TRE researchers from IP3 appeared at a panel on Transnational radio and the construction of regionality in interwar Europe at the NordMedia Conference in Copenhagen August 13.-15.. See the abstract for the panel and the individual papers below.

Transnational radio and the construction of regionality in interwar Europe Chair: Jacob Kreutzfeldt, Assistant Professor Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, The University of Copenhagen The introduction of radio as a broadcast medium in interwar Europe provided a new sphere for sensing presence, for interaction and for the construction of identities. This panel will present three papers on the production of regionality in interwar radio and will facilitate discussion on the ways in which this technical medium reshaped identities between national and transnational culture. It has been argued that radio, due to the national institutionalization, mainly took part in constructing national cultures (Briggs 1961-95). However it should not be forgotten that the medium from the outset was intimately connected with ideas of transnationalism (Hilmes 2012), and that within international fora (i.e. IBU or Nordic Collaborations), efforts were made to use radio as an instrument for internationalism (Lommers 2012). Due to newly established online research access to historical radio programs and schedules, researchers in the panel are able to focus on historical programs and asks how these, represent and perform ideas of transnationalism influenced by ideological and technological factors. Focusing on three different kinds of collaborations between national broadcasters, namely musical programs, city portraits and staff exchanges, the panel will provide a broad spectrum of cultural programming and exchanges, and will ultimately question whether Benedict Anderson’s notion of Imagined Communities (Anderson 2006) was already supplemented by Arjun Appadurai’s multiple Imagined Worlds (Appadurai 1996) in interwar radio. All researchers in the panel are part or the HERA-funded Transnational Radio Encounters research project, which furthers a transnational approach to radio. www.transnationalradio.info Keywords: interwar radio, transnationalism, culture & identity, program analysis

European music? The International Broadcasting Union’s interbellum concert series “European Concerts” Morten Michelsen, Associate Professor Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, the University of Copenhagen After the Great War radio became an important tool for nation building in the old and the many new European nations, and the International Broadcasting Union (1925-45) intended to use it for ‘regional building’ as well. To some, nation building and international cooperation would be opposites. But most European countries, though, had no problem with following both strategies at the same time, and apparently listeners had no problems either. In many ways language was an obstacle to international transmissions, but music lent itself willingly to be the basis for such communication (O’Flynn 2007). By the 1920s most music was related to or associated with more or less specific geographical places. Romantic nationalism had seen to that either by creating ‘national styles’ and/or by incorporating various kinds of folk music into concert music. At the same time the notion of music as a universal phenomenon came to the fore, sometimes articulated in the cliché ‘music is an international language’. Drawing upon theories of nationalism I will demonstrate how music fitted well within the double or paradoxical strategy of nation and region building by discussing one aspect of the strategy, namely, in what ways did interbellum radio organizations and leaders use music in their multilateral collaborations, especially the concert series “European Concerts” (1931-39) organized by the IBU (cf. Lommers 2012). What did the orchestras play, how did the broadcasting houses contextualize it, and how did they communicate nationality/internationality in music, in concert programs, in radio magazines? Keywords: IBU, concert transmissions, nation building, national/international, romantic nationalism