Cultural Milestones
High culture dominated commercial network television programming in the 1950s and 1960s with the first television appearances of Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini, the first telecasts from Carnegie Hall took place during this era, the first live American telecasts of plays by Shakespeare, the first telecasts of Tchaikovsky's ballets The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker and the first opera specially composed for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors. The Bell Telephone Hour, an NBC radio program, began its TV run, featuring both classical and Broadway performers. All of these were broadcast on NBC, CBS and ABC, something that would be unheard of today. Commercial networks now concentrate on more popular items. The networks then had their own art critics, notably Aline Saarinen and Brian O'Doherty.
Read more about this topic: Golden Age Of Television
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being “mother’s only accomplishment,” today’s children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child’s needs are thus a cultural football in an economic and marital game.”
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