Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde: Experimental radio plays in the postwar period 9781526155726

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Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde

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Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde Experimental radio plays in the postwar period Edited by

Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaerts, Siebe Bluijs and Pim Verhulst

manchester university press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2021

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5571 9 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Shukhov or Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow (Arssenev, Wikimedia Commons) Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Presss

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Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Introduction: The acoustic neo-avant-gardes between literature and radio – Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaerts, Siebe Bluijs and Pim Verhulst

vii viii

1

Part I: The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde 1 Transnational, untranslatable: Apollinaire in Freddy de Vree’s multilingual radiophonic composition A Pollen in the Air – Lars Bernaerts 27 2 Radiophonic art and electroacoustic music: an aesthetic controversy during the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares – Tatiana Eichenberger 46 3 A forefront in the aftermath? Recorded sound and the state of audio play on post-‘golden age’ US network radio – Harry Heuser67 4 Croaks and calls: posthuman sound ecologies in the neo-avantgarde – Jesper Olsson 87 5 Textual and audiophonic collage in Dutch and Flemish radio plays – Siebe Bluijs 106 6 ‘Ja, ja, so schön klingt das Schreckliche’: an audionarratological analysis of Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Lost & Found: Das Paradies – Jarmila Mildorf 128 Part II: The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry 7 Poetry on the Austrian radio: sound, voice and intermediality – Daniel Gilfillan

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  8 Gerhard Rühm’s radiophonic poetry – Roland Innerhofer   9 A theatre of choric voices: Jandl and Mayröcker’s radio play Spaltungen – Inge Arteel 10 Language, sound and textuality: Caryl Churchill’s Identical Twins as neo-avant-garde (radio) drama – Pim Verhulst 11 Studio audience: Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio – Adam J. Frank

179 196 213 236

Index254

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Figures

1.1 Detail from ‘Paysage’ and from the translation, ‘Landscape’. Translation by Anne Hyde Greet, reproduced from Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916) by Guillaume Apollinaire, © 1980 by The Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.29 1.2 ‘La Colombe poignardée et le jet d’eau’ and the translation, ‘The Bleeding-Heart Dove and the Fountain’. Translation by Anne Hyde Greet, reproduced from Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916) by Guillaume Apollinaire, © 1980 by The Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press. 38–9 2.1 The first page of the script of the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (reproduced with permission from the Daphne Oram Collection, Goldsmiths, University of London, ORAM3/2/016).59 2.2 Transcript of the first lines of the script of the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.) 62 5.1 Pages from Bert Schierbeek’s Inspraak (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1970), pp. 66–7, 98–9. 118–19

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Notes on contributors

Inge Arteel is professor of German literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on post-1945 Austrian literature and drama, with a particular interest in ‘experimental’ authors and playwrights (especially Jelinek and Mayröcker), on text and theatricality, the radio play and gender studies. Together with Lars Bernaerts she coordinates a research project on the radio play, funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO). She is a member of the FWO research network on the European Neo-Avant-Garde (ENAG). Recent publications include, with Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, ‘New Dramaturgies in Contemporary Vienna: Wiener Wortstaetten, Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen and Die Schweigende Mehrheit’, Modern Drama, 61.3 (2018), pp. 352–79; ‘Non-Sovereign Voices in Friederike Mayröcker’s Aural Texts’, Partial Answers, 15.1 (2017), pp. 135–50; and ‘Szenisches Schreiben: Theatralität und Räumlichkeit in Jelineks “Bühnenessay” Rein Gold’, in Monika Szczepaniak et al. (eds), Jelineks Räume (Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2017), pp. 45–59. Lars Bernaerts is an associate professor of Dutch literature at Ghent University (Belgium). Previously, he taught literary theory at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research and publications focus on narratology, experimental fiction, modern Dutch literature and cognitive literary studies. He co-edited Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative (University of Nebraska Press, 2014, together with Luc Herman, Dirk De Geest and Bart Vervaeck), several books on Dutch experimental fiction and special issues on narrative theory, and Luisterrijk der letteren. Hoorspel en literatuur in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Academia Press, 2020, with Siebe Bluijs). Forthcoming are Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German (co-edited with Inge Arteel and Olivier Couder) and Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama (Ohio State University Press, co-edited with Jarmila Mildorf). Bernaerts is also a co-director of the Centre for the Study of Experimental Literature (SEL,



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joint research group at Ghent University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel), which is part of the international research network ENAG (European Neo-Avant-Garde). Siebe Bluijs is a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University (the Netherlands). He holds a PhD in Dutch Literature from Ghent University (Belgium). His research interests mainly concern the interactions between literature and (other) media. His current research focuses on ‘digital literature’ (i.e. poetry that employs kinetic typography, literary smartphone applications, and narratives in virtual reality). In his PhD project, he analysed the form and function of the postwar literary radio play in the Low Countries (1960–2000), focusing on innovations in narrative and semiotic composition. Together with Lars Bernaerts he co-edited a volume on the Dutch and Flemish radio play entitled Luisterrijk der letteren. Hoorspel en literatuur in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Academia Press, 2020). Bluijs writes extensively on contemporary (Dutch) literature. Additionally, he has a background in graphic design, with a specialisation in book design and typography. Tatiana Eichenberger is a fourth-year PhD student in the Media Studies Department of the University of Basel, writing a thesis on the electronic studio as an experimental sound laboratory of broadcasting, as part of the project ‘Radiophonic Cultures’. She has studied music and media studies at the University of Basel, preceded by music studies at the University of Arts in Berne (concert and teaching diploma for flute). She completed her Master of Arts in 2014 with a thesis on musical authorship between composition and interpretation in the music of the European and the American avantgarde in the 1950s. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of musicology and media studies, for example sound and image in experimental film, sound design in science fiction films or visualisation of music through the medium of music notation. Adam J. Frank is professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, and is currently a residential fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. His research and teaching areas include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American l­iterature and media, histories and theories of affect and feeling, and science and technology studies. Author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015) and co-author, with Elizabeth Wilson, of A Silvan Tomkins Handbook (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), he has also produced audiodramas in collaboration with composers in Canada, the United States and Europe.

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Daniel Gilfillan is associate professor of German studies at Arizona State University in the School of International Letters and Cultures, senior s­ustainability scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and faculty affiliate in Film and Media Studies, Jewish Studies and English. His primary area of research engages the relationships between sound, media and the perception of experience. Gilfillan has published widely on German and Austrian radio and sound art, and on the history of the radio in Germany as an experimental art medium; see Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He is currently working on a second book entitled Sound in the Anthropocene: Sustainability and the Art of Sound. This new book explores the role and centrality of sound for understanding the complex interconnections within sustainability practice and the equally complex interactions between humans and other ecosystem populations (animals, landscapes, geologies and atmospheres). In addition, he is co-editing and translating (with Solveig Ottmann) a volume of essays written by Weimarera radio producer Hans Flesch, with the title Before Brecht: Hans Flesch and Weimar-Era Radio Theory. Harry Heuser is a writer, curator and educator. His doctoral study ‘Etherized Victorians’ (CUNY, 2004) examined canonically marginalised scripts of US American plays broadcast on network radio in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. The dissertation formed the basis for his book Immaterial Culture: Literature, Drama and the American Radio Play, 1929–1954 (Peter Lang, 2013). As lecturer in art history at Aberystwyth University, Wales, he applies interdisciplinary approaches to visual/material culture to explore its intersections with literature and performance, as well as its endurance and mutability in regenerative acts of adaptation. As a curator, he has staged exhibitions engaging with cinema and radio-related ephemera. He is a contributor to the forthcoming anthology Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama (Ohio State University Press). Roland Innerhofer is a professor of German literature at the Institut für Germanistik of the University of Vienna. His research focuses on nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, the avant-garde, utopian literature, literary and genre theory, as well as the interconnection between literature, technology, architecture and cinema. He is the author of several monographs, among them Deutsche Science Fiction 1870–1914. Rekonstruktion und Analyse der Anfänge einer Gattung (Böhlau Wien, 1996). Recent publications include Sonderweg in Schwarzgelb? Auf der Suche nach einem österreichischen Naturalismus (with Daniela Strigl; Studien Verlag, 2016); Spielräume. Poetisches. Politisches. Populäres



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(with Christian Huber;  Löcker Verlag, 2016); and Keime fundamentaler Irrtümer.  Beiträge  zu einer Wirkungsgeschichte Heimito von Doderers (with Matthias Meyer and Stefan Winterstein; Königshausen and Neumann, 2018). Jarmila Mildorf teaches English language and literature at the University of Paderborn (Germany). Her research interests are audionarratology, socionarratology and conversational storytelling, dialogue, literature and medicine/medical humanities. She is the author of Storying Domestic ­ Violence: Constructions and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners (University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and co-editor of thirteen collections of essays and special issues/themed journal sections, including Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama (with Lars Bernaerts; Ohio State University Press, 2021), Aural World-Making: Audionarratological Approaches to Sound and Narrative (thematic section published in CounterText, 5.3, 2019), Dialogue across Media (with Bronwen Thomas; John Benjamins, 2017), Narrating Sounds (with Till Kinzel; thematic forum published in Partial Answers, 15.1, 2017) and Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (with Till Kinzel; De Gruyter, 2016). Her articles have been published in numerous collections and journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Literature, Style, Narrative, Narrative Inquiry, Partial Answers, Journal of Gender Studies. Jesper Olsson is Professor at the Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University, where he leads the research group ‘Literature, Media History and Information Cultures’ (LMI) and is the director of the research programme ‘The Seed Box: A Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory’ (www.theseedbox.se). His own research focuses on literature, art and media history. He co-edited A Cultural History of the Nordic Avant-Garde 1950–1975 (Brill, 2016), with Tania Ørum, and his latest publications are the digital book (as editor), Archive Book Conference: Representations and Reconfigurations of the Digital in Swedish Literature 1950–2010 (www.reprecdigit.se) (2018) and Spaceship, Time Machine. Öyvind Fahlström’s Ade-Ledic-Nander (2017). He is also a literary critic in the daily Svenska Dagbladet and one of the founders of the art-literaturetheory journal OEI. Pim Verhulst is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp. His research combines genetic criticism, intermediality and audionarratology to study works by (late) modernist and postwar authors. His articles have appeared in Genetic Joyce Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the Journal of Beckett Studies, of

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which he was the assistant editor until 2020. He has published chapters in Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio (Palgrave, 2017), Beckett and Modernism (co-edited with Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle; Palgrave, 2018) and Pop Beckett (Ibidem, 2019). His monograph, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury, and with Jarmila Mildorf he recently edited Radio Art and Music: Culture, Aesthetics, Politics (Lexington, KY, 2020).

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Introduction: The acoustic neo-avant-gardes between literature and radio Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaerts, Siebe Bluijs and Pim Verhulst In 1968 literary writers Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker, known for their experimental poetry, created the piece Fünf Mann Menschen (Five Man Humanity). The witty 14-minute play exploited the stereophonic possibilities of the radio in new and surprising ways. In Italy, authors of the ‘neoavanguardia’ showed an interest in translating their literary poetics into radiophonic form: both Umberto Eco and Edoardo Sanguineti collaborated with the composer Luciano Berio (Osmond-Smith, 2013). In 1979 the American avant-garde composer John Cage composed Roaratorio, a radio play for electronic tapes, Irish folk music and voice, based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In the Netherlands, Lucebert and Bert Schierbeek, experimental poets of the so-called Vijftigers movement, wrote scripts for radio plays. There are numerous examples of neo-avant-garde artists experimenting with radiophonic genres, creating fascinating works of art. In fact, all over Europe and North America we can find examples of such radiophonic experimentation that uses and transforms avant-garde techniques, such as montage, collage and improvisation. The radio play in particular provided a playground to further think about the semiotic power of the auditory domain. It challenges artistic conventions as well as the distinctions between different media and genres, supported by technological novelties of the postwar period such as stereophony, the transistor radio and the tape recorder.

New research perspectives The time is right to further unearth, examine and compare these inventive works for the ear, not just because they are becoming more widely available through archival work or digitisation, but also because recent developments have brought us approaches more suited to describing and interpreting experimental radio plays. The last decade has seen a remarkable return of scholarship on radio drama in all its forms (radio plays,

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features, etc.), ­especially in countries where a scholarly tradition on the subject was already quite strong – the United States (Verma, 2012; Heuser, 2013; Pavlik, 2017), the United Kingdom (Hand and Traynor, 2011; see also below), France (Bennet, 2010; Héron, 2010; Héron and Linarès, 2012; Cohen, 2015; Scales, 2016), Italy (De Benedictis, 2004; De Benedictis and Novati, 2012), and Germany and Austria (Köhler, 2011; Kapfer, 2017; Rinke, 2018; Wodianka, 2018; Ehardt, 2020; Krug, 2020). The radio play also came to attention in countries where it had been somewhat overlooked by scholars. In Belgium and the Netherlands, for instance, only one academic book on the subject had been published (Bulte, 1984) until recently (Bernaerts and Bluijs, 2019; Wijfjes, 2019). Spain and Latin America are also quickly following suit (Rea, 2013; Birkenmaier, 2015). This increase of academic interest can partly be explained by the recent celebration of radio broadcasting’s centenary, marking Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the technology, as well as by the new distribution and consumption technologies that the internet has to offer: radio plays have been made available through digital streaming services, and radio institutions and broadcasting corporations provide digital tools to search their abundant archives (e.g. the ARD-Hörspieldatenbank, initiated by the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv; the BBC’s Genome website, which allows users to browse billings in the popular Radio Times magazine from 1923 to 2009; or the website of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), where French radio recordings can be listened to and downloaded). This renewed interest in radio drama coincides with significant developments in the humanities, such as the increased attention to popular culture in cultural studies, for example Matthew Rubery’s (2016) observations on the audiobook. Particularly important, as well, is the so-called ‘acoustic turn’ or ‘auditory turn’, as one of its earliest advocates termed it (Ihde, 1976), which roughly occurred around the turn of the millennium, and the emergence of the discipline of ‘sound studies’ that followed in its wake. The acoustic turn is often seen as a response to the ‘phonophobia’ that presumably resulted from the criticism of ‘phonocentrism’, as it was formulated by deconstructivism (Stewart, 1990; Morris, 1997: 5–6; Mowitt, 2011: 23). Sound studies is a multidisciplinary field rooted in the observation that vision has too long been privileged over sound in the humanities (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2012; Sterne, 2012). Foregrounding the role of sound in both society and culture (particularly after the Industrial Revolution), the discipline draws on the work of media scholars who have paid attention to (technologies of) sound, for example Friedrich Kittler, Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. A crucial point of reference is R. Murray Schafer, whose World Soundscape Project has provided the field of sound studies with its own specialised terminology, of which ‘soundscape’ is probably

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Introduction 3

the most pervasive concept (Schafer, 1977; 1994). Books that can be classified under the rubric of sound studies have treated a wide variety of topics, ranging from the impact of industrial noise (Bijsterveld, 2008) and sound technology (Gitelman, 1999; Lastra, 2000; Sterne, 2003), to the cultural history of ventriloquism (Connor, 2000). Last but not least, a field has developed that investigates the narrative aspects of sound. Audionarratology, an emerging subdiscipline of transmedial narratology and semiotics, argues that classical narratology relies too heavily on visual metaphors. By reverting to sound studies and studies of oral narrative culture, its goal is to create a vocabulary and a methodology to properly analyse and (re)consider the narrative aspects of sound (Schmedes, 2002; Huwiler, 2005; 2006; Mildorf and Kinzel, 2016; 2017; Mildorf, 2019; Bernaerts and Mildorf, 2021). Within the domain of audionarratology, the radio play has acquired a privileged status. As an acoustic art form that creatively combines spoken language, aspects of voice, music and sound effects, it offers an ideal test case for the theory and methodology proposed by this nascent field. While some scholars have considered the relationship between literary studies and radio in general (Whittington, 2014; Van Puymbroeck, 2018), particularly in Anglophone academic circles, and more in the UK than in the USA, the resurgence of the topic has gone hand in hand with the rise of ‘New Modernist Studies’ (Latham and Rogers, 2015). This reinterrogation and redefinition of modernism after postmodernism has enlarged traditional understandings of the term to embrace previously excluded literary works or authors, themes, times and places, but also new forms of artistic expression. Visual media such as film or cinema had always been central to the field, but other technologies were also being included more systematically after the turn of the century, radio and related forms of telecommunications among them (Campbell, 2006; Murphet, 2009; Trotter, 2013; 2016; Groth and Murphet, 2017; Frattarola, 2018). This necessary shift of focus in modernism has contributed greatly to the emancipation of literary radio studies in recent decades, but it has also imposed limitations (Verhulst, 2022a). Critical inquiries rarely venture beyond the 1920s and the 1930s, that is, the canonical time frame of ‘high’ modernism (Tiffany, 1995; Fisher, 2002; Avery, 2006; Frattarola, 2009; Cohen, Coyle and Lewty, 2013; Hendy, 2013; Feldman, Tonning and Mead, 2014; Dinsman, 2015; Crook, 2020a). Although some critics have slightly extended the temporal boundaries into the 1940s (Cohen and Coyle, 2015; Whittington, 2018), 1950s (Lodhi and Wrigley, 2018; 2020) and 1960s (Hepburn, 2013), the immediate postwar period remains an academic barrier, notwithstanding its recent terminological broadening into ‘late’ modernism (Miller, 1999; Weller, 2018).

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Not going too far back in time, one way in which scholars of radio have managed to circumvent this hegemony of modernism, with its temporal and thematic constrictions, is by focusing on one specific author – Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard (Guralnick, 1995), Samuel Beckett (Branigan, 2008; Addyman, Feldman and Tonning, 2017; Sanchez Cardona, 2018; Verhulst, 2022b), George Bernard Shaw (Conolly, 2009), William Shakespeare (Jensen, 2018), Muriel Spark (Waugh, 2018) or George Orwell (Crook, 2020b) – or by zooming in on specific periods combined with national and institutional elements, for example the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Third Programme (Niebur, 2010; Bloom, 2016; Chignell, 2019). Sometimes they use case studies from Europe alongside North America to investigate the radio play art form itself (Crook, 1999; Porter, 2016; McMurtry, 2019), or concentrate on themes such as classical Greek literature (Wrigley, 2015), music (Mildorf and Verhulst, 2020; 2022), (sub)genres such as horror (Hand, 2014) or popular entertainment (Purcell, 2020).

The avant-garde and radio In this collection, it is through the notion of the ‘avant-garde’ that we enlarge the perspective in a way that is crucial to understanding how radio was nudged by impulses of innovation. Commonly split into a prewar ‘historical’ and a postwar ‘neo’ branch, separated by the Second World War, each is marked by different qualifications and value judgements, which we will return to later. Pivotal in this respect was Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead’s edited collection Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde (1992). Similar publications about the relationship of artistic innovation or experimentation to sound and radio followed (Weiss, 1995; Morris, 1997; Kahn, 1999; Weiss, 2001; Street, 2012), but Kahn and Whitehead’s book is so uniquely dedicated to the avant-garde cause and so programmatic in its ambitions that it merits more extensive consideration. In what follows, we will revisit Wireless Imagination in light of more contemporary debates about the terms historical and neo-avant-garde, in order to reassess the radio medium’s position within this ongoing critical dialogue and to determine how it could enrich that dialogue. What motivated their book was Kahn’s, at the time accurate, observation that ‘the literature on the arts of recorded and broadcasted sound, and of conceptual, literary, and performative sound, is scant at all levels, from basic historical research to theoretical modelings’, so that ‘the study of the relationship of sound and radio to the arts is open to a full range of investigations, including the most general’ (Kahn and Whitehead, 1992: 1). As our brief survey has shown, much scholarly work has been undertaken to remedy this situation, partly

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Introduction 5

thanks to Kahn and Whitehead’s sorely needed intervention. However, despite Whitehead’s criticism in his chapter that ‘the investigation of radio has disappeared into the investigation of sound’ (1992: 253; emphasis in original), their book, ironically, falls prey to a similar impulse (cf. Aspley, 2006: 223). Kahn and Whitehead do not distinguish between a historical and a neo-avant-garde either, at least not theoretically, even though several of their chapters could be situated in the latter category or on the border in terms of timing – especially the later ones on John Cage and William S. Burroughs, but also some of the earlier ones – and there are clear differences to be noted between the two when it comes to broadcasting. One of the first contributions to mention radio, about halfway into the collection, is Mel Gordon’s survey of ‘Russian sound creation’ from 1910 to 1930. His discussion of Soviet radio, however, is included as something of an afterthought at very end of the chapter: The dramatic use of radio entered Russian life around 1929. Radio had captured the imagination of Russian Futurists and constructivists from Khlebnikov to Sergei Tretyakov in the early twenties, but little resulted from it. Meyerhold and Tairov directed innovative theatrical pieces on radio in the thirties; yet again these were isolated incidences. Only in the early sixties  – possibly related to [Léon] Thérémin’s 1961 appearance on Radio Moscow – did Russian Sound Creation find its way to Soviet radio. (Gordon, 1992: 242)

However brief, Gordon’s wording is significant. Not only does he situate the pinnacle of radio experimentation in the neo-avant-garde era, which could thus be interpreted as a continuation or revival – if not the culmination or fulfilment – of prewar artistic practices, he also implicitly associates the historical avant-garde with a lack of tradition and institutional embedding in the context of a broadcasting corporation. That this was not an obvious or natural environment for avant-garde art, at least not in the decades immediately surrounding the war, is apparent from Antonin Artaud’s experience in France with Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God). This radio play was written at the request of Fernand Pouey, who was in charge of all literary and artistic broadcasts for the state-owned Radiodiffusion française (RDF) – replaced by Radiodiffusion-télévision française (RTF) in 1949 – to spearhead his new series La Voix des poètes (Eck, 1991: 65). The day before the broadcast was scheduled, on 2 February 1948, with all the speeches and sound effects having already been pre-recorded, ‘Wladimir Porché, the director, prohibited the broadcast. Serving as the conscience of the French Republic, he rationalized this suppression by arguing that the French people should be spared, or indeed protected from, Artaud’s scatological, vicious, and obscene anti-Catholic and anti-American ­ pronouncements’

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(Weiss,  1992: 272). Although it was given a private audition in theatres, the play would not be heard on French radio until thirty years later. Artaud had created ‘percussive, xylophonic, glossolalic, and guttural sounds’ that were ‘a sort of musique brute or musique pauvre fully in the spirit of his theatre of cruelty’, in an attempt to ‘express the inexpressible, profound, chaotic essence of human existence’ (1992: 295). For Weiss, however, the result is an ‘ultimate failure’ compared to Artaud’s other avant-garde endeavours, because ‘recording and broadcast technologies conventionalize performance’ (1992: 302). As this example shows, certain key aspects of the  historical avant-garde’s aesthetics or poetics, especially those that thrived on live performance and immediacy, did not transfer well to the mechanical medium of radio, whose institutional strictures could further stifle or censor, even suppress them. In this sense, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu is an important watershed in the transition from historical to neo-avant-garde on the wireless. Aspley contextualises the case of Artaud by pointing to differences between the prewar and postwar organisation of European radio space, using the UK system as a model: The post-war introduction of the Third Programmes alongside the Home and Light Programmes made for a clearer distinction between highbrow and lowbrow provision. In France, the pre-war situation was complicated by the existence of private stations alongside the State radio service. After the war the creation of France-Culture created more or less a Gallic equivalent of the Third Programme (subsequently Radio 3). In the 1930s avant-garde material was thus placed into slots before and after more mainstream programmes. From the 1950s onwards the natural home, in theory, for neo-avant-garde programmes should have been the more highbrow channels, but this was not always the case, perhaps because the frontiers between high and popular culture, in practice, were being redrawn. (2006: 224)

In the late 1940s, Artaud became the victim of a transitional period in French radio. No doubt fuelled by this sensational incident, for a long time the dominant view in Anglophone circles was that of Ian Rodger. Ignoring the private stations, he claimed that ‘the avant-garde writer has largely been denied access to radio by a severely controlled state monopoly’, so that ‘there has been little radio drama of much significance’ (1982: 6). At first sight confirmed by the fact that the prominent Oulipo member Georges Perec conducted most of his radiophonic experiments in Germany (Nannicini Streitberger, 2013), this one-sided representation has since been revised, for example in an essay collection on the Aventures radiophoniques du Nouveau Roman (2017), edited by Pierre-Marie Héron, Françoise Joly and Annie Pibarot.

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Introduction 7

Aspley, too, adds to this more nuanced understanding by singling out two figures who managed to straddle the divide separating the historical and neo-avant-garde on French radio, namely Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault. Originally members of the Surrealist group in 1920s Paris, they both ‘clearly seemed to assume from the outset that what they did in radio had to become more mainstream in its appeal than their surrealist roots might suggest, but by no means did they discard radical designs’ (Aspley, 2006: 225). The work by Desnos from the 1930s and 1940s mostly consisted of advertisements, talks or more popular genres such as detective stories with an absurd twist, involving Artaud as voice actor and director, which resulted in a ‘curious mixture of tradition and invention’, a ‘strange clash between form and content, between the particular poetic style, which possesses a certain “innocence”, for want of a better term, and the ­gruesome or horrific material’ (2006: 229). The same contrast or hybridity characterises Soupault’s radio plays from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a strong self-reflexivity. Étranger dans la nuit ou ça n’arrive qu’aux autres (Stranger in the Night, or It Only Happens to Others, 1974/1977) dramatises ‘possibilities inherent in the title of the popular song made famous by Frank Sinatra’, while featuring a ‘wireless set which works just as much as a “character” as the characters proper’ and is even ‘included in the dramatis personae in the script published’ (2006: 236). Similarly, in the five-act comedy La Maison du bon repos (The House of Good Rest, 1976), Soupault ‘gave a role … to sound effects (“le ­bruitage”)’, coupled to his ‘very surrealist interest in the fluidity of the frontiers between sanity and madness’ (2006: 237–8). This leads Aspley to conclude that Soupault’s pieces perform a delicate balancing act between mainstream culture and  experimentation, which also implies that radio ‘may have changed the nature of the avant-garde, simply because people no longer had to make the effort to go out and find it, in art galleries, theatres or cinemas’ (2006: 239). In addition to Aspley’s embrace of aspects more commonly associated with popular or low-to-middlebrow culture, Mark E. Cory offers a comparable model of continuation between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde practices that puts a more positive spin on institutionalisation. His analysis links the ‘forgotten chapter of avant-garde experiments from Weimar Germany’, driven by figures such as Rudolf Arnheim, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Flesch and Walter Ruttmann, to ‘the developing aesthetic of today’s New Hörspiel’ and authors such as Peter Handke, Gerhard Rühm, Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker, in what he calls ‘a fascinating pattern of continuity and discontinuity’ (1992: 331). In this sense, the relationship between the more traditional and the Neues Hörspiel becomes instrumental  for understanding the relationship between a historical and neo-avant-garde.

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Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde

Similar to Artaud, Flesch’s Zauberei auf dem Sender (Microphone Magic, 1924) enacts the precarious position of artistic experimentation through a state-controlled mass medium, before it was confiscated by the Nazi Party for propagandistic purposes. The radio play ‘challenges “normal” (though very young) broadcasting conventions with interruptions, unmotivated sound effects, and distortions of musical tempi, which are ultimately unmasked as a power struggle between an artistic director and a “magician” determined to show the radio audience the magical aspects of this new medium’ (Cory, 1992: 339). By extending his analysis into the 1960s and 1970s, Cory is able to illustrate that institutions can also be conducive instead of averse to artistic freedom, with initiatives such as the annual Radio Prize of the War Blind or specialised studios across the country  – and Europe, for that matter – that actively rewarded and encouraged radiophonic experimentation. Such an infrastructure was lacking before the war, when technology was not yet as advanced, adding to the historical avant-garde’s untimely demise. But this relationship also raises the crucial question ‘whether by its very success avant-garde radio art in Germany has become so institutionalized that it has lost its oppositional character’ (1992: 333).

Theories of ‘neo’ and the avant-garde This question, of course, applies to the neo-avant-garde in general. It is the main reason why Peter Bürger, in his famous Theorie der Avantgarde (Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1974/1984), dismisses the neo-avant-garde as a hollow and uncritical repetition, an institutionalised parody or pastiche of the genuine historical avant-garde, which itself failed to fulfil its ambitions. By contrast, critics associated with the journal October, most notably Hal Foster (1994; 1996) and Benjamin Buchloh (1984; 2000), stressed the continuity with the historical avant-garde, by countering that the neo-avant-garde it is not just reiterative, but also occasions new aesthetic experiences and artistic spaces, representing a case of ‘deferred action’ in which the historical avant-garde is fully understood and realised. Bürger’s negative assessment continued to be influential for a long time, but two important essay collections have emerged since then, grounded in an international research project coordinated by the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, which confirm Foster and Buchloh in their critique of Bürger and offer additional positive ways of thinking about the neo-avant-garde: Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant Garde (Rodopi, 2005, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann) and Neo-Avant-Garde (Rodopi, 2006, edited by David Hopkins). In what follows, we briefly wish to highlight some

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Introduction 9

relevant insights from these ­publications, in order to clarify the purpose of the present essay collection and the remaining critical lacunae it seeks to address. Some of the most prominent shortcomings of Bürger’s reasoning that are identified by the authors in these collections include an all too narrow selection or limited representation of the historical avant-garde’s activities, treated in a way that is too monolithic and inadequately distinguishes between geographical territories, genres, creative disciplines and art forms, while insufficiently taking into account the neo-avant-garde’s own historical context or how it differs compared to the prewar period. As David Hopkins points out in his introduction: ‘One should be wary … of too quickly assimilating post-war avant-gardism to pre-war avant-gardism in the way that Bürger does, and attend as sensitively as possible to the developmental nuances of the neo-avant-garde’, calling for a ‘re-historicisation’ (Hopkins, 2006: 5). According to Scheunemann, it was the ‘combined onslaught of fascist and socialist cultural politics’ that ‘sealed the fate of the avantgarde’, not necessarily its artistic failure, so that ‘placing the avant-garde in a political vacuum did not only generate questionable speculations about the reasons for its decline’, but also had ‘severe consequences for the way in which the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s was approached’. More than just mere repetition, ‘the reappropriation of artistic strategies and techniques of the historical avant-garde in several neo-avant-gardist movements of the post-war period turns into a highly important historical operation’ (Scheunemann, 2005: 35–6). As if to counteract its positive rehabilitation, in a more recent rebuttal of criticisms directed at Theory of the AvantGarde, Bürger now seems to prefer the term ‘post-avant-garde’ (2010: 703), provocatively reaffirming the behindhand, after-the-fact status that it holds in his interpretation, which clearly still implies a value judgement. This has led several critics, including Hubert van den Berg, to speak of an avant-garde movement instead, chronologically distinguishing a prewar from a postwar phase (2005: 73). However, precisely because the self-awareness that it continues in a previous ‘tradition’ is such a defining, though problematic, characteristic of the neo-avant-garde, to which it responds in a variety of creative ways, we feel that the prefix is useful to retain for this volume, the difference not merely being a temporal one. As van den Berg goes on to state, ‘there can be no doubt that the cultural field, in which the avant-garde movements operated, underwent a profound change in the middle of the 20th century’ and that ‘the status and position of avant-garde art and artists changed substantially after the war’, from ‘the margins of the respective national literary and artistic fields’ to ‘a position more and more in the centre of the cultural field’ (2005: 64). While this is reason enough for Bürger to dismiss the neo-avant-garde out of hand, it

10

Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde

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should in fact be a fundamental criterion by which it can be understood and appreciated on its own terms, not those of the historical avant-garde. As Anna Katharina Schaffner concludes: ‘Whether the neo-avant-garde is a genuine “avant-garde”, a false avant-garde, a continuation of avantgarde practice with new emphases and theoretical approaches or something else entirely ultimately on one’s definition of “avant-garde”’ (2006: 111). The third option that Schaffner offers captures most closely the rationale of the present volume: if one defines avant-garde mainly in terms of certain techniques and formal strategies, such as the exploration of the material, the abandonment of narrative and representation, the dissection of established linguistic and pictorial orders and conventions, and the thematisation of aesthetic qualities and conventions of usage of the signs and symbols deployed, then most neo-avant-garde work would have to be considered as avant-garde indeed. (2006: 111–12)

As such, what the historical and neo-avant-gardes have in common is a penchant for artistic experimentation, yet in different historical, political and cultural circumstances, which affect their techniques and strategies in equally distinctive, but no less valuable or legitimate ways. Important as these reappraisals of the neo-avant-garde may be, the fact remains that the debate surrounding its relationship to the historical avant-garde has largely been conducted ‘in terms of the visual and plastic  arts rather than the verbal ones’, so that it becomes ‘necessary to make appropriate conversions for a writer working in radio’ (Aspley, 2006: 232). Although radio is also an acoustic or sonic art form in addition to a verbal one, Aspley’s conclusion still holds true today: ‘In studies of the avant-garde the relative paucity of coverage of radio would seem to suggest that it has a “Cinderella” status among the arts, even though it was undoubtedly one of the most important technological and cultural innovations of the twentieth century’ (2006: 223). Apart from several chapters on film, Tania Ørum’s contribution to the book edited by Scheunemann is the only one to mention radio. Writing about the Danish Experimental School of Art movement, she reminds us that ‘the relation between technology and avant-garde is not simple’ (2005: 321). It implies artistic negotiation, sometimes even sacrifice, in a way that is paradigmatic of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde: Really advanced text-and-sound experiments … still required expensive technical facilities available only with professional assistance from Radio Denmark in order to produce interesting results. In the advanced sound studios, however, avant-garde experimentation is often difficult, the machinery is too expensive to play with, and technical specialists take over, giving machinery priority over experiment. (2005: 318)

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Introduction 11

In addition to highlighting, once again, the complex institutional embedding that is typical of the neo-avant-garde, which is both an enabling factor and a limiting one, Ørum suggests that a distinction could be made between the canonical period of the 1960s and the 1970s, on the one hand,  and the  decades that followed, on the other, as new technologies became more  accessible, cheaper and easier to use. This evolution loosened the  institutional grip on creative experimentation, especially when the  internet and the podcast format flourished from the 1990s onwards, which not  only challenged the traditional role of radio studios and broadcasting services as facilitators and disseminators, but also stretched the terminology from ‘radio play’ or ‘radio art’ to ‘sound art’ or ‘audio drama’. In order to study this dynamic as well, the present volume expands the accepted time frame and includes the kind of formal experimentation that continues and expands the views and strategies of the historical avant-gardes.

Goals and outline of this volume This volume reveals the fundamental contribution of audio drama to the neo-avant-garde from 1945 to the present, in chapters dealing with genres that border on the radio play, such as sound collage, sound poetry, textsound composition, features and the radio documentary. The chapters will address 1) institutional and contextual aspects of audio drama, 2) technological, intermedial and material issues, alongside 3) historical, ideological and political contexts. International unions and national broadcasting corporations such as the WDR in Germany, RAI in Italy and the BBC in the UK helped to create a framework for radiophonic experimentation. These and other institutional contexts and collaborations have impacted the creative process in different ways. Did neo-avant-garde artists actively work together with certain corporations, or with composers and directors who are associated with a poetics of innovation? In what ways did the newly created studios and platforms of the postwar period, such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the Cologne Studio für elektronische Musik, the Groupe de recherches de musique concrète, or the CBS Radio Workshop, foster innovation and how do they compare in their affiliations with the historical avant-garde? To what extent did the collective poetics of neo-avant-garde groups such as the Wiener Gruppe (Austria) advance the radio play? This volume examines such questions through a range of case studies, revealing the actual institutional dynamics and international collaborations that shape the neo-avant-garde radio play.

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Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde

Artists who were exploring the semiotics of auditory storytelling often experimented in related media such as music, sound poetry and acoustic art as well, thereby questioning the boundaries between them. How do radio plays by neo-avant-garde artists relate to experiments in, for example, novels, cinema or theatre? How do these artists employ the constraints and affordances of the medium? To what extent do they exploit the possibilities of electro-acoustic manipulation, stereophonic positioning, montage, mix and other semiotic means characteristic of the radio play? The chapters in this book advance our understanding of the aesthetic and technological connections between these art forms. Needless to say, the border crossing between genres and media is inextricably linked to the politics of the neo-avant-garde, its aim to liberate the artist and society from certain artistic and ideological constraints. In the case of the radio play, this project intersects with the politics of the radio. Critics and thinkers have often posited that radio can have an emancipatory and political function, as it can reach large audiences in their own homes. So it is legitimate to ask the question how the neo-avant-garde radio play stages political questions or whether it acknowledges its own ideological structure. To what extent do neo-avant-garde artists take the public nature of radio and its dependence on the state into account? The radio play may also become a platform for repressed voices, such as those of animals and nature. All these questions are considered not in isolation, but in the historical and cultural contexts of concrete case studies. This book is divided into two parts. While ‘The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde’ analyses the composition of experimental pieces within their context, ‘The acoustic neoavant-garde between theatre, music and poetry’ shows how the radio plays in the neo-avant-garde era are part of an inter-artistic ecology. The auditory neo-avant-garde is fundamentally transnational, intermedial and multilingual, while also tied to the institutional contexts of broadcasting services. In the first chapter, Lars Bernaerts examines these tendencies against the backdrop of theories of the neo-avant-garde and discusses how the experimental radio play A Pollen in the Air (1970) is embedded in institutional collaborations of the 1960s and 1970s as well as in a literary context. Freddy de Vree, the creator of A Pollen in the Air, was in touch with colleagues across Europe while at the same time collaborating with literary authors in Belgian neo-avant-garde networks. On the radio, he was active as a producer and literary critic. This institutional background is crucial to understanding the experiment of A Pollen in the Air, a fictional aural biography of the French poet Apollinaire. The play includes an intertextual collage of previously recorded sounds and voices, alternated with narrated passages. In a series of anecdotes, presented ­simultaneously in

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Introduction 13

two languages, the fragmented narrative recounts the life of Apollinaire. Quotations from the poet are explicitly inserted into the piece and the fictional biographical anecdotes are derived from Gunnar Harding’s prose poems (also from 1970) and Stefan Themerson’s 1961 novel Cardinal Pölätüo. In bringing these intertexts together, De Vree’s collage seems to efface the signature of himself as a creator, but in fact his creative contribution lies in the selection of materials, the multilingual collage and the radiophonic effects. Bernaerts argues that A Pollen in the Air is the result of avant-gardist cross-pollination on an institutional as well as compositional level. It is a work in which avant-garde views and strategies are brought together in a collage of intertexts, languages and electroacoustic manipulation. In De Vree’s composition, we can hear an echo of Apollinaire’s affinity with cubism; the anecdotes can be traced back to Harding and Themerson; and the multilingual character is associated with Finnegans Wake. And still, De Vree’s own poetics and commitment to the avant-garde permeate the radiophonic composition. If Belgian network radio embraced, or at least welcomed, experimentation and encouraged affinities with the historical avant-garde, Tatiana Eichenberger shows that the situation was more problematic in Britain. By focusing on the ‘radiophonic poem’ Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (1957), co-written and produced by Frederick Bradnum and Donald McWhinnie, she traces the internal disagreements between various BBC departments and officials with regard to the status of ‘electroacoustic music’, as well as its strained relation with the musical avant-garde in Britain and musique concrète elsewhere. These institutional tensions mark Private Dreams and Public Nightmares as something of a compromise piece on both the level of content and form, particularly through its adherence to textual support, while at the same time creating affinities with the historical avant-garde’s musical treatment of the word. By making ample use of archival material at the BBC Written Archives, Eichenberger is able to shed much-needed light on the collaborative process behind this iconic production, but also on how it connects to the creation of the Radiophonic Workshop, whose governing rationale differed markedly from similar ­initiatives on the European continent. Central to Harry Heuser’s chapter is the tension between the avantgarde’s principally anti-institutional stance and radio art’s reliance on institutional frameworks. This tension brings Heuser to ask: what is ‘network’ and ‘radio’ about network radio plays? Singling out the CBS anthology programme Radio Workshop (1956–57), a revival of the prewar Columbia Workshop, the chapter makes clear why US network radio ceased to be a medium for experimentation in the years following the war. Heuser approaches these issues through the lens of technology, more specifically

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Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde

the tape recorder. While network radio increasingly came to rely on this technology, it (also) became an instrument for avant-garde artists working with sound. By demonstrating that broadcasters used tape for purposes of efficiency, economy and editorial control, Heuser argues that network radio put strict limitations on the playfulness and artistic potential of the technology, altering both its effects and its perception. Through a contextualised analysis of broadcast sound pieces, such as the tape experiments of sound archivist Tony Schwarz, Heuser makes clear why an audiophonic avantgarde was unable to flourish on postwar US network radio. The chapter thus demonstrates why attention to institutions and the particularities of broadcasting systems is fundamental to understanding radio art in a neoavant-garde context. The affordances of technology are also pivotal in Jesper Olsson’s chapter. He discusses radiophonic configurations of humans, animals and technologies in which sound can destabilise the presumed divide between the human and the non-human domains. The chapter reveals the various practices in postwar avant-gardes that dramatise human–animal and animal–machine interactions through sound, ranging from Henri Chopin’s sound poetry to Louise Lawler’s sound piece Birdcalls. New technologies, such as the tape recorder and commercially available loudspeakers, shaped these explorations to a great extent, Olsson argues. Against the background of cybernetics and posthumanism, his three case studies illustrate how sonic interactions between human, animal and technology urge the listener to rethink the category of the human itself. Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (1957) famously opens with the sound of rural animals. The evocation of animals in the piece supports the undermining of humanist ideals, a gesture that is made possible by the features of radio itself. The Swedish artist Åke Hodell is the creator of several text-sound compositions and so-called electronisms in which he uses alphanumerical code combined with visual and concrete poetry. The soundscapes of The Road to Nepal (1971) and The Djurgården Ferry across Styx (1972) interweave human, animal and technological sounds in a way that opens up new ways of thinking about these interrelations. The human ‘subject’ is not necessarily central and can switch position with non-human ‘objects’. Öyvind Fahlström, a Swedish exponent of concrete poetry, created the radiophonic poem Birds in Sweden (1962). Olsson argues that the piece creates a posthuman ecology through translations of language into sound, and bird sounds into human listening. In sum, the acoustic artworks of these three artists each in their own way show a movement away from anthropocentric approaches and open the door to posthumanism. Siebe Bluijs’s chapter examines the radio play’s use of collage, one of the most prominent techniques of the (neo-)avant-garde. Bluijs distinguishes

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Introduction 15

collage as an artistic principle from the ‘technical’ procedure of montage – an editing technique that lies at the heart of the medium – arguing that the ‘collage radio play’ actively goes against the streamlining principle that is characteristic of the prototypical radio play. Taking the radio play’s multimodality as a starting point for his analysis, Bluijs explores the productive interaction between ‘textual’ and ‘audiophonic’ collage. After a theoretical discussion of collage as a reading strategy, the chapter presents a close reading of three radio plays from Flanders and the Netherlands. Collage plays a distinctive role in each: an experimental radiophonic collage piece, a radio play adaptation of a literary collage work, and a more or less conventional narrative radio play that incorporates various ‘found’ fragments. Bluijs shows that the specific constraints and affordances of the radio play add new dimensions to the collage technique. Additionally, his chapter shows that the concept is productive for radio works that fall outside the scope of the avant-garde as well. Because of the art form’s ephemeral and multilayered nature, the radio play scholar is often faced with methodological challenges. These potential obstacles are addressed by Jarmila Mildorf in her chapter, which showcases the strengths of audionarratology, a discipline in the development of which she has played a pioneering role. Audionarratology goes against the visual bias of (transmedial) narratology by exploring how sound, music, language and voice are employed to evoke storyworlds. Mildorf demonstrates the possibilities of her approach by offering an audionarratological analysis of the complex narrative structure of Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Lost & Found: Das Paradies (2004), a radio play designed for (and recorded as) a live performance, which reworks John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). Mildorf argues that Lost & Found is by no means a deconstruction of the canonical text, but should rather be regarded as a neo-avant-garde ‘homage’. Considering the observation that the radio play has the formal structure of a musical composition and makes extensive use of jazz, blues and hard rock, the chapter particularly pays attention to the (narrative) role of music. Mildorf demonstrates how music offers commentary on the events of the storyworld, and is even able to ‘narrate’ the story independently of the words uttered by the narrator or the characters. Mildorf’s ‘close listening’ argues that the radio play’s soundtrack echoes the orality and musical rhythms of Milton’s poetry, bringing traditional forms to the twenty-first century. The experimental radio play is particularly open to transgressing the boundaries between poetry and sound art, as Daniel Gilfillan maintains in his chapter on sound art created for Austrian radio between 1990 and 2010. Gilfillan traces the debate on the innovative potential of the radio play back to German pioneers such as Otto Palitzsch and his dedication to

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Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde

the specificity of a Sendespiel. According to Palitzsch, the pure ‘broadcast play’ relies on the composition of both human and non-human sounds in order to evoke spatiality, movement and emotionality. In contemporary broadcast art, too, sound structures the acoustic space through a composition of physical and immaterial dimensions. Gilfillan demonstrates this in his analysis of three poetry-based radio pieces: Petra Ganglbauer’s broadcast Ökotonal (2010), Peter Pessl’s 1996 sound poem Anchored in Trance, and their collaborative piece Wie es möglich ist mit geschlossenen Augen (How It Is Possible with Closed Eyes, 1991). These are all works that explore a compositional aesthetics of ecological networking. Ganglbauer creates an ‘ecotonal’ world, an intermedial and multimodal sonic space between the material and spiritual, by mixing poetic recitation with scientific interviews and paraverbal vocality with ­unidentifiable, shapeless sounds. Pessl’s sound poem expands verbal poetry into the realm of primal and paraverbal language by means of a plant-induced trancelike consciousness of the speaker, thus ‘situating human voice back into a larger context of natural sound’. In their collaborative piece, the artists explore  the human voice as the intermedial instrument of navigation between the textual level (of a narrative text) and the aural level (of disintegrating and merging voices), interconnected with non-human sounds. To conclude, Gilfillan elaborates on the collaborative production process of the ORF Kunstradio programme and points out how this acoustic art uses broadcasting not so much to claim medium specificity, as in Palitzsch’s time, but to transgress the studio creation and enlarge the scope of aural receptivity. The musicalisation of language is a constant practice in the radio plays of the Austrian poet, composer and musician Gerhard Rühm. In his chapter, Roland Innerhofer indicates that Rühm’s work not only fits well with the neo-avant-garde experiments of the New Radio Play, it is also strongly related to his training in the twelve-tone compositional technique. In his analysis of selected radio plays, Innerhofer concentrates on Rühm’s consistent transposition of language into musical composition and the resulting decomposition of (textual) language as the primary semantic field. Several differences as well as commonalties are identified in Rühm’s wide-ranging radiophonic work of over sixty years. As early as 1958, Rühm experimented with the semantic arbitrariness of linguistic material, breaking up the conventional relationship between signifier and signified. From 1968 onwards, several radio plays were based on the incorporation of pre-given textual and acoustic material which Rühm, in a process of reduction and abstraction, detaches from its primary narrative structure and semantic context. Repetition and variation, often based on a strict mathematical system, enhance the musical quality of the single words and

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Introduction 17

syllables. At times, the conceptual transformation of phonemes into sounds and tones touches on extralinguistic, sensual levels of cognition. In other pieces, Rühm explores the mixing and deformation of highly diverse linguistic registers, such as biblical, scientific and journalistic language, often with a meta-reflective attention to the medial context of broadcasting. His latest work experiments with biographical narratives that are decomposed into elementary sound material. The emotional appeal of life stories is transposed into the suggestive quality of the chordal composition of basic monovocal elements. In Inge Arteel’s chapter on the radio play Spaltungen (Splits, 1969) by Austrian poets Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker, the choric figurations of collective voices in this New Radio Play are connected with both theatre history and the poetics of concrete poetry. In avant-garde mass theatre the antique figure of the chorus was orchestrated as a homogeneous body ­representing the people, often stylised as followers of a messianic protagonist. National Socialism recuperated these spectacular performance aesthetics and remodelled them in its own phonocentric propaganda. The vocal dramaturgy of the Nazis’ choric radio plays aimed at a nationwide immersion of the listening audience into compliance with the speech of the leader. Arteel analyses the experimental radio play Spaltungen in relation to the complex radiophonic inheritance of the choric figure. Her close reading focuses on the play’s confrontation and interaction of the single voice with several choruses and vocal groups. The reading shows that the shifting and multilayered vocal structure relies both on the literary principles of concrete poetry and on experimental acoustic techniques of processing sounds and utterances. Through this dynamic structure, the radio play destabilises the performance format of the cultic mystery play, with its hierarchical relation between the messianic male leader and the cheering mass of followers. The chapter concludes that the disembodied quality of the radio play can be read as an extreme reduction of the corporeal phenomenology of avantgarde mass spectacles and their fascist successors, which tried to evoke corporeal presence even on the radio. Pim Verhulst takes Caryl Churchill’s ‘interior duologue’ Identical Twins (1968) as a case study to investigate the role of radio in the neo-avantgarde, placing it in relation to the historical avant-garde and (late) modernism, as well as genre-specific movements such as postdramatic theatre and the Theatre of the Absurd. While Churchill’s destabilising treatment of language and speech as sound or noise establishes continuity with avant-garde predecessors in Britain and abroad, the postwar institutional context of the BBC is explored, by way of archival research, as a typically neo-avantgarde environment that attempted to reconcile new aesthetic experiences with concerns over audience reception, particularly through the use of

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Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde

stereophony. Usually embraced by neo-avant-garde artists as an experimental feature, stereo sound was somewhat atypically exploited by the BBC producers as a means to curb the radical blurring of identity that is so characteristic of Identical Twins. This notion is also explored contrastively through the lens of intermediality, to consider the status of Identical Twins as an ‘interior duologue’ and the friction between theatrical performance, textuality and recording. Finally, Verhulst’s chapter analyses the formative role of radio in Caryl Churchill’s own oeuvre and its lasting effect on her later drama, to argue more generally that the medium played an important but overlooked part in the theatrical revolution that innovated the British stage from the 1950s onwards. As Adam J. Frank discusses in the final chapter of the volume, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould developed a practice of contrapuntal radio and explored the potential of the studio in The Solitude Trilogy (1967–77), a series of radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Gould’s commitment to musical counterpoint, as described by Edward Said, resurfaces in this series. In ‘The Idea of North’, as well as in the other pieces of the trilogy, Gould used the typical means of radio to elegantly layer and alternate voices, music and sounds. The result is a ‘sonic density that plays at the limits of a listener’s ability to follow’. Frank examines the aesthetics and politics of Gould’s contrapuntal radio from a phenomenological perspective. Not only does he situate Gould’s work in the European and American avant-gardes, he also reveals personal and affective motives for the pianist’s turn from stage to studio, which is essential to an understanding of the documentaries. In the peculiar communicative and experiential space of the studio, the audience is not physically present, and yet a degree of intimacy and communion is created between sender and receiver. In this delicate interplay, Gould created ‘an interoceptive ­theatricality’ and an invitation to listen closely. The act of attentive listening is at once a political and an aesthetic one, Frank argues, as it turns the studio into a utopian place where multiple voices are actively integrated and regarded as equal. In the mock studio interviews of ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’ (1981), Frank further traces Gould’s theatrical view of the studio audience in the stylistic modes of ridicule and caricature. In the ending of ‘Fantasy’, Frank sees the ultimate moment in which an ideal ‘audience’ in the sense of ‘the state of listening’ is evoked. What Gould hints at is a fundamental sense of communion with listeners who are not present. As a whole, this volume offers readers a representative view of the unity and diversity of the acoustic neo-avant-garde across Europe and North America. It has benefited from the many stimulating dialogues and exchanges held during an international conference at Ghent University in Belgium from 28 to 29 November 2018, co-organised by the editors of this



Introduction 19

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volume, and shows the striking similarities in aims and scope of experimental radio plays in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the UK and the US. The innovative intermedial pieces, which integrate the radio play with music, theatre/drama, poetry and film, led to such fascinating genres as sound poetry, radio documentary and radiophonic collage, which are closely examined in the chapters of this book. In this way, it allows readers not just to broaden their perspective on radio art but also to tune in to the neo-avant-garde.

References Addyman, D., M. Feldman and E. Tonning (eds) (2017). Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aspley, K. (2006). ‘The avant-garde, neo-avant-garde and radio: Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault’, in D. Hopkins (ed.) Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 223–42. Avery, T. (2006). Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. London: Routledge. Bennet, C. (2010). La musique à la radio dans les années trente. La création d’un genre radiophonique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Bernaerts, L., and S. Bluijs (eds) (2019). Luisterrijk der letteren. Hoorspel en litera­ tuur in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Ghent: Academia Press. Bernaerts, L., and J. Mildorf (eds) (2021). Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Bijsterveld, K. (2008). Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Birkenmaier, A. (2015). ‘“Soy una Sor Juana de Arco electrónica”: Severo Sarduy’s radio play Dolores Rondón’, La Habana Elegante, 57, http://www. habanaelegante.com/November_2015/Invitation_Birkenmaier.html (accessed 14 September 2020). Bloom, E. C. (2016). The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Branigan, K. (2008). Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett. Bern: Peter Lang. Buchloh, B. (1984). ‘Theorizing the avant-garde’, Art in America, 72, 19–21. Buchloh, B. (2000). Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bulte, I. (1984) Het Nederlandse hoorspel. Aspecten van de bepaling van een tekstsoort. Utrecht: H en S. Bürger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bürger, P. (2010). ‘Avant-garde and neo-avant-garde: an attempt to answer certain critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde’, New Literary History, 41.4, 695–715. Campbell, T. C. (2006). Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chignell, H. (2019). British Radio Drama, 1945–63. London: Bloomsbury.

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Cohen, A. (2015). Les compositeurs et l’art radiophonique. Paris: Éditions de l’Harmattan. Cohen, D. R., M. Coyle and J. Lewty (eds) (2013). Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Cohen, D. R., and M. Coyle (eds) (2015). ‘Broadcast traces/tracing broadcasting: modernism and radio’, special issue of Modernist Cultures, 10.1. Connor, S. (2000). Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conolly, L. W. (2009). Bernard Shaw and the BBC. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cory, M. E. (1992). ‘Soundplay: the polyphonous tradition of German radio art’, in D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 331–71. Crook, T. (1999). Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Crook, T. (2020a). Audio Drama Modernism: The Missing Link between Descriptive Phonograph Sketches and Microphone Plays on the Radio. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Crook, T. (2020b). George Orwell on the Radio: His Works in Sound Drama and Documentary. London: Routledge. De Benedictis, A. I. (2004). Radiodramma e arte radiofonica. Storia e funzioni della musica per radio in Italia. Turin: EDT. De Benedictis, A. I., and M. M. Novati (2012). Imagination at Play: The Prix Italia and Radiophonic Experimentation / L’immaginazione in ascolto: Il premio Italia e la sperimentazione radiofonica. Milan: Die Schachtel and Edizioni Musicali Rai Trade. Dinsman, M. (2015). Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II. London: Bloomsbury. Eck, H. (1991). ‘Radio, culture et démocratie en France, une ambition mort-née (1944–1949)’, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, 30, 55–67. Ehardt, C. (ed.) (2020). Radiobilder. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Radios in Österreich. Vienna: Vienna University Press. Feldman, M., E. Tonning and H. Mead (eds) (2014). Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. London: Bloomsbury. Fisher, M. (2002). Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foster, H. (1994). ‘What’s neo about the neo-avant-garde?’, October, 70, 5–32. Foster, H. (1996). ‘Who’s afraid of the neo-avant-garde’, in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–32. Frattarola, A. (2009). ‘The modernist “microphone play”: listening in the dark to the BBC’, Modern Drama, 52.4, 449–68. Frattarola, A. (2018). Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Gitelman, L. (1999). Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gordon, M. (1992). ‘Songs from the museum of the future: Russian sound creation (1910–1930)’, in D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 198–243.

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Introduction 21

Groth, H., and J. Murphet (eds) (2017). Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic  Meditation in Modern Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Guralnick, E. (1995). Sight Unseen: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press. Hand, R. J. (2014). Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hand, R. J., and M. Traynor (2011). The Radio Drama Handbook: Audio Drama in Practice and Context. London: Continuum. Hendy, D. (2013). ‘Painting with sound: the kaleidoscopic world of Lance Sieveking, a British radio modernist’, Twentieth Century British History, 24.2, 169–200. Hepburn, A. (2013). ‘Acoustic modernism: BBC radio and The Little Girls’, Textual Practice, 27.1, 143–62. Héron, P.-M. (ed.) (2010). ‘Jean Cocteau et la radio’, Cahiers Cocteau, 8. Paris: Editions Non Lieu. Héron, P.-M., F. Joly and A. Pibarot (eds) (2017). Aventures radiophoniques du Nouveau Roman. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Héron, P.-M., and S. Linarès (eds) (2012). ‘Pratiques du média radiophonique’, La Revue des lettres modernes: Jean Cocteau, 7. Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard. Heuser, H. (2013). Immaterial Culture: Literature, Drama and the American Radio Play, 1929–1954. Bern: Peter Lang and Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. Hopkins, D. (2006). ‘Introduction’, in D. Hopkins (ed.), Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 1–16. Huwiler, E. (2005). ‘Storytelling by sound: a theoretical frame for radio drama analysis’, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast Audio & Media, 3.1, 45–59. Huwiler, E. (2006). Erzähl-Ströme im Hörspiel. Zur Narratologie der elektroakustischen Kunst. Paderborn: Mentis Verlag. Ihde, D. (1976). Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Jensen, M. (2018). The Battle of the Bard: Shakespeare on US Radio in 1937. Ashland, OH: Arc Humanities Press. Kahn, D. (1999). Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kahn, D., and G. Whitehead (eds) (1992). Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kapfer, H. (2017). Sounds like Hörspiel 1989–2017. Munich: Belleville. Köhler, S. (2011). Hörspiel und Hörbuch. Mediale Entwicklung von der Weimarer Republik bis zur Gegenwart. Marburg: Tectum. Krug, H.-J. (2020). Kleine Geschichte des Hörspiels. Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag. Lastra, J. (2000). Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Latham, S., and G. Rogers. (2015). Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. London: Bloomsbury. Lodhi, A., and A. Wrigley (eds) (2018). ‘Radio modernisms: features, cultures and the BBC’, special issue of Media History, 25.2.

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Lodhi, A., and A. Wrigley (eds) (2020). Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC. London: Routledge. McMurtry, L. G. (2019). Revolution in the Echo Chamber: Audio Drama’s Past, Present and Future. Bristol: Intellect. Mildorf, J. (2019). ‘Aural worldmaking: introduction’, CounterText, 5.3, 290–93. Mildorf, J., and T. Kinzel (eds) (2016). Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter. Mildorf, J., and T. Kinzel (eds) (2017). ‘Narrating sounds: introduction to the forum’, Partial Answers, 15.1, 61–7. Mildorf, J., and P. Verhulst (eds) (2020). Radio Art and Music: Culture, Aesthetics, Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Mildorf, J., and P. Verhulst (eds) (2022). Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama. Leiden: Brill. Miller, T. (1999). Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Morris, A. (1997). Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Mowitt, J. (2011). Radio: Essays in Bad Reception. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Murphet, J. (2009). Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nannicini Streitberger, C. (2013). ‘Les pieces radiophoniques expérimentales. L’exemple de Peter Handke et de Georges Perec’, Recherches en communication, 37, 57–72. Niebur, L. (2010). Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. New York: Oxford University Press. Ørum, T. (2005). ‘Means and metaphors of change: technology and the Danish avant-garde of the 1960s’, in D. Scheunemann (ed.), Avant-Garde/Neo-AvantGarde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 311–24. Osmond-Smith, D. (2013). ‘Voicing the labyrinth: the collaborations of Edoardo Sanguineti and Luciano Berio’, Twentieth-Century Music, 9.1–2, 63–78. Pavlik, J. V. (2017). Masterful Stories: Lessons from Golden Age Radio. New York: Routledge. Pinch, T., and K. Bijsterveld (eds) (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, J. (2016). Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Purcell, J. F. (2020). Mabel Constanduros and the Development of Popular Entertainment on the BBC, 1925–57. London: Bloomsbury. Rea, L. (2013). Argentine Serialised Radio Drama in the Infamous Decade, 1930–1943: Transmitting Nationhood. New York: Routledge. Rinke, G. (2018). Das Pophörspiel. Definition – Funktion – Typologie. Bielefeld: transcript. Rodger, I. (1982). Radio Drama. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rubery, M. (2016). The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sanchez Cardona, L. M. (2018). Samuel Beckett electrónico: Samuel Beckett coclear. Mexico City: Juan Pablos Editor.

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Introduction 23

Scales, R. P. (2016). Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schafer, R. M. (1977). The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf. Schafer, R. M. (1994). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, NY: Destiny Books. Schaffner, A. K. (2006). ‘Inheriting the avant-garde: on the reconciliation of tradition and invention in concrete poetry’, in D. Hopkins (ed), Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 97–117. Scheunemann, D. (2005). ‘From collage to the multiple: on the genealogy of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde’, in D. Scheunemann (ed), Avant-Garde/NeoAvant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 15–48. Schmedes, G. (2002). Medientext Hörspiel. Ansätze einer Hörspielsemiotik am Beispiel der Radioarbeiten von Alfred Behrens. Münster: Waxmann. Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterne, J. (ed.) (2012). The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Stewart, G. (1990). Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Street, S. (2012). The Poetry of Radio: The Colour of Sound. Abingdon: Routledge. Tiffany, D. (1995). Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trotter, D. (2013). Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trotter, D. (2016). ‘Literature between media’, in V. Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge History of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 386–403. Van den Berg, H. (2005). ‘On the historiographic distinction between historical and neo-avant-garde’, in D. Scheunemann (ed), Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 63–74. Van Puymbroeck, B. (2018). ‘Literatuur en radio’, Cahier voor ­literatuurwetenschap, 10, 95–101. Verhulst, P. (2022a). ‘Radio after modernism’, Cahier voor literatuurwetenschap, 11, forthcoming. Verhulst, P. (2022b). The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays. Brussels and London: University Press Antwerp and Bloomsbury. Verma, N. (2012). Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waugh, P. (2018). ‘Muriel Spark’s “Informed Air”: the auditory imagination and the voices of fiction’, Textual Practice, 32.9, 1633–58. Weiss, A. S. (1992). ‘Radio, death, and the devil: Artaud’s Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu’, in D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 269–302. Weiss, A. S. (1995). Phantasmic Radio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weiss, A. S. (ed.) (2001). Experimental Sound and Radio. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weller, S. (2018). Language and Negativity in European Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, D. (1992). ‘Out of the dark: notes on the nobodies of radio art’, in D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 253–63.

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Whittington, I. (2014). ‘Radio studies and 20th-century literature: ethics, aesthetics, and remediation’, Literature Compass, 11.9, 634–48. Whittington, I. (2018). Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics, and the BBC, 1939–1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wijfjes, H. (ed.) (2019). De radio. Een cultuurgeschiedenis. Amsterdam: Boom Uitgevers. Wodianka, B. (2018). Radio als Hör-Spiel-Raum. Medienreflexionen – Störung – Künstlerische Intervention. Bielefeld: transcript. Wrigley, A. (2015). Greece on Air: Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s–1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part I

The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde

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1

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Transnational, untranslatable: Apollinaire in Freddy de Vree’s multilingual radiophonic composition A Pollen in the Air Lars Bernaerts In the study of the neo-avant-garde, the notion of institutions is a crucial one. Peter Bürger considers ‘the attack on the institution of art and the revolutionizing of life’ (Bürger, 2010: 696) as the core of the avant-garde: ‘The unification of art and life intended by the avant-garde can only be achieved if it succeeds in liberating aesthetic potential from the institutional constraints which block its social effectiveness’ (Bürger, 2010: 696). In the neoavant-garde, however, the historical avant-garde is itself i­nstitutionalised: it is recognised as art, exhibited in museums etc. Therefore, the neo-avantgarde must be a failed avant-garde. This is the logic of Bürger’s original argument: ‘Since now the protest of the historical avant-garde against art as institution is accepted as art, the gesture of protest of the neo-avant-garde becomes inauthentic’ (Bürger, 1984: 53). From several angles this view has been thoroughly criticised. Benjamin Buchloh (1986) and Hal Foster (1996), for example, give a positive interpretation of the gesture of repetition through which the neo-avant-garde refers to the historical avant-garde, and Dietrich Scheunemann (2005) demonstrates that the attack on the institution(s) of art is not as inherent in the historical avant-garde as Bürger suggests. In the context of the aural neo-avant-garde, the debate is worth revisiting because the institution of radio broadcasting services played such a major role in the production and distribution of acoustic artworks, in particular of radio plays. Across Europe creative minds working for radio were able to find a forum for wild experimentation on the radio and were stimulated to collaborate with other European radio stations. In fact, experimental radio is very much a transnational phenomenon, with collaborations that exceed the neo-avant-garde networks of performances, exhibitions and festivals: the institution of radio brings together neo-avant-garde-minded radio makers and allows for transnational collaboration. Across Europe experimental radio plays were circulating and being translated; and also on a physical level, radio waves do not care about national borders. To be sure, the institutional context puts some pressure on the aesthetic potential

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of radiophonic pieces, as they become part of the kind of fixed, subservient structure they often fundamentally rebel against. Still, it is remarkable how much of the neo-avant-garde poetics was welcomed on the radio in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter will go into a telling case of transnational and multilingual neo-avant-garde on the radio. A Pollen in the Air (1970), by the Belgian writer Freddy de Vree, based on texts by the Swedish poet Gunnar Harding, was produced and broadcast by the public service in Flanders (Belgium), Sweden and Denmark, and in that way was both institutionally anchored and the product of transnational collaboration. In essence the piece is a fragmented fictive biography of Guillaume Apollinaire. The topic already reveals the play’s strong ties with the historical avant-garde, which are extended to its entire thematic and sonic composition, as I will argue. In order to make this statement concrete at the outset, let us consider the opening of this work for radio. After the title we hear a gunshot, a quotation in French about the Belgian people, a voice repeating the words ‘a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of’ and a whispered reference to Apollinaire in Danish, then another gunshot. Next, Apollinaire’s parents are introduced.1 The pope is suggested to be Apollinaire’s father, and we witness a scene in a casino in Monte Carlo with the three-year-old Apollinaire. Two voices – one speaking in Dutch, one in Danish – read out the following anecdotal material: in an old photograph you can see Apollinaire’s mother with white ostrichplumes in her hat and a black and white dog beside her and it was that dog who was later renowned as the trademark of Boston shoe-cream and that same dog was as a matter of fact Apollinaire himself as everyone who owns a tin of this shoe-cream can verify. (sound of a priest/pope singing in Latin) his eyes are infinitely sad. what’s more Apollinaire was the pope’s son. when he was three years old Apollinaire went to the casino in Monte Carlo and broke the bank and all the bills had the same turquoise colour as his sailorsuit and as the water of the Mediterranean in impressionist paintings and on all the bills he saw his mother’s face but never a sign of the pope.2 (sound of a message in Morse code, continuing while a voice reads out the following nonsense words:) mascaronino poleva, cascaronine poleva, lascaronino poleva couchés ensemble amants couchés ensemble amants séparer mes membres amants (De Vree, 1971: 15' 19"–16' 51")

As is already clear from the inevitably reductive transcription, the radio play offers a rich texture of languages, voices, stories and sounds. It is

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Transnational, untranslatable 29

Figures 1.1a and 1.1b   Detail from ‘Paysage’ and from the translation, ‘Landscape’ (Apollinaire, 1980: 30–1)

an avant-gardist collage that centres around a towering figure of the historical avant-garde, Apollinaire. The creators3 render the biography almost ­ unreadable through mixing, montage, simultaneous voices and languages. In a sense, the composition does justice to the mythical status of Apollinaire’s b ­ iography: ‘Apollinaire’s life was as fragmented and surprising as the new forms of poetry and painting whose cause he championed’, Pamela Genova writes in a study of Apollinaire and Cubism (Genova, 2003: 50). It is appropriate then that the radiophonic presentation is also in keeping with a cubist aesthetics of decomposition, of which Apollinaire was such an important proponent, and with Apollinaire’s own transmedial work. The final line of the transcription refers to an aural translation of one of his visual poems (Figures 1.1a and 1.1b). Apart from these quotations from the French poet’s work, the play narrates moments from his life in a quite unruly manner. Not only does it fragment and destabilise a coherent notion of identity which is presupposed by the concept of a biography, it also resists the idea of individual creativity in its reliance upon montage and collage. In this way, De Vree’s composition foregrounds the pure materiality of voices and languages – it is ‘music for words perhaps’, to allude to Marjorie Perloff’s reading of John Cage’s Roaratorio (1989). Roaratorio and De Vree’s radio play are directly linked to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), as we will see. This chapter untangles and contextualises these aspects of theme, form and intertextuality. On the one hand, the chapter demonstrates the intriguing continuity between the transnational dynamics of the institutional

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context, De Vree’s literary activities and the poetics of A Pollen in the Air. On the other hand, I will argue that the intertextual collage deconstructs the idea of the individual, creative artist by conjuring up the figure of Apollinaire, but only in a spectral, ephemeral way through the audiophonic composition. In an avant-gardist gesture, De Vree’s own poetics and authorship are effaced from the start and at the same time remain recognisable. A Pollen in the Air is a case that highlights the transnational nature of radio-play production and of the aural neo-avant-garde, which creates auditory equivalents to textual and visual avant-gardes. And the piece is an excellent example of how the avant-garde is reappropriated in postwar radio plays.

Freddy de Vree and A Pollen in the Air The Flemish poet and radio producer Freddy de Vree was the cousin of Paul de Vree (1909–82), who was one of the Flemish embodiments of the transnational neo-avant-garde in the domain of concrete and visual poetry. Freddy de Vree’s earliest poetry was published under the pseudonym Goria in his uncle’s literary magazine, De Tafelronde (The Round Table), in 1959. Around that time, De Tafelronde had already established a reputation as an avant-garde magazine under the strong impulse of Paul de Vree. A few years later, the magazine would grow out to be a forum for the international neo-avant-garde, in particular for visual and concrete poetry, and the concomitant crossover between visual art and literature (De Geest and Fisch, 2019). Goria’s poetry was bilingual, switching from French to Dutch within the poem; Freddy de Vree’s first poems under his own name were written in French. The multilingual spirit that is apparent in A Pollen in the  Air was part of his poetics right from the start. From then on, he was active in a range of neo-avant-garde magazines, such as Het kahier, Nul and Gard Sivik. He wrote poetry, novels, essays, literary criticism and art reviews. In 1977 he co-founded the publishing house Ziggurat. As a publisher he specialised in bibliophile editions that bridged the gap between literature and contemporary art. He was active in the literary and cultural field of his time, but often also in the shadow of major authors and artists such as Hugo Claus, Willem Frederik Hermans and Ivo Michiels, with whom he collaborated. His literary Bildung was oriented towards the international avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, with a particular interest in the French tradition and a belief in the aims and means of Surrealism (Depreter, 2015: 154). As Elke Depreter argues in her study of Surrealism in postwar Flemish poetry, De Vree can be considered as a mediator of Surrealism in Flanders because of his contributions to literary magazines (2018: 124).

