![]() ![]() ![]() Meanwhile, others devised initiatives inspired by new media, such as NBC's Music Appreciation Hour, which ran from 1928 to 1942 or Victor's “Red Seal,” a gramophone label launched in 1903 to promote classical music. For some, broadening access meant bolstering late nineteenth-century institutions, such as the BBC Proms and the Boston Pops, concert series founded in 18 respectively. These included those who hoped to broaden access to high culture and the institutions and initiatives through which they sought to do so. Yet from the beginning, the battle lines were complicated by the “middlebrows”-those artists, mediators, and audiences who sought to combine these putatively oppositional aims. In one camp were the “lowbrows,” whose imagined desire for mindless entertainment was supposedly exploited by shamelessly commercial companies in the other, “highbrows,” epitomized by the emerging modernists, were said to shun the offerings of mass culture in favor of aesthetic autonomy, originality, and difficulty. 1 In response to the rise of mass technology, commentators of that era sorted consumers and products into polarizing categories in an anxious attempt to restore order to a shifting cultural terrain. Coined in the 1920s to describe those who fell between high and low culture, the concept harks back to an era openly invested in cultural hierarchies. From the pluralist vantage of today's academy, a colloquy on the “middlebrow” might seem like an unfashionable proposition.
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