Listening with Lefebvre: The Sound of the Everyday in Postwar Radio Art

Politicizing Everyday Life: From Lefebvre to the New Left

Kristin Ross has charted the rise of interest in the quotidian in postwar France by pointing out how the theme of everyday life in its alienating guise emerged as a counterpoint to the rapid modernization and spread of American consumerist culture.⁷ It was at this historical conjuncture, as she remarks, that the everyday became a privileged site for ideology criticism and artistic resistance—from Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) and the films of Jacques Tati to the writings of Lefebvre, the Situationists, and the nouveaux romanciers. For Lefebvre in particular, engagement with everyday life proved to be a life-long occupation. Its major outcome was the three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, published between 1947 and 1981, whose interconnected themes and concerns developed vis-à-vis the changing socio-economic and political realities of the French postwar period.⁸ To this, we can add the late work Elements of Rhythmanalysis: An Introduction to the Understanding of Rhythm, fleshing out ideas that were already sketched in the Critique as well as Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968), a book imbued with the revolutionary spirit of the student and protest movements. During the 1960s, while teaching at the Universities of Strasbourg and Nanterre, Lefebvre entertained ties with student activists and political avant-gardists of the Situationist International—a group with whom he had a productive, yet complicated relationship.⁹ Though his more active engagement soon came to a halt after the May events, his relentless impetus towards politicizing everyday life, paired with a critical stance on dogmatic Marxism as well as state politics, briefly made him a sympathetic mentor to the new leftist movement. Lefebvre’s call for a “cultural revolution” and a revitalization of the spirit of the “Festival” especially struck a chord with the younger generation in their ambition to implement change in the structures of everyday life and thinking via performative action:

The revival of art and of the meaning of art has a practical not a “cultural” aim; indeed, our cultural revolution has no purely “cultural” aims, but directs culture towards experience, towards the transfiguration of everyday life. The revolution will transform existence, not the state and the distribution of property, for we do not take means for ends. This can also be stated as follows: “Let everyday life become a work of art! Let every technical means be employed for the transformation of everyday life!”¹⁰

With such revolutionary rhetoric, Lefebvre not only gained popularity with the French New Left but also attracted the attention of political circles in West Germany, where translations of his writings appeared from the late 1960s onwards. As Michael Trebitsch has noted, it was “in Germany during the 1970s that the debate on everyday life which sprang up in the context of the alternative movement was the most firmly rooted in Henri Lefebvre’s thought.”¹¹

Though his influence on the West German New Left was less pervasive than that of the Frankfurt School, translations of Everyday Life in the Modern World and the first two volumes of Critique of Everyday Life, published by the Suhrkamp and the Hanser Verlag in the first half of the 1970s, gave everyday life political currency and contributed to establishing it as a field of scientific inquiry.¹² In 1975, the new leftist journal Kursbuch devoted an issue to the topic of “Alltag” (the everyday), featuring a range of essays that embraced core themes of Lefebvre’s. In the opening piece, “Unser Alltag: Nachruf zu Lebzeiten” (Our everyday: an obituary during our lifetime), Karl Markus Michel, co-founder and -editor of the journal, addressed the decline of everyday life in connection with the “victory march of the clock” and the increasing specialization within work life.¹³ The issue further contained an article on “Alltags-Zeit” (Everyday time), referring to Lefebvre’s distinction between the cyclical time of nature and the linear, homogenous time of industrial capitalism.¹⁴

By the end of the 1970s, the notion of the everyday had gained widespread circulation in social science, too. In a seminal essay from 1978, Norbert Elias called it a key concept of some contemporary schools of sociology, while drawing attention to the varied meanings and connotations attached to the term.¹⁵ A predominantly negative understanding of everyday life had emerged from the Frankfurt School with their focus on the “culture industry” (Adorno and Horkheimer) and “false needs” instilled in people by media and consumerism (Marcuse). Lefebvre shared many concerns with his German counterparts, yet his approach remained distinguishable in its more nuanced as well as ambiguous understanding of everyday life as a source of impoverishment and potential social transformation alike.

