Tuning in to the Neo-avant-garde : Experimental Radio Plays in the Postwar Period

Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde offers the first in-depth study of the radio play’s significance for the neo-avant-garde. In the postwar period, radio began to function as a site of artistic experimentation for the literary neo-avant-garde, especially in the form of the radio play. In the wake of the historical avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde had a strong interest in aural media, in the seemingly autonomous power of sound and voice. Therefore, it is not surprising that postwar avant-garde artists and literary writers in particular all across Europe, the US and the UK started to experiment with the radio play. Neo-avant-garde artists actively engaged with newly created studios and platforms in the postwar period. The contributions to this book examine how the radiophonic neo-avant-garde stages political questions and acknowledges its own ideological structure, while taking into account the public nature of radio. Alongside these cultural and political contexts, the book also reflects on intermedial and material issues to analyse how they have impacted artistic production in different parts of the world. Specific attention is paid to how artists explored the creative affordances of radio and the semiotics of auditory storytelling through electroacoustic manipulation, stereophonic positioning, montage and mixing, while also probing the ways in which they experimented in related genres and media such as music, sound poetry and theatre, questioning the boundaries between them. Because of its exclusive focus on the audiophonic realm, the book offers a valuable new perspective on the continuing debate surrounding the neo-avant-garde and its relationship with the historical avant-garde. Front Matter 1 Contents 6 List of figures 8 Notes on contributors 9 Introduction: The acoustic neo-avant-gardes between literature and radio 14 Part I: The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde 38 Transnational, untranslatable: Apollinaire in Freddy de Vree’s multilingual radiophonic composition A Pollen in the Air 40 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 59 A forefront in the aftermath? Recorded sound and the state of audio play on post-‘golden age’ US network radio 80 Croaks and calls: posthuman sound ecologies in the neo-avant-garde 100 Textual and audiophonic collage in Dutch and Flemish radio plays 119 ‘Ja, ja, so schön klingt das Schreckliche’: an audionarratological analysis of Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Lost & Found: Das Paradies 141 Part II: The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre,music and poetry 164 Poetry on the Austrian radio: sound, voice and intermediality 166 Gerhard Rühm’s radiophonic poetry 192 A theatre of choric voices: Jandl and Mayröcker’s radio play Spaltungen 209 Language, sound and textuality: Caryl Churchill’s Identical Twins as neo-avant-garde (radio) drama 226 Studio audience: Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio 249 Index 267 "Bringing together an international and diverse group of scholars, Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde offers the first in-depth study of the radio medium's significance as a site of artistic experimentation for the literary neo-avant-garde in the postwar period. Covering radio works from the 1950s until the 2010s, the collection charts how artists across the UK, Europe and North America continued as well as reacted to the legacies of the historical avant-garde and modernism, operating within different national broadcasting contexts, by placing radio in an intermedial dialogue with prose, poetry, theatre, music and film. In doing so, the volume explores a wide variety of acoustic genres - radio play, feature, electroacoustic music, radiophonic poem, radio opera - to show that the medium deserves to occupy a more central place than it currently does in studies of literature, (inter)media(lity) and the (neo- )avant-garde."-- Provided by publisher This collection offers the first in-depth study of the radio medium’s significance as a site of artistic experimentation for the literary neo-avant-garde in the postwar era. It addresses institutional and contextual aspects of audio drama, as well as intermedial and material issues alongside ideological and political topics.