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Transnational, untranslatable 31

For more than thirty years, De Vree was a radio producer for the Third Programme of the Flemish public service BRT. In that capacity he collaborated with the Wallonian RTB (Jean-Louis Jacques), the Dutch NCRV (Ab van Eyk), the Austrian ORF, the German WDR, Radio Bremen, the Danish Radio Danmark and the Swedish Sveriges Radio. His contacts with the Swedish Third Programme (Ingrid Hiort af Ornäs) also involved visits to the Fylkingen festival in Stockholm, which welcomed European musical avant-gardists and sound poets such as Henri Chopin.4 As a radio maker, he was known for his intellectually demanding radio reviews of philosophy, experimental literature and studies of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. When the Third Programme seemed to yield to the wave of commercialisation in public broadcasting around the turn of the century, De Vree decided to quit the job.5 His positioning within the institutional landscape thus certainly demonstrates the tension between the supposed liberating force of the avant-garde and the ideological constraints of radio. In the 1960s and 1970s there was room for the avantgarde, but this gradually changed in the decades that followed. With all this in mind, let us move to the avant-garde poetics of A Pollen in the Air, which reflects the multilingual and international orientation of De Vree and his immediate institutional context. In fact, the piece itself was the result of a collaboration between the Belgian public broadcasting service BRT and the Swedish and Danish public broadcasters (Sveriges Radio/ Radio Danmark). It premiered in the Moderne Museet in Stockholm. Next to the Swedish-Dutch version there is a Danish-Dutch version, recorded more than a year later. The Danish-Dutch version is the one I am referring to in this chapter. The title of the play is programmatic and reveals something about its ­aesthetics.6 What strikes the listener first is the pun, which trades on the similarity in sound with the name of the French poet Apollinaire. The pun fits into a rich avant-garde practice of homophonic variation and calls to mind a rebus poem by the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos. In that rebus Apollinaire is conjured up as ‘apple in air’ (Desnos, 2011: 227). At the same time, the pun of the title splits one name into five words, thereby announcing the way this radio play decomposes a biography. ‘A pollen in the air’ also denotes a fertile exchange: it is through the transfer of pollen that plants can reproduce themselves. Pollination has the connotation of reproduction without a fixed pattern, like the idea of ‘dissemination’ in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. The ‘meaning’ of the poet’s life is accessible only in the form of scattered and sometimes contradictory signifiers, the radio play suggests, which is to say that this ‘meaning’ can never be reached – there are only these ‘fragments of fragments’. In this approach to biography, the piece arguably explores the possibility of an auditory and textual equivalent to a cubist visual syntax. Like the Cubism that Apollinaire propagated, this work for radio brings

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together several perspectives on Apollinaire without aligning them neatly with each other. As the critic Apollinaire himself argued, ‘Cubism is more complete than Naturalism or Realism because it incorporates a multiplicity of elements from ordinary life seen from many perspectives simultaneously, the objective world dignified by the creative subjectivity of the ordering consciousness of the modern mind’ (Genova, 2003: 58). As in the avant-garde, De Vree deploys the collage technique to question what Marjorie Perloff calls, with regard to collage in the historical avant-garde, ‘the lingering faith in the logocentric subject, the unifying Poetic Theme’ (2003: 190). The fragments fertilise each other, as the metaphor of the title suggests, to form one creative image, an image that in itself is not smooth and coherent, and in that way does justice to the experience of modernity. The pollination takes place through the air, just like the fruitful exchange of sonic, semiotic elements that occurs in radio waves. Finally, the English title echoing a French name is symptomatic of the multilingual transactions in the piece. In sum, the title prefigures the focus on sonic qualities of languages, the gesture of decomposition and the radiophonic collage. A lot is going on in the 15-minute mix and montage of anecdotes, voices, sounds and music, but the piece is not a random product of chance operations; it is not that kind of avant-garde. Rather, it is the result of careful intertextual collage and a consistent radiophonic aesthetics that – ­conspicuously – still follows the chronology of Apollinaire’s life, starting with his birth and ending with his death. The piece can therefore be said to contain two distinct forces, one towards linearity and narrative meaning in the temporal presentation of anecdotes, and one towards discontinuity  and a break with narrative, realism and intelligibility. By emphatically drawing upon a collage technique, the piece undermines any idea of fixed narrative meaning. Rather, it increasingly draws attention to the materiality of the piece. As Perloff writes: ‘collage and montage acted to undercut the reproduction of the “real” and to foreground the constructive impulse itself – the making of a work rather than the work itself’ (2003: 191). By drawing attention to the process of creation, A Pollen in the Air circumvents in interesting and ambiguous ways the ‘musealisation’ of the historical avant-garde criticised by Bürger. On the one hand, it circumvents this type of institutionalisation because the story of Apollinaire, an unmistakable exponent of the historical avant-garde, is rendered almost unreadable. In this way, the auditory musealisation is nipped in the bud. On the other hand, the collage technique itself can be considered part of the ‘museum’ of the avant-garde. When the piece uses this compositional ­strategy, is it not institutionalising the avant-garde on a formal level? I argue that the piece escapes this problem by adding a new radiophonic logic to the visual and textual heritages of collage and abstraction. As the



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f­ollowing discussion will show, the collage not only stages intertexts but also extends to the radiophonic poetics.

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Sources and intertexts A Pollen in the Air consists of a series of biographical anecdotes about Apollinaire, taken from Gunnar Harding’s Guillaume Apollinaires fantastika liv (1971) and Stefan Themerson’s 1961 novel Cardinal Pölätüo. Harding’s prose poetry on Apollinaire is an early work in his literary career, which started in 1967. Later he would translate work by Vladimir Majakovskij and Apollinaire (among others) into Swedish. Guillaume Apollinaires fantastika liv contains forty prose poems, of which sixteen were translated as The Fabulous Life of Guillaume Apollinaire before the book appeared in Swedish.7 Together, the poems form a witty fake biography (‘försfalskade Apollinaire-biografi’ in Harding’s words, 1974: 5) with ekphrastic passages, motifs from Apollinaire’s poetry and criticism, alongside infamous moments from his life. Harding also smuggles an avant-garde aesthetic into the prose poems. They show a futurist interest in machines and movement, as we can notice here: ‘at the same time as thousands of wax candles were shot out of machine guns and Bleriot glided in over the town in his puttering monoplane and bombed the streets with electric light-bulbs and the Trans-Siberian express choo-chooed’ (Harding, 1982: 12). And several scenes verge on surrealist imagery: ‘Apollinaire lived in Germany inside a big cuckoo-clock in the Black Forest and in the evenings the English governess who was living there as well sat perched on the Lorelei rock combing her long golden hair … and a steamer full of Germans with green hats and red hairy goosepimply legs went down the river’ (1982: 16). Above all, Harding uses prose poetry to serve up discontinuous, partly fictionalised but still chronological morsels of Apollinaire’s life. This resonates with a cubist mode of presentation. In A Pollen in the Air this mode finds an auditory extension. Themerson’s novel too contains a falsified biography of Apollinaire. The Polish writer Stefan Themerson (1910–88), who is known for cinematic collaborations with his wife Franciszka, creates a somewhat absurdist world in which Cardinal Pölätüo is the mysterious father of Apollinaire. The cardinal begets a child by the Polish countess de Kostrowicki, who is known to have been the French poet’s mother. Like Harding, Themerson is imbued with avant-gardist ideas, as his movies, photomontages, experimental films and affinities with artists such as Kurt Schwitters demonstrate. Whereas Harding’s text is a key source for A Pollen in the Air, Themerson’s novel is more of a peripheral inspiration, in particular for the identification of Apollinaire with Jesus Christ in De Vree’s piece.

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Finally, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is part of the intertextual web. In his preface to the Danish-Dutch version, De Vree suggests that A Pollen in the Air is a radiophonic homage to Joyce’s novel. The preface is itself a peculiar addition, because De Vree’s voice is interrupted by elaborate snippets from the actual play as well as sonic elements such as a quotation from Finnegans Wake read by Joyce and parts of John Cage’s Amores: IV. Solo for Prepared Piano (1936/43). As a result, the difference between the preface and the actual play is effaced. The reference to Joyce opens the preface and in that way frames the interpretation of the entire piece. For De Vree, Finnegans Wake is a celebration of a multilingual poetics and of the sonic richness of language. It is ‘the paroxysm of sounds in literature of this century’, he says (De Vree, 1971: 00' 54"–00' 58"). Beyond its status as a text, Joyce’s novel is a musical and sonic composition in De Vree’s view. A Pollen in the Air, then, exploits the sonic qualities of language and underscores its multilingual nature. In this audiophonic allegiance to Finnegans Wake, De Vree’s work can be compared to John Cage’s Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1986), an anti-narrative and anti-mimetic radio play based on the novel. Roaratorio evokes the aesthetic spirit of Finnegans Wake by mixing words, sounds and music from the novel, meticulously following intricate compositional procedures. Perloff (1989) discusses the complex composition of Roaratorio and its reception of Joyce as a prime example of how appropriation and repetition in the neo-avant-garde can resist institutionalisation and musealisation. I will come back to this point in the next section, but it is quite interesting that both Roaratorio and A Pollen in the Air are modelled on Joyce’s novel, use varieties of a collage approach, and transpose the spirit of Finnegans Wake into a multimodal audiophonic work of art. They both foreground incomprehensibility, and are not necessarily understood by critics either. On Perloff’s reading this shows the vitality of the piece: ‘even the work of a venerable “avant-gardist” like Cage is far from being understood by establishment critics, much less commodified or appropriated by the bourgeois art audience whose preconceptions it implicitly challenges’ (1989: 215). As this chapter suggests, a similar argument applies to De Vree’s fictive biography.

Intertextual and radiophonic composition The multilingual nature of the radio play partly resides in the fact that it does not erase the direct traces of the source texts nor those of i­ntertextuality. The radiophonic aesthetics reinforces and at the same time obscures the intertextual collage. It reinforces it by introducing additional intertextual links, for example by adding music and performing voices in such a way

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that it reminds listeners of similar experimental radio plays. It obscures the intertextual collage to the extent that it hinders comprehension of the actual words and sentences, and to the extent that the source text is fragmented and sonically manipulated. Parts of Harding’s text are left out and the poems are interrupted by other sonic textures such as the Morse code and the dadaist nonsense line in the earlier example. Also, since two languages are simultaneously spoken, it becomes difficult to hear what the voices are saying. Instead, the quality of their voices and the auditory features of the language (melody, pace, timbre, etc.) stand out more. By applying a radiophonic logic that trumps any narrative or even textual logic, meaning can emerge from sound – the pollination occurs in the air. This alternative logic consists in an alternation and stereophonically distributed simultaneity of voices, languages and electroacoustic treatment. In a telling sequence, for example, the narrators recount the poet’s life at the start of the First World War, in 1914 and 1915. Before this sequence, we can hear Apollinaire’s poem ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, which was published in 1913 in Alcools. The chronological order is more or less maintained (1913–1914–1915–1916), but the radiophonic presentation still creates a fragmented portrait, a fragmentation already audible in the way ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ is presented. The voice of Jean Vilar in a well-known recording is chopped up as it were. What follows is this anecdote adapted from Harding’s text: some time in the summer of 1914 Apollinaire stepped into a painting by Robert Delaunay and in that picture Apollinaire was a goalkeeper diving for a ball which was flying straight into the sun which was the sun and The Big Wheel went on spinning round. fragments of fragments of fragments of fragments of fragments of fragments and all of a sudden he saw the whole world filling up with rats and that was the opening of World War One (De Vree, 1971: 22' 45"–23' 08")8

Apollinaire’s affinity with abstract painting and cubist painters is not narrated or described, but evoked in an ekphrasis of Robert Delaunay’s painting L’Équipe de Cardiff, with which the painter participated in the Salon des indépendants in 1913. The ekphrasis is animated, in the sense that the French poet is projected as a character into the painting. The fact that he crosses an ontological border by stepping into the painting suggests that the world inside and outside the painting are actually juxtaposed on the same level, which may call to mind cubist compositions and collages. After this scene we can hear the autoreferential repetition of the words ‘fragments of fragments’ in an estranging arrangement of voices, followed by an announcement of the outbreak of the First World War. The n ­ arrator’s

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i­ntonation connotes a happy excitement that is continued in the jazz tune ‘High Society’ (1939)9 by Jerry Roll Morton’s New Orleans Jazzmen, featuring Sidney Bechet on soprano saxophone. The jazz music is backgrounded while another voice reads the poem ‘Peu de chose’ in French. This is followed by the anecdote of Apollinaire being hit by a grenade during the war and the sequence ends with a quotation from a pornographic love letter by the French author written in 1915.10 In the brief sequence a range of audiophonic strategies is deployed. Perhaps the most striking one is, again, the simultaneity of two voices telling the same story using the same words, which is also the simultaneity of two genders and two languages, split across the two channels (left and right). In the left channel, a female voice reads the prose poem in Danish, while the male voice in the right channel reads it in Dutch. In the course of the play, the male and female voices switch sides now and then. Their formal, sober and clean diction conveys neutrality as if they were news­ casters. Only rarely do they switch to a more expressive mode, for example when the voices announce the outbreak of the First World War. Also, both voices switch to whispering in some passages. Voices, language and silence are the main auditory impulses of the piece, but the anecdotes about Apollinaire’s life are sometimes accompanied or interrupted by music as well. In the sequence under discussion, the jazz music is an ironic marker of the importance of the war for Apollinaire. As the music fades out, a reverb effect is added, which frames the music and the war as eerily in the distance. The effect is estranging rather than immersive, directing the listener towards an aesthetic rather than a historical experience. All the auditory options (speaking and whispering, male and female, Dutch and Danish, music and electroacoustic effects) are treated as basic semiotic, material features that draw attention to themselves. Rather than supporting the narrative gist or a realist frame, they make the piece less transparent, less linear and less comprehensible. In the earlier mentioned introduction to his piece, De Vree emphasises that he aimed to create a ‘play of voices that is only partly comprehensible but as soon as it is understood it becomes superfluous because it is made up’ (De Vree, 1971: 11' 00"–11' 18"). French, Danish, Swedish, Latin and so on do not require translation because that would not only obscure the source text, but it would also render the play more comprehensible and less adventurous as an auditory experience. Just as in a visual collage, the piece juxtaposes heterogeneous materials in which the original context is still recognisable (for example Vilar’s reading of the poem or the religious singing). The collage allows the creator to – in the words of the Italian futurist Marinetti – ‘destroy the I in literature’ and ‘subsitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter’ (qtd. in Perloff, 2003: 58). Effacing the human

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subject at the expense of materiality is a paradoxical but appropriate move in a fictive biography of a major avant-gardist. The fragmented and heterogeneous nature of the radio play thus does not make the radiophonic dimension somehow meaningless or random. De Vree finds an auditory equivalent for visual abstraction and the visual effects of poetry. This is the repetition of avant-garde gestures such as collage and cubist composition, in a postwar context. It is the kind of repetition Hal Foster conceptualises as deferred action (Foster, 1996: 28–32). Taking his cue from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, he argues that the avant-garde follows the logic of trauma. Only in its repetition does the avant-garde become knowable and effective. The relation between historical and neo- is nachträglich, Foster avers. Similarly, in the essay ‘The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-AvantGarde’ (1986), Benjamin Buchloh stresses the effectiveness of the postwar avant-garde. He discusses the example of monochromy as ‘the abandonment of conventional attributions of the “meaning” of color in favor of the pure materiality of color’ (1986: 44), which occurred in the historical avant-garde – in the work of Rodchenko and Malevich – and again in the neo-avant-garde. We can think of Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana or Robert Rauschenberg. Yves Klein’s blue paintings are not the redundant and etiolated repetition of the historical avant-garde, but a new, powerful statement in a postwar world where painting ‘had already become subservient to the conditions of the culture industry’ (1986: 50), as Buchloh argues. The same strategy of monochromy becomes a comment upon the new socio-economic constellation and upon the changing role of the artist. This ‘pure materiality’ is also explored in the New Radio Play in German and in experimental radio plays across Europe, as other chapters in this book reveal. The pure materiality of voice and sound in particular is emphasised and exploited. In this way, neo-avant-garde sound art and radio drama go back to avant-garde visual and auditory strategies and also repurpose them, in a process that is characteristic of literary-historical dynamics (Moretti, 1996: 20–2). The repetition and repurposing in A Pollen in the Air is clear when we consider the way De Vree integrates and reinterprets Apollinaire’s poetics and aesthetic views. The radio play provides a cubist portrait of a writer who promoted Cubism, an aural portrait with surrealist and dadaist moments, a portrait that finds sonic equivalents for visual experimentation. When the radio play quotes a visual poem from Calligrammes (1913–16), the simultaneity and modulation of voices translate the untranslatable visual effects of the poem. Apollinaire’s poem is shown in Figures 1.2a and 1.2b. As in the earlier example of ‘Paysage’ (‘Landscape’), textures of voice replace the visual effects of the poem. After the sound of a plunge we hear the first verses of

The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde

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Figure 1.2a  ‘La Colombe poignardée et le jet d’eau’ (Apollinaire, 1980: 122; De Vree, 1971: 19' 54"–20' 43")

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Figure 1.2b  ‘The Bleeding-Heart Dove and the Fountain’ (Apollinaire, 1980: 123)

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The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde

the poem in French by a male voice. In tune with the way the verses are arranged in two funnelling columns, the verses are arranged stereophonically. While the left channel gives us ‘Gentle faces stabbed’, we hear ‘Dear flowered lips’ through the right channel. The words ‘ANNIE’ (left), ‘et toi’ (middle) and ‘MARIE’ (right) are still presented simultaneously, the remaining lines of the first figure (the dove) are not. The second figure (the water of the fountain) is presented in the same fashion of stereophonic distribution. Yet another strategy is developed for the third figure (the eye or base of the fountain), however. It is entirely whispered by the male voice except for the elegiac ‘O’. Stereophony is used here to present the same verses by the same voices simultaneously but with a slight delay. The ‘O’ is spoken at a regular volume and thus brings into relief – as it does in the visual poem – the elegiac theme of lost lovers and friendships. The whispering voice in French then fades into a whispering female voice in Danish, which continues the series of biographical fragments. In the migration from paper to radio, the auditory materiality of voice and language replaces the visual materiality of letters, verses and shapes on the page. The audiophonic composition conveys and transforms the typographical experiment and poetics of Apollinaire, as it does the poetics of Themerson, Harding and Joyce.

De Vree’s signature Despite the intertextual compilation or rather precisely because of this collage approach, the poetics of De Vree still emerge. De Vree’s signature resides in the selection of materials, in the multilingual make-up of the piece and the treatment of voices. First, the anecdotes and source texts selected by De Vree echo the views on art, literature and life we can find throughout his work. The hybrid and paradoxical genre of the fictive biography is a project that De Vree developed in his poetry. It is paradoxical because the genre presupposes an interest in the facts and continuity of an artist’s life while at the same time undermining this factuality and coherence. In Een sneeuwvlok in de hel (A Snowflake in Hell, 1972) and De dodenklas (The Class of the Dead, 1977), two books of poetry, De Vree includes fictive biographies of Aleister Crowley (1885–1947), the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont, 1846–70), Marcel Broodthaers (1924–76) and Charlie Parker (1920–55). Like these cycles of poems, A Pollen in the Air presents an artist’s life in a deconstructed way, stressing discontinuity and deviation. Although De Vree is clearly fascinated by the way the facts of life shape an author, he does not reduce a biography to a coherent series of significant moments or epiphanies of some kind.

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What is more, De Vree’s works emphasise those aspects that transgress the bourgeois worldview. In that respect his fictive biographies extend his interest in sadism and pornographic writing, which in his view embody the anti-bourgeois spirit (De Vree, 1964). In the 1960s and 1970s De Vree wrote erotic and pornographic fiction under his own name and as well as under pseudonyms. Together with three other Flemish neo-avant-gardists (C. C. Krijgelmans, René Gysen and Gust Gils), De Vree translated De Sade’s Juliette (1966). In A Pollen in the Air this fascination surfaces in the sexually explicit quotation from Apollinaire’s Letters to Lou. The radio play highlights the transgressive nature of the myth that Apollinaire has become, not just in his poetry (which transgresses boundaries between text and image) or his life story (which mixes fact and fiction) but also in his morality (which challenges dominant views). In the pornographic ­dimension of Apollinaire, De Vree recognises the same refusal to accept bourgeois standards of decency and decorum, which he sees as hypocritical. In the same way, Apollinaire’s treatment of language, his ideas on simultaneity, fragmentation and juxtaposition are reappropriated in a new context by De Vree in his radiophonic piece. Secondly, the multilingual nature of the radio play is in keeping with De Vree’s international orientation and affinity with the connotations and sound qualities of different languages. De Vree himself translated French and English literature. In fact, together with the Flemish writer Gust Gils he translated Stefan Themerson’s novel Cardinal Pölätüo into Dutch (1967). As already mentioned, De Vree wrote poetry and essays in French, and switches to French or English within Dutch texts. A Pollen in the Air is more radical in this respect because it refuses to translate what is incomprehensible to a large part of the audience. What is more, the number and range of languages is extended, and simultaneous presentation obstructs a direct understanding even more. In De Vree’s earlier mentioned commentary, this multilingual poetics is associated with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The wildly creative multilingual experimentation in Finnegans Wake becomes a model for A Pollen in the Air, on the understanding that De Vree shifts from a multilingual play of textual signifiers to a play of ­auditory signifiers. This brings us to the third and final point of De Vree’s poetics: his treatment of voices. The modulation of voices in A Pollen in the Air is similar to that in De Vree’s adaptations of two experimental novels. At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s he adapted for radio Het boek alfa (Book Alpha) and Orchis Militaris, two novels by the Flemish author Ivo Michiels. The novels were published in 1963 and 1968 as the first parts of an experimental cycle. In Michiels’ literary work, voices and language are presented as independent creative forces. The performative view

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of language is transposed by De Vree into a composition of voices, male and female, old and young, simultaneous and alternating, switching from whispers to monotonous speaking. This aesthetics of voices is also characteristic of the way A Pollen in the Air invites the listener to appreciate the aural dimension of voice and language. What typifies the fictive biography, however, is that the comprehensibility of language is hampered through the use of voice and the refusal to translate, while the Michiels adaptations rely on clear diction so as to foreground the creative, rhythmic language. We have seen that the imaginary biography of Apollinaire arranges existing textual and auditory material and as such effaces the traces of individual creativity. Yet De Vree’s signature as an artist still surfaces in the deliberate selection and presentation of those materials as well as in the radiophonic dimension.

Conclusion A Pollen in the Air truly is the result of avant-gardist cross-pollination, a work in which avant-garde views and strategies are brought together in a collage of intertexts, languages and electroacoustic manipulation. In De Vree’s composition, we can hear an echo of Apollinaire’s affinity with Cubism; the anecdotes can be traced back to Harding; the multilingual character is associated with Finnegans Wake. At the same time, De Vree’s own poetics and commitment to the avant-garde permeate the radiophonic composition. The aural neo-avant-garde is fundamentally transnational, multimodal – in combining semiotic modes such as language and music – and multilingual. Also, the neo-avant-garde radio play is embedded in the institutional contexts of public radio services and crosses the national boundaries associated with these services. It consistently refers back to the historical avant-garde while also breaking with tradition and with bourgeois worldviews. In all these respects, A Pollen in the Air is a representative case of the neo-avant-garde radio play. It creates an auditory and compositional equivalent to Apollinaire’s poetics combined with a focus on the multilingual and untranslatable dimensions of language. In this way, A Pollen in the Air demonstrates how the neo-avantgarde radio play itself is always the result of cross-pollination – and Freddy de Vree is one of the many bees who helps this fertilisation.

Notes  1 Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky was born in Rome in 1880. His mother was Polish.

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  2 The radio play is in Dutch, Danish and Swedish; the translation is taken from Harding (1982: 13). The lines that follow are not part of Harding’s text.  3 I will metonymically use the name Freddy de Vree for the creators. De Vree was the main creative force behind the piece, but a radio play is always the result of collective authorship. The voice actors in the play were Frans Boenders, Anne Grete Nissen/Kerstin Lundberg and Marc Rombaut. The technicians were E. Christensen, Roger Cleeremans, Jules Courtois, Hans Von Eichwald, Marcel van Uffel, Kjeld Westergaard.   4 The Stockholm organisation invited poets from other countries to its festival. They were given the opportunity to make electroacoustic poetry that was then performed in the Modern Museum. Flemish poets such as Paul de Vree and Gust Gils also participated in the event (Roggeman, 1975: 272; Florquin, 1977: 181). It was in this context that A Pollen in the Air was recorded in Stockholm on 13 April 1970.  5 Personal communication with Frans Boenders, 3 September 2018 and 22 August 2019.   6 The title is derived from a drawing in Gunnar Harding’s Den svenske cyklistens sång.  7 Published by the Windhover Press of the University of Iowa in 1970. Harding met De Vree in Iowa (personal communication with Gunnar Harding, 29 August 2019). De Vree stayed at the University of Iowa in 1968–69. His Fulbright Fellowship allowed him to participate in Paul Engle’s International Writers’ Workshop (Auwelaert, 2011: 210–11). The genesis of Harding’s Apollinaire biography is complex. It dates back to Den svenske cyklistens sång, which contained three fictive biographies in poetry of Shelley, Apollinaire and Allen Ginsberg. He worked on the prose poetry while he was writing other work in the period 1968–71 (Harding, 1974: 7). As the poet mentions in the expanded version published under the title Guillaume Apollinaires gåtfulla leende: en endlos biografi (1989): ‘Upprinnelsen till boken fanns redan i en prosadikt i min debutsamling Lokomotivet som frös fast, 1967. En sektor ingick sedan i Den svenske cyklistens sång, 1968. Fyra år senare utkom Guillaume Apollinaires fantastika liv, 40 prosadikter. Men boken har fortsatt att skriva sig. Den här versionen behöver inte nödvändigtvis innebära slutet’ (‘The book originated in a prose poem in my debut collection Lokomotivet som frös fast, 1967. A segment was then included in Den svenske cyklistens sång, 1968. Four years later Guillaume Apollinaires fantastika liv, 40 prose poems came out. But the book has continued to write itself. This version is not necessarily the end’) (Harding, 1989: 5–6).  8 Translation taken from Harding (1982: 22). The line ‘fragments of fragments …’ is not part of Harding’s text.  9 It is not irrelevant that the date of the recording was the year in which Joyce published Finnegans Wake. Also, prewar jazz is one of the main interests and inspirations of Harding. In the foreword to his collected early poetry he suggests that his poetry can be compared to the instrumentation and rhythm of New Orleans jazz (Harding, 1974: 5). 10 Since the grenade attack took place in 1916, the chronology is not accurate in this sequence.

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The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde

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References Apollinaire, G. (1980). Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916). Trans. A. Hyde Greet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Auwelaert, P. (2011). ‘Alfred Celeste Alphonse de Vree’, in Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, 2010. Leiden: Maatschappij der nederlandse Letterkunde, pp. 208–18. Buchloh, B. (1986). ‘The primary colors for the second time: a paradigm repetition of the neo-avant-garde’, October, 37, 41–52. Bürger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bürger, P. (2010). ‘Avant-garde and neo-avant-garde: an attempt to answer certain critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde’, New Literary History, 41.4, 695–715. De Geest, D., and M. Fisch (2019). ‘“i do not only commit myself – in making art – to one option”. Confronting Paul de Vree and Gerhard Rühm’, in I. Arteel, L.  Bernaerts and O. Couder (eds), Confrontational Readings: Literary NeoAvant-Gardes in Dutch and German. Cambridge: Legenda, pp. 13–48. Depreter, E. (2015). ‘Inleiding bij Le Sang de nos pères (1962) van Freddy De Vree’, in L. Bernaerts, D. de Geest, H. Vandevoorde and B. Vervaeck (eds), Het lab van de sixties: positionering en literair experiment in de jaren zestig. Gent: Academia Press, pp. 151–5. Depreter, E. (2018). Het troebel onderbewustzijn van de spoorzoeker: Surrealisme en dada in de Vlaamse poëzie 1949–1972. Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel. De Sade, D. A. F. (1965). Juliette. Trans. G. Gils, R. Gysen and F. de Vree. Antwerp: Walter Soethoudt. Desnos, R. (2011). Écrits sur les peintres. Paris: Flammarion. De Vree, F. (1964). ‘Literatuur en vrijheid: pornografie en haar verdedigers’, Podium, 18.10, 446–51. De Vree, F. (1971). A Pollen in the Air. Together with G. Harding. Recorded 13 April 1970 (Dutch-Swedish) and 22 July 1971 (Dutch-Danish, with a preface by F. de Vree). De Vree, F. (1972). Een sneeuwvlok in de hel. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. De Vree, F. (1977). De dodenklas. Antwerp: Pink Editions & Productions. Florquin, J. (1977). ‘Paul de Vree’, in J. Florquin, Ten huize van … 13. Bruges: Orion-Desclée de Brouwer, pp. 132–87. Foster, H. (1996). The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Genova, P. A. (2003). ‘The poetics of visual cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire on Pablo Picasso’, Studies in 20th Century Literature, 27.1, 49–76. Harding, G. (1971). Guillaume Apollinaires fantastika liv. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand. Harding, G. (1974). Poesi 1967–1973. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand. Harding, G. (1982). The Fabulous Life of Guillaume Apollinaire. Trans. G. Harding and S. Bernard Smith. Dublin: Raven Arts Press. Harding, G. (1989). Guillaume Apollinaires gåtfulla leende: en ändlös biografi. n.p.: Gedins. Moretti, F. (1996). Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez. London: Verso.

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Perloff, M. (1989). ‘Music for words perhaps: reading/hearing/seeing John Cage’s Roaratorio’, in M. Perloff (ed), Postmodern Genres. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, pp. 193–228. Perloff, M. (2003). The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roggeman, W. (1975). Beroepsgeheim: Gesprekken met schrijvers. ’s-Gravenhage and Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar. Scheunemann, D. (2005). ‘From collage to the multiple: on the genealogy of avantgarde and neo-avant-garde’, in D. Scheunemann (ed), Avant-Garde/Neo-AvantGarde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 15–48. Themerson, S. (1967). Kardinaal Pölätüo. Trans. G. Gils and F. de Vree. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij.

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2 Radiophonic art and electroacoustic music: an aesthetic controversy during the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares Tatiana Eichenberger Introduction: ‘Noises on the Air’ or even ‘Horror on the Third’1 ‘You may detest this programme, but I hope you won’t dismiss it. Certainly nothing quite like it has come out of your loudspeaker before; every single sound in it has been specially manufactured for the occasion’ (McWhinnie, 1957a: 27). With these thoughtful words in the Radio Times issue from Friday, 4 October 1957, BBC producer Donald McWhinnie introduced the upcoming first broadcast of his new experimental production, the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, which would air the following Monday. McWhinnie was aware of the risk of bringing out something so novel, and he smoothly anticipated critical voices among the public and press. In a four-minute introduction broadcast immediately before the piece, McWhinnie highlighted its experimental nature, explained how the new sounds were produced, and stated why, in his opinion, the use of such sounds would be the future of radiophonic art. ‘In fact, we’ve decided not to use the word music at all’, McWhinnie stated shortly after describing how these new sounds, which have ‘indefinable and unique qualities of their own’, were produced through a ‘multiplicity of operations’ of recording and editing, operations that were identical to those for producing music with electroacoustic means (1957a: 27; 1957b). Private Dreams and Public Nightmares was produced during the founding period (November 1956–April 1958) of the first electronic studio within the BBC, known as the Radiophonic Workshop.2 Despite the fact that McWhinnie explicitly emphasised – both in the press and in the broadcast introduction – that this piece was an experiment and that its script by Frederick Bradnum was ‘specifically designed to exploit some of these new sounds and dependent on them for full effect’ (1957b),

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the radiophonic poem was criticised for the text’s shortcomings. Following the traditional rule of the word in radio drama, Paul Ferris, a critic for the Observer, stated that any radiophonic form must have a high-quality text and asked if a text was really necessary to explore new sounds: ‘If the idea was simply to show how effective pure sound can be, why not put on a display of sounds-without-words? But if words are to be used, surely the first essential of a radiophonic poem, or a radiophonic anything, is an interesting script’ (Ferris, 1957). The critic for The Times went even further, claiming that Bradnum’s text did not have any independent value: ‘The text had been written to exploit “radiophonic” devices. It could scarcely have survived otherwise. Mr. Bradnum’s poem is in the style of the New Apocalypse poets whose shapeless lines and facile obscurity, long banished from the world of little magazines, linger on in radio features’ (‘Private Dreams and Public Nightmares’, 1957). The second point of the critics was the aesthetic quality of the new sounds, an aspect that McWhinnie also mentioned in his introduction: ‘Indeed, the broad effects are the easiest to achieve: horror, hysterical comedy. It’s much more difficult to manage tenderness, lyrical beauty, sweetness, and light’ (1957b). Following similar considerations, the author of the review in the Manchester Guardian framed his criticism with some suggestive questions: ‘What I want to know is, could they not try this radiophonic method with a real poem … and is it possible to invent sound in any range other than fearful, melancholy, and oppressive?’ (‘The “Radiophonic Poem”’, 1957). The critic in The Times was very sceptical about this new development: ‘How can one dignify with the word “music” a series of sounds manufactured on a tape recorder?’ (‘Private Dreams and Public Nightmares’, 1957). With this ­statement, he captured the general attitude both within the BBC and among the public towards developments in electroacoustic music in the 1950s. The circumstances surrounding the production of Private Dreams and Public Nightmares mirror the general situation at the BBC during a phase when traditional values met the experimental avant-garde developments in radiophonic art and in music as well. The efforts to establish an electronic studio at the BBC beginning in November 1956 came relatively late compared to continental Europe, where electronic studios at broadcasting corporations in Paris, Cologne and Milan were, as major actors, essential to the development of avant-garde electroacoustic music. In direct reaction to developments on the Continent, the BBC took a strong position against the autonomous composition of electroacoustic music. Its Radiophonic Workshop did not produce any such compositions and devoted all its experiments on sound to radio and television programmes. This contradictory approach to its electronic studio raises numerous questions concerning the relationship between radiophonic art and electroacoustic music.

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Unlike at the continental broadcasting corporations, the initiative to establish an electronic studio came from the BBC Drama and Features departments – which belonged to the Entertainment Division of BBC Sound Broadcasting – and not from the Music Division – which encompassed the Music Programmes and Light Music departments. Initially, I will attend to a disagreement between these two divisions about the Radiophonic Workshop’s purpose. To reveal the special need of the Entertainment Division for such a facility, this chapter will, on the one hand, trace developments regarding experimental, genuine radiophonic forms within the BBC in the prewar years. On the other hand, the BBC’s firm position against electroacoustic music – represented by its conservative Music Division, which did not want to participate in the project – raises questions about the situation of the British musical avant-garde in the postwar years. The radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, which was produced during this initial phase full of internal disagreement, reveals strategies for creating a radiophonic piece using electroacoustic sounds in connection with a written text. A close look at this piece will try to depict how music and word became tightly intertwined during the process of transforming the written script into the piece’s recorded, acoustic form.

Towards the BBC Radiophonic Workshop In an internal memorandum from 12 November 1956 entitled ‘Radiophonic music’, the head of the Central Programme Operations Department at the BBC, Brian George, thanked the Organiser of Studio Operations, Malcolm Garrard, for a ‘most interesting and valuable report’ and stated: ‘I also feel that we must guard against over emphasising the musical? aspects of the scheme (Concrete, Electronic or Radiophonic) at the expense of the general demand for new sounds, be they musical or unmusical. The title you have chosen would in these circumstances be inappropriate’ (BBC WAC, R97/11/1, Radiophonic Workshop General, File 1, 1953–73). George refers in this memorandum to a five-page report entitled ‘Historical outline’ (BBC WAC, R97/7/1, Radiophonic Effects and Electronic Music, 1956–63), which Garrard had sent to him a few days before on 8 November with a memorandum under the subject ‘Attached report on radiophonic music’ (BBC WAC, R97/11/1, Radiophonic Workshop General, File 1, 1953–73). This document summarised the developments in the field of electroacoustic music in Europe and the US and communicated ‘a need for a unit and equipment in the BBC to enable producers to carry out the work as described in para 1 (a)’. Paragraph number 1 (a), entitled ‘Musique Concrete [sic]’, describes electroacoustic techniques of recording and transforming sound

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as follows: ‘A noise or source of sound is recorded, but in being filtered, modulated, transposed, it becomes unrecognisable’. Garrard uses the term ‘radiophonic music’ as a general term for the new musical developments he introduces in the report, but he carefully distances his proposal from them and seeks to limit the terminology: ‘To avoid confusion and perhaps comparison, I suggest that we do not use the words Musique Concrete [sic] or Electronic Music’ (BBC WAC, R97/7/1, Radiophonic Effects and Electronic Music, 1956–63).3 George does not suggest an alternative term when he criticises ‘radiophonic music’ in his answer to Garrard, but a small handwritten note entitled ‘Nomenclatures’ is attached to a signed carbon copy of George’s memorandum – which might be his personal copy – and appears to be a brainstorming for possible terms for the new sounds and the facility producing them. The terms ‘Radiophonic Effects’ and ‘Radiophonic Effects Unit’ are underlined, indicating a preference over the other listed terms: ‘Special Studies Unit’, ‘Advanced Studies Unit’, ‘Special Recorded Effects Unit’, ‘Radiophonic Music Unit’, ‘Radiophonic Music’, ‘Special Musical Effects’ and ‘Special Effects’. This initial exchange about the terminology for sounds produced by electroacoustic means thus already includes one of the most important questions regarding the use of electronic devices to produce music. Can something still be considered music if it is not produced by human beings playing musical instruments but operating machines? (BBC WAC, R97/7/1, Radiophonic Effects and Electronic Music, 1956–63) Garrard’s ‘Historical outline’ from November 1956 marked the first official step towards the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. As of April 1958, the Radiophonic Workshop was an officially operational unit within the BBC specialising in producing sounds with electroacoustic means. The report, which summarises the personnel, technical and spatial requirements for such a facility, was the motivation for putting together representatives from different departments in the Electrophonic Effects Committee – soon renamed the Radiophonic Effects Committee. As George wrote to the representatives of the BBC’s Engineering Department in order ‘to set up a small Committee’, in a memorandum entitled ‘Radiophonic Effects’ dated 16 November 1956, the main aim was ‘to keep pace with developments elsewhere’ (BBC WAC, R97/11/1, Radiophonic Workshop General, File 1, 1953–73). The first meeting of the committee took place on 14 December 1956.

Disagreement between the Entertainment and Music divisions Almost simultaneously with the proposal for an electronic studio, the Light Music Department started its own project with the construction of

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a ‘Multi-Colour Tone Instrument’, a kind of expanded electronic organ with the possibility of generating different sounds and sound effects. This led to a disagreement between the Music and Entertainment divisions at the second meeting of the committee on 6 March 1957. The Light Music Department, which represented the Music Division, suggested that sounds be divided into two categories, with each division taking responsibility for one category. The Music Division proposed two criteria for categorisation: on the one hand, how the sounds were produced; on the other, whether the sounds could be expressed in existing forms of musical notation. The Music Division would then be responsible for sounds produced by musicians on instruments or electronic devices that could be expressed using existing forms of musical notation, while the Entertainment Division would take responsibility for sounds produced by technical methods that could be expressed with existing musical notation. This artificial and in many ways questionable categorisation can be seen to be a result of an encounter that took place a month earlier. On 12 February, BBC representatives from the Light Music, Features and Central Programme Operations departments attended the committee meeting of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. The report on this meeting by the assistant head of Features, Douglas Cleverdon, who also initiated the encounter, was very positive and welcomed the cooperation. In the memorandum ‘Musique concrete and electronic music’ of 13 February 1957, he suggested inviting young composers to playbacks and discussions of pieces of experimental music and to demonstrations of the future studio: ‘This would help us to get to know young composers with the necessary enthusiasm and elementary technical knowledge, who might in due course undertake experimental work for us’. In opposition, the representative of the Light Music Department, Bernard Keeffe, stated in the memorandum ‘Electronic music’ of 13 February 1957 that it should not be the BBC’s role to provide composers with a toy related to stylistic developments in atonality and twelve-tone composition on the Continent, especially since these methods led to the impasse of producing compositions that could not be played by musicians. Building a studio to outdistance those in Cologne and Milan would, he argued, be ill-advised since only a small proportion of British composers were using the twelve-tone method. The Music Division thus cast itself as a guardian of musical developments in Britain. In further internal discussions between the departments, the head of Light Music, Frank Wade, argued on 19 March 1957 in his memorandum ‘Radiophonic (electronic) music and sound effects’ that the BBC should avoid fostering ‘sterility, which has resulted in Europe from expensive laboratories being at the disposal of secondary musical composers who have produced little beyond freakishness’; instead, ‘a watch will be kept to safeguard the



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rational development of musical aesthetics in this country’ (BBC WAC, R53/483/1, Electronic Effects & Music, File 1, 1956–58).

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Differentiation from the continental electronic studios The BBC’s strong, decisive position resulted from a complex interplay of national, cultural and political circumstances and was also a clear direct reaction to developments on continental Europe. During the establishment of the Radiophonic Workshop the BBC drew upon the newest achievements in the field of electroacoustic music and took foremost as a model the electronic studios in Paris and Cologne rather than other European radio studios. Although these electronic studios were established at broadcasting corporations, radio and television productions were only a minor part of their output. The compositions of electroacoustic music were not produced primarily for broadcast but rather for the concert hall – for the so-called ‘loudspeaker concerts’. During the first years of their existence, these studios exhibited a shift in output away from the declared intentions and justifications for their establishment. The Cologne Studio für elektronische Musik (officially opened in 1953) represents the most extreme example. The report from a meeting on 18 October 1951, which is considered the founding act of the studio, explicitly mentions the advantages of such a facility for ‘das Problem der “rundfunkeigenen Musik”’ (the problem of genuinely radiophonic music) and for producing ‘akustische Effekte von bisher noch nicht gehörter Gestalt’ (acoustic effects of a form that has not yet been heard) (Morawska-Büngeler, 1988: 8) for radio plays. Yet starting from day one under the direction of Herbert Eimert, the studio largely produced studies and compositions of elektronische Musik. In the case of the Cologne studio, a complete separation of electroacoustic music and radiophonic art can be observed, although at first the same methods and partly the same sounds were used in radiophonic pieces as could be found in electroacoustic compositions by the founders of the studio, Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert. Interestingly, the Paris studio, Groupe de recherches de musique concrète (founded in 1951), developed out of the Studio d’essai, a workshop for experimental radio founded in 1942 by Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s interest shifted from a radiophonic to a musical focus in 1948, when he coined the term musique concrète (see Schaeffer, 2012). Here radiophonic art and electroacoustic music are very closely connected, but the tendency towards autonomous electroacoustic music is very obvious. The BBC was cautious and tried to avoid such shifts by clearly defining the role of the studio from the outset. Garrard’s ‘Historical outline’ asserted that the studios in Paris and Cologne seemed to be ‘specifically

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charged to make new compositions’ and that the special ‘need for a unit and equipment’ in the BBC came from the Drama and Features departments, which had already started to develop an ‘especially written and conceived art form’. Based on these first experiences, combined with the technical developments made in the electronic studios on the Continent, the Drama and Features departments at the BBC expected to ‘develop a facet of the technique that has been overlooked by the workers on the Continent’ (BBC WAC, R97/7/1, Radiophonic Effects and Electronic Music, 1956–63).

Radiophonic art and the musical avant-garde in Britain The protagonists involved in the process of establishing the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who came from the opposing Entertainment and Music divisions, used two fundamental arguments to justify their own positions, and both drew on the concept of British cultural tradition. On the one hand, the Drama and Features departments emphasised the tradition of experimental radiophonic forms, which had been developed over the past decades; on the other, the Light Music Department argued for the British musical tradition, which had not participated in the latest streams of the musical avant-garde.

The tradition of experimental radiophonic forms at the BBC The tradition of experimental radiophonic forms at the BBC evolved from a productive exchange between the genres of radio drama and radio feature, which were separated into two departments within the Entertainment Division in 1945. Experiments in search of a genuine radiophonic form had been conducted since the 1930s by a group of four producers (Lance Sieveking, Archie Harding, E. J. King-Bull and Mary Hope Allen) under the name the Research Unit (Whitehead, 1989: 110). The Research Unit was integrated into the Drama Department in 1937 as the Features Unit, and consequently the Drama Department introduced in the same year a programme called Experimental Hour, ‘a platform for unusual and adventurous forms of writing’ (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1938: 15). As a result of aesthetic and political differences between the representative of radio drama, Val Gielgud, and that of features, Laurence Gilliam, the Features Unit became its own department with Gilliam as the head by July 1945 (Whitehead, 1989: 111–12). Shortly thereafter, the Third Programme, which was established in 1946 to build a platform for minorities’ interests, commissioned the Features Department to produce different kinds of experimental radiophonic pieces, which were broadcast at regular intervals (Whitehead, 1989: 35).

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During the war, the Features Unit contributed much more to the development of new genuine radiophonic forms than the Drama Department. In the heyday of the features from the war years until the early 1950s, the Features Department brought out productions that won awards at the renowned Prix Italia, while the Drama Department was engaged in producing classical radiophonic forms such as adaptations of stage plays, novels and series. Features, which oscillated between documentary and drama and used ‘powerful techniques for the presentation of fact and for the generation of emotion’ (Gilliam, 1950: 10), fulfilled the requirements for a pure radiophonic art form and for radio in general: ‘to make the listener feel as well as think, to entertain as well as to inform’ (1950: 10). The fact that hardly any experimental pieces in the drama genre were brought out during this period was due to the conservative attitude of the Drama Department head, Val Gielgud, who was very successful with classical stage repertoire but was not particularly open to drama written for the radio, especially by authors from movements such as the Angry Young Men and the Theatre of the Absurd (Whitehead, 1989: 30, 139). These circumstances changed in 1953 when Donald McWhinnie became the assistant head of Drama and opened the door to a younger generation of writers. The previous achievements in features, such as the breaking out of traditional forms and using advanced techniques, were adopted by the Drama Department. Radio drama started to attract young authors with its  openness to experimentation and close connections to theatre, which was still the centre of attraction for most of them. This upturn in radio drama at the BBC came at a time when television was taking over as the main mass medium and the radio feature was starting to have problems justifying its position as the most relevant form for the presentation of current events. The Features Department was unable to bring new authors on board and gradually lost its significance over the course of the late 1950s. The development of new radiophonic forms was stimulated through a new approach in script writing. This approach was closely related to a revelation about the ‘nature of speech and its silences’ (Rodger, 1982: 97) from recording and listening to ordinary conversations, which was made possible by the portable tape recorder. As Ian Rodger, himself a young writer at the time, states in his book Radio Drama, ‘writers and producers started listening in a different way’ (1982: 108) and applying these new experiences in their scripts. This became evident in the ‘structure and timing of dialogue and … the very precise control of sound effects and movement’ (1982: 99), as well as in the conscious use of silence and an ‘emphasis on economy of words and on the bare statement’ (1982: 105). As I will show with Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, such dialogue demanded a unique

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i­nterpretation and performance, which emerged from close collaboration between author, producer, actors and the sound team. Not only the possibilities of recording and repeated listening, but especially the achievements of transforming and editing of any recorded sounds were promising tools for the elaboration of a new genuine radiophonic art form. To be able to follow up and develop this new approach, the Drama and Features departments expressed the need for a unit specialised in producing not only sounds and effects but also entire radiophonic pieces through electroacoustic means.

The British musical avant-garde and musical developments in Europe While the Third Programme became the platform for presenting the experimental radiophonic pieces of young avant-garde writers, the young musical avant-garde had no access to the BBC studios. Indeed, they had been completely ignored by the BBC, which was the number one medium for shaping opinions and tastes in Britain. During the establishment of the Radiophonic Workshop, the Radiophonic Effects Committee drew, on the one hand, on the experiences and achievements of the continental electronic studios, which were pillars of the musical avant-garde; on the other, it did not give the musical avant-garde in its own country the opportunity to keep pace with them. The continental electronic studios in Paris, Cologne and Milan acted in the 1950s as major players in the development of avant-garde music. Electroacoustic music – that is, music using the newest technical ­achievements – represented the logical future of music. In most cases, the initiatives to establish these studios came from people with musical backgrounds such as composers, musicologists, music journalists and musicians (Herbert Eimert, Robert Beyer, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna) or engineers and scientists with profound musical interests (Pierre Schaeffer and Werner Meyer-Eppler). In all cases, they were members of the musical avant-garde with positions in radio or connections to radio. But this was not the case in Great Britain. The composers of the younger generation – i­ncluding Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Richard Rodney Bennett and Cornelius Cardew – did not have  any  access to the BBC studios. The contemporary British music the BBC presented to its public consisted of the older generation of composers such as Benjamin  Britten or Michael Tippett (Siebert, 2015: 28). But it was this young generation who followed up on and participated in the developments on the Continent, especially the Internationale Ferienkurse für neue Musik in Darmstadt (Rupprecht, 2015: 111–13; Siebert, 2015: 23–4).

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Led by the Third Programme – which was tasked with promoting ‘high culture’, representing the interests of minorities and following contemporary British developments in spoken and written word as well as in music – the BBC did not broadcast any composition by young avant-garde composers who took part in and contributed to the newest developments in music in and outside Britain (Siebert, 2015: 28–9). This fact appears to be unique to the British public’s postwar reception of international musical events. In contrast to the 1920s and 1930s, when the BBC regularly broadcast works of ‘ultra-modern music’ (see Doctor, 1999) such as by the Second Viennese School and kept pace with the Continent, after the Second World War Britain fell into a kind of a cultural isolation and ‘failure of awareness’ (Wood, 1961: 156; Siebert, 2015: 30). This situation seems to have resulted from a complex interplay of cultural-political and aesthetic issues. As one of the main actors in the public musical scene, one of the BBC’s main objectives was – as William Haley, founder of the Third Programme stated – ‘raising the public taste’ (qtd. in Siebert, 2015: 29); and to do so, the BBC chose to rely on proven classics of serious music and not on chasing ‘after the meteoric fashions of the avant-garde’ (Milner, 1957: 133). On the other hand, the BBC also used public opinion as an excuse to promote established classical and not avant-garde music, as can be seen in the following statement by Leonard Isaacs, music organiser of the Third Programme: ‘The BBC is not anti-12-tone – it takes decisions on its readers’ reports’ (qtd. in Siebert, 2015: 30). As Jo Wilhelm Siebert suggests, such excuses by individ­uals within the BBC might have been a ‘willkommener Deckmantel für die eigene Sichtweise’ (‘welcome cover for their own point of view’) (2015: 30). It is clear from this viewpoint that the primary ambition of the BBC was to reach a mass audience, which caused difficulties in promoting avant-garde movements. But, as Kate Whitehead puts it in her book on the Third Programme: ‘The avant-garde requires a forum free of the need to attract a large audience’ (1989: 2). Thus, while in the 1950s broadcasting corporations on the Continent were founding electronic studios and broadcasting programmes about the newest developments in electroacoustic music, the BBC was occupied with promoting well-established classical music.

Productive collaboration between word and music Drama Department studios were places of encounter and close collaboration between ‘artists of words and music’ (Rodger, 1982: 50). The resulting reciprocal influence impacted the future artistic output of individuals, turning them into artists ‘like Britten, in whose music the spoken word is always present, and MacNeice, in whose poetry the hint of music is never

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absent’, as Ian Rodger recalls (1982: 50). Considering the situation of the musical avant-garde and the public in Britain in the 1950s, it is not surprising that composers who were engaged in the traditional production process of radio plays with composed instrumental music and had no experience with electroacoustic music were afraid that using tape recorders to produce dramas and features would mean the end of this enriching collaboration and loss of their indispensability: ‘Writers, composers, producers, actors and musicians had evolved a complex and very fruitful creative relationship … when the tape-recorder came in they [composers] were no longer needed in the same way … The tape-recorder meant that this collaborating community of ­different talents would no longer be needed’ (Rodger, 1982: 93). On the other hand, Rodger also states that, thanks to experiences with portable tape recorders, ‘writers and producers started listening in a different way’ (1982: 108), which led to a new kind of experimental writing. But in comparison to writers, British composers, musicians and music critics did not have this experience of using electroacoustic devices in the 1950s, and thus were less equipped to listen ‘in a different way’. This explains the Music Division’s vehement rejection of electroacoustic music during the process of establishing the Radiophonic Workshop, as well as the sharp critiques of Private Dreams and Public Nightmares regarding the insufficiency of its text and the aesthetic quality of the electroacoustic sounds to the point of questioning their nature as music. This understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of developments in electroacoustic music as being only a solution for those compositions that could not be played by musicians also explains the questionable categorisation of sounds based on whether one can express them in existing forms of musical notation or play them on instruments. Finally, assessing composers of electroacoustic music as ‘secondary musical composers who have produced little beyond freakishness’ (BBC WAC, R53/483/1, Electronic Effects & Music, File 1, 1956–58), as Frank Wade wrote in his memorandum ‘Radiophonic (electronic) music and sound effects’ on 19 March 1957, and depriving them of competencies and abilities, led to their rejection as potential composers for radio. But composers of electroacoustic music – or rather artists of sound – were definitely needed in the production of experimental radiophonic art. In fact, ‘no longer … in the same way’ as Rodger stated, but in a different way. The new approach required at least as close collaboration between the artists of words and music as productions with instrumental music. Following Garrard’s suggestion, the Radiophonic Effects Committee decided that the team of the Radiophonic Workshop would consist of studio managers, who were, as part of the Central Programme Operations Department, responsible for operational work in the studios and who also had creative experience in radio drama, features, or music productions (British Broadcasting

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Corporation, 1956: 94–5). The first employee of the Radiophonic Workshop was Daphne Oram, the studio manager of Music. Oram had experimented in the field of electroacoustic composition in a private context already during the late 1940s and had submitted an electroacoustic composition to the Music Department in 1950 (Daphne Oram Collection, Goldsmith University London, ORAM3/5, The Radiophonic Workshop – The first 25 years, 1982–1983). So, the Radiophonic Workshop actually did employ a composer of electroacoustic music and benefited from her knowledge and experience, but it did not officially recognise her as a composer. In 1959 she left the Radiophonic Workshop to work as a composer with her own private electronic studio. Oram’s departure was closely linked to the BBC’s dismissive stance regarding electroacoustic music. In addition to Oram, the Radiophonic Workshop started with Desmond Briscoe, the studio manager of Drama, who had experience from experimental productions such as Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (see Briscoe, 1983). With this mixture of technical as well as creative experience in drama and music, they formed a good personnel basis for the new electronic studio, despite the ‘lack’ of composers of electroacoustic music at the BBC.

Radiophonic poetry – a new radiophonic form of art The radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (see Niebur, 2010: 28–34) is an example of an experimental radiophonic piece. It was produced through close collaboration between the author, producer, actors and sound team, which consisted of Oram and Briscoe and the sound engineer Norman Bain. Radiophonic poetry was designed to experiment with electronically generated and manipulated sounds, described by McWhinnie in his book The Art of Radio as ‘an inextricable conception of word and special sound and an exploratory flight into a new territory of sound’ (1959: 87). All the sounds were produced in close connection to the written and spoken word. The fact that McWhinnie and Bradnum chose a poetical and not a prosaic form such as a novel or a story already points to the strategy of connecting words with sounds in the rather musical form of radiophonic poetry. Frederick Bradnum’s text embodies three roles that represent the inner voices of a sleeping person during a nightmare: the dozing, the anxious and the rational self. As in a dream, the scenes change without any logical reason and leave impressions of inner conflicts and fears that haunt one in a nightmare. The moving inner life of the sleeping person is depicted by the split personality with three voices, but the second and third voice show characteristics of a divide even within themselves. Both voices are marked

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by moments when their colour and mood change in such a way that they sound like a totally different person. It can be assumed that Bradnum, who was wounded in the Second World War and allegedly spent several hours in the sea waiting to be rescued, drew on his war experiences while writing the script. In 1961 he suffered a breakdown, which was closely connected to his war memories (see Adrian, 2002). While the dozing self, represented by the first voice played by a female, appears and disappears again and again – as if almost uninvolved in the events – and displays the different phases of sleeping, a conflict arises between the other two voices. The second voice (the anxious self) tries to fall deeper and deeper into sleep, but it is disrupted by the third voice (the rational self). Reproachful, the rational self accuses the anxious self of hiding in sleep and of being unwilling to face reality and its own fear. The more the conflict between the two grows, the deeper the first voice falls to sleep. The rational self finally manages to reach the conscience of the anxious self, which suddenly finds itself in a glass maze without an exit. It sees that its image is divided and faces the reality of daily life: one is dependent on trusting people who rule the world even though one mistrusts them to some extent. Suddenly the image shatters and the second voice walks on water ‘between floating brief cases [sic], umbrellas and drowned faces’ and asks ‘who will pray for those who drown in / lonely places?’ This might be a particularly autobiographical part of the piece, describing the experienced fears of the author in a hopeless situation during the war. The rational self assumes here the role of an observer and commentator. Suddenly, it aggressively accuses the second, anxious voice: ‘Your fear has stabbed like little knives / Which kill so many that you might sleep’. The anxious self defends itself and finally reveals that it was the third voice who started to talk about fear and woke the second voice up from its sleep. Finally, the second voice realises that the image is no longer divided and that it has merged with the third voice: ‘Like a mirror, I am you and you are me’.

A close connection between words and music Bradnum designed the script with precise sounds in mind, which he listed parallel to the text such that the script consists of two columns: ‘basic effects’ and ‘dialogue’ (see Figure 2.1). He presented his idea of ‘sound-scripting’ in a press release on 7 October 1957, the day of the first broadcast: The text … must impose strong visual images upon the mind, and these should in turn suggest sound patterns. So far as I can see at present, it ought to strike at the subconscious, at the instinctive emotions. By this, the finished

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Figure 2.1  The first page of the script of the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares

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work, word and effect, can create a world of different dimensions from that created by any other art form. (BBC WAC, R97/7/1, Radiophonic Effects and Electronic Music, 1956–63)

At the beginning of the piece Bradnum uses words in the text that evoke sounds, which he consequently suggests as the ‘basic effects’. For the line ‘like a wind from the ground’, he suggests, for example, a wind sound, and for the line ‘darkness and the pulse of my life bound’, he imagines a pulsating beat. He also used a less direct translation of the text into sounds: for the first line, ‘Round and round’, he suggests a ‘contra puntal [sic] rhythm’, or for the text ‘still falling, falling’ an effect which he calls ‘descending scale’. He uses this approach mostly at the beginning of the script. In the course of the piece he makes other, less obvious links between text and sound. For example, in a line expressing the well-being of the anxious self – ‘contained in the bud of myself … curled with the worm’ – Bradnum suggests a ‘close and woolly’ mood. Next to such atmospheric sounds, he sometimes prescribes actions for the voices, such as ‘whimper into scream’, ‘a screech’, ‘rude noise’ or ‘self-pitying whining noise’. His script furthermore describes special effects such as the ‘sound of running’, ‘slabs of sound’, a ‘rocket-like noise’, ‘footsteps’ and ‘a bell or the impression of one’; effects achieved by electroacoustic techniques, such as ‘acoustic change’, ‘musique concrete [sic] of vespers’, a ‘montage of water noises’ or ‘these words repeated speeded up’; and, finally, also silences noted as ‘silence’, ‘no effects at all’ or ‘nothing’. The sound prescriptions are more spontaneous than consistent or systematic. This means that Bradnum, for example, does not always determine what expression or action a voice has to execute or which sound effect he would like to accompany the text. There are also lines in the text for which he does not suggest any basic effect.

Creation of a radiophonic piece in an experimental production process Electroacoustic techniques (reverse play, speeding up the recorded material, using reverb, echo and different filters), which were inspired by musique concrète and elektronische Musik and were presented in Garrard’s ‘Historical outline’, were used both to process the voices and to produce new sounds in Private Dreams and Public Nightmares. But not everything one hears in the recording of the finished piece is traceable to the script. Due to aesthetic decisions during the experimental work directly with the sound material, various changes of the basic effects in the script had to be undertaken. On the one hand, the number of suggested sounds was reduced in order to avoid overloading the piece with sounds redundant to the spoken word, their exact timing was changed, and sounds were also produced that

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are not in the script. On the other hand, sounds and sound structures were elaborated that are indeed related to the text, but developed in the course of the production process into autonomous musical ideas. In addition to these techniques, a further sound layer was added through the interpretation of the text by the actors: the voices also perform effects that are not scripted, produce noises using different kinds of vocal colour from whispering to screaming, and change their dynamics and tempo. This kind of interpretation combined with the use of different and sometimes very quickly changing filters causes the listener not to be able to recognise whether the same voice is still speaking or a different one has started. All these modifications, which emerged in production through the close collaboration of all those involved, result in a unique form and an inseparable whole. None of the  sound elements (spoken word, sounds, noises and silence) plays a more important role than another. Because the text is closely connected to the sounds and vice versa it cannot stand on its own, as the critics of Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, who represented the tradition of the word’s primacy in radio drama, would have imagined. The first few lines of the piece evidence many such small deviations from the written script (see Figure 2.2). It begins with a trembling gliding sound, which through its repetition obtains a swaying character. It is repeated twice before the first voice comes in with a very static expression: ‘Round and round’. For this first line, the script suggests ‘A contra puntal [sic] rhythm’. The motif that can be heard seems to correspond rather with Bradnum’s description of ‘a slow developed rocking sound’, which is to be found later in the script, at the end of the second voice’s first appearance in the lines ‘Holding me as if in a cradle. / Rocking’. It is to be assumed that during production the timing of this sound was moved to the beginning, giving it a special role as a leitmotif for the whole piece, which will be discussed later. The second line of the first voice, ‘Like a wind from the ground’, should, according to Bradnum, have been accompanied by ‘A wind’. Here the timing of the sound was changed: the wind sound appears two lines later, just after the first voice finishes its first four lines and before the second voice comes in. This makes it sound as if the second voice, the anxious self – ‘I fall through nothing, vast empty spaces’ – is falling down from the sky carried by the wind. At the end of the second line of the second voice, ‘Darkness and the pulse of my life bound’, the suggested ‘Pulsating beat’ begins. At first it sounds more like a trembling of the fading wind sound and then gradually modulates into a machine-like pulsating sound. Through this change in the timing and the montage of the wind sound with pulsing, decelerating sounds, a whole new musical structure emerges, which gives the text its own drive and a particular imagery.

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Figure 2.2  Transcript of the first lines of the script. Bradnum used the words in bold (not in the original) as inspiration for the sound effects

We can only guess how the production proceeded. Whether the voices were recorded separately and the actors had sound samples, or whether they were able to listen to the samples during the recording of their own parts, is unclear. The following section leaves these questions unanswered, but it does suggest that the actors had an idea of what the soundtrack sounded like while performing and recording their roles. For example, for the second voice’s line – ‘A cry in the heavens / Bird or angel?’ – Bradnum suggests ‘A developed sound like a cry’ (see Figure 2.2). In the recording, the timing is slightly changed, with the sound starting just after the previous lines of the second voice in free fall: ‘Like music the way down is slow defying gravity: / Almost to a stop, almost’. The actor suddenly changes his voice colour as if he were effectively startled by this ‘developed sound like a cry’. The next section also suggests a close collaboration between actors and the sound

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team. Accompanied by a swaying sound, the speech in this section decelerates over four lines, beginning with ‘Silence that beats everywhere’, until it ends with a gong-like sound, described in the script as ‘One low sweet note’. The precise timing of this passage raises the question whether the actor recorded his lines to an already finished soundtrack or whether the sound team carefully followed his deceleration with the soundtrack in retrospect. This close connection between word and music also appears in the overall structure of the piece. The very first sound, the ‘rocking sound’, which accompanies the opening lines of the first voice – ‘Round and round / Like a wind from the ground / Deep and deep / A world turns in sleep’ – was transformed during production into a leitmotif of the piece. This sound always accompanies the first voice, the dozing self, which recurs and disappears again and again through the whole piece. The sound and the voice change slightly every time through the use of different filters and text variations, but it is always clearly recognisable. Bradnum introduced the leitmotif idea in the script but did not implement it consistently. He always connects the recurring appearance of the first voice with new effects: ‘A contra puntal [sic] rhythm’, ‘A variation of the opening’, ‘A series of tin-can bangs (like a round-about)’, ‘Gently contrapuntal rhythm’, ‘The rise and fall of water’, ‘Wind and words, faster and faster. Crescendo. Note from bells’, ‘Harsh, grating turning sound’, ‘Stonelike, empty sound’. The idea of a consequently implemented leitmotif in both words and music must have evolved during the collaborative production process. This musical thought and its dominant position in the piece as a leitmotif gives Private Dreams and Public Nightmares its unique overall formal structure, in which it possesses a double role, so that the formal structure appears to be ambivalent. On the one hand, it can fit into a classical dramatic scheme, where the leitmotif takes the role of a short intermezzo between the individual formal parts. On the other hand, it can be seen as a recurring pattern in a form similar to a rondo in music, in which new musical ideas are connected through a recurring recognisable one. This form would adequately correspond to the structure of a dream with individual adventurous events linked together by the calmer phases of enduring sleep.

Conclusion The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was developed from the need of the Features and Drama departments, which supported experimenting with the new world of sounds much more than the conservative Light Music Department. Because of the strong negative attitude of the latter, the Radiophonic Workshop was created without the involvement of

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c­omposers of electroacoustic music, whose inclusion producer Douglas Cleverdon desired. With its aim to ‘keep pace with developments elsewhere’, the Radiophonic Effects Committee drew upon the achievements of the  ­electronic studios at the European broadcasting corporations that were the main actors in the development of electroacoustic music. But the Radiophonic Workshop did not produce electroacoustic music and was careful about using the term ‘music’ from the beginning. It devoted its work to creating radiophonic art. In the phase during the 1950s, when traditional values met the experimental avant-garde developments in radiophonic art and in music, the BBC was caught in a conflict between preserving traditional values and supporting the avant-garde. Which of these two directions was pursued depended to a large extent on individuals’ personal interests. The fact that the Light Music Department started its own project of building an electronic instrument suggests that it did not have an aesthetic problem with electroacoustic sounds. Instead, its problem seems to have been an institutional one: it wanted to maintain traditional musical structures. Its categorisation of sounds and the division of responsibilities shows a clear interest in still being able to employ musicians (‘sounds produced by musicians on instruments or electronic devices’) and composers (‘which can be expressed in existing forms of musical notation’) in a traditional way for its productions. The radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares does not represent a radiophonic piece with special sound effects but rather a radiophonic piece fully dependent on electroacoustic means – ‘put together inch by inch’, as McWhinnie (1957b) states in his introduction. Producing such a piece required intense collaboration between author, producer, sound team and actors, since the final recording emerged from the interaction of spoken word and sounds. As shown in my analysis, the production process consisted in a close back-and-forth collaboration in working on the sound. With their aim of creating a new form of radiophonic art, the initiators of the Radiophonic Workshop tried to break out of the primacy of the word and create a radiophonic piece in which voice, sound, noise and silence would become closely connected equivalent elements. It is exactly here that occurs the close connection between radiophonic art and electroacoustic music: both used the same technical means; both endeavoured to develop a new art form that could include all types of sounds on equal footing; both built the foundations for future forms of sonic arts. The close similarities between these two fields makes distinguishing them a complex task dependent on numerous factors, from aesthetic convictions to the cultural-political interests of individuals or organisations.



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Notes 1 ‘Noises on the Air’ and ‘Horror on the Third’ were the titles of reviews of Private Dreams and Public Nightmares for the Observer and the Daily Telegraph, which vividly point to the extent of the critical voices against the new radiophonic art (see Ferris, 1957; ‘Horror on the Third’, 1957). 2 The term ‘electronic studio’ refers to institutions that were dedicated to the production of music and sound through electroacoustic means and were gradually founded worldwide after the Second World War by private individuals, companies or publicly financed institutions such as universities and broadcasting corporations. This term, which is established in the professional jargon, is in fact a twofold abbreviation: on the one hand, it is an abbreviation of the term ‘electronic music studio’; on the other, ‘electronic music’ is an abbreviation of ‘electroacoustic music’. 3 The term musique concrète refers to a type of music produced using recorded sounds or published recordings by the Groupe de recherches de musique concrète at Radiodiffusion-télévision française (RTF) in Paris; ‘electronic music’ refers to music produced only with synthetic sounds by sine-wave generators at the Studio für elektronische Musik of Nordwestdeutsche Rundfunk in Cologne. I refer to both of these styles collectively as ‘electroacoustic music’.

References Adrian, J. (2002). ‘Frederick Bradnum’, Independent, 18 January, https://www. independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/frederick-bradnum-9260646.html (accessed 11 January 2021). Briscoe, D. (1983). The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. British Broadcasting Corporation (1938). BBC Handbook 1938. London: BBC Broadcasting House. British Broadcasting Corporation (1956). BBC Handbook 1956. London: BBC Broadcasting House. Doctor, J. (1999). The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferris, P. (1957). ‘Noises on the air’, Observer, 13 October. Gilliam, L. (1950). B.B.C. Features. London: Evans Brothers. ‘Horror on the Third’ (1957). Daily Telegraph, 7 October. McWhinnie, D. (1957a). ‘Private Dreams and Public Nightmares’, Radio Times, 4 October, 27. McWhinnie, D. (1957b). Introduction to Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, 7 October 1957, BBC Third Programme, recording of radio broadcast, www. youtube.com/watch?v=6N1I_03wPEE (accessed 15 April 2020). McWhinnie, D. (1959). The Art of Radio. London: Faber and Faber.

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Milner, A. (1957). ‘English contemporary music’, in H. Hartog (ed.), European Music in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 132–51. Morawska-Büngeler, M. (1988). Schwingende Elektronen: Eine Dokumentation über das Studio für Elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks in Köln 1951–1986. Cologne-Rodenkirchen: P. J. Tonger Musikverlag. Niebur, L. (2010). Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘Private Dreams and Public Nightmares: By Frederick Bradnum’ (1957). The Times, 9 October. ‘The “Radiophonic Poem”: Experiment with Sound’ (1957). Manchester Guardian, 9 October. Rodger, I. (1982). Radio Drama. London: Macmillan. Rupprecht, P. (2015). British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schaeffer, P. (2012). In Search of a Concrete Music. Trans. C. North and J. Dack. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Siebert, J. W. (2015). Peter Maxwell Davies’ Traditionsbewußtsein: Analytische Beiträge zu Worldes Blis. Hanover: Siebert Verlag. Whitehead, K. (1989). The Third Programme: A Literary History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wood, H. (1961). ‘English contemporary music’, in H. Hartog (ed.), European Music in the Twentieth Century. 2nd edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 145–70. Archival sources BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading (hereafter BBC WAC), R97/11/1, Radiophonic Workshop General, File 1, 1953–73. BBC WAC, R97/7/1, Radiophonic Effects and Electronic Music, 1956–63. BBC WAC, R53/483/1, Electronic Effects & Music, File 1, 1956–58. Daphne Oram Collection, Goldsmith University London, ORAM3/5, The Radiophonic Workshop – The first 25 years, 1982–1983.

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A forefront in the aftermath? Recorded sound and the state of audio play on post-‘golden age’ US network radio Harry Heuser Three seconds of rhythm and blues. The sound of a throat being cleared. Then,  in an amplified, reverberating male voice, the following pronouncement: We interrupt this record to bring you a special bulletin. The reports of a flying saucer hovering over the city have been confirmed. The flying saucers are real.