The Programmed Everyday

While Lefebvre emphasized the peculiar double nature of everyday life, he devoted his main energies to uncovering how, with the advent of modernity, it had lost its fertile qualities. Reviving Marx’s concept of alienation from the 1844 Manuscripts, he argued that estrangement not only characterized modern labor relations but penetrated human existence on a much deeper level, to have become “constant and everyday.”¹⁶ With the emergence of the “private consciousness” (conscience privée), i.e., a self-centered, atomistic mode of existence, the individual had given up their identity as a political actor and public being.¹⁷ Passivity and false individuality were further reinforced by the mass media. Lefebvre scorned how radio and television cast themselves as life advisors, telling people “how they should live well and make the best of things; what they would choose and why; how they would use their time and space.”¹⁸ Instead of opening private life to politics, the mass media programmed the everyday and glossed over its alienating aspects by staging the world as a spectacle, or broadcasting fragmentary representations of it to be consumed as a commodity:

At one and the same time the mass media have unified and broadcast the everyday; they have disintegrated it by integrating it with the “world” current events in a way which is both too real and utterly superficial.¹⁹

However, mass media not only created a mere simulacrum of reality, but they also showed an omnivorous taste for exploiting the trivial side of everyday life, turning the ordinary into something extraordinary simply through the act of presenting it.²⁰

Akin to the Frankfurt School theorists, Lefebvre saw homogeneity, fragmentation, and hierarchization at the heart of the modern everyday.²¹ Its homogenous character resulted from and became apparent through the rationalized character of Western capitalist society, commodification, the uniformity of reception generated by the media, the reign of clock time, and the predominance of linearly repetitive rhythms. Fragmentation, which he thought of as being contained within the overall sameness of modern society, pertained to the splintering of consciousness into ever more specializations and dissociated realms as well as the experience of time and space, manifesting itself in manifold separations, as, for example, between private and public, work and leisure, or center and periphery. Last of all, the everyday was thoroughly permeated by hierarchical relationships, from the sphere of labor and income to the world of objects.

Clock Time and Signals

For Lefebvre, the ascendancy of clock time and the proliferation of signals, both of which he saw occurring with capitalist industrialization, assumed a central role in programming the everyday. As Karl Marx had already noted, “the clock was the first automatic device to be used for practical purposes, and from it the whole theory of the production of regular motion evolved.”²² The distinction between clock time and lived time, as it originated in the nineteenth century, would resound through the discourse of modernity and beyond. Important shifts in the history of timekeeping were brought about by the rise of radio, which facilitated the dissemination of standard time, as well as the introduction of the atomic clock in the postwar period:

In the twentieth century, “clocks” changed from mechanical and astronomical-based systems to electromagnetic and atomic-based ones, while “life” was increasingly studied in terms of its microbiological structure and cellular movement. These changes, sustaining the binary split of clock time/lived time, depended on particularly modern technologies—from radio to film.²³

From the 1960s onwards, leading historians, such as Edward P. Thompson, Jacques Le Goff, and Reinhart Koselleck began investigating the historical evolution and social functions of clock time by contrasting it against other temporal orders, such as “church time” or the “natural” rhythm of pre-industrialized labor.²⁴ A similar binarism is introduced by Lefebvre. Proceeding from an initial distinction between the linear and the cyclic, he conceived of everyday temporality as an interference between natural rhythms and socially produced time systems. While, on the one hand, everyday time is marked by artificially imposed linear rhythms associated with clocks, watches, and industrialist labor,²⁵ it also remains inherently connected to cyclic patterns of the cosmic, nature, and human bodily existence:

Critique of everyday life studies the persistence of rhythmic time scales within the linear time of modern industrial society. It studies the interactions between cyclic time (natural, in a sense irrational, and still concrete) and linear time (acquired, rational, and in a sense abstract and antinatural).²⁶

However, as Lefebvre maintained, the empty repetition connected to clocks and machines fundamentally differs from the cyclical rhythms of nature:

Although they are repetitive, rhythms and cycles always have an appearance of novelty: the dawn always seems to be the first one. Rhythm does not prevent desire for, and pleasure of, discovery: hunger and thirst always seem novel… . In linear repetition, by contrast, the formal and material identity of each “stroke” is recognized, generating lassitude, boredom, and fatigue… . The closer productive activity approximates to industrial production using machines, the more linear repetition becomes, losing its rhythmical character.²⁷

Cycles are hence not reducible to identical recurrences of the same but can be perceived as novel, vital, and enriching—in contrast to the monotony of mechanized labor and the quantified time of clocks, to which modern work life has become fully subjected:

Everyday life is modelled on abstract, quantified time, the time of watches and clocks… . This homogeneous and desacralized time has emerged victorious since it supplied the measure of the time of work. Beginning from this historic moment, it became the time of everydayness, subordinating to the organisation of work in space other aspects of the everyday: the hours of sleep and waking, meal-times and the hours of private life, the relations of adults with their children, entertainment and hobbies, relations to the place of dwelling.²⁸

As space becomes dispersed and divided up into work life, commutation, domestic life, and leisure, linear time is experienced as discontinuous and fragmented.

Along with the predominance of linear repetition, Lefebvre detected another deprivation in the fabric of daily life, caused by the spread of signals.²⁹ The signal, as he defined it, is redundant, repetitive, and mono-sensory, i.e., either visual or auditory, and serves the main function of commanding or prohibiting actions. Each signal thus “programmes a routine, exactly like a calculator, regulating patterns of conduct and behavior.”³⁰ As such, it contrasts with the ambiguity and affective appeal of the symbol, which reinforces the sense of collectivity and connection between the members of a social group (Lefebvre’s prime example is the Christian cross).³¹ While symbols are archaic, assuming a vital role in the village of the past and surviving into the present in the form of monuments and cathedrals,³² signals originate with the process of industrialization (factories, railroads, etc.) and proliferate in modern urban life, engendering a loss of richness in communication:

Not only are signals ever more numerous, not only are they becoming more dense, but bit by bit they are dismantling the semantic field. As the “signalling” pole becomes more and more intense the magnetic power of signals is increased. They corrode symbols and lessen the tension between the poles of expression and signification to the advantage of the latter. The semantic field becomes simplified and unified… .³³

Everyday life thus saw a gradual emptying out of symbolic expression, leading from signification to the inflation of signals, leaving “the active ‘subject’ externalized and passive, like an inert object at their command.”³⁴

As Thomas S. Davis has pointed out, Lefebvre’s work on the everyday is full of reflections on modern art—ranging from Baudelaire and James Joyce to the Surrealists, Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, and film—which he considered “as an invaluable register of the changing realities of daily life under capitalism.”³⁵ In the opening chapter of his Everyday Life in the Modern World, he pays a critical tribute to contemporary French literature, remarking on how quotidian life, as depicted in the nouveau roman, appears “less and less bearable, less and less interesting… .”³⁶ However, while Lefebvre was right in detecting a shift in the treatment of the everyday, artistic engagements with the sphere of the quotidian were ultimately more varied than his reading suggests.³⁷

Sounding the Everyday in French Postwar Art

Among the nouveaux romanciers, Georges Perec, inventor of the concept of the “infra-ordinary,” most thoroughly attended to the spaces and sounds of modern daily life. In 1969, he initiated a long-term project entitled “Lieux,” centered on twelve Parisian places that held autobiographical significance to him. Perec planned to visit each location twice a year for a period of twelve years in total and document his impressions by way of real-time written or recorded descriptions as well as from memory.³⁸ Though the project remained unfinished, it yielded several offshoots, including the radio work Tentative de description de choses vues au Carrefour Mabillon le 19 mai 1978, produced for the newly established Atelier de Création Radiophonique and broadcast on France Culture on February 25, 1979.³⁹

While Perec valued the quotidian for all its unexplored ordinariness and banality, his early novels Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante (Things: A Story of the Sixties) from 1965 and Un homme qui dort (A Man Asleep) from 1967, respectively, bring its capitalist permeation to the fore. The latter has as its protagonist a young Parisian student, who seeks to escape from the humdrum of modern life through an existential act of withdrawal. The narration, using the second person “you” to involve the reader directly in the protagonist’s state of mind, draws attention to the repetition of micro-actions, gestures, and sounds that make up his everyday:

Drops of water are continually forming on the drinking-water tap on the landing. Noises drift up from Rue Saint-Honoré far below. The bells of Saint-Roch chime two. You look up, you stop reading, but you had already stopped long ago. You put the open book down beside you on the bed. You reach out your hand, you stub out the cigarette which is smoking in the ashtray, you finish your bowl of Nescafé: it is barely lukewarm, too sweet, on the bitter side.⁴⁰

After deliberately failing to show up for an exam, the student stays in his room during the day and strolls aimlessly through the city at night. His rebellious attempt against the social regime of time finds its expression in the motif of the arrested alarm clock on the bed table. Eventually, however, he comes to realize that his commitment to indifference and nothingness is but a futile illusion, as time always prevails. Throughout the novel, traffic sounds, bells, dripping water, and the noises emanating from the neighboring apartments inevitably sustain the rhythm of everyday temporality:

With each passing day your patience has worn thinner, the hypocrisy of your pitiful efforts has been laid bare. Time would have had to stand still, but no-one has the strength to fight against time. You may have cheated, snitching a few crumbs, a few seconds: but the bells of Saint-Roch, the changing traffic lights at the intersection between Rue des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Honoré, the predictable drip from the tap on the landing, never ceased to signal the hours, the minutes, the days and the seasons. You may have pretended to forget time, you may have spent nights walking and days sleeping. But you couldn’t ever quite get away with it.⁴¹

In the film adaptation of the novella from 1974, directed by Bernard Queysanne and Perec himself, the sound sphere of the infra-ordinary likewise assumes a prominent role (Figure 1).⁴² During the first ca. fifteen minutes, up to the point when the student (played by Jacques Spiesser) refrains from pursuing his studies, the ticking of the clocks is almost continuously present on the musique concrète-inspired soundtrack by Phillipe Drogoz and Eugénie Kuffler. On a visual level, the sounds of alienation are complemented by images of sameness and circularity, such as when the camera pans along a line of identical chairs in the classroom.

A Man Asleep thus echoed concerns that were central to the critical project of Lefebvre, for whom Perec had worked as a research assistant in the 1960s. In fact, the film nods to their common intellectual ground by placing a copy of Everyday Life in the Modern World in the hands of the protagonist. Another trace of the affinity of their thinking can be found in Perec’s essayistic inventory of spaces entitled Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces) from 1974. Echoing one of Lefebvre’s critical observations, Perec remarks how in modernity, “spaces have multiplied, been broken up and have diversified.”⁴³ In the chapter devoted to the apartment, he furthermore points at the all-pervasive functionalism to which domestic space has been subjected:

It seems to me … that in the ideal dividing-up of today’s apartments functionality functions in accordance with a procedure that is unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral. The activities of the day correspond to slices of time, and to each slice of time there corresponds one room of the apartment.⁴⁴

Perec humorously illustrates the division of living space along the timely patterns of everyday activities in the form of a bureaucratically detailed schema (Figure 2).

Putting modern functionalism in question, he, in turn, envisions alternative models of spatial organization that would be based “no longer on circadian, but on heptadian rhythms.”⁴⁵

A number of other artists and researchers in the French postwar context developed an interest in everyday sounds and spaces that can be seen as intertwined with the work of Perec and Lefebvre, respectively. In the field of urban sociology, Jean-François Augoyard investigated the daily walking practices of inhabitants of the “new town” l’Arlequin, situated on the outskirts of Grenoble, the outcome of which was his study Pas à Pas: Essai sur le cheminement quotidien en milieu urbain (Step by Step: Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project) from 1979. In the same year, he founded the Centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore et l’environment urbain (Research Centre on Acoustic Space and Urban Environment) to advance research on urban sound phenomena and ambiances.⁴⁶

