Radio, television, film, the phonograph, wire recorders and mechanical instruments are but some of the technologies that Arnold Schoenberg wrote about or utilized during his lifetime. Infinitely curious and inquisitive, Schoenberg invented all sorts of things, some of which, including a typewriter for musical notation, belie his interest in technology. Rather than provide a broad survey of Schoenberg’s engagement with technology, this chapter focuses more specifically on how Schoenberg interfaced with technology as a means of presenting artistic ideas, particularly musical ideas. Though Schoenberg’s views on technology may appear ambivalent or, at times,even contradictory, something approaching consistency emerges when his writings about technology are considered in the context of his writings about how the musical idea is transmitted from composer to listener.

While stand-up comedy is conventionally thought of in terms of liveness and live performance, it is also the case that recorded media – such as radio and television – have a long, intertwined relationship with stand-up. Beginning from a historical perspective, this chapter outlines how recorded comedy media drew on live forms from its inception, taking inspiration from music hall and vaudeville. Recorded stand-up remains a fundamental component of contemporary recorded media, via stand-up specials on platforms such as HBO and Netflix. But the grammar of recorded media offers challenges to the pleasures associated with stand-up – especially in terms of liveness – and this chapter therefore explores the particularities of stand-up on radio and television, and its ongoing relationship to the live forms that predated it and continue alongside it.

What is Chinese hip-hop? How is its authenticity negotiated and contested in China? Instead of seeing Chinese hip-hop as a given cultural form that follows a singular trajectory, this chapter conceptualizes it as a precarious cultural formation suspended by competing claims to authenticity and overdetermined by divergent forces, such as the hip-hop communities, the state, and commercial forces. The broadcast of The Rap of China in 2017 was a decisive moment in the massification of hip-hop in China, in which the subcultural genre was domesticated, commercialized, and re-infused with hegemonic ideology. Focusing on the televisual remediation of hip-hop in China, this chapter illuminates how battles for authenticity have been fought out among different actors or groups, how tensions between the ethos and the techne of hip-hop unfold, and how censorship and propaganda imperatives delimit the contours of the genre’s representation to the mass audience. It problematizes the line between “the underground” and the mainstream, while foregrounding the process in which different horizons of hip-hip negotiate with one another, co-shaping what is visible, audible, and commendable. The issues discussed in this chapter will likely remain central to the development and dilemma of Chinese hip–hop in the years to come.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.

This chapter proposes that the English-language Latinx melodrama of the twenty-first century owes much of its rise in visibility and market viability to the transnational success of the Latin American telenovela in the late twentieth century. The chapter traces the notable influence that the telenovela genre has had on Latinx melodrama and highlights the way telenovelas have mobilized and attracted Latinx audiences as well as registered the political intensities of Latinx life in the twenty-first century. The chapter includes a brief overview of how Latin American telenovelas first came to the attention of English-language television producers and a definition of the genre as a melodramatic vehicle informed by José Muñoz’s “brown feeling.” Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin offer examples of how adaptations have recognized their telenovela origins and influences. East Los High (2013–2017) stands out as one of the few successful English-language telenovelas. Party of Five (2020) – a reboot of the 1994 dramedy – leans into a telenovela-style melodrama that emphasizes the stakes of the story. The chapter ends with a brief overview of several recent shows that are influenced by the telenovela genre.

In 1980, the fledgling Entertainment and Sports Programming Network delivered the first live television coverage of the NFL draft. The draft would become one of the biggest events on ESPN’s and the NFL’s calendars and demonstrate to the emerging cable industry that talk sold – sometimes better than the thing being talked about. Chapter 5 recounts how ESPN, for years the leading cable channel, built a multibillion-dollar business by nurturing an obsession with scouting athletic giftedness. The talent talk allowed the network to bridge the two dominant racial ideologies of the time, color blindness and multiculturalism, and model for other cable networks and media how to turn commentary into mass entertainment.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a veritable industry spring up around Pepys. Three best-selling biographies by Arthur Bryant were influential in establishing Pepys as an English hero, while novels about Pepys’s wife Elizabeth mocked attitudes towards the diary advocated in mainstream historical works. Spurring much of this interest, however, was the experience of two world wars. To trace the roles the diary performed during wartime this chapter looks at three very different productions: the long-running diary parody by R. M. Freeman (1909–46); the war diaries of one of Pepys’s readers, Constance Miles (1939–43); and the post-war BBC drama The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1958). In wartime, Pepys’s portrayal as an ‘ordinary’ Englishman proved more effective than his representation as a heroic figure. The journal and its adaptations legitimated a range of emotional responses to disturbing times.