As if to corroborate this statement, and yet incongruous with it, the Platters’ chart-topping single ‘The Great Pretender’ cuts in, briefly, with ‘Too real when I feel / What my heart can’t conceal’, its source instantly misidentified by the male voice, now sounding like a suave disc jockey, as ‘Too Real’ by ‘The Clatters’. This frenetic montage of sound, music and voice served as the attentiongetting opening of ‘The Flying Saucer’, a 1956 novelty record conceived by first-time songwriter-producers Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman and created with the aid of magnetic tape recording and editing technology. In all, ‘The Flying Saucer’ sampled seventeen hit tunes of the day, fragments of which, augmented by a few sound effects, were spliced together so as to constitute a narrative, however sketchy, of an invasion threat from outer space.1 ‘Goodbye, Earth people’, the raucous assault concludes in a highpitched, electronically distorted voice, indicating the successful execution of the hijacking mission. So successful, indeed, was the offensive – and so offensive the success – that ‘The Flying Saucer’ would land in the charts like the numbers whose copyrights it violated but, unlike them, it achieved this conquest without the benefit of air play on network radio, which it was denied. Playing at rather than on network radio, Buchanan and Goodman’s novelty record can tell us a great deal about the state and status of US American network radio in 1956, a beleaguered industry whose techniques, formats and history it references. The record’s echoing of newscasting conventions such as the special bulletin would have been familiar to anyone growing up listening to the radio, particularly in times of unfolding conflicts, be it the Munich Crisis of 1938 or the escalation of the Cold War

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in the early days of the Space Race. And while neither the creators of the record nor their target audience were quite old enough to have experienced the dramatisation for radio of H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel The War of the Worlds – which had been broadcast live over the affiliate stations of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) on 30 October 1938, never to be repeated – the legendary panic and the debate that ensued would have made the record’s nod to it unmissable. More obvious still was the single’s reflexive spin on the network’s growing indebtedness to the recording industry after having long prided itself on the liveness of its programming. In the 1950s, in response to the rise of the Top-40 format of so-called independent stations, even network radio stalwarts such as comedian Eddie Cantor, crooner Rudy Vallee and the minstrel duo of Amos ‘n’ Andy, heard on network radio in various narrative formats since 1929, were recast as disc jockeys, a new breed of glorified salesperson that ‘The Flying Saucer’ shrewdly disposed of by mechanisation. Drawing for its narrative frame both on the latest trend in broadcasting and on radio’s so-called golden age, Buchanan and Goodman’s pasticcio summed up all that had been lost in the aftermath of the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast – the best-known and least representative radio play of that bygone era – as well as to the guardedness that made network offerings sound increasingly played out. An outlier such as ‘The Flying Saucer’ – a radio soundalike that made a record of broadcasting’s past and present – provides us with an opportunity to interrogate not only the terrestrial channels it circumvented but also the theoretical frameworks in which certain plays for listening can be accommodated while others are discounted: what is ‘network’ and ‘radio’ about network radio plays of the 1950s that sets them apart from the experimental radio plays of the 1930s as well as from the emerging ‘audio art’ of the time? And how might a belated engagement with them contribute to the discourse on the avant-garde from which they are generally excluded? I shall consider this expansive brace of questions in relation to the state-ofthe-art recording technology of the 1950s that, adopted and adapted by artists such as John Cage and Nam June Paik, not only played an important role in the evolution of sound art but also revolutionised network programming in ways that made at least one 1950s critic exclaim: ‘Without the tape recorder one wonders if radio would be the exciting instrument it is today’ (Van Horne, 1942: 98).2

Technology and tradition: network radio after 1945 That the ‘exciting instrument’, far from being playable by anyone at will, was under the control of broadcasters leasing the airwaves returns us to

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the central question: what is ‘radio’ about ‘radio art’? The answer seems so obvious that it is rarely posed. And yet, before we can determine whether or not a performance is ‘avant-garde’ radio, we need to be mindful of the institutional setting, the battlefield in which such a forefront is to be situated or sought. One instance of a problematically indiscriminate use of both terms – ‘radio’ and ‘avant-garde’ – is Richard Kostelanetz’s idiosyncratic Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993), which devotes short entries to ‘Audio Art’ as well as ‘Radio Art’. The lexicographer, himself a writer of plays for radio broadcasting, sets out by identifying ‘esthetic innovation’ and ‘initial unacceptability’ as ‘basic measures of avant-garde work’ (Kostelanetz, 1993: ix). Whereas ‘Sound Art’ is defined as an ‘esthetic experience based on sound’, whether existing ‘on radio’, stage or audiotape (1993: 12), ‘Radio Art’, according to Kostelanetz, denotes an ‘art’ that exploits the ‘capabilities unique to audio broadcast’ (1993: 181). What might those ‘capabilities’ be, and what makes them ‘unique’? Defining ‘Radio Art’, Kostelanetz predictably cites the Mercury Theatre on the Air production of ‘The War of the Worlds’, together with Lights Out, a thriller anthology whose immediate popular success, resulting in a respectable run on network radio (1935–39, and intermittently 1942–47), hardly betokens ‘initial unacceptability’. These US examples are named alongside 1970s Kunstkopf broadcasts from Germany – presumably both East and West – where, according to Kostelanetz, ‘radio art matured mostly’. Furthermore, by pointing out that ‘special audio experience might be made available in the U.S. on discs or cassettes’, whereas, ‘in Germany at least it is more likely to be heard over the radio’ (1993: 181), Kostelanetz reduces the determination of what constitutes radio to a question of origination, disregarding the contexts in which radio events are received. And yet a consideration of attitudes towards the system of broadcasting is key to our understanding of network radio’s capability – or incapability – of serving artists as a medium. It is no coincidence that, just as sound recordings were gaining recognition as art, network radio ceased to be regarded as a medium – a forum for and instrument of – artistic experimentation, which it had been, to some extent, during the 1930s and early 1940s, when the networks managed to recruit modernist poets, playwrights and novelists whose socialist and anti-fascist views were at least not incompatible with the government policies that, after years of neutrality, broadcasters were expected to promote. Experimental radio plays, once in the service of left-wing, anti-fascist causes, had no utility for broadcasters when such an agenda no longer served to unify the public against foreign powers, as wartime propaganda had done. The journalist and radio playwright Norman Corwin, whose CBS-commissioned Pearl Harbor special We Hold These Truths had reached an estimated sixty million listeners in December 1941, summed up

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the state of postwar radio in 1947 – the year that tape recordings first came into use in radio broadcasting – by likening network radio to a ‘department store’ in which rare ‘luxury items’ had to be displayed alongside ‘a lot of supposedly essential commodities and perhaps too many cheap brands of goods’. This should not discourage writers from engaging with the medium, Corwin insisted; nor should the excesses of advertising – growing and increasingly vocal complaints about which made Frederic Wakeman’s novel The Hucksters a national bestseller in 1946 – be an argument for ‘government radio’, which Corwin deemed ‘a cross between a museum and a religious school’ (Corwin, 1947: 55–6). Favouring the ‘department store’ model that had showcased his output for nearly a decade, Corwin missed the writing on the soundproof wall: after a return to radio in 1947 with One World Flight – a thirteen-part commentary on the postwar state of international relations based on wire recordings he gathered while travelling around the globe – he would effectively end his relationship with CBS, having been advised by a network executive to be more commercial and refusing to sign a contract asking for 50 per cent of any subsidiary sales of works he produced for that network (Corwin, 1993: 133). A few years later, in 1951, Corwin expressed his disillusionment by offering this ‘advice’ to writers who sought to ‘make a living from radio in these years of its decline’: ‘Be mediocre’. To succeed, writers needed to ‘[k]eep within the pale of clichés of character and situation so traditional there is a mellow patina on them’, characteristics readily recognised ‘by listening to normal, day-in-day-out radio’. Anyone with aspirations beyond ‘formula’ should simply ‘[f]orget radio’, at least ‘until such time as radio return[ed] to a constructive attitude toward public service and to a respect for esthetic values in writing’ (Corwin, 1951: 35–7). As the word ‘aftermath’ in my title is meant to suggest, the changes in the radio industry within the decade immediately following the end of the Second World War were not only profound but, from the perspective of artists such as Corwin, devastating. Throughout the 1950s, network radio was subject to budget cuts and talent raids, depleted as the pool already was due to the blacklisting and expulsion of radio artists during the McCarthy years. Furthermore, as its profits helped fund the technology of and programming for the audio-visual medium that, by the mid-1950s, had supplanted it as the primary source of home entertainment, radio broadcasting was suffering if not an existential crisis, then at least a crisis of identity. During the Second World War, network radio’s aim had also been its chief asset: its ability to unite a nation and to respond to a crisis with the immediacy of live broadcasting. Once this common cause was removed and restraints on broadcasters were lifted, advertising replaced propaganda, and suiting the sponsor became the paramount concern.

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Corwin was not alone in misjudging the situation back in 1947. As Rothenbuhler and McCourt point out, broadcasters had aimed to follow the path they had ‘blazed’ prior to the war, when the ‘industry’s cultural and aesthetic standards were nationalist and middlebrow’, and when ‘[m]usic (almost exclusively live, rather than recorded) was secondary’ to comedy and drama. By the mid-1950s, however, the market in which network radio operated was dramatically altered. As the number of local stations increased, the influence of the national networks waned (Rothenbuhler and McCourt, 2002: 367), an erosion of power to which ‘The Flying Saucer’ and its impact on local markets attests. Unlike the less strictly regulated stations that did not number among their affiliates, the networks struggled to protect a shifting and shrinking territory. Not only were they mindful of a potential ‘legal tangle’ with performing rights organisations such as ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), but they were also concerned about the i­nfiltration of the system that ‘The Flying Saucer’ threatened to orchestrate. Even though the record was an ‘obvious gag’ that sent up rather than replicated the ‘realism’ of a ‘notorious pre-war broadcast’, the trade paper Variety reported, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) nonetheless continued to baulk at the imitation of its ‘news broadcast format’ – the special bulletin, in particular – for purposes other than the actual reporting of breaking news (‘2 Webs Ground “Flying Saucer”’, 1956: 107). In their rejection of such material, the networks acted in accordance with the self-censorship guidelines set up by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), established not long after the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast, which decreed that ‘[n]on-news programs shall not be presented as authentic news broadcasts’ (Crews, 1946: 111). The threat posed by ‘The Flying Saucer’ was its corruption of broadcasting’s continuity, the frame reserved for the authoritative voice of the broadcaster or given over by that authority to the public service announcements and sponsorial messages in which broadcast plays were embedded. On the air, Buchanan and Goodman’s recorded chatter would become all but indistinguishable from the network’s spiel, especially since the act of tuning in, unlike the deliberate or random positioning of a needle on a physical record, could occur at any point during a broadcast in progress, which is just what had triggered the widespread misreading of the Mercury Theatre’s mockumentarian take on The War of the Worlds as reportage. Radio made sound ‘live’, and hence actual, even what was recorded, which, by the mid-1950s, much of the networks’ programming actually was. Indeed, as Leonard Maltin put it, the ‘one significant change’ that US network radio underwent in the late 1940s was the ‘advent of recording tape’ (1997: 292). Mainly for the sake of expediency, network radio

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was making increasing use of recorded content, known as transcriptions. ‘Recorded programs, made by the big producers of syndicated programs and available in bulk lots, are coming more and more into favor’, observed radio writer-director Robert Arthur. The ‘present state of mind – and finances – of the radio industry calls for minimum budgets and a minimum of experimentation with new shows’. Transcribed programmes were comparatively cheap, and they did not ‘tie up a station’s studios or personnel in the way a live program does’ (Arthur, 1956: 195). The fact that live stagings of plays were a thing of the past was acknowledged with reluctance and only as legally required, generally in a single word – ‘transcribed’ – at the beginning of a programme. The sound art potentialities of magnetic tape recording were largely neglected by the networks. Largely, but not quite.

Tape and script: the transcribed revival of the Radio Workshop The same year that ‘The Flying Saucer’ landed in the charts, the CBS Radio Workshop (1956–57), an anthology of plays written or adapted for the medium, commenced with a transcribed dramatisation of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian – and quarter-century-old – novel Brave New World, narrated by its author. Hitting the airwaves at a time when all of the major non-serial and non-episodic radio play programmes had been cancelled, the eighty-six broadcasts spanning CBS Radio Workshop – which has been called ‘a last hurrah of sorts’ (Maltin, 1997: 303) – might well have sounded groundbreaking. At least, the sustaining (that is, not commercially sponsored) programme was heralded as such in the press, despite the fact that the series was the third and final reboot of a programme inaugurated two decades earlier, and that, running its course, it did not initiate a renewed engagement in the form, experimental or otherwise. Still, on the surface, the revival of the Workshop was a return to a ‘constructive attitude toward public service’ found wanting in 1950s broadcasting by Corwin, who himself had been associated with the Workshop in the late 1930s and early 1940s. ‘We’ll never get a sponsor anyway, so we might as well try anything’, CBS Radio’s vice president Howard G. Barnes was quoted as saying in articles published in Time and TV Radio Mirror, the latter providing a detailed if inaccurate forecast of the series (‘Sound Drama’, 1956: 36; ‘Who’s Who’, 1956: 56). The networks’ fostering of habitual listening through the production of serialised, episodic or anthologised plays imposed considerable constraints on experimentation. And yet, despite being uniformly framed and timed to fit the weekly thirty-minute slot allotted to the programme, the Workshop productions nevertheless managed to resist formula. Broadcasts ranged from a one-voice opera based on a play by August Strindberg to

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documentaries using tape-recorded interviews. The former was a continuation of the musical experiments of the earlier Workshop series, which had featured John Cage’s score for ‘The City Wears a Slouch Hat’ (31 May 1942), whereas the latter could trace its lineage to One World Flight, broadcast live, though Corwin’s recorded segments had been accompanied by a musical score performed live in a studio (Keith and Watson, 2009: 199–200). While a documentary using recorded footage may not strike us as experimental today, it constituted an innovation in 1950s radio broadcasting. Pioneering in this regard was The People Act (1950–52), a series of community documentaries based on pre-recorded interviews and speeches. Initially heard over NBC stations, the programme was subsequently produced by rival network CBS, which had set up a Documentary Unit in 1946. As Matthew C. Ehrlich has pointed out, the ‘selling points’ of CBS’s successful campaign were a more prominent timeslot for the weekly broadcast than NBC had offered, as well as CBS’s superior tape-recording technology (2011: 125). Media scholar Erik Barnouw, himself a radio playwright, welcomed the ‘tape recorder’ as a ‘new tool of dramatization’ through which a new level of realism could be achieved. Recorded sound ‘shifted attention to a new kind of dialogue: nonacted dialogue’, as distinguished from the live studio re-enactments of actual events and the impersonation of historical figures by radio performers on programmes such as The March of Time (1931–45) (Barnouw, 1956: 159). ‘No actress in radio or pictures could duplicate the moving, authentic words of the Italian woman’, radio writer Jerome Lawrence marvelled in his preface to one of Corwin’s transcripts for One World Flight. ‘You barely understand her, yet here is forty-five seconds of the most moving, naked emotion you ever heard on a radio broadcast’ (Lawrence, 1947: 280). For broadcasters, the thrill listeners derived from voices never heard before on radio was secondary. The use of tape recording became an economically attractive alternative to scripted studio productions, considering that, as Barnouw pointed out, it was not customary to remunerate non-professional speakers (1956: 159). So steeped in broadcasting conventions were radio playwrights such as Barnouw that they lacked the vision to imagine tape recording as anything other than a ‘tool of dramatization’. Radio plays, they knew, were expected to communicate. Declaring radio to be the ‘greatest disciplining force in modern playwriting’, Corwin argued that whatever was not ‘directly communicable and easily assimilated’ had ‘no right to be on the air’ (1940: 131). Speech and sound were almost entirely in the service of sense-making, which sets radio plays apart not only from the avant-garde activities of the electronic musicians and emerging sound artists of the 1950s but also from the action painters then gaining recognition. In ‘The Liberating Quality

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of Avant-Garde Art’, an address delivered to the Annual Meeting of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas, on 5 April 1957, the art historian Meyer Schapiro contrasted the mass media with the arts by arguing that what made the art of his day ‘so interesting’ was precisely its ‘high degree of non-communication. You cannot extract a message from painting by ordinary means; the usual rules of communication do not hold here.’ Avant-garde art – equated by Schapiro with modernism – was distinguished by ‘inner freedom and inventiveness’, as well as its ‘fidelity to artistic goals’, including the ‘mastery of the formless and accidental’, which helped to ‘maintain the critical spirit and the ideals of creativeness, sincerity and self-reliance’ that Schapiro deemed ‘indispensable to the life of our culture’ (1978: 226). Network radio plays, always scripted to safeguard against fortuity, were never ‘formless’. Magnetic tape recording and editing provided additional mechanisms of mastery over chance, as, in Barnouw’s words, it offered the ‘excitement of reality, but reality that [could] be stripped of formlessness and tooled with selectivity’ (1956: 162). Although broadcasters mainly considered its uses in terms of efficiency, economy and editorial control rather than artistic freedom, magnetic tape recording technology nonetheless liberated radio plays from the constraints of the studio; taking the microphone into the streets instead of relying on illusionistic re-enactments of events and drawing on an exhausted catalogue of generic sound effects, the tape-recorded documentary was more in tune with lived modernity, an avant-gardist preoccupation since Baudelaire expressed his appreciation for ‘on-the-spot drawings from life’ (Baudelaire, 1972: 396). The Workshop, while less ambitious in scope and vision than Corwin’s travelogue One World Flight, presented tape-recorded sound portraits of three Western metropolises: ‘The Voice of New York’ (2 March 1956), ‘A Portrait of Paris’ (6 July 1956) and ‘A Portrait of London’ (20 July 1956), for the last of which Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah served as narrator, predictably guiding listeners to the city’s most noisy attractions, including Petticoat Lane and Big Ben. In addition, the Workshop attempted a bells-and-whistles presentation of the ‘Sounds of a Nation’ (18 November 1956). Conceived in the spirit of Thanksgiving, with which holiday its broadcast roughly coincided, and billed as a ‘re-evocation through sound of some of the significant themes’ in the development of the United States, it featured the sound effects of conventional radio drama, indices of ‘building and creating’ – the audible reminders of progress – that were used to underscore the spoken narrative and dramatised vignettes. Somewhat less impressionistic were the Workshop’s sound portraits of individuals, among them ‘A Living Portrait of a Man in Action’ (20 April 1956) and ‘A Writer at Work’ (12 October 1956). The former promised to

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examine the ‘personality, the living and working habits of [the] tycoon. Our tools’, radio reporter Martin Weldon declared, ‘are a notebook and a tape recorder, combining to create’ what the title promised. However, the cursory sketch of a ‘businessman’ who ‘enjoys what he does’ withheld much about its sitter, real estate magnate William Zeckendorf, and made no mention of the fact that CBS executives were trying to negotiate a deal with Zeckendorf for the construction of Television City in midtown Manhattan. It is the voice of the reporter rather than Zeckendorf’s own that promotes the view that the tycoon’s ‘dreams’ – dismissed by some as ‘pipe dreams’ – assist in urban renewal, be it the rebuilding of the ‘shabby West Side’ of Manhattan or the realisation of ‘the most ambitious slum clearing projects of all time’ in Washington, DC, which had just been given ‘official approval’. The composite portrait was not so much stitched together by way of tape editing as it was constructed by the editorialising presence of the institutional narrator. ‘A Writer at Work’, meanwhile, was trammelled by the fact that the chosen subject, Hector Chevigny, was overheard working in radio at a time when, as Corwin had lamented, the networks offered few creative opportunities for aurally minded playwrights. Chevigny had been writing for network radio for nearly three decades and, between 1936 and 1937, had been director of the CBS Script Division in Hollywood. He had written plays for prestige anthology programmes such as The Cavalcade of America ­(1934–53) and Arch Oboler’s Free World Theater (1943). In the early 1950s, he took over as head writer for the daytime serial The Second Mrs. Burton (1946–60), the last radio serial to leave the airwaves. Due to the network’s cancelling of anthology programmes, ‘A Writer at Work’ could avail itself only of Chevigny’s latter assignment. A microphone was set up in his New York home, where Chevigny was caught on tape dictating to his secretary as he struggled to come up with something ‘bright and cute’ for an upcoming Thanksgiving broadcast. ‘Oh, darn these Holiday scripts’, Chevigny exclaimed as he churned out lines such as ‘And are you ready for more turkey, Terry, dear?’ and cues such as ‘Sound Effects: tableware as wanted’. The programme concludes with a light-hearted sketch designed to demonstrate that Chevigny could rise to the challenge. And yet a reviewer for Variety expressed the wish that ‘there were more on the subject’s personal life in view of the fact that Chevigny has long been a “human interest” story of which the public at large knows just about nothing’ (Traube, 1956: 46). What the reviewer alluded to but did not mention was that Chevigny, at that point in his life, had been blind for well over a decade (Heuser, 2006). An opportunity to produce both an insightful self-portrait and an incisive institutional critique of network broadcasting was abandoned in favour of an endorsement of the system and a validation of its formulae that, so the play argued, had not yet been exhausted.

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Clearly, it would take a selective sampling of the Workshop’s output to make a case for its avant-gardist spirit. It was ‘sheer myth-making to suggest’ that the Workshop was ‘undiluted genius’, Robert J. Landry, a Variety staff writer who was involved in Workshop productions during the 1940s, remarked prior to the revival of the series: ‘A careful researching of old Workshop scripts and a diligent hearing of old recordings debunks that posture.’ In fact, Landry contended, the ‘mimeograph machines’ of the network’s ‘publicity department … turned out hotter copy about the Workshop than the Workshop itself managed to get on the air’ (1955: 102, 110). The aforementioned statement by CBS vice president Barnes, published in eulogistic articles without by-line, attests to this. Landry’s references to the materiality of radio plays – to ‘scripts’, ‘copy’ and ‘­mimeograph’ – is telling. Scriptedness not only bestowed longevity on ephemeral broadcasts; it also made it possible for playfulness to be ­contained, censored and curtailed. When one of the CBS Radio Workshop scripts appeared in an anthology of prize-winning plays, the foreword by the noted editor and radio personality Clifton Fadiman expressed dissatisfaction with the standard of writing of the works included. The ‘statements’ that the winning plays made about life, ‘while clear and for the most part sincerely felt’, struck him as ‘in no case original, unconventional, startling, or penetrating’. If the ‘ends’ were ‘not in all cases related to art’, they were the ‘ends’ that radio and television, at ‘their present stage of evolution, believe proper and possible to the medium’ (Fadiman, 1957: ix–x). The Workshop’s award-winning script was ‘Bring on the Angels’, a sentimental biographical sketch of the journalist and anti-liberal social critic H. L. Mencken. Written by one-time Peabody Award winner and formerly blacklisted but rehabilitated and reined-in radio writer Allan Sloane, ‘Bring on the Angels’ was produced on 8 June 1956, some four months after Mencken’s death. That the play gained recognition in print while other, more experimental Workshop productions went unpublished is owing to its narrative format. Unlike aural sound portraits or unscripted, ‘non-acted dialogues’, conventional radio plays could be more readily reproduced in print. A number of presumably outstanding broadcast scripts were compiled in anthologies such as Radio’s Best Plays (1947), rare as those publications became after the end of the Second World War. This privileging of scriptedness and the effort to elevate broadcast plays qua literature continues in the academic reception of such performances, for which writers are credited, whereas motion pictures are commonly regarded as a director’s medium. No writer could be credited with the Workshop’s unprintable production of ‘I Was the Duke: A Portrait of a Juvenile Delinquent’. Its broadcast on 9 December 1956 was introduced as an ‘experiment in communication’

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between a young prison inmate and the radio audience. ‘The experiment: your reaction.’ The stated intention was an attempt to facilitate an understanding of ‘hoodlumism’ by giving the audience a chance to ‘meet the criminal’. Such a dialogue was generally complicated, the narrator-host argued, by two factors: ‘He wouldn’t talk to you. He couldn’t talk to you because you don’t talk the same language, and because he doesn’t trust you.’ Accordingly, an intermediate was installed in the person of an interviewer, a reformed criminal, now a radio writer, who was also a friend of the ‘Duke’. So candid is the portrait and so raw its language that an unexpurgated broadcast of the extant recording on network radio, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, seems doubtful, listed though it was in the broadcasting schedules published in major national newspapers. ‘I Was the Duke’ contains lewd references to sex (‘all the broads were knocked up’), including homosexuality (being called a ‘tender fish’ by a fellow inmate), and the language is rife with expletives such as ‘piss’, ‘shit’, ‘asshole’ and ‘hell’, vocabulary clearly in violation of the NAB code, according to which ‘[s]acrilegious, profane, salacious, obscene, vulgar or indecent material’ was ‘not acceptable for broadcast’ and ‘no language of doubtful propriety’ would be ‘sanctioned’ (Crews, 1946: 112). For once, network radio did ‘talk the same language’ as a growing segment of US society: the disenfranchised embodiments of ‘hoodlumism’ who struggled to define themselves vis-à-vis the ‘positive conception of the consumer as the quintessential citizen’, which, as Sheryl Kroen has pointed out, ‘only came to prevail after the Second World War’ (2004: 709). The broadcast, in its comparative restraint in editing and editorialising, gave the so-called hoodlum the voice and – through tape recording – the means for self-portraiture that offenders against the law were generally denied in the media. Instead of being objectified or called upon to represent a type, the documentarian subject, recounting incidents of being belittled, beaten and betrayed, is accorded a position to present his views on modern society, including the state of race relations due to which, according to him, a ‘little colored boy’ in his place would have no ‘chance’. ‘Non-acted dialogue’ thus demonstrates that, to some extent, magnetic tape managed to democratise network radio broadcasting by capturing a multiplicity of speakers. And yet, if no one took notice, let alone offence, how effective could network broadcasting be for the raising of rebel voices? Besides, tape recording made it possible to sidestep the system of national broadcasting altogether and to create in its stead a global network of listener-producers who shared sound recordings by post. ‘In the hands of more than two million people is a tool which can be used to create a new form of expression’, a writer for the periodical Tape Recording claimed. ‘Yet, except by a small handful of people’, its ‘true potential’ as a ‘creative

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instrument’ has ‘not even been recognized’, let alone ‘used’. One among that ‘small handful’ was Tony Schwartz, a US American sound archivist referred to in the article as a ‘pioneer in creative taping’ (Mooney, 1960: 19–20).

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Curating and networking: Tony Schwartz’s tape exchange Purchasing his first tape recorder not long after the end of his military service, during which he first became aware of such technology, a secret weapon of sorts that originated in Nazi Germany, Schwartz set up tape exchanges of music recorded by amateurs and professionals living as far afield as Peru, England and the Soviet Union. To make his intentions known, he sent a request in the form of a lacquer disc to the publishers of magazines such as Audio Record, saying, in part: Hello. My name is Tony Schwartz … I would like to exchange music with you. I can make or play material on wire, tape or disc. I am interested in songs or music that people sing or play in their conscious or unconscious efforts to make the world a better place to live in. (‘Musical Swap Shop’, 1951: 1)

Radio has been called ‘yesterday’s Internet’ (Nachman, 1998: 7), but the opportunities broadcast radio provided for collaboration and reciprocity were far more limited than the analogy suggests. With his international tape exchanges, Schwartz opened alternative channels to national broadcasting, even though his aim to counter the media was merely implied at the time. ‘We have more control over the media god than we might think possible’, Schwartz wrote years later, ‘yet we haven’t begun to exercise this control and to use the second god as a social instrument in the hands of society’ (1983: 6). A commercial artist by trade, Schwartz was also adroit at creating a niche market for what started out as a hobbyist pursuit, making his eclectic collection commercially available on albums such Exchange (1954) and The World in My Mailbox (1958). In his spoken introduction to the latter, Schwartz stated that although the exchange he established was ‘mainly musical, you can see the possibilities for any type of audible material’. Those possibilities were explored by Schwartz himself. His magnetic tape recorder captured what an article in High Fidelity magazine called the ‘beautiful, raucous, piteous, amusing and otherwise characteristic sounds’ of New York City (Oppenheimer and Freeman, 1954: 31). ‘New York is my home’, Schwartz introduced himself with rhythmic simplicity on New York 19, an album he named after the postal code of his Manhattan neighbourhood on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen. ‘That’s where I live, and that’s where I

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work. I carry a portable tape recorder with me wherever I go. I’ve recorded the sounds that I hear. The sounds of my city … These recordings are my story, the story of New York.’ Part of Schwartz’s ‘story’, shared on this and subsequent albums, was the sounds of children at play, of street vendors, plumbers and taxi drivers, as well as an earwitness account of the life and death of Jean Tinguely’s sculpture Homage to New York on 18 March 1960 in the Garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The alternative networkings of his tape exchange and his commercial recording ventures notwithstanding, Schwartz did not altogether bypass the broadcasting medium, which he supplied with tapes from his archive. When one of his curated compilations, extracts from which also aired on WNBC’s poetry series Anthology in 1954, was broadcast as part of Workshop’s aforementioned series of urban sound portraits under the title ‘The Voice of New York’ (2 March 1956), scripted narration by a professional radio writer was added; the narration was delivered by Fadiman, well remembered at the time for his decade-long tenure as moderator of the quiz programme Information, Please (1938–48). Schwartz’s personal reflections in his own, untrained voice were largely voiced over and voided. The nature of the exchange thus changed, the archivist no longer served as curator of his collection, let alone as autobiographer. A similar depersonalisation occurred in the Workshop production of ‘A Dog’s Life’ (31 March 1957), in which Schwartz’s audio diary of adopting and raising a puppy was turned into an authoritatively voiced third-person narrative featuring Schwartz’s recordings. This is how Schwartz, as a freelancer, negotiated the project with CBS. In turn, the network gave him permission to monetise the broadcast a year later as a record album whose liner notes contained plugs for the Amplifier Corporation of America, developers of the recording technology, as well as the market that supplied ‘all the bones’ chewed by Schwartz’s dog. ‘I have no interest in sound effects’, Schwartz declared decades later in an interview with Kostelanetz. ‘My whole area of study has been how sound affects people, or the effect of sound, not sound effects’ (Schwartz and Kostelanetz, 1996: 60). Rejecting the term ‘sound effects’ – commonly used to define the extent to which the non-verbal functioned in radio plays – Schwartz set himself apart from network practice. And yet, like Buchanan and Goodman, he nonetheless took his cues from network broadcasting, as his records followed its established pattern of announcement and narration. Whether or not they rose above being mere effect, sounds on network radio were never permitted to speak for themselves. Rather, they were signposts, and whatever else needed to be pointed out and disambiguated was supplied by narration. In Schwartz’s records, sounds were always explained in the brief comments that prefaced each recording. For one of his albums,

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Schwartz even availed himself of the voice talents of a prominent network radio announcer, Dwight Weist, who provided the narration for New York Taxi Driver (1959). The pairing of amateur recordings and institutional voice was so incongruous that one reviewer remarked: ‘[M]aybe it’s just as well that the occasional narrator here, a standard-voiced big-company announcer, has such idiotic stuff to read and does it in such a de-humanized, commercial-sounding manner. It makes the taxi men sound all the better’ (Canby, 1959: 59). The CBS Radio Workshop was no futurist playground; rather, network radio more closely resembled ‘La Radia’, the name Marinetti and Masnata gave to ‘shows on radio’ that were ‘realistic’, ‘trapped in the notion of the scene’, ‘rendered stupid by music’ and ‘a too timid imitation’ of futurist aims (Marinetti and Masnata, 2009: 293). The closest network radio came to exploring the creative potentialities of tape-recording technology was the Workshop production of ‘I Have Three Heads’ (26 May 1957).

Cutting and curtailing: state-of-the-art editing as guarded play According to the continuity, as delivered by the programme’s announcer, Stuart Metz, ‘I Have Three Heads’ was ‘conceived and created’ by CBS radio engineer Mort Goldberg, even though, in keeping with network radio’s print-fettered approach to audio play, CBS staff writer Charles S. Monroe was credited with supplying the script. The play was billed as a ‘study of the techniques, the possibilities, and the improbabilities of tape recording’. Nevertheless, like most network radio plays, it was delivered in dramatic form. The first-person narrator referred to in the title is an anthropomorphised tape recorder, Howard Ampex, who faces a rival in a newer model, Jerrold. The play’s title refers to the mechanical heads of the Ampex 200 – the ‘first successful American tape recorder’ (Brøvig-Hanssen, 2013:  137)  – which are demonstrated to serve three functions: ‘one for erasing, the second for recording the sounds and words that are fed into it, and the third for playing back what’s already on the tape’. Not content to perform as instructed, Howard, played in an electronically distorted voice by the well-known radio actor Jackson Beck, cuts the announcer short when he is relegated to a supporting role. ‘In today’s workshop Mr. Goldberg is [being] aided and abetted by’, Metz sets out, to which Howard sarcastically responds: … by a writer, a director, a …? Who needs them? All you need for a good bang-up tape job is a good engineer like Morty and a trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly tape machine like me. That’s all you need. Morty and I, we



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put our heads together. His one head and my three, and we can do anything. Yes, sir, anything!

This provides a set-up for a number of demonstrations of tape recording and editing, many of which are musical. The selections differ greatly from the contemporary pop records sampled in ‘The Flying Saucer’: a number from the Broadway musical My Fair Lady in three renditions, Vincent Youman’s 1924 hit ‘Tea for Two’, and four marches performed by military bands recorded in France, England, Russia and the United States – an audition tape for CBS’s new series Sounds of the World. ‘Maybe they ought to trade the UN for a good tape machine’, Howard quips, trimming down to a throwaway line the alternative vision for a transnational assemblage by proxy that was at the heart of Schwartz’s tape exchange. ‘Boy, could we have fun. Boy oh boy oh boy’, the machine marvels at one point. And yet, for all its playfulness, ‘I Have Three Heads’ left it to the listener to imagine what was beyond the bounds of network radio, which is just where ‘The Flying Saucer’ had taken off a year earlier. Ditching both medium and message, Buchanan and Goodman’s ‘cut-up’ had demonstrated that anyone with magnetic tape-recording equipment – ­commercially available in the US since the late 1940s – could copy music, curate found sounds and thus create anew by not starting from scratch. In doing so, it archly defied the culture it appropriated, cutting an industry down to whatever size it deemed fit for repurposing. More than a popular record, ‘The Flying Saucer’ is Pop as Richard Hamilton famously defined it in 1957: ‘transient (short term solution), expendable (easily forgotten), lowcost, mass-­produced, young (aimed at youth), witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business’ (1983: 24). Conservative and cautious, network radio was still ‘big business’ in the 1950s; but, despite a history that spanned a mere quarter century, it was no longer ‘young’, ‘witty’, let alone ‘sexy’. The fact that ‘The Flying Saucer’ would become a hit without network exposure is a telling indicator of network radio’s diminished reach and relevance. National broadcasters, unlike the creators of ‘The Flying Saucer’, did not dare do more than hint at the subversive uses of recording technology. Mort Goldberg’s borrowing of commodities such as My Fair Lady – itself a product of bourgeois repurposing – for the exercise of putting technical know-how on display is devoid of the anarchic ‘Methods of Détournement’, including the ‘direct uses of détourned phrases … in radio broadcasts’, that Guy Debord began to formulate in 1956 when he and avant-garde artist Gil J. Wolman dismissed some forms of appropriation, such as the Duchampian turn of adding a moustache to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, as ‘no more interesting than the original version’ thus transformed (Debord and Wolman, 2009: 36; Lievrouw, 2011: 37). Indeed, ‘I Have Three Heads’

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goes so far as to assure its audience that, in broadcasting, tape recording was not being used as irresponsibly as the narrative suggests it could be. When Howard overhears two maintenance men at work in the tape room and fears being taken out by them, he records and edits their conversation, neutralising the threat it poses in order to preserve his life. ‘That’s the most dishonest thing I ever heard’, Jerrold protests. ‘You changed the order of the words.’ ‘You’re right’, Howard concedes. ‘It is dishonest. That’s why tape recordings are thrown out in the courts of most States. That’s why editing for broadcast takes an entirely different turn.’ On network radio, the use of magnetic tape recording did in fact take on a ‘different turn’ than it might have under conditions less inimical to experimentation. Of the three heads at work in recorded sound, the play insists, at least one remains level. Significantly, it is the newer model that censures the playful older one. In the very act of experimentation, ‘I Have Three Heads’ signalled the premature end of tape editing as play.

Conclusions and openings: advancing the discourse on radio art To tell network radio’s controlled experiments apart from the avant-garde sound art that it by and large forestalled, we need to pay closer attention to the systems in which radio plays are embedded. ‘[I]t’s about time somebody looked at the role of abstract sound and radio in the “avant-garde”’, a reviewer of Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead’s anthology Wireless Imagination (1992) commented. ‘But as a … “first word” on the subject’, he added, ‘we might have done better with a volume more firmly grounded in the everyday world, a world where wireless sound has served not merely as a conceptual and aesthetic challenge but as a concrete reality on the social field’ (Taylor, 1993). ‘Indeed’, another reviewer remarked, the anthology’s ‘reconstruction of an auditory avant-garde seems intent on marginalizing radio, on isolating the medium from its institutional contexts’ (Tiffany, 1994: 245). Such readings are still more widespread today. Even when they claim, as Martin Spinelli does, that an ‘innovation’ such as ‘The War of the Worlds’ could only ‘happen … within an understanding of a radio context’, ‘traditional analyses of broadcasts … as sociopolitical events’ are argued to be no more effective than treating broadcasts as ‘literary documents preserved on tape’, as both approaches have ‘occluded’ the ‘importance’ of such listening events as ‘genuinely innovative radio happenings that define a new species of radio art as occurring only incidentally in sound or the broadcast voice’ (2009: 68, 87). As the broadcasters’ insistence on guarding the integrity of the continuity violated by ‘The War of the Worlds’ and ‘The Flying Saucer’ suggests,

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­contextualisation is not simply a way of reading broadcasts. It is the broadcasting mode. If commercialism made the ‘department store’ model of network broadcasting undesirable for artists, it was continuity that made it inoperable for the avant-garde. Unlike local or community broadcasting, network radio was predicated on the assumed homogeneity of the audience, not on its diversification. An avant-garde might thrive in an aftermath, as  Dada had done in an age when, according to Kurt Schwitters, ‘new things had to be made out of fragments’ (qtd. in Eldersfield, 1985: 12); but it does so outside of and in opposition to institutional settings such as network broadcasting. No equivalent to Schwitters’ ‘Ursonate’ originated on US network radio. The networks that avant-gardists create – including the tape exchanges through which the unauthorised copies of the broadcast recordings discussed here have entered circulation – are, and must be, of their own making. Despite the profusion of twenty-first-century studies devoted to radio art in relation to modernism, and the acknowledgement of radio’s ‘ability to break down ontological borders’ (Milutis, 2001: 59), an engagement with the ‘concrete reality’ of network broadcasting, particularly in the television age, has remained scant.3 As a result, recordings documenting the uneasy, volatile period of network radio’s postwar aftermath and the ultimate failure of recording technology to reinvigorate network radio play production have been left on the tape room floor.4 Even more than access to those tapes, however, we need transdisciplinary approaches to radio that i­ nterface studies in broadcasting, literature and the performing arts, as well as narratology and relational aesthetics, to achieve switched-on l­istening experiences as opposed to remote readings of works that, c­ onsidered in isolation, might be earmarked for a revisionary take on the avant-garde. Before we can set out to redefine the boundaries of our discourse, we must define the spheres of ‘radio’ in which acts of tuning in are enmeshed.

Notes 1 The records sampled in ‘The Flying Saucer’ have been identified by a number of sources, including Otfinoski (2000: 9–11). 2 A note about formatting: on US network radio, plays were generally broadcast as part of a series and are therefore not unlike chapters in an anthology. More clearly to distinguish between series and play titles, titles of anthologised plays are placed in single quotation marks, whereas titles of series are italicised. The only play mentioned here that was not part of a series is also italicised. 3 Apart from Broadcasting Modernism (Cohen, Coyle and Lewty [eds], 2009), which I cite in this essay, such studies include Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and

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the BBC, 1922–1938 (Avery, 2006), Broadcasting in the Modernist Era (Feldman, Tonning and Mead [eds], 2014), and Modernism at the Microphone (Dinsman, 2015); none of them is concerned with network broadcasting in the United States. 4 My own study, Immaterial Culture, is complicit in this neglect, concerned as it is with radio plays written or produced between 1929 and 1954, a period during which radio plays were the ‘project of a vast and complex industry employing writers, technicians, and performers who were especially trained and called upon to draw together audiences of a size today’s increasingly diversified television and internet offerings can no longer attract’ (Heuser, 2013: 12).

References ‘2 Webs Ground “Flying Saucer”’ (1956). Variety, 25 July, 107. Arthur, R. (1956). ‘Radio is not well’, in H. Brean (ed), Mystery Writer’s Handbook. New York: Harper, pp. 193–6. Avery, T. (2006). Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. London: Routledge. Barnouw, E. (1956). Mass Communication. New York: Rinehart. Baudelaire, C. (1972 [1863]). The Painter of Modern Life: Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Trans. P. E. Charvet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 395–422. Brøvig-Hanssen, R. (2013). ‘The magnetic tape recorder: recording aesthetics in the new era of schizophonia’, in F. Weium and T. Boon (eds), Material Culture and Electronic Sound. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, pp. 131–57. Canby, E. T. (1959). ‘Record review’, Audio, June, 54–9, 67. Cohen, D. R., M. Coyle and J. Lewty (eds) (2009). Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Corwin, N. (1940). ‘The sovereign word’, Theatre Arts, February, 130–6. Corwin, N. (1947). ‘Looking for art, bub? Talent vs. leadership in radio’, Theatre Arts, May, 55–6. Corwin, N. (1951). ‘Radio writing, USA’, The Writer, February, 35–7. Corwin, N. (1993). Norman Corwin’s Letters. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade. Crews, A. (1946). Professional Radio Writing. Cambridge: Riverside-Houghton. Debord, G., and G. J. Wolman. (2009). ‘Directions for the use of détournment’, in D. Evans (ed.), Appropriation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 35–9. Dinsman, M. (2015). Modernism at the Microphone. London: Bloomsbury. ‘A Dog’s Life’ (1957). P. Roberts, producer. CBS Radio Workshop, 31 March 1957. Ehrlich, M. C. (2011). Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Eldersfield, J. (1985). Kurt Schwitters. London: Thames and Hudson. Fadiman, C. (1957). ‘Foreword’, in The Writers Guild of America Presents the Prize Plays of Television and Radio, 1956. New York: Random House, pp. vii–x. Feldman, M., H. Mead and E. Tonning (eds) (2014). Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. London: Bloomsbury. Hamilton, R. (1983). Collected Words. London: Thames and Hudson.

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Heuser, H. (2006). ‘A (blind) “writer at work” faces his audience’, broadcastellan, 12 October, https://harryheuser.com/2006/10/12/a-blind-writer-at-work-faceshis-audience/ (accessed 16 September 2020). Heuser, H. (2013). Immaterial Culture: Literature, Drama and the American Radio Play, 1929–1954. Oxford: Peter Lang. ‘I Have Three Heads’ (1957). M. Goldberg, creator. CBS Radio Workshop, 26 November 1957. ‘I Was the Duke: A Portrait of a Juvenile Delinquent’ (1956). W. N. Robson, producer. CBS Radio Workshop, 9 December 1956. Keith, M. J., and M. A. Watson (2009). Norman Corwin’s ‘One World Flight’: The Lost Journal of Radio’s Greatest Writer. London: Continuum. Kostelanetz, R. (1993). Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. Pennington, NJ: A Capella. Kroen, S. (2004). ‘A political history of the consumer’, Historical Journal, 47.3, 709–36. Landry, R. J. (1955). ‘One who loved radio for its own sake’, Variety, 5 January, 102, 110. Lawrence, J. (1947). ‘A new radio form’, Hollywood Quarterly, 2.3 (April), 280–1. Lievrouw, L. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity. ‘A Living Portrait of a Man in Action’ (1956). M. Weldon, creator and narrator. CBS Radio Workshop, 20 April 1956. Maltin, J. (1997). The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio’s Golden Age. New York: Dutton. Marinetti, F. T., and P. Masnata (2009 [1933]). ‘The radia: Futurist manifesto’, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 292–5. Milutis, J. (2001). ‘Radiophonic ontologies and the avantgarde’, in A. S. Weiss (ed.), Experimental Sound and Radio. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 57–72. Mooney Jr, M. (1960). ‘Make creative sound your hobby’, Tape Recording, June, 19–22. ‘Musical Swap Shop’ (1951), Audio Record, 7.3, 2–3. Nachman, G. (1998). Raised on Radio. New York: Pantheon Books. Oppenheimer, B., and I. Freeman (1954). ‘Eavesdropping in New York 19’, High Fidelity, May, 31–3. Otfinoski, S. (2000). The Golden Age of Novelty Songs. New York: Billboard Books. Rothenbuhler, E., and T. McCourt (2002). ‘Radio redefines itself, 1947–1962’, in M. Hilmes and J. Loviglio (eds), Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio. New York: Routledge, pp. 367–87. Schapiro, M. (1978) ‘Recent abstract painting’, in Modern Art. New York: George Braziller, pp. 213–26. Schwartz, T. (1983). Media: The Second God. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Schwartz, T., and R. Kostelanetz (1996). ‘Tony Schwartz, American hörspielmacher’, Perspectives of New Music, 34.1, 56–64, www.jstor.org/stable/833484. ‘Sound Drama’ (1956). Time, 6 February, 36. ‘Sounds of a Nation’ (1956). P. Roberts, director and producer, CBS Radio Workshop, 18 November 1956. Spinelli, M. (2009). ‘“Masters of sacred ceremonies”: Welles, Corwin, and a radiogenic modernist literature’, in D. R. Cohen, M. Coyle and J. Lewty (eds), Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, pp. 68–88.

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Taylor, T. D. (1993). ‘The sound of the avant-garde’, review of D. Kahn and G.  Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination. Postmodern Culture, 4.1, doi:10.1353/pmc.1993.0051. Tiffany, D. N. (1994). Review of D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination. Modernism/modernity, 1.3, 244–6. Traube, L. (1956). ‘Radio followup’, Variety, 17 October, 46. Van Horne, H. (1942). ‘Radio grows up’, Theatre Arts, May, 98. ‘Who’s Who on CBS Radio Workshop’ (1956). TV Radio Mirror, July, 56–9. ‘A Writer at Work’ (1956). S. Davis, director. CBS Radio Workshop, 12 October 1956.

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Croaks and calls: posthuman sound ecologies in the neo-avant-garde Jesper Olsson One of many evocative works of feminist art from the 1970s is American artist Louise Lawler’s sound piece Birdcalls. It was initiated early in the decade, developed over the following years, and is usually dated 1972–81. Consisting of a tape recording supplemented by a visual appendix, Birdcalls offers a critique of the male hegemony of the art world, delivered through an at once simple and subtle sonic operation. A list of names of contemporary artists, mainly culled from the minimalist, conceptualist and performance roster – Acconci, Andre, Barry, Beuys and so on – are uttered as if by a bird. Lawler explores a vocal register that drifts away from cultivated human articulation and brings these symbols of art towards the animal and the aviary.1 Birdcalls is a funny work (as goes without saying) and offers a mocking critique of gender positions in the art field. The work, however, is more ingenious than this, and it is linked to certain strands in postwar art and literature, which engage with important transformations of culture, society and everyday life. On the one hand, Lawler explores the aesthetic potential of new sound technologies, which were to expand artistic expressivity in many ways. On the other, she acknowledges, in sound, the profound and decisive interlacing of humans and technologies that the postwar period brought about. And in both respects, she connects with the flourishing field of radio art and sound poetry during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This is also the field to be traversed in this chapter, while lending an ear to how the sounds of humans get entangled with the sounds of technologies and animals and, especially, the calls of birds. These entanglements are quite pervasive and they affect the conception of an autonomous human subject standing in front of a world of objects and sounds that it identifies and controls. More than this, the works to be approached here challenge some of the established and entrenched hierarchies between humans, animals and machines. One way of designating and analysing these entanglements is, thus, by turning to the notion of the posthuman, as it has been developed by theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles,

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Rosi Braidotti and others. By exploring works of radio art and sound poetry as ‘posthuman sound ecologies’, it is possible to pose important questions about the human and non-human that have a specific resonance in the early twenty-first century, when the interweaving of humans and technical media has become ubiquitous. This requires taking into account an expanded and denaturalised conception of ecology (Morton, 2007; Hörl, 2017): ecologies involve nature as well as artifice and technologies. The composition of such sound ecologies was far from rare during the postwar decades. Here I will focus on works by three different writers and artists from the postwar decades. Samuel Beckett’s well-known radio play All That Fall (1956) will function as the springboard for a discussion of how the sounds of animals are explored in experimental radio art from the 1960s and early 1970s by Swedish artists and poets Åke Hodell and Öyvind Fahlström. The works to be discussed were all produced within the technical and institutional frameworks offered by postwar public radio  – the studio facilities at the BBC and SR (Sveriges Radio, Swedish Public Radio). The aesthetic affordances of the medium are activated to a shifting degree in the works, but the technical infrastructure offered by public radio is a condition for them. It allows for the (new) connections between animal, machine and human. This trio is also, famously, evoked in the subtitle to Norbert Wiener’s breakthrough publication Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). As a new field for knowledge work, cybernetics is important for an understanding of how the human subject was affected and transformed by technology during the second half of the twentieth century (see Hayles, 1999). In developing and using a mathematical concept of information, cybernetics transgressed human language and approached all beings (animals as well as machines) as informational processes. German media theorist Erich Hörl (2017: 4–5) has designated this as a ‘cyberneticization’ of life and society, and has – via the work of Félix Guattari – described how a ‘machinocentric world’, a technological culture of sense and a new aesthetic paradigm hereby emerges, which is not subjected to and regulated by the workings of human language (Hörl, 2017: 16). This transformation affected the arts, and especially the art of the neoavant-garde. The vibrant field of new forms and practices created here entailed a weird mix of materialities and semiotics, which can be connected to a new technological situation conditioned by cybernetics and information theory. What is at stake in this mix is, not least, a new aesthetic investigation of the relations between animals, humans and machines; an investigation that challenges binary conceptual mappings of the world, such as subject and object, organic and artificial, human and animal, human and surroundings. At issue are other modes of subjectivity and communication.



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Consequently, these half-century-old sound pieces can be revisited today in order to shed light on a current situation, in which the posthuman and machinocentric is a much more tangible reality than it was fifty years ago.

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Animals, media and sound recordings: a cybernetic take One of the most iconic images from the early twentieth century shows a loyal dog sitting beneath an organically shaped horn. The image of Nipper listening to ‘his master’s voice’ on a gramophone record has continued to operate in both commercial iconography and in the public mind for a long time, and in a variety of contexts. Its success is not surprising, since the image captures a cuteness and naivety as well as an alertness in dogs that are highly valued. At the same time, the contrast between something natural (an animal) and something highly artificial (a modern feat of engineering) gives the image an extra charge. More surprising is, perhaps, that this combination of animals and technical media has been far from unusual during the last hundred and fifty years. On the contrary, there is a tradition of similar interlacings to be discovered, as scholars such as Akira Lippit, Jussi Parikka and Jacob Smith have shown. While Parikka has analysed the convergences of insects and swarming with media technologies and networks in his Insect Media, Smith engages with ‘eco-sonic media’ in his book of the same name, exploring, among other things, how animals became part of a modern media infrastructure through the custom of keeping caged canary birds in households from the mid-­nineteenth century onwards, which prefigured domestic phonographic practices. Such more-than-human art-and-media entanglements would proliferate in acoustic arts – for example in music, sound art, sound poetry and Hörspiele – during the period in focus here. And they were not restricted to humans and animals, in a narrower sense, but included humans and various technological ensembles as well as natural or planetary phenomena, as Douglas Kahn has shown in his investigations into the weirder sound regions of whistlers and other atmospheric phenomena in Earth Sound Earth Signal (2013). This is also confirmed by a cursory look at the sound art lists and archives covering the period. Accordingly, the ‘Sound’ section of the online archive Ubuweb includes such gems as Anna Lockwood’s intimations of animals and nature in early pieces, for example Tiger Balm or Bubbling (both 1970). The latter is a reminder of her collection of aquatic sounds in the River Archive (Austin and Kahn, 2011: 312). A more comprehensive inventory would also include more or less forgotten works such as Stanley Lunetta’s ‘Spider Song’ (1968) (Austin and Kahn, 2011: 183–92),

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in which the human–animal connection is mediated by a famous comic, or the strange intersensorial composition ‘Fur Music’ by Nelson Howe (1971) (Austin and Kahn, 2011: 295–7). Similarly, an account of the sound poetry scene would have to contend that the genre thrived on energies and meanings engendered when the human voice was challenged by something else, such as animal cries or the noise of technologies. Consequently, most genealogies of the genre’s postwar fate find an important crossroad in Antonin Artaud’s 1947 recording for French Public Radio of Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God), which veers towards the primal scream and animal cries. Similarly, the explorations of the ‘factory of the body’ in the work of Henri Chopin, or the semi-abstract soundscapes evoked in the compositions of Bengt Emil Johnson, or the playful interspecies translations of concrete poet Bob Cobbing in a poem such as ‘Alphabet of Fishes’, all uncover worlds that are not solely dependent on human articulation. Further samples could be adduced, but more important is to ask what conditioned these sonic adventures. One answer lies, certainly, in the new recording devices, especially the tape recorder, but also, for instance, contact microphones and loudspeakers that became available (see Morton, 2004). Not only was it now possible to explore the acoustic ­properties of the human voice and body, but also to dive into an ocean of sound beyond. However, this story of technology – underwritten by practitioners such as Chopin and Cobbing (Olsson, 2011a: 65) – is supplemented by cybernetics, which circumvented human language and, thus, also changed linguistic and semiotic activities in literature and art. The latter was eminently observable in the avant-garde aesthetics of concrete and visual poets, sound poets, minimalists, conceptualists and Fluxus artists. Traditional notation systems and languages were interspersed with alphanumerical code, graphical figures, drawings, photography and so on. This can be linked to Katherine Hayles’s astute analysis of how languages and humans during these decades were to be merged with codes and machines; what she calls ‘intermediation’ (Hayles, 2005: 30–3), a concept that is particularly resonant here as it explicitly acknowledges the cybernetic connection. For artists and poets working with sound, such a transgression of human language entailed not only an exploration of other signifying systems, but a conflation of the human voice with all kinds of noise – cries, calls, croaks, buzzes, hums, drones and so on – that the acoustic ecologies of the new century mustered. In Hörl’s analysis, the abovementioned ‘cyberneticization’ of society, which he also describes as an ‘ecologization’ of thinking and being, began with the control revolution around 1900 (Beniger, 1982). It took a second step with cybernetics and computers in the mid-century, and would,

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among other things, entail a radical ontological upheaval, dethroning the Anthropos and putting humans into the same setting as other animals and machines. Today, a third phase has been reached, with an ‘explosion of environmental agency’ engendered by, for example, algorithmic environments and sensor networks (Hörl, 2017: 9). This complex techno-ecological situation displaces ideas of an autonomous individual. From this perspective it is, then, possible to return to postwar sound and radio art as an aesthetic exploration of how a new technological environment affected the relation between human and more-than-human – other animals as well as various machines – and at the same time suggested the emergence of a ‘posthuman’ subjectivity (Hayles, 1999; Braidotti, 2015). In the following sections, I will approach some works that through new sound technologies explore the limits of the human in an encounter with the sounds of animals and birds.

Rural sounds, dead language In 1956 the BBC executive and director Donald McWhinnie was occupied with the production of a drama that belonged to a body of work that would have a huge impact on late twentieth-century culture and art. McWhinnie’s challenge was to transpose the written words on paper in Samuel Beckett’s new play All That Fall into the audio-real soundscape created by modern radio. There were, of course, many problems to be solved in the process, and one of the daunting tasks provoked an exchange of letters between the director and the writer. Regarding the reproduction of ‘rural sounds’ that were to be heard in the beginning of Beckett’s play, as the protagonist Maddy Rooney comes walking along the road to town, McWhinnie wrote to Beckett: ‘I’m sorry to disturb you about the animals. Of course, we have realistic recordings, but the difficulty is that it is almost impossible to obtain the right sort of timing and balance with realistic effects. By using good mimics I think we can get real style and shape into the thing’ (qtd. in Esslin, 1980: 128). Beckett did not like the idea, but eventually approved of the solution to privilege ‘style and shape’ over ‘realistic recordings’. This aesthetic and technological conundrum comprises a conflict between mimesis and formalist play, between realism and artifice – a tension explored by many modernists and avant-gardists during the century. A related issue is the challenge that new media and technical recordings of sound brought to artistic practices steeped in various sign systems and representational codes. Last, but not least, the exchange between Beckett and McWhinnie actualised the problem of how animals – or, more generally, the non-human – were to be accounted for in an artistic medium not restricted to the use of alphabetic signs.

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All of these questions are interconnected, and they are elaborated in the play, even if mostly in words rather than in sound. In All That Fall, as in other works by the author, the (post)modern mutation of humans is approached through a rapprochement to animals and matter, earth and dirt. Connected to this is the prosthetic and cyborgian poetics activated in many of Beckett’s texts, from the employment of media such as tape recorders and bicycles to the use of textual operations of mutilation and inoculation (see Jameson, 2002; Tajiri, 2007). And even if technologies and their sonic output do not play a central role in All That Fall, they are present in the plot through, for instance, train and car, and they affect time, space and perception. Moreover, the technical apparatus had an impact on the very production of the radio play (see Esslin, 1980), which it is not possible to delve deeper into here. My intention is primarily to bring up some observations on animals and their sounds in Beckett’s play, which will function as a backdrop for the reflections on the other radio works to be discussed. This kind of sound is, actually, what a listener to Beckett’s play hears as it starts. ‘Rural sounds’ are the first words in the text and they will be crucial for setting the atmosphere. But the ‘Sheep, bird, cow, cock, severally, then together’, as the ensuing sentence runs, will also find deeper significance, ranging from the familiar role as comic fold and skewed mirror for the anthropo-countenance to something more complex and evasive to the recurrent variations of becoming-animal and becoming-earth in the play (Beckett, 2006: 157). All That Fall displays a constant swerve away from the human and humane towards animals, soil, plants and other modes of being. This movement is a common theme in Beckett. Think, for instance, of Winnie in the mound, embedded by sand, in Happy Days (1961). Thus, Maddy Rooney adores the ‘laburnum’ and seems to envy its ontological condition (Beckett, 2006: 159). Or she simply wants to turn into a ‘big slop thick with grit and dust and flies’ (2006: 159), or into something even more elemental, ‘oh to be in atoms, in atoms!’ (2006: 163), when human existence seems just too much of a hassle and too burdened by convention, negotiation, insufficiency, failure and sorrow. This transformation of subjectivity and movement towards the nonhuman is ambiguous, fraught with irony and contradiction. Maddy, while longing for the vegetal, makes resistance towards being treated like a mere thing (2006: 164), and distinctions are acknowledged: ‘Let us halt a moment and let this vile dust fall back on the viler worms’, as she suggests after a car has passed and sprayed dust on her and Mr Tyler (2006: 161). Dust is an element for the worms, but the difference from the bipeds on the road is not one of kind but of degree (‘viler’). Sometimes even insects



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seem  animated by a higher ethical inclination – ‘Pissmires do it for one another … I have seen slugs do it’ (2006: 170). Still, long-standing revered symbols as well as romantic notions of nature and animals are ridiculed, as are overblown humanist ideals: mrs rooney: Yes, it was a hinny, he rode into Jerusalem or wherever it was on  a hinny. [Pause.] That must mean something. [Pause.] It’s like the ­sparrows, than many of which we are of more value, they weren’t sparrows at all. mr rooney: Than many of which! … You exaggerate, Maddy. mrs rooney: They weren’t sparrows at all! mr rooney: Does that put our price up? (2006: 185)

At other times, the animals and, not least, their expressive acts, such as birdsong and other things, seem to be what Maddy longs for – the ‘cooing of the ringdoves’ or the ‘Venus birds! Billing in the woods all the long summer’ (2006: 162). On the other hand, at what seems like the most charged moment of the play, all animals fall silent, including the birds; even the wind ‘scarcely stirs the leaves’ – ‘All is still. No living soul in sight. There is no one to ask. The world is feeding’ (2006: 180). Accordingly, the play and its play with animals and their sounds offers a complex acoustic ecology of the human and the non-human. Moreover, the absence of sound as well as human voices and language plays an equally important role, as in the scene above, which is an exact inversion of the cacophonic scene that sets off the play. The cacophonies are, moreover, far from limited to animals or noisy non-human entities, such as a train whistle. Human modes of expression are also afflicted. Thus, Maddy complains, several times, about the strangeness of her language and speech. At one point, her husband Dan describes her utterances as a ‘dead language’. It seems directly linked to the detritus and waste that becomes soil. Thus, it is part of the gravitational pull, the geo-force, at work in the play: all that fall. And in the end, it is end and death, or finitude and transience, that permeate all bodies, voices and sounds that commingle in All That Fall.2 I would also suggest that the mixing of ontologies and the displaced subjectivities that are encountered in Beckett’s piece could be materialised in a more evocative way through the medium of radio and recorded sound, through its play with acousmatic sounds, for instance, or in complex montages of human voices and non-human sounds, or in radio’s specific affordance of making present absent bodies – all features that Beckett would explore fully in later dramatic works. Even though he sticks to words here, All That Fall sets the stage for further acoustic experimentation in the wake of new ­technical media and cybernetics during the postwar decades.

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Minimalist media ecologies In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Swedish writer, artist and composer Åke Hodell would turn to radio and the recently invented genre of ‘textsound-composition’ in order to expand and differentiate his avant-garde practice. Hodell had, at this point, a fascinating biographical and artistic trajectory behind him. As a former pilot in the Swedish air force, he had experienced a heavy crash during a training session in the south of Sweden in 1941. He survived, but was severely injured and forced to endure a long convalescence, during which literature became a major interest. In 1953 Hodell published his first collection of poetry, Flyende pilot (Escaping Pilot), moulded by a modernist idiom based on the metaphor as central device. In 1962 the follow-up, Ikaros död (The Death of Icarus), came out, containing poems along the same lines as the debut. In reality, however, Hodell was, from the mid-1950s, moving in a somewhat different direction. In his so far unpublished poetic work he tried to configure – in text, image and sound – the complex experience of being a modern pilot, whose body and mind were incorporated into a sophisticated technical system of gauges, meters, screens and radio transmitter, which mediated and, undoubtedly, transformed the perception of the world. Put in other words, Hodell sought to investigate the new cybernetic assemblage of human and machine through the old, but constantly changing mediaaesthetic assemblage called poetry. Fittingly, the latter was undergoing a radical metamorphosis in the neoavant-garde of the period, not least due to the emergence of new media. In Sweden this kind of work, often aggregated as ‘concrete poetry’, was a major literary and artistic force (Olsson, 2011b). This was undoubtedly a productive context for what Hodell came to designate as his ‘electronisms’, which were formed by the insertion of visual figures and alphanumerical code into language and poetry and by the adoption of various devices from the Futurists and Dada (see Gardfors, 2017). In 1963 Hodell published his minimalist concrete poetry book igevär, consisting of the three syllables I, line after line of the single letter over twelve pages, followed by the peripeteia gev, and then numerous strata of the vowel ä on thirty-five pages before the poem concluded with a harsh and liberating r. The same year a sound version of the piece was performed by four male voices at the ABF house (the workers’ association for culture and education) in Stockholm in front of a surprised audience. During the following years, Hodell created a number of experiments in the same vein, exploring collage, happenings and sound poetry, and moving smoothly between gallery, book, theatre, radio and (even) television.

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If sound was integral to Hodell’s practice, he would by mid-decade dig deeper into the genre of text-sound composition, and later on, in the 1970s, also turn towards the more familiar radio drama. His first important work in this vein was Structures III, staged at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in April 1967 and broadcast by Swedish Public Radio, which had also commissioned the piece.3 It is a 32-minute-long composition, based on repetition, consisting of the sounds of different weaponry developed during the twentieth century, culminating with the apocalyptic sound of  an  H-bomb. The work is minimalist and oriented towards the building of a structure. Its sources are few and easily identifiable. There is no abstraction of the sound object along the lines of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète. As Johan Gardfors claims, ‘referentiality and citation’ are the cornerstones here and in Hodell’s poetics of intervention in general (2017: 92). Such referentiality is also operative in the two sound works by Hodell that I want to discuss here, The Road to Nepal (1971) and The Djurgården Ferry across Styx (1972). If military machinery and technology as transformers of human life and experience are at the forefront in Structures III, other beings and environments are staged and investigated in these two works. In addition, we encounter the sounds of ‘nature’ – especially through the croaks, calls and twittering of birds – but also more urban and slightly mythical spaces and surroundings, which complexify the meanings and experiences engendered. The Road to Nepal was composed and broadcast in 1971, in the aftermath of a series of explicitly political works by Hodell. In these books, collages and gramophone records, topical issues are addressed: the nuclear arms race in USS Pacific Ocean (1968), counter-cultural activism in Where is Eldridge Cleaver (1969), the US war in Vietnam in Mr. Nixon’s Dreams (1970), colonialism and racism in Mr. Smith in Rhodesia (1970). From this perspective, the new sound piece from 1971 might seem like a retreat from the turbulence of society and politics towards a space of inwardness and meditative reflection. But with further listening, the situation in The Road to Nepal becomes more multifaceted. The acoustic ecology is complex, and the same goes for the production of subjectivity that is at stake. The Road to Nepal opens with the sounds of birds. The landscape evoked is, however, from the beginning quite dense, and it is difficult not to associate it with a tropical forest. The title is a driving force in this regard, and a slightly exoticising strand comes to permeate the listening. As the piece continues, the birdsong encounters other sounds and mutates. First, what sounds like a human voice, electronically filtered, enters the space and is soon manipulated further – probably through changes of tape speed  – acquiring a robot-like and machinic character. Suddenly, a motorbike

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passes, and the cacophonic acoustics of the jungle in all its variety comes to life. We hear birds twittering, insects buzzing, and monkeys and other mammals, more difficult to identify, calling. The sound of the motorcycle will come back, and in the first half of the piece it functions as a kind of cue or signal when the soundscape is about to change: from animal sound to human voice to electronic rhythm. After about twelve minutes (of the total 21' 34"), a thorough change takes place. The sounds become more layered, different sounds are superimposed, and this builds up until around sixteen minutes when a brief attenuation begins and the motorbike crashes (16' 50"). The rest of the piece consists of darker, gargling and more muffled sounds. They come forth as more elemental, no longer the expression of individual beings or objects, but rather the sound of a diffusely shaped body or the sound of matter as such. At twenty-one minutes, clear birdsong suddenly erupts again, as if dawn arrives. This epiphanic moment strengthens the otherwise quite weak narrative elements in the work. The year after The Road to Nepal, Hodell followed up with The Djurgården Ferry across Styx. The work displays several similarities with its predecessor – the minimalist structure, the use of repetition and echoes – but the more-than-human acoustics, especially birds and their calls, take on a different meaning. The Djurgården Ferry across Styx has an elementary narrative framework provided by the Greek myth, alluded to in the title, about Styx, the river of oblivion and the borderline to Hades. With Hodell, this mythical and metaphysical passage between life and death has been transposed to Sweden and the city of Stockholm, where we find the Djurgården island, park and recreation area, the destination of the ferry in the piece and also Hodell’s home for many years. The Djurgården Ferry across Styx is another 20-minute piece, and it starts with the voice of Hodell reading or chanting in Swedish the phrase ‘The sky is darkened by exhaust-blue crows, croak, croak …’, which is repeated several times and expanded into a larger space through the use of echo before fading away. This exposition is followed by a horn, the ferry, a church bell and the sound of actual crows, which engenders a slightly Gothic atmosphere for the scene. After that, Hodell’s voice returns with a contraction and a series of variations of the initial sentence: ‘exhaust-blue crows, croak, croak … dead crows … the crows of Charon … the crows of oblivion … the crows of sleep … the crows of hell’. These words, and especially the mimicking of a crow by Hodell, are manipulated electronically and combined and layered by the presence of other sounds: the signal horn, transformed into a drone, various more shrill signals, electronic buzzing and what might be a railway.

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After about four minutes, the sonic landscape dissolves in a short series of croaks by actual crows, followed by a variation of drones in different pitches and ended by a short human scream (eight minutes). Then, we briefly hear church bells replaced by a major minimalist drone session that continues for almost ten minutes – once again made slightly denser and markedly spatial through shifts in pitch and through the subtle presence of water. Eventually, the crows come back for a moment (around sixteen minutes), after which a minimalist synth-tune evolves, becoming more elaborated and hectic, before subsiding and disclosing the sound of a train departing, with which the whole piece ends. There are several common traits between the works. Apart from the formal similarities, there is the co-presence of animal and especially bird sounds, human voices, even if much more subdued, and various sonic effects of technologies and cultural artefacts. This formation highlights the three ontological ‘spheres’ that were to be compressed into one through the informatic paradigm of cybernetics (human, animal, machine) discussed above. Moreover, it actualises the three entangled ecologies analysed by Félix Guattari: ‘the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity’ (2005: 18). The latter is here mutated both through electronic modulation of the voice and through its interlacing with the more-than-human sounds and expressions. This entanglement is, as hinted at above, a central theme in the 1960s works of Hodell. In some important pieces, such as Lågsniff (1965–66) – both a book, a performance and a film for television – this comes forth through the intermediation of language and code, and through the thematisation of the technically mediated experience of the pilot in the cockpit. Similar observations can be made in relation to other works, such as the collage book Självbiografi (Autobiography, 1967) or the abovementioned Structures III. All of these stage, in different ways and media, how perception, agency and thinking are affected by information technologies. What is of special interest here is, however, how the animal and nonhuman are allowed to enter. One path has already been described. The aesthetics opened up by radio and recording technologies paved the way for an acoustic presence of animals in art, and for a playful technical transformation of this presence. Moreover, the recording, playback and broadcasting enabled articulations of the cyberneticised experience according to which seeing and hearing, work and play, even love, are modulated by code, signals and electric circuits. Most notably, acoustic ecologies could be composed, which – just like the assemblage of humans, animals and ­technologies – displaced the subject/object organisation of human representations of the world and instead privileged immersion, participation and complex relationalities (see Connor, 2011).

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The Road to Nepal and The Djurgården Ferry across Styx construct such sonic spaces in which the Cartesian and hierarchical orderings of the world are dissolved. Rather than presupposing a distinct and autonomous human subject, these pieces blur the demarcations that frame experience along such lines. They do not present a narrator with full or almost full access to events taking place outside him/her, or a human protagonist situated at the centre of a story, which would imply a firmly anchored listener outside of the work. Instead, machines form our seeing and listening, and the sounds of objects and animals are just as important in constituting the posthuman environment that we as listeners are immersed in, and risk getting lost in. Moreover, human language and the human voice itself are dethroned through technical manipulation, by being silenced, or by becoming an instrument for mimicking birds. Their privilege is dissolved. For Hodell, this generates indeterminacy and openness, but also an existential anxiety. At least, this is a possible interpretation of the posthumanist settings in his books. In the sound works, these settings and ecologies seem to create a space for spiritual experience. This is also the most common interpretation of the two works discussed above (see Ekbom, 1995), and it is supported by the artist’s outspoken interest in Zen and the idea of reaching Satori, the stated goal for some of his works with electronics (Hodell, 1967). The minimalist drones and the repetitions should, consequently, lull the listener into an experience of pure contemplation and a release from the turmoil of history and material bodies. Such a reading is plausible, but it comes at a cost. One has to ignore or at least ameliorate, in some way, the obvious and obdurate presence of death and even apocalypse in the works. The Road ends on a lighter note, with birdsong. But this is preceded by a long passage where the sounds evoke a more primordial or entropic state in which undifferentiated matter seems to reign, and where no clear signals or meanings are receivable. Furthermore, as we embark The Djurgården Ferry, the lighter birdsong has been substituted with the croaks of crows, which, as we have seen, will accompany the listener while crossing the waters to Hades. That technical and ‘natural’ (water, birds) sounds are grafted on to each other, and that the crows are described as emitting polluting sounds (‘exhaust-blue’, avgasblå in Swedish) – this suggests a sinister assemblage of something naturalorganic and something chemically toxic and highly artificial. This gives an environmentally apocalyptic touch to the sceneries and micro-narratives explored. The forest and the waters are, moreover, marked by death, sleep and oblivion, as is emphatically stated by the voice of Hodell. Taken together, such circumstances point to an interpretation of the final sound of a train in The Djurgården Ferry across Styx as the sound of departure. What it departs from is not only life, but perhaps even human life as



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such, or the Anthropocene. Here, in the intimations of entropy and death, another convergence between the acoustic ecologies of All That Fall and the sounds of Hodell can be observed.