Composer Luc Ferrari, who opened electroacoustic music to incorporate recognizable sounds from everyday life—albeit one removed from the more fast-paced urban habitat of the city of Paris—likewise worked in aesthetic proximity to the nouveaux romanciers. For the preparation of his Presque rien no. 1 subtitled Le lever du jour au bord de la mer (Daybreak at the seashore), the initial piece from the eponymous cycle of tape compositions, Ferrari spent the summer of 1967 in the Croatian seaside town of Vela Luka. Placing a stereo microphone on the balcony of his hotel, he made several recordings of the local daybreak ambiance, thus becoming aware of “those sounds which repeated every day: the first fisherman passing by the same time every day with his bicycle, the first hen, the first donkey, and then the lorry which left at 6 am to the port to pick up people arriving on the boat.”⁴⁷ In condensing his material to a typical morning soundscape, Ferrari sought to create an environmental composition akin to a “photographic slide,” unmarked by any clearly perceivable traces of sound manipulation.⁴⁸ As Eric Drott has remarked, the composer’s agenda of transforming the highly specialized field of musique concrète into an amateur practice, which meant keeping technical interventions at a minimum, can be situated “within a range of movements and initiatives undertaken in France during the 1960s in order to promote cultural democratization.”⁴⁹ In the same way, Presque rien could be said to translate Lefebvre’s project of rhythmanalysis into tape composition by sounding a slice of rural life whose repetitive elements remain inherently connected to the cycle of nature. Unfolding as a continuous, rhythmically arranged flow of sonic events—from the hushed “petits bruits” (small sounds) accompanied by the soft lapping of waves to the crescendo of buzzing cicadas—Presque rien no. 1 presents a soundscape that appears strongly aestheticized as well as untouched by the fragmenting and homogenizing tendencies endemic to the modern everyday.

Sounds of Sameness and the Mediatized Everyday in West German Radio Art

In 1960s Germany, engagement with everyday life gained prominence in various artistic contexts. Filmmakers in West and East, such as Helma-Sanders-Brahms, Erika Runge and Klaus Wildenhahn, resorted to documentary devices in order to investigate the living and working conditions of lower-class social groups. Within the West German literary scene, the work of the nouveaux romanciers was echoed by proponents of “Alltagslyrik” (quotidian poetry), such as Wolf Wondratschek, as well as the new realist group of writers around the Cologne-based editor Dieter Wellershoff. In the vein of Freud’s 1901 Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), New Realism, more specifically, turned to the private sphere and family life as the locus of pathological tendencies and repressed desires in West German society, as Carrie Smith-Prei has pointed out and linked to the agenda of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), pushed forward by the New Left:⁵⁰ When the 1960s anti-authoritarian movement criticized the government’s policies, they targeted the family in particular as the stronghold of the perceived perpetuation of National Socialist values and repression.⁵¹ This criticism was especially directed against the conservative family and sexual policy upheld by the Adenauer government in the 1950s.⁵²

Mediated through the work of the nouveaux romanciers, the theme of the everyday furthermore found its way into experimental radio art. This influence becomes evident when comparing Michel Butor’s Fluglinien (Airways) with the inaugural piece of the New radio play, Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker’s Fünf Mann Menschen (Five men humans).⁵³ As Würffel has pointed out, Butor’s play, which consists of bits and pieces of everyday conversations between anonymous passengers on a flight, abounds with formulaic patterns of speech while gradually undermining the individual voice to the point of being indistinguishable.⁵⁴ In the same manner, the title Fünf Mann Menschen, in referring to an anonymous group of people, is suggestive of the loss of individuality in modern society. The play presents a range of speech scenes, depicting a thoroughly standardized, bureaucratically “administered” life cycle, leading from birth to school and job counseling to the military and eventually death. Instead of individualized characters, it features as main roles a speaker and five male voices, passing through the stages from childhood to adulthood. As the authors note, their voices should sound “jeweils differenziert, doch nicht charakterisiert” (distinguishable, yet not characterized).⁵⁵ The birth clinic scene (Figure 3) opens and closes the piece circularly, thus evoking an endless loop of repetitive social acts, hierarchies, and behavior. The nurses’ chorus comments “routinemäßig” (as a matter of routine) on the event of birth, “Ein Sohn, ein schöner Sohn!”) (A son! A beautiful son!), followed by the laconic “aha” of the fathers, sounding five times in succession while moving from the left to the right position of the stereo field.

