Golden Age of Radio

While the telling of stories in audiovisual media is relatively new, our love of hearing stories is definitely not! Almost a century ago, people were just starting to get into what was perhaps the most popular home entertainment medium through the decades of the 1930s and 1940s—radio. In the U.S., radio was a commercial broadcast medium that brought news, entertainment, and music to almost every household.

This discussion will focus on music in radio drama, exploring the various roles and functions that music fulfilled in two long-running series: Dr. Christian and Death Valley Days. We’ll focus specifically on the work of Josef Bonime, who was the music director at the New York-based advertising agency McCann-Erickson from 1930 to 1958—years that traverse the “golden years” of radio as a commercial entertainment medium through the appearance of television.

Rika Asai is a Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches classes in music history and culture for undergraduate music majors and non-music majors. She also mentors graduate students in the area of music pedagogy. Dr. Asai received her Ph.D. in musicology from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, with a dissertation entitled “The Joseph Bonime Collection of Radio Music: Music and Advertising in the Golden Age of Radio.” Her research centers on music’s relationship with consumer culture and media. She has contributed a chapter, “‘From operatic pomp to a Benny Goodman stomp!’: The National Biscuit Company and Let’s Dance,” to Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences (Oxford University Press, 2016) as well as the Oxford Handbook on Music and Advertising (2021).