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Swedish birds and mixed ontologies Hodell’s interest in sound experiments actually goes much further back than his work with ‘electronisms’. In some biographical accounts he mentions, for instance, the deep impression that the scat of Louis Armstrong had upon him as a child, a form of singing that has a strong resonance with sound poetry. Even so, Hodell’s more elaborate sound art must, as suggested, be linked to the emergence of text-sound composition in Sweden in the mid-1960s. The term text-sound was coined by the poets and composers Lars-Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson in order to capture a new practice that integrated word and sound in intermedia configurations (Higgins, 1966). The need for a name became urgent with the Fylkingen festival in 1967 (see Hultberg, 2016). And even though many artists, composers and poets in Sweden were engaged in this kind of practice at the time, a specific starting point for the genre was soon identified: the work of Öyvind Fahlström. Fahlström was the most internationally renowned Swedish artist during the period. He was also the instigator of concrete poetry in Sweden through his manifesto from 1953 (see Olsson, 2011b). Versatile in many arts and media, Fahlström had begun to work with sound recordings in earnest in the early 1960s, and in the autumn and winter of 1962 he composed a seminal piece called Fåglar i Sverige (Birds in Sweden), designated – ­generically – as ‘radiophonic poetry’. It was shaped by the specificities of the radio medium, and in January 1963 the piece was broadcast on Swedish Public Radio. Fåglar i Sverige is based on an ornithological field guide named Fåglar i Sverige, written by Erik Rosenberg, a recording of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ and a visit to Fahlström’s artist friend Jasper Johns’s summer house on the American East Coast (see Hultberg, 1999; Bessa, 2008; Olsson, 2016).4 This tripartite experiential merger was triggered by Fahlström’s long-standing interest in language and sign systems, not least their specific materialities – as his concrete poetry confirms – and in the possibility of transgressing the human and anthropocentric perspective (his early surrealist poetry displays a strong curiosity in the animal as a test case for the latter). In the radio poem from 1962, the focus is, as the title makes clear, on birds, even if not exclusively. It references actual birds as well as birds from myth, literature and art. The piece as a whole consists of nine parts. It begins

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with echoing steps in an apartment building and a soft voice (Fahlström’s) reading some lyrically inflected lines with an exoticising bent (‘In the Arabian desert  …’) accompanied by the suggestive  Leitmotif  from the SF  film Forbidden Planet (1956). And it ends, tellingly, with The  Tornados  hit ‘Telstar’, celebrating the satellite in orbit,  a  technology that had made planet Earth as such ‘programmable’,  according to one of Marshall McLuhan’s famous and prophetic sayings. At surface level, the soundscape established in Fåglar i Sverige comes forth as a collage that combines narrated segments, readings of concrete poetry, found text, talk and sound, sampled music stretching from opera to pop, and a variety of spectacular sonic effects (animals, guns, birds, jet engines, etc.). Moreover, Fahlström exploits some of the defining traits and affordances of radio, at least according McLuhan (1964), such as the construction of an intimate space; for instance, through the narration in the beginning of the piece, or when he, later on, in the sixth part, addresses the listener and advises him or her to stick out their tongues. This attests to the medium’s potential to create communities as well as its capacity for manipulation. Fåglar i Sverige is without doubt a complex and funny work. It operates on many levels and forces the listener to attend to both sonic textures, voices, words and sentences and the media technological conditions and how they operate on the senses, producing affects as well as meanings. Here I want to focus on the translational processes between human and nonhuman, and especially in relation to animals and birds. Such processes are a key to the piece and were at the forefront of Fahlström’s art and thinking during the period. It is no coincidence that he now invents, and also uses in his work, two artificial languages – ‘birdo’ (fåglo in Swedish), developed out of the written transcriptions of bird calls, and ‘whammo’, based on the onomatopoetic expressions in comics. One early instance of such intersemiotic and interspecies translational activity in Fåglar i Sverige is displayed in the fourth part. Here we encounter a fragment with field recordings of, among other things, birdsong, made by the famous naturalist, filmmaker, photographer and whistling artist Jan Lindblad, who was also a celebrated imitator of animals. Among the bird sounds in the segment are, interspersed, some verbal comments by Lindblad, such as, ‘it is a very dull, strong sound …’ Descriptions of this kind submit to a familiar anthropomorphic approach to the non-human. But the piece as a whole is an exploration of alternative modes of negotiating between languages and ways of being. It navigates the acoustic spaces shared by different entities and sign systems, investigating what Jacob Smith designates as a ‘zoosemiotic communication shared across species’ (Smith, 2015: 44).

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Accordingly, Fahlström plays with onomatopoeia and other forms of transport between sign and reality, music and noise, humans, animals, artefacts and machinery. What becomes obvious in the work is an openness and fluidity, if not a continuum, between previously separated semiotics  and spheres of being. This is, for instance, intimated in the sonic modulations and mutations – presented below as scored in the ­manuscript – from the part devoted to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and Sir Basil Rathbone’s recording of the poem. Rathbone’s words, to the left, are vocalised by Fahlström, as transcribed to the right, and then, in the next phase, ­translated  – ­according to the logic of his invented languages – into the recorded sounds from a machine gun and so on: remember ringmunchbrrru(p) December Dringsmekbrrru(p) ember hm-brrru(p) floor f(e)h-oww … ringmunchbrrru(p) telephone–munch–machine gun Dringsmekbrrru(p) telephone–smack–machine gun hm-brrru(p) humming–machine gun f(e)h-oww shovel snow–elephant

Thus, a posthuman sound ecology is established, in which we as listeners become immersed and where the sonic mutations and translational processes continue, without any natural or self-evident endpoint. Translation here comes forth as a key trope and an all-encompassing existential operation (see Flusser, 2002: 194) that negotiates not only the difference between languages, but also between creatures and ontological domains. Instead of pointing to a universal code that could redeem differences – such as the language of nature, or of mathematics, as in information theory – Fåglar i Sverige finds its meaning in an opacity and materiality enforced by the addition of sounds and a translation without end. The play between meaning and materiality in the poem cannot be terminated.

Conclusion The specific acoustic mix of human, animal and machine in Fåglar i Sverige is connected to the impact of cybernetics on culture and art at the time. Fahlström had, like many others, read Norbert Wiener in the 1950s (Olsson, 2017). But if cybernetics, in its early incarnations, challenged established configurations such as subject and object, it was also focused

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on communication and control. In particular, it presents communication as control, through feedback loops and through the reduction of noise. This is hardly the case with the sound ecology that emerges in Fahlström’s work. Rather than reinforcing closure through negative feedback, such as verbalisations that anchor sound and noise by stabilising the ambiguity of a piece, the acoustic montage multiplies elements, which engender new relations and new perspectives. Such an expansion, which can be compared to the addition of new metalevels or planes of composition in a work – some literary metafiction would be a case in point (see Burton, 2017) – relativises and ecologises thinking and experience. There are relations, but no privileged and controlling external position. Everything is connected to something, but nothing is connected to everything, to paraphrase Donna Haraway’s (2016) discussion of ‘sympoiesis’, an ontogenetic process, which grows and makes relations beyond every idea of a closed work or system. What, then, about the other works discussed here? While Beckett’s acoustic intimations of animals in All That Fall can be read as part of a more generalised negotiation of human existence with organic and inorganic matter and entropy, Hodell’s sonic exploration of birds and mythical as well as metaphysical passages leads to a state where ontological hierarchies are dissolved, whether this is to be framed and understood as an experience of a Zen Buddhist Satori or death. There is, thus, an affinity with Fahlström’s work in the subversion of anthropocentrism and in the alternative assemblages of humans, animals, matter and technical artefacts. However, there are differences as well. In both Beckett and Hodell one can perceive the echoes from older metaphysical and, even, religious scenarios and narratives, fuelled by the idea of overcoming lack and absence, of a fulfilment of sense and presence; or, on the contrary, by its impossibility, which is a negativity that operates according to the same scheme. In Fahlström, a new media situation has transformed the voices and sounds into a playful mix of events and relations that appear, combine, transform and dissolve, in similarity and difference, but within the same space and world. Instead of absence/presence his radio poem revolves around pattern and modulation, signal and noise, to paraphrase Hayles (1999). The world of Fåglar i Sverige is then, more radically, a posthuman ecology, which calls forth a reconsideration of subjectivity and the relation between human and more-than-human. The expansive and additive soundscape that engenders new acoustic figures and events – the ontogenetic ‘worlding’ in the work – could, as suggested, be linked to the kind of transgression of closed systems that Haraway designates as sympoiesis, as distinct from the autopoiesis of closed and self-sufficient



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informational systems, analysed by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and integral to the second wave of cybernetics (Hayles, 1999: 10–11). Actually, there are many artistic practices from the postwar decades that encourage such revisitings and rereadings in order to energise and complexify the current discussion and, thus, create a genealogy of the present state and of various contemporary efforts. As Hörl writes in an article apropos the work of Haraway: Without exception, all worlding now appears, and this is the point, to be constituted sympoietically; all worlding becomes a transworlding. It is motivated by a primary, trans-species, shared worldhood, indeed, by an environmentality based on an originary entanglement of always only partial relations, and manifests itself in this entanglement. (2018: 165–6)

Such a description seems strangely apposite to the posthuman sound ecology in Fahlström’s Fåglar i Sverige.

Notes 1 Lawler’s work can be found at Ubuweb: www.ubu.com/sound/lawler.html (accessed 11 October 2019). 2 In a recent study on Beckett’s short prose, Jonathan Boulter (2019) explores the posthuman subjectivity taking shape in these works and links it to questions of death and the posthumous. 3 All of the sound works by Hodell discussed here can be found on the CD Verbal Brainwash and Other Works 1963–1977 (Fylkingen Records), also on Ubuweb: www.ubu.com/sound/hodell.html (accessed 11 October 2019). 4 A CD with Fahlström’s piece is available in Hultberg (1999). The, so far, most elaborated reading of the piece can be found in Bessa (2008).

References Austin, L., and Kahn, D. (2011). Source: Music of the Avant-Garde 1966–1973. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beckett, S. (2006). The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume III of the Grove Centenary Edition. New York: Grove Press. Beniger, J. (1982). The Control Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bessa, A. S. (2008). Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Boulter, J. (2019). Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Braidotti, R. (2015). The Posthuman. Oxford: Polity. Burton, J. (2017). ‘Metafiction and general ecology: making worlds with worlds’, in E. Hörl (ed.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 253–83. Connor, S. (2011 [2005]). ‘Ears have walls: on hearing art’, in C. Kelly (ed.), Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 129–39. Ekbom, T. (1995). Bildstorm. Stockholm: Bonniers. Esslin, M. (1980). Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media. London: Methuen. Fahlström, Ö. (1962–63). Fåglar i Sverige/Birds in Sweden, transcription and CD in Hultberg (1999). Flusser, V. (2002). Writings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fuller, M. (2005). Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gardfors, J. (2017). Åke Hodell: Art and Writing in the Neo-Avant-Garde. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Guattari, F. (2005 [1989]). The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2005). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Higgins, D. (1966). Intermedia. New York: Something Else Press. Hodell, Å. (1967). ‘Skywriting’, Gorilla, 2, 1–9. Hodell, Å. (1971). The Road to Nepal, www.ubu.com/sound/hodell.html (accessed 29 April 2020). Hodell, Å. (1972). The Djurgården Ferry across Styx, www.ubu.com/sound/hodell. html (accessed 29 April 2020). Hultberg, T. (1999). Öyvind Fahlström i etern – Manipulera världen/Öyvind Fahlström on the Air – Manipulating the World. Stockholm: Sveriges Radio förlag. Hultberg, T. (2016). ‘Fylkingen’s text-sound festivals, 1967–1974’, in T. Ørum and J. Olsson (eds), A Cultural History of the Nordic Avant-Garde 1950–1975. Leiden: Brill, pp. 456–63. Hörl, E. (2017). ‘Introduction to general ecology: the ecologization of thinking’, in E. Hörl (ed.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–73. Hörl, E. (2018). ‘The environmentalitarian situation: reflections on the becoming-environmental of thinking, power, and capital’, Cultural Politics, ­ 14.2, 153–73. Jameson, F. (2002). A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso. Kahn, D. (2013). Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energy and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lawler, L. (1971–82), Birdcalls, www.ubu.com/sound/lawler.html (accessed 29 April 2020). Lippit, A. M. (2000). Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Scribners. Morton Jr, D. L. (2004). Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Morton, T. (2007). Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olsson, J. (2009). ‘“Ask tre … spole fem”. Beckett och bandspelaren’, in A. Cullhed et al. (eds), Ordens negativ. Lund: Symposium, pp. 241–57. Olsson, J. (2011a). ‘The audiographic impulse: doing literature with the tape recorder’, in M. Rubery (ed.), Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 61–75. Olsson, J. (2011b). ‘Kneaded language: concrete poetry and new media in the Swedish 1960s’, Modernism/Modernity, 18.2, 273–88. Olsson, J. (2016). ‘Radiophonic poetry and a blind movie – Öyvind Fahlsröm’s sound art’, in T. Ørum and J. Olsson (eds), A Cultural History of the Nordic Avant-Garde 1950–1975. Leiden: Brill, pp. 359–65. Olsson, J. (2017). Öyvind Fahlström: Ade-Ledic-Nander. Stockholm and London: Moderna Museet and Koenig Books. Parikka, J. (2010). Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, J. (2015). Eco-Sonic Media. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tajiri, Y. (2007). Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism. London: Palgrave. Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

5 Textual and audiophonic collage in Dutch and Flemish radio plays Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Siebe Bluijs

Writing in the 1930s, pioneering film scholar and early radio theorist Rudolf Arnheim argued that montage offered great possibilities for the radio play to establish itself as an art form, as it had done for film (see Hand and Traynor, 2011: 17–18; Drakakis, 1981: 5): ‘So long as radio drama neglects to take advantage of montage-forms and fails to use the most natural technical procedure for producing them, no zeal or imagination will carry broadcasting in this department beyond the first stages’ (Arnheim, 1986: 132). According to Arnheim, the affordances of montage lay at the heart of the radio medium. The variegated programming of radio stations and the listener’s ability to switch between channels presented a succession of heterogeneous elements. As such, the ‘[w]ireless directly juxtaposes what is farthest removed in space, time and thought with amazing vividness’ (1986: 119). This juxtaposition demanded a great deal of the listeners’ cognitive abilities. They were challenged to make connections between the ‘antagonistic transmissions one after another or even on top of each other’ (1986: 120). The new art form of the radio play, Arnheim stated, should use this inherent quality of radio to its advantage. Instead of relying on the listener’s associative capabilities, however, the montage of the radio play should strive for a naturalising effect, ‘where the various items are momentarily covered up to blend them in, so that a loose hazy texture is obtained which conveniently hides the seams of the montage’ (1986: 122). Arnheim provided the example of a fictitious documentary-style radio play avant la lettre, in which original sound fragments are used to convey a politician’s life story: The ease with which wireless can present occurrences at various places and times as a unity and in spatial juxtaposition is especially suggestive if it deals not only with imaginary themes, but also with genuine ones taken from reality. If, for instance, sound-shots of various episodes from the life of a politician existed, they could be put together in a sound-picture and so a whole life could be concentrated into a single hour. (1986: 116)



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According to Arnheim, montage should streamline the ‘sound-shots’ that are taken from ‘various places and times’ in ‘real life’ into a ‘unity’. The resulting ‘sound picture’ would be an autonomous radiophonic work. Another famous early radio theorist, Walter Benjamin, held an opposite view on educational radio pieces that were similar to Arnheim’s fictitious documentary: The literary radio play in particular is as little served by the arts-and-crafts cobbling together of so-called conversations, plucked from anthologies and from excerpts of works and letters, as by the dubious audacity of having Goethe or Kleist at the microphone, reciting the words of the script writer. (2014b: 370)

According to Benjamin, the radio play had enormous educational potential, as long as it went beyond the pedagogical tools that defined the older media. In his article ‘Zweierlei Volkstümlichkeit: Grunsätzliches zu einem Hörspiel’ (‘Two Kinds of Popularity: Fundamental Principles for a Radio Play’, 1932), he argued that textbooks and public lectures for laymen often provided watered-down versions of scholarship. ‘Popularization’ thus meant that knowledge was translated into more understandable – and therefore less accurate – terms: Radio – and this is one of its most notable consequences – has profoundly transformed this state of affairs. On the strength of its unprecedented technological potential to address unlimited masses simultaneously, popularization has outgrown its well-meaning, humanistic intentions and become an endeavor with its own formal laws. (2014b: 369–70)

For Benjamin, radio had to take into account its medium-specific constraints and affordances – its ‘formal laws’ – if it wished to elevate the listener: ‘It demands a total transformation and rearrangement of the material from the standpoint of popular relevance’ (2014b: 370). In this sense he envisioned a use of montage that differed diametrically from Arnheim’s understanding of the technique. In an earlier essay from the same year, ‘Theater und Rundfunk’ (‘Theater and Radio’), Benjamin brought montage in relation to the avant-garde movement of Epic Theater: Suffice it to say that the principle of Epic Theater, like that of montage, is that of interruption. Only here, interruption acts not as a stimulus, but as a pedagogical tool. It brings the action to a temporary halt, forcing the audience to take a critical position toward the proceedings and the actor to take a critical position toward his role. (2014a: 367)

For Benjamin, montage had an inherently critical function, precisely because it was able to counteract the streamlining characteristics of narrative unity.1

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Crucial to Benjamin’s notion of montage is the idea of i­nterruption. Instead of ‘conveniently hiding the seams of the montage’, to use Arnheim’s phrase, montage should be used as a means to draw attention to the fault lines between the individual elements.

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Montage and collage While both scholars argue that the technique is inherent to the radio medium, Arnheim and Benjamin present two contradicting interpretations of the affordances that montage offers for radio drama: ‘streamlining’ and ‘interruption’ respectively. The difference between these interpretations offers a guiding principle to understand the artistic strategy that is central to this chapter: collage. Collage is one of the defining techniques of the (neo-) avant-garde (Bürger, 1974: 77). It is commonly defined as the assemblage of heterogeneous materials in which the original source of the fragments remains recognisable (Perloff, 1986). At its conception collage revolutionised notions of ‘originality’ and ‘craftsmanship’ (Scheunemann, 2005: 33). The term was originally used in relation to painting, but it quickly became relevant in relation to other arts, such as film, photography and literature (Scheunemann, 2005: 27–8, 33). While it has its origins as a visual concept, the term has been used in the context of audiophonic art as well (Vowinckel, 1995). The terms ‘collage’ and ‘montage’ are sometimes used interchangeably.2 However, as Arnheim’s and Benjamin’s use of the term ‘montage’ demonstrates, the concept often gains different, even contradictory, meanings. The terminological confusion arises from the complicated relation between montage as a technical procedure and collage as an artistic strategy. What adds to the confusion is the notion that the collage technique in the arts originated in the experience of modernity, which was partly connected to media that rely on montage, such as film and radio (Banash, 2004). In film, for instance, meaning not only relies on the content of the individual shots (and the sounds on the soundtrack), but is the result of the juxtaposition and succession of these elements.3 Similarly, the (prototypical) radio play brings together voices, music and sound effects. These sounds are either recorded in a studio especially for the play or they are taken from pre-existing recordings. In the finalised radio play this distinction is irrelevant, however, since the individual elements are streamlined into the overall composition. Collage is thus similar to montage because it brings together heterogeneous elements into a new, artistic context. In contrast to montage, however, collage emphasises the heterogeneity of its elements and its sources.



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To understand the differentiation better, it is necessary to consider the use of the term collage in the context of theories of the avant-garde. The concept was initially theorised in relation to the plastic arts. According to art historian Peter Bürger (1984: 77), the incorporation of unchanged ‘reality fragments’ – such as the insertion of newspaper clippings in the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque – meant a departure from the humanistic perspective that had predominated in painting up until Cubism. This gesture had fundamental consequences for the arts: The insertion of reality fragments into the work of art fundamentally transforms that work. The artist not only renounces shaping a whole, but gives the painting a different status, since parts of it no longer have the relationship to reality characteristic of the organic work of art. They are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality. (1984: 78)

Following Theodor Adorno, whose political-ideological interpretation of the technique he explicitly rejects, Bürger understands collage as a composition principle that is defined by the negation of synthesis between the various elements and the artwork’s overall composition (1984: 79; cf. Adorno, 1970: 232). ‘The parts “emancipate” themselves from a ­superordinate whole; they are no longer its essential elements’ (Bürger, 1984: 80). Bürger argued that the inserted fragments play a double role: they function within the context of the work, and they simultaneously point to their original context. Marjorie Perloff has taken up this argument, suggesting that [c]ollage … subverts all conventional figure-ground relationships, for here nothing is either figure or ground; rather, the collage juxtaposes ‘real’ items … so as to create a curiously enigmatic pictorial surface. For each element in the collage has a dual function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert. (Perloff, 1986: 48–9).

For the purpose of this chapter, I distinguish between collage and montage as artistic practices. I understand montage as the act of bringing together various elements in which the sources’ original contexts are made subordinate to their function within the overall composition. In collage the individual fragments function simultaneously as an index of reality and as an element of the artistic whole. Defined as such, the concept of collage becomes relevant for radio plays that foreground the referential nature of the individual elements that make up the sound composition. This foregrounding relies on the use of montage as a technical procedure, that is also used in the prototypical radio play. The collage radio play, however, brings the seams of the montage technique to the foreground.

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Collage and the radio play The radio play’s reliance on montage might seem to be at odds with the artistic principle of the collage. Bürger has argued that his conception of collage does not apply to art forms in which montage is intrinsic to the medium – such as film: ‘In the film, the montage of images is the basic technical procedure. It is not a specifically artistic technique, but one that lies in the medium’ (Bürger, 1984: 73). Therefore, he argues: ‘Within the frame of a theory of the avant-garde, the use to which film puts the concept cannot become relevant because it is part and parcel of the medium’ (1984: 76–7). Thus, according to Bürger, the technical procedure of montage is at odds with the artistic principle of collage.4 Antje Vowinckel, by contrast, argues that collage can be a productive concept with regard to the radio play – another art form that relies on the technical procedure of montage. In her book Collagen im Hörspiel. Die Entwicklung einer radiophonen Kunst (1995) she traces the genealogy of what she calls the ‘collage radio play’ (particularly in the German-speaking world), and she offers a typology of the genre. Vowinckel distinguishes the artistic principle of collage from the technical procedure of montage (1995: 22). So, while her view on montage differs from Bürger’s, her definition of collage is principally in accordance with his. When the sounds mainly serve as an illustration to a narrator’s or a character’s discourse, Vowinckel states that the term ‘collage’ does not apply, since the individual elements then lack ‘materiale Eigenständigkeit’ (‘material autonomy’, 1995: 58). As the quotes from Arnheim and Benjamin indicate, the collage elements can point to different sources. Arnheim talks about original sound ­materials – or in his words: ‘sound-shots’; Benjamin speaks of ‘excerpts of works and letters’. Likewise, Vowinckel states that the radio play’s collage elements can either consist of words from external materials or original sound material; they can thus be subdivided into ‘textual’ and ‘audiophonic’ materials (1995: 156). She pays attention to the use of collage in literature and she devotes a chapter to collage radio plays that make extensive use of textual citations (‘Zitat-Collagen’), concluding that a textual citation refers less to an original context than audio material does (1995: 170), except when the text is well known to the extent that it is recognised as a quotation by (almost) everyone (1995: 181). This chapter takes the distinction between textual and audiophonic collage as a starting point. Doing so, it understands collage as a transmedial concept (Valcke, 2005: 300).5 This is relevant for the radio play, since the art form has a variety of semiotic elements at its disposal, namely spoken language, voice, music, noise, fading, cutting, mixing, the (stereophonic)

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positioning of the signals, electroacoustic manipulation, original sound (actuality) and silence (Huwiler, 2005: 57; Schmedes, 2002). This means that the radio play offers unique possibilities with regard to the artistic principle of collage, since it is able to combine textual collage (which relies on the semiotic element of language) and sound collage (which can pertain to voice, music, noise, etc.). Additionally, the radio play employs several (relatively) medium-specific techniques to manipulate and combine these elements (stereophony, fading, cutting, etc.). Of special importance with relation to collage is the semiotic element ‘original sound’ (Originalton), which refers to ‘found’ sound material that is not specifically made for the radio play. This material – which can consist of other semiotic elements such as voice and music – has to be recognised as ‘external’ for it to be regarded as a separate semiotic element (Huwiler, 2005, 67; Schmedes, 2002, 84–8).6 Since a defining characteristic of the (neo-)avant-garde is the breaking of boundaries between media and genres, the use of collage should be regarded in relation to a variety of artistic forms and media. The intrinsic multimodality and genre hybridity of the radio play (see Bernaerts, 2017a) makes it the medium par excellence for (neo-)avant-garde experiments. Its contingency on other media, such as literature, film, theatre and music, makes it a perfect test case for a transmedial approach to collage. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, radio play makers transformed the radio play into an art form that originated in the studio, rather than at the writer’s desk. By splicing together various ‘found’ materials and field recordings, these artists emancipated the medium from its historical ties to literature and the theatre (Cory, 1994). In the collage radio play, the ‘author’ often coincides with the director.7 At the same time, however, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous materials had strong affiliations with the (avant-garde) use of the collage technique in other art forms. Subsequently, the collage techniques of the radio play attracted artists working in the literary avant-garde, bringing their own collage principles to the radio play. (As we shall see, however, collage offered possibilities for artists working outside this paradigm as well.) The period during which the collage radio play gained more prominence is relevant. When neo-avant-garde artists turned to the radio after the war this had a profoundly different meaning than it had had before the war, since the rise of National Socialism was connected to the medium of the radio (Hale, 1975), and the radio play was a propaganda medium for the Nazis.8 The Nazis’ reliance on the medium also meant that the infrastructure of the radio play was left largely intact. Consequently, the radio play was able to establish itself as a narrative form with mass appeal in the 1950s and 1960s – until it lost its momentum to television. The cultural context for radio and the radio play had thus profoundly shifted since the

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war. Like his friend Walter Benjamin, the avant-garde playwright Bertolt Brecht had been optimistic about the democratic possibilities that the radio offered (Brecht, 1968); after the war, a great deal of that optimism had been shattered. The artists of the neo-avant-garde picked up the pieces and put them in entirely new constellations. Following Scheunemann (2005: 36), I therefore argue that the neo-avant-garde should not be understood as an anachronistic repetition of exhausted (or even ‘failed’) techniques, but as a continuation of an artistic-political project. Neo-avant-garde artists continued the principles and the techniques of the historical avant-garde. The following sections offer close listenings of three collage radio plays to explore the productive interactions between audiophonic and textual collage techniques in these works. In doing so, this chapter investigates the collage technique in relation to the medium’s constraints and affordances. It investigates a variety of radiophonic works, produced in Flanders and the Netherlands, in which collage elements play different roles. These case studies are an experimental radiophonic collage piece, a radio play adaptation of a textual collage work and a (more or less) conventional radio play that incorporates various ‘found’ fragments. This variety allows me to test whether the concept of collage offers a productive reading strategy for ­interpreting these radio plays.

Mi.50 Lacking a clearly artistic national radio play tradition (Bernaerts and Bluijs, 2019), innovative radio play makers working at the Dutch and Flemish broadcasting corporations kept their ears open to practices in neighbouring countries. They were especially alert to the productions of the BBC and the radio play innovations in the German-speaking world. Andries Poppe, head of the radio play department and radio play dramaturge at the Belgian Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation (BRT), organised listening sessions for radio play makers to stay in touch with the newest developments.9 His team visited the West Deutsche Rundfunk (WDR) in 1971 to learn about technological developments such as stereophony and aesthetic innovations such as the Neues Hörspiel (Arteel, 2019: 40). One of the staff members at the BRT, Flor Stein, who was the assistant to sound director Robert Bernaerd at the time, paid close attention. The first case study, Stein’s Mi.50 (produced in 1974, broadcast in 1976), is an experimental radio piece that is often regarded as one of the earliest examples of the Neues Hörspiel in Flanders. Stein’s radio play was explicitly inspired by this German art form (Stein, 2016). For Stein the Neues Hörspiel maximised the possibilities of radiophony, which allowed the

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radio play to emancipate itself from its connections to literature. According to him, most writers were approaching the radio play as a literary genre, presumably because they lacked knowledge of radiophonic possibilities. Stein usually had to make major adjustments to their scenarios; the new form allowed radio play makers such as himself to ‘remove’ the writer from the creative process altogether (Stein, 2016). In the mid-1970s, Stein made a clandestine radio production outside regular office hours with the help of friendly actors and technicians.10 The BRT decided to broadcast Stein’s ‘stereo radio score for four voices’ on 18 October 1976, and submitted it for the Prix Italia in 1977, where it received an honourable mention.11 Stein’s sound piece discards the fundamental elements of the prototypical narrative radio play: it lacks characters and a clear narrative. Mi.50 presents a collage of found sound fragments and newspaper headlines that are read by voice actors. Some fragments refer to external textual sources that are instantly recognisable, such as the statement of principle of the European Convention on Human Rights and an article from the Belgian constitution. Mi.50 brings together both textual and audiophonic collage elements, making use of the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, and using the affordances of the medium. Mi.50 uses a literary text as a prologue. A fragment of the colonial novel Gangreen 1: Black Venus (1968) by the Flemish author Jef Geeraerts, read by the author himself, precedes the ‘actual’ radio play. The voice of the author serves as an index for the literary source material: both the author and the novel were well known to Belgian listeners at the time.12 The inclusion of the novel’s fragment can be read as an artistic statement: after a ‘literary’ introduction, sound takes over as an autonomous art form. The written word loses its privileged position as the most important element, as the literary citation becomes one of many fragments in the audio collage. At the same time, however, the literary fragment frames the radio play and thus provides an entrance to interpret the collage work as a whole. The fragment from Gangreen 1 starts in medias res: Geeraerts tells about a man who takes a knife and makes an incision into the main character’s wrist. The listener might gain the impression that this is a violent scene. It turns out, however, that the fragment is a description of an initiation ritual: the story’s protagonist – a white man who resembles Geeraerts – enters an African tribal community.13 Through this ambiguity, the scene introduces the theme that is central to the radio play (a theme that is characteristic of the Cold War era in which the work was conceived): the complex ­interaction between violence and peace. A recurring theme in the fragments that follow is war, which is already indicated by the play’s title (the Mi.50 is a type of heavy machine gun, also known as an M2 Browning). We hear the sound of atomic bombs and news

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items about the threat of a thermonuclear war. The voice actors list places and dates of nuclear explosions (such as Los Alamos, Bikini, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the names of nations that possess nuclear weapons and the names of terrorist organisations that were active in the early 1970s. The play also includes the voices of the anti-war movement. We hear the rallying cries at a protest – ‘Freedom’ and ‘Stop the war!’ – and there are fragments from the protest songs ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (1969) and ‘Power to the People’ (1970) by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band. Apart from editing techniques, Mi.50 uses other semiotic elements that the radio play has at its disposal, such as stereophony and electroacoustic manipulation. ‘Give Peace a Chance’, for example, is drowned in distortion, suggesting that the title’s plea does not have the desired effect. When the song has ultimately become unrecognisable, we hear a military slogan: ‘We need you for the army!’ Through the simultaneous presentation of these fragments and their electroacoustic treatment, it is suggested that a call for peace can be a pretext for war. A majority of the fragments in Mi.50 are an indication of the zeitgeist of the Cold War. These fragments are alternated with references to history. After Geeraerts’ introduction, the play starts with a chronological list of  geological eras, after which the voices count down through thousands of years. This succession of time indications suggests that all of history has led to the current age, which is possibly the end of time because of the imminent  threat of a nuclear catastrophe. This apocalyptic theme is also played out through various fragments that refer to religious texts. We hear verses from chapter 11 of the Book of Daniel, in which Daniel has a vision that predicts war. The juxtaposition of fragments that are indications of the Cold War and a biblical prophecy suggest that a disastrous outcome of the geopolitical situation is inevitable. Two other fragments that reference biblical verses function simultaneously as indications of the Cold War, establishing a connection between religion and the contemporaneous theme of war. First, we hear Jesus’ final words from the cross: ‘Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23:46). With these words, Jesus surrenders his human life to God’s will, and thus faces his imminent death. The textual reference gains a wry undertone in relation to the play’s fragments that concern the possibility of a nuclear war. At the same time it establishes connections by means of its audiophonic materiality. The fragment in which the words are uttered is taken from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). The listener recognises the voice of Ted Neeley, the actor who plays Jesus, and the eerily atonal music of Andrew Lloyd Webber that accompanies the scene. The fragment thus simultaneously functions as a reference to the New Testament and to contemporaneous pop culture. Through this double gesture, enacted by the

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radio play’s audiophonic affordances, the relevance of Jesus’ words – the most famous dying words in Western literature – is underlined. Later in the play, we hear a radio transmission from the Apollo 8  mission, the first manned mission to orbit the moon (21–27 December 1968). An American voice recites the first verses of Genesis. These lines about the creation of the earth and how God separated light from darkness form a counterpoint to the theme of war and destruction that runs throughout the play. What matters perhaps more than the words, however, is the fact that these lines are coming to us from the other side of the moon. Modern technology has made it possible to explore outer space, but at the same time it has brought us the threat of an apocalyptic war. The connection between technological development and war is made explicit shortly before the end of the play, when again we hear a citation from Gangreen 1: ‘but the people, they are vice … They have used the powers that they have discovered in the earth mainly to destroy and to kill.’ The radio play uses medium-specific affordances to convey a warning about the potentially apocalyptic dangers of the current situation. It suggests that more conventional means – such as regular news broadcasting – are insufficient. This is made explicit when a news anchor reads newspaper headlines. Headlines about the Third World, telemarketing and the world of banking are read at a fast pace and without pause. This can be regarded as an expression of information overload in the technological age. At one point the news shifts from a conventional, neutral, informative tone to a more expressive one. First, the male voice gives information about the rising economic power of China. This message is followed by (female) giggles and gasps. The male voice repeats his words at a louder volume, emphasising certain words to convey the seriousness of the information. Again, his words are met with laughter. In the end, the man tries to shout his message over the chattering voices, while the giggling and chatting intensifies. The implication is clear: the audience is unable (or unwilling) to grasp the implications of the imminent geopolitical situation. This suggests that a new strategy is needed that would make them aware of the connections. Mi.50 can be regarded as an attempt to develop such a strategy in the audiophonic realm. This strategy is made explicit in a different fragment. We hear three beeps – two short and one long: a radiophonic convention to indicate the time and to introduce the news. Then, a male voice announces (in English): ‘Newsworld – AFM’s Weekday Information Service’. The material quality of the fragment and the English language point to the fact that this fragment is taken from a foreign radio broadcast. The announcement is followed by a short melody, a sound that is used to indicate transitions between news items. Normally the short melody is followed by information, but

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in Mi.50 this short melody is repeated nervously ad nauseam. Because the fragment draws attention to the announcements, jingles and transitional sounds, it emphasises the ‘in-between’, bringing the collage technique to the foreground. Mi.50 makes references to literature, biblical texts and newspaper headlines (textual collage), and it uses sound fragments that point to contemporary pop culture, the space age and radio broadcasting (audiophonic collage) to effectively establish connections between the present, history and religion. Both techniques serve the radio play’s social commentary on the relationship between war and peace in the era in which the play was conceived.

Inspraak In Stein’s view, the collage radio play offered a means for radio play makers to ‘emancipate’ the radio play from its connections to literature and theatre. However, the possibilities of the new form drew the attention of (neo-) avant-garde authors. For Bert Schierbeek, a prominent figure of postwar literary experimentation in the Netherlands, the radio play offered a continuation and an expansion of his textual poetics, as becomes clear from the adaptation of one of his own experimental works. Schierbeek’s collage novel Inspraak (1970) is preceded by the following oxymoronic statement: ‘I am grateful to everyone who has spoken in me, including myself, and I can guarantee that there is not one word in this book that is my own’ (Schierbeek, 1970: 2).14 The book brings together advertisements, political slogans, daily conversations, etc. The multiplicity of voices is exemplified in the novel’s form. It was typeset by the author, using an IBM72 typewriter. This machine offered the possibility of choosing from a variety of typefaces: I used Prestige for all the narrative passages that glue together the whole work. For everything that is poetic or lyrical, I used Italic, which means cursive … Orator was used, of course, for exclamations like slogans, etc. Gothic, a condensed letter, for advertisements … and things like that, and sometimes statements as well. The book is called Inspraak,15 and those statements are never my own.16

These typefaces are the metaphorical ‘voices’ of the individual text fragments. The different fonts are used iconically or are based on conventions. As we can see in Figure 5.1a, poetic lines such as ‘o / the eleven / syllables of the / drum’ are set in Italic, and an ad for vaginal deodorant (‘Bidex voor uw derde oksel’) is written in all caps and set in Gothic (and the words are underlined).

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Together with Fons Eickholt and Jacques Boersma, Schierbeek adapted the collage work for radio. Like the novel, the radio play brings together news items, advertisements, slogans, personal statements and other materials. Some of the fragments are taken from the book, but there are also original sound fragments, such as the same fragment from the Apollo 8 mission that was used in Mi.50, and the song ‘Masters of War’ by Bob Dylan. Elsewhere, I have interpreted the collage technique in Inspraak (both in the book and in its radio play adaptation) as an expression of the fragmentation that is the result of a mourning process (Bluijs, 2019). As a result of the loss of a loved one, the novel’s ‘I’ is disseminated into a variety of discourses. In the book this reading is activated by several fragments, but in the radio play adaptation the theme of loss and death is even more prominent, mainly because in the second part of the play a male voice addresses his recently deceased lover. In order to grasp how the theme of loss is played out in relation to the particularities of textual and audiophonic collage, we need to take the specificities of the collage technique in both media into consideration. In the book Inspraak the individual fragments are connected by conjunctive words and phrases, such as ‘because’, ‘but’, ‘meanwhile’, ‘certainly’, ‘in any case’, or ‘says the man’, followed by a colon (see Figures 5.1a and 5.1b). These phrases are set in the recognisable typeface Prestige, which refers to the act of writing on a typewriter. These are elements that, in the words of Schierbeek, ‘glue the work together’. This suggests an extradiegetic level in which all the other fragments are embedded. This would mean that the work cannot be considered a collage, since all the parts are made subordinate to an overall structure. The work, however, frustrates the notion of an overarching whole. Sometimes the conjunctions are semantically motivated  – ‘but’ is expressive of two contrasting fragments; ‘because’ establishes a logical sequence between fragments – but just as often the relation between the fragments is not made clear. Because of this ambiguity the technical realisation is emphasised; the glue is made visible. In the radio play adaptation, the technical realisation is made explicit in a similar way. After several fragments we hear a voice that seems to come from a control room. The voice utters one word, as if to indicate that the fragment that we just heard has been put on record correctly: ‘OK’. The  voice is unmoved regardless of the content of the preceding audio fragment; it sounds the same every time, regardless of whether the fragment is an advertisement for a sex toy or a story about a woman with leukemia. Since the voice’s tone bears no relation to the fragments, it merely emphasises the technical procedure of recording. At other times the original source is explicitly referenced by a narrating voice. A fragment about the

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Figure 5.1a  Two pages from Bert Schierbeek’s Inspraak (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1970), pp. 66–7

last moments of the Goebbels family is preceded by a female voice, saying: ‘I read in Der Spiegel from ’69 about Berlin 1945.’ What follows is a dramatised re-enactment of its content. This too draws attention to the radio play’s use of the collage technique. The fragments that are taken from mass media such as radio and newspapers gain meaning in relation to the radio play’s theme of the loss of self. On the one hand, the play presents fragments from reality that cannot be integrated into the symbolic order of the mourning subject, whose subjectivity thus becomes disintegrated. On the other hand, the work shows a common thread: most of the fragments concern the theme of death. This suggests that everything that comes to the mourning ‘I’ gains meaning in relation to the death of his loved one. The collage technique can thus be ­considered an expression of the experience of a mourning process. The medium-specific affordances of the radio play add new meanings to this expression, as it has different possibilities for juxtaposing heterogeneous elements. In the radio play as well as in the book, linearity is counteracted by the collage technique. When reading the book, the reader can ­immediately see the ­different

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Figure 5.1b  Two pages from Bert Schierbeek’s Inspraak (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1970), pp. 98–9

texts arranged on the page. The text, however, is still presented consecutively in the sense that the fragments are read one after another. If a text wants to present two fragments simultaneously, it has to print them in ­superposition – making the text illegible. For auditory collage, this restriction is less applicable, since the human ear is able to process several auditory inputs simultaneously. This has consequences for the notion of collage in the audiophonic realm. In one fragment the overlap of sensory inputs is used to suggest a relation of content. In the left channel we hear someone giving directions; in the other channel we hear a story about a dying woman. The relation between the two situations becomes clear: the theme of loss is juxtaposed with the notion of ‘being lost’. The fact that this relation is not achieved through succession is of importance. Because of the simultaneous presentation of the fragments, the listener cannot follow the directions heard in the left channel: she too becomes lost. Therefore, the audiophonic strategies bring a characteristic that is latent in the textual collage into full effect. The radio play also uses audiophonic collage elements that cannot be found in the book. In the second half of the play a mourning man addresses

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his deceased lover. A female voice responds to his words, but her voice is drowned in echoes and mixed in the background, suggesting that she is not in the same space as the man. This dialogue is interrupted by the same fragment from the Apollo 8 mission that was used in Flor Stein’s Mi.50. As argued, the material quality of the original audio material points to extraterrestrial communication from the space mission. The juxtaposition with the discourse of the mourning person is meaningful. If it is possible to communicate with people on the other side of the moon, the radio play seems to ask, why should we not be able to communicate across the borders of death? This fragment thus activates an idea that is historically linked to radio. In the early days of radio technology, people believed that they would be able to make contact with the afterlife through radio waves (see Whitehead, 1992; Weiss, 1995). On a textual level, the fragment carries meaning as well. The phrase ‘Let there be light’, for instance, is meaningful in relation to the dark situation of the mourning subject. Thus, just like in Mi.50, both the textual content and the material quality of the sound fragment function simultaneously within the overall composition and as indexes of a reality that is external to the work.

Top 31 Both Mi.50 and Inspraak can be considered neo-avant-garde works because of their extensive use of collage. The collage technique, however, also offered possibilities for the more ‘conventional’ radio play. The next case study is a radio play by Walter van den Broeck, an author whose textual work is not informed by an avant-garde poetics.17 His first work for radio uses an  autobiographical narrative as a framework to investigate the dynamics  between subjectivity and mass media. This case study offers the possibility of scrutinising whether the concept of collage offers a productive reading for radio plays that fall outside the scope of the (neo-) avant-garde. Top 31 is a stereo radio play by van den Broeck ‘and many, many others …’, as the scenario indicates. It uses the succession of heterogeneous ­audiophonic fragments in ‘regular’ broadcasting as its main compositional principle. A quick and witty disc jockey has invited the author van den Broeck, played by himself, into the studio to mark his 31st birthday. This DJ, named Manfred the Terrible, plays a collection of songs and ‘found’ fragments that are related to the life of the author. Apart from songs, the soundtrack includes pre-recorded spoken word fragments and archival material, such as the opening speech by the former Belgian king Boudewijn at the World Expo 1958 in Brussels. Superimposed on the music we hear

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Walter and two other voices (male and female) describing a personal memory from Walter that is connected to the music. The association of the song with a particular time and space is underlined as the soundtrack blends the music with ambient noises (such as the ticking of a cuckoo clock, a carnival or a beach). The content of the memories is overly sentimental and reminiscent of quarter-life nostalgia. This sentimentality is matched by the content of the sweet pop tunes that are mostly about falling in love. Of special importance are fragments in which we hear the author’s children, his parents, sister and brother-in-law talking about Walter. The inclusion of his family’s voices annoys the author quite a bit. He does not like his private life being presented on the public radio. The radio play, however, seems to ask: how much of these memories is, in fact, private? Top 31 conveys the notion that, in the information age, our experience of the world is highly mediatised. Commercial and public mass media have made private memories more collective than ever – this goes for pop music, news highlights, as well as for radio plays. On two occasions we hear fragments of radio play adaptations of the popular Flemish comic book series Suske en Wiske and Nero. The DJ provides an ironic remark about one of these fragments: ‘How did they manage to piece it together?’ His comment on the assembled nature of the radio play not only metafictionally refers to the play that we are listening to, but also points to Top 31’s central idea that our personal memories are a collection of assembled fragments that are mostly public. The intrusiveness of mass media is acted out by a voice that regularly interrupts Walter and Manfred to provide information on current affairs. Additionally, Manfred reads ‘entertaining’ stories from the newspaper. As the DJ says: ‘There is always the newspaper to distract ourselves’. In Dutch, the word for ‘distraction’ (verstrooien) also means to scatter, to dissipate. The DJ’s words frame the fragmentation of the self as a result of mass media and as a form of entertainment. As the word verstrooien also brings ‘broadcasting’ to mind, the radio medium is particularly implicated in this word play. By bringing together commercial music, private memories and world affairs, the radio play conveys the notion that the public world continuously penetrates the private realm through mass media such as the radio. The personal and the public are made subordinate to a logic of consumption that is inherent to the medium. According to Jody Berland, radio place[s] together sound messages that are disparate in terms of their location of origin, their cultural purpose, and their form, in order to create a continuous enveloping rhythm of sound and information. The rhythm’s ‘reason’ isn’t about insight, originality, history, logic, or emancipation. It’s about the market. (1984: 41)

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The commercial nature of the radio content is made explicit in Top 31 when the popular marching song ‘Koning Voetbal’ (‘King Football’) is played simultaneously with the stock market report. Because the disparate fragments are embedded within the overall framework of the author’s life story, it is not evident that Top 31 is a collage work. However, precisely because the fragments in Top 31 function both in relation to the overall composition and as autonomous elements, I argue that it is productive to read Top 31 as such. The collage technique brings forth the idea that the boundaries between the individual and the collective are blurred in the information age, as Perloff explains: Indeed, to collage elements from impersonal, external sources – the newspaper, magazines, television, billboards – is to understand, as it were, that, in a technological age, consciousness itself becomes a process of graft or citation, a process by means of which we make the public world our own. (1986: 77)

Top 31 confronts ‘public’ fragments with ‘personal’ material. The figure– ground relationship – to recall Perloff’s metaphor – between the individual and the universal is effectively subverted by the collage technique. The fragments that are directly connected to the private life of the author – like the father’s remark about his son that he is ‘a bloke like no other’ – are submerged into the overall composition. His father’s words, which are repeated several times, gain an ironic twist: despite what his father is saying, Walter is a bloke just like any other, since his memories are shared by a majority of his contemporaries who are tuned in to public radio. The fact that his memories are retold by Walter and two other voices points to the idea that Walter’s memories are shared collectively.

Conclusion Collage, both as a technique and as an artistic principle, can be found in a variety of art forms, and the radio play is no exception. Particularly relevant in this regard is the radio play’s reliance on the technical procedure of montage. This chapter has presented a distinction between montage and collage as artistic principles. In the prototypical radio play, montage is used as a structuring element in which the ‘seams’ are ‘hidden’, to paraphrase Arnheim. This creates an artistic unity in which all the individual elements gain meaning in relation to the overall structure. A collage radio play, on the contrary, draws attention to the heterogeneous nature of its elements – in which case ‘interruption’, to use Benjamin’s word, is the guiding principle. The collage radio play explicitly draws attention to the way it brings together heterogeneous elements into a new, artistic whole.

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Since the distinction between these two poles is not absolute, this chapter has presented the concept of collage as a reading strategy. As such, it has proven to be productive with regard to neo-avant-garde works that make extensive use of ‘found’ sound fragments and textual citations. At the same time, however, the concept is relevant for more conventional radio plays as well, as the use of collage is not limited to works that fall within a neoavant-garde framework. Considering that the radio play has continuously adopted conventions and techniques from other media and genres, it is not surprising that its use of collage has been contingent on its use in, for example, literature. The collage radio play presented possibilities that the prototypical radio play – with its reliance on a script and the performance of actors – did not offer. For a radio play maker such as Flor Stein, this meant that he was no longer dependent on literary authors who, in his view, were unaware of the affordances of radiophonic art. For a neo-avant-garde writer such as Schierbeek, however, the radio play offered a continuation and expansion of his textual poetics. Likewise, the possibilities that the collage technique offered for works for radio also attracted a more conventional author such as Van den Broeck. By presenting a theoretical discussion and three case studies I have tried to highlight the diverse ways in which textual and audiophonic collage techniques are able to interact in the radio play. As becomes clear from the case studies, the collage technique lends itself par excellence to the radio play due to its connection to the mass medium of radio. The radio plays under scrutiny bring the fragmentary nature of ‘regular’ radio broadcasting in relation to their use of the collage technique. Mi.50 offers a critique of the lack of effective communication in mass media; in Inspraak, the radio fragments are meaningful in relation to the subject’s loss of self as a result of a mourning process; Top 31 addresses the influence of mass media on the notion of subjectivity. These radio plays bring the intermedial and transmedial aspects of the collage technique into full effect. The collage radio play is able to present fragments from different sources simultaneously, adding new possibilities for the composition principle of juxtaposition. Additionally, because of the radio play’s constraints and affordances, the medium is able to create tensions between the textual origin and its audiophonic treatment, either by expressing an iconic relation (for instance when a newspaper headline is read by a voice that is reminiscent of radio broadcasting) or by creating discrepancies between audiophonic and textual dimensions.

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Notes  1 Benjamin mentions Brecht’s radio play Der Lindberghflug (The Flight across the Ocean, 1930), Elisabeth Hauptmann’s work for radio, and his own collaborations with Wolf Zucker as examples of radio works with a pedagogical aim that was similar to that of Epic Theater.  2 Art historians usually also distinguish ‘assemblage’, which refers to three-­ dimensional objects such as sculptures.  3 This principle is known as the Kuleshov effect, named after Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who showed that the same shot of a man’s face, followed by a shot of a plate of soup, a woman and a dead child, evokes the notion that the man’s facial expression signifies ‘hunger’, ‘lust’ and ‘grief’ respectively.  4 This notion has been challenged by scholars of avant-garde film (e.g. Wees, 1993).  5 Valcke’s use of the term ‘montage’ largely overlaps with my understanding of ‘collage’.  6 It is especially relevant in the context of the German and Austrian radio play to recognise Originalton as a separate semiotic element. Radio play makers from these countries developed a new radio play subgenre in the 1970s, called O-Ton. These radio plays largely or exclusively made use of documentary sound material (Schöning, 1974). Since the sound material does not draw attention to its own materiality, and the fragments are made subordinate to the overall theme of the play, Vowinckel does not regard these radio plays as collage radio plays (1995: 58).  7 The collage radio play of the 1960s and 1970s had its historical precedents. Shortly after the radio play’s introduction, radio play makers started experimenting with the possibilities of sound reproduction techniques. Walter Ruttmann’s Wochenende (Weekend, 1930) is one of the earliest and most notable examples of this: it did not rely on voice acting or a script, but only made use of original material, bringing together sound fragments from various times and places, thus creating an impression of a weekend in Berlin. As such, it emphasised sound reproduction as an autonomous technique rather than as a structuring principle, making Wochenende an early example of a collage radio play (Vowinckel, 1995: 60).  8 For an analysis of the radio play in the Netherlands during the years under the German occupation, see Van der Logt (2008).  9 The BRT was the name of the Dutch-speaking broadcasting corporation in Belgium. Its French- and German-speaking counterparts were Radio-Télévision belge de la Communauté française (RTBF) and Belgischer Rundfunk (BRF). The BRT was renamed the Flemish Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation (VRT) in 1998. 10 The voices in the radio play are those of Hilde Sacré, Reinhilde Demets, Ugo Prinsen and Ronny Waterschoot. 11 The prize went to Mauricio Kagel’s Die Umkehrung Amerikas (America’s Reversal, 1976).

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12 Shortly after the novel was awarded an important literary prize, copies were confiscated because of its allegedly racist and sexually demeaning nature, resulting in a controversy that ensured the book became a bestseller (KANTL, n.d.). 13 Although, of course, the white man’s presence in the community is itself part of the violent history of colonialism, which novels such as Gangreen helped ­legitimise. 14 The translations from Inspraak are my own. 15 The untranslatable word inspraak refers to participation; having inspraak means having a voice in the matter. 16 From an interview with Adriaan Morriën (qtd. in Bakker and Stassen, 1980: 136). The translation is mine. 17 His early novels, however, are sometimes considered slightly experimental (see Wesselo, 1983).

References Adorno, T. W. (1970). Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Arnheim, R. (1986 [1936]). Radio. Trans. M. Ludwig and H. Read. New York: Ayer. Arteel, I. (2019). ‘Experimenteel grensverkeer rond 1970: de receptie van het Duitstalige hoorspel in Vlaanderen’, in S. Bluijs and L. Bernaerts (eds), Luisterrijk der letteren. Hoorspel en literatuur in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Gent: Academia Press, pp. 33–51. Bakker, S. N., and J. Stassen (1980). Bert Schierbeek en het onbegrensde: een inleidende studie over de experimentele romans. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Banash, D. (2004). ‘From advertising to the avant-garde: rethinking the invention of collage’, Postmodern Culture, 14.2, muse.jhu.edu/article/55199. Benjamin, W. (2014a [1932]). ‘Theater and radio: on the mutual supervision of their educational roles’, in L. Rosenthal (ed.), Radio Benjamin. Trans. J. Lutes. London: Verso, pp. 365–8. Benjamin, W. (2014b [1932]). ‘Two kinds of popularity: fundamental principles for a radio play’, in L. Rosenthal (ed.), Radio Benjamin. Trans. J. Lutes and D. K. Reese. London: Verso, pp. 369–71. Berland, J. (1984). ‘Contradicting media: towards a political phenomenology of listening’, Border/Lines, 1.1, 32–5. Bernaerts, L. (2016). ‘Voice and sound in the anti-narrative radio play’, in T. Kinzel and J. Mildorf (eds), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 133–48. Bernaerts, L. (2017a). ‘Hybride en multimodaal: nieuwe genretheorie en het literaire hoorspel vandaag’, Cahier voor literatuurwetenschap, 9, 113–25. Bernaerts, L. (2017b). ‘Dialogue in audiophonic form: the case of audio drama’, in J. Mildorf and B. Thomas (eds), Dialogue across Media. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 205–23. Bernaerts, L., and S. Bluijs (2019). ‘De vergeten luisterhoek van de literatuur: hoorspel en literatuur in Nederland en Vlaanderen’, in L. Bernaerts and S. Bluijs (eds), Luisterrijk der letteren. Hoorspel en literatuur in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Gent: Academia Press, pp. 3–32.

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Bluijs, S. (2019). ‘“De stem die blijft”. Bert Schierbeeks Inspraak. Een vergelijkende analyse van boek en hoorspel’, in L. Bernaerts and S. Bluijs (eds), Luisterrijk der letteren. Hoorspel en literatuur in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Gent: Academia Press, pp. 163–82. Brecht, B. (1968 [1932]). ‘Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat’, in Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. 18. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 127–34. Bürger, P. (1974). Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bürger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cory, M. E. (1994). ‘Soundplay: the polyphonous tradition of German radio art’, in D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 331–71. Cory, M. E., and B. Haggh (1981). ‘Hörspiel as music: the creative dialogue between experimental radio drama and avant-garde music’, German Studies Review, 4, 257–79. Crook, T. (1999). Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Drakakis, J. (ed.) (1981). British Radio Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hale, J. (1975). Radio Power: Propaganda and International Broadcasting. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hand, R., and M. Traynor (2011). The Radio Drama Handbook: Audio Drama in Practice and Context. London: Continuum. Huwiler, E. (2005). Erzähl-ströme im Hörspiel: zur Narratologie der elektroakustischen Kunst. Paderborn: Mentis. KANTL (n.d.). ‘Gangreen 1 (Black Venus), Jef Geeraerts’, literairecanon.be, http://literairecanon.be/nl/werken/gangreen-1-black-venus (accessed 5 September 2019). Offermans, C. (1983). De kracht van het ongrijpbare. Essays over literatuur en maatschappij. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Perloff, M. (1986). The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scheunemann, D. (2005). ‘From collage to the multiple: on the genealogy of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde’, in D. Scheunemann (ed.), Avant-Garde/ Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 15–48. Schierbeek, B. (1970). Inspraak. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Schierbeek, B., F. Eickholt and J. Boersma (1972). Inspraak. KRO, 11 April 1972. [radio play] Schmedes, G. (2002). Medientext Hörspiel. Einsätze einer Hörspielsemiotik am Beispiel der Radioarbeiten von Alfred Behrens. Münster: Waxmann Verlag. Schöning, K. (1974). Neues Hörspiel O-Ton; Der Konsument als Produzent; Versuche; Arbeitsberichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stein, F. (1976). Mi.50. BRT, 18 October 1976. [radio play] Stein, F. (2016). Unpublished interview with S. Bluijs and E. Verschueren, 22 December 2016. Valcke, J. (2005). ‘Montage in the arts: a reassessment’, in D. Scheunemann (ed.), Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 297–309. Van den Broeck, W., and F. Stein (1972). Top 31. BRT, 28 March 1972. [radio play]

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Van der Logt, A. P. A. M. (2008). Het theater van de nieuwe orde. Een onderzoek naar het drama van Nederlandse nationaalsocialisten. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vowinckel, A. (1995). Collagen im Hörspiel. Die Entwicklung einer radiophonen Kunst. Würzburg: Köningshausen & Neumann. Wees, W. (1993). Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives. Weiss, A. S. (1995). ‘Preface: radio phantasms, phantasmic radio’, in Phantasmic Radio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–8. Wesselo, J. J. (1983). Vlaamse wegen. Het vernieuwende proza in Vlaanderen tussen 1960 & 1980. Antwerp: Manteau. Whitehead, G. (1992). ‘Out of the dark: notes on the nobodies of radio art’, in D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 253–64.

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6 ‘Ja, ja, so schön klingt das Schreckliche’: an audionarratological analysis of Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Lost & Found: Das Paradies Jarmila Mildorf Preliminary reflections: the avant-garde today In a survey article about German radio play productions in the 1990s, Knut Hickethier assessed Andreas Ammer’s work by saying that ‘Ammer was concerned with deriving pleasure from destroying old conventions and with quoting text in such a way that it becomes recognisable’ (‘es geht Ammer … um das lustvolle Zerschlagen alter Konventionen und das wiedererkennende Zitieren’) (1998: 142). Both points certainly also apply to Lost & Found: Das Paradies, a radio piece which Ammer co-produced with pop musician FM Einheit, alias Frank-Martin Strauß, and which was first presented in a live performance on 8 October 2004 at the Münchner Haus der Kunst (Huwiler, 2016: 107). For one thing, Ammer quotes extensively from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which was first published in 1667 and which itself already reworks the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve. He also significantly rewrites Milton’s narrative by giving the ending especially a somewhat irreverent and modern-day twist, as I will discuss further below.1 Furthermore, the performance of the piece in front of a live audience breaks with the conventions of radio production and reception, since the technological means of this production, for example mixing and electric amplification, are made visible. Thus, Elke Huwiler (2016: 108) argues, the central effect of the live performance was to foreground the radio play’s mediatisation by showing how sound effects, music and voices represent or create the storyworld and storytelling situation. Moreover, Ammer and FM Einheit’s piece seems to cross generic boundaries, as can be seen in the fact that it is often referred to as a ‘radio play’ by scholars and critics – and by me in this chapter – while Bayerischer Rundfunk and the script itself classify Lost & Found as an ‘oratorio’.2 These three features – the playful adoption and reworking of literary traditions, a meta-reflexive exposition of the means and media used for the creation of an art piece, and

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the blurring of generic categories – point to postmodern strategies (Grabes, 2004: 85, 109). What makes Lost & Found an avant-garde postmodern radio work, I argue, is its refusal to overhaul or deconstruct radio art per se or, for that matter, the literary work it chooses as a point of departure. As my audionarratological analysis will demonstrate, Ammer and FM Einheit clearly hold on to storytelling, whether through words, voices, sounds or music, and they do so in a manner that suggests seriousness and sincerity rather than the ironic distancing that is the staple feature of postmodern art (Lehmann, 2006: 22). This may sound paradoxical if one considers that the historical avantgarde defined itself precisely through a radical making-over of the means of expression or media through which art forms communicated.3 Indeed, one can say that the historical avant-garde did away with notions of ‘artworks’ and their ‘communication’ altogether and thus created conceptual art (Lehmann, 2006: 18). In this sense, the historical avant-garde negated art twice or ‘doubly’. One might argue, as does philosopher Harry Lehmann (2006: 24) in his system-theoretical model of the development of modern art, that the deliberate negation of the historical avant-garde’s double negation of art is one option at the disposal of contemporary artists and, if chosen purposely and with a reflexive stance, it may become a marker of a new direction in which what has been postmodern is once more surpassed (2006: 36–7). Lehmann posits a development of modern art that begins in the Early Modern period – when art gained autonomy as a system in its own right – and that rests on the continuous differentiation of art along three axes: the artwork, its medium and its degree of ‘reflexion’, that is, a logic or code that inheres in an art form and that it constantly negotiates with itself and in relation to the world (2006: 11). While initially these three components were interlocked in art and remained so despite changes in style throughout the centuries, Lehmann argues, it was modernism’s achievement to decouple the medial side by experimenting with diverse formal parameters and media of art, thus eradicating differences among the art forms (2006: 16–17). The historical avant-garde went a step further by additionally decoupling the artwork as such, allowing for anti-works to arise and thus separating out reflexion as the remaining autonomous parameter (2006: 18; see also Grabes, 2004: 52). In Lehmann’s account, postmodernism finally reinstituted art’s medium by having recourse to traditional art forms, playfully quoting and ironically refracting them. The next logical step then would involve – as one possibility out of many  – a further reinstitution of the artwork, thus bringing together the initial parameters of art again, albeit in a less rigidly integrated or interlocked way (2006: 26). As I shall argue in this chapter, Ammer and FM Einheit’s radio piece shows this potential to innovate postmodern art and to be ‘a step ahead’,

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as it were, because it constitutes an artwork that invests its audiophonic medium with meaning and that, furthermore, shows a playful seriousness in the way it celebrates great literature. Instead of merely deconstructing Milton’s epic, Ammer and FM Einheit put in its place a radio piece whose storytelling is no less complex and fascinating, thus paying homage to the great epic tradition. My analysis will make clear that there is no ‘cookbook approach’ to the question of what might count as avant-garde today. As Lehmann points out, artists now have unprecedented freedom to either negate previous parameters of art – as modernism and the historical avantgarde did – or to negate those very negations. We shall see that it is this freedom that may lead to the combination or co-occurrence of seemingly incongruent features – incongruent only if measured against a fixed set of expectations about avant-garde art. Before I move on to my analysis of Lost & Found, a few words are in order concerning my methodology: audionarratology.

Close listening and audionarratology Sound art poses great methodological challenges when it comes to its description. For one thing, since the radio play at hand is multilayered and operates through various semiotic channels, it is well-nigh impossible to give a complete and adequate picture. Depending on a researcher’s i­nterest and expertise, the analysis may take a text-semiotic or media-focused approach, it may attend to either the language, the sounds, the music, the actors’ impersonations, the interaction with the audience, or any other aspect. However, as will hopefully become clear from my discussion, it is the interplay among all these facets that brings the radio play to life, and so, ideally, as many of these aspects as possible should be considered alongside one another. This of course requires a genuinely interdisciplinary approach. In an ideal world, scholars with diverse backgrounds in, for example, literary and cultural studies, media studies and musicology, perhaps also linguists, philosophers and certainly radio practitioners would have to ­collaborate to illuminate radio art from multiple perspectives. Even if this ideal constellation were to come true, we would still be left with the problem of how to access the actual art piece. Sound art is performative in nature, there may or may not be full scripts and notes, and even with those at hand, there may have been a degree of improvisation during the actual performance. What does one want to study? The performance or a recording? Furthermore, sounds, voices and music are ephemeral phenomena. How can one ever hope to adequately hear and understand them and then to find means of noting them down? How can one find a technical

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v­ ocabulary that allows one to describe what one hears? Audionarratology, which I delineate below, can offer a first step in this direction. It is important to note that the main source for my analysis of the play is the recording of the live performance, which is available in podcast form on the Bayern 2 HörspielPool website.4 In addition, Andreas Ammer kindly provided me with the script for the play.5 As regards the music, I was told by FM Einheit that there was no score and that he worked very much as I did – by listening (email communication). There are arguably significant differences between the two modes of reception of reading and listening, and, within the latter, between listening to a live performance or to a recorded version, which I would like to briefly reflect on.6 In the live performance, as Huwiler explains, the audience was confronted with a stage on which musicians were located in the background, the director of the play on the left, also having a variety of percussion devices at his disposal (like metallic pipes hanging from the ceiling on which he slammed with a metallic stick), and the three performers speaking the parts of Adam, Satan and Eve in the front, all three of them having a microphone before them. (2016: 107)

Not only was the audience thus able to see how the play’s sound tapestries were created but they could also experience the actors’ voices as fully embodied phenomena, which lends Milton’s poetic language a corporeal sonority and musicality. The audio recording could be said to ‘kill’ the physicality of the live performance by disembodying voices and music. At the same time, however, listening to the podcast can create a much greater sense of intimacy with the voices, music and sounds presented in the play, as listeners are not distracted by the visual input of musicians, sound artists and voice actors working on stage (although perhaps they are disturbed by disruptive features of their own current surroundings when listening to the play; see Kuzmičová, 2016). However, in both cases the performative aspect, which foregrounds the rhythmicality of language and the ‘texture’ of speaking voices, can be said to remind audiences of the sound side of the language art that both Milton and Ammer created.7 The performance of Lost & Found – live or through the radio – thus marks ‘its material embeddedness in the world of things’, as Charles Bernstein (1998: 21) puts it. It does so by, for example, bringing the metrical pattern of Milton’s text to listeners’ attention, as I will discuss below. A concern with the material side of art is also central to the historical avant-garde’s poetics; in contemporary art, it might demonstrate the kind of ‘reflexion’ that Lehmann identifies as a key characteristic of a potential new avant-garde. The recording allows for repeated listening and for jumping back and forth in the radio play that enables one to compare sequences and to

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conduct a ‘close listening’ – a term Bernstein (1998) used in the context of performance poetry – which is not possible in the live performance. Here, impressions must inevitably be fleeting, the overall effects of the radio play are ephemeral and solely connected to the here and now of the actual performance, or to what remains in one’s memory. Thus, even though the live radio play foregrounds its mediatisation, much of the intricate detail of its design is likely to have been lost on the original audience, since listening to the play as it unfolds in real time does not allow one to take it in in its entirety. Even a retrospective close listening to the recorded version poses analytical and methodological difficulties, as I will intermittently point to in my discussion. In fact, one could argue that the radio play’s sound patterns are intended to make listening to them more demanding and thus to force listeners to pay even more attention. The main effect throughout much of the play is comparable to a situation in which one tries to tune in to a radio station and, because of an overlap in frequencies, one is listening to two channels at the same time. In order to understand what happens in one of the channels, one has to strain one’s ears and listen very carefully. This is what I propose to do in this chapter, where I analyse Ammer and FM Einheit’s play from an audionarratological perspective. Audionarratology explores the interfaces among sound, music, voice and narrative structure in artistic genres and media that use auditory channels but also in non-sonic artefacts (e.g., presentations of sound and music in novels). To bring into sharper relief its concern with narrative, audionarratology also takes into view sound art that is non-narrative or anti-narrative in nature, for example experimental audio art in its manifold manifestations (Mildorf and Kinzel, 2016). First and foremost, audionarratology seeks to place audio art forms more centre stage in narratology, which has hitherto focused on visual and audiovisual means of storytelling in comics, films and video games, for example. To the vibrant field of sound studies, audionarratology may offer reflections on and tools for analysing the potentially narrative dimensions of sound. Audionarratology is still very much a work in progress and, clearly, a lot more work needs to be done to further map out the field, illuminate its demarcation lines and refine its vocabulary. However, we can start by asking three interrelated questions about the radio play at hand: 1. How do sounds, music and voices contribute to its global narrative structure? 2. Which functions do they assume on a more micro level or locally? 3. Do they ever become narrative in themselves in that they ‘tell’ us something?



