It drifts among whatever spirits pass across the night.
Here is a thought to fasten to your throat. Who knows who may be listening and where? Seems Like Radio is Here to Stay by Norman Corwin was broadcast in 1939. Julia Barton has just launched a short series of essays for Transom about old radio. It's called Audio Ancestors, and the first essay is about Norman Corwin.
Apparently, Julia's Nieman Fellowship deep dive was incredibly productive because she's also launched her own newsletter about radio and broadcast history called Continuous Wave.
Now, of course, Julia is not alone in her enthusiasm for old school radio. It's delightful and fantastically hokey and politically incorrect. Sarah Montague has a long, long history producing radio. Sarah made documentaries for WNYC for many years. She was one of the founding members of AIR, the Association of Independence and Radio.
She's been a producer at Selected Shorts for close to 30 years. It's a program that features actors reading short works of fiction. And something I didn't know about her when we spoke, Sarah's been a volunteer reader of the news for the LGBTQ program This Way Out. I know This Way Out. It's been around since the 80s.
I used to air it on stations that I managed. Came on reel-to-reel tape at the time. As you might remember, did everything at one time. When I started Selected Shorts, on Fridays I would stagger down to FedEx with 10-inch reels. You say that to people today, and it's as if you've told them that you used to hunt your food with a club. Cracks me up. Anyway, getting back to early radio, Sarah teaches a class at the New School called Radio Audio Masterworks.
The premise is fairly straightforward. Listen to great radio works and critically analyze them, just like she did when she studied English at Cambridge University. Taking a step back and saying, here are the memes, here are the tropes, here's the metaphorical structure, here's the creative overview, here are the other influences, all the things that we would expect to be brought to bear on Beethoven's Fifth or Beloved or any of these things.
In Sarah's class, they analyze a variety of stories. S-Town by Brian Reed, May May, A Daughter's Song by Deme Roberts, Essays and Stories by Scott Carrier, The Idea of North, which is a groundbreaking sound art documentary by Glenn Gould from the late 1960s. And Sarah takes her class back even further to the 1930s and 40s. Old Time Radio had a robust, immensely generous audience.
for genre drama of all kinds, employed thousands of people, established radio as the dominant entertainment medium in this country. One piece from that time period is a real favorite of Sarah's, an anti-fascist play called The Fall of the City. It's by Archibald MacLeish. Archibald MacLeish's Fall of the City is to me one of the seminal works in American radio. It is a golden age classic. ♪
Ladies and gentlemen, this broadcast comes to you from the city. The world has watched with wonder for three days. Not for the common occasions of brutal crime, or the usual violence of one sort or another, or coronations of kings, or popular festivals. No, but for stranger and disturbing reasons. The resurrection from death in the tomb of a dead woman.
Each day for three days there has come to the door of her tomb at noon a woman buried. The terror that stands at the shoulder of our time touches the cheek with this. The flesh winces. There have been other omens in other cities, but never of this sort and never so credible. In a time like ours, seemings and portents signify. Ours is a generation when dogs howl and the skin crawls on the skull with its beasts foreboding.
All men now alive with us have feared. We have smelled the wind in the street that changes weather. We have seen the familiar room grow unfamiliar. The order of numbers alter. The expectation cheat the expectant eye. The appearance defaults with us. Here in this city, the wall of the time cracks. We take you now to the great square of this city.
We are here on the central plaza. We are well off to the eastward edge. There's a kind of terrace over the crowd here. It is precisely four minutes to twelve. The crowd is enormous. There might be ten thousand. There might be more. The whole square is faces. Opposite over the roots of the mountains. It is quite clear...
There are birds circling. We think they are kites by the look. They're very high. The tomb is off to the right somewhere. We can't see for the great crowd. Close to us here are the cabinet ministers. They stand on a raised platform with awnings. The farmer's wives are squatting on the stones. Their children have fallen asleep on their shoulders. The heat is harsh. The light dazzles like metal. It dazes the air as the clang of a gong does.
It is one minute to twelve now. There is still no sign. They are still waiting. No one doubts that she will come. No one doubts that she will speak, too. Three times she has not spoken. Now it is twelve. Now they are rising. Now the whole plaza is rising. Fathers are lifting their small children. The bloom fans on the platform are motionless. There is no sound but the shuffle of shoe leather. Now even the shoes are still. We can hear the hawks. It is as quiet as that now.
It is strange to see such throngs so silent. Nothing yet. Nothing has happened. Wait. There's a stir here to the right of us. They're turning their heads. The crowd turns. The cabinet ministers lean from their balcony. There's no sound. Only the turning.
That's the opening to the original performance of Fall of the City from 1937. Orson Welles was the narrator, and as I mentioned, Archibald MacLeish wrote the play. MacLeish was a poet and a playwright. He earned Pulitzers for work in both areas, and he was also the Librarian of Congress for several years in the 1930s.
