Publications [#382783] of Philip Rupprecht

Articles in Books

1. Rupprecht, P. "SYMPHONIES SERIOUS OR FOR FUN: Malcolm Arnold, the BBC, and the Production of Taste." The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow January, 2022: 390-416. [doi]
   (last updated on 2025/04/22)

   Abstract:
   Malcolm Arnold’s concert music of the 1940s and 1950s pleased audiences but rankled press critics. The archived verdicts by the Score Reading Panel at the BBC Music Department document mixed opinions of Arnold’s music. Arnold’s characteristic tone-often called humorous and frivolous-confounded critics seeking serious or complex statements. The symphony as a genre takes a relatively high position within a midcentury British field of cultural production. Beyond Bourdieu’s hierarchical model, British cultural theorists from Eliot and Leavis to Hoggart, Williams, and Hall surveyed an interplay of elite and “ordinary” tastes, both susceptible to bureaucratic planning. Adopting a policy of cultural “uplift,” the BBC’s pyramid of radio broadcasting channels-Light, Home, and Third-constructed clearly separate categories of listener. Arnold’s stylistically eclectic Symphony No. 1 was initially rejected for BBC broadcast as a score too vulgar for highbrow or even middlebrow taste.