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Metatextuality, literary-critical commentary and narrative voices When the radio play begins, we first hear, for nearly a minute, a kind of sound tapestry that strikes one as dark and mystical. There are some unidentifiable sounds that might have been created by manipulating the metal pipes or metal sheets that Huwiler described, as well as sounds that remind one of broken chords and of strings being scratched. There is no recognisable melody, but a pattern emerges from electronically manipulated sounds moving at regular intervals from the background to the foreground and back again. At 01' 14", a male voice begins to repeat the syllables ‘da tá, da tá’ several times before he says: ‘Das Versmaß ist das des englischen Heldenepos’ (‘the metre is that of the English heroic epic’) (Ammer and Einheit, 2004: 01' 23"–01' 28"). Rather than starting with the story straight away, the play introduces listeners to Milton’s source text by mentioning its genre and its structural design. We learn that the poem uses blank verse and does not rhyme, a point that Milton himself stressed as a way of defending his composition in a prefatory note that he added to the fourth edition. Then we learn what the story is all about: ‘Das Thema ist das des verlorenen Menschengeschlechts, ohne Versöhnung am Ende – tragisch’ (‘the theme is that of lost mankind, without a reconciliation in the end – tragic’) (01' 40"–01' 47"). In a way, we are offered what in linguistic narrative analysis would be called an ‘abstract’, that is, a short preliminary summary of the story before it is actually told (Labov and Waletzky, 1967). This echoes the arguments in prose that precede each of the twelve books in Milton’s poem. They also summarise what happens in the respective books. Furthermore, we are given an evaluation of the story through the adjective ‘tragic’. Interestingly, the speaker at this point drawls out the vowel in the first syllable, thus emphasising the ‘tragedy’ that the word expresses. With hindsight, we can reinterpret this evaluation as an instance of irony because, as we figure out later, the person who introduces us to the story at the beginning is the same voice actor who subsequently impersonates Satan, Alexander Hacke.8 The shift from Hacke’s narratorial or even meta-narratorial role to his role as Satan is marked by a change in voice quality. Thus, he says: ‘Wohlan, es beginne der Gesang, worin geschrieben steht: Besser in der Hölle zu herrschen, als im Himmel zu dienen’ (‘Thus may begin the book, where it is written: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’”) (Ammer and Einheit, 2004: 02' 08"–02' 14"), which is followed by a loud scream at 02' 17". The transition from the narrative frame text to Satan’s direct speech becomes noticeable because Hacke assumes a much higher-pitched voice with a creaky quality – a common convention for the representation of witches or other demonic characters. Throughout the play, this m ­ anipulated

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voice quality is maintained and reserved for the enactment of Satan, alongside instances of either impish or devilishly roaring laughter, which makes the character more easily recognisable.9 Likewise, when Australian singer Anita Lane speaks Eve, she uses a soft voice to mark Eve’s innocence and graciousness. By contrast, once Eve has eaten from the forbidden fruit, her newly awakened sexual desire is indicated by a more lascivious voice quality (29' 43" ff.) and in the end, her state of corruption can be heard in a rather rude-sounding voice that also suggests drunkenness (01h 15' 20" ff.). Here, one can see how voice quality is used for characterisation both in a general sense to identify the characters as such, but also more specifically to give us an insight into their disposition and emotional state at any given moment.10 This suggests that one not only has to consider characters under two different aspects, as Huwiler (2005: 85) argues, namely as elements of the story or, in Chatman’s (1978: 19) term, story existents, on the one hand, and with regard to their actual discursive representation (‘Darstellung’), on the other; but, even on the level of representation, one must distinguish between more global and local levels of characterisation. The doubling of the three voices for narrator and character roles is particularly interesting from a narratological perspective. After all, Genette (1980: 31–2) used the category of voice metaphorically to talk about narrators’ positions in relation to the stories they tell. In radio plays, voices are actualised, and in Lost & Found they are used in intriguing ways to transgress narrative boundaries. For example, Anita Lane, who recites all the lines quoted from Milton in English, also speaks Eve, and Günter Rüger and Alexander Hacke, who speak Adam and Satan respectively and in those roles resort to first-person narration, also function as narrators and metacommentators. The multilingual make-up of the radio play contributes to the creation of complex narrative layers. Thus, when Rüger speaks, in German translation,11 the first lines from Milton that bid the Muse begin the story – ‘Des Menschen erste Schuld und jene Frucht / des strengverbotnen Baums, die durch Genuß / Tod in die Welt gebracht und jeglich Weh … besinge nun, himmlische Muse Du’ (Ammer and Einheit, 2004: 02' 48"–03' 02") (‘Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world and all our woe … Sing Heavn’ly Muse’; Milton, 2005: I, 1–3, 6),12 Lane immediately recites the same lines in English. Since she speaks as a woman, she personifies the Muse at this point, or at least listeners are encouraged to associate her recital with the song of the Muse. This is followed by a deep male voice – that of jazz singer James Blood Ulmer, whose main task is to perform blues and jazz songs in the course of the play – repeating verbatim parts of what Lane has just recited. This echo structure, which can be found throughout the entire play, seems to suggest that Milton’s text quite literally, as well as figura-

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tively, resonates with us across time, space and languages. After this part, Hacke starts speaking as none other than the poet himself. He says in a very poetic manner that hinges on internal rhymes and the inversion of syntactical units: ‘Und ich, der Dichter, der oft und auch gern wie Satan spricht, flehe aus dem Chaos um Hilfe Euch für meinen kühnen Gang, denn er, der Gesang, erstrebt im Klang und Vers noch ungeahnte Dinge’ (‘And I, the poet, who often likes to speak like Satan, appeal to you for help with my bold endeavour, for my song, in using sound and verse, strives to reach unknown things’) (Ammer and Einheit, 2004: 03' 29"–03' 49"). When he mentions his predilection for speaking like Satan, he again changes his pitch to enact Satan’s voice. This suggests a fusion of the poet Milton and his character, which also implicitly alludes to the criticism some contemporaries such as Dryden raised against Paradise Lost because, in their view, Milton, by making Satan the sublime hero of the poem, apparently sympathised with him (see Addison, 2005: 1712). At the same time, to have Milton the poet speak directly in the radio play of course constitutes an instance of metalepsis, that is, the vertical transgression of storyworld boundaries (Genette, 1980: 234–7). And this metalepsis is taken one step further when Hacke as Milton appeals for help and thus seemingly addresses the audience present in the performance: ‘Euch’ (‘You’). When the poet then calls upon his Muse again, asking her to relate what made Adam and Eve fall from grace – and here Hacke directly reads out the German translation again (Ammer and Einheit, 2004: 03' 49"–04' 01") – this very much imitates the communicative situation at the beginning of Milton’s poem but also gives it a more tangible quality, since the diverse ‘voices’ in which the poet speaks, as well as the dialogues that he conjures up between various characters, are now actualised. In this connection, it is interesting that dialogical passages in the play retain inquit formulae or phrases introducing direct speech, which is technically not necessary, since the turns-at-talk are already distinguishable through the different speakers.13 For example, when Satan tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit (41' 45"–47' 23"), Rüger speaks the narrative frame text including introductory clauses such as ‘Erwidernd sprach der höllische Versucher’ (42' 14"), ‘To whom the guileful Tempter thus replied’ (Milton, 2005: IX, 567), ‘so sprach der Lügengeist’ (44' 05"–44' 07"), ‘So talked the spirited sly snake’ (Milton, 2005: IX, 613) or ‘doch sie rief … ihrem Führer zu’ (44' 17"–44' 19"), ‘thus to her guide she spake’ (Milton, 2005: IX, 646). By retaining these formulae in a radio play, which usually presents dialogue scenes more directly, the literary convention of narratorial framing – which we often overlook or take for granted in written narratives when they shift into the ‘showing’ mode – is foregrounded and laid bare for us. Here we can also see that Lost & Found is not a radio play in the conventional sense

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(hence, the label ‘oratory’) because it emphasises recital over dramatisation. This becomes most noticeable when Lane occasionally overemphasises the iambic pattern of Milton’s verses – for example, at 41' 59"–42' 12": ‘What may this mean? Language of man pronounced by tongue of brute?’ (Milton, 2005: IX, 553–4) – thus deliberately foregrounding the structural patterns of the source text that were already pointed out in the beginning. Even more explicit metatextual commentary can be found throughout the piece and is often coupled with metalepsis. That is, the narrator-characters guide the audience through the story by not only summarising stretches of the plot or anticipating what will happen in the next book (‘davon kündet unser nächster Gesang, ohne viele Worte’ [‘this will be the topic of our next book, without many words’], 21' 46"–21' 50"), but also by passing evaluative comments and explaining the source text’s design, as we already saw at the beginning of the play. Thus, at 17' 42", the narrator says of Milton’s description of the gates of hell: ‘Der Text ist nicht so leicht zu verstehen’ (‘the text is not so easy to understand’). And he continues by explaining that Milton added prose arguments to each book in the second edition of Paradise Lost to offer ‘cursory’ readers (‘flüchtigen Lesern’) guideposts. Later, he points out a gap in Milton’s summary to the second book: ‘Hier hat sich Milton in seiner Zusammenfassung taktvoll darüber ausgeschwiegen, was wirklich im Gesang geschrieben steht’ (‘Here, in his summary, Milton has kept tactfully quiet about what is really said in the book’) (18' 23"–18' 34"). What is omitted from this argument is Satan’s encounter with his daughter, Sin, who had conceived Death through an incestuous relationship with her father and who was in turn raped by her son, which led to the birth of numerous hellish monsters. Interestingly, the radio play has the devil tell this backstory in the first person, while in Milton’s second book the story is addressed to Satan by Sin since he does not recognise her at first. The change in narrative situation is most likely due to pragmatic considerations, as the character of Sin would have required another female voice. However, the story as such cannot be omitted as it forms a thematic bracket with the radio play’s ending, where humankind’s newly acquired state of sinfulness is highlighted. After this embedded story, Satan sets out on his journey down to earth, and here we have an interesting example of one plotline being kept open while the scene changes to another situation in the story that happens at the same time. Thus, the narrator invites the audience to turn their attention to Paradise and what can be found there: ‘Doch werfen wir, solange sich Satan noch auf seinem Flug durchs Chaos befindet, einen Blick hinunter ins Paradies’ (‘Let us cast a glimpse into Paradise while Satan is still flying through chaos’) (25' 45"–25' 53"). The inclusive ‘we’ suggests that the narrator takes the audience by the hand, as it were, and allows them to

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observe the storyworld from a bird’s-eye perspective, as is traditionally the prerogative of an omniscient, that is, an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic, narrator who can zoom into and out of the storyworld at will (Genette, 1980: 227–31, 243–7). Another lengthy stretch of metalepsis in combination with metatextual commentary can be found at 31' 19" and following, when Hacke in his function as meta-narrator describes the symmetrical construction of Book IV, where Paradise is described. This symmetry was also enacted prior to this meta-commentary through the mirrored repetition of lines spoken alternately by female and male voices that the audience has by now become familiar with. In the meta-commentary, Hacke explains that the four books in the middle of Milton’s epic poem summarise what happened and anticipate the future, and that they do so ‘in ermüdender Ausführlichkeit’ (‘rather extensively, which is quite tiring’) (31' 39"–31' 41"). He then links Milton’s story to today and thus again transgresses not only the original story’s boundaries but even those of the performance: ‘Da die Zukunft des Paradieses aber unsere Gegenwart ist, überspringen wir diese langatmigen Schilderungen’ (‘Since the future of Paradise is in fact our present, we are going to skip over these long-winded depictions’) (31' 46"–31' 54"). Shortly after, he once again suggests that the performers leave out parts from the middle of the story with the permission of the audience – ‘mit Ihrer Erlaubnis’ (32' 30") – because they are behind schedule in relating the plot. This explanation, together with the direct address to the audience, suggests spontaneity and improvisation, while in truth the entire piece is quite obviously through-composed like a musical composition. In fact, these lines can be found in the script (p. xviii). In other words, the oratorio plays with its situatedness in the performance context, but this playfulness is ironically premeditated. The podcast version obviously differs from the live performance in that its audience is no longer the original audience to whom these words were addressed. Thus, the illusion of spontaneity created here only works to the extent that podcast listeners will put themselves in the original audience’s shoes, and is therefore probably most effective on first listening.

Sound, music, rhythm and narrative structure What is most striking in Ammer and FM Einheit’s radio piece right from the start is its sound tapestry. Günter Rinke (2018: 201–2) compares the live radio play to a pop music concert, especially because the audience can be heard clapping towards the end and because an encore is offered by the performers on stage. Indeed, the play ends rather oddly by once again mixing storyworld and real-world levels. Thus, when at 01h 11' 58" the play appar-

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ently ends, which is marked by a significant moment of silence (as is used throughout the play to demarcate scene or episode boundaries), the audience begins to clap and cheer. Then, one of the musicians counts the  beat and new music sets in, a kind of feel-good swingy jazz music. All the while this is playing in the background, Rüger addresses the audience directly by saying: Ja, sehr verehrte Zuhörerinnen im Saal und draußen an den Über­ tragungsgeräten, wie Sie bereits richtig gemerkt haben, sind wir am Ende unserer kleinen Show angelangt. Adam und Eva, meine Freundin und ich, und auch Gott, das Weichei, und auch Satan lebten glücklich bis an ihr Lebensende. Und weil dies hier eine Show und nicht die Weltgeschichte ist, und weil wir, die Lebenden, gewissermaßen die Zugabe nach dem bedauerlichen Verlust des Paradieses verkörpern, spielen wir, so wie sich das gehört, am Ende dieser Show, dieses Hörspiels, noch eine Zugabe, die das Leben betrifft. (01h 12' 15"–01h 12' 55") (Right, ladies and gentlemen here in the auditorium and out there listening to the radio broadcast, as you will already have noticed, we have come to the end of our little show. Adam and Eve, my girlfriend and I, and God, that wimp, and also Satan lived happily ever after. And since this here is a show and not world history, and since we, the ones who live now, in a way epitomise the encore after the sad loss of Paradise, we are going to play at the end of this show, of this radio play, an encore that touches on life.)

Life and storyworld are curiously merged together here; the performers present themselves both in and out of their roles. Rüger still refers to himself as Adam while also including himself in the group of people who are living at this moment. The play is clearly labelled as a ‘show’ and even as a ‘radio play’ but its boundary with reality is obscured right up to the actual ending. The encore consists of Louis Jordan’s song ‘I’ll Die Happy’, which ­essentially features a man who celebrates his life in sin. The subtext created by this song ties in with the situation reached in the radio play: Adam and Eve have been cast out of Paradise, but unlike Milton’s characters, the play’s first humans do not seem to regret their fall from grace. As Adam says somewhat irreverently just before the ending when he mentions Michael’s prophecy regarding humankind’s future: ‘Ich bekomme noch etwas die Zukunft gezeigt. Im Buch interessiert sie mich, aber eigentlich ist sie mir wurscht’ (‘I am shown a bit of the future. In the book I’m interested in it but, actually, I couldn’t care less’) (01h 06' 36"–01h 06' 45"). The slippage into colloquial and dialectal speech with the word ‘wurscht’ constitutes an instance of bathos, that is, the creation of incongruence through the mixing of high and low speech styles. This move towards the mundane is completed at the very end, when, after the song performed by James Blood Ulmer, which blends in with the



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credits spoken by Alexander Hacke, Eve is given the last word. To Hacke’s words, spoken in English, ‘My name is Alexander Hacke, I’m sure the happiest guy in the graveyard’, she responds in a drunken voice:

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Yeah, yeah, promises, promises, you’ll never die ’cause you’re dead already. You died years ago and you were miserable then. I’ll be happy when you die. You’re not even on the road to nowhere, you’re roadkill on the road to nowhere. [laughter] User, abuser, you think that makes it ok, just because you can say it it’s cute? (01h 15' 20"–01h 15' 59")

Both Hacke and Lane continue to voice their characters long after the play is technically finished, and thus they once again tie the action of the presented plot to the here and now of the present moment (in sociolinguistic narrative analysis this would be called the coda – note the analogy to music). Eve’s disillusionment with Adam and with their current situation seems to suggest that no happiness could be found in sin after all. She refers back to lines in the jazz song that euphorically stress the pleasures of moral misconduct and corruption (‘user, abuser’) and calls the song’s message into question. This final commentary also tones down the feel-good atmosphere that has been created through the uplifting music at the end. Rinke (2018: 203) suggests that Ammer and FM Einheit, by combining popular music forms with an ‘elitist’ literary text, may deliberately have sought to undermine the differentiation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. He  also classifies their play as a ‘Pophörspiel’ (pop radio play) precisely because they draw on popular music forms.14 Rinke argues that the pop radio play more generally, unlike avant-garde pop, only marginally participates in the critical assessment and revaluation of popular art (2018: 20). However, he further claims that authors/producers such as Ammer and FM Einheit can be counted among avant-pop artists because they open canonical works of literature to a reception that is modelled on the reception of popular culture without becoming trivial in doing so (2018: 20). I concur with Rinke’s assessment that Ammer and FM Einheit’s works are not trivial. At the same time, when it comes to Lost & Found, I think that Rinke’s discussion does not go far enough. For one thing, the radio play’s music, even though it adopts recognisable pop music features such as bass lines and techno beats, is still a far cry from the unobtrusive and more mainstream musical landscape that forms the backdrop to much of music radio today. FM Einheit’s background in noise music and industrial rock as well as his experiments with new sources for music production, which earned him the label of an avant-garde musician in the media (Siedenberg, 2000), can definitely be traced in the way that metal pipes are used as instruments, and noises and screaming are included in the composition. FM Einheit’s sound tapestries demand attention rather than facilitating diversion, e­ specially in

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combination with the radio play’s text. This might be even more the case when one listens to the recording, as it is often impossible to figure out the source of certain sounds. Secondly, Rinke largely ignores or at least does not talk about the complex ways in which sound and music are employed to create a narrative in this radio play, as I continue to discuss below. Here, we shall see that Ammer and FM Einheit in fact use music much the way that one would expect in radio plays, namely to support the narrative, that is, they endorse a ‘traditional’ radio play aesthetic, which may be surprising in an avant-garde piece. However, as I argued at the beginning, if we posit with Lehmann that contemporary avant-garde art may be marked precisely by its deliberate and reflective choice regarding what and what not to negate, then Ammer and FM Einheit’s piece definitely meets this criterion. What emerges on repeated listening to the recording is a musical composition that shows regularities as can be found in various forms of classical music as well. Thus, the very last part that features the light-hearted music and Jordan’s song as an ‘encore’ could be considered a coda that loosens up the tension of the preceding soundscapes. The actual ending, starting at 01h 07' 17" after Eve says: ‘So let’s come to an end, which was written like this’ (01h 07' 10"–01h 07' 16"), could be said to resume the music that was played at the very beginning, with slight variation, thus constituting a kind of reprise. This repetition of the first musical sequence also offers a frame structure, together with other musical sequences that recur almost in reverse order at the beginning and at the end. For example, the second sequence that follows the first one also precedes the final one, and a blues song and a jazz song, which both create an additional subtext regarding the devil,15 occur as little interludes at points that are nearly equidistant from the beginning and the end (i.e., excluding the coda), namely at 10'  10" and 55' 46" respectively. Two musical sequences recur at regular intervals and in alternation with one another or – in the middle of the radio play – with other sequences. They can be said to function like leitmotifs because they feature repeated musical themes and similar instrumentation.16 One is reminded of recurring themes in a rondo or a ritornello. The sequence immediately following the first sequence (for convenience’s sake, we may call it sequence B) begins at 06' 33" and is marked by swift-paced, syncopated beats and synthetic sounds as are common in techno music. Throughout the play, this sequence typically occurs in combination with the meta-narrative comments and plot summaries mentioned earlier. It thus functions as a musical signal for the onset of those parts in the radio play and, because of its quick pace, it suggests restlessness and hurry as if the music is meant to propel the plot forward – which in fact it does because the plot summaries condense the lengthier depictions in Milton’s original.

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This sequence B takes an interesting turn when Alexander Hacke talks about how Satan and the other angels were expelled from heaven. As soon as Hacke has mentioned the Fall, the music starts to assume a downward movement (07' 36"), playing what I think must be four descending semiquaver (or sixteenth) notes over and over again for thirty-two beats (or presumably eight bars in 4/4 time).17 One could say that the music here imitates what the story tells or, put differently, that it enacts a plot element through its own sonic means.18 The idea that music can actually narrate has been discussed rather controversially both in musicology and in narratology (see Maus, 1991; Micznik, 2001; Trautsch, 2015; Wolf, 2002).19 Even if one does not want to claim that music is narrative in nature, there are numerous moments in the play when the music takes over from the verbal narrative and seemingly continues to ‘tell’ the story, filling the gap that the pause in the verbal narrative has created by suggesting actions and the passing of time. In a semiotic sense, the music becomes indexical at such points, that is, it points to aspects of the storyworld. Thus, like the fall of the angels, Satan’s journey when he goes in search of humankind in Book II of Paradise Lost is mimicked by the music as well as by Anita Lane’s speech rhythm at this point in the play. The narrator says: ‘So macht sich Satan auf den Weg’ (‘And then Satan sets out on his journey’) (15' 12"–15' 14"), and this is immediately followed by a clapping sound produced with a percussion instrument, as well as the onset of a new musical sequence that is primarily marked by a strong cross-rhythmic bass guitar beat and a flute melody that consists of long notes hovering above the bass and containing occasional offbeat stresses, which further complicates the rhythm. The offbeat pattern interestingly coincides with a strongly marked stress pattern in Lane’s recital. Thus, when she quotes from Milton, she emphatically stresses the words in the line that list features of hell (rocks, caves, etc.), thereby foregrounding the shift to a spondaic rather than an iambic metre. She also exaggerates the iambic rhythm by speaking the syllables as if she were scanning the lines: He passed20 and many a region dolorous, O’er many a frozen, many a fiery alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, A universe of death which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutt’rable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived: Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire. (15' 28"–16' 21"; Milton, 2005:  II, 619–28)

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In doing this, Lane also lays bare the micro-level metrical construction of Milton’s poem, pointing to how the metre here suggests the monotony of hell. It is after this stretch of quotation that the narrator comments: ‘Ja, ja, so schön klingt das Schreckliche’ (‘Oh, yes, this is how beautiful horror sounds’) (16' 25"). I do not think that Ammer is being ironic here. On the contrary, the correlations between sound, music, language and voice reinforce a sense of the musicality of poetic language and, hence, of its aesthetic appeal.21 By integrating musical rhythm with speech rhythm in this way, the radio play at this point suggests not only Satan’s physical movement but also his emotional turmoil. This sequence recurs in two variations each time Satan is placed centre stage in the play (see 21' 58"; 01h 03' 14"). It thus also functions as a means of characterisation: Satan’s conflicted character is captured by the stark musical contrast between the guitar bass line and the more mystical flute sounds. In each variation, the sound tapestry becomes increasingly phantasmagoric. At 21' 58", the musical sequence again represents Satan’s journey, this time from hell to Paradise. The bass line, which continuously repeats the tone sequence C – A – Bb – C#, creates a threatening atmosphere while also building up suspense: we have a sense that something is about to happen. Then, when Lane quotes: ‘Th’ Apocalypse heard cry22 in Heav’n aloud / Then when the Dragon, put to second rout, / Came furious down to be revenged on men: / “Woe to the inhabitants on Earth!”’ (25' 24"–25' 37"; Milton, 2005: IV, 2–5), we can hear the flute tones descending and becoming weaker, which alludes to the descent of evil into the world and anticipates death and destruction. At 59' 34", the music accompanies and underlines Adam and Eve’s sexual awakening, which is mentioned both by the narrator and by Adam himself. When the music eventually takes over for an entire minute between 01h 00' 30" and 01h 01' 29", the suggestion is strong that Adam and Eve are having intercourse during that time, especially since we occasionally hear grunting sounds from Adam (or Satan?). Shortly after, when the scene is shifted to Satan in hell, who is waiting for his companions to applaud him – ‘wartete auf Applaus’ (01h 02' 30") – the music also changes into hard rock style guitar playing (01h 02' 35"). Just like before, the music eventually takes over entirely, this time for more than a minute (between 01h 03' 49" and 01h 05' 03") and is combined only with loud screaming and hellish laughter.23 It is extremely noisy but it nicely captures the chaos and orgy-like atmosphere among the devils, who celebrate their victory. At such points, one could say that the music continues the narrative, suggesting events and clearly marking the passage of time while also characterising the situation. Another function of the music is to offer a second layer of ­expression – ‘un secondo strata espressivo’ (De Benedictis, 2004: 117) – and thus to pass

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an indirect evaluative comment on the presented action. A good example is the musical representation of Paradise in Lost & Found. As one would expect, this sequence (25' 54"–30' 55") differs significantly from other musical sequences in the play. It is noticeably quieter and more peaceful. At first, one hears bell-like tones from a synthesiser moving upwards. The basic pattern is G – A – Bb – C – D – Eb / A – Bb – C – D – F# – A, that is, a harmonic G minor scale, which is repeated over and over again with slight variation here and there. What is most striking is the fact that the scale is never completed, that is, the endpoint, G, is never reached; the scale either stops short before or jumps beyond it and always reverts to its starting point. This inconclusiveness, together with the fact that it is a scale in a minor, rather than a major, key suggests that all is perhaps not so well in Paradise. The strife for harmony and completion in the music corresponds to the same strife in humanity, and its ultimate failure on the musical level does not bode well for Adam and Eve. The minor key also introduces an element of sadness, or at least the atmosphere is slightly subdued, thus anticipating the tragic turn that Adam and Eve’s fate is going to take. Furthermore, the symmetrical structure on the level of language in this part – as lines are repeated, which mirrors the original text’s symmetry (see Shawcross, 1965) – is not carried over into the music. Here, by contrast, one can find a slight build-up of tension since the bass guitar begins to accompany the initial, chiming tones and thus lends them more force. This example shows that music can assume a function quite independent of the spoken text and may even offer scope for alternative interpretations of a sequence. In narratological terms, one could argue that the music here assumes what James Phelan (2005: 12) has called the ‘disclosure function’ in character or first-person narration, that is, it opens another communicative channel through which a narrator unselfconsciously reveals to the audience things that might diverge from or conflict with his or her more overt or intended messages.24

Conclusion In approaching Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s radio play from an audio­ narratological perspective, I asked three interrelated questions: 1) How do sounds, music and voices contribute to its global narrative structure? 2) Which functions do they assume on a more micro level or locally? 3) Do they ever become narrative in themselves in that they ‘tell’ us something? In ‘close listenings’ to selected moments in the radio play, I discussed its complex narrative structure which hinges on the use of first- and thirdperson narrative situations in past and present tense, as well as multiple

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and alternating narrative voices, which are actualised in fascinating ways through the actors’ vocal expressivity. I discussed the role of quotation, translation, summary, metatextuality and metalepsis as key elements in the play’s treatment of Milton’s original text. As far as the play’s sound tapestry and music are concerned, I showed how they assume quasi-narrative tasks by functioning as identification markers for personae and situations, by offering narrative ‘commentary’ and counterpoints as well as suggesting eventfulness. The radio play’s sonic design can be said to resemble a musical composition, and the strong beats of much of the ‘soundtrack’ echo the orality and musical rhythms of Milton’s poetry. What emerges is a seemingly contradictory picture: features that can clearly be counted among postmodern textual strategies are combined with storytelling techniques in radio art that strike one as ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’. For an assessment of Ammer and FM Einheit’s piece as avantgarde, both these postmodern and conventional usages pose a problem, since they seem to suggest that the artwork is not ‘ahead’ of its time but is very much ‘with’ it or even retrogressing from it. However, these things only pose a problem if we take it for granted that being avant-garde involves trying to supersede previous artistic methods and dismantling art as such. And yet Lehmann has argued, as I outlined above, that trying to overcome postmodernism may indeed involve a serious going to back to traditional forms and a reinstitution of the artwork, its medium and its reflexion. What makes Lost & Found neo-avant-garde then, I argue, is precisely the mix of the old and the unexpected: Ammer and FM Einheit chose an old genre (the oratorio) but renewed it by, for example, using unusual instrumentation and a religious subject matter that was already filtered through a literary text; they play with narrative conventions in a postmodern way through metalepsis, for example, but never compromise storytelling as such. And finally, they rework a canonical literary text by giving it a surprising and seemingly irreverent twist, but never seriously call into question the greatness of Milton’s original work. In fact, I interpreted the radio piece’s overall presentation of Paradise Lost as a means of paying homage to rather than deconstructing it. As Rinke contends, Ammer and FM Einheit offer a potentially broad audience access to a ‘difficult’ piece of literature without being trivial in doing so. Perhaps, as Wilke (2010: 77) has argued for music, the real watershed for the question of ‘avantgarde’ art is the quality of this art – no matter how frowned upon notions of quality have become in the wake of postmodern theorising. And only the future can tell what scholars will one day consider the avant-garde of our day and age when looking back from a vantage point that we cannot foresee.



Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Lost & Found: Das Paradies 145

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Notes  1 In this connection, it is interesting that Ammer, in his doctoral thesis, conceived of literature as the ‘litter’ that has come down to us through an emissary (‘letter’) made of letters (of the alphabet), i.e., as ‘litterature’ (Ammer, 1989: 22). In that sense, Milton’s heroic epic poem can be regarded as a literary work that Ammer ‘found’ and rewrote in his radio piece. The piece’s title thus assumes a double connotation: it refers back to Milton’s epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and also alludes to Ammer’s reworking of the former in his own work.  2 An ‘oratorio’ originally denoted a piece of music on a religious subject for orchestra and singers that was performed without acting. The genre gained momentum in the second half of the seventeenth century (Reimer, 1972: 1). By the twentieth century, it had been extended to include performances that shared at least some of the elements of the original musical genre (1972: 9). Lost & Found’s first live performance can be said to fit the category since it included music and voices, albeit predominantly reciting rather than singing voices.  3 Examples for this are the push towards ever greater abstraction in pictorial art and sculpture or the introduction of another tonal system, dodecaphony, as well as noise and silence as new parameters in music (see Wilke, 2010).  4 www.br.de/mediathek/podcast/hoerspiel-pool/andreas-ammer-fm-einheit-lostfound-das-paradies-oratorium-nach-john-miltons-paradise-lost/31272.  5 In the following, I refer to the recording of the live performance by marking the respective points of time of a quote. When I talk about the script, I give page numbers (in Roman letters, as do Ammer and Einheit).  6 In her article on stage directions in radio drama scripts, Janine Hauthal (2021) demonstrates how recipients can arrive at rather different interpretations of a radio play depending on whether they read the script or listen to it, because stage directions may verbalise information that is not readily available in the performed radio play. On the other hand, deliberate ambiguities in a radio play script may have to be disambiguated in actual performance.  7 In the case of Milton’s epic poem, readers imagine these features of orality; in Ammer and FM Einheit’s oratorio/radio piece they are actualised.  8 In the script, Ammer has these metatextual parts spoken by ‘Milton/Satan’, thus not only blurring the boundaries between storyworld-internal and -external text but also conflating characters’ identities (see also below). In the general overview that precedes the primary text of the radio play – Ammer calls it ‘Panorama’ – he even uses the term ‘Herausgeber’ (editor) (p. ii). In a radio play, this seems particularly odd because ‘editor’ points to the practice of writing and book making rather than that of performing a text.  9 According to the script, Hacke also used two different microphones when speaking the parts of Satan and Milton. The audience at the live performance would thus have had an additional distinguishing marker through the visual channel. 10 The fact that Lane speaks her part with a mild Australian accent might strike one as noteworthy, perhaps even as ironic, in the context of a radio play that arguably celebrates one of the most canonical of English poets. However, I do

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not think that this would have mattered much in the original performance where, presumably, most people would not have recognised the accent. 11 Ammer himself translated Milton’s lines anew for this oratorio, as the script makes clear (p. ii). 12 I refer to the Norton Critical edition of Milton’s work throughout. However, to make it possible for readers to consult other editions, I do not cite page numbers of the Norton edition but rather give the number of the book in Roman together with line numbers in Arabic numerals. 13 Furthermore, the audience at the live performance would have seen who was speaking at any given moment. 14 Rinke conceptualises the pop radio play by analogy with pop literature (2018: 16). Pop radio plays refer to phenomena of popular culture on the verbal level but also through the inclusion of pop music, for example. Furthermore, they often involve a collage of original soundbites that point to aspects of culture an audience would be familiar with while also deconstructing and defamiliarising those aspects (2018: 18). They thus become art pieces for everyday use but still retain depth (‘Gebrauchskunst mit Tiefgang’, 2018: 18). 15 The two songs are ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ by Robert Johnson and ‘Evil’ by Howlin’ Wolf. Incidentally, the kinds of music drawn upon for the radio play – jazz, blues, hard rock and heavy metal – are also close to Milton’s theme of Satan’s machinations because they all were considered ‘devil’s music’ at some point in their history and frequently thematise the devil or evil. 16 Interestingly, Ammer himself uses a symmetrical pattern for the general layout of his radio piece by dividing it into twelve songs (to match Milton’s books), which are interrupted at regular intervals by five ‘arguments’. This reminds one of the five-act structure in classical drama. In his script, Ammer even expressly calls the third argument the ‘symmetrische Mitte des Stücks’ (symmetrical middle of the piece) (p. iii). 17 The lack of a musical score makes describing such musical structures a challenge and arguably leads to speculation, which is a general problem when it comes to analysing avant-garde or neo-avant-garde sound art. 18 A similar motif using a descending chromatic scale representing a hellish downfall can be found in Louis Spohr’s opera Faust (1852; first version performed in 1816); see McClelland (2019: 250–1). However, as is the case with musical motifs, they need not be exactly the same across different musical pieces even though they may capture similar ideas, and, conversely, the same motif may signify very different ideas in different contexts. One is therefore well advised to interpret a motif individually in its given place, as I also do below with the motif of Paradise, for example. 19 For a brief overview of different positions, see Mildorf (2017). For more extended discussions of music and literature, see the articles in Gess and Honold (2016). 20 This line is adapted to the radio play but in fact misquotes Milton’s line, which already starts in the preceding verse and runs: ‘Through many a dark and dreary vale / they passed…’ (Milton, 2005: II, 618–19). In the radio play, Satan

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­ ndertakes the journey mentioned, whereas in Milton, these lines refer to the u bands of fallen angels who venture to explore the underworld. Satan’s solitary journey technically only begins at line 629. 21 Here, it is interesting to refer to what Ammer wrote in his doctoral thesis about ghosts in literature: ‘An den Gespenstern entdeckt das Wort seine autochthon terroristisch autonome Gewalt. Geister sind auch Emanationen, Denkmuster und gewissermaßen – in all ihrem chimärischen Sein – Konkretionen jenes singularischen Abstraktums, das menschlich Geist heißt’ (‘With ghosts, language discovers its autochthonous terrorising autonomous force. Ghosts are also emanations, patterns of thought and to a certain degree – in all their chimerical existence – concrete manifestations of that singular abstraction that is called the human mind’) (Ammer, 1989: 16–17). By implication, Milton’s Satan figure might also be seen as a mental image that is forced on us through Milton’s words and that potentially brings us closer to his imaginative mind. 22 Here, Ammer technically again misquotes Milton, since he leaves out the first line, and the line he begins his quote with only makes sense in combination with that preceding line: ‘O! for that warning voice which he who saw / th’ Apocalypse heard cry in Heav’n aloud’ (Milton, 2005: IV, 1–2). 23 One is reminded of screaming in heavy metal music or industrial rock, and also of the unconventional use of sounds in some of François Dufrêne’s crirhythme performances – even though in the latter, the sounds are obviously produced by voices. 24 In radio drama, it is of course difficult to talk about a ‘narrator’ unless there is an instantiation of such a persona in the form of a voice-over narration. One way of getting around this problem is to talk about an audiophonic ‘composition device’ (see Bernaerts, 2021). And radio plays can of course also create ambiguity and unreliability through their audiophonic narrative means (see Mildorf, 2021).

References Addison, J. (2005). ‘From Spectator 297 (Feb. 9, 1712)’, in G. Teskey (ed), John Milton, Paradise Lost: Authoritative Test, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism. New York: Norton, pp. 379–80. Ammer, A. (1989). Horrorgraphie: Das Aufschreiben der Angst & die Schrecken der Schrift als Mikromechanik des Sinns in der klassischen Zeit deutscher Literatur. Munich: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Ammer, A., and FM Einheit (2004). Lost & Found: Das Paradies. Performed by A. Lane, A. Hacke and G. Rüger, Münchner Haus der Kunst, 8 October 2004, www.br.de/mediathek/podcast/hoerspiel-pool/andreas-ammer-fm-einheit-lostfound-das-paradies-oratorium-nach-john-miltons-paradise-lost/31272 (accessed 29 April 2020). Bernaerts, L. (2021). ‘Narrative mediation and the case of audio drama’, in L. Bernaerts and J. Mildorf (eds), Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, pp. 63–81.

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Bernstein, C. (1998). ‘Introduction’, in C. Bernstein (ed.), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–26. Chatman, S. (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. De Benedictis, A. I. (2004). Radiodramma e arte radiofonica: Storia e funzioni della musica per radio in Italia. Turin: EDT. Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. J. E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gess, N., and A. Honold (eds) (2016). Handbuch Literatur & Musik. Berlin: De Gruyter. Grabes, H. (2004). Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne. Tübingen: A. Francke. Hauthal, J. (2021). ‘“Stage” directions in the radio script: a transgeneric narratological approach’, in L. Bernaerts and J. Mildorf (eds), Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, pp. 41–62. Hickethier, K. (1998). ‘Junges Hörspiel in den neunziger Jahren: Audioart und Medienkunst versus Formatradio’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 111, 126–44. Huwiler, E. (2005). Erzähl-Ströme im Hörspiel. Zur Narratologie der elektroakustischen Kunst. Paderborn: Mentis. Huwiler, E. (2016). ‘A narratology of audio art: telling stories by sound’, in J. Mildorf and T. Kinzel (eds), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 99–115. Kuzmičová, A. (2016). ‘Audiobooks and print narrative: similarities in text experience’, in J. Mildorf and T. Kinzel (eds), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 217–37. Labov, W., and J. Waletzky (1967). ‘Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience’, in J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 12–44. Lehmann, H. (2006). ‘Avantgarde heute: Ein Theoriemodell der ästhetischen Moderne’, Musik & Ästhetik, 38, 5–41. Maus, F. E. (1991). ‘Music as narrative’, Indiana Theory Review, 12, 1–34. McClelland, C. (2019). ‘Louis Spohr’s tragic Faust’, in L. Fitzsimmons and C. McKnight (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241–62. Micznik, V. (2001). ‘Music and narrative revisited: degrees of narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 126.2, 193–249. Mildorf, J. (2017). ‘Musik’, in M. Martínez (ed.), Handbuch Erzählen. Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 87–91. Mildorf, J. (2021). ‘Auricularization and narrative-epistemic stance in Louis Nowra’s Echo Point’, in L. Bernaerts and J. Mildorf (eds), Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, pp. 144–63. Mildorf, J., and T. Kinzel (2016). ‘Audionarratology: prolegomena to a research paradigm exploring sound and narrative’, in J. Mildorf and T. Kinzel (eds), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 1–26.

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Milton, J. (2005 [1667]). Paradise Lost, in G. Teskey (ed.), John Milton, Paradise Lost: Authoritative Text, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism. New York: Norton, pp. 1–303. Phelan, J. (2005). Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Reimer, E. (1972). ‘Oratorium’, in H. H. Eggebrecht and A. Riethmüller (eds), Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, Ordner IV: M–O. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, pp. 1–9. Rinke, G. (2018). Das Pophörspiel: Definition – Funktion – Typologie. Bielefeld: transcript. Shawcross, J. T. (1965). ‘The balanced structure of “Paradise Lost”’, Studies in Philology, 62.5, 696–718. Siedenberg, S. (2000). ‘F.M. Einheit: Mit Performance zu neuer Platte’, Spiegel Online, 5 February 2000, https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/f-m-einheit-mitperformance-zu-neuer-platte-a-62998.html (accessed 14 September 2020). Trautsch, A. (2015). ‘Orpheus, Till Eulenspiegel, Major Tom: Über die Möglichkeit musikalischer Narrative’, in F. Döhl and D. M. Feige (eds), Musik und Narration: Philosophische und musikästhetische Perspektiven. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 85–109. Wilke, R. (2010). ‘Zwischen Neo-Avantgarde und Neuer Einfachheit: Postmoderne in der Musik’, in A. Hübener, J. Paulus and R. Stauf (eds), Umstrittene Postmoderne: Lektüren. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, pp. 61–77. Wolf, W. (2002). ‘Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie’, in V. Nünning and A.  Nünning (eds), Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, pp. 23–104.

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Part II

The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry

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7 Poetry on the Austrian radio: sound, voice and intermediality Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Daniel Gilfillan

Radio history is filled with examples that illustrate the long-standing collaboration between the worlds of literature and the sound- and networkbased media tools that the radio medium delivers. In the context of 1920s Germany, the early relationships between the fledgling medium of radio and the world of artistic production yielded many intense debates that either differentiated the medium purely as a communications device or welcomed it as a type of blank canvas ripe with artistic possibilities. Central to these debates was the tension between seeing radio broadcast as a form of entertainment that would serve primarily utilitarian purposes, and seeing the medium’s potential for developing radio-specific artistic genres.1 Otto Palitzsch, German essayist, playwright and Hörspiel pioneer, situates his 1927 critique directly in the midst of these debates, pointing to the already fixed, functional use that radio had been transformed into during the four years of its infancy, and asking two critical questions about the untapped possibilities of the medium: ‘Wo aber bleiben die besonderen, nur dem Rundfunk eigenen Möglichkeiten? Übertragungen von Musik, Vorträgen, Rezitationen. Schön. Damit ist das Fundament gelegt. Aber was weiter?’ (‘But what’s keeping the specifically radio-focused possibilities? Transmissions of music, lectures, recitations. Lovely. With these the foundation has been laid. But what comes next?’) (Palitzsch, 1927: 7).2 Questions such as these posed by Palitzsch challenged the first programming directors, radio theorists and enthusiasts to find the creative and intellectual room to experiment with the medium, to develop new radio-based genres so as to take advantage of the innovative design and functionality of the device, and to engage with the process of adapting existing forms from the realms of film, literature and poetry in order to capture and mediate the compositional and spatial attributes of sound for transmission via radio. What Palitzsch’s challenges heralded was the innovation of the Hörspiel, which moved the fledgling medium solidly in the direction of developing its own cultural forms, and in the process began the long relationship between radio and literature that endures (in one shape or another) today. While

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154 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry much of the experimentation that marked the initial phases of this relationship would eventually become sedimented into entertainment-based models focused less on innovation and more on maintaining public programming standards, the Hörspiel form continues to foster experimental approaches that push the envelope of media-based possibility within the realm of sound broadcast and transmission. The intermediality at the heart of such collaborations understands radio production as a form that combines both the textual modes bound up within the literary, and the aural/spatial modes bound up within sound. Intermediality references how a discrete piece of media always exists within a series of medial configurations that provide it with a network of possible meanings and legitimacies. A work of radio art allows the artist to mix any number of discrete elements from the media realms of text, sound and image to produce what Anette Vandsø describes as a ‘complex intermedial act’ (2011: 68) that accompanies and shapes our experience of listening to the radio art piece: In order to describe what conditions our listening experience, it seems important to include not just the intertextual references, but also the intermedial combination of sound and the paratexts that contain information regarding the source of the sounds, and the technological means of production, since this knowledge shapes our listening experience. (2011: 74)

How we listen to a work of radio art involves following and understanding an elaborate network of intertextual, paratextual and parasonic references housed within the radiophonic space of broadcast. As I will explore in this chapter, this complex intermedial act also comprises an understanding of how this radiophonic space, as materialised through the perceptive capacities of sound and the transmission/reception capacities of radio, encompasses and organises a notion of intermediality that features the compositional minds of artists and the compositional minds of listeners as the site where these meanings and legitimacies take shape. At the centre of the chapter is an investigation of three poetry-based sound works created for Austrian radio that will help us to understand how the intermedial and the compositional play equivalent roles in adapting a poetic text for radio broadcast using the modality of sound. The first, Ökotonal (Ecotonal, 2010) by Austrian poet and radio/sound artist Petra Ganglbauer, explores her tonal/vocal play with language, and her conceptual interweaving of biological, spiritual and poetic discourses into a type of ecology or ecosystem of sound-based communication. What Ganglbauer’s acoustic plays and fragments ask us to do is to question a perceived totality of the world as something that can be fully/completely known, and to critically reflect on our own position within the world. The second, Anchored

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in Trance (1996) by German-Austrian poet and radio artist Peter Pessl, examines relationships between human voice/speech and the acoustics of non-human agents (animals, plants, rocks, landscapes, etc.). Pessl uses the psychoactive plant Atropa belladonna to induce a trance-like vocal state to accompany the poem past the traditional boundaries of spoken recitation and into deeper understandings about the performativity and liveness of language. The third, and final, example is a collaborative piece between Pessl and Ganglbauer, and is Pessl’s first ever work for the radio medium, entitled Wie es möglich ist mit geschlossenen Augen (How It Is Possible with Closed Eyes, 1991). This piece pinpoints Pessl’s engagement with the spatial relationships that exist within language, between signs and their signifiers, and the ways in which sound allows these relationships to be experienced consciously. It was produced within the framework of an artists’ workshop hosted by the Kunstradio project of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) in 1990 in its newly opened digital Studio RP4 and provides an intriguing lens through which to examine questions of production and dramaturgy. Both Ganglbauer and Pessl have each produced numerous works for broadcast as part of the Kunstradio programme, but importantly this range of work moves beyond the very structured production and dramaturgical realm of Hörspiel by allowing the artist direct access to the methods of sound production, and curatorial control over their ideas about the adaptation of their work for broadcast. What interweaves the work of  these two radio artists and poets is their considered use of sound as a vehicle that modulates and adapts information from its original form – as vocal, as textual, as spatial, as emotive – into an alternate form deliverable via aurality to any number of listeners’ respective cognitive realms. For both poets and their radio projects the element of sound resides within an almost primal, noumenal space, as something outside of experience that simultaneously celebrates its immaterial substance and yet material force. While we might easily understand attributions such as spiritual, ephemeral and immaterial to describe our experience of sound, the metaphysical implication of this notion of sound as primal and noumenal suggests an even deeper sense for the actual and potential unknowability of sound in terms of its essence, its origins, or the source of its creation. Our experience of sound is always already immediate in our knowledge that we have heard something, and is thus registered as meaningful, regardless of whether we can source its origins or not.3 These paradoxes inherent to sound – its elusive origins outside of perception, yet its pervasiveness as a carrier of information – underscore the importance of sound for both the creation and obstruction of knowledge. Central to each of these artists’ work is this understanding that sound both conveys and withholds knowledge, that

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156 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry sound adopts and adapts the realms of the vocal, the textual, the spatial and the affective to be mediated for reception and parsing aurally, and by extension epistemologically, in the mind of the listener. While Ganglbauer and Pessl bring very distinct sonic, textual and artistic elements to their respective projects, the foundation of their work points to the importance of both sound and voice for accomplishing the adaptation of one form of mediated knowledge into another – of poetry and poetic modes into soundbased radio broadcast. The intermediality of sound production finds resonance throughout the history and contemporary practices behind radio as an artistic medium. In addition to recognising the absence of radio-specific forms in his 1927 essay ‘Gefunkte Literatur’ (‘Broadcast Literature’), Palitzsch makes key contributions to an understanding of how the radio serves as a hub for organising and delivering an array of sound-based informational inputs. In the course of the essay he identifies a series of radiophonic genres that should be brought into play in broadcasts that will engage the radio as the device to capture and transmit the unique experiences of the world in an aural fashion. Invoking the Sendespiel or ‘broadcast play’ form, Palitzsch criticises early examples that only used the radio medium to present already existing plays before the microphone, and instead lobbies for something more original: Es wird die Schaffung des reinen Hörspiels erstrebt, das nicht etwa chorisch getragen oder nur auf Menschenstimmen und Musik eingestellt zu denken it, sondern eingefügt in eine akustische Atmosphäre, in das das Johlen der Automobile oder der Schrei eines Esels genau so ihren Platz finden können wie der Pfiff des Windes oder das Angelusläuten einer Dorfkirche. An Stelle der farbigen tritt die tönende Kulisse. Nur so läßt sich im Rundfunk die Raumvorstellung geben, die für eine dramatisch bewegte Handlung unerläßlich ist. (1927: 9) (The creation of the pure Hörspiel is sought, which is not intended to be supported by a chorus or focused solely on human voices and music, but rather as something inserted into an acoustic atmosphere. Here the honking of a car or the cry of a donkey is able to find its place just as the whistling of the wind or the ringing of the Angelus of a village church. In the place of a colourful coulisse, a tonal one appears. Only in this way can spatial perception be ascertained in radio, which is essential for a dramatically moving storyline.)

Key to Palitzsch’s identification and exemplification of the Sendespiel as a type of pure Hörspiel is the relationship he draws between acoustic atmosphere and spatial perception, clearly identifying the importance of human and non-human sounds (the honking of a car, the whistling of the wind, the braying of a donkey, the ringing of the Angelus bells etc.) for evoking in

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the consciousness and imagination of the listener the otherwise intangible aspects of dramatic action and spatial setting at the heart of the broadcast piece.4 Sound’s ability to capture and convey movement, spatiality and emotion in very distinct ways works synergistically with the human mind’s ability to unify within consciousness any number of perceptual inputs, such that a cognitive picture of the world and one’s position within it comes to light. If we follow American philosopher John Searle’s work into the nature of human consciousness, we find the hypothesis that consciousness needs to be approached as a unified field of all perceptual faculties, that consciousness can be conceived as a type of a priori experiential ground upon which modulations via perceptual inputs form and direct the unified field. In these discussions about consciousness as a unified field, Searle links back to German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his notion of the transcendental unity of apperception, or humans’ innate/intuitive understanding that all objects are perceivable. Kant’s ideas about the human understanding of reality operate through the interrelationship between the abstract realm of the noumenal, a field of indeterminate and thus unknowable entities, and the material realm of the phenomenal, the range of perceptible, quantifiable and quality-laden objects that populate our field of sensory perception. In short, Kant posits that our experience of the world around us is based on the encounters we have with both of these realms, that is, by way of the objects or phenomena that we encounter on a daily basis through sense perception (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch) and by way of an intellectual understanding of things that exist outside or beyond the senses (noumena) vis-à-vis an abstract or metaphysical questioning or challenging of these same phenomena through questions such as ‘What makes this thing the object we perceive it to be?’ (Searle, 2002; Kant, 2007).5 Rather than thinking of consciousness as the multimedial staging area par excellence where the visual, auditory and tactile momentarily converge, we should instead consider it in terms of always being active, as a fundamental, receptive state that accommodates and becomes shaped by perceptual modes. In the context of sound and radio broadcast, and in light of work from early radio theorists such as Palitzsch, both Searle’s and Kant’s thinking provides a method for understanding how sound itself always already functions as a type of unified field of other perceptual or informational inputs. In this sense we might also begin to understand how sound is itself inherently intermedial given its ability to combine multiple intertextual, paratextual and parasonic references to both its phenomenal and noumenal origins and our ability or inability to receive or perceive them. The fragile relationships within sound between the origin sound and the non-immediate reception of that sound reflect the almost intimate

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­embodiment of objects that occurs in sound-wave production. Sound mediates physicality into immateriality, but in doing so it retains those features of the phenomenal object that call forth our a priori knowledge of it as a tangible thing. In his study of sound art, Brandon LaBelle understands sound as always relational, as always mediating material and immaterial forms, distance and proximity, spaciousness and location: Sound thus performs with and through space: it navigates geographically, reverberates acoustically, and structures socially, for sound amplifies and silences, contorts, distorts, and pushes against architecture; it escapes rooms, vibrates walls, disrupts conversations; it expands and contracts space by accumulating reverberation, relocating place beyond itself, carrying it in its wave, and inhabiting always more than one place; it misplaces and displaces; … sound overflows borders. (2006: xi)

LaBelle’s insights about the spatial dimensions of sound illustrate the complexity with which sound operates and with which it needs to be approached. To the extent that the textual, linguistic, spatial and affective  are always connected to the realm of sound in their conceptualisation, sound also inhabits, shapes and propels them outwards, modulating them and broadcasting them forward to a host of potential listeners. In this context, both Palitzsch’s focus on the broadcast- and, hence, network-­ functionality that accompanies the term Sendespiel and LaBelle’s ideas about the underlying spatial and proximal features bound up within sound provide us with an entry into the broadcast work of Ganglbauer and Pessl. As we will see, both artists work with a set of intermedial strategies for invoking a range of textual, spatial, linguistic/ paralinguistic and affective modalities for activation within the minds of their listeners via their radio-based sound projects.

Sound, spatiality and contemplation With over twenty prose and poetry volumes to her credit, Ganglbauer is as prolific an author and poet as she is an insightful radio and media artist. At the heart of her radio productions for the ORF Kunstradio and her interdisciplinary, intermedial projects for live performance lies a deep-seated interest in the concept and construct of spatiality. While evocative of physical space and location, Ganglbauer’s approach to the spatial centres on the human body and its interrelationships with the private worlds of the individual, the public worlds of the self/other, the  biological worlds of humans and ecosystems, and the intellectual/spiritual worlds of minds and sounds in thought. Her work resides at peripheries, at those spaces

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of transition where the individual encounters experience that refuses neat categorisation and instead embraces either sublime potential or m ­ ysterious imponderability. In the radio art broadcast that we will explore here, Ganglbauer positions human experience in the midst of colliding, overlapping, collapsing and inspiring acoustic realms, where the instability and facticity of daily life is juxtaposed against the reflection and unsettledness of the poetic mind. From the title of her 7 February 2010 broadcast Ökotonal one can already discern the spatial overlapping that will play out acoustically within the work’s 29-minute duration. The word Ökotonal combines three distinct German terms: Ökoton, Ton and tonal (ecotone, sound, tonal).6 Ganglbauer utilises a set of simultaneously competing and intersecting concepts and definitions from biology and Castanedan allegory to create and explore a sonic world situated between the biological and the spiritual. Where the concept of the Ökoton stems from biology and references the transitional zones that exist between distinct ecosystems (e.g. between a forest and a meadow, or a lake and a grassland) and the diverse ecological niches that exist within them, Ganglbauer’s use of the term tonal arises from experiential anthropologist and New Age philosopher Carlos Castaneda’s adoption and interpretation of early Mesoamerican/Nahuatl shamanistic/ritual cultures, which also incorporates the term’s binary, the nagual (Montemayor, 2004: 243–4). Framed loosely in Castaneda’s context, the tonal/nagual duality outlines an approach to the world that divides human experience in terms of ordered and knowable phenomena (the tonal) or chaotic and unknowable abstraction (the nagual), a duality that recalls Kant’s ideas about the phenomenal and noumenal aspects of human consciousness. Interestingly, this tonal/nagual duality also forms a principal part of Deleuze and Guattari’s provocative concept of the ‘body without organs’, an idea that wants to understand the human subject as a type of constantly transforming liminality, wherein the tonal serves to organise human experience and provide return or anchoring points for the becoming-other, becoming-animal, becoming-molecule desires of the nagual (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 162). Ganglbauer connects the separate concepts of Ökoton and tonal morphologically through their common use of the word Ton, meaning sound. In addition to serving as the nodal point linking the two notions in Ganglbauer’s piece, sound also resonates with those liminal spaces surrounding them that otherwise reside outside of conscious awareness. In effect, Ganglbauer utilises the perceptual mode of sound to triangulate the specific notional and definitional facets bound up within each of these concepts, while also pointing to the capacity of sound to capture what exists beyond the phenomenal realm. The experience of listening to the sounds of a specific ecotone calls forth in the imagination of the listener

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160 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry those tonal qualities that help to identify its defining features (bird, insect or other animal sounds, the natural sounds of wind, water and weather). As listeners we can imaginatively place ourselves into this ecotonal space, while at the same time we understand this imagination as being generated only by the thoughts that these sounds evoke, not by the actual physical phenomena of the ecotone itself. Ökotonal is comprised of interviews with author/biologist Gertraud Klemm and author/artist Ingrid Coss, poetry and literary works by Josef Ondracek and Ganglbauer herself, and found and ambient sound evocative of the broadcast’s thematic focus on transitional and liminal spatiality. In the audio-based artist’s statement that accompanies the broadcast, Ganglbauer zeroes in on how the specific discourse networks surrounding the biological notion of the ecotone and the Castanedan usage of the tonal/ nagual themselves continually cross between the precision of definition and the elusiveness of understanding: Es geht um Graubereiche, und Grenzbereiche, und Zwischenzonen, sag ich jetzt, um Schwellen-Situationen, und ich versuch mich … mittels wissenschaftlicher und literarisch-künstlerischer Beiträge diesem Begriff [des Ökotons] zu nähern. Zum einen bleiben wir eben in diesem Bereich des Ökosystems … Und zum anderen bewegen wir uns auch auf eine andere nicht-materielle Ebene in diesem feinstofflichen Bereich würde ich sagen, in diesem Bereich zwischen zwei Ebenen, zwischen Materie und Materie – da stellt sich die Frage was liegt dazwischen, oder was liegt zwischen dem Schrei des Vogels, zum Beispiel und dem Hörvorgang, was liegt zwischen der Frage und der Antwort. Also ich versuch mich auch auf eine unwägbarere Ebene mit diesem Begriff auseinanderzusetzen. (2010c, audio transcript) (I’ll say now that it deals with grey areas, and borderlines, and intervals – liminal situations, and I attempt to draw closer to the concept [of the ecotone] by means of scientific and literary-artistic contributions. On the one hand we rest within this area of the ecosystem … And on the other hand we also move on to an immaterial plane, in a subtle region, I would say, in this region between two planes, between matter and matter – and the question arises, what lies between them, or what lies between the call of a bird, for example, and the auditory process, what lies between the question and the answer. So I also try to engage with this idea on an imponderable level.)

The grey areas and liminal spaces that Ganglbauer detects in the constellation constructed vis-à-vis the Ökotonal highlight the elements of play and ambiguity at the heart of human perception and meaning-making. The move that occurs between concept and definition is one founded in the realm of the incalculable, but which also gets parsed into usable, exacting speech, and which, in many ways, parallels the processes involved in creating knowledge. As we read in the poem that begins the work, these



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same ephemeral aspects of human language and speech are also articulated through the literary-poetic elements of the broadcast: Wolken weiss queren kreuzen ziehen die Momente. Im Brackwasser die schillernden schwimmenden Gesichter. In den Felsstufen die Ebenen des Meeres: So bleibt es, so bleibt das erdachte Nichts Ein lautloser Fall Nichts weiter Nicht mehr als Die deutlichen Vorzeichen von der/ Das Unausgesprochene ist somit kein Rätsel So. Wie es uns erscheint. (Ganglbauer, 2010a)7 (Clouds white traverse cross expand the moments. In brackish water the shimmering swimming faces. In the rocky crags the planes of the sea: So it remains, so remains the conceived nothingness A noiseless instance No more Nothing more than The clear sign of the/ The unspoken is thus no riddle Just so. As it appears to us.)

As the literary opening of the broadcast, Ondracek’s poem is ­suggestive of the full range of ideational components that Ganglbauer explores in her radio art piece. From the natural phenomena of clouds, rocky cliffs and the brackish water of the ocean to the abstraction of thought brought forward in the creation of nothingness, the use of metaphor renders into poetic language the same spatial and biological transitions evoked by the ecotone, and the same traversal of the threshold intimated by the tonal/nagual in the Castanedan duality of which Ganglbauer is so fond. What the vocal recitation of the poem and the montage of taped interviews also point to is a considered use of sound to both enhance and inhibit the clarity of speech. Both sound and the literary each have the ability to absorb and modulate the range of spatial, affective, vocal and textual modes that constitute the material and immaterial worlds produced in the work. The contemplative power of sound and the thoughtful reflection of the poetic help to capture in substance the moments of imponderability that exist, as Ganglbauer puts it, between the cry of a bird and the auditory processing of such a cry. Rather than activating a specifically aural consciousness in the mind of the listener, the intermediality inherent in sound

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162 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry assists each listener in cognitively navigating the threshold zones that constitute the biological ecotone, the Castanedan tonal/nagual and the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal. How this liminal navigation is realised acoustically within the actual piece is an important facet to consider, especially given Ganglbauer’s understanding of the difficulty involved in fully knowing the niche regions that comprise an ecotone. The acoustics of the piece, as we will see, help draw the listener into the transitional zones of these ecotonal systems, in order to reflect on the possibility that their definition is as phenomenally perceptible as it is noumenally imperceptible. Ganglbauer describes her process as uncertain, as involving layers of imponderability due to the complex nature of the relationships at play between sound, ecosystem and human sensate experience. In his philosophy of mingled bodies, Michel Serres explores human sensory perception as shaped by the contingencies of bodily experience: Before making sense, language makes noise: you can have the latter without the former, but not the other way around. After noise, and with the passage of time, a sort of rhythm can develop, an almost recurring movement woven through the fabric of chance. The sea gives birth to a tidal flow, and this flow to Venus: a rhythmic current emerges from the disorderly lapping of waves, music surfaces to this place. In turn, this layer of music, universal before the advent of meaning, carries all meaning with it; distilled, differentiated language selects the meaning or meanings it will isolate from this complex, and then broadcast. Whoever speaks is also singing beneath the words spoken, is beating out rhythm beneath the song, is diving into the background noise underneath the rhythm. (2008: 120)

When we examine Serres’s musings on sound and hearing, we are ­immediately struck by two things: the descriptive way he links aurality and the natural rhythms of the world; and the siting of music as the location where meaning takes shape as a constant outgrowth of these flows and rhythms. Sound, noise, rhythm, music, language, meaning – for Serres, these are medial points that move steadily further away from a phenomenological understanding of the world. Central to Serres’s ideas about sensation is a critique of language – a notion of language that has become too far removed from the network of relationships that our system of sense perception sets up with the world around us. It is precisely our move away from a conscious understanding of the world as a unified sensate experience, as reflective of our being in some way severed via language from an interwoven network of phenomenological experience, that underlies Serres’s philosophy. His comments here about sound and the function of language provide reminders of the constant play of uncertainties that lead to meaning-making, that meaning and truth are as much about the sensual



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processes of composition that lead to language as they are about fixing a meaning into language. Serres points to a similar moment where the value of uncertainty in l­anguage resides, a primordial moment in which language has not yet been disconnected from its origins in the mingled surfaces of the human body and its encounter with the world via sense perception: Sometimes, beneath song, like a smothered, stifled, veiled, flattened, timid meaning, the phrasing seems to speak a forgotten language from before the time of meaning, so ancient that it speaks to our flesh. It makes audible the material framework of language, its energy, like its walls, support structure or habitat; it builds the nest of meaning. (2008: 127)

In his explanation of how sound filters through noise and the intricate rhythms of music to become meaning, Serres lights upon language as the requisite medium for its broadcast, and upon voice as the instrument for the  realignment of language and of human beings, within a larger world of sensation and experience. And it is here with voice and vocality that we might find a response to Serres’s misgivings about language, where we would see voice forming the entrance to and vocality the resonance of the interior surfaces of a body connected to an origin prior to language. It is also through this focus on voice that Ganglbauer’s piece for radio responds in some way to Serres’s preference for a vocabulary that seems saturated by a very romanticised desire to return to a moment, an origin, which our technologies, our media and our language have mediated us away from, and which it is never possible to restore. That Ökotonal is structured through voice in the form of poetic recitation, citation and interview, and through vocality by using intonation, rhythm and dialect, implies a language that maintains both the obscurity in origins that Serres celebrates and the complexity in meaning that he equally misses. To approach the complex ecotonality of these ecosystems, Ganglbauer turns for assistance to the voices of Klemm and her expertise in biology, and Coss and her embodied aesthetic engagement with a specific ecotone region. Each of these interview threads serves to trace the back-and-forth imprecision evident in both scientific discourse and experiential account. While Klemm’s examination of the ecotone moves between a desire in scientific discourse for clear definition and the ambiguity of being able to capture the multiple ecological niches that layer any one ecotone, Coss’s description of the mysterious energy oscillations she experienced while travelling in the Alpine village of Gniva in the Italian Friuli-Resia region resides consistently in the realm of the imponderable. That Coss focuses her comments on this region of Italy is also compelling for the geopolitical and linguistic ecotonalities of the region, given its triangulated borderland position with Austria and Slovenia, its location in the mountainous valley

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164 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry landscape of the Julian Alps and Prealps, and its use of a unique transitory dialect of Slovene, known as Resian. Ganglbauer employs sound to either accentuate the precision of Klemm’s words or to inhibit and mask the clarity of Coss’s description through white noise and interference, in order to demonstrate the power of sound to move its listener into these liminal spaces of transition and unsettled thought – spaces where becoming-other, becoming-molecule, becoming-animal are ponderable. Where Klemm and Coss’s approaches to understanding complex ecosystems through scientific or experiential discourses converge is through Ganglbauer’s own focus on voice. The steady tenor of Klemm’s biological definition of the ecotone involving words and phrases such as oxygen gradients, differentials and the identification of those living organisms that inhabit these transitional zones is heightened by the clarity and crispness of her voice and authenticated through the undertones of accent and dialect in her speech patterns. In contrast, Coss’s vocal description of the peculiar energy oscillations that arise in this Alpine village around dusk as a type of transition phenomenon remains so unclear, so imprecise, that for a listener it seems that these very energy oscillations are causing the interference and noise that inhibit any possibility of capturing them through speech or sound. Ganglbauer moves her listeners into and between these interviews through a palette of ambient noise that begins with the steady beating of a drum and gradually evolves into a range of sounds that evoke a spatial formlessness, perhaps as a way to reflect the unsettledness and instability of both the ecotones and the energy oscillations. As the piece proceeds, these liminal spaces of ambient sound and background noise adapt to include snippets of human voice and news broadcasts, bird, animal and insect sounds, electronically modulated voices and noises. The piece ends with a similar series of sounds and voices: the repeated question ‘aber was ist zwischen’ (‘but what is between?’), an almost harmonic mix of noise, chirps, bass notes and the fluttering sound of something being input on a keyboard, and the voice of Klemm that bookends this ambient mix: ‘So ein steriles Ökoton wird unter normalen Umständen nicht zu finden sein. Glas und steriles Wasser drauf zum Beispiel’ (‘Under normal circumstances it would be difficult to find such a sterile ecotone. Something like glass with sterile water clinging to it’) and ending with a sentence centred on a wordplay: ‘Es ist ein Mortoton, was man nicht etwa bezeichnen könnt’ (‘It is a Mortoton [a death knell/an extinction], I don’t know how else to describe it’) (2010a, transcript).8 Like the salinity of the brackish water that harbours so much life in the Ondracek poem that begins the piece, the possibility of an ecotone that has become so sterile as not to support life is as imponderable as the description of what an

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­extinction would sound like. That such sounds of the ecotone defy description through definitional or sonic capture is an important place to end, for it asks the listening audience to think about where the radio art piece has taken them, and asks them to continue to ponder through these liminal spaces that comprise the range of ecotonal zones, to continue pondering the imponderable. Sound in all of its forms, whether as language and voice, as hearing and listening, as musicality, as echo and reverb, as communication, or as representation, has always been a crucial component in humankind’s effort to know. Spatial, ideational, affective, temporal, experiential, scientific, acoustic and/or speculative threads (among many others) may reside within any sound wave for variable parsing by the multiple possible recipients with the correct biology or technology for hearing it. Sound is thus also always compositional in its production and its reception, drawing discrete but momentary connections between its points of origination and its points of arrival, whereupon it once again triggers a compositional move dependent on the cognitive, instinctual, biosemiotic and physical abilities and needs of its varying recipients. When we focus on human agents, sound’s ability to capture and convey movement, spatiality and emotion in very distinct ways works synergistically with the human mind’s ability to unify within consciousness a number of perceptual inputs, such that a cognitive picture of the world and one’s position within it comes to light. Voice forms a core element in communicative behaviours: how humans engage with each other, how they relate to the realm of the natural, and how they continually establish individual/collective agency vis-à-vis topics of mutual concern. Human voice serves as our interface, our connection, to an existence where humans reside alongside other entities, living or otherwise. Anthropologist Tim Ingold clarifies this role of human voice and human speech in his work on the connections between the environment and perception: Non-human sounds like thunder or animal calls, the voices of other-thanhuman persons, and the speech of human beings are alike in that they not only have the power to move those who hear them, but also take their meaning from the contexts in which they are heard. In these respects, no fundamental line of demarcation can be drawn between the sounds of nature and of human speech. (2000: 104–5)

In the live radio performance framework of Pessl’s 1996 sound poem Anchored in Trance, the contextual relationships that Ingold detects between human voice/speech and the sounds of nature take on a more expansive role through Pessl’s use of the psychoactive plant Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade) to induce a trance-like state that accompanies

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166 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry the poem past the traditional boundaries of spoken recitation and into deeper understandings of the performativity and liveness of language. This 33-minute 18-second broadcast provides an opportunity for thinking about these relationships between sound, voice and language specifically within a constellation of ideas surrounding vocalisation, affectivity and notions of the primal and paralinguistic. At stake in this piece by Pessl are the various states of play among the exteriorised and interiorised surfaces of language and non-language that shape both the poem, which serves as a frame for the piece, as well as its connections to the deeply woven nodal points that affix human identity and subjectivity within language and emotion amid the phytochemically produced, psychoactive agency of the plant. Anchored in Trance takes Pessl’s poem ‘Melville von einer Landschaft Schwede’ (‘Melville from a Landscape Swede’) and adapts it for radio broadcast by excerpting portions from the poem as anchor points for a set of trance-like intervals induced by Pessl’s ingestion of the Atropa belladonna plant. As with Ganglbauer’s Ökotonal, Pessl’s Anchored in Trance opens with the first line of the poem acting as a type of poetic statement and closes with a recitation of the poem in its entirety. The opening line is punctuated by vocal pauses, silences and a feeling of unfinished longing as embodied by an ellipsis, which then abruptly demarcates a transition to the first instance of trance: ‘Melville / Von einer Landschaft Schwede / Mit Hügeln / Melville / In einer mittleren Linie’ (‘Melville / From a landscape Swede / With hills / Melville / In a mediating line’) (Pessl, 1996, audio transcript). This opening salvo of poem and trance makes any immediate interpretative analysis elusive, not only because of the linguistic playfulness invoked by the noun Swede and the proper name Melville but also because of the elliptical pause that Pessl makes with the line ‘In a mediating line’. The idea of a middle or mediating line draws our attention – both in the radio piece and in our engagement with the poem – to a similar transitional space as those posed by Ganglbauer, except the transition here is one that occurs within the internal/external seepage of language accompanying the human voyage between raw emotion, intellectual reflection and declarative presentation. If taken as a horizon line, we begin to understand the role of the poem itself in mediating between physical place and reflective space, between the written/spoken word and the range of non-linguistic impulses underlying them, between collected meaning and deep-seated emotion. In similar fashion, this opening poetic statement clearly shows the extent to which language is never concretely emplaced within definition, but instead is always pliant and reliant upon each recipient’s initial encounter with the individual components of the message and subsequent set of associations that arise



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from the layered set of contexts within which the message is housed. In an email about his work, Pessl engages with this role of language: [D]as ganze Gedicht ist sehr weit weg von einem konkreten, eindeutigen, vorhersehbaren Sprachgebrauch, hier geht es vorallem um die Möglichkeiten der Sprache, die unendlichen Variationen, um das Erzeugen von reiner Schönheit, um das Evozieren unbewusster Muster, die der Sprache unterlegt sind (unterlegt werden). Beim Rezipienten kann das bestimmte, sagen wir ‘eindeutige’ Assoziationen erzeugen und soll es auch ... (email message to author, 29 July 2011) (The entire poem is distanced from a specific, decisive, and predictable use of language. Here it is above all about the possibilities of language, the infinite variations; about the production of pure beauty; about the evoking of unconscious models, which lie beneath (and are laid beneath) language. With recipients this can produce, let’s say, ‘decisive’ associations, and it should do this as well …)

One reading of the opening line of the poem – as evocative of a Swedish landscape with intertextual invocations of American writer Herman Melville – is just one possible set of associations and readings that stem from the multiple possible encounters with Pessl’s piece. The work of radio broadcast in limitlessly compounding these layers of linguistic possibility demonstrates, as well, the role of the medium in extending the literary form through the intermedial possibilities of broadcast sound. Pessl’s use of the poem to enframe the entirety of the piece serves both as organising principle and as a foundational entry and exit point to the more sublime interiority of vocalised sound that comprises the piece. As Pessl’s radio performance advances, the amount of time devoted to plant-induced trance or poetic recitation is seemingly random. Where we can detect a more distinct syntactic patterning and rhythmic flow in the trance portion from the start of the broadcast, this rhythmic quality begins to break down further into the broadcast as the phytochemical compounds of the deadly  nightshade and their effects become heightened,  and as  Pessl  himself experiences the pursuant altered state of consciousness more deeply.  Whether we think of the agential relationship that arises between the  biosemiotic processes inherent to Atropa belladonna and  Pessl’s own semiotic framing of identity and subjectivity as forming a heightened sense  of awareness or a deeper connectivity to the larger world, the sounds  produced by their pairing locate language as a compositional and performative medium that points to, but does not always privilege, meaning. The poem thus functions as a type of anchoring point for the performer as well as for the listening audience, as a point of calm departure and expectation into the trance-like vocal cadences

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that form the heart of the piece, and as a point of arrival and reflective clarity from out of the, at times, muted guttural paralanguage that assists communication. As the spoken lead-in to the broadcast clarifies, Pessl wanders in and through the poetic realm, dives beneath its surface, to discover ‘neue, bisher unbekannte Dimensionen’ (‘new, as yet unknown dimensions’) of language, its hidden depths and its associations with human emotion and desire: Er dringt dabei in akustische Räume vor, die in der Vor-und Nachzeit der Menschen-Sprache zu orten sind: die Sprache der Tiere, der Pflanzen, des Gesteins, der großen Landschaften, des Himmels, der Nacht, des Tages. Diese Durchquerung von Raum und Zeit führt ihn in verschiedene Sphären, die einmal außerhalb, ein andermal mitten im Zentrum der Sprache liegen. Abwechselnd gerät Pessl dabei in unterschiedliche Entwicklungsphasen des Wortes: er durchstreift seine Entstehungsgeschichte, um schließlich wieder ins Stadium seiner Auflösung zu gelangen. (1996, audio transcript)9 (He penetrates through his work into acoustic spaces, which are located in the pre- and post-history of human language: the language of animals, of plants, of rocks, of great landscapes, of the sky, of night and day. This crossing of space and time leads him into diverse spheres, which one time lie outside and another time lie in the exact centre of language. Through this Pessl alternately encounters the word in varying phases of development: he roams over its origin story, in order to finally arrive again at the stage of its dissolution.)