This chapter considers Percy Shelley’s multifaceted depictions in modern popular culture as indicative of his ever-evolving reception in mainstream popular culture: he is simultaneously a rebel and an aesthete, a revolutionary and a fop, an ultra-canonical poet and a countercultural icon. Appearances of Shelley’s works – and depictions of the poet himself – in such popular media as television, film, comic books, graphic novels, contemporary fiction, pop music, and even international events like the Olympic closing ceremonies speak both to Shelley’s continued cultural relevance and to the variety of ways in which that relevance has evolved in the two centuries since his lifetime.

This chapter explores several legal opinions (pl. fatāwa) from the minority theological and legal tradition known as Ibāḍism, as represented by the work of the modern Ibāḍī jurist Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ (d. 1401/1981). The Ibāḍiyya are usually regarded as the inheritors of the early Khārijite movement and are thus neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī. Important Ibāḍī communities are today found in Oman and in smaller numbers in North Africa (Jerba Island in Tunisia, the Jabal Nafūsa mountains of Libya and the M’zab valley in Algeria). Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ was the most prominent figure of the so-called ‘Ibāḍī Rennaisance’ (al-Nahḍa al-Ibāḍiyya) of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Ibāḍī community in M’zab sought to find a place for themselves in their Sunnī-dominated environment, leading to an upsurge of Ibāḍī legal and theological scholarship. The fatwās excerpted here discuss the lawfulness of television and radio, eating the meat of non-Muslims, Pepsi and Coca Cola, smoking and various drugs.

Just a century separates the practical origins of radio transmission in 1895 and the first smartphone in 1997: a century which saw the rapid extensions of experimentation into widespread applications. The wireless revolution would transform almost every aspect of human interaction and society, from finance and business to political propaganda and the control of crime. Communication ceased to be a matter of space, and wireless communication was a revolution with as important transformative impact as any in history.

For some, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck and shit, bitch has been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a tabooed word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was considered to be defamatory, a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies, while some radio stations and television networks have been fined for using it. Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the word’s use, bitch has undergone a dramatic “unbleeping” over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. This chapter looks at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.

The growth of Bernstein’s career coincided with the growth of television, so many knew him through his broadcasts. His fifty-three hour-long award-winning Young People’s Concerts (1958−72) are among his most significant television work and were seen at their height by nearly ten million in the USA and in over forty countries. In each show, the maestro would expound on some musical principle, with clarity and appeal, accompanied by demonstrations by him and the New York Philharmonic. While the series clearly shows Bernstein’s brilliant pedagogy, a deeper story lies beneath. No other musician in the late twentieth century so fully addressed the issues of the day as did Bernstein, and no other classical musician has ever been so widely seen. Through his Young People’s Concerts, the maestro not only spread his love of music but also raised his artistic voice from this bully pulpit to work for a better world.

No one so inspired the generation of American musicians born in the 1940s and 1950s as did Bernstein, an ‘inescapable’ and ‘incontroverible’ icon of the 1960s and beyond. His celebrity was particularly linked to the explosive growth of television, beginning with appearances on Omnibus (from 1954) and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts (from 1958). Two texts complicate his reputation as Wunderkind of American music: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ (1970) and Leon Botstein’s ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’ (1983). But by the time of his 100th birthday celebrations in 2018, Bernstein’s stature as cultural icon seemed intact and secure, resting largely on West Side Story.

Bernstein wrote five books during his life: The Joy of Music (1959), The Infinite Variety of Music (1966), Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (1962), The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (1976), and Findings (1982). The first four were part of his desire to make his lectures and commentary from his televised appearances available in written form and the fifth book is a compilation of mostly minor writings from throughout Bernstein’s life. This chapter is a summary of the contents of each of these books, with commentary on what the more substantial efforts tell us about the author’s musical philosophy. The major essay from Findings considered here at some length is Bernstein’s senior honours thesis written while a student at Harvard: ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’. Although better known as a conductor and composer, Bernstein’s writings are also important representations of his thinking.