Hear Aldous Huxley Learn Courageous New World. Plus 84 Traditional Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956-57)

We appear to be liv­ing via but anoth­er main second for pod­solid­ing. Over the previous 20 years, the medi­um has gone from area of interest exper­i­ment to primary­stream behavior, becom­ing a reg­u­lar a part of how we study, enter­tain our­selves, and move the time. The pop­u­lar­i­ty of podcasts—in an age of ubiq­ui­tous screens and per­pet­u­al distractions—speaks to some­factor deep with­in us. Oral sto­ry­telling, as previous as human speech, nev­er actual­ly dis­ap­pears. The medi­um evolves, plat­kinds shift, dis­tri­b­u­tion modifications—however the fundamental enchantment stays con­stant.

However the dif­fer­ences between this gold­en age of pod­solid­ing and the gold­en age of radio are nonetheless sig­nif­i­cant. The place the pod­solid is commonly off-the-cuff, and sometimes very inti­mate and private—generally seen as “too private”—radio professional­grams have been nearly all the time care­ful­ly script­ed and fea­tured professional­fes­sion­al tal­ent. Even these professional­grams with man-on-the avenue fea­tures or inter­views with ordi­nary of us have been care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed and medi­at­ed by professional­duc­ers, actors, and pre­sen­ters. And the busi­ness of scor­ing music and sound results for radio professional­grams was a really seri­ous one certainly. All of those formalities—in addi­tion to the lim­it­ed fre­quen­cy vary of previous ana­log document­ing expertise—contribute to what we imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize because the sound of “previous time radio.” It’s a quaint sound, but in addition one with a cer­tain grav­i­tas, an echo of a bygone age.

That gold­en age waned as tele­vi­sion got here into its personal within the mid-fifties, however close to its finish, some broad­solid com­pa­nies made each effort to place togeth­er the excessive­est qual­i­ty radio professional­gram­ming they might with the intention to retain their audi­ence. One such professional­gram, the CBS Radio Work­store, which ran from Jan­u­ary, 1956 to Sep­tem­ber, 1957, could have been “too lit­tle too late”—as radio preser­va­tion­ist web site Dig­i­tal Deli writes—however it nonethe­much less was “each bit as inno­v­a­tive and reduce­ting edge” as the professional­grams that got here earlier than it.

The primary two episodes, proper beneath, have been drama­ti­za­tions of Aldous Huxley’s Courageous New World, learn by the creator him­self. The sequence’ stay­ing 84 professional­grams drew from the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, James Thurber, H.L. Menck­en, Mark Twain, Robert Hein­lein, Eugene O’Neill, Balzac, Carl Sand­burg, and so many extra. It additionally fea­tured orig­i­nal com­e­dy, dra­ma, music, and This Amer­i­can Life-style professional­recordsdata and sto­ry­telling.

Hux­ley returned in professional­gram #12, with a sto­ry known as “Jacob’s Arms,” writ­ten in col­lab­o­ra­tion with and browse by Christo­pher Ish­er­wooden. The good Ray Brad­bury made an seem­ance, in professional­gram #4, intro­duc­ing his sto­ries “Sea­son of Dis­be­lief” and “Hail and Farewell,” learn by John Dehn­er and Sta­cy Har­ris, and scored by future movie and TV com­pos­er Jer­ry Gold­smith. Oth­er professional­grams, like #10, “The Exur­ban­ites,” nar­rat­ed by well-known battle cor­re­spon­dent Eric Sevareid, con­duct­ed prob­ing inves­ti­ga­tions of mod­ern life—on this case the expansion of sub­ur­bia and its rela­tion­ship to the adver­tis­ing indus­strive. The above is however a tiny sam­pling of the wealth of qual­i­ty professional­gram­ming the CBS Radio Work­store professional­duced, and you may hear all of it—all 86 episodes—courtesy of the Inter­internet Archive.

Sam­ple stream­ing episodes within the play­er above, or down­load indi­vid­ual professional­grams as MP3s and luxuriate in them at your leisure, nearly like, effectively, a pod­solid. See Dig­i­tal Deli for a com­plete run­down of every program’s con­tent and solid, in addition to an exten­sive his­to­ry of the sequence. That is the swan track of gold­en age radio, which, it appears, perhaps nev­er actual­ly left, giv­en the incred­i­ble num­ber of lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences we nonetheless have at our dis­pos­al. Sure, some­day our pod­casts will sound quaint and curi­ous to the ears of extra superior lis­ten­ers, however even then, I’d guess, peo­ple will nonetheless be telling and document­ing sto­ries, and the sound of human voic­es will con­tin­ue to cap­ti­vate us because it all the time has.

Be aware: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this submit appeared on our web site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 230 Episodes of Escape: Clas­sic Radio Dra­mas of Sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells & Extra (1947–1954)

X Minus One: Hear Clas­sic Sci-Fi Radio Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

Dimen­sion X: The Nineteen Fifties Sci­Fi Radio Present That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & Extra

Hear 90+ Episodes of Sus­pense, the Icon­ic Gold­en Age Radio Present Launched by Alfred Hitch­cock

Hear 149 Vin­tage Hal­loween Radio Exhibits from the Gold­en Age of Radio

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian based mostly in Durham, NC.