In addition to the play of language that Pessl locates within poetry, there is also a nod here to recognising language as something that exists outside language, as something definitively non-human in its ontological connections to things outside the realm of human sensate experience. There are echoes here, too, of Michel Serres’s ideas about language, perception and the body as the sites where meaning is in a constant state of being shaped. For Pessl, then, the literary mode of poetry provides a surface moment that enwraps all of the potential permutations and combinations bound up within language, as well as all of those aspects of language that resist being hinged in meaning. The pendulousness of language as being anchored in the textual or detached in the vocal highlights the role of sound in implementing the poetic into broadcast. In a certain sense, the interplay of the literary with the transmission/reception framework of sound helps trace the contours of the Kantian sublime – that space of experience in closer proximity to a noumenal sense of self existent prior or adjacent to a phenomenally mediated knowledge of the world. As a highly mediated art form that draws on multiple textual, sonic, paratextual and parasonic elements, radiophonic art makes possible any number of compositional

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readings on the part of any one individual listener. And while in Kant’s thinking it would be impossible to capture a noumenal sense of self, the potentialities offered through these compositional readings could at least point to an awareness that something lies outside our conscious experience of the world in this noumenal space. Anchored in Trance suggests one possible collaboration between sound and the literary. As a perceptual mode that carries forward those sonic markers we use to identify the origins of a particular sound, as well as tonal sensations indicating movement, depth and positionality, sound modulates these specific strands of information into aurally mediated knowledge. In the case of Pessl’s radio art piece, sound tunnels beneath the flat textual surface of the poem, enlivening the emotional and the spatial and embodying everything that language hides behind and within it. The influence of the agential relationship that arises through Pessl’s ingestion of the psychoactive Atropa belladona plant assists with this more embodied form of language production, and points to a larger set of interconnections we produce and share with the natural world and its array of sentient and non-sentient entities. Poetic voice becomes unmoored from the clarity of recitation through plant-induced trance, producing an altered state of acoustic consciousness regarding the complex set of relationships we share with the world around us, and situating human voice back into a larger context of natural sound. What Pessl conjures forth is a trance-induced vocal entity that arises out of the calm recitation of the poetic excerpts and confronts the listener with moments of playful dissonance, moments in which the listener encounters a human voice caught in the entanglement between the human capacity for reason, speech and language, and the phytochemical and biosemiotic communication intrinsic to the performative world of Atropa belladonna. This entanglement points to an agential relationship that exists prior to or possibly after language becomes associated purely with meaning, rather than being understood as a fluid process towards meaning.

Sound and the dramaturgy of broadcast Where Ganglbauer and Pessl each incorporate the literary mode of poetry in their respective individual pieces as foundational trigger and return points for the thought-provoking, sonic meanderings that evoke real place and engage mind space, their semi-collaborative piece Wie es möglich ist mit geschlossenen Augen from 1991 operates at the level of voice, of the vocal, as a mediatised instrument that navigates within the interior layers of language and distinguishes between the materiality of its visual form

170 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry

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as ­textuality and the immateriality of its voiced form as aurality. In the lead-in to the radio broadcast, Pessl zeroes in on the fleshiness of the body as the site where meaning resides, and where language and tonality work in concert to return us to an a priori moment of perception where object and linguistic concept were one and the same: Es war für mich der Klang immer sehr wichtig; d.h. der Klang des Einzelworts, die intensive Beschäftigung mit dem Einzelwort, die Untersuchung der Verbindung zwischen dem Wort und dem bezeichneten Ding oder Wesen. … Ich glaube, daß es nur in einem veränderten Bewusstseinszustand möglich ist, Ding und Begriff wieder zu vereinen. Und ich glaube nicht, daß es ein Problem der Sprache an sich ist, daß sie die Quelle aller Mißverständnisse ist, sondern daß die verstellte Sprache, die von verstellten Menschen gesprochen wird und verwendet wird, dann wirklich nur mehr Unsinn produziert, weil das Band zwischen Ding, Wesen, und Begriff zerstört ist. Und wenn das zerstört ist, kann nicht sinnvolles mehr entstehen. … (1991, audio transcript) (Sound has always been important to me, that is, the sound of the individual word, the intense preoccupation with the individual word … to explore the connection between the word and the signified object or essence … I believe that it is only possible in an altered state of consciousness to reunite the thing and its concept. And I don’t feel that it is an inherent problem of language that it becomes a source for misunderstandings. Rather a misplaced language,  which is used and spoken by misplaced people, produces really only nonsense, because the thread between object, essence and concept is destroyed. And when this is destroyed, then nothing meaningful can arise …)

We see here the various roots that appear in his later Anchored in Trance piece from 1996, insofar as the core vocal/tonal/aural components residing at the heart of language provide those points of access to a state and acoustics of consciousness where the connections between object, essence and concept have not yet been pulled apart by a notion of a misplaced or disguised language. At the centre of the radio piece are two voices, each encountering the other within the auditory space of the piece, at once  running parallel to the other, talking past the other, and at times  uniting, until they both  collide with or are interrupted by an annoying noise reminiscent of metal on stone, but which both are able to withstand. According to Pessl, the two voices play very specific roles with respect to his own voice which inhabits the literary narrative comprising the piece: Eigentlich eine Stimme, d.h. der Text, ist so entstanden, daß es eine Stimme war, die dann von mir getrennt wurde, weil ich davon ausgehe, dass man Personen/Dinge voneinander ohnehin nicht trennen kann, deshalb entsteht es zuerst einmal, gemeinsam, weil ich glaube das alles miteinander in Verbindung



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steht. Das heisst, es gibt weder das Ding in Ruhe noch gibt es den von der Mitwelt abgeschnittenen Menschen oder das abgeschnittene Tier. Es steht alles miteinander in völliger Verbindung. Und deshalb ist es in einer Stimme entstanden, ist dann von mir getrennt worden, aber nur zu dem Zweck um dann in der Produktion des Hörstücks in der Gleichzeitigkeit der Stimmen wieder zu einem zusammenzuwachsen. (1991, audio transcript) (Actually, one voice, that is, the text, developed from the idea that it was one voice which became separated from me. I assume that persons and objects cannot be separated, as it is, from one another, and therefore it initially originates together, because I believe that everything is deeply connected. That is, there is neither an object in repose nor is there a person or animal disconnected from the social world. Everything exists in complete fusion. And therefore, it originates in one voice, is then separated from me, but only for the purpose of merging into one in the simultaneity of voices in the production of the radio piece.)

When we take this in light of Pessl’s earlier discussion of misaligned language and misaligned human beings, then this disintegration of Pessl’s narrative voice into two reflects precisely our move away from a conscious understanding of the world as a unified sensate experience, as emblematic of Serres’s understanding that we have in some way been severed via language from an interwoven network of phenomenological experience. That this initial disintegration and consequential merging of voices is motivated through the core narrative’s adaptation into the spatial and performative facets of sound demonstrates, again, the intermediality that lies at the heart of sound. It is key to note here that the two voices merge only after the jarring interruption of the noise of metal on stone, which Pessl connects as the depiction of ‘persönlichen Schmerz’ (‘personal pain’) (1991, audio transcript). That an almost non-human sound provokes the fusion of the two voices, even for a brief moment, is telling for the realignment of language, of human beings, within a larger world of experience where ‘object-essence-concept’ have not yet been torn apart. As discussed earlier, it is important not to read this as a desire for a restoration of a better, previous state, but rather that these pieces of radio art point to the interconnectedness and relationality of the varying intermedial inputs that demand another way of perceiving and listening in order to be heard and seen. For Pessl, these fragments of narrative text spoken by each voice also have clear connections to a particular memory from his childhood, and the specific spatial connotations generated within and by such memory. Pessl reproduces the atemporality that surrounds memory by utilising the physical place of the RP4 digital studio and the movement of the voice within this space to evoke the territorial wanderings of the voices themselves within the imagined space of an apartment

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172 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry where the narrative text is set. Produced within the collaborative framework of the RP4 workshop set up by Kunstradio at the ORF broadcasting studio, this measured use of the digital studio for the creation of the piece also points to the innovative artistic expertise that Pessl brings, and clearly reflects the approach taken by Kunstradio in placing the artist at the centre of expertise in the production of the piece. The workshop invited seventeen visual artists, composers and writers to participate in a weekend to introduce them to the then-new digital Hörspiel studio, RP4 and the realm of broadcasting.10 Following the workshop, participants were invited each to produce a piece in the digital studio, all of which were then broadcast as part of the ORF Kunstradio programme in 1991. This workshop approach, cast as it was in terms of artist expertise as the organising principle, provided both artistic direction via Serbian audio/radio artist Arsenije Jovanović’s experience working with sound-based media and technical input from ORF sound engineer Gerhard Wieser. This artist-centred, horizontal approach to the production of radio art provides us with an opportunity to expand on our earlier genealogy of the Hörspiel and get a sense of how the role of dramaturgy changes across the same lineage. In connection to the early experiments called for by pioneers such as Palitzsch and his notion of the Sendespiel, we can look to the 1960s for an understanding of forms that sought to add additional examples to offset the type of literary-based, staged radio drama that Hörspiel had grown into during the two decades following the Second World War. Here Klaus Schöning, founder and long-term director of the Studio Akustische Kunst at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Broadcasting) in Cologne, identifies two forms in the evolution of radiobased sound productions, both of which desired to expand radio-listener and radio-practitioner understanding of radio-based genres beyond the sedimented literary/narrative forms with which they had become synonymous within the definitional practice embodied by the term Hörspiel. Schöning’s Neues Hörspiel and Ars Acustica, instead, navigate between what he calls an ‘open dramaturgy’ and an ‘open Hörspiel ­aesthetic’  – moments in the process of production in which the artist herself has moved away from delivering a text that has been adapted for broadcast by someone else, and is instead situated as a conduit in the midst of production. In Schöning’s chronology, these productions see the artist as engaged in everything from highly detailed, ­technically focused scripts to imprecise concepts that are only realised through the actual process of production itself (Schöning, 1987: 138).11 The movements Schöning focuses on between an open dramaturgy and an open aesthetics also point to a desire to uncouple these soundbased forms from the medium of radio. In this uncoupling Schöning also



Poetry on the Austrian radio 173

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builds in some definitional murkiness to allow the Neues Hörspiel and Ars Acustica forms to potentially resist the type of sedimentation experienced in the traditional radio drama form of Hörspiel. Yet in his elaboration and ­exploration of the two forms and their history, Schöning himself points to a type of paradox that exists in being able to absolutely detach the development of a work of Ars Acustica or Neues Hörspiel from the structured realities of the radio medium: Das Radio jedoch ist kein abstrakter Freiraum. Das Radio ist eine verwaltete Institution. Jede Radiostation unterliegt ganz unterschiedlichen Verwaltungen und Konditionen. Radiokunst ist eine verwaltete Kunst. Die Grenzen des Radios sind immer auch die Grenzen der akustischen Kunst im Radio. Auch die Grenzen im Kopf der Radioexperten sind die Grenzen der akustischen Kunst – im Radio. (1987: 128–9) (The radio, however, is not an abstract space. The radio is an administered institution. Every radio station is subject to completely different administrations and sets of conditions. Radio art is an administered art. The borders of radio are always the borders of acoustic art in radio. Even the boundaries in the heads of the radio experts are the boundaries of acoustic art – in the radio.)

So, in a sense, we’ve arrived at the heart of a long-standing debate about how or whether artistic content can itself transcend the borders/boundaries of the medium in which it resides. And Schöning provides no adequate response or solution to this debate beyond miring himself like the dramaturge and radio expert he criticises here, or suggesting that acoustic art should exist within the formlessness of the creative moment, to then be mediated by the enframing capacities of the medium. In each case, both the ideational and practical limitations underpinning the medium will always govern the reception of the piece, regardless of how openly the dramaturgy or aesthetics are defined. With respect to the RP4 project and Pessl’s and Ganglbauer’s collaborative production within it, the institutional framework of the ORF still maintains some administrative control over set broadcasting standards and schedules, but the collaborative arrangement of the workshop and the absence of dramaturgical oversight traditionally applied to Hörspiel production illustrate how at least some of the administered features of a radio art production can be minimised to allow the artist’s creative impulses to guide the creation, if not the distribution, of the piece. Literature on the radio has moved light years beyond what Palitzsch and other pioneers of the Hörspiel had envisioned in moving the radio towards developing and supporting its own artistic and cultural forms. While a traditional notion of Hörspiel combines the performative and literarybased elements of stage drama with primarily Foley-sourced ­reproductions

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174 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry of sound in order to evoke character, plot and setting for the listening public, the form is not necessarily one that has come to understand itself as being propelled by sound, but rather instead by the spoken word. In contrast, Schöning’s historical and theoretical discussion surrounding the Neues Hörspiel and Ars Acustica points to the importance of seeing these two forms not necessarily as alternatives to or experimental extensions of ­narrative-based Hörspiel, but rather as ‘herausragende HörSpiele, autonome Werke der akustischen Kunst dieses Jahrhunderts. In beiden Traditionen könnte das Hörspiel auch als “Radiokunst” seine Identität finden’ (‘outstanding HörSpiele, autonomous works of acoustic art in the twentieth century. In both traditions the Hörspiel could also be understood as “radio art”’) (Schöning, 1988: 68).12 In seeking to clarify that Neues Hörspiel and Ars Acustica are autonomous forms of acoustic art set apart from a traditional idea of Hörspiel, in using a clever spelling to mark that distinction, and finally in suggesting that the two forms are traditions within which Hörspiel takes some of its identity as ‘radio art’, Schöning only succeeds in making the murkiness of these definitions that much more cloudy, and in limiting an understanding of radio art to mean that all sound-based art, music and Hörspiel are examples of radio art just because they are broadcast on the radio.13 Yet elsewhere in his writing, he also makes some extremely compelling points about the importance of spoken versus written language, and identifies a series of components that help create the backdrop for acoustic art: spielerisch ausprobierend auch mit textungebundener Sprache, Sprachzitat, expressiver Artikulation, Umweltgeräusch, Originalton, akustischen objets trouvés, musikalischen Klängen, elektronischer Technik, der Kunst der Montage und Collage bis hin zur Gestaltung mehrtägiger akustischer Ereignisse eines ‘composing the radio’, sowie der Realisierung des Radios als eines allen zugänglichen Hör-Raums … (Schöning, 1987: 129) (a playful experimentation with a textually unbound language, spoken word sample, expressive articulation, ambient noise, direct quotation, acoustic found art, musical sounds, electronic technique, the art of montage and collage, right up to the organisation of multi-day acoustic events in the style of ‘composing the radio’, as well as the implementation of the radio as listening space accessible to everyone …)

Perhaps the slipperiness that characterises Schöning’s essays is exactly the point, that the desire for precise definitions belongs to a peculiarly human need to capture the complexity of an experience in the simplest terms and forms possible. For Schöning, Ars Acustica both utilises and extends the intermedial contours of the Neues Hörspiel, and for that matter Palitzsch’s Sendespiel, to provoke an acoustic art that exists outside the scope of any



Poetry on the Austrian radio 175

one medium, and that aspires to a new type of language divorced from a text-based or written language, and residing instead within a purely spoken/ vocalised, and thus also heard, language:

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Die menschliche Stimme. Die Poesie der Laute. Die uns umgebende Welt der Geräusche: Eine allen verständliche Sprache. Die Utopie der akustischen Kunst: das Bewusstsein der Hörenden öffnet sich. Es fängt an, das zu hören, was zu hören ist, wenn das Hörspiel nicht mehr zu hören ist. (Schöning, 1987: 140) (The human voice. The poetry of sounds. The world of sounds surrounding us: a language comprehensible to all. The utopia of acoustic art: the consciousness of the listener opens up. It begins to hear what is able to be heard when the Hörspiel can no longer be heard.)

Through this alignment of human voice, the poetry of sounds and the world of sound that surrounds us, Schöning points us to a form of acoustic art that centres on the same primordial power of the sonic that Serres also identifies, and that moves away from the more formal aspects of the Hörspiel as administered by the radio as institution. Ganglbauer and Pessl’s work within radio broadcast showcases these aspects of sound, which speak to its inherent intermediality, and it is this focus on sound along with each of these artists’ central creative role in the production of these works that make them stand apart from the very studiofocused creation of a typical Hörspiel. At the core of each radio art piece is the use of sound to engage and position listeners within a cognitively situated realm of ideas, emotions and sensations. In much the same way that Searle approaches consciousness from within the unified field theory described earlier, here the entire array of sensate experiences (visual, emotional, aural, spatial, haptic, olfactory, gustatory) that comprise any one listener’s realm of conscious knowledge become triggered via the listening experience and evoke, as well, an assortment of potential interpretations and meanings. The significance of the listening experience, as it is bound together with the adaptation of the underlying textual, spatial and emotional material of the poem for sound-based broadcast, thus lies in the manifold interpretations the broadcast calls forth through its reverberation of the poem itself. The relationships that Pessl and Ganglbauer explore between language, sound and spatiality focus on the ways in which both the spatial and the literary inform and are informed by the nature of sound as a perceptual mode, and as a carrier of knowledge. The tonality, ambiguity and affectivity of human language form a certain logic or trajectory across each of these pieces for radio. Sound’s ability to modulate the textual – to break it down into the constituent components that are housed within language (vocal, semantic, morphological, etc.) and to distill the emotional, spatial and ideational

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176 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry e­ lements that reside within it – suggests an ontological capacity that allows it to easily move between and within Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal model of knowledge and experience. The element of broadcast enlarges the field of aural receptivity to extend not only the poem’s reach, but also the range of possible meanings the poem takes on in the minds of the broadcast’s listeners. As complex intermedial acts, these poetry-based sound works combine a palette of found, collected and produced sound with the creative skill of the two artists to produce a listening experience that engages the range of intertextual, paratextual and parasonic references within the consciousness and imagination of each listener. Peter Pessl and Petra Ganglbauer demonstrate how poetry on Austrian radio experiments with poetic language, acoustic atmospheres and human/non-human voice and vocality across the intermedial space of sound broadcast.

Notes  1 See Gilfillan (2009: 22–86) for additional background about radio programming and broadcasting in the Weimar Republic. On the relationship between literature and the media see Segeberg (2005: 143–9).  2 All translations into English are my own, except where otherwise indicated.  3 See Kim-Cohen (2009), Cox (2009) and Lavender (2017) for investigations of the ontological/phenomenological nature of sound, and questions regarding the noumenal sound-in-itself.  4 For more detailed definitional and typological discussions about the Hörspiel, see Döhl (1988) and Hagelüken (2006).  5 We can also look to the work of J. E. Cutting (1986) and his elaboration of directed perception, and J. J. Gibson (1966) and his ecological approach to understanding perception, for interesting corroborative parallels to both Kant’s early discussions about human understanding and perception, and Searle’s contemporary work investigating the relationship between consciousness and language.  6 Ganglbauer speaks of her use of these concepts in an audio-based artist’s statement (2010c).  7 The poem also appears as part of an online website (Ganglbauer, 2010b) that accompanies the broadcast.  8 The word Mortoton, according to Ganglbauer in an email communication from 12 December 2019, ‘was a language game’. While the term has no definitive meaning in German, the Italian adjective morto combined with the German word Ton in the context of Klemm’s description suggests an ecotone that has lost its resilience and has died or become extinct. Given the meaning of Ton as sound, then, the understanding of Mortoton as the sound of extinction is easily perceived.  9 Lead-in to Peter Pessl’s Anchored in Trance (1996), spoken by Heidi Grundmann, 00' 59"–02' 57".

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10 Participants in the workshop included writers Marlene Streeruwitz, Lucas Cejpek, Walter Grond, Katharina Riese, Ferdinand Schmatz and Peter Pessl; visual artists Gottfried Bechtold, Eva Ursprung and Gudrun Bielz; intermedia artists Martin Breindl, Andrea Sodomka, ManfreDu’Schu and Reinhard F. Handl; sound artists Arsenije Jovanović and Winfried Ritsch; composers Peter Battisti and Karlheinz Essl; and sound engineer Gerhard Wieser. 11 For additional resources on the Neues Hörspiel, see Schöning (1970; 1974; 1982). 12 An English translation of this essay (with some differences in content) appeared in 1991; see Schöning (1991). 13 For a more compelling set of contours for describing radio art, see Robert Adrian’s manifesto ‘Toward a Definition of Radio Art’ (n.d.).

References Adrian, R. (n.d). ‘Toward a definition of radio art’, Vienna: ORF Kunstradio, www. kunstradio.at/TEXTS/manifesto.html (accessed 28 July 2019). Cox, C. (2009). ‘Sound art and the sonic unconscious’, Organised Sound, 14.3, 19–26. Cutting, J. E. (1986). Perception with an Eye for Motion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Döhl, R. (1988). Das neue Hörspiel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Ganglbauer, P. (2010a). Ökotonal, Vienna: ORF Kunstradio, http://stream.mur. at:8000/kunstradio/mp3/2010A/07_02_10.mp3 (accessed 20 March 2021). Ganglbauer, P. (2010b). ‘Ökotonal von Petra Ganglbauer’, Vienna: ORF Kunstradio, www.kunstradio.at/2010A/OEKO/index.html (accessed 28 July 2019). Ganglbauer, P. (2010c). ‘Statement Petra Ganglbauer’, Vienna: ORF Kunstradio, http://stream.mur.at:8000/kunstradio/mp3/2010A/07_02_10int.mp3 (accessed 20 March 2021). Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gilfillan, D. (2009). Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hagelüken, A. (2006). ‘Acoustic (media) art: Ars acustica and the idea of a unique art form for radio – an examination of the historical conditions in Germany’, World New Music Magazine, 16, 90–102. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge. Kant, I. (2007 [1781]). The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. M. Weigelt. London: Penguin. Kim-Cohen, S. (2009). In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. New York: Continuum. LaBelle, B. (2006). Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum. Lavender, J. (2017). ‘Introduction: sounding/thinking’, Parallax, 23.3, 245–51.

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178 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry Montemayor, C. (2004). ‘Appendix G: The Nahuales or Tonas’, in C. Montemayor and D. Frischmann (eds), Words of the True Peoples: Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Indigenous-Language Writers. Vol. 1: Prose. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 243–4. Palitzsch, O. A. (1927). ‘Gefunkte Literatur’, Der Kreis, 4.1, 6–10. Pessl, P. (1991). Wie es möglich ist mit geschlossenen Augen, Vienna: ORF Kunstradio, http://stream.mur.at:8000/kunstradio/mp3/1991A/31_01_91.mp3 (accessed 20 March 2021). Pessl, P. (1996). Anchored in Trance, Vienna: ORF Kunstradio, http://stream.mur. at:8000/kunstradio/mp3/1996A/11_01_96.mp3 (accessed 20 March 2021). Schöning, K. (ed.) (1970). Neues Hörspiel: Essays, Analysen, Gespräche. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schöning, K. (ed.) (1974). Neues Hörspiel. O-Ton: Der Konsument als Produzent, Versuche. Arbeitsberichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schöning, K. (ed.) (1982). Spuren des Neuen Hörspiels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schöning, K. (1987). ‘Auf den Spuren der akustischen Kunst im Radio’, in documenta 8: Kassel 1987. Vol. 1: Aufsätze. Kassel: Weber & Weidemeyer, pp. 127–41. Schöning, K. (1988). ‘Konturen der Akustischen Kunst’, in H. L. Arnold (ed.), Bestandsaufnahme Gegenwartsliteratur: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Österreich, Schweiz. Munich: edition text + kritik, pp. 67–86. Schöning, K. (1991). ‘The contours of acoustic art’, trans. M. E. Cory, Theatre Journal, 43.3, 307–24. Searle, J. R. (2002). Consciousness and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Segeberg, H. (2005). ‘Industrial culture, writers and the media: on the history of literature and the media in the Weimar Republic’, in C. Emden and D. Midgely (eds), Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 129–56. Serres, M. (2008). The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Trans. M. Sankey and P. Cowley. London: Continuum. Vandsø, A. (2011). ‘Listening to the world: sound, media, and intermediality in contemporary sound art’, SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 1.1, 68–81.

8 Gerhard Rühm’s radiophonic poetry

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Roland Innerhofer

Gerhard Rühm’s (b. 1930) radiophonic work began at a time when, at least in German-speaking countries, the radio play was largely understood as an inner stage, a kind of echo chamber of inwardness, and was mainly psychologically oriented. When German authors such as Paul Wühr, Ludwig Harig and Jürgen Becker began working experimentally for radio in the mid-1960s, thus preparing the transition to the New Radio Play in 1968 (Schöning, 1969), Viennese authors Rühm and Konrad Bayer (1932–64) had already written a radio play that had radically broken with psychological conventions. Rühm shares the use of montage techniques with the New Radio Play. However, for Rühm, the manipulation of the acoustic qualities of the original material seems to take precedence over its semantic function. This approach to acoustic material is related to the fact that Rühm’s radiophonic art is strongly influenced by his musical education – he was privately taught by Josef Matthias Hauer, who had already developed a system for twelve-tone technique based on tropics instead of rows by 1911, even before Arnold Schönberg. Hauer integrated this technique into a universal system by assigning the tones to colours or food. The twelve-tone technique reflects a growing degree of abstraction in human perception and art that dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Rühm’s radio plays take up this tendency when they transform language into music. The resulting process of abstraction can be regarded as representative of the neo-avant-garde’s particular approach to radio plays. This chapter will analyse which semiotic function the acoustic material – sound, word, noise and music – performs in Rühm’s radiophonic poetry. I will pay special attention to the relationship between the written text and the acoustic realisation of the radio plays. An important context for literary creation, and especially for radio plays in Austria and Germany after 1945, was the abuse of language by the National Socialists. The German-speaking neo-avant-garde felt the need to purify language, to examine its elements and to find new ways of using language and linguistic expression. It was Rühm’s concern to find

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180 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry a formal concept for each of his radio plays and ‘Hörstücke’,1 which was then translated into a written record and an acoustic realisation. Rühm wrote in 1970, ‘im idealfall, meine ich, ist jedes hörspiel, jedes hörstück die realisation eines jeweils eigenen formalen konzepts’ (‘ideally, i think, every radio play, every radio piece is the realisation of its own formal concept’) (1970: 46).2 All acoustic phenomena, whether words, sounds or noises, are equally available material. But regardless of Rühm’s declared intention to constantly find new formal compositional concepts, his radio plays, created over a period of almost sixty years, show consistent characteristics. These include the techniques of radical reduction and abstraction, which enable and promote media permeability and the mutual crossing of boundaries between language and music. This constant interplay between language and music also implies that in Rühm’s case, language – with few exceptions – holds a central position. Franz Mon put it concisely: ‘Hörspiel ist immer auch Sprachspiel’ (‘Radio plays are always language plays’) (1994: 264). Rühm’s first radio play dates back to 1958 and he has continued his work for radio until today. His auditory and radiophonic poetry shows an enormous range, ‘from chanson to number poem, from breath poem to composition with mere language sounds’ (Weiss, 2001: 261). It should also be emphasised that Rühm realised his radio plays himself with few exceptions, and directed them. This shows his ambition to take into his own hands the artistic production process in all media up to the final product. My chapter will highlight some paradigmatic examples from this wideranging oeuvre to illuminate the diversity, but also the constants, of Rühm’s radiophonic production.

Arbitrariness and association of language signs Rühm’s first radio play, sie werden mir zum rätsel, mein vater (you are becoming a mystery to me, my father), was written in 1958 as a joint work with Konrad Bayer. It was not until 1968 that WDR Cologne produced it under the direction of Klaus Schöning, who from then until 2001 headed the Cologne-based Studio Akustische Kunst, which he built up. Deutschlandfunk re-broadcast this production on 18 February 2018. This delayed realisation and reception is not surprising, since sie werden mir zum rätsel, mein vater was far ahead of its time. Rühm and Bayer’s approach to the radio play must be seen in the context of the works of the neo-avant-garde Vienna Group, active from 1954 to 1964, which included not only Rühm and Bayer but also Friedrich Achleitner, H. C. Artmann and Oswald Wiener. Collaborative work was an important feature of their activities, and the radio play was an attractive genre for these authors

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because it was conducive to their efforts to transcend the boundaries of the individual disciplines of art and combine different media. While in the German-speaking world in the 1950s Surrealism imported from France was regarded as the ne plus ultra of innovation by many, Rühm and Bayer experimented with a more radical form of montage. Their processes of alienation did not involve psychological situations, but – mostly found – linguistic material, that is, words, sentences, phrases and commonplaces. As Klaus Ramm put it: ‘What can be read or heard here is independent or has become − as far as possible − independent linguistic or acoustic material’ (1999: 119). Consequently, it is the language, the words and the sentences that act and not any characters in the ordinary sense. This also means that the radio play does not follow a plot, but plays with plot elements. This playful character becomes particularly evident when dealing with the father figure. The name Abraham recalls a central mythical figure from the book of Genesis, but the text undermines every expectation of a serious engagement with the biblical material. It is therefore particularly ironic that the son bears the name Ernst. Rühm writes: ‘hier wird ein pathetisches motiv – man wird unschwer die biblische “opferung isaaks” erkennen – in redensartlich trivialen und, im wörtlichen sinn, ver-rückten dialogen persifliert’ (‘here a pathetic motif – one will easily recognise the biblical “sacrifice of Isaac” – is satirised in trivial and, literally, crazy dialogues’) (2016a: 653). Rühm explains that action sequences only emerge in the production process from the material relationships between preformed language elements, words and sentences (2016a: 653). This mode of production builds on a distanced and artificial attitude towards literary patterns of action. By releasing the linguistic and acoustic material from conventional communicative use and its practical logic, it achieves greater autonomy and mobility. In the dialogue between father and son, the text itself reflects on the arbitrariness of these material linguistic relationships by referring to the common linguistic thesis according to which the relationship between the signifier and the signified is based on human convention and agreement rather than on a natural law: ‘abraham: ich habe angst. / ernst: das wort angst ist durch die historische entwicklung zu erklären und hat mit der sache selbst nichts zu tun’ (‘abraham: i am fearful / ernst: the word fear can be explained by the historical development and has nothing to do with the matter itself’) (2016a: 15). In the following, I will give some examples of how the text sequence emerges from linguistic associations. The beginning of the dialogue between father and son is about a gift from the father to the son, a ‘selbstbinder’, that is, a clip-on or a bow tie. Another term for this is the German word ‘fliege’, also meaning ‘fly’. Later in the text, the other meaning of this word is activated when Ernst proposes to become a fly and then the ­physical

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182 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry c­haracteristics of this insect are described. Another word proliferates through the text and creates comic effects, the word ‘orgel’ (‘organ’), in the sense of the musical instrument. The first time the word appears in the text is when the father says ‘diese taste fehlt in meiner orgel’ (‘this key is missing in my organ’) (2016a: 13). The son, who is described in the dramatis personae as ‘sein geistig zurückgebliebener sohn, ein redner’ (‘his mentally retarded son, a speaker’) (2016a: 11), answers: ‘ich will mit orgeln nichts zu tun haben. die liebsten geschöpfe sind mir filosofen’ (‘i don’t want to have anything to do with organs. my favourite creatures are philosophers’) (2016a: 13). The father insists: ‘du würdest sehr reinlich aussehen, mit dem selbstbinder an der orgel’ (‘you’d look very clean, with the bow tie on the organ’) (2016a: 13). Instead of playing the organ, the son focuses on repeating the word ‘orgel’. To a series of questions that the father asks him, the son answers consistently with ‘orgel’, except for the last one: ‘welchen ort hat die sonne?’ (‘what place does the sun have?’) (2016a: 19). The answer is a hybrid neologism formed from ‘ort’ and ‘orgel’: ‘ortel’. Subsequently, the word ‘orgel’ is interjected on every possible occasion. Even at the father’s request, ‘setz dich auf deine fünf buchstaben!’ (‘go and sit on your five letters!’) (2016a: 18), the son replies with ‘orgel’, which takes the place of the intended arse (Arsch). Another idiomatic phrase that is deformed by the word ‘orgel’ is Ich bin ganz Ohr, ‘I am all ear’, which is transformed into ‘ich bin ganz orgel’ (‘i am all organ’) (2016a: 23). This transformed idiomatic phrase is then taken literally, when the father asks the son to replace the missing sound of the organ with his voice – the son produces the sound as a cry of pain (‘au’) when the father strikes him with his stick. The radio play ends with the word and the theme ‘orgel’. After the swimmer Engelbrecht pulls out an organ key found in the sea, the instruction reads: ‘orgelmusik klingt auf und beendet das hörspiel’ (‘organ music sounds and ends the radio play’) (2016a: 27). This ending can be understood as a parody of a teleological radio play plot that is structured in a linear sequence. Rühm emphasises in his retrospective self-commentary that this play is not in the first place based on a ‘verfremdung psychologischer situationen’ (‘alienation of psychological situations’) and thus not on ‘das negativ des traditionellen psychologischen theaters’ (‘the negative of traditional psychological theatre’) (2016a: 653), as in absurdist theatre. The rejection of surrealism and absurdist theatre implied in this statement serves to underline the radicality and innovativeness of Rühm’s own position. Starting from a structure that emerges from linguistic associations, deformations, calculated destruction and reconstruction, this radio play navigates between semantics and asemantics, whose boundaries appear to be fluid. Therefore, it is not surprising that all the radio stations the authors contacted ended up rejecting it.



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Bayer and Rühm’s joint work is exemplary of an important momentum in Rühm’s entire radio play oeuvre up to the present: the breaking open of conventional logical-grammatical and especially psychological-causal contexts, leading to the release of individual linguistic elements through language play. Music is still exclusively a theme, but not, as in later radio plays, an artistic means that enters into a dialogue with the art of language.

Reduction and abstraction: intertextual procedures For Rühm, the deconstruction of an art form that had previously been largely dominated by psychology paved the way for new aesthetic procedures. From 1968, Rühm’s radio plays worked with found or pre-formed text and sound materials. In their treatment, two closely interwoven strategies can be discerned: reduction and abstraction. In 1968 Rühm wrote his second radio play, ophelia und die wörter (ophelia and the words). WDR Cologne produced it in 1969 with Schöning as the director. In 1986 Schöning also realised an English (Rühm, 1998: Track 1) and in 1991 a Spanish version of this radio play. Here, too, the poetic liberation of the linguistic material – Ophelia’s complete text from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in the classical translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel for the German version − takes precedence over any narrative linearity. In the places where the text of Ophelia’s interlocutors is left out, the nouns and verbs of her own spoken text are inserted in reverse order and spoken from six different stereophonic positions. With this new arrangement of Shakespeare’s dramatic text, Rühm wanted to confront Ophelia, according to his own statements, with her own, alienated language: ‘repetierte wörter nutzen sich dabei bis zur unkenntlichkeit ab, sind zuletzt nur noch dumpfe schallereignisse’ (‘repeated words wear out beyond recognition, and are ultimately only dull sound events’) (2016a: 655). This wear and tear also affects the soundscape, which ‘ist aus der schallumsetzung jener begriffe abgeleitet, die hörbares bezeichnen’ (‘is derived from the sound conversion of those terms which designate the audible’) (2016a: 655). Rühm’s radio play deconstructs Ophelia as a dramatic character; instead, her words function independently from their traditional role as actors distributed in the acoustic space. Whereas Shakespeare’s Ophelia finally lapses into pathological introversion, Rühm’s radio play presents this madness from the very beginning as Ophelia’s entanglement in a process of disintegrating linguistic material. What is thematised in Shakespeare’s play, Ophelia’s loss of linguistic reference to the world, is staged acoustically in the radio play by releasing the words spoken by Ophelia and depriving them of their syntactic and grammatical context.

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184 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry Rühm’s radio plays experiment with the interweaving of acoustic and semantic elements in a variety of ways. blaubart vor der krummen lanke (bluebeard before the krummen lanke) was written in 1972–73 and produced by WDR Cologne in 1973 under the direction of the author. It uses the sound recording of a subway ride through seven stations in Berlin as a ‘rahmenstück’ (‘framing piece’), into which associations with the figure of Bluebeard and his wives are inserted – quotations from seven different adaptations of the Bluebeard material. This ‘rahmenstück’ is followed by a ‘kernstück’ (‘core piece’), in which associations are grouped around seven key words in italics that have already been mentioned in the frame. Trancelike repetitions associate a dream world in which figures, things, symbols and names appear to be intertwined and co-present. The choice of the historical figures who appear in the core piece in the sevenfold role of Bluebeard and his seven wives as interlocutors is initially motivated by the fact that all fourteen names begin with the syllable ‘la’, a syllable taken from the name Blaubart: Selma Lagerlöf, La Jana, La Mara (alias Marie Lipsius), Helene Lange, Sophie von La Roche, Else Lasker Schüler and Louise Lateau in the roles of the wives; Kurd Lasswitz, Rudolf von Laban, Joseph Lanner, Gustav Landauer, Johann Kaspar Lavater, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and Laurentius as figurations of Bluebeard. However, the syllable also comes from the motto of the radio play, a quotation from Bayer’s text der sechste sinn (the sixth sense, first published in 1966): ‘“la, la, la”, sang goldenberg. “bla, bla, bla”, antwortete braunschweiger’ (‘“la, la, la,” sang goldenberg. “blah, blah, blah,” braunschweiger replied’) (Rühm, 2016a: 172). This quote signals the emptying of the meaning of language. It is therefore first the arbitrary order of the alphabet, not any kind of intellectual-historical context, that determines the basic structure of the radio play. In a second step, a network of associations is woven from these persons and the quotations from or on their works, with seven recurring, symbolic keywords forming the knots. These words, in turn, refer to the frame of the radio play, in which quotations from seven adaptations of the Bluebeard material are assigned to seven underground stations. The core piece is a collage of quotations from texts written by or about the historical persons mentioned above. The combination of heterogeneous text material, related to certain keywords, opens up new horizons of meaning. The allusion to the closed spaces of the unconscious, which are explored in the stations of this literary journey, is clear. This process of experimental exploration of the unconscious can be understood in a Freudian sense. In his commentary on the play, Rühm himself alludes to the process described by Freud of becoming aware of the remnants of memory through word conceptions (Freud, 2017: 16). Rühm writes: ‘jedesmal wenn einer dieser reizbegriffe auftaucht,

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ruft er die zu ihm gehörigen früheren wach und lässt sie mitklingen, bis sie, allmählich von neuen verdeckt, versinken. alles erlebte ist auf abruf, provoziert durch das auslösende “schlüsselwort”, wieder präsent’ (‘every time one of these irritating terms appears, it awakens the earlier ones belonging to it and lets them sound along until they sink, gradually concealed by new ones. everything experienced is present again on demand, provoked by the triggering “keyword”’) (2016a: 662). But while in the acoustic version, where the keywords are marked by a lower pitch, these words are soon replaced by new ones and, as Rühm puts it, ‘sink’, the reading of the radio play text allows a return to previously mentioned keywords, marked twice with italics and asterisks, so that the sinking into oblivion is not inevitable, but can be reversed by leafing back. Antje Vowinckel’s characterisation of the function of Rühm’s quotation collage – ‘Rühm uses the collage in such a way that in the process of becoming conscious of an ego, the unrelated and the seemingly random prove to belong together’ (1995: 179) – applies to both modes of reception, listening and reading. This particular work thus also ties in with the surrealist concern to release the unconscious, and it places Rühm in an explicitly avant-garde and neo-avant-garde tradition. In the two examples just discussed, a basic procedure for Rühm’s radio plays becomes clear: from given or found materials, motifs or narratives, a single one is selected, be it a dramatic figure, a phonetic element, or a keyword. In a process of abstraction, the original concrete connections are omitted in favour of essential characteristics. The material thus released forms the starting point for new combinations and configurations. This also applies to the radio play apocalypse, produced by WDR Cologne in 2001 under the direction of Rühm. This work is based on chapters 8–20 of the Revelation of St John from the New Testament. Rühm referred to his text as a ‘Hörstück’, not a ‘Hörspiel’, and thus emphasised the absence of a plot. He eliminated all words from the original text that do not contain a ‘u’ or ‘au’. Rühm justified this selection criterion with the statement that ‘das “u” ist der dunkelste vokal’ (‘“u” is the darkest vowel’) (2016a: 678). Early on, Rühm considered radical reduction, the ‘prägnanz des ausdrucks und ökonomie der mittel’ (‘conciseness of expression and economy of means’) (1984: 29), to be essential for his auditory texts. In apocalypse, this reductive process transforms the language images of the Bible text into sound images. Released single words and sounds replace grammatical and syntactical hierarchies. Among other things, this results in longer chains of the word ‘und’ (‘and’), which, according to the author, potentiate the ecstatic visionary character of the text: ‘so entsteht der eindruck, es würde in dem ausnahmezustand, der für apokalyptiker symptomatisch ist, atemlos nach sprachlichem ausdruck für das u ­ ngewöhnliche

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186 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry gerungen: jedes “neugefundene” wort markiert gewissermaßen einen sprachlichen geburtsakt’ (‘thus the impression is created that in the state of emergency, which is symptomatic for apocalyptics, there is a breathless struggle for linguistic expression of the unusual: every “newly found” word in a way marks a linguistic act of birth’) (Rühm, 2016a: 678). The linguistic search movement that Rühm emphasises in his commentary receives an ironic note, since the words found are often words that have already been repeated several times. Thus, the search is contrasted with a logic of delay. This robs the underlying apocalyptic narrative of its teleology. If the last line of the ‘Hörstück’ begins with the word ‘und’ just like its first line (and all the other lines), and if the piece ends with the retrograde detonation with which it begins, then this results in a cyclical structure that replaces the final one of the apocalyptic model. The cyclical structure is additionally underlined by the sounds accompanying the spoken text, namely the ‘geräusch eines fahrenden zuges – in räumlich kreisender bewegung’ (‘sound of a moving train – in spatially circling motion’) (Rühm, 2016a: 637). The words in this piece are repeated and assembled into agrammatical clauses. The conjunction ‘und’ no longer connects terms, but only refers to itself. It does not fulfil a semantic function, but acquires autonomy and signals that the apocalyptic narrative represents a sequence of events without causal or final coherence. The apocalyptic narrative is stripped of any concrete prophetic character. An apocalyptic atmosphere conveyed not primarily by the semantics of the words, but by their sound, replaces it. Here, too, one can observe how new levels of meaning emerge from an arbitrary selection criterion. The ambiguity already present in the original apocalyptic narrative is fully unfolded. The experimental deformation of a highly canonical text unleashes a play of associations that offers the reader the opportunity to comprehend apocalyptic thinking and feel free from the burden of exegetical specifications. This radio play is also symptomatic of Rühm’s preference for number games, which in this case can be supported by apocalyptic number mysticism. The number three is particularly important for Rühm − as in the original text. Rühm writes: ‘der streng methodisch gewonnene text umfasst überraschenderweise genau dreihundert zeilen’ (‘surprisingly, the strictly methodical text comprises exactly three hundred lines’) (2016a: 678). Whether by chance or calculation, the numerical order reinforces the effect of abstraction. The reduction to the essential also manifests itself in the acoustic realisation. Rühm marks three of the ‘u’-words with whispers and uses them as structural markers for three sections. Like the agrammatically ordered words of this radio play in general, the marked words ‘gebunden’, ‘suchen’ and ‘laufen’ (‘bound’, ‘seek’, ‘run’) do not refer to any concrete

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event, but mark out a broad field of meaning. This semantic indeterminacy is contrasted with a mathematical systematics. The text is divided into three parts by three different background noises. In the first section, the key words appear ten times, in the second twenty times, in the third thirty times. The sequence of the whispered keywords does not follow a mathematical formula, but a rhythmic structure is audible. With artistic ease and inventiveness, Rühm shakes off the burdens of the traditional apocalyptic narrative. The apocalyptic tradition is thus not liquidated, but becomes mobile and aesthetically productive for the shattering of fixed meanings. As acoustic material, the fragments release new sensual experiences and extend the semantic spectrum of the apocalyptic motif.

Crossing boundaries between language and music The release of the linguistic material, which Rühm achieves through reductive and abstractive processes, opens up manifold possibilities for crossing the border between language and music. The radio play japanischer salat. eine radiophone ‘hommage à eric satie’ (japanese salad. a radiophone ‘hommage à eric satie’) is an exemplary case in point. The author directed this play, first broadcast in 1990 by WDR Cologne and revised in 2000. The title is borrowed from Eric Satie’s 1889 collection of anecdotes entitled Salade japonaise. Rühm’s work plays with various ways of transforming the alphabet into other sign systems. In the first transformation of an anecdote from this collection, the twenty-five phonemes contained therein are replaced by the nasal sound ‘m’, which is technically transposed in twentyfive steps of the whole tone scale. In the second part, the same phonemes are transformed into animal sounds or in one case into human snoring, and ‘in der dritten transformation sind den 25 phonemen 25 mechanische beziehungsweise von gegenständen herrührende geräusche zugeordnet’ (‘in the third transformation, the 25 phonemes are associated with 25 mechanical noises or noises originating from objects’) (Rühm, 2016a: 334). In the fourth transformation, the phonemes are replaced by piano keys in a whole tone sequence. In the 2000 version, this transformation is heard at the beginning of the play (Rühm, 2016b: Track 2). The play concludes with the simultaneous sequence of the four transformations and the delayed spoken anecdote text. Characteristic of Rühm’s method is the invention of his own rules, the development of an artificial method. A calculated mechanics takes the place of narration and action. Through such conscious construction, new worlds of meaning are directly derived from the linguistic material. The starting point is a short found text. This clearly defined pretext in terms of language and content

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188 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry forms the springboard for a series of distortions that dissolve the narrative schema and linguistic meanings in animal voices, sound and noise compositions as well as instrumental music. The radio play thus becomes a means of penetrating into extralinguistic states of consciousness. Such procedures are to be considered an attempt to do justice to the complexity of the relationship between consciousness and reality, which is simplified in a continuous narration. As Ramm formulates it: ‘The systematic testing of all the possibilities that language and sound material have to offer gives Rühm the opportunity to make discoveries beyond the realms of our understanding and consciousness standardised by the limits of language’ (2017: 15' 50"–16' 02"). The aim is to explore sensual possibilities of cognition that go beyond the framework of what can be empirically experienced and conceptually formatted. The means of such exploration is a radio aesthetics, an autonomous radio art. Rühm’s works for radio are characterised by methodical diversity and ingenuity. The transposition of speech sounds into sound compositions and instrumental music is also the basis of his most famous radio play, wald, ein deutsches requiem (forest, a german requiem). It was produced by WDR Cologne in 1983 (Rühm, 1998: Track 2) and awarded the Radio Play Prize of the War Blind in 1984. As in many other radio plays, Rühm integrated original sound into his work here as well. wald, ein deutsches requiem is based exclusively on documentary material such as news, O-Ton (original recorded sounds) and legal texts. In order to distinguish the radio play from the sphere of news, Rühm combines passages into a collage and accentuates them by incorporating musical elements and noises. As in japanischer salat, the piano pieces are literal transpositions (Rühm, 2016a: 282–3) of a cited text into music: the individual phonemes of the text are assigned certain tones on the piano. These artistic means are intended to convey an explosive sociopolitical message in an aesthetic way that is tailored to the radiophonic medium. The superimposition of language, music and sounds charges the theme emotionally and gives Rühm’s Ars Acustica the function of an appeal. However, Rühm himself restricts this appeal to the extent that he asserts: ‘auf diese weise will “wald, ein deutsches requiem” – ohne zusatzkommentar, ohne polemik (wenn auch oft in plakativer form) und durch kein persönliches credo belastet – den hörer zu einer eigenen stellungnahme provozieren’ (‘in this way, forest, a german requiem − without additional commentary, without polemics (even if often in an ostentatious form) and without any personal credo − wants to provoke the listener to make their own statement’) (2016a: 667). With this statement the author plays down the deliberate intention to convince listeners of the necessity of an environmentally conscious policy. Such a resistance to directly politically engaged art can be regarded as typical of the Austrian neo-avant-garde.



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Generic hybridisation Rühm always works in an intermedial field. He is particularly interested in the phenomenon of the transition from one medium to another. As Florian and Stefan Neuner emphasise, ‘Rühm’s investigation of artistic material always leads to the discovery of a self-difference of the respective medium. Rühm … insists on working at the border where the traditional art media – structural as well as historical – dissolve’ (2008: 154). Rühm’s radio plays can thus be regarded as experimental arrangements, exploring the possibilities of transforming spoken language into music as well as the similarity of music to language. Rühm’s radio plays not only work through overlays between language and sound, but also within language by means of the overlapping of different tones and registers. A striking example of this is von welt zu welt. ein science-fiction-hörspiel (from world to world. a science fiction radio play) broadcast by BR Munich in 1975 and directed by the author (Rühm, 2016b: Track 1). The theme of this radio play is the biological process of fertilisation. However, this theme only gradually becomes apparent, because the process is linguistically alienated in several respects. First, the events are transferred into a cosmic space and a science fiction scenario is created, as the subtitle clearly signals. The term ‘science fiction’ is understood literally; the scientific description of a microbiological process is presented as a cosmic event. Rühm highlights this reference to science fiction not only in the subtitle, but also in the self-commentary to his play, where he describes it as the ‘zusammentreffen zweier hermetischer welten, [das] sich als invasion der bewohner der einen in die andere vollzieht’ (‘the meeting of two hermetic worlds, which takes place as the invasion of the inhabitants of one into the other’) (2016a: 663). Rühm speaks of the ‘gewaltige vergrößerung’ (‘tremendous enlargement’) in which ‘ein alltägliches ereignis der mikro­ welt’ (‘an everyday event of the microworld’) is presented (2016a: 663). The second linguistic register, which contrasts with the description of an everyday event, is a creation story presented in a mythical tone again reminiscent of the biblical Genesis. Thus, right at the beginning of the radio play, the profane biological act of procreation is interwoven with a cosmic creation myth. It begins with a long ‘u’ spoken by a man’s voice and maintained for several minutes, which finally proves to be the sound of the word ‘und’. This beginning returns in the abovementioned radio piece apocalypse, but in von welt zu welt the ‘und’ is followed by a ‘jetzt’ (now), which accentuates the eventness and presence of the subject. The biblical tone returns at the end of the play; the moment of fertilisation, in which only one sperm survives while the remaining millions die,

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190 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry is staged as an apocalyptic event with quotations from the Revelation of St John. Such a mythical exaltation is not untypical for the genre of science fiction. The dynamics of such a creation story are also shaped in a way characteristic of early SF, which was influenced by social darwinism: namely as a race in which only the strongest, fastest and most skilled survive. The radio play describes this race, which is also a struggle for survival, in the sound of a sports report. It evokes the live sports reports on the radio that were still popular in the 1970s, and that were only gradually replaced by television broadcasts. These radio reports were confronted with the task of presenting an event invisible to the listener as vividly as possible and making it comprehensible. The excitement had to be generated by the emotional charge of the oral report and thus the invisibility had to be compensated for. In Rühm’s von welt zu welt, however, the reported event, unlike a sporting event, is actually invisible in everyday life. The representation of fertilisation as a swimming competition of sperm is reminiscent of popular formats in which scientific explanations are illustrated by anthropomorphisms or zoomorphisms. The sports report also opens up another field of tension: although the winner of the competition is a single individual, he remains part of an impersonal, anonymous, almost mechanical event. The impersonality of the biological process manifests itself in the radio play in the ‘unterschwelliges, erregtes stimmengewirr’ (‘subliminal, excited confusion of voices’), in the  ‘hintergrundsgebrabbel’ (‘background babble’) that accompanies the sports reporter’s account of the heroic competition of the swimmers and interrupts it repeatedly (Rühm, 2016a: 202). The overlapping of the stylistic levels of biblical mythology, science fiction, popular science and sports reportage produces a perspectivism that is often tinged with irony. The effect of this radio play oscillates between astonishment at the ‘wonders of nature’ and horror at the mercilessness of biology.

Transforming biography into acoustic art Rühm’s latest radio play to date – hugo wolf und drei grazien, letzter akt (hugo wolf and three graces, last act), written in 2012–13, produced by WDR Cologne and HR Frankfurt am Main in 2015, directed by the author  – shows a similar handling of pre-formed material. In this case, however, it is not a mythical, but a biographical narrative that Rühm takes up and works on. While, according to Peter Bürger, the aim of the historical avant-garde is ‘to integrate art into the praxis of life’ (1984: 22), Rühm’s radio play transposes life, or rather a specific biography, into art. hugo wolf und drei grazien, letzter akt is conceived as a performative stage play as well as a radiophonic text. Rühm called it ein radiophones

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redeoratorium für stimmen, geräusche und clavier (‘a radiophonic oratorio for voices, noises and piano’). The work was awarded the SWR Karl Sczuka Prize in 2015. The text is divided into two parts that also structure its acoustic realisation: a detailed explanatory ‘introduction’ is followed by the actual radio play. In the introduction, the reader or listener learns how the radio play was created, on which principles it was constructed, and which materials were used, mainly Hugo Wolf’s (1860–1903) biography. In addition, the introduction provides information about the technical realisation of the play. According to Rühm’s introduction, the radio play goes back to a plan ‘ein sprechstück für fünf personen zu verfassen, von denen jede ausschliesslich wörter auf einen der vokale U, O, A, E, I spricht, die sich allmählich zu fünfstimmigen vokalklängen überlagern’ (‘to compose a spoken piece for five persons, each of whom speaks exclusively words with one of the vowels U, O, A, E, I, which gradually overlap to five-part vocal sounds’) (2016a: 445). This self-imposed rule is reminiscent of the ‘methodischer inventionismus’ (‘methodical inventionism’) (Rühm, 1985: 14) propagated by the Vienna Group, or of the method of language extension by self-imposed constraints characteristic of the OULIPO group. To create thematic resonance, Rühm engaged the composer Hugo Wolf, whose name encompasses the u and o vowels. This entanglement of a language-play composition principle with a semantic dimension, in this case a historical artist figure, is characteristic of Rühm’s radio plays. The interweaving of text, voice and music preserves the various possibilities of reception. Inge Arteel emphasises this especially in the relationship between reading the text and hearing the choral speech: ‘the straightforward referential reading is not crossed out but remains traceable between the lines that open it up for a more anthropological, general hearing, when the chances and pleasures of speaking together become audible’ (2019: 346). As Rühm explains in his introduction, it was also fortunate that ‘die ersten silben der drei vornamen die vokale A, E, I enthalten’ (‘the first syllables of the three first names [of Wolf’s three lovers] contain the vowels A, E, I’) (2016a: 445). As can be seen from the title addition letzter akt, the text concentrates on the last phase of Wolf’s life, which was determined, on the one hand, by delusions and, on the other, by increasing physical and mental numbness due to his early syphilis-related, consciousness-splitting illness. This division of consciousness is formally mirrored by dividing the male part into two voices, the o- and the u-voice. Both were spoken by Rühm, but the u-voice was technically transposed to a somewhat lower register. The appearance of the ‘grazien’ (a, i, e) can thus be interpreted in this context as Wolf’s hallucinatory projections. In the three female voices spoken by Rühm’s wife, Monika Lichtenfeld, the e-word sequence functions as the normal speaking voice, while the a-word sequence is technically

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192 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry somewhat lower and the i-word sequence somewhat higher transposed. The entire linguistic material of the radio play is limited to two hundred words, with fifty each for monovocal words with a, e and i, and twenty-five each for monovocal words with o and u. Rühm interprets the progressive reduction and semantic blurring of the word inventory in its increasing chordal superimposition as a model-like process of gradual mental decline: ‘gesagtes verliert sich am ende in reinem klang’ (‘the spoken is lost at the end in pure sound’) (2016a: 446). Rühm not only directed, but also played the piano and spoke the five voices of the radio play together with Lichtenfeld. While Rühm reserved the artistic text for himself and his wife as speakers, the introduction was taken by another speaker, Dominik Freiberger. This objectifies the authority of the commentary. Rühm definitely wanted to control or at least influence the process of reception by conveying information about contexts. This aspiration to determine the attitude of reception can be seen as symptomatic of experimental, avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art. With his wordy introduction – it accounts for a third of the entire play – Rühm ties in particularly with the tradition of the New Radio Play. As Jochen Meißner (2015) writes: ‘With this, Rühm not only continues the beautiful tradition of prefaces, which reached its climax with the invention of the New Radio Play a good forty years ago, but he also provides further proof that one only hears what one knows.’ The introduction also gives an insight into the author’s workshop. The reader or listener learns how the work of art was produced, which materials it was made of, and which processes were used to assemble it. In his introduction, Rühm states: ‘nachdem ich umfangreiche monovokale wortlisten erstellt hatte, musste für dieses formale grundkonzept natürlich eine thematischer aufhänger gefunden werden, der dem ganzen einen inneren zusammenhang verleiht’ (‘after i had compiled extensive monovocal word lists, a thematic hook had to be found for this basic formal concept, of course, which lends the whole an inner coherence’) (2016a:  445). Remarkably, this inverted order of the production process compared to standard practice – first the formal concept was defined, then the material that fitted into this concept was found – is no longer recognisable in the actual radio play. The independence of the work of art from its genesis was emphasised by Theodor W. Adorno: The confounding of artworks with their genesis, as if genesis provided the universal code for what has become, is the source of the alienness of art scholarship to art: for artworks obey their law of form by consuming their genesis. Specifically aesthetic experience, self-abandonment to artworks, is indifferent to their genesis. (1997: 179)

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Gerhard Rühm’s radiophonic poetry 193

Even if the genesis in this case is not explained by scholars but by the author himself, the main piece emancipates itself from its explanatory introduction. Particularly in the acoustic reception (Rühm, 2015), the sound experience by no means appears as a dry implementation of a formal specification. Rather, the timbre of the reduced word material and the rhythm of its repetition and variation develop a suggestive pull. Words and sounds evoke reminiscences and are associated with emotional valences. Since the links between the elements are neither syntactically nor narratively fixed, individual possibilities for a kaleidoscopically changing construction of meaning open up: ‘The meanings that emanate from the semantic force field of the individual words and word fragments simultaneously provoke subjective interpretations in the imaginary space they create’ (Weiss, 2015). In the last part of the play, this pull effect is intensified by the sound of the piano played by Rühm himself. Anton Reicha’s very modern-sounding fugue accompanies the three female voices, which recite monovocal word sequences from letters of the names of Wolf’s three lovers. Here, too, it is initially a reductive process that drives the artistic production. Language material obtained from biographical documents forms the basis for an aesthetic construction that no longer focuses on an individual life course, but models a general pattern. Nevertheless, in the superposition of physiological and artistic disintegration, the concrete biographical source material (with its autobiographical potential for evocation) shines through, but as an elementary process it becomes permeable for manifold references. In this late work, the interplay between specific biography and abstract biographical model goes hand in hand with the interplay between language and music. As in Rühm’s other radio plays, language in its rhythm and tone of voice refers to the other medium, music; and music, for its part, shares its structures with those of speech and writing. Thus, a constant bidirectional border crossing takes place between music and language.

Conclusion Rühm’s works conform to the basic impulse of the neo-avant-garde inasmuch as he consistently refuses to regard fiction as a naive representation of reality. This leads to a rejection of coherent semantic content or linear narrative structures. Rühm uses the methods of linguistic reduction and abstraction to bring out the acoustic values of the linguistic material in a new and intensified way. By emphasising the tonal elements of language, by transposing language into music and by superimposing sounds and noises, the symbolic meaning function of language is no longer at the centre, but becomes an equal part in the interplay of artistic means. This interaction of

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various acoustic phenomena and messages opens up possibilities for sensual insight beyond what can be experienced in empirical and discursive ways. However, this does not mean that semantics are extinguished in these radio plays. On the contrary, their semantic dimension gains urgency through the formal procedures applied. Semantic meanings do not result from causal or final contexts, but crystallise out of net-like fields of association.

Notes 1 Rühm used this expression to describe shorter radio plays without a plot. 2 All translations from non-English source texts are mine. Rühm consistently uses lower-case characters in his texts. I retain this practice when quoting or translating from his texts.

References Adorno, T. (1997). Aesthetic Theory. Ed. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum. Arteel, I. (2019). ‘Experimental acoustic life writing – Gerhard Rühm’s radio plays’, CounterText, 5.3, 332–51. Bürger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-garde. Trans. M. Show. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Freud, S. (2017). Das Ich und das Es. Ed. L. Bayer. Stuttgart: Reclam. Meißner, J. (2015). ‘Eine fast kubistische Liebesgeschichte. Gerhard Rühm: Hugo Wolf und drei Grazien, letzter Akt. Ein radiophones Redeoratorium’, Hörspielkritik, http://hoerspielkritik.de/eine-fast-kubistische-liebesgeschichte/ (accessed 23 July 2019). Mon, F. (1994). ‘hörspiele werden gemacht’ [1974], in F. Mon, Gesammelte Texte 1. Essays. Berlin: Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, pp. 264–74. Neuner, F., and S. Neuner (2008). ‘Zwischen Selbstorganisation und Selbstbehauptung. Gerhard Rühms intermediale Arbeiten im Kontext der internationalen Neoavantgarde’, in T. Eder and J. Vogel (eds), ‘verschiedene Sätze treten auf’. Die Wiener Gruppe in Aktion. Vienna: Zsolnay, pp. 133–59. Ramm, K. (1983). ‘Blaubart vor der Krummen Lanke im Radio. Gerhard Rühm’, in K. Schöning (ed.), Hörspielmacher. Autorenportraits und Essays. Königstein: Athenäum, pp. 163–8. Ramm, K. (1999). ‘Horchkomödie und Melodram im Radio. Zu Sie werden mir ein Rätsel, mein Vater von Gerhard Rühm und Wintermärchen von Gerhard Rühm’, in K. Bartsch and S. Schwar (eds), Gerhard Rühm. Graz: Droschl, pp. 117–24. Ramm, K. (2017). ‘System und Sinnlichkeit. Gerhard Rühms Hörspiele’, Hörspiel und Medienkunst, www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/hoerspiel-und-medien​ kunst/hoerspiele-gerhard-ruehm-100.html (accessed 24 July 2019). Rühm, G. (1970). ‘zu meinen auditiven texten’, in K. Schöning (ed.), Neues Hörspiel. Essays, Analysen, Gespräche. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 46–57.

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Rühm, G. (1984). TEXT – BILD – MUSIK. ein schau- und lesebuch. Vienna: Freibord. Rühm, G. (1985). ‘Vorwort’, in Die Wiener Gruppe. Achleitner, Artmann, Bayer, Rühm, Wiener. Texte. Gemeinschaftsarbeiten. Aktionen. Reinbek: Rowohlt, pp. 5–36. Rühm, G. (1998). Ophelia and the Words. Wald, ein deutsches Requiem. Kleine Geschichte der Zivilisation. CD: Ars Acustica, Wergo. Rühm, G. (2015). Hugo Wolf und drei Grazien, letzter Akt, www.swr.de/swr2/hoer​ spiel-feature/karl-sczuka-preis-2015-preistraeger-gerhard-ruehm/-/id=661194/ did=15873788/nid=661194/1jt29ne/index.html (accessed 15 August 2019). Rühm, G. (2016a). gesammelte werke 3.2: radiophone texte. Ed. P. Pechmann. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Rühm, G. (2016b). von welt zu welt. CD, supplement of Rühm 2016a. Schöning, K. (ed.) (1969). Neues Hörspiel. Texte, Partituren. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Vowinckel, A. (1995). Collagen im Hörspiel. Die Entwicklung einer radiophonen Kunst. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Weiss, C. (2001). ‘zu empfehlen ist ein gelenkiges ohr’, in A. Stuhlmann (ed.), Radio-Kultur und Hör-Kunst: Zwischen Avantgarde und Popularkultur 1923–2001. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 260–7. Weiss, C. (2015). ‘Karl-Sczuka-Preis 2015 Laudatio auf Gerhard Rühm’, SWR2 Hörspiel und Feature, www.swr.de/swr2/hoerspiel-feature/karl-sczuka-preis2015-preistraeger-gerhard-ruehm/karl-sczuka-preis-2015-laudatio-auf-gerhardru​ehm/-/id=661194/did=15873788/mpdid=15873792/nid=661194/f1gy9o/ind​ ex.html (accessed 24 July 2019).

9 A theatre of choric voices: Jandl and Mayröcker’s radio play Spaltungen Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Inge Arteel

This chapter will consider the radio play Spaltungen (Splits), written in 1969 by Ernst Jandl (1925–2000) and Friederike Mayröcker (b. 1924), two leading authors of the Austrian neo-avant-garde. When reading the scripts of Jandl and Mayröcker’s jointly written radio plays of the late 1960s one is struck by the ubiquitous presence of collective figures and voices, often explicitly marked as choruses and presented in relation to anonymous single voices. In their well-known radio play Fünf Mann Menschen (Five Man Humanity, 1967), the ‘Chor der 5 Schwestern’ (‘chorus of five nurses’) (Jandl and Mayröcker, 1971: 24) is accompanied by several groups of five voices, identified as men, boys, young men and newborns respectively.1 Der Gigant (The Giant, 1967), their second play, is spoken by – along with several nameless individuals – five milkmen, five girls and a chorus of black people (Jandl and Mayröcker, 1971: 43). In Spaltungen, the third play they co-authored, a single male voice is accompanied by a mixed chorus, a female chorus and several anonymous male and female voices. In their final collaborative piece, Gemeinsame Kindheit (Shared Childhood, 1969), the dialogues of anonymous family members are interspersed with the chanting or singing of a child choir.2 The manifold manifestations of collective voices and generic vocal groups in the plays mentioned above, together with the anonymous and largely indeterminate quality of the individual vocal personae – at most, they are vaguely typified as being members of a certain societal structure or group (a family, a generation, an occupation etc.) – prompt the question of the relation of these phenomena to the theatrical figure of the chorus. In this chapter, I want to have a closer look at the vocal figurations in Spaltungen in order to investigate how they connect with the long-standing theatrical phenomenon of the chorus within the medium of radio and the genre of the experimental radio play. I will therefore briefly address the history of the chorus, especially in the German context of the first half of the  ­twentieth century, and move on to the Neues Hörspiel (New Radio Play) of the 1960s, before presenting my analysis of Spaltungen. Could it

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be that the experimental radio play is the genre par excellence for staging the figure of the chorus as a dynamic site of conflict between singular and collective vocal entities, a site where these conflicts are disputed and negotiated and a singular central position is disturbed? Spaltungen in particular explores the above conflicts in an almost elementary way, abstracting them even more conspicuously than the other plays from concrete contextual referentiality and narrative lines. Through its focus on Spaltungen, this chapter contributes to the intermedial research on choric figurations in a diverse range of art forms, elaborating on connections between the radio play, theatre history and techniques of concrete poetry.3

The versatile figure of the chorus Tracing the history of the chorus in theatre brings to the fore highly diverse and even contradictory manifestations and instrumentalisations of this plural theatrical figure.4 Commonly associated with the theatre of Antiquity, archeological findings as well as the oldest choric lyrics suggest that the chorus was a rural collective body performing sacred rituals for the god Dionysus well before the formation of ancient tragedy. This chorus can be imagined as a group of wandering dancers, musicians and singers, travelling the countryside and getting together to celebrate the cycle of life and death and the gods associated with this cycle. In the fifth century BC the chorus gradually migrated to the polis, a spatial relocation that is reflected in its steady integration into the institutionalised Dionysian festivals and the theatrical genre of the tragedy. Aeschylus’ tragedies show the importance of the chorus as a relational ensemble of conflicting voices and h ­ eterogeneous bodies that accompanies the appearance of the protagonist, witnesses his tragic fate, and empathically and despairingly voices its comments. The institutional integration, however, also implied the steady vocal domestication of the chorus – the silencing of its polyphony – and its dramaturgical marginalisation, the chorus becoming less and less relevant for the dramatic structure of tragedy. In Euripides’ tragedies for instance, written forty years after Aeschylus’ plays, only a remnant of the chorus’s crucial presence remains. Modern drama substantially changed the ancient figure of the chorus. Whereas Shakespeare still worked with the interdependency of the protagonists and the collective subjects who surround them, the prescriptive poetics of the Enlightenment and classicism either eliminated the chorus or reduced it to a marginal and passive character, detached from the tragedy lived by the protagonist. At best, the chorus contributed to the affective atmosphere of the play, or else it was considered to voice authorial intent or the ­perspective

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198 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry of an idealised homogeneous audience, that is, ‘the people’. The latter view was re-evaluated around 1900 by theatre innovators such as the Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) and his compatriot, the composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950). Together with other avant-garde artists such as German choreographer Mary Wigman (1886–1973), they developed an aesthetics for a mass theatre that put the chorus centre stage as an empowering collective subject, producing in the performance a communal identity that merged audience and performers, art and life.5 Especially in the 1920s, their aesthetic endeavour to break open and expand the enclosed bourgeois space of the Guckkastenbühne and free it from theatrical conventions such as the central perspective and logocentrism was linked with the longing to holistically rebuild a new energetic community that could stand up in modern times and come to terms with the experience of the First World War.6 A dynamic energy forms the basis of this remodelling of theatre: a scenography that dynamises the stage with abstract, mobile constructions such as staircases and platforms; a rhythmical use of lighting design; a simultaneity of visual and acoustic events on stage; and a unifying and disciplined gymnastic choreography of the participating bodies. The view of the chorus as the incorporation of ‘the people’ was most notably adopted in the mass theatre of Austrian avant-garde director Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), who with his ‘Theatre of Five Thousand’ actively strove for community building through theatrical mass entertainment. In several of his productions before and after the First World War, Reinhardt allowed large groups of spectators and actors to move through space, filling it with their accumulated energy. Most probably, the individual members of this transitory and ephemeral ‘theatrical community’ might not all have perceived or experienced this energetic atmosphere in a similar way (FischerLichte, 2005: 58, 62). Yet on the symbolic and semiotic level, the chorus did materialise, as the masses were orchestrated as religious followers of a single messianic protagonist, a dramaturgy that referred much more to the Catholic tradition of the passion play than to ancient tragedy.7 This aspect in particular allowed the recuperation of Reinhardt’s innovative aesthetics by the spectacular aesthetics of National Socialism.8 At the same time as these experiments towards a new people’s theatre, another, but younger, influential avant-gardist of German theatre, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), addressed the challenge of choric aesthetics. His works, however, go in the opposite direction. Unlike Appia and Reinhardt, Brecht incorporated reflections on the ambivalent sociopolitical character of the chorus and its dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, providing it, so to speak, with a question mark rather than an exclamation mark – thus aligning more with the polyphony and dissent of the ancient chorus than with its modern reinvention. In his fragmentary anti-war play Fatzer, written



A theatre of choric voices 199

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in 1926, the hierarchical relationship between the chorus and its leader is questioned, as is any heroic trait in the protagonist. Furthermore, collective playing and speaking are tried out but never fully realised, that is, the chorus is not consolidated into a homogeneous, synchronically moving and speaking subject.9 Brecht’s sceptical approach also differs from the contemporary choral drama of the workers’ movement and authors such as Ernst Toller and Bruno Schönlank, whose texts for proletarian amateur choruses were very much written in a mystic expressionist vein.