Throughout the piece, stereophonic multiplication of voices, word repetitions, and the deadpan, matter-of-fact style intonation serve to evoke sameness, social uniformity, and routinization. In scene no. 5, entitled “Berufsberatung” (job counseling), the speech delivered by the “Berufsberater” (job counselor) is recorded five times, “möglichst gleichartig und im gleichen Tempo” (as similarly as possible and in the same tempo), and the takes then sound simultaneously from the five stereo positions.⁵⁷ The dialogue between the counselor (BB) and the young men (JM) unfolds as an ironic commentary on the negation of freedom of choice in terms of self-realization (Figure 4). The counselor, who characterizes himself as a mouthpiece of the economy, tells the youngsters that their role in society will be chosen for them. Subsequently, he starts to list a number of professions, spoken “in gleichmäßigen Taktschlägen” (in a steady beat), while ignoring the desperate objections on part of the boys.

Wolf Wondratschek, one of the main proponents of “Alltagslyrik,” provided another critical perspective on the everyday with his 1969 language play Paul oder die Zerstörung eines Hörbeispiels (Paul or the destruction of a listening example), based on the prose text Also (Thus) from the book Früher begann der Tag mit einer Schusswunde (In earlier times the day began with a gunshot wound). Its protagonist is an ordinary truck driver named Paul, who travels from Munich to Hamburg (Figure 5). The piece opens with a motor noise, announced by speaker 3 (Geräusch). Then follows a news announcement. As speaker 4 informs us a little later: “Paul sieht verschiedene Dinge, Paul denkt verschiedene Dinge; das wiederholt sich für Paul jeden Tag” (Paul sees different things, he thinks different things; that repeats itself for him every day). Though reminiscent of a stream-of-consciousness technique, the speech montage does not offer us access to Paul’s inner thoughts and feelings. What passes through his eyes and mind on the journey, is mostly not articulated by himself but distributed among several unspecified male voices, who refer to him in the third person in a laconic, matter-of-fact style, reminiscent of the nouveau roman. Through the voices’ constant and abrupt switching between different stereo positions as well as various acoustics, including megaphone, telephone, and radio, the disjointed character of the montage is further enhanced.

The entire text consists of a sequence of unrelated, deliberately trivial as well as partly nonsensical statements and utterances, which make up Paul’s petty inner and outer reality. As voice D3 laconically remarks, “Wildwechsel. Dauerregen. Richtung Hamburg. An der Windschutzscheibe zerplatzt ein Vogel. Scheiße. Und mittlerweile wurde es Montag” (Deer crossing. Continuous rainfall. Direction Hamburg. A bird bursts on the windshield. Shit. And meanwhile it became Monday). The string of impressions evokes the ceaseless and monotonous passage of days. In the course of the play, certain phrases are repeated, varied as well as broken up into fragments. This technique establishes a web of motivic connections, while simultaneously enhancing the sense of empty repetitiveness that lies at the heart of Paul’s existence.

In his analysis of the play, Hans-Edwin Friedrich rightly points out that the quotations serve to render audible the antithesis between society and the individual.⁶⁰ As the interspersed speeches stand out from their immediate context, the sphere of politics appears removed from Paul’s everyday. Though he is constantly exposed to news coverage, he is not able to form a critical consciousness of his own. His understanding of politics narrows down to what concerns his life as a truck driver. As the voice H2 (see Figure 5) ironically remarks: “Paul stellt sich unter dem Wort ‘Autobahn’ das Wort ‘Politik’ vor” (When Paul thinks of the word “autobahn,” he thinks of the word “politics”). On the other hand, the extensive use of media content—newsflashes, sports reports, advertisements, and television sounds—exposes the media’s role in infiltrating and disintegrating the everyday. The individual seems but a passive container to be filled with haphazard content.

