Televising Taste: Performing Classical Music on American Screens explores how American television portrayed canonical European classical music in the Cold War era. Situating mid-century TV culture within a history of music visualization efforts, it complicates narratives about the postwar decades as a peak moment of polarity between “high” and “low” cultures, and between ideologies of consensus and rebellion. Drawing on discourse analysis, archival research, and the medium of videographic analysis, Evelyn Kreutzer suggests that the legacies of European classical music played an important part in the formation of an American national identity and that they were interwoven with and negotiated through popular media. Conjunctions of classical music and television occurred in dialogue with aspirations for cultural capital, which were attached to European classical music and inscribed into visions of American cultural literacy and citizenship. Simultaneously, these conjunctions responded to anxieties that popular culture and mass media would diminish “serious” music appreciation and turn audiences into passive consumers.

Through musical mediations on television, Televising Taste addresses larger ideological and historical implications of taste and canon politics, contributing a new interdisciplinary perspective on the interdependence of music and media cultures.

Evelyn Kreutzer is a media scholar, video essayist, and curator. Her work explores audiovisual memory, media history, sound, and the intersections of creative and artistic moving-image practices.