National Socialist radio as theatre of the masses With Brecht we can move from the theatre stage as a space for the visual performance of choric bodies to the radiophonic medium as a space for the acoustic performance of choric voices. Indeed, Brecht’s ideas on the radio, written down between 1927 and 1932 in several short programmatic texts, stimulate a similar reflexive and critical attitude towards this relatively new medium as with regard to the instrumentalisation of the ancient theatrical figure of the chorus. In the lively critical discourse that characterised the beginning of German broadcasting, Brecht drew attention to the technical specificities and experimental opportunities of the radiophonic apparatus and envisaged the listener as an active co-producer of information and knowledge. Brecht diagnosed the growing political appropriation of the wireless in the course of the 1920s – broadcasting in Germany had been put under state control as early as 1923, simultaneously with the beginning of entertainment radio – that strategically used the belief in the medium as capable of authentic expression to ‘nurture a sense of nationalistic identity’ through passive listening (Gilfillan, 2009: 100). Whereas several radio producers had experimented with innovative formats in the nascent genre of the radio play in the course of the 1920s, this became impossible after 1932, when the Nazis implemented their radio reforms under the sign of Gleichschaltung.10 Nazi community building did not only take place via image and (written) language politics, but was first and foremost installed via acoustic evocation (Annuß, 2019: 74; Epping-Jäger, 2006). From 1933 onward, National Socialism actively combined the theatrical and vocal modalities of the choric figure in the radiophonic medium, which was conceived as a ‘theatre of the masses’ (Annuß, 2019: 101). Goebbels’s speech on 18 August 1933, entitled ‘Der Rundfunk als achte Großmacht’ (‘The Radio as the Eighth Great Power’), together with the introduction of the so-called Volksempfänger, a relatively cheap radio receiver for the masses that quickly found its way into millions of German households (Gilfillan, 2009: 97), point out the

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200 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry high degree of commitment of National Socialism to this medium. The Nazi view on radio did not take for granted like-minded listeners and consumers; rather, it was an active instrument to immerse the audience in the programme so as ‘to regenerate the national German spirit’ (Gilfillan, 2009: 100), of which each individual household had to become part. The soundscape of the political mass rallies, the speech choruses in the radio plays, and the choric figures in the theatrical mass performances of the years 1934–35, the so-called Thingspiele, all follow a similar aural dramaturgy: to immerse a homogeneous community in the experience of listening to and applauding the leader’s voice, a voice that produces such homogeneity in the first place.11 Medial specificities did, however, present challenges for the phonocentric propaganda machine and its obsessive need for control and perfection. The mass rallies profoundly relied on the theatrical co-expressivity of the voice and body of the speaker. The acoustic transfer was guaranteed by the highquality loudspeaker apparatus that amplified the leader’s voice. The limited visibility of his body on the other hand required it to be substituted with aggrandised symbols and signs in order to create an ‘imaginary visibility’ (Epping-Jäger, 2006: 164). The choric voice of the assembled audience interacted with this multimodal dramaturgy: the frenetic cheering of the orchestrated mass surrounded and elevated the leader’s voice and confirmed the visually tiny body of the leader as its potent origin. Transferring the resonance of mass rallies to the disembodied medium of radio, the medium that would guarantee a nationwide outreach to every single German subject, was thus far from self-evident. Indeed, Hitler’s voice did not work in the insulation of the radio studio; it needed the live ‘Jubelchor’ (Annuß, 2019: 88), the cheering of the masses as its accomplice in creating the shared aural space. Consequently, Hitler’s radio speeches were recorded during mass rallies. This not only ensured the live acclamation of his speech even when broadcast, it also transmitted the power of the sources of the acousmatic sound to the non-choric radio audience, immersing it in compliance. National Socialist radio plays regulated the affective dimensions of choric speech even more meticulously into a format fit for a mass media audience. Their main dramaturgical aim was to integrate the cheering of the masses into a fictionalised scheme that follows the narrative of a Christian mystery or passion play, infused with declamatory and musical formulas of confession, sacrifice, celebration and worship. Single anonymous voices and several choric formations are orchestrated by a leading vocal figure into a declamation according to rhythmical musical patterns that gradually accelerate and raise the voices into a climax. At the end all the voices chant in unison, having successfully been forged into a vocal unity under the direction of the superior voice of the saviour.12



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The innovations of the Neues Hörspiel National Socialism thus occupied the radiophonic medium for the ideologically inspired fusion of theatrical and acoustic modalities in order to domesticate the traditionally plural body of the chorus into a unified declamatory body of followers of the one and only leader. The differentiation from the preceding avant-garde innovations of the choric figure and the concurrent socialist aesthetics of the proletarian chorus was not total: some characteristics, such as the presentation of the chorus as ‘the people’ and the importance of an affectively unifying vocal orchestration, were adopted from them and ideologically remodelled. It is this complex radiophonic inheritance of the choric figure that some radio art of the Neues Hörspiel of the late 1960s deals with, while at the same time combining it with the decade’s climate of contestation of the central authoritarian perspective and dominant voice. Jandl and Mayröcker’s Spaltungen is a case in point. Before turning to my reading of Spaltungen, let me briefly elaborate on the institutional and aesthetic context of the Neues Hörspiel. In Germanspeaking countries, the Neues Hörspiel of the late 1960s and the 1970s designates a prolific period of experimental radio plays. The cultural politics of restoration after the Second World War had continued the conservative policy of the radiophonic institutions, characterised by a hostile attitude towards technical and aesthetic innovations. But as in the 1920s, also in the  1960s individual producers experimented with both technical and aesthetic innovations within the institutional confines, especially in West Germany, where the radio landscape had been decentralised and several radio stations engaged with national and international developments in literary and acoustic art, such as the French nouveau roman, concrete poetry, dramatic experiments by authors such as Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke and Heiner Müller, and the acoustic art of the Parisian Club d’essai and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A decisive role was played by the ‘active dramaturgy’ (Schöning, 1969: 8) of some influential producers and dramaturgs looking for new scripts, among whom Hansjörg Schmitthenner (1908–93), head of the radio play section at Bayerischer Rundfunk from 1950 until 1974, and Klaus Schöning (b. 1936), who was in charge of the Colognebased Studio Akustische Kunst from 1968 until 2001, took on prominent roles. After having tried in vain for several years to sell their radiophonic scripts, experimental authors were eventually able to implement their innovative formats for the medium. The New Radio Play explicitly aimed at counteracting the ‘white noise’ of mainstream literary radio plays (Lentz, 1999: 38) which adhered to realistic radiophonic storytelling or dialogic role playing, and in which the i­deology

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202 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry of the radio as a medium of acoustic manipulation of the ­imagination was not dealt with. Telling a story through the microphone was not a concern of the authors of the New Radio Play, neither did they think of their medium as a ‘drama in the dark’ (see Vowinckel, 1995: 152) which stimulates preconceived visual images through acoustic means. Diverse though the radio plays of the Neues Hörspiel actually are, some common characteristics can be identified: the exploration of the radiophonic medium as a technical mouthpiece; attention to the discursive but also regional and dialectal variations of the German language; the autonomous materiality and musicality of language and the importance of soundscapes; and the decentralised spatial and aural structuring of the acoustic space through the implementation of stereophonic and mixing techniques.

Addressing the inheritance of choric speech In the late 1960s both Jandl and Mayröcker were well-known names in the German-speaking landscape of the literary neo-avant-garde. Jandl’s fame had started as early as the late 1950s and he gained international recognition on 11 June 1965, when he was invited to read his poems in London’s Royal Albert Hall during a poetry slam with several poets of the Beat generation, attended by six thousand people. Jandl, an impressive performer of his own poems, turned out to be the star of the evening. The performance of his poem ‘ode auf N’ (‘ode to N’, written in 1957) is especially relevant as a neo-avant-garde reappropriation of choric speech acts. The poem dissects the name of Napoleon by means of shifting, splitting and combining the sounds and phonemes that make up the name. Whereas the printed text might look like a dadaist juggling with characters, the performance, which lasts less than two minutes, follows a dramaturgy that parodically exposes and eventually destroys the hysterical and climactic speech of Führer-like leaders. Moreover, as the recording of the London performance shows,13 the carefully orchestrated accelerating crescendo sweeps up the audience, which joins in with cheers and shouts; never, though, does the performer guide the mass into a unified acclamation. Indeed, the chanting that the audience takes up rather resembles an unruly and anarchic choric speech act. Thus, Jandl’s performance not only parodies the speech of dictatorial leaders, but in its unpremeditated happening-like constellation and atmosphere it also destabilises the orchestration of avant-garde mass theatre and its envisaged community building through disciplined choric performance.14 Jandl’s success was followed by a recording session in 1966 at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, where Jandl for the first time explored the possibilities of electronic and radiophonic techniques for the performance and

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recording of poetry. This experience, which resulted in a record with thirteen poems from his collection Laut und Luise, is said to have been the direct occasion for him writing, together with his fellow Austrian poet Mayröcker, the radio play Fünf Mann Menschen (Jandl, 2016: 347).15 Within a basic narrative structure about the indoctrination of young men to become cannon fodder in times of war, Jandl and Mayröcker combine the principles of concrete poetry – such as the reduction of linguistic material and schematic dialogical utterances – with the possibilities of the recently developed stereophonic technique. As I referred to earlier, the dramatis personae are not individualised but presented in typified groups of five, so that, in Jandl’s words, they ‘nicht ein jeder seine eigene Rolle spielten, sondern alle jeweils die gleiche, stellvertretend für soundso viele andere, fünf Mann, von der Erdbesatzung’ (‘do not each play their own role but all the same one, representative for so many others, five men of the world staff’) (Jandl, 2016: 335). Spaltungen is a stereophonic radio play of fifteen minutes, which was first broadcast in 1970 in a co-production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk with Südwestfunk. It was directed by Heinz von Cramer, a composer by training and a kindred spirit of both authors in many respects: the rhythmical orchestration of speech acts and his preference for choric figurations instead of individual narrators characterise his directorial work for the radio.16 Spaltungen is all about the confrontation and interaction of a centrally positioned single male voice with several choruses and vocal groups. The single voice too is itself split up into antagonistic but simultaneously present characteristics. His central position in the acoustic space is thus from the very start decentred; the endeavour to keep that central, sovereign ­position – demonstrated, among other aspects, by an obsessive repetition of the personal pronoun ‘Ich’ – gradually weakens. In the end the voice claims to divest itself of its human characteristics so as to fully dissolve into silence, or to die. Spaltungen thus can be read as a structuralist analysis of the power struggle at work between single and collective voices and the mutual process of inclusion and exclusion, without, however, pinpointing a hierarchy nor an identity in any self-evident political way: the single voice can be presuming leadership and the right to be followed; or it can be desperately seeking to establish its own position as a leading voice, producing an I that is precarious in the first place; or even seeking to differentiate itself from the choruses that surround it. Equally, the vocal groups and choruses, far from taking up clear-cut positions, sometimes support and sometimes oppose the single voice, or at times just mimic it. The vocal structure thus performs an ever-shifting and multilayered interaction of speech acts. In order to specify more concretely the way in which the radiophonic technique and poetic characteristics are combined to address the inheritance of choric speech, I will now take a closer look at some fragments of the radio production.17

204 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry

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Splits and fusions – cuts and collages The single male voice opens the play with a sequence (00' 01"–01' 10") in which it mechanically repeats a self-defining clause that at the same time undoes any homogeneous identity: ‘Ich bin glücklich/traurig’, whereby ‘glücklich’ (‘happy’) and ‘traurig’ (‘sad’) are spoken simultaneously by the technically split voice. The sequence sounds like a drill exercise in performative speech: the voice starts as a barely audible whisper, grows gradually louder and stronger until it shouts the paradoxical sentence as an order rather than a self-definition. The Spaltung or split is thus active from the very beginning of the play and affects several of its modalities. Not only does it semantically point to a schizophrenic mental state, it is also explicitly realised in the technical split – a split that is also a doubling – of the single voice. And there is another split or incongruous element at work: the paraverbal elements of the voice, its authoritarian, menacing shout at the end of the sequence, contrast with the semantics and rhetorically confuse the listener. The single male voice, be it the voice of a leader or an Everyman, is thus destabilised from the very beginning, as is its reception by the implied audience. The single voice is accompanied by choruses, a mixed chorus and a female chorus. Shortly after the beginning of the play a soundscape suggests a gunfight and an explosion (01' 50"–02' 18"). After a two-and-a-half-­second pause, a softly buzzing surround sound starts, at first rather a corporeal sound than a linguistic utterance, but gradually identifiable as an ‘s’-sound and interspersed with the simultaneously chanted words ‘Samen’ (‘seed’) by the female chorus and ‘Amen’ by the mixed chorus. With these minimalistic linguistic means, the theme of biological procreation is introduced and linked with Christian liturgy. Thus, after the short interruption of warlike sounds, out of the thick curtain of gentle s-sounds appears a reference to the sowing of seeds, readable both as the biblical parable of proclaiming the message18 and as the Christian command to procreate. Contrary to the incongruous elements at the beginning and their confusing appeal, here the collective voices are united in a multilayered but harmonious choric speech act, ignoring the preceding warlike interruption. Strikingly, while working towards a climax their communal chanting prepares for the single male voice to appear more godlike than ever and loudly proclaim his absolute order: ‘So soll es sein’ (‘So it will be’) (03' 40"). Choruses and leading voice are attuned to one another; indeed, the choruses have prepared the floor for the voice of the leader. The above passage shows the interaction between literary principles and acoustic experiments: principles of concrete poetry, on the one hand,19 such as the reduction of semantic elements and the creation of words and

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­ orphemes through the substitution of characters and phonemes along m vertical and horizontal axes, and the stretching of the contingent relation between form and meaning; and, on the other hand, experimental acoustic techniques of processing sounds and utterances into a structural simultaneity, by means of stereophony, mixing, backgrounding and foregrounding, complemented by cuts and silences. Both share an explicit self-reflexive nature, drawing attention to the material and technical manipulation of the production, and an estranging effect, abstracting the semantics of language and sound from straightforward referentiality. A bit later in the radio play, another passage (starting at 05' 48") even more intricately demonstrates the relation between the literary and acoustic techniques and how both levels together perform the shifting alliances between the choruses and the single voice. First, unlike the passage commented on above, a conflictual confrontation between the female chorus and the male voice is acted out. At regular intervals the female chorus pronounces the noun ‘Nacht’ (‘night’), extremely stretching every letter of the word, thereby occupying all five positions of the stereophonically outlined space, which creates a surround effect. In the intervals the male voice, firmly located in the central position, shouts the word ‘nicht’ (‘not’), equally stretching out the word. Gradually, his position as well as his utterance and his voice change: the pronunciation of the word ‘nicht’ is audibly split into three parts: n-ich-t – the technical cuts are obviously meant to be heard – whereby the voice pronounces the n- rather on the left side, the newly generated pronoun ‘ich’ from the central position, and the -t rather on the right side. The radiophonic technique thus cuts up both voice and utterance. In doing so it distributes the voice over more than one position and distils the personal pronoun ‘ich’ out of the negation ‘nicht’. Immediately afterwards the female chorus is relocated to the background of the acoustic space and faded out. The male voice has successfully severed itself from its female surroundings – the gender dimension of the confrontation is clearly audible in this part of the play. Next, however, as soon as the female chorus is silenced, two other, mixed choruses take the floor and accompany the male voice. Again, the acoustic and spatial dimensions go hand in hand with a poetic act: the two choruses join the male voice from either side of the stereophonic structure, and they respectively add an l- and a -t to his constantly repeated ‘ich’. After the cut-up that created the ‘ich’ out of ‘nicht’, the ‘ich’ is now collaged into ‘licht’20 (‘light’), and here too the process is clearly audible through the extreme expansion of the l-, the ‘ich’ and the -t. The passage ends with a total foregrounding of both choruses that fills all acoustic positions, thereby creating a kind of enveloping cosmic atmosphere, and triumphantly and in unison they shout the word ‘licht’. In doing so, they not only vocally

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206 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry incorporate the male voice in their collective body, they also poetically integrate his ‘ich’ into their ‘licht’. Here, the chorus has taken over and the single voice is no longer a leader but a member of the community roaringly worshipping the light. Before the end of the play, several more shifts and changes in the vocal power balance take place, alternately foregrounding either the single male voice or (one of) the choruses. Eventually the male voice, after having unsuccessfully proclaimed ‘Es werde Nacht’ (‘Let it be night’), seems to give up: his ‘ich’ gradually shifts into the sigh ‘ach’ (‘alas’), eventually transforming into the noun ‘Nacht’, which in its turn leads the way to the repetitive sound of a destructive gunfight, as an echo of the war sound at the beginning of the play. The ‘Nacht’ then shifts into the adjective ‘nackt’ (‘naked’), first repeatedly uttered by the male voice and then taken over by the female chorus, which until the end provides with this word the acoustic background for the final sentences of the single voice: with its last words the male voice professes the shedding of his being human: ‘ich war Mensch ich werfe es ab’ (‘I was human I’m shedding it’). This ending is as ambivalent as the constellations in the course of the play. It allows for both an apocalyptic reading – the extinction of humanity, its dissolution in the realm of the night – and a more positive interpretation in which the surrender of the one and only (male) voice, in a kind of selfless sacrificial gesture, might give way to other possibilities of collective speech, neither relying on nor struggling with the voice of a leader figure, or even to the possibility of silence. This ­surrender – whether to the end of his aspirations as a leading voice or to another, non-human condition – might even lend the male voice a tragic quality, as it seems to be his fate to disappear ‘nackt’, divested of the human figure that he alone represented, divested even of his voice, as the play ends with six seconds of complete silence.

Destabilising the choric mystery play The paratextual sentence introducing the script of the radio play not only mentions the connection with concrete poetry; it also identifies the play as ‘ein nicht-religiöses Mysterienspiel’ (‘a non-religious mystery play’) (Jandl and Mayröcker, 1971: 58) and continues: ‘Die einzige Figur des Stückes, der MANN, ist völlig auf sich selbst bezogen und steht daher für alle’ (‘The sole figure of the play, the MAN, stands completely alone and thus represents all’) (1971: 58). This genre label links the text to the religious theatre formats of the mystery and passion plays that were very popular in the 1920s and 1930s, also among avant-garde directors such as Max Reinhardt, as I already indicated.21 The Nazi adaptation of these genres

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foregrounded allegorical schemata such as the fight between the powers of Light and Darkness for the soul of the people, the sacrificial gesture of the messianic figure in order to consolidate its power, and collectivisation (Vergemeinschaftung) as a totalising principle (Annuß, 2019: 222–5). Their remodelling into the cultic mass rituals of the Thingspiel, which was especially popular around 1934–35, was preceded by their production as choric radio plays (Annuß, 2019: 223): on the radio, an affective vocal dramaturgy was tried out that had to discipline the people into following the voice of the pastoral, messianic Führer-figure. National Socialist remodelling of religious theatre might thus be summed up as follows: ‘Mit dem NS-Passionsspiel wird die Fiktionalität des Massentheaters bereits klarer akzentuiert und der heilsgeschichtliche Anspruch der Nazis über die protagonistische Präsentation einer Mensch gewordenen Allegorie erprobt’ (‘With the NS passion play the fictionality of mass theatre is more clearly accentuated and the claim to salvation of Nationalist Socialism is explored in the presentation of the protagonist as the human incarnation of allegory’) (Annuß, 2019: 224, italics in the original). Spaltungen can be read as a destabilisation of this claim to salvation and the human figuration of the protagonist that supports it. Though the paratext introduces the male voice, MAN, as the only ‘figure’ of the radio play, his single figurative voice is shown as split from the very beginning, as the analysis of the opening sequence has shown. At times, the single voice does invoke connotations of a messianic figure bringing order to the chaos and light into the night. But his language is rudimentary and cut up, and his commands and exclamations, though voiced from the central speaking position, show only the remains of the performative speech acts of a godlike voice, or of the spreading of the word of God. His forceful clinging to the pronoun ‘ich’ rather exposes his central position as inflated, not as that of a ‘natural’ leader. And his declamatory voice extremely stretches and stresses the phonemes in a way that defies any eloquence. Spaltungen can moreover be read as exposing the constructivism at work in any unified presentation of the chorus as a group of followers. The different choruses are constantly shifting, both in their interaction with the protagonist and in their relations with each other. Sometimes they occupy all speaking positions, creating a kind of surround modus. Sometimes they provide the acoustic background out of which the single voice appears or into which it is submerged, or they engage in an antagonistic, climactic exchange. The technology of the stereophonic acoustic space joins the poetic principles of concrete poetry to perform these shifts in an elementary concrete manner with cuts and collages of voices and language alike, counteracting any stable or whole ‘human incarnation’.22 Thus, not only is the Nazi fiction of salvation and leadership destabilised, but the p ­ receding

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208 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry avant-garde mass theatre of the first decades of the twentieth century, with its figuration of a unified, harmonious body of ‘the people’, is also exposed as fictional. Or rather, Spaltungen, in its abstract rendering of the conflictual interaction of protagonist and chorus, seems to point to the continuum that existed between (some) avant-garde and National Socialist performance aesthetics. We might conclude, as hinted at before, that this neo-avant-garde radio play aspires ‘to a critical consciousness of both artistic conventions and historical conditions’ (Foster, 2001: 1) of avant-garde practices of choral drama and mass theatre. As a radio play, Spaltungen performs this critical reappropriation in the aural medium of radio. Jandl and Mayröcker both clearly demonstrate a preference for the acoustic mode, apart from their printed literary work. Mayröcker has not written any theatre texts but, in the early 1970s, several radio plays were collected under the generic title Schwarmgesang. Szenen für die poetische Bühne (Swarm Song. Scenes for the Poetic Stage, 1978), presenting plenty of choric figurations and anonymous voices. In Jandl’s collected works, several short scenic sketches, some of them only a few sentences long, are subsumed under the heading ‘theatre plays’, though none of them is actually a theatre play in any conventional sense. Even his best-known play, and the only full-length one, Aus der Fremde (Out of Estrangement, 1980), is not called a theatre play but a Sprechoper or speech opera. Textually, most of the sketches remind us of concrete poetry and its extreme reduction and abstraction of linguistic material. All of them deal with the conditions and modalities of speaking, but not via individualised embodied figurations. Indeed, Jandl seems to radically avoid the suggestion of both dramatic characters and the phenomenological bodies of p ­ erformers. These theatrical sketches share with the experimental radio plays the characteristic that voice and speech are separated from their potential embodiment in such a radical way that even the imagined ­embodiment in the mind of the reader/listener is thwarted.

Conclusion As a reflection on the specificities of the radiophonic medium, Spaltungen in particular opposes any invitation to incarnate the disembodied radiophonic voices (see Macho, 2006: 142). Linking this back to Spaltungen as a critical reworking of choric speech acts and collective vocal figurations, this neo-avant-garde radio play can be considered an extreme reduction of the corporeal phenomenology of avant-garde mass spectacles and their fascist successors. The play does address the representational challenge that the constellation of chorus and protagonist has presented since Antiquity – not,

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however, by naively reviving the plurality and unruly dispute of the ancient chorus, nor by repeating the modern instrumentalisation of the chorus as ‘the people’ or invoking a utopian alternative in the mind of the audience, but by an anti-authoritarian destabilisation of the complex inheritance of the preceding decades that had muted the versatile choric voice. Spaltungen demonstrates the radiophonic and poetic technologies that produce and deconstruct the collective and single voices and their speech acts. The play  does not erase vocal embodiment but delegates it to an elementary acoustic constellation of vocal, technological and poetic performance.

Notes  1 For this radio play, produced in 1968 by Südwestfunk and directed by Peter M. Ladiges, Jandl and Mayröcker were awarded the prestigious Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (Radio Play Prize of the War Blind) in that same year. Though not the first manifestation of the so-called Neues Hörspiel (New Radio Play), it was the production that brought these new developments into public and critical debate.  2 In this chapter, I use ‘chorus’ to denote the collective theatrical figure. However, in Gemeinsame Kindheit, the group of children is explicitly presented as a group of singers, hence my use of ‘choir’ here.  3 Hardly any research has been done so far on Jandl and Mayröcker’s collaborative radio plays. There are some introductory analyses of Fünf Mann Menschen only, mainly related to the frequent use of this radio play for didactic purposes.  4 The brief overview and the perspective I adopt are mainly based on Haß and Tatari (2014), Haß (2014; 2016), Meister (2016) and Annuß (2019); and to a lesser extent also on Crombez and Van den Dries (2014).  5 Before the First World War, the three met at the Institute of Rhythmics in the festival hall (Festspielhaus) in Hellerau, the first German ‘garden city’ on the outskirts of Dresden, founded in 1909 as a planned community inspired by the then popular social reform movements.  6 As David Roesner points out for Appia’s early works, his practice ‘is not accompanied by the revolutionary or anarchical “gestus” employed later by the Futurists or Dadaists; his aim is not novelty, but a recalling of and reorientation towards an expressive “essence” that he claims to have been lost in decades of accumulating theatrical conventions’ (2014: 27).  7 Especially noteworthy is his production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann (Everyman) with which he co-founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920 and that he would stage there every year from 1926 until 1937. Jedermann has been on the programme of the festival ever since, except for the war years 1938–45.  8 Evelyn Annuß uses the term Konkurrenzfaschismus (‘fascism rivalry’) when she discusses the speech of 8 May 1933 by Hitler’s secretary for propaganda Joseph Goebbels to an audience of theatre practitioners in which he cites Reinhardt’s

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210 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry notion of the Theatre of Five Thousand and outdoes it with his ‘Theatre of the Hundred Thousand’ (Annuß, 2019: 133). Reinhardt, of Jewish descent, had refused the distinction of ‘honorary Aryan’ offered to him by the Nazis, who wanted to involve him in their cultural politics. In 1937 he left Europe for the United States.  9 See Annuß, who states of Brecht’s ‘reflexivem Choreinsatz’ (‘reflexive use of the chorus’) (2019: 36, italics in original): ‘Im kollektiven Spiel geht es entsprechend gerade nicht um gemeinschaftsstiftendes Nachsprechen und synchronisiertes Bewegen, sondern ums Probehandeln’ (‘Accordingly, collective play is not at all about consolidating the group through repetitive speech nor about synchronic movement, but about trying something out’) (2019: 39). 10 Hans Flesch, for instance, friend of composers Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill, author of the first ever radio play to be broadcast on German radio – Zauberei auf dem Sender (Microphone Magic, 1924) – and successful innovative radio producer in Frankfurt and Berlin, was arrested in 1933. The experiments by him and other producers were considered destabilising perversities (see Gilfillan, 2009: 85; for a detailed analysis of Flesch’s contribution to experimental radio, see Rothe, 2009: 159–218). 11 Based on a plethora of archival documents, Annuß (2019) offers a detailed reading of these phenomena. 12 Annuß is careful to distinguish the Nazi chorus aesthetics from the proletarian one that was also prominent in the late 1920s, for example in the work of Toller and Schönlank. Though the latter also aims at community building through the effective orchestration of choric speech – and in this aspect proves to be anschlussfähig for Nazi aesthetics – the proletarian chorus performs its speech rather in a frontal way, confronting the audience rather than integrating it, and is never subordinated under a master’s voice. Indeed, if a master’s voice or a bourgeois chorus is present, it is exposed as an antagonist belonging to the ruling class that should be overthrown (Annuß, 2019: 115–16). Strikingly, from 1937 onwards Hitler and Goebbels tried to ban speech choruses from political rallies and the radio, with the exception of short, formal and highly ritualised choric interventions. In their opinion the choruses, often an assembly of untrained ‘people’, all too often remained unprofessional and undisciplined and thus endangered the aim of presenting a unified body speaking with one eloquent voice (Annuß, 2019: 381–7). 13 British filmmaker Peter Whitehead made a documentary film out of footage of the poetry night at the Royal Albert Hall, entitled Wholly Communion (1965). Parts of it, including Jandl’s ‘ode auf N’, are available on YouTube. 14 The performance could thus be considered as aspiring to a critical awareness – in the sense of Hal Foster (2001: 1) – of avant-garde choral aesthetics and their institutional and political success in the 1920s and 1930s, even more so as it brings spontaneous interaction between artist and audience on to the institutional stage of the Royal Albert Hall. 15 No research has been done so far on the actual genetics of the collaborative writing process of Jandl and Mayröcker’s four radio plays. Mayröcker

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­ aintains that Jandl played a more active role in the writing of Fünf Mann m Menschen, Der Gigant and Spaltungen, whereas he stresses that he would not have written them without her. The importance of concrete poetry in these three plays does align them with Jandl’s poetics rather than Mayröcker’s (Schmidt, 2002: 156–66). 16 www.deutschlandfunk.de/der-regiegigant.757.de.html?dram:article_id=113441 (accessed 18 March 2020). Von Cramer (1924–2009) was a prolific author of radio plays, a successful librettist and one of the leading directors of the Neues Hörspiel. He directed, among others, Peter Handke’s Hörspiel Nr. 1 and Jandl and Mayröcker’s Der Gigant and Gemeinsame Kindheit, as well as several other radio plays by Mayröcker. In 1972 he made the experimental television movie Traube (Grape) with Jandl and Mayröcker. 17 In-text references are to the broadcast of the radio play on 30 April 1970, the recording of which was made available by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. The script of the radio play is published in Jandl and Mayröcker (1971: 57–78). 18 And even a reference to the radiophonic medium itself can be deduced from this passage, when we associate ‘Samen’ with the etymological meaning of the English ‘broadcasting’ as the dispersion of seeds. 19 With an explicatory sentence that as a kind of stage direction precedes the printed script of Spaltungen (the sentence is not spoken in the radiophonic production), the authors draw attention to its being produced ‘mit den Mitteln der konkreten Poesie’ (‘with the means of concrete poetry’) (Jandl and Mayröcker, 1971: 58). 20 In the script this noun is written in lower case. 21 Even as early as 1911 at London’s Olympia Hall, Reinhardt had spectacularly and to wide acclaim staged the wordless play Das Mirakel (The Miracle) by German playwright Karl Vollmöller, with around 1700 participants. 22 This brings to mind the notion of a ‘concrete choreography’ that radio dramaturge Johann Kamps, a pioneer of the Neues Hörspiel at Saarländischer Rundfunk, in 1969 proposed to describe the playful use of stereophonic technology in combination with poetic principles of concrete poetry. On Kamps’s role, see Wodianka (2018: 253–62).

References Annuß, E. (2019). Volksschule des Theaters. Nationalsozialistische Massenspiele. Paderborn: Fink. Crombez, T., and L. Van den Dries (eds) (2014). Mass Theatre in Interwar Europe: Flanders and the Netherlands in an International Perspective. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Epping-Jäger, C. (2006). ‘Stimmgewalt. Die NSDAP als Rednerpartei’, in D. Kolesch and S. Krämer (eds), Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 147–71. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2005). Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London: Routledge.

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212 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry Foster, H. (2001). The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. 4th edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gilfillan, D. (2009). Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haß, U. (2014). ‘Die zwei Körper des Theaters. Protagonist und Chor’, in M. Tatari (ed.), Orte des Unermesslichen. Theater nach der Geschichtsteleologie. Zürich: diaphanes, pp. 139–59. Haß, U. (2016). ‘Chor_Figur und Grund’, in J. Bodenburg, K. Grabbe and N.  Haitzinger (eds), Chor-Figuren. Transdisziplinäre Beiträge. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, pp. 115–30. Haß, U., and M. Tatari (2014). ‘Eine andere Geschichte des Theaters’, in M. Tatari (ed.), Orte des Unermesslichen. Theater nach der Geschichtsteleologie. Zürich: diaphanes, pp. 77–90. Jandl, E. (2016). ‘Darüber etwas zu sagen. Bemerkungen zum Hörspiel das röcheln der mona lisa’ [1977], in Werke 5. Munich: Luchterhand, pp. 346–50. Jandl, E., and F. Mayröcker (1971). Fünf Mann Menschen. Hörspiele. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Lentz, M. (1999). ‘Lautpoesie der Reduktion. Wechselseitige Bedingtheiten von Stimme und Schrift in Gerhard Rühms auditiver Poesie’, in K. Bartsch and S. Schwar (eds), Dossier 15: Gerhard Rühm. Graz: Droschl, pp. 37–84. Macho, T. (2006). ‘Stimmen ohne Körper. Anmerkungen zur Technikgeschichte der Stimme’, in D. Kolesch and S. Krämer (eds), Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 130–46. Meister, M. (2016). ‘Figurationen des Chors im gegenwärtigen Theater’, in J. Bodenburg, K. Grabbe and N. Haitzinger (eds), Chor-Figuren. Transdisziplinäre Beiträge. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, pp. 145–56. Roesner, D. (2014). Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making. Farnham: Ashgate. Rothe, K. (2009). Katastrophen hören. Experimente im frühen europäischen Radio. Berlin: Kadmos. Schmidt, S. J. (2002). ‘Gemeinschaft(s)Arbeit: Ernst Jandls und Friederike Mayröckers Hörspiele’, in S. J. Schmidt (ed.), Erfahrungen. Österreichische Texte beobachtend. Klagenfurt: Ritter, pp. 156–66. Schöning, K. (ed.) (1969). Neues Hörspiel. Texte, Partituren. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Vowinckel, A. (1995). Collagen im Hörspiel. Die Entwicklung einer radiophonen Kunst. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Wodianka, B. (2018). Radio als Hör-Spiel-Raum. Medienreflexion – Störung – Künstlerische Intervention. Bielefeld: transcript.

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Language, sound and textuality: Caryl Churchill’s Identical Twins as neo-avant-garde (radio) drama Pim Verhulst (Late) modernism, the (neo-)avant-garde and postdramatic theatre During the period of ‘high modernism’, traditionally placed before the Second World War, literary innovation in Britain is typically perceived to have been driven by poetry and prose, not so much by drama. As Peter Childs observes in his Routledge introduction to modernism, ‘it is fair to say that Modernism had less impact on writing for the theatre in Britain than on fiction and poetry’ (2017: 110). In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Christopher Innes even characterises the drama of the period as ‘antimodernist’, adding: ‘At first sight it might seem contradictory to include drama in a discussion of Modernism’ at all (2011: 128). ‘This may be partly due to the specifically English and American focus of studies that site the defining moment of literary Modernism in the Pound–Eliot nexus’, Innes admits, but he does conclude that international developments, spearheaded by playwrights such as August Strindberg or Bertolt Brecht, did not immediately catch on in Britain as they did in the rest of mainland Europe (2011: 128). Claire Warden challenges this assertion, not so much by staking out the claim for a theatrical strand of modernism that aligns itself with the prose and poetry of the period, but rather by setting it apart as ‘avant-garde’ for its experimental and controversial nature, based in particular on its treatment of speech as sound rather than language. She singles out Sweeney Agonistes (1932), T. S. Eliot’s fragmented and jazz-rhythm-inspired play in verse, and W. H. Auden’s more political as well as musical Dance of Death (1933) as two, yet by no means the only, performances that ‘due to their content, formal techniques and challenge to taste or tradition, caused a stir’ (2012: 3). From this point onwards, Warden continues, ‘one can follow a theatrical family tree and find Unity Theatre and Theatre Workshop, as well as figures such as Montagu Slater, Terence Gray and Basil Dean’ (2012: 3). This localises her ‘British theatrical avant-garde’ in the ‘particular historical period between approximately 1914 and 1956’ (2012: 3), which g­ enerously

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214 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry exceeds the canonical time frame of modernism. Not coincidentally, 1956 was the year in which Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot made its famous debut in London’s West End, soon followed by a younger generation of playwrights that included Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill. ‘All too frequently’, Warden states, ‘1956 [like 1922 before it] is perceived as the annus mirabilis, the year British theatre suddenly transformed itself, “catching up” belatedly with things that had been going on in Continental Europe for decades’, an approach she rejects as ‘highly reductive’ (2012: 4). At the same time, she is very much aware of the problematic ‘multiplicity of definition’ as well as the ‘troublesome relationship between the terms “avant-garde” and “modernist”’, which stipulated that ‘avantgardists [are] always political whereas modernists [are] more concerned with aesthetics’ (2012: 4) – a myth that has long since been debunked. ‘Can one even make such a terse distinction between the modernist and the avant-garde?’, Warden questions. Although in British Avant-Garde Theatre (2012) she still appears to isolate this movement from prose- and poetrydominated modernism, her more recent study on Modernist and AvantGarde Performance (2015) aligns the two and traces their experimental commonalities. Even if the generation of playwrights coming to the fore in late 1950s Britain represents a continuation rather than a break with the ‘experimental tradition’ of the previous decades, it was still felt to be different in some respects by certain theatre critics. Martin Esslin (1961) quickly classified the work of Irish and British playwrights such as Beckett, Pinter and, to a lesser degree, Stoppard into a new international movement called the Theatre of the Absurd, which also included Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Israeli, Swiss, German and American dramatists. A female playwright such as Caryl Churchill, whose work was every bit as experimental and innovative, did not fit the mould and was left out of what has generally been criticised as an ‘exclusively white male endeavour’ (Bennett, 2015: 122). Since then, the term Theatre of the Absurd and its application have been reassessed, most notably by Michael Y. Bennett (2011; 2015). Although Churchill is briefly mentioned in Bennett’s Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd, she is presented there as an atypical figure in that she ‘provides a type of solution to the absurd situation’ (2015: 122), especially in her plays of the 1970s and 1980s, when she starts to take a more activist stance with regard to topics such as feminism or ecology. These plays are still experimental for their radical approach to conventional language and stage practice, but they can hardly be called ‘absurd’. Compared to modernism and the Theatre of the Absurd, a term such as the (neo-)avant-garde is much more inclusive in that, on the one hand, it establishes a tradition of artistic experiment, be it in poetry, prose or theatre, which, on the other hand, always remains in

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Language, sound and textuality 215

the vanguard of literary innovation from the late nineteenth until the early twenty-first century. Then again, lumping together these notions and movements runs the risk of diluting the terminology to such an extent as to render it useless and unworkable. For that reason, and keeping in mind the critical caveat that my observations are confined to a British context, I would like to preserve the term modernism – and its recent extension ‘late’ modernism (see Miller, 1999; Weller, 2018) – for poetry and prose, while exploring the usefulness of the term (neo-)avant-garde for drama, which includes radio and is not just limited to the theatre. I do so because including the medium in my discussion is useful to tease out what distinguishes the historical avantgarde from the neo-avant-garde. However, let us start with the similarities of this lineage, before moving on to the differences. In her previously mentioned study, Claire Warden emphasises ‘the British avant-garde’s use of noises and impenetrable language systems’, which was ‘certainly not unique to Britain’ but occurred ‘across the Continent’, where ‘such noncommunicative methods had dominated the avant-garde scene’ (2012: 109). She connects the ‘questioning of the reliability and objectivity of language’, as found in the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Hugo Ball and the Dadaists, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Maurice Maeterlinck and Antonin Artaud, through the use of non-linguistic rhythms or sounds and a breakdown of  the textual alphabet (2012: 110), to British avant-garde plays – such as The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) by Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, or The Other Animals (1949) by Ewan MacColl – for their use of screams and animal noises as an indication that conventional ‘language is unable to cope with the pain or despair or confusion or the modern world’ (2012: 111). Warden admits that these experiments were less radical than their continental counterparts, in the sense that ‘British dramatists were far more interested in recognisable discourse than revelling in non-­ communicative confusion’ (2012: 112), but the British theatrical avantgarde did share the historical avant-garde’s suspicion of language, despite a difference in degree as to how much they undermined or even destroyed it. As this chapter sets out to illustrate, it is precisely this preoccupation with language, and its representation as sound, noise or music – in opposition to a more traditionally textual or communicative function – that aligns  a British postwar dramatist such as Caryl Churchill with the historical avant-garde; much more so than her male contemporaries, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, whose work one would be hard-pressed to label ‘neo-avant-garde’. Exactly because of this tension between the textual and the verbal through sound, Churchill’s work has also been assigned to what Hans-Thies Lehmann in 1999 christened postdramatic theatre, that is, plays that are considered to be a continuation of the historical avant-garde

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216 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry from the late 1960s onwards. As Mladen Ovadija notes in his Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre (2013), ‘theatre sound has been overwhelmingly neglected in contemporary critical and scholarly discourse’, which has ‘by and large ignored the seminal role of the historical avant-garde’s treatment of sound in the development of contemporary performance’ (2013: 9). While he sees in postdramatic theatre a way to remedy this situation, and also highlights the important role of ‘La Radia’ (1933) – a futurist manifesto of radiophonic theatre by Marinetti and Pino Masnata – for creating ‘the synthesis of media and materials in a new technological environment’ (2013: 135), the term itself does muddy the connection with the historical avant-garde. It certainly does so more than a concept such as the neo-avant-garde, which amalgamates old and new by stressing a continuation rather than a break. The notion of the ‘postdramatic’ more emphatically – and no doubt deliberately – distances itself from what came before and presents what comes after as something other. Its added prefix has always made the term ‘neo-avant-garde’ problematic, because it has connotations of both innovation and reduplication, concepts that at first sight might seem irreconcilable. As Hal Foster puts it: ‘In postwar art the problem of repetition is primarily the problem of the neo-avant-garde’ (1994: 5). This has given it the reputation for ‘pastiche’ or ‘parody’ that pales in comparison with the more radical agenda of the historical avant-garde. Rejecting Peter Bürger’s famous ‘dismissal of the postwar avant-garde as merely neo’ (1994: 11), which ‘can only turn the antiaesthetic into the artistic, the transgressive into the institutional’ (1994: 13), Foster instead argues decisively that ‘the neo-avant-garde has produced new aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections, and political interventions, and that these openings may make up another criterion by which art can claim to be advanced today’ (1994: 16). ‘Rather than render the avant-garde null and void’, Foster continues, ‘these developments have produced new spaces of critical play and prompted new modes of institutional analysis’ (1994: 22). Because of his exclusive focus, Foster primarily looks for these ‘new experiences’ and ‘spaces’ in the domain of the visual arts, but the postwar revival of radio, and its relationship to innovations in theatre, is another important – though overlooked – element to factor in, not least because it aptly and acutely topicalises the institutional tensions that both Bürger and Foster highlight. In this respect, and particularly in the British postwar context, the creation of the BBC Third Programme – later Radio 3 – as an institutional platform sympathetic to more ‘highbrow’ and ‘experimental’ productions is a significant factor.1 What binds playwrights such as Churchill to Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard, who were together largely responsible for the revolutions that shook up the theatrical landscape of postwar Britain, is that they came to

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it with a fresh pair of eyes as well as ears, by writing for the radio in addition to the stage. According to Esslin, who was a former head of drama at the BBC, radio contributed only indirectly to the ‘renaissance of British play-writing that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s’. That generation of young authors ‘had the entire range of great drama easily and constantly available to them’ on the BBC Third Programme, in the form of radio adaptations by European ‘avant-garde’ playwrights including Anouilh, Betti, Brecht, Camus, Cocteau and Ionesco, all of them ‘productions which could rarely be staged’ in England (qtd. in Whitehead, 1989: 138). At least as important, I would add, is the hands-on experience that this new generation of postwar dramatists gained with the wireless by writing their first plays alongside radio scripts or by adapting them for the medium, so that for them the two modes of dramatic expression became closely intertwined from the beginning. In his milestone essay collection British Radio Drama (1981), John Drakakis considers this possibility, albeit with some reserve: ‘To what extent radio bequeathed anything in the way of formal influence to the development of British drama, or to particular dramatists, such as Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard, is, and will continue to be for some time, a matter of debate’ (1981: 18). Writing a few years later, Kate Whitehead seems to be more confident in her assessment of radio’s lasting effect on British theatre: ‘Not only was the new generation of writers being led into the Drama Department, the innovations that Features had made were being transferred to Drama, then through them, ironically, on to the stage itself’ (1989: 143). Caryl Churchill, a fascinating playwright overlooked by Esslin and Drakakis, is a good case study not only to substantiate Whitehead’s claim and to reassess the role of radio in the development of British postwar drama in particular, but also to investigate the importance of the medium for the neo-avant-garde at large.

Caryl Churchill and the radio medium Much like Pinter and Stoppard, the groundbreaking nature of Churchill’s work springs partly from a deep and early affinity with the radio medium. When, in a 1988 interview, Geraldine Cousin asked her ‘Did you choose to write for radio for pragmatic reasons, or was it also a fascination with the medium?’, Churchill answered: I think it was both, because I listened to radio a lot. As a child, I was of a generation who grew up with radio, not television. Television was around at the end of my childhood, but I don’t remember it ever being important at all. Radio was, and it was nice because you could do other things at the same time,

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like drawing. I went on listening to radio, Beckett plays for example. Until, I suppose, my early twenties radio was really quite important to me. So it was partly that, and partly having had one radio play done. (Cousin, 1988: 3–4)

That one radio play was The Ants (1962), written after she graduated from the University of Oxford in 1960, soon followed by six more scripts, all broadcast on BBC Radio 3: Lovesick (1967), Identical Twins (1968), Abortive (1971), Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen (1971), Schreber’s Nervous Illness (1972) and The Judge’s Wife (1972). Because Churchill started writing for the BBC very early on in her career, before redirecting her attention exclusively to the theatre with stage plays such as Owners (1972) and Moving Clocks Go Slow (1973), her radio drama is sometimes disregarded as minor work, written merely to generate cash in the absence of a steady income from theatrical playwriting, which was hard to combine with being a young mother. Needless to say, such an outlook sells her radiophonic work short. Not only does it ignore the unique qualities of these acoustic dramas, conceived for a medium so different in its creative affordances from the stage; it also ignores the intermedial nature of her work and the lasting cross-pollinations that occurred between radio and theatre, as she applied knowhow gained in one medium to the other, innovating her stage work in the process. Still, Churchill had to overcome certain clichés of radio drama that were widespread among both theatre practitioners and critics at the time. As appears from her interview with Cousin, she shared in the common misconception that radio is a ‘blind’ medium when she confessed of her first radio play: ‘I thought of it as a television play. I hadn’t realised, I think, what a visual medium radio was at that point’ (Cousin, 1988: 3). As the visual dimension gradually became more prominent in her work for the medium, by way of more demanding appeals to the imagination, voice and language became more central to her stage plays, repeating and elaborating many of the experiments she had tried out first on the air. As Cousin observed, ‘a number of themes from the radio plays seemed to be carried forward into the stage plays’, which Churchill confirmed: ‘I’m sometimes conscious of them, but I think I’m probably not conscious of them all, and very often perhaps not conscious of them when I’m writing. I mean, I might be thinking about something without realizing at the time that I’ve thought about it before’ (1988: 4). Overlapping dialogue and confused identities, first employed in Identical Twins and then repeated, in different forms, throughout the stage plays of the 1970s and later, are but two examples of such themes or devices. Churchill seems exceptionally conscious of the radio drama tradition, openly alluding to and thereby aligning herself with it, not just in her writing

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for the medium, but also in her theatre. Identical Twins, for example, seems to invoke Harold Pinter’s famous radio play A Slight Ache (1959), which features a mysterious match seller who might be blind and makes no sound, which raises the question if he actually exists or is just imagined by Edward and Flora, whose lives he comes to dominate. When Teddy, one of the twins in Churchill’s radio play, is ‘walking along Knightsbridge with about fifteen pounds on me’, he sees ‘an old man selling matches, half blind, the sort of thing you try not to look at too closely’ (Churchill, 1968a: 8). For Churchill, who may have heard A Slight Ache on the radio during her time at Oxford, not looking too closely at Pinter – or Beckett, for that matter – lest she became too influenced by them, or merely copied their examples, would have been sound advice to keep in mind when writing her own radio plays, which all break new ground in the medium, although here is not the place to dwell on them. An even more fascinating case is Churchill’s Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991). A mixture of theatre, ballet and opera in three parts, it merges text, music, dance and song into a spectacle on history’s great ­poisoners – Dr Crippen, Medea and Madame de Brinvilliers. It requires nine ­performers – four dancers, three singers, one singer/actor and one regular actor – with many of the scenes combining disciplines. The music and the script were written first, in close collaboration with composer Orlando Gough, followed by a choreography that drew as much on the rehearsal process as on improvisation. Not coincidentally, given the strongly intermedial and multidisciplinary nature of the piece, it takes its title from a book that one of the characters, Mr Pugh, is reading in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (1954), as part of a scheme to poison his wife, the insufferable Mrs Pugh (Thomas, 2014: 32). The title of the piece can thus be regarded as a clear nod to Thomas’s radiophonic ‘play for voices’ and to its ­documentary-style collage of speech, music, song and sound effects that is so typical of radio features, and which Churchill exports to the stage. In doing so, she may be said to register a debt to her former experience in radio and recognise the medium’s formative influence on her work. Identical Twins perhaps best illustrates the intermedial cross-fertilisation that not just marks Churchill’s work but drives its impressive and constantly innovating richness. Yet it is a hard work to classify. Casually referred to as a ‘radio play’ by the handful of critics who have written about it, as well as by Tessa Leslie of the play agency Margaret Ramsey, who forwarded it to BBC script editor Richard Imison on 29 March 1968 (BBC WAC, Caryl Churchill, Scriptwriter File III 1968–72), the script itself and the Radio Times magazine present it as ‘an interior duologue’. Churchill’s other works for the medium were all billed as either ‘a play for radio’ or as ‘a dramatisation’ in the case of Schreber’s Nervous Illness (1972),

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220 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry based as it is on Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903).2 The term ‘duologue’ is quite common in theatre, usually denoting a dramatic performance that is limited to two speakers, for example in the case of a telephone conversation as we find it in Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine (1930). Yet its deviation from the more typical ‘radio play’ is noteworthy and puns on the notion of ‘interior monologue’ as much as it toys with the duality that marks the identities of Clive and Teddy. It also suggests that Identical Twins takes up a special place in Churchill’s oeuvre, seemingly confirmed by the fact that it has never appeared in print. There is only a production script in the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, Reading, and the recording can be listened to at the British Library in London, where it is stored on the BBC Sound Server, but it is not commercially available. All of Churchill’s radio plays are available from Nick Hern in a single volume called Shorts (1990), which also collects her television plays alongside a few stray theatrical pieces. Apart from Identical Twins, her first radio play, The Ants, has also been omitted from this volume, though it had already appeared in 1968 as part of a Penguin collection of radio plays for the ‘New English Dramatists’ series (no. 12). Paraphrasing Hal Foster to suit the specific case of Churchill, this prompts the question: What is so neo-avant-garde about Identical Twins that it can only be conveyed in performance, be it radiophonic or theatrical, and is lost in print? However, given the elusiveness of the play, a brief introduction is in order before we try to answer this question.3

Identical Twins True to its title, the play is about a pair of identical twins, Teddy and Clive, who take turns to talk about themselves and each other. They also speak simultaneously and on these occasions they say exactly the same thing, only changing the names of their wives – Margaret and Janet – or that of their twin brother, as in the following example: teddy and clive: Margaret/Janet has been distant all day. My own fault of course but it makes me cry because I am doing my best to be responsible. She didn’t see me cry luckily and never has, I haven’t been so weak the last ten years, though I used to as a child after a long illness or sometimes after a bad fight with Clive/Teddy, not an ordinary fight because we had them every day, with bricks in our playpen and knives once when we were sixteen, but I do remember this feeling of collapse. (Churchill, 1968a: 1)

When speaking independently, the two do not repeat each other word for word, but they often say similar things, from their own perspectives, using

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slightly different phrasings. As is so often the case with identical twins, Teddy and Clive share many characteristics. They both look unwell and feel depressed, contemplating suicide at different points in their lives, which they refer to as their ‘decision’. They also have two children each – Tom and Susy for Clive; Stephen and Lizzie for Teddy – but they dislike their wives and cheat on them openly – Teddy with one of his tenants, Dawn; Clive with the nanny, Nicola. Yet their personalities differ in some respects as well. Clive is fond of the countryside, which Teddy detests, much preferring the city, and whereas Teddy is the extroverted one, Clive is the introvert. Clive also likes to wear older and more comfortable clothes, while Teddy is always decked out in new apparel, clean and fashionable. In school, Clive performed appallingly, always setting off on long walks, but Teddy worked hard, and so on. They were rivals from a young age, getting into fights all the time, often quite violent ones, out to kill each other as they got older. Sick and tired of everyone confusing them all the time, even their girlfriends and parents, they grew desperate for their own identities. This feeling is shared by Teddy and Clive, as is made clear in their simultaneous recitation of the following lines: teddy and clive: I knew early on I was quite unique though Mummy and Daddy couldn’t tell us apart. Which is which? Which is which? they would say, and I stood waiting for them to decide. As often as not they got it wrong. Then I had to go by his name to avoid embarrassment. As soon as we could we got out of sight and came back for reidentification. Sometimes four times in a row. They had spotted some mark. A missing button? A stain on my trousers? Or a spot on my face, would I have the wrong name all week? Or had they at last seen the essential difference, but the wrong way around forever? (1968a: 6)

Of course, the fact that each of them claims to be ‘quite unique’ at the same time undermines the statement. Later in the script, they both say together, ‘At seventeen I began to be myself’ (1968a: 12), which again ironically compromises the uniqueness of their shared thought. Slowly but surely, as the twins echo in chorus: ‘Even other people could see the difference … I pointed it out to people and they saw it’ (1968a: 12–13). At this point, they decided it was time to part ways: teddy and clive: The day I came nearest to feeling fond of him was when I realised we were both separately planning to run away from each other. We went to the station together at night. I don’t remember worrying about our parents. There were two trains in side by side and we tossed a coin for direction. I got into my train and walked along the corridor. There he was in his train, walking along the corridor. He stopped and stared at me like a ­reflection till one of the trains moved and we slid apart. That was the happiest time. (1968a: 14)

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222 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry Due to an unfortunate series of events, however, the twins are reunited as adults. When Janet takes her own life through an overdose of sleeping pills, Clive, her husband, goes to visit his brother again, taking his nanny, Nicola, with him. The reaction of Margaret, Teddy’s wife, is telling: ‘It’s incredible, I can’t tell you apart’ (1968a: 15). Things have gone back to old and even the children are confused, thinking they now have ‘Two daddies’ (1968a: 16). In a darker moment, Clive takes an overdose of sleeping pills himself, as his brother sits watching from across the table, doing absolutely nothing. From this moment on, the mental connection that binds the twins, sustained while living apart as shown by the simultaneous speech parts, begins to fade. This becomes visible in the script, as the lines are now given in two columns: teddy and clive: If I were in his position what would I do next? clive: Teddy sits down and watches. teddy: I sit down and watch. Clive takes more pills. I take more pills. This is one of those This is one of those stupid things you stupid things you regret later. I go regret later. I take on watching. some more pills. And Then I get up without some more. Then I lean a word and go over the table and hide straight out for my face in my arms and a walk, the night hope I’ll go to sleep is quite mild as the quickly and whether it day has been and I works or not is out of feel better for some my hands now. fresh air. (1968a: 24)4

The separation continues, as Clive slowly slips into a deep sleep from which he is never to wake. The script now uses stage directions to indicate the slow fading of Clive’s voice when he speaks together with his brother, until he falls silent and Teddy is left alone, which is one of the most powerful and moving scenes in the play: teddy and clive: (Clive whispers) When I was very small I would stand with him in Mummy’s triple mirror. If we stood very close we could almost shut it round us. There were hundreds of reflections, all the same. (Clive’s voice gets fainter) Then I was terrified to move. (Clive silent now) teddy: not knowing which reflections would move with me. (1968a: 25)

This is also a pivotal moment. When Margaret notices what has happened, she screams ‘Clive, … Teddy’s dead’, believing the dead brother to be her husband, perhaps in a moment of wishful thinking. Teddy has by now fallen hopelessly in love with Clive’s mistress, Nicola, so if he wants to

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Language, sound and textuality 223

get rid of his wife, this is the perfect chance. He only has to pretend to be Clive; Margaret will not be able to tell the difference anyway. ‘It only took me a moment to decide’, Teddy says. While Clive’s decision was to kill himself, his is to go on living – another trait setting the twins apart. But Teddy comes clean: ‘“I’m not Clive”, I said, “That’s Clive”’ (1968a: 25). Teddy does usurp his brother’s life, by leaving Margaret for Nicola to live on the farm, but he does so, crucially, as himself, not as Clive. So, instead of giving up his identity for another, he affirms and asserts his own. It is not a happy ending, however. When Teddy asks Nicola if she loves him, she answers: ‘What’s the difference?’ (1968a: 26). The neighbours also keep calling him Clive, which he cannot be bothered to correct. Towards the end of the script, Teddy states: ‘Sometimes I think I’ll make one effort, not to kill myself’ (1968a: 26). This leads one to wonder if he is in fact unique, or whether he will simply copy his twin brother, in life as in death, and commit suicide too. Churchill seems to be playing on a pun that is inherent in the word ‘individual’; one that combines the Latin roots in- (not) and dividere/dividuus (to divide or divisible) with duo or dualis (two), to give an apparently contradictory but accurate definition of twin identity, which is at once indivisible or unique and double or repetitive. As such, Identical Twins may be said to enact the very problem of ‘repetition and return’ that afflicts the neoavant-garde itself (Foster, 1994: 31), occasioning the question whether it is merely a double, a cheap knockoff of the historical avant-garde. A significant difference between the two, according to Foster, lies in his observation that ‘the neo-avant-garde is obsessed with the twin problems of temporality and textuality’ (1994: 31). This is also reflected in Identical Twins, whose representation of identity takes shape through quite dissimilar aesthetic experiences, depending on whether we read it as a text/script or hear it as a recording. As we will see in the following section, the way in which Identical Twins investigates temporality – or rather ‘contemporality’, given its dualist set-up – clashed with the institutional context of the BBC, in part because radio drama, in its broadcast form, is a non-textual or acoustic genre. This places significantly different and higher demands on the listener, which the Third Programme producers sought to mitigate.

Identical Twins as neo-avant-garde (radio) drama One of the hardest aspects of Identical Twins for listeners, without access to the script, is to distinguish the voices of Clive and Teddy, because the twins are played by one and the same actor, Kenneth Haigh – though he was not the BBC’s first choice, Paul Scofield, Albert Finney, Nicol Williamson

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and Michael Bryant all having been unavailable (BBC WAC, Production File). The production proved to be quite a technical feat, before the advent of digital editing, as John Tydeman explains in an interview with John F. O’Malley: She [Churchill] didn’t know how difficult technically it was to do. It is a fact that we had to record twin A and then sync (synchronize) twin B, who was played by the same actor. He had to wear head caps to keep in sync with himself because the two twins had different personalities. You could not use the same tape and double it up because one is more forceful than the other, so although they are saying the same things at times, they have to say it in a slightly similar way but in two different voices. (qtd. in Fitzsimmons, 1989: 15–16)

In a more recent interview with Mark Lawson for The Guardian, he adds: Kenneth had to record the second speech while we played the first one back, and it turned out that it was almost impossible to do that (keeping pace with your own own voice) for more than 30 or 40 seconds at a time. So we had to put the play together in very small takes. (Lawson, 2012)

It is still possible to see these ‘takes’ on the BBC’s production script, which shows dozens of cues for timing where the actor could take a break. The result amounts to a total duration of 36' 20", recorded on two reels, or 35' 35" without the announcement, which took forty-five seconds: This is the BBC Third Programme. Identical Twins, a duologue for radio by Caryl Churchill. Clive and Teddy are twins. They look alike and they sound alike. Kenneth Haigh plays Clive and Kenneth Haigh also plays Teddy. Identical Twins. (BBC WAC, Production File)

It made a difference on which kind of radio set and where in England this announcement was heard, as some listeners were able to receive it in stereo, ‘a system by which sound is split into and reproduced by two separate channels in order to create a spatial effect’ (Crisell, 1997: 133). While in the late 1950s people still had to ‘place their radio receivers near their television sets’ to experience stereophony for simulcast programmes, usually musical events, by the late 1960s ‘listeners in the South of England had … been able to hear some Third and Music Programme broadcasts in stereo, from the Wrotham transmitter’ (Carpenter, 1996: 224, 247). So, for those who owned a compatible set and happened to be located in a serviced area, the line pertaining to Clive in the announcement above would have emanated from the left-hand speaker, and the one on Teddy from the right-hand speaker, as a means to familiarise audiences with the technique the play uses to distinguish between the characters.5 Fully in keeping with the double nature of Churchill’s Identical Twins, it could thus be heard simultaneously



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across the nation in ‘twin’ versions, though these were not quite ‘identical’, again like the two brothers themselves. These circumstances divided listener responses to the broadcast and may explain its relatively low appreciation score, as reflected in the BBC audience research report (LR/68/1609):6 the device used in which the twins often spoke ‘more or less in unison’ made it all even more difficult to follow, it was complained: the voices were often not quite synchronised (‘this may have been intentional’), but it had the effect of blurring the words. But even with the careful differentiation of tones of voice, a listener commented, it was difficult to gather which twin was speaking, and sorting out the different relations and associations a difficult task: ‘I gave up attempting to follow whose wife and whose children were whose! – or which had really died!’ While the ‘gimmicky double-talk’ was so irritating and the plot so ‘lacking in significance’ and ‘tedious’ and ‘sordid’ to a few, that listening was judged rather a waste of time. (BBC WAC, Production File)

However, there were positive reactions too: over a quarter of the listeners giving evidence reacted far more appreciatively finding it a most original and amusing play (‘a human problem made comic but with strong connections with reality’), well acted and produced: ‘Kenneth Haigh managed to sound like two different people in his “solo” appearances’. The technique by which the twins spoke ‘simultaneously, but slightly off-beat, yet lost nothing in clarity of enunciation’ impressively conveyed an ingenious situation. Some listener[s] were fascinated by what they described as the haunting and strangely compelling quality of the story, and a small number stated their intention of listening to the repeat. (BBC WAC, Production File)

While these different responses might of course be ascribed to varying tastes, as is so often the case with art and literature, broadcasting circumstances such as electromagnetic interference from the atmosphere or ‘static’ may also have had an effect on the clarity of the performance. However, no variable had so profound an impact, it seems, as stereophonic sound: Only eleven listeners in the sample were receiving the broadcast stereophonically, though forty-two said they lived within range of a stereophonic transmitter. Of those who were listening to stereo, one or two expressed the view that on this occasion the programme did not benefit (‘though the voices were clearly discernible the fact that they were not speaking in perfect unison was irritating’). But the rest agreed that the production was most effective and it had been more enjoyable in stereo: ‘Stereo was a considerable asset, as the two characters emerged from different speakers – otherwise I think I would have found it hard to know which one was talking.’ (BBC WAC, Production File)

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226 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry As this last comment confirms, the stereo version of Identical Twins was considerably less challenging to listeners than its monaural counterpart, which the vast majority of the audience had heard. While it was still difficult to understand the twins whenever they spoke together, solo each would always emanate from one or the other speaker. This made it possible to affix their identities, which listeners to the mono version had to do on the basis of certain details in the speeches alone. The divergent responses therefore confirm Elke Huwiler’s point that, ‘while technical features like mixing or stereophony are widely neglected’ (2005: 49) in analyses of radio drama, they can assume a narrative function, in this case affecting the representation of the characters’ identity crisis and how it is, in turn, experienced by an audience. Finally, the responses illustrate that, even if the Third Programme was receptive to radiophonic experimentation, a sizeable contingent of its listeners still remained conservative-minded, even in the late 1960s. This clearly affected producers in their take on Identical Twins and underlines the institutional tensions that are commonly associated with the (radiophonic) neo-avant-garde. The handwritten note ‘Suggest stereo!’ on an internal BBC memo dated 9 May 1968 strongly indicates that it was not part of Churchill’s original idea for the play, but had rather been recommended or even enforced by the BBC, possibly because of audience concerns. While reactions to the script had been positive from the start, in her memo of 2 May Margaret Etall, who offered to produce Identical Twins herself, instantly recognised its ‘technical challenge which would almost make it worthy of Third Prog.’; she went on to conclude ‘it is certainly good enough for R[adio]4’, be it ‘with a possibly low Response Index, of course’. Her colleague, David Spenser, was more cautious in his memo of 9 May, fearing it would be ‘technically very difficult’: ‘I must admit that I don’t consider it tailor made for Radio 4. To me its literary qualities would be quite acceptable on Radio 3. It is by no means an easy play and would make demands on the listener.’ Spenser’s view eventually won out, but even for the more experimentally inclined Third, stereophony was deemed a necessary aid to promote understanding. On 30 October, Tydeman informed Churchill by letter that they were ‘doing it in stereo’, again suggesting it had been the BBC’s idea, not hers. She was invited to recording sessions, but it is not known if she actually went, as this is the last file on Identical Twins in her scriptwriter folder for the years 1968–72. We should therefore be cautious with Mary Luckhurst’s assertion that ‘[i]n Identical Twins, Churchill exploited recent developments in stereo sound’ (2015: 37). The extant archival evidence leaves open the possibility that it may have been an institutional compromise rather than an authorial choice, to tone down or even contain the script’s neo-avant-garde features, at a time when Churchill’s ­breakthrough

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Language, sound and textuality 227

plays for the theatre were yet to be written and her stature had not yet risen. As other chapters in this volume have shown, in particular those by Lars Bernaerts, Siebe Bluijs and Inge Arteel, stereo was often used to enhance a broadcast’s neo-avant-garde aesthetics. It could have served this same purpose for Identical Twins, had the voices of Terry and Clive switched speaker now and then to subvert the pattern and make listeners relive the confusing fragmentation that the twins experience. Instead, it was used for quite the opposite purpose, to stabilise the characters’ identities and voices. This serves as a reminder that the transition from authorial conception to eventual broadcast is mediated not just by the radio technology itself, but also by the institutional context that embeds it, as Harry Heuser does well to emphasise elsewhere in this volume. Especially in mono, less so in stereo, the piece requires very close attention and a good retentive memory. It deliberately pushes at the limits of radio by overloading the listener’s ability to process acoustic information, especially considering that Identical Twins was broadcast only twice, on 21 November and 7 December 1968. We do have some details to go by, for example the names of the twins and their respective wives, mistresses or children, but the repetitions of Teddy, Clive, Margaret, Janet, Nicola, Dawn, Tom, Susy, Stephen or Lizzie serve more to confound and tantalise than to actually guide the listener, particularly if crucial information is frustratingly mentioned at the same time and overlaps. For example, shortly after Clive dies, one needs to recall that Teddy is the one who just stepped out, so that when he says to Margaret, pointing at his dead brother face down on the table, ‘“I’m not Clive,” … “That’s Clive”’ (Churchill, 1968a: 25), we can be sure that he is, in fact, telling the truth. Their two voices sound almost exactly the same, except for an occasional difference of intonation. The speech part is clearly given as Teddy’s in the script, so there is no doubt about it when we read Identical Twins. When we listen to the recording, that foothold is taken away, unless in the stereo version – provided that listeners remember whose voice is coming from which side and trust its regularity. This may partly explain why the play has never been published in print. It would clarify textually what other­wise has to be construed and negotiated acoustically, often without the possibility, and thus also the reassurance, of resolution. But how does a theatrical rendition hold up in comparison? As Darren Gobert puts it in his book The Theatre of Caryl Churchill (2014), she ‘conjures the twins as disembodied characters who recollect in hindsight in the voice of a single, absent actor who recorded the dialogue two weeks before the broadcast. And thus the playwright underscores how radio drama works differently to secure its characters’ from theatre (2014: 84). For his 2002 production of Identical Twins at the Royal Court in London, Dominic

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228 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry Cooke used real-life brothers, John and Martin Marquez, to play Teddy and Clive, but their ‘physical dissimilarities undermined the play’s central conceit’, because the stage always enforces ‘the blunt corporeality that tells against the twin’s putatively identical appearance’, according to Gobert (2014: 84). Even in the case of actual twin-actors, he goes on to state, ‘differences would begin asserting themselves in and through the body, so central to identity’ (2014: 84). Other productions have attempted to work around this by using only one actor on stage, as in the radio version, and letting him interact with a pre-recorded voice. This is perhaps already a hybrid practice, inserting a radiophonic device into a theatrical setting, but it does not have to violate Churchill’s idea for the brothers and their embodiment, neither on the stage, nor on the radio. At several moments in the script, Churchill calls for the sound of ‘SPEEDED  UP TAPE OF THEM TALKING TOGETHER INCOM­ PRE­HENSIBLE’ (1968a: 14), which later recurs as ‘(SPEEDED UP)’, ‘(SPEEDED UP, VERY SHORT)’ (1968a: 15) and, finally, as ‘(SPEEDED UP, PROLONGED INTO HIGH SHRIEK)’ (1968a: 16). In the actual recording, however, these are never used. It is unclear to what extent the removal of such tape sound effects was another compromise to listener taste that BBC officials made on behalf of Churchill, but in a note dated 3 July 1968, John Tydeman states that the script ‘does need a bit of pruning’, which may refer to these few occasions (BBC WAC, Scriptwriter File III, 1968–72). The sudden use of the tape effects, quite late at fourteen pages into the script or roughly nineteen minutes into the broadcast, would have served as a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, shattering the illusion of immediacy that characterises both the broadcast and the stage performance. In his book Liveness, Philip Auslander criticises ‘the  common assumption … that the live event is “real” and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow articifial reproductions of the real’ (1999: 3). Referring to Steve Wurtzler, he asserts that, traditionally, ‘the categories of the live and the recorded are defined in a mutually exclusive relationship, in that the notion of the live is premised on the absence of recording and the defining fact of the recorded is the absence of the live’ (1999: 3). As with stereo, the decision to use tape effects or not again leads to different aesthetic experiences, complicating the ‘interior duologue’ aspect of the production. Listeners suddenly realise that they do not have direct access to the characters’ thoughts, only in a mediated way. This breaks down the radiophonic ‘fourth wall’, so to speak, and reactivates the audience’s awareness that they are hearing a recorded broadcast, which they might have otherwise forgotten. Omitting the fast-forward and rewind effects from the radio version but using them on stage would put the views of Auslander and Wurtzler into practice, exposing the feigned immediacy of

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Language, sound and textuality 229

the theatre as rehearsed and passing off the pre-recorded nature of broadcasting as live, thereby turning the tables. It seems legitimate to conclude, also judging from the BBC response surveys, that the broadcast of the play succeeds better in allowing listeners to relive and immerse themselves in the confusion of personalities that Clive and Teddy undergo as identical twins – differently in mono and stereo – than would be possible for spectators of a staged performance. The difference is expressed most successfully and powerfully, perhaps, in the stereo version when Clive dies and Teddy slowly comes to fill both speakers – or, more eerily, the headphones. It dispels the chaotic confusion of two competing voices, replacing it in our ears with the stable, almost soothing sound of a single vocal source. This is again a good example of how stereophonics can be used to convey narrative information through sound. However, as with the examples above, the result is that it distinguishes the brothers more clearly, thus detracting from the element of identity confusion that is central to the acoustic experience of Identical Twins as a neo-avant-garde (radio) play.

Radio and Identical Twins in Churchill’s later drama So, was Identical Twins always meant to be a ‘radio play’ after all, or did it simply happen to become one, after it failed to transfer to the stage for whatever reasons? In this respect, it is perhaps important to observe that the play arose out of Churchill’s desire to experiment with vocal counterpoint. As her editor, Nick Hern, recollects: We were sitting one day and Caryl said: ‘I want to have overlapping dialogue.’ And I said: ‘Oh, my God, how are we going to do that?’ And we worked it out, using a forward slash, and even put a little example of how it would work at the front of the script. And now it’s an absolutely standard way of laying out a play. (qtd. in Lawson, 2012)

This, indeed, is how the device is typographically dealt with in the BBC production script of Identical Twins, as we have seen above, but the uncertainty of Churchill’s opening note is remarkable: ‘They should probably both be played by the same actor’ (Churchill, 1968a: 1). It seems as though she intended for Identical Twins to be an experiment, to assess what could be gained, potentially for the theatre, and what better condition to explore in than the ephemeral medium of radio, where everything dissolves into air, without having to be repeated night after night, nor even published if the author does not wish it so. Churchill’s opinion of the result is not known, as far as I am aware, but it must have been a valuable ­learning experience.

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230 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry She further perfected the use of overlapping dialogue in her stage plays of later years, most notably in Top Girls (1982) and Hot Fudge (1989), but also elsewhere, in a great variety of ways (Ivanchenko, 2007; 2018). As Sophie Bush declares, Top Girls is often misleadingly ‘credited with the theatrical invention of overlapping dialogue’ (qtd. in Churchill, 2018: 37). Instead, by way of other critics such as Elaine Aston, Philip Roberts and Geraldine Cousin, Bush duly reminds us of ‘Churchill’s previous experimentation with a similar but slightly simpler technique in her much less well-known play Three More Sleepless Nights’, published in 1980 (qtd. in Churchill, 2018: 37). Still, all of them overlook the even less well-known and unpublished Identical Twins, which not only situates the actual origin of the device at a much earlier point in time, but also in the sound-based medium of radio. Although Bush is correct to state that Top Girls, being one of Churchill’s most successful plays, ‘brought this device to a wider audience’ (qtd. in Churchill, 2018: 37), the way it is employed there builds on the earlier Identical Twins as much as it develops it in new directions and applies it to new themes – in this case examining identity through womanhood. The following exchange is a suitable example from the first part of Top Girls, where (semi-)historical figures are joined at the dinner table by fictional characters from different periods of time, to recount their experiences at the hands of men: Pope Joan (ninth century, medieval legend), Lady Nijo (thirteenth century, Japanese diarist and concubine of Emperor Go-Fukusaka), Isabella Bird (nineteenth century, Victorian explorer), Dull Gret (Flemish folklore, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting), Patient Griselda (European folklore, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales) and Marlene (the ‘protagonist’ of Top Girls): griselda: My father could hardly speak. The Marquis said it wasn’t an order, I could say no, but if I said yes I must always obey him in everything. marlene: That’s when you should have expected. griselda: But of course a wife must obey her husband. / And of course I must obey the Marquis.* isabella: I swore to obey dear John, of course, but it didn’t seem to arise. Naturally I wouldn’t have wanted to go abroad while I was married. marlene: *Then why bother to mention it at all? He’d got a thing about it, that’s why. (Churchill, 2018: 86)

As Churchill explains the symbols in her ‘Note on layout’ preceding the playtext (2018: 59–60), a forward slash indicates the moment at which the next line interrupts the previous one, making two speeches overlap, while an asterisk indicates two lines following each other immediately, without a pause. Thus, in the example above, Griselda is cut short mid-sentence by

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Language, sound and textuality 231

Isabella, who latches on to the word ‘obey’ with her own personal experiences. But, before she is able to finish her remark, Isabella is, in turn, interrupted by Marlene, who reacts to Griselda’s line. As a result, the three women speak simultaneously in a cacophony of voices that drowns out poor Isabella. This contrapuntal way of performing discourse challenges a theatrical audience more than a text does a reader. Some critics, such as Aston, interpret the device in a negative sense, stating that ‘the women are largely self-centredly caught up in their own individual narratives’, and considering their ‘inability to listen and to share experiences with women [as] indicative of intrasexual oppression’ (2010: 39). Reinelt sides with Aston, observing that the ‘theatrical technique of overlapping speeches’ makes ‘the women talk on top of each other’ (2000: 180), almost as if they are engaged in a scramble to be ‘top girl’, much like Win, Nell and Marlene in the second part of the play, which is situated at the ‘Top Girls’ Employment Agency – a name rich in connotations. Roberts’ interpretation is more positive. On the one hand, he regards it as a more realistic way of conveying ‘the effect of a normal dinner party’; on the other hand, he notes that the layered speech creates ‘composites as well as individuals’, juxtaposing and contrasting collective ‘women’s experience’ with ‘individual lives’ (2008: 83). Although it is applied to both a different theme and context in Top Girls, the resulting confusion of identities on stage bears striking resemblance to the way it featured in Identical Twins, initially on the radio. In addition to the fragmentation, merging and blurring of individuality through vocal counterpoint, another way in which Identical Twins anticipates Churchill’s later theatrical work is in its use of speech and language as mere sound or noise. A good case in point would be The Skriker (1994), a play about an ancient elf-like creature capable of metamorphosing itself into objects as well as human shape on stage, adopting different languages accordingly. This is her opening speech: Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span spick and spun the lowest form of wheat straw into gold, raw into roar, golden lion and lyonesse under the sea dungeonesse under the castle for bad mad bad sad adders and takers away … Slit slat slut. That bitch a botch an itch in my shoulder blood. Bitch botch itch. Slat itch slit botch. Itch slut bitch slit. (Churchill, 1998: 2)

As Ovadija captures it so well, the Skriker’s idiom is a mix of Englishsounding ‘music-like words … dug up from a pre-verbal phonetic chaos’ that is ‘reminiscent of avant-garde sound poetry that strove to revive the ancient phonetic roots of language’ and ultimately allows it to ‘reclaim the power of speech’s forgotten sensuality’. The ‘sheer musicality and ­assonance of sibilants and affricates’, which appears ‘primitive, infantile,

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232 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry and illogical’, is refashioned as a ‘subliminal language [that] retaliates against logocentrism, consumerism, and the belief in scientific progress’ (2013: 187). Ovadija’s qualification of it as ‘pre-symbolic’ is particularly pertinent in the context of an ephemeral performance which, as opposed to a text, is acoustic and again results in a much more difficult experience for a listening audience than a reader. The same holds true for Blue Heart (1997), which is actually made up of two plays, Heart’s Desire and Blue Kettle. In the second, Churchill, gradually and seemingly at random, replaces words from the characters’ conversation with ‘blue’ and ‘kettle’, thereby forcing the spectators to fill in the blanks by deducing the missing information from the verbal as well as the physical context. This, again, deconstructs language and communication as established on a set of culturally fabricated conventions, vulnerable to ambiguity and distortion as soon as that framework is disrupted or deprived of the textual foundation that allows for rereading and contextual support. Although Identical Twins is perhaps not yet as radical in its approach to language as The Skriker, what it shares with this play, as it does with Three More Sleepless Nights, Top Girls, Hot Fudge and Blue Heart, is the destabilising of language through sound, which directly connects them to the historical avant-garde. The neo-avant-garde extends and transforms this lineage by adding the radiophonic as a new aesthetic experience in which to continue exploring and exploiting language through the joined notions of (con)temporality and textuality. In the case of Churchill, although she is by no means unique, this practice intermedially carries over into theatre as an artistic space where institutional strictures were apparently more relaxed in the 1980s–90s when compared to those that governed the BBC Third Programme in the 1960s–70s. Yet, in this connection, it is always important to keep in mind that the publication of texts, as perhaps yet another cultural institution, always imposes limitations of its own on the acoustically neoavant-garde nature of her plays, both for the stage and for the air.

Conclusion In more than one respect, not just as an ‘interior duologue’, Identical Twins is unique in Churchill’s work, wedged between the siblings of radio drama and stage theatre, which have historically been treated like stepbrothers or stepsisters, but which actually have more in common than their antagonistic framing would suggest. Identical Twins, as a generic hybrid or neo-avantgarde crossover of radio and theatre, fittingly captures the spirit of the play. Just as the identity of Clive and Teddy lies somewhere in between them at the halfway point, like some unattainable state or ontological no man’s

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land, Identical Twins occupies a liminal artistic space between radio and theatre: existing in both – perhaps even intended for both – but never fully coinciding with either. It lives on in archives as a playscript or broadcast, without a published text or recording, ephemerally materialising into a stage performance every now and then. While the reason for its enigmatic status remains unclear, this chapter has suggested that it may be due to the disambiguating nature of publication, which also includes the option to pause, rewind or fast-forward a recording. This firmly locates the neoavant-garde element of its aesthetic experience in the acoustic, which could be diminished by textual as much as by performative reiteration. Identical Twins may then be considered as a transitional piece for Churchill’s career in the late 1960s. On a more general level, it testifies to radio’s central but neglected position in the establishment of a neo-avant-garde movement in British postwar drama, which includes postdramatic theatre but requires to be defined more broadly, beyond the stage, incorporating the theatre of the air. Not, however, as two separate and disconnected genealogies, but as closely intertwined.

Notes 1 For more information on the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, see Whitehead (1989), Carpenter (1996) and Tatiana Eichenberger’s chapter in this volume. 2 This information on Churchill’s radio plays was retrieved from the BBC’s Genome website, an online database listing all Radio Times billings and announcements from 1923 to 2009; see https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/ (accessed 29 April 2020). 3 Although Identical Twins is rarely discussed in Churchill criticism, due to its relative inaccessibility, Gobert (2009: 106–8) offers another brief introduction to the play. 4 The typography suggests that Churchill intended for these lines to be spoken together by the twins, but in the BBC broadcast they are said in turns and thus do not overlap. In addition to the use of stereophony and the omission of the tape effects, as discussed later on in this chapter, the alternating speech parts may be another way in which the BBC made the radio play easier to follow for listeners, diminishing some of its neo-avant-garde characteristics. 5 The recording of Identical Twins at the British Library is also the stereophonic version. 6 According to the BBC’s audience research report, the estimated audience size for the broadcast of Identical Twins on 21 November 1968 was ‘0.1% of the population of the United Kingdom’, which roughly corresponds to 55,210 listeners. The sample that completed the questionnaire consisted of seventy-seven people, which equalled ‘7% of the Third Programme Listening panel who heard all or most of the broadcast’. The reaction index was 46, while ‘the average for

234 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry plays on Third Programme during the first nine months of the year was 61, and other plays by the author, The Ants (Week 48, 1962) and Lovesick (Week 15, 1967) gained 56 and 40’. The conclusion was that Identical Twins had received ‘a rather cool response from the majority of listeners in the small sample’ (BBC WAC, Production File).

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References Aston, E. (2010). Caryl Churchill. Tavistock: Northcote House. Auslander, P. (1999). Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge. Bennett, M. Y. (2011). Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennett, M. Y. (2015). The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carpenter, H. (1996). The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996. London: Phoenix Giant. Childs, P. (2017). Modernism. London: Routledge. Churchill, C. (1968a). Identical Twins. Production script, BBC Written Archives, Caversham, Reading. Churchill, C. (1968b). Identical Twins. Audio recording, British Library, London, 1CDR0025520 and 2CDR0022753. Churchill, C. (1998). Plays: 3. London: Nick Hern Books. Churchill, C. (2018). Top Girls. Ed. Sophie Bush. London: Bloomsbury. Cousin, G. (1988). ‘The common imagination and the individual voice’, New Theatre Quarterly, 4.13, 3–16. Cousin, G. (1989). Churchill: The Playwright. London: Methuen Drama. Crisell, A. (1997). An Introductory History of British Broadcasting. London: Routledge. Drakakis, J. (1981). ‘Introduction’, in J. Drakakis (ed.), British Radio Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36. Esslin, M. (1961). The Theatre of the Absurd. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Fitzsimmons, L. (1989). Churchill on File. London: Methuen Drama. Foster, H. (1994). ‘What’s neo about the neo-avant-garde?’, October, 70, 5–32. Gobert, R. D. (2009). ‘On performance and selfhood in Caryl Churchill’, in E. Aston and E. Diamond (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 105–24. Gobert, R. D. (2014). The Theatre of Caryl Churchill. London: Bloomsbury. Huwiler, E. (2005). ‘Storytelling by sound: a theoretical frame for radio drama analysis’, The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, 3.1, 45–59. Innes, C. (2011). ‘Modernism in drama’, in M. Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 128–54. Ivanchenko, A. (2007). ‘An “interactive” approach to interpreting overlapping dialogue in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (act 1)’, Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylisics, 16.1, 74–89.

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Ivanchenko, A. (2018). ‘Overlapping speech in Caryl Churchill’s Hot Fudge: constructing interactional and interpersonal contexts’, Literary Linguistics: International Journal, 7.3, 1–25, https://journals.linguistik.de/ijll/issue/view/ 15/20 (accessed 29 April 2020). Lawson, M. (2012). ‘Caryl Churchill, by the people who know her best’, The Guardian, 3 October, www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/oct/03/caryl-churchillcollaborators-interview (accessed 29 April 2020). Lehmann, H.-T. (1999). Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren. Luckhurst, M. (2015). Caryl Churchill. New York: Routledge. Miller, T. (1999). Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World Wars. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ovadija, M. (2013). Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Reinelt, J. (2000). ‘Caryl Churchill and the politics of style’, in E. Aston and J. Reinelt (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 174–93. Roberts, P. (2008). About Churchill: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber and Faber. Thomas, D. (2014). Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. Ed. W. Davies and R. Maud. London: Phoenix. Warden, C. (2012). British Avant-Garde Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Warden, C. (2015). Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weller, S. (2018). ‘From language revolution to literature of the unword: Beckett as late modernist’, in O. Beloborodova, D. Van Hulle and P. Verhulst (eds), Beckett and Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37–53. Whitehead, K. (1989). The BBC Third Programme: A Literary History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Archival sources BBC Written Archives Caversham (hereafter BBC WAC), RCONT 12, Caryl Churchill, Scriptwriter File III 1968–1972. BBC WAC, R19/2,252/5, Tydeman, John, Productions 1968, ‘Identical Twins’, Caryl Churchill.

11 Studio audience: Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Adam J. Frank

‘I detest audiences’ (Gould, 1966: 00' 01"–00' 03"). So begins a 1966 television interview with Glenn Gould, the virtuoso Canadian pianist who had retired from the concert stage just two years earlier at the age of 31. Gould’s retirement was no publicity stunt: by all accounts the eccentric, hypochondriacal performer found large crowds genuinely distressing. In giving up the stage, however, by no means did Gould renounce publicity as such. On the contrary, he maintained and cultivated intimate connections with ever-increasing numbers of listeners by dedicating his remarkable talents and energies to radio and recording. As attested by his large discography (over seventy-five discs for Columbia Records) and two decades of innovative radio productions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Gould’s hatred for audiences was more than matched by his love for that audience replacement, the microphone. He puts it this way in his characteristically arch manner: ‘the fact that in most forms of broadcasting a microphone six feet away stands as surrogate for an audience has always been, for me, prominent among the attractions of the medium’ (Gould, 1985: 354). This chapter argues that the microphone – or rather, the studio for which the microphone stands in as metonym – permitted Gould to convert audiences to audience, that is, to the state of listening itself, and to an especially capacious form of listening. Gould sought to cultivate in himself and his listeners the capacity to entertain in quiet awareness several distinct voices at once, a capacity that he gave significant ethical, aesthetic and political weight to and that, as we shall see, answered a set of psychic needs. Such contrapuntal listening, a crucial part of his piano technique, permitted Gould to develop those extraordinary interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard music that won him international renown and controversial genius status following the success of his debut album The Goldberg Variations (Columbia Records, 1955). Gould brought this contrapuntal sensibility to radio in the 1960s and 1970s where it would evolve into a kind of ethos in his major radio works, the documentaries collected and

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Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio 237

released under the title The Solitude Trilogy whose layered polyphonies remain challenging listening experiences. Gould called these works contrapuntal radio. To be clear, the layering of voices atop one another does not characterise all or even most of Gould’s radio work. For example, in his portraits of a variety of musical figures (Petula Clark, Pablo Casals, Leopold Stokowski, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss) we listen to one speaking voice at a time, almost always in dialogue with voices that come before and after, presenting thoughts and ideas in conflict with one another, and brought together with music that may contribute yet another ‘voice’ to the conversation. The hour-long drama-documentaries (as he called them) that comprise The Solitude Trilogy also use recordings of interviews that Gould conducted, but are more complex. The primary subject of ‘The Idea of North’ (1967), ‘The Latecomers’ (1969) and ‘The Quiet in the Land’ (1977) is isolation in geographical regions of Canada: the near-Arctic north, Newfoundland and rural Manitoba. Gould would create a script or score from the ­transcribed interviews which he would then realise (with the help of CBC sound engineers) through extensive tape splicing, volume control and other studio techniques. In the first two radio documentaries Gould orchestrated voice tracks over what he called a basso continuo, the sound of the rumbling train going north in ‘The Idea of North’ and the sound of the surf in ‘The Latecomers’. By the time he made ‘The Quiet in the Land’ Gould’s use of sonic materials had become more elaborate, involving, for example, the juxtaposition of a song by Joan Baez with a Mennonite children’s choir, ambient sounds, and as many as nine voices simultaneously. These works pursue disjunctions between voice and meaning at the same time that they express thoughts and ideas in language. As Richard Kostelanetz has suggested, Gould composed for the medium of radio (1988: 567). The layering of speaking voices atop or close beside one another, the subtle, nuanced play with gain or volume, and the arrangement of materials both musically and in terms of verbal content all form part of his approach to contrapuntal radio. I take this to name Gould’s compositional techniques and poetics: the editing together and mixing of multiple recorded voices, music and other sounds in complex, conflicted dialogue to achieve a kind of sonic density that plays at the limits of a listener’s ability to follow, sort and separate the meanings of these tracks, multiple non-exclusive meanings that are presented simultaneously. Something approaching this sonic density characterises most of Gould’s radio work, the documentaries and portraits as well as the late comic recording ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’. I will attend closely to this seemingly minor recording which features Gould’s ridiculous impersonations of fictitious music critics later in this essay, for it will allow me to unfold

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238 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry the strange theatricality permitted by the studio and central to Gould’s contrapuntal radio. From the literary critical and affect theoretical perspective I take here, Gould looks and sounds like a writer, composer and producer who was committed to several intersecting media, including recorded music, written and printed language, vinyl, magnetic tape and radio. In his embrace of the microphone and the studio Gould resembles earlier modernist writers who used radio to communicate challenging work to large audiences. No doubt Gould would have agreed with George Orwell who, in an essay entitled ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ (1945), contrasts ‘That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”’, at which ‘there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile’, with a radio broadcast in which ‘The poet feels that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something’ (1993: 167). Gertrude Stein describes her interview on NBC radio in the mid-1930s in similarly affective terms: ‘you knew, you really knew, not by what you knew but by what you felt, that everybody was listening. It is a very wonderful thing to do’ (Stein, 1935: 168).1 Both Orwell and Stein were facing potentially hostile audiences: Orwell was engaged by the BBC to broadcast literary programmes to India during the war, and Stein was beginning a United States lecture tour to popularise her radically experimental writing and poetics. No wonder that both emphasise what Orwell calls the ‘make-believe’ elements of radio and the protective space of the studio in which ‘the audience has no power over you’ (1993: 167, emphasis in original). In the studio, to address one sympathetic, ‘conjectural’ (1993: 167) or imagined person is to address (in principle) anyone. I take this to be radio’s basic phantasmatic structure of address, one that is especially appealing to writers insofar as it gratifies a fundamental wish: to enjoy communion with an audience while being alone and protected from them. Gould partook of this powerful phantasy and sought to realise it by way of the studio – etymologically, the artist’s or scholar’s workroom, a private space for reverie, a study. This chapter is in two sections. The first section surveys a variety of critical writing on Gould, briefly locates his work in the contexts of European and North American avant-gardes (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan), and summarises materialist criticism of Gould’s radio work before offering a more phenomenological approach to the studio as a way to bridge aesthetic and political readings of counterpoint. The second section listens closely to ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’ to locate the studio as a space of fantasy in the sense that object-relations theory understands that concept.2 The studio, I argue, offered a safe space of containment for Gould and his many conflicting voices and, at the same time, it is itself doubly, precariously contained: both by the institutions that supported Gould’s



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work (in particular, the CBC) and by the listener who may internalise the intimate space of the studio. This phantasy of internalisation is what I mean by studio audience.

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Counterpoint, from music to radio How to begin to understand the aesthetic and political meanings of Gould’s contrapuntal radio? Edward Said wrote several essays on Gould that explored (among other things) the pianist’s commitment to musical counterpoint in Bach in particular. Consider this description of Gould’s precise articulation of simultaneous melodic voices at great speed: as you listen to the music you feel as if you are watching a tightly packed, dense work being unfolded, resolved almost, into a set of intertwined lines held together not by two hands but by ten fingers, each responsive to all the others, as well as to the two hands and the one mind really back of everything. (Said, 2008: 4)

What Said finds unusual in Gould’s performance is a highly literate intellectual engagement, the ‘capacity to display an almost verbal intelligence through his fingers’ (2008: 221) that transforms musical performance into an experience of reading or writing: ‘For him every performance was a reading in the literal sense: the work he played seemed to be advancing an argument, making points’ (2008: 226). Said is not alone in this observation. As the French film director Bruno Monsaingeon in his documentary Glenn Gould: Hereafter (2006) explains, Gould’s performance style lets ‘his listeners, whether musicians or music lovers, listen to his music as if they could read it’ (Monsaingeon, 2006: 10' 15"–10' 34"). Gould’s writerly musical performance is connected with his passion for and fascination with counterpoint, which Said defines this way: ‘the essence of counterpoint is simultaneity of voices, preternatural control of resources, apparently endless inventiveness. In counterpoint a melody is always being repeated by one or another voice; the result is horizontal, rather than vertical, music’ (2008: 5). This endlessly inventive, horizontal multiplicity orients a listener towards a paratactic, potentially democratising space of equal voices or lines, what Said implies in Culture and Imperialism (1993) when he proposes reading archives contrapuntally with an awareness of official as well as counter-histories.3 But Said’s discussions of counterpoint offer a more complicated treatment of this musical form: ‘Counterpoint is the total ordering of sound, the complete management of time, the minute subdivision of musical space, and absolute absorption for the intellect’ (2008: 5). In counterpoint the tendencies towards multiplicity or plurality,

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240 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry on the one hand, and towards totality, on the other, are in tension, a tension Said explores in his late essay ‘Glenn Gould, the Virtuouso as Intellectual’, which juxtaposes Gould’s interpretations of Bach with Theodor Adorno’s writing on the composer. For Adorno, Bach’s music, in bringing together anachronistic or ‘antiquated contrapuntal devices with a modern rational subject’ (Said, 2008: 273), offers musical images that reconcile rationalised, technical production with highly idiosyncratic subjectivity in an attempt (here I’m citing Adorno, as cited by Said) ‘to help [music] reach its innermost truth, the emancipation of the subject to objectivity in a coherent whole of which subjectivity itself was the origin’ (2008: 273). In listening to Gould we are tuning in to the dialectical, Hegelian thinking of a neo-avant-garde. I suspect that the concept of the avant-garde, rooted in a European Marxist critical tradition and conditioned (in part) by the state’s control of media, is not always well-suited to the twentiethcentury North American landscape. Nevertheless, Gould’s writing sounds like an unexpected Canadian cousin to the Frankfurt School, as if he were translating German aesthetic philosophy for North American audiences more familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan than that of Adorno. Indeed, according to Richard Cavell, who analyses Gould’s radio poetics by way of McLuhan’s ideas about acoustic space and environmental prosthetics, Gould read Adorno’s writing on Bach (Cavell, 2002: 163). Gould was clearly committed to an eclectic musical avant-garde, drawn both to the modernist serialism of Arnold Schoenberg and to the very late romanticism of Richard Strauss, while also engaging with John Cage’s aleatory compositional procedures, even if he disagreed with them in print and on air. Gould’s idiosyncratic performance habits, his disdain for major figures in the concert repertoire and his retreat from the stage to the studio all chime with Adorno’s critique of the ‘atomistic listening’ produced by the conditions of concert-going (Said, 2008: 270). As Said points out, Gould’s writerly commitment to musical counterpoint cultivates structural or systematic listening, which, when combined with an insistence on highly idiosyncratic interpretation, offers ‘a critical model for a type of art that is rational and pleasurable at the same time, an art that tries to show us its composition as an activity still being undertaken in performance’ (2008: 277). Gould brings together this avant-garde emphasis on process and performance with a powerful commitment to recording. In this way, his political and aesthetic concerns resemble those of Walter Benjamin more than they do Adorno’s. This becomes clear to a reader of ‘The Prospects of Recording’ (1966), an essay that serves as a manifesto for Gould’s poetics (based on a radio programme he produced, ‘Dialogue on the Prospects of Recording’, which included an interview with McLuhan), and which unfolds the  sonic  advantages of the studio as well as its editorial p ­ ossibilities, its

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‘take-twoness’. Gould’s commitment to the studio emphasises a ‘zero-toone relationship’ with listeners (Gould, 1985: 318) by way of the ‘analytic clarity, immediacy, and indeed almost tactile proximity’ of recording (1985: 333). Studio recording and editing was, for Gould as well as for other producers of the 1960s and 1970s, a process of discovering new ways to interpret and present music by recording multiple performances and splicing together distinct interpretations (Gould was unusual in bringing these methods to recordings of European art music). In a manner entirely consistent with Benjamin’s conceptualisation of the work of art (exemplarily, film) in the era of its technological reproducibility, Gould argues against the ideal of authenticity associated with live performance and proposes to revalue the work of forgery: ‘the role of the forger, of the unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture’ (1985: 343). We should think of Gould’s career in terms of a full commitment to the aesthetic and political possibilities of the studio and the forms of publicity that accompany broadcasting and recording. To return to Said’s initial description, Gould’s ten fingers, two hands and one mind all need to be located in the space of the studio, where we can also find the hands, fingers and minds of studio engineers (Andrew Kazdin, Lorne Tulk, Ray Roberts, among others) as well as the microphones, multi-track recorders, sound boards, cables, amplifiers and other equipment necessary to create Gould’s recordings (for a similar point about the labour of recording, see Hecker, 2008: 81). Said may not have meant his arithmetic series to be reductive, down to ‘the one mind behind everything’, but it is worth keeping in our own minds that Gould’s legendary solitariness may not be as singular as he and his commentators would sometimes have it. A reader of Peter Ostwald’s insightful, sympathetic biography of Gould may be struck by the many, hours-long, late-night telephone conversations Gould insisted on having with friends, and his dependence on specific individuals for practical support even while he sought a stringent emotional autonomy. And so, while I agree with much of Ross Posnock’s recent reading of Gould’s idiosyncrasies as ensuring a form of privacy in which ‘absorption and introspection could flourish’ (2016: 246), part of a larger argument that Gould’s retirement from stage to studio expressed a political and spiritual rejection of ‘the public realm’s impoverishment’ (2016: 255), I am not persuaded that Gould’s aesthetics ‘erases the public domain’ and ‘enters the closed circuit of “system” in the shape of the recording studio’ (2016: 252). Neither Posnock nor Said examines Gould’s work for radio in any detail, nor the forms of sociality that radio encourages. With the emergence of sound studies and radio studies, Gould’s reputation as a radio composer has risen. Jeff Porter in his book Lost Sound offers persuasive readings of (or close listenings to) The Solitude Trilogy, which he describes as Gould’s ‘cubist experiment with radio’ (2016: 180).

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242 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry Those who address this work in radio tend to offer more materialist readings that focus on technological aspects of the studio, Foucaultian themes of self-care, and national as well as imperial contexts. Tim Hecker treats the studio as ‘a physical space, a field of social relations and a frame of musical consciousness’ (2008: 78), Edward Jones-Imhotep (2016) uses the resources of science studies to locate Gould as an important thinker of the technologised self, and Lytle Shaw locates at least some of Gould’s radio works as ‘tours … of the reticulated network of Cold War radar defense systems set up by the United States’ (2018: 164). Meanwhile, Canadian studies scholars have  been writing about this major figure in the Canadian cultural landscape for decades, with several commentators unfolding the politics of Gould’s contrapuntal techniques. For example, Anna Sajecki (2015) reads Gould’s radio essay on Petula Clark in the context of Canadian attitudes towards the Cold War and highlights his anti-totalitarianism, although she does not offer a critique of the wellmeaning pluralist politics of voice and inclusion that defines the Canadian nationalist discourse of multiculturalism. Note the absence, in ‘The Idea of North’, of any voices indigenous to the Arctic North, even while Inuit peoples (‘Eskimo’ in the documentary’s terminology) become its major subject. If, for CBC Radio in the centenary year of 1967, the North is an idea that belongs to white, urban, settler Canadians, any contemporary treatment of this idea must now include other voices.4 While I am drawn to these critical, materialist readings of Gould’s work in radio, this essay seeks to unfold the phenomenology of studio audience and the ethical relations to art that the studio made possible for Gould (Jones-Imhotep’s essay has been especially helpful in this regard). The approach that I take here builds on Kevin McNeilly’s reading of ‘The Idea of North’ which suggests that the North becomes a utopian concept, ‘a name for a certain multiplicitous music’ (1996: 87), such that what emerges from Gould’s documentary is ‘a zone of antagonisms’ (1996: 88) that remains unresolved and, therefore, invites a particularly attentive listening practice. Gould’s arrangement of the voices of others through his contrapuntal techniques represents what McNeilly calls ‘a proactive form of listening, of attending to those voices, of letting them speak through him’ (1996: 101); the North becomes an occasion for this active form of listening to multiple voices, an opportunity to arrange complex materials in comparative solitude through the filter of individual subjectivity. I would take this further and argue that the North is no more or less utopian than the space of the studio itself. The ‘northern listening’ that Gould seeks to make available is, more precisely, studio audience. Gould understood very well what the phenomenology of studio audience offered to listeners as well as to writers/producers. Consider his

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description of attending a performance of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic playing Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony: ‘I took refuge in a glassed-in broadcast booth over the stage, and although I was in a position to see Karajan’s face and to relate every ecstatic grimace to the emerging musical experience, the audience … was not’ (Gould, 1985: 320). The booth (or the studio, more generally) not only protects Gould as listener, it also offers him a privileged vantage point, a fuller, more nuanced experience of performance, as well as an opportunity to use it. Gould would integrate a recording of this performance into ‘The Idea of North’ but ‘revised the dynamics of the recording to suit the mood of the text’ (1985: 320). The studio protects Gould (from both audiences and performers) and permits him to use recorded materials for his own compositional purposes, to refunctionalise music and recording, what Brian Eno called in a 1979 lecture ‘The Recording Studio as Compositional Tool’ (Albiez and Dockwray, 2016). These compositions are, in turn, meant to be listened to in our own seemingly private, phantasmatic spaces analogous to studios, such as bedrooms, living rooms, cars and those protective spaces of audience we create every day with earbuds or headphones. These recreate studio listening in us.

A Glenn Gould phantasy I turn now to ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’, an audio recording that Gould created in his home studio that foregrounds both the privacy and the kind of sociality that belong to studio audience (Mowitt, 1987: 177). This hourlong piece, released as part of his last analogue recording The Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album (1980), has not been broadcast on radio (as far as I know). The album cover features a photograph of Gould at fifty with a mischievous smile, sitting in a studio control room with a microphone in the foregound, while in the background the image of Gould’s 1955 self, the glamorous young man of the first Goldberg recording, is repeated on a dozen blue-screened studio monitors. In this image Gould mediates and mediatises himself in reference both to a famous image of McLuhan (also seated in front of an array of monitors) as well as to Warhol’s screen prints, an ironic depiction that is at once self-deprecating and self-­ aggrandising, and that serves to frame a 25-year retrospective of his career. The double-album consists of a miscellany of unreleased and previously released tracks (interpretations of works by Bach, Scarlatti, Strauss) and includes his own composition ‘So You Want to Write a Fugue?’ (1963) as well as two comic recordings featuring impersonations of music critics, ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’ and ‘Critics’ Call-Out Corner’.

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244 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry The ‘Fantasy’ centres on a mock studio interview hosted by Margaret Pacsu, in which Gould is grilled about his career and aesthetic choices by a series of guests, alter-ego music critics voiced by Gould himself (with one by Pacsu): the pompous Brit, Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornthwaite; the philosophically astute German critic, Dr Karlheinz Klopweisser; and the American critic, a psychedelic 1960s hangover named Theodore Slutz. In addition to her role as the game, hapless host, Pacsu is the voice of Hungarian Marxist musicologist Marta Hortavanyi. Gould had developed these characters in the context of a small group of Toronto friends who occasionally met as the Lower Rosedale Shakespeare Reading Society (Gould, 1992: ix). Gould took great pleasure in hammy, informal performance, and while he has frequently been accused by friends, acquaintances and biographers of not being quite as funny as he thinks he is, a listener must acknowledge that he delivers his convoluted, at times cringe-worthy lines with great commitment. In fact, the interview dialogue (written entirely by Gould) addresses a characteristically serious set of musical, aesthetic and political concerns, albeit in the mode of the utterly ridiculous. I approach this recording to understand the peculiar theatricality that accompanies Gould’s version of studio audience, an interoceptive theatricality at once physiognomic and fantastical, self-disclosing and self-absorbing, what one might call a theatre of the mind’s ear that is intimately related to the performance of reading (Kivy, 2006: 63). Consider the opening dialogue, which begins with Margaret Pacsu complaining about the heating system. ‘Oh I know, it’s always incredibly cold in the studio,’ Gould says, to which Pacsu replies, ‘Cold? I always find it incredibly warm and terribly stuffy’ (Gould, 1980: 00' 04"–00' 11"). The joke, in part, is about Gould’s habit of wearing scarves, overcoat and gloves in all weather, but the intimate close-mic and the question of temperature immediately make the listener aware of the bodily, spatial dynamics of the studio itself, dynamics that the scene continues to unfold. Insipid, unexplained humming from two distinct sources begins as Pacsu and Gould discuss the best seating arrangement, their movement conveyed via stereo panning and the speakers’ variable distances from the microphone. By the time the studio engineer Duncan Haig-Guinness (voiced by Gould in a thick brogue) suddenly breaks in with the distinctive squawk of feedback from the control room mic, listeners have been made acutely aware of an uncomfortable three-dimensional space inhabited by an indeterminate number of conflicting voices and estranged sounds. The theatricality of Gould’s studio audience is somewhat Brechtian insofar as interruption and juxtaposition break with naturalist conventions of continuity or closure (in Gould’s recording everything is commentary and meta-commentary). At the same time this theatricality is related to

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fantasy as such, or rather, to phantasy-with-a-ph in the sense that Melanie Klein and her followers in the school of object-relations theory have defined it: ‘mental representation of those somatic events in the body which comprise the instincts’ (Hinshelwood, 1991: 32). From the perspective of affect and object-relations theory the studio becomes a primary site for phantasy both insofar as it permits seemingly impossible situations to be realised (the Arctic oil rig performance that ends the piece, on which more later) and, more significantly, as it focuses attention inward on scenarios or transactions between or among voices and other sonic elements that register, evoke, or conjure with bodily impingements. Think of the infamous humming on Gould’s piano recordings, a highly theatricalised display of absorption that registers both the corporeal aspects of his playing (Sanden, 2009: 20–3) and his attempt to convey the music’s ideal form, an intended acoustic image that Gould communicates to himself and his listeners. The humming in the opening scene of ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’ refers to and evokes this interoceptive theatricality in the space of the studio, at once stuffy and cold, and like the old-fashioned study of humanism, a place for fantasy and reverie. This studio is not quite the closed space of ‘system’ that Posnock suggests. In fact, the studio is represented as distinctly open in a number of ways. When the panel discussion begins, two of the critics have not yet arrived, and when they eventually do join the panel they bring with them news from outside. Theodor Slutz enters audibly through a studio room door and mutters something incomprehensible about a traffic jam (Gould, 1980: 13' 08"–13' 20"), and Marta Hortavanyi apologises for being late after delivering ‘a wonderfully successful lecture to a Kodaly kindergarten on the subject of “Decadence in Dodecaphony”’ (33' 14"–33' 22"). Duncan, the weary, put-upon studio engineer, consistently breaks in from the control room as he wrangles various audio clips of Gould’s recordings. And the piece wastes no time in conjuring the outside space of greatest importance to Gould, the Arctic North. In the pre-interview chat we discover that two of the panel guests, Sir Nigel and Dr Klopweisser, each spent time as young men engaged in ethno-musicological studies in Greenland and the Northwest Territories, and they describe their 1960s experiences in politically (and sexually) idealised terms. Once again northern listening, located in and filtered through fantasies about Indigenous spaces and peoples, becomes utopian practice. The interview itself is structured by excerpts from and discussions about several recordings of Gould’s piano performances and radio compositions. Phenomenologically, it is disruptive for a listener to move from Gould’s extraordinarily sensitive piano playing to his broadly caricatured voices of the music critics, even while his own voice, that of Glenn Gould the

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246 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry subject of the panel discussion, is thoughtful, expressive and finely textured. This contrastive technique permits Gould to deliver analysis, commentary and explication of his own performances, methods and thinking, that is to say, it both describes and enacts his multi-voiced contrapuntal poetics. For example, when Sir Nigel responds to the aria from the 1955 Goldberg Variations by registering a musically conservative complaint about Gould’s choice to perform Bach on piano rather than harpsichord or clavichord – ‘there is such a thing as authenticity, and one can never accord it too much respect’ (11' 12"–11' 14") – Dr Klopweisser passionately disagrees and emphasises Bach’s theoretical orientation towards musical structure rather than instrumental timbre. Here Gould replays a tired debate about historical authenticity and, of course, agrees with Klopweisser. ‘Birds of a feather,’ says Sir Nigel, making clear Gould’s affiliation with avant-garde German aesthetic philosophy by overt contrast to the conservatism of the ‘editor-inchief of Field & Theme: The Country Gentleman’s Guide to Music in the Garden’ (11' 41"–11' 46"). Throughout the interview Klopweisser makes Gould’s points for him, as in the next example of a Mozart recording that Sir Nigel disdains for Gould’s idiosyncratic choice of tempo and, more generally, his refusal of the ‘interpretive mainstream’ (19' 30"), to which Kloppweisser responds: ‘It is surely the duty of the artist to create, and not to re-create’ (20' 20"). Yet the contrast is not only with reductive historical conservatism coded British, but also with a seemingly pointless avant-gardism unconcerned with structure coded American and voiced by Theodore Slutz. Slutz’s contributions range from sharp, surprising insights to rambling descriptions of banal or incomprehensible aesthetic experimentation, and it is during one of these rambles that the audio recording indulges explicitly in overlapping voices. Gould has just explained his use of editing and montage, a discussion entirely in line with Walter Benjamin’s thinking on technological reproducibility – ‘For me, the language of film offers the best possible lingo with which to describe the ideal conditions for the recorded performance’ (22' 08"–22' 14") – and what follows is precisely an example of montage or collage that serves as a reflexive segue to a discussion of The Solitude Trilogy. Slutz appreciates Gould’s verbal polyphony: ‘Well, speaking personally, man, I really dig the parts where three or four cats speak together you know  … some of the solo acts I can sort of do without because I figure they’re more message than mood’ (26' 14"–26' 27"). But the question of message remains, and Klopweisser, once again, offers meta-commentary on Gould’s poetics by highlighting the theme of isolation, distance from the Zeitgeist, the commitment to being ‘in the world, not of the world’ (27' 57"–28' 00"). Gould offers a concise expression of his central ethical theme: ‘I don’t think one can benefit from isolation in whatever

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form … without first coming to terms with the Zeitgeist, as you say, without deciding that its tremendously tyrannical force has to be overthrown in one’s own life before one can really learn from such an experience’ (28' 37"–22' 02"). Gould’s revolutionary sentiments are both ironised and contextualised when Marta Hortavanyi, who has arrived in the studio, describes ‘The Idea of North’ as ‘escapist entertainment’ (40' 35"–40' 37"). She much prefers Gould’s second drama-documentary ‘The Latecomers’ and offers a hilarious vulgar-Marxist allegorical reading that nevertheless offers genuine support for Gould’s ruthless editing methods. ‘One simply splices until one gets as close to the ideal statement as one can’ (36' 08"–36' 13"), Gould explains, a method that is less concerned with interview subjects’ individual characters than with the larger project of creating ‘A collective recognition of the argument that binds them together’ (37' 15"–37' 18"), as Klopweisser elucidates the Marxist point. It can be difficult for a listener to register the sophistication of at least some of the back-and-forth debates about poetics in this audio piece precisely because they take place in the mode of the ridiculous. This is characteristic of Gould who, in his polemical writing and radio interviews on music and technology, consistently offers conflicting opinions, attitudinising rants, displays of excessive erudition and pointed irony, self-deprecating humour, prophecy, anecdote, a reflexive grab-bag of writerly gestures and voices. These stylistic gestures (the ridiculous among them) index the sociality of the recording-studio-cum-writer’s study and are fundamentally related to his political and aesthetic commitments to counterpoint. The studio’s capacity to accommodate multiple voices and other sonic elements is central to a theatricality that Gould refuses to oppose to documentary reality. Consider his description of listening to radio plays as a teenager in the mid-1940s: ‘A lot of that ostensibly theatrical radio was also, in a very real sense, documentary making of a rather high order. At any rate, the distinctions between drama and documentary were quite often, it seemed to me, happily and successfully set aside’ (Gould, 1985: 374). Gould pursued serious documentary radio as a form of theatre and almost always considered his radio works in dramatic terms. For example, he introduces the radio broadcast of his portrait of composer Richard Strauss, The Bourgeois Hero (1979), subtitled ‘a conversation piece in two acts’ this way: What I tried to convey here in this piece was the impression that these ­characters – well, seven of the eight of them anyway – have perhaps run into each other at, oh I don’t know, a country lodge or something, you know, and it was evening and they sat down and just began to reminisce about Strauss. (Gould, 1979: 01' 12"–01' 29")

248 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry

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What permits Gould to happily set aside the distinction between drama and documentary in creating an imaginary scene or situation is what Rudolf Arnheim, the great early theorist of radio, called the acoustic bridge. For Arnheim, the absence of the visual in radio creates sonic contiguity between music, speech and sound effects: By the disappearance of the visual, an acoustic bridge arises between all sounds: voices, whether connected with a stage scene or not, are now of the same flesh as recitations, discussions, song and music. What hitherto could exist only separately now fits organically together: the human being in the corporeal world talks with disembodied spirits, music meets speech on equal terms. (Arnheim, 1972: 195)

Arnheim’s manner of marrying materialist explanation to idealising rhetoric is strangely appropriate to Gould’s radio poetics, and the notion of the acoustic bridge is a key aspect of the phenomenology of studio audience that I am seeking to describe. Gould’s contrapuntal techniques rely on the contiguity of acoustic elements in a manner that does not sum up or unify listeners’ experiences. Listening to Gould’s radio works involves sustaining an encounter with multiple vocal lines and their distinct temporalities, tracking the separation of voices and other acoustic elements even while the interaction among them creates the works’ most effective, heterogeneous meanings. To return to the ‘Fantasy’, Sir Nigel believes this cannot be done: ‘It’s absolutely impossible to concentrate on more than one spoken line at a time’ (Gould, 1980: 42' 50"–42' 55"). Yet this line, entirely audible, is delivered atop and across others at a moment when two conversations are taking place simultaneously, one between Klopweisser and Gould, the other between Sir Nigel and Marta, both on the topic of ‘The Quiet in the Land’. Instead of playing an excerpt from Gould’s most complex work, the ‘Fantasy’ offers a version of precisely the kind of challenge that Sir Nigel believes it is impossible to meet. In contradicting this belief, the piece enacts Gould’s contrapuntal poetics while commenting on their reception. Before turning to the final segment of the ‘Fantasy’, and to offer some context for it, I want briefly to think about Gould’s commitment to an aesthetics of counterpoint as highly personal as well as political and ethical. In yet another mock-interview, a print interview published a few years before (in High Fidelity, February 1974) entitled ‘Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould’, we encounter what appears to be one of Gould’s basic ethical stances towards art. The piece begins by touching on possible topics for discussion: ‘what about the political situation in Labrador?’ ‘[P]erhaps aboriginal rights in western Alaska would make good copy’ (Gould, 1985: 316). Gould’s insistence on foregrounding Indigenous



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North American political conflict in a piece ostensibly about music eventually leads to the topic of destructiveness in art:

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Well, I feel that art should be given the chance to phase itself out. I think that we must accept the fact that art is not inevitably benign, that it is potentially destructive. We should analyze the areas where it tends to do least harm, use them as guidelines, and build into art a component that will enable it to preside over its own obsolescence. (1985: 324–5)

Gould’s remarkable thesis seems to be an unusual mix of ideals: a broadly Buddhist orientation (do no harm), perhaps, or traditional forms of care combined with modernist better-living-through-design. But whatever the various philosophical, spiritual or ideological sources of this ethical stance, there are personal, affective ones as well. Peter Ostwald’s biography cites Andrew Kazdin, a Columbia Records studio engineer who Gould worked closely with for many years and who tells a story of a childhood memory Gould recounted in which a quarrel with his mother activated feelings of intense murderous rage. As Kazdin puts it, ‘The experience caused [Gould] to retreat into serious introspection, and when he emerged, he swore to himself that he would never let that inner rage reveal itself again’ (Ostwald, 1997: 55–6). The fantasy of killing one’s mother – as Ostwald makes clear, ‘the very person on whom he depended most for his nurturance of his musical talent’ (1997: 56) – may well have contributed to organising key aspects of Gould’s affective life, no doubt in the elaboration of powerful defences against such violent thoughts. To be clear, my own concern here is much less etiological than Ostwald’s who, as a psychiatrist as well as a former friend, seeks to explain aspects of Gould’s behaviour. I am simply sketching one affective context for Gould’s hypervigilant attention to aggression and competition, a significant motive that led him to leave the stage and seek the protection of the studio: ‘until physical and verbal aggression are seen as simply a flip of the competitive coin, until every aesthetic decision can be equated with a moral correlative, I’ll continue to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic from behind a glass partition’ (Gould, 1985: 325). Again, I bring this personal context into the argument not for diagnostic purposes but for structural ones: to identify a fundamental affective motive that Gould might share with some of his listeners. As we have seen, the studio serves to protect Gould from performance (from the aggression of the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan) as well as from the audience (the hostility of concertgoers). At the same time, it serves as a compositional tool that permits him to use aggression and hostility in his work, to display and regulate destructiveness. Contrapuntal radio, then, offers Gould a set of techniques for the theatrical display of the regulation of art’s

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250 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry ­ estructiveness. It permits this destructiveness to be deflected endlessly d in inward involutions with the ideal goal of phasing out such destructive energies or, at the very least, of avoiding the harm that less regulated art might inflict on others. If Gould’s contrapuntal radio is a means to realise antagonisms in speech and other acoustic forms, the studio becomes an interoceptive space in which one can listen to and harness one’s own most destructive tendencies, and air them safely. Relatedly, the studio offers a welcome solution to the problem of modernist (and avant-garde) audience. Recall George Orwell and his appreciation of radio, as it helps him to defend himself against the anticipated hostility of an audience for poetry, and at the same time, the hostility that Orwell himself feels towards the audience that he fears will reject him. The solution radio offers is the conjectural, ideal audience of one, similar to the ‘zero-to-one relationship’ that Gould seeks in recording. Such an exclusive relationship with audience is the opposite of the politics of inclusiveness required by national broadcasting, which refuses to accommodate the destructiveness or contemptuous relations between artist and audience. The final sequence of Gould’s ‘Fantasy’ offers a hyperamplified contrast between the CBC’s national broadcasting ethos of inclusiveness and the inevitable destructiveness that Gould sees accompanying performance. In response to Marta Hortavanyi’s question about whether he intends to return to the concert stage like other artists who ‘make a hysteric return’, Gould answers that he has already done so (44' 00"–44' 04"). The reference is to Vladimir Horowitz’s historic return to Carnegie Hall in 1965 after a long hiatus from the stage, an event that Gould deplored (with, it seems, very little sympathy for Horowitz’s struggles against depression and homophobia) and that he parodies in a lunatic ten-minute set piece that ends the album. ‘The Hysteric Return’ is a fictional CBC radio broadcast of Gould’s return to the stage on an Arctic oil rig belonging to Geyser Petroleum, accompanied by the ‘incomparable Aklavic Philharmonic’ (45' 58") in performances of ‘Tchaikovsky’s First, Rachmaninoff’s Second and Chopin’s Third Piano Concertos’ (46' 48"–46' 53"). Throughout the piece we hear a howling Arctic wind, a wildly cheering audience, Gould’s caricatured playing of the Romantic repertoire, and the announcer’s CBC-style commentary and narration (relentlessly sober and upbeat), along with occasional contributions from the control room (Duncan, once again) and two roving correspondents (at one point, Theodore Slutz reports from a nearby dinghy). The announcer informs us that, since the ‘exploratory rig XP67’ is only large enough to hold Gould, a dozen tuned pianos and the audience of ‘Mr. Gould’s fellow stockholders in Geyser Petroleum’ (47' 29"–47' 33"), the CBC production team as well as the orchestra are all located two miles downwind on the deck of the nuclear submarine Inextinguishable.

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Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio 251

The over-the-top ‘Hysteric Return’ is not simply lampooning Horowitz but, rather, the concert-going culture that solicits the return-to-the-stage as part of a pianist’s career, and the entire self-congratulatory institutionalised media environment which, as the announcer puts it, depends on the ‘triumph of closed-circuit television and audio technology’ for the broadcast to take place (47' 44"–47' 46"). Even more, the audience of oil executives serves precisely as an overt figure for the exploitation of natural resources, including the pianist’s talent, for prestige and economic gain (I should note that Gould himself invested successfully in mining and other forms of Canadian resource extraction). The recording reaches Swiftian levels of satire, burlesque and irony when, in the middle of Gould’s encore, the audience suddenly abandons the rig because of news of an oil discovery of such proportions that, as the chairman of the board of Geyser Petroleum puts it, ‘it would relieve all North Americans from [incomprehensible] the Persian Gulf in the future’ (52' 15"–52' 17"). The announcer quickly wraps up the broadcast, explaining that the CBC must stop transmission since the disappearance of the audience alters the status of the concert, which ‘can no longer be classified as a public event under the provision of the Public Event Statutes of the Broadcasting Act’ (53' 10"–53' 20"). The nuclear submarine submerges, the broadcast ends, and Gould is left alone in the howling wind, repeatedly thanking an audience that consists of a single barking seal. The destructive fantasy element of Gould’s investment in studio audience is never clearer than in this piece. The conversion of the audience of concertgoers (exploitative oil executives) to audience itself (the state of listening) is precisely what takes place at its conclusion: the fictional broadcast ends but the audio we are listening to continues (impossibly) for a short while longer, the barking seal figuring Gould’s ideal receiver while the wind howls on for a long fifteen seconds before the sound slowly fades out. Finally, the utopian space of the Arctic North has become the site of audience – no broadcast, only northern listening. ‘The Hysteric Return’ ends ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’ for there is no need to return to the panel discussion when the studio itself, with its multiple antagonistic voices, transforms into the sound of the wind. Gould’s ‘Fantasy’ expresses a fundamental wish for communion with an audience without its presence, and for the exploitative and destructive capacities of both audience and performer to vanish. His contrapuntal radio seeks to realise this wish through the phenomenon of studio audience.

252 The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry

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Notes Thanks to Lars Bernaerts for the invitation to submit a proposal to the conference ‘Tuning in to the Neo-Avant-Garde’ and to the Institut d’études avancées de Paris where I was in residence (2018–19) while developing the initial drafts of this chapter. Thanks as well to my colleagues at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) for helpful discussion and reading suggestions while I prepared the next draft: Robert Brain, Richard Cavell, Alex Dick, Kevin McNeilly and Laura Moss. Michael Moon and the volume’s editors offered comments that I tried to take into account in the final chapter. 1 One context for this essay is my Radio Free Stein project which renders a number of Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio music theatre (www.radiofreestein.com). There is an interesting homology between the space of the studio in Glenn Gould’s production practices and the space of the stage in Stein’s theatre. Gould’s radio poetics, not directly indebted to Stein’s radical theatre, nevertheless comes in its wake. 2 Here I am informed by Wilfred Bion’s theory of reciprocal psychic containment, which I have summarised and used elsewhere (Frank, 2015; 2018). 3 Linda Hutcheon (2014) has pointed out the intimate connection between counterpoint and comparativity for Said. 4 For a recent Indigenous response to Gould and his role in the Canadian cultural imaginary, see Geronimo Inutiq’s ARCTICNOISE (2015). See also Cam Scott’s essay (2018) on listening to Gould’s radio works fifty years later.

References Albiez, S., and R. Dockwray (2016). ‘The recording studio as compositional tool’, in S. Albiez and D. Pattie (eds), Oblique Music. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 139–73. Arnheim, R. (1972 [1936]). Radio: An Art of Sound. Trans. M. Ludwig and H. Read. New York: Da Capo. Bion, W. (2014). ‘Attention and interpretation’, in C. Mawson (ed.), The Complete Works of W. R. Bion, vol. VI. London: Karnac Books. Cavell, R. (2002). McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Frank, A. (2015). Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol. New York: Fordham University Press. Frank, A. (2018). ‘The expansion of setting in Gertrude Stein’s landscape theater’, Modernism/modernity, 3.1, https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0042. Gould, G. (1966). ‘Interview with Alex Trebek’, Intertel: The Culture Explosion. CBC, 9 November 1966, https://glenngould.com/videos/interviews/ (accessed 29 April 2020). Gould, G. (1979). ‘Glenn Gould and Howard Dyck introduce “Strauss The Bourgeois Hero”’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EhLNko4_r0 (accessed 29 April 2020). Gould, G. (1980). ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’, The Silver Jubilee Album, Disc 2. Sony Classical S2K 60686 60688.

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Gould, G. (1985). The Glenn Gould Reader. Ed. T. Page. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gould, G. (1992). Glenn Gould: Selected Letters. Ed. J. P. L. Roberts and G. Guertin. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Hecker, T. (2008). ‘Glenn Gould, the vanishing performer, and the ambivalence of the studio’, Leonardo Music Journal, 18, 77–83. Hinshelwood, R. D. (1991). A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association Press. Hutcheon, L. (2014). ‘Edward Said on music: always comparative, always contrapuntal’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 83.1, 21–7. Inutiq, G. (2015). ‘ARCTICNOISE. Curator’s essay’, http://akaartistrun.com/ portfolio-item/arctic-echoes-arctic-noises/ (accessed 29 April 2020). Jones-Imhotep, E. (2016). ‘Malleability and machines: Glenn Gould and the technological self’, Technology and Culture, 57.2, 287–321. Kivy, P. (2006). The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kostelanetz, R. (1988). ‘Glenn Gould as a radio composer’, The Massachusettes Review, 29.3, 557–70. McNeilly, K. (1996). ‘Listening, Nordicity, community: Glenn Gould’s “The Idea of North”’, Essays on Canadian Writing, 59, 87–105. Monsaingeon, B. (2006). Hereafter/Au delà du temps. DVD. Ideal Audience Intenational. Mowitt, J. (1987). ‘The sound of music in the era of its electronic reproducibility’, in R. Leppert and S. McLary (eds), Music and Society: The Politics of Composition,  Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 173–97. Orwell, G. (1993 [1945]). ‘Poetry and the microphone’, in N. Strauss (ed.), Radiotext(e). New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 165–71. Ostwald, P. (1997). Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius. New York: W. W. Norton. Porter, J. (2016). Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Posnock, R. (2016). Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Said, E. (2008). Music at the Limits. New York: Columbia University Press. Sajecki, A. (2015). ‘Contrapuntal politics: Glenn Gould, Canadian landscape, and the Cold War’, Canadian Literature, 225, 11–27. Sanden, P. (2009). ‘Hearing Glenn Gould’s body: corporeal liveness in recorded music’, Current Musicology, 88, 7–34. Scott, C. (2018). ‘The Idea (of an idea) of North (of the North): Glenn Gould’s piece at 50’, Sounding Out!, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/02/05/the-idea-ofan-idea-of-north-of-the-north-glenn-goulds-cbc-radio-piece-at-50/ (accessed 29 April 2020). Shaw, L. (2018). Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stein, G. (1935). ‘I came and here I am’, Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan, February, 18–19, 167–8.

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Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page Achleitner, Friedrich 180 Adorno, Theodor 109, 192, 238, 240 Aeschylus 197 Ammer, Andreas 15, 128–32, 137, 139–40, 142–4, 145n1, n5, nn7–8, 146n11, n15, 147nn20–2 Annuß, Evelyn 209n8 Anouilh, Jean 217 Apollinaire, Guillaume 12–13, 28–33, 35–42, 42n1, 43n7 Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, Wilhelm, see Apollinaire, Guillaume Appia, Adolphe 198, 209n6 Armstrong, Louis 99 Arnheim, Rudolf 7, 106–8, 110, 122, 248 Artaud, Antonin 5–8, 90, 215 Arteel, Inge 17, 191, 227 Arthur, Robert 72 Artmann, H. C. 180 Aspley, Keith 6–7, 10 Aston, Elaine 230–1 Auden, W. H. 213, 215 Auslander, Philip 228 Bach, Johann Sebastian 236–40, 243, 246 Bain, Norman 57 Ball, Hugo 215 Barnes, Howard G. 72, 76 Barnouw, Erik 73–4 Battisti, Peter 177n10 Baudelaire, Charles 74 Bayer, Konrad 179–81, 183–4 Bechet, Sidney 36 Bechtold, Gottfried 177n10

Beck, Jackson 80 Becker, Jürgen 179 Beckett, Samuel 4, 14, 57, 88, 91–3, 102, 103n2, 201, 214, 216, 218–19 Bennett, Michael Y. 214 Berio, Luciano 1, 54 Berland, Jody 121 Bernaerd, Robert 112 Bernaerts, Lars 12–13, 227 Bernstein, Charles 131–2 Betti, Ugo 217 Beyer, Robert 51, 54 Bielz, Gudrun 177n10 Bion, Wilfred 252n2 Bluijs, Siebe 14–15, 227 Bodin, Lars-Gunnar 99 Boenders, Frans 43n3, n5 Boersma, Jacques 117 Boudewijn, King of Belgium 120 Boulter, Jonathan 103n2 Bradnum, Frederick 13, 46–7, 57–8, 60–3 Braidotti, Rosi 88 Braque, Georges 109 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 112, 124n1, 198–9, 210n9, 213, 217, 228, 244 Breindl, Martin 177n10 Breton, André 215 Briscoe, Desmond 57 Britten, Benjamin 54–5 Broodthaers, Marcel 40 Bryant, Michael 224 Buchanan, Bill 67–8, 71, 79, 81 Buchloh, Benjamin 8, 27, 37 Bürger, Peter 8–9, 27, 32, 109–10, 190, 216



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Burroughs, William S. 5 Bush, Sophie 230 Cage, John 1, 5, 29, 34, 68, 73, 240 Camus, Albert 217 Cantor, Eddie 68 Castaneda, Carlos 159–62 Cavell, Richard 240 Cejpek, Lucas 177n10 Chevigny, Hector 75 Childs, Peter 213 Chopin, Henri 14, 31, 90 Christensen, E. 43n3 Churchill, Caryl 17–18, 214–20, 223–33 Churchill, Winston 74 Clark, Petula 237, 242 Claus, Hugo 30 Cleeremans, Roger 43n3 Cleverdon, Douglas 50, 64 Cobbing, Bob 90 Cocteau, Jean 217, 220 Cooke, Dominic 227–8 Corwin, Norman 69–75 Cory, Mark E. 7–8 Coss, Ingrid 160, 163–4 Courtois, Jules 43n3 Cousin, Geraldine 217–18, 230 Crowley, Aleister 40 Cutting, J. E. 176n5 De Vree, Freddy 12–13, 28–34, 36–7, 40–2, 43nn3–4, n7 De Vree, Paul 30 Dean, Basil 213 Debord, Guy 81 Delaunay, Robert 35 Deleuze, Gilles 159 Demets, Reinhilde 124n10 Depreter, Elke 30 Derrida, Jacques 31 Desnos, Robert 7, 31 Drakakis, John 217 Ducasse, Isidore 40 Dufrêne, François 147n23 Dylan, Bob 117 Eco, Umberto 1 Ehrlich, Matthew C. 73 Eichenberger, Tatiana 13, 233n1 Eichwald, Hans Von 43n3 Eickholt, Fons 117

Index 255 Eimert, Herbert 51, 54 Eliot, T. S. 213 Engle, Paul 43n7 Eno, Brian 243 Essl, Karlheinz 177n10 Esslin, Martin 214, 217 Etall, Margaret 226 Euripides 197 Fadiman, Clifton 76, 79 Fahlström, Öyvind 14, 88, 99–103 Ferris, Paul 47 Finney, Albert 223 Flesch, Hans 7–8, 210n10 Fontana, Lucio 37 Foster, Hal 8, 27, 37, 210n14, 216, 220, 223 Frank, Adam J. 18 Freiberger, Dominik 192 Ganglbauer, Petra 16, 154–6, 158–64, 166, 169, 173, 175–6 Gardfors, Johan 95 Garrard, Malcolm 48–9, 51, 56, 60 Genova, Pamela 29 Gibson, J. J. 176n5 Gielgud, Val 52–3 Gilfillan, Daniel 15–16 Gilliam, Laurence 52 Gils, Gust 41, 43n4 Ginsberg, Allen 43n7 Gobert, Darren 227–8, 233n3 Goebbels, Joseph 118, 199, 209n5, 210n12 Goldberg, Mort 80–1 Goodman, Dickie 67–8, 71, 79, 81 Gordon, Mel 5 Gough, Orlando 219 Gould, Glenn 18, 236–51, 252n1, 252n4 Gray, Terence 213 Grond, Walter 177n10 Grundmann, Heidi 176n9 Guattari, Félix 88, 97, 159 Hacke, Alexander 133–5, 137, 139, 141, 145n9 Haigh, Kenneth 223–5 Haley, William 55 Hamilton, Richard 81 Handke, Peter 7, 201, 211n16 Handl, Reinhard F. 177n10 Haraway, Donna 102–3

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256

Index

Harding, Gunnar 13, 28, 33, 35, 40, 42, 43n2, nn6–9 Harig, Ludwig 179 Hauer, Josef Matthias 179 Hauptmann, Elisabeth 124n1 Hauthal, Janine 145n6 Hayles, N. Katherine 87, 90, 102 Hecker, Tim 242 Hermans, Willem Frederik 30 Hern, Nick 220, 229 Héron, Pierre-Marie 6 Heuser, Harry 13–14, 227 Hickethier, Knut 128 Hindemith, Paul 210n10 Hitler, Adolf 200, 209n8, 210n12 Hodell, Åke 14, 88, 94–9, 102, 103n3 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 209n7 Hopkins, David 9 Hörl, Erich 88, 90, 103 Horowitz, Vladimir 250–1 Hortavanyi, Marta 244–5, 247, 250 Howe, Nelson 90 Hutcheon, Linda 252n3 Huxley, Aldous 272 Imison, Richard 219 Innerhofer, Roland 16 Innes, Christopher 213 Inutiq, Geronimo 252n4 Ionesco, Eugène 217 Isaacs, Leonard 55 Isherwood, Christopher 215 La Jana 184 Jandl, Ernst 1, 7, 17, 196, 201–3, 208, 209n1, 3 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 198 Johns, Jasper 99 Johnson, Bengt Emil 90, 99 Johnson, Robert 146n15 Joly, Françoise 6 Jones-Imhotep, Edward 242 Jordan, Louis 138, 140 Jovanović, Arsenije 172, 177n10 Joyce, James 1, 29, 34, 40–1, 43n9 Kagel, Mauricio 124n11 Kahn, Douglas 4–5, 82, 89 Kamps, Johann 211n22 Kant, Immanuel 157, 159, 162, 168–9, 176 Karajan, Herbert von 243, 249 Kazdin, Andrew 241, 249

Keeffe, Bernard 50 Kittler, Friedrich 2 Klein, Melanie 245 Klein, Yves 37 Klemm, Gertraud 160, 163–4, 176n8 Kostelanetz, Richard 69, 79, 237 Kroen, Sheryl 77 Kuleshov, Lev 124n3 La Roche, Sophie von 184 Laban, Rudolf von 184 LaBelle, Brandon 158 Ladiges, Peter M. 209n1 Lagerlöf, Selma 184 Landauer, Gustav 184 Landry, Robert J. 76 Lane, Anita 134, 136, 139, 141–2, 145n10 Lange, Helene 184 Lanner, Joseph 184 Lasswitz, Kurd 184 Lateau, Louise 184 Laurentius 184 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 184 Lawler, Louise 14, 87, 103n1 Lawrence, Jerome 73 Lawson, Mark 224 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 215 Lehmann, Harry 129–31, 140, 144 Lennon, John 114 Leslie, Tessa 219 Lichtenfeld, Monika 191–2 Lindblad, Jan 100 Lippit, Akira 89 Lipsius, Marie, see La Mara Lockwood, Anna 89 Lucebert 1 Luckhurst, Mary 226 Lundberg, Kerstin 43n3 Lunetta, Stanley 89 MacColl, Ewan 215 Maeterlinck, Maurice 215 Majakovskij, Vladimir 33 Maltin, Leonard 71 La Mara 184 Marconi, Guglielmo 2 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 36, 80, 215–16 Marquez, John 228 Marquez, Martin 228 Masnata, Pino 80, 216 Maturana, Humberto 103

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Index 257

Mayröcker, Friederike 1, 7, 17, 196, 201–3, 206, 208, 209nn1–2, 210–11nn15–17 McCourt, Tom 71 McLuhan, Marshall 2, 100, 238, 240, 243 McNeilly, Kevin 242 McWhinnie, Donald 13, 46–7, 53, 57, 64, 91 Meißner, Jochen 192 Melville, Herman 167 Mencken, H. L. 76 Metz, Stuart 80 Michiels, Ivo 30, 41–2 Mildorf, Jarmila 15 Milton, John 15, 128, 130–1, 133–8, 140–2, 144, 145n1, nn7–9, 146nn11–12, nn15–16, n20, 147nn20–2 Mon, Franz 180 Monroe, Charles S. 80 Monsaingeon, Bruno 239 Morriën, Adriaan 125n16 Morton, Jerry Roll 36 Motte Fouqué, Friedrich de la 184 Müller, Heiner 201 Neeley, Ted 114 Neuner, Florian 189 Neuner, Stefan 189 Nissen, Anne Grete 43n3 Oboler, Arch 75 Olsson, Jesper 14 O’Malley, John F. 224 Ondracek, Josef 160–1 Ong, Walter 2 Ørum, Tania 10–11 Orwell, George 238, 250 Ostwald, Peter 241, 249 Ovadija, Mladen 216, 231–2 Paik, Nam June 68 Palitzsch, Otto 15–16, 153, 156–8, 172–4 Parikka, Jussi 89 Parker, Charlie 40 Perec, Georges 6 Perloff, Marjorie 29, 32, 34, 109, 122 Pessl, Peter 16, 155–6, 158, 165–73, 175–6, 176n9, 177n10 Phelan, James 143

Pibarot, Annie 6 Picasso, Pablo 109 Pinter, Harold 4, 214–17, 219 Poe, Edgar Allan 99, 101 Poppe, Andries 112 Porter, Jeff 241 Posnock, Ross 241, 245 Pouey, Fernand 5 Prinsen, Ugo 124n10 Ramsey, Margaret 219 Rauschenberg, Robert 37 Reicha, Anton 193 Reinhardt, Max 198, 206, 209–10n8, 211n21 Riese, Katharina 177n10 Rinke, Günter 137, 139–40, 144, 146n14 Ritsch, Winfried 177n10 Roberts, Philip 230–1, 241 Rodger, Ian 6, 53, 56 Roesner, David 209n6 Rombaut, Marc 43n3 Rosenberg, Erik 99 Rothenbuhler, Eric 71 Rubery, Matthew 2 Rüger, Günter 134–5, 138 Rühm, Gerhard 7, 16–17, 179–94 Ruttmann, Walter 7, 124n7 Sacré, Hilde 124n10 Sade, Marquis de 41 Said, Edward 18, 239–41, 252n3 Sajecki, Anna 242 Sanguineti, Edoardo 1 Satie, Eric 187 Schafer, R. Murray 2 Schaffner, Anna Katharina 10 Schapiro, Meyer 74 Scheunemann, Dietrich 8–10, 27, 112 Schierbeek, Bert 1, 116–18, 123 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 183 Schmatz, Ferdinand 177n10 Schmitthenner, Hansjörg 201 Schönberg, Arnold 179 Schöning, Klaus 172–5, 177, 180, 183, 201 Schönlank, Bruno 199, 210n12 Schreber, Daniel Paul 220 Schu, ManfreDu’ 177n10 Schüler, Else Lasker 184 Schwartz, Tony 78–81

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258 Scofield, Paul 223 Scott, Cam 252n4 Searle, John 157, 175, 176n5 Serres, Michel 162–3, 171, 175 Shakespeare, William 4, 183, 197 Shaw, George Bernard 4 Shaw, Lytle 242 Siebert, Jo Wilhelm 55 Sinatra, Frank 7 Slater, Montagu 213 Sloane, Allan 76 Smith, Jacob 89, 100 Sodomka, Andrea 177n10 Soupault, Philippe 7 Spark, Muriel 4 Spenser, David 226 Spinelli, Martin 82 Spohr, Louis 146n18 Stein, Flor 112–13, 116, 120, 123 Stein, Gertrude 238, 252n1 Stoppard, Tom 4, 214–17 Strauß, Frank-Martin 128 Strauss, Richard 237, 240, 243, 247 Streeruwitz, Marlene 177n10 Strindberg, August 72, 213 Themerson, Stefan 13, 33, 40–1 Thomas, Dylan 219 Tinguely, Jean 79 Tippett, Michael 54 Toller, Ernst 199, 210n12 Tydeman, John 224, 226, 228 Tzara, Tristan 215 Uffel, Marcel van 43n3 Ulmer, James Blood 134, 138 Ursprung, Eva 177n10

Index Vallee, Rudy 68 Van den Berg, Hubert 9 Van den Broeck, Walter 120, 123 Vandsø, Anette 154 Varela, Francisco 103 Verhulst, Pim 17–18 Vilar, Jean 35–6 Vollmöller, Karl 211n21 Von Cramer, Heinz 203, 211n16 Vowinckel, Antje 110, 124n6, 185 Wade, Frank 50, 56 Wakeman, Frederic 70 Warden, Claire 213–15 Waterschoot, Ronny 124n10 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 114 Weill, Kurt 210n10 Weist, Dwight 80 Weldon, Martin 75 Wells, H. G. 68 Westergaard, Kjeld 43n3 Whitehead, Gregory 4–5, 82 Whitehead, Kate 55, 217 Whitehead, Peter 210n13 Wiener, Norbert 88, 101 Wiener, Oswald 180 Wieser, Gerhard 172, 177n10 Wigman, Mary 198 Williamson, Nicol 223 Wolf, Hugo 191, 193 Wolman, Gil J. 81 Wühr, Paul 179 Wurtzler, Steve 228 Youman, Vincent 81 Zeckendorf, William 75