Radio’s Everydayness I: The Alienated Listener

As radio art evolved in the 1970s, West German radio culture underwent significant changes. With the advance of television, radio had to wave goodbye to a golden past of unchallenged monopoly paired with high cultural ambition, as it declined from an educative tool to an entertaining time-filler. As radio portables became a common household accessory and with car radios on the rise, sound not only spread into space but also gained a sociable quality as a background companion to everyday activities. Programming, too, took new paths with popular formats designed for casual attentiveness. As a critical mirror of contemporary media culture, West German radio art took note of these developments and surrounding public debates. Television violence, for instance, which spurred a discussion about the harmful effects of media, found its echo in several radio plays, including Fünf Mann Menschen, Elfriede Jelinek’s Untergang eines Tauchers (Sinking of a diver) from 1973, Mauricio Kagel’s 1975 Soundtrack, ein Film-Hörspiel (Soundtrack, a filmic radio play) and Urs Widmer’s 1976 Fernsehabend (Television evening). Kagel, whose (Hörspiel) Ein Aufnahmezustand ((Radio play) a state of recording) from 1969/70 can be regarded as one of the most original contributions to the New radio play, created several media-centered radio pieces in the 1970s and early 1980s.⁶¹ Both his Soundtrack, ein Film-Hörspiel and the 1982 Rrrrrrr…, Hörspiel über eine Radiophantasie (Rrrrrrr…, radio play on a radio fantasy) present domestic settings of television viewing and radio listening in ways that sound out the alienation of human existence and communication. While the New radio play initially aimed to break free from theatrical models, these later radio works revitalized features, such as setting, role, interior monologue, and dialogue to stage and interrogate the media’s presence in and influence on everyday life.

The studio-created setting for Rrrrrrr… is a small apartment, comprising a living room with a television set and a radio, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Stereophonic sound provides a realistic sense of space and movement. The play, which unfolds in real time over ca. 38 minutes, features as its protagonist an anonymous, middle-aged man, “Er” (He), who spends his evening listening to the radio while flipping through the newspaper. The setting of the play mirrors key changes in the everyday life of West German society that took place in the 1970s, as the model of the nuclear family eroded and alternative living arrangements, such as the single household, emerged.⁶² The radio fantasy sounding in the play is Kagel’s own imaginary composition, consisting of a diverse set of popular pieces for various instrumentations that start with the letter “R” (Rheinländer, Rigaudon, Repercussa, Rumba, among others). To infuse a dose of parody, he wittily violates their generic conventions.⁶³ For the most part, Kagel’s “typical” listener is preoccupied with the prosaics of life and banal routines, such as eating, cooking, and going to the bathroom to which radio provides the humming backdrop. When the music does capture his meandering attention, it prompts spontaneous expressions of like or dislike. To make audible the constant switching between concentrated and distracted listening, the volume of the music changes accordingly in the course of the play. As Kagel states in his introduction to the play: “We are hence listening in the third person (since ‘He’ listens in our place). And ultimately, we hear the discontinuity of this listening likewise in a discontinuous manner.”⁶⁴

However, Rrrrrrr… presents more than a mere reflection on domestic culture and listening behavior. Rather, Kagel shines a sad spotlight on the solitary individual and his alienated everyday existence. Now and then, noises from the outside world penetrate the confined space of the apartment. A baby cries behind the wall, and the telephone rings, engendering a short, monosyllabic conversation (Figure 6). “He” is waiting for a woman. However, when his doorbell eventually buzzes at the end of the play, it turns out to be a stranger looking for someone else.

Daily life, as staged in Rrrrrrr…, thus appears devoid of any meaningful human connections. Similar to Wondratschek’s play, Rrrrrrr… exposes the fragmentation of the everyday and its “colonization” by the mass media, which keep the individual entangled in a web of distractions and trivialities. Through the technique of interior monologue, the intermingling of mind and media is brought to the surface. The protagonist’s thoughts, voiced in an intimate, quiet tone, rapidly jump between his daily affairs, work, memories of the past, future vacation plans, newspaper headlines, horoscopes, dating ads, crosswords, and the music sounding from the radio. The man’