Of course, at the time he wrote Fall of the City, fascism in Europe was on the rise. Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy. And at this point, everybody in that generation is looking across the Atlantic and knowing that they are about to see the death of that world. The only people who don't seem to know this yet are the governments. Everybody is havering. Nobody is making the right decisions. It is unmistakably clear to anybody at that point with fascism
a modicum of intuition that Hitler is going to overrun these countries and that Nazism is going to prevail if something isn't done.
MacLeish wanted to write a play that addressed that, but obliquely, and he chose to do this by way of combining his several interests. He's an epic poet, he's interested in Mayan civilization, and he wants to create a field of thought in which you can bring to bear on the idea of why totalitarianism regimes succeed. MacLeish could have portrayed an easy answer to that question. Why do totalitarian regimes succeed?
She says he could have created a horrible, very aggressive central character as leader, making people kowtow. But no, he's saying there's a moral underpinning here that has to do with our own fear of liberty, the easiness with which people are swayed by authority, and how terribly, terribly dangerous this is. There's no sound, only the turning. First the waters rose with no wind. Listen, that is she. She's speaking.
Then the stones of the temple kindled without flame, or tinder of maize leaves. They see her beyond us. The crowd sees her. Then there were cries in the night haze, words in a once-heard tongue, the air rustling above us as at dawn with herons. Now it is I who must bring fear, I who am four days dead, the tears still unshed for me, all of them.
I, for whom a child still calls at nightfall. Death is young in me to fear. My dress is kept still in the press in my bedchamber. No one has broken the dish of the dead woman. Nevertheless, I must speak painfully. I am to stand here in the sun and speak.
The city of masterless men will take a master. There will be shouting men, blood after. Do not ask what it means.
I do not know, only sorrow and no hope for it. Fall of the City takes place in an unknown terra firma that is clearly modeled on something like one of the ancient Aztec communities. There is a mountain, there's an open plain, there are people of indetermined origin, but it doesn't really matter who they are because they represent all of us.
And what he enacts is the advance of totalitarianism in a classic form. There is a conqueror. He's coming towards us. A series of messengers come to relay the fact that he is advancing. Any Greek tragedy has this. And different kinds of leaders, religious leaders, military leaders, poets and artists, get up to say, this is what we should do about this.
And then the next wave of people gets up and says, no, no, no, that won't work because of this. As a result of which, of course, they're in a state of stasis. And what happens when the conqueror finally advances upon them is they bow down and do nothing. And the final act of this play is...
It's relayed to us as a news report, and there were a couple of different sources for this. At the time, we were hearing lots and lots of coverage from Europe by people like Edward R. Murrow describing the advance of totalitarianism. So people's ears were geared up to hear reportage of that kind. And the last line of this play, if I remember correctly, is the conqueror advances in
He's legions tall and he's wearing a suit of armor and he pulls the visor up and there is nobody there because, of course, we are the oppressors of ourselves. The voices are silent. They're watching. They stand in the slant of the sunlight, silent and watching. The silence after the drums echoes the drumbeat. Now there's a sound.
They see him. They must see him. They're shading their eyes from the sun. There's a rustle of whispering. We can't see for the glare of it. Yes? Yes? He's there in the end of the street in the shadow. We see him. He looks huge. A head taller than anyone. Broad as a brass door. A hard hero. Heavy of heel on the brick. Clanking with metal. The helm closed on his head. The eye holes hollow.
He's coming. He's clear of the shadow. The sun takes him. They cover their faces with fingers. They cower before him. They fall. They sprawl on the stone. He's alone where he's walking. He marches with rattle of metal. He tramples his shadow. He mounts by the pyramid. Stamps on the stairway. Turns. His arm rises. His visor is opening. There's no one. There's no one at all. No one. The helmet is hollow. No one.
The metal is empty. The armor is empty. I tell you, there's no one at all there. There's only the metal, the barrel of metal, the bundle of armor. It's empty. They don't see. They lie on the pavement. They lie in the burnt spears, the ashes of arrows. They lie there. They don't see or they won't see. They are silent. The people invent their oppressors. They wish to believe in them. They wish to be free of their freedom. Released from their liberty...
The long labor of liberty ended. They lie there. Look. It's his arm. It is rising. His arm's rising. They're watching his arm as it rises. They stir. They cry. They cry out. They are shouting. They are shouting with happiness. Listen. They're shouting like troops in a victory. Listen. The city of masterless men has found a master.
You say it's a day with a conference, day that has come to us. The city is fallen. The Fall of the City, first broadcast in 1937. It aired on CBS and was produced for a program called Columbia Workshop. Sarah Montague told me quite a bit more about how this recording was made, in particular, the very unusual way the crowd was recorded.
Hear all about it at transom.org. This is Sound School from PRX and Transom. I have support from Genevieve Sponsler and Jay Allison, who give my scripts the once-over, and from Jennifer Jarrett, the managing editor at Transom. WCAI graciously lets me use their studio here in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the radio center of the universe. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Thanks for listening. From PRX.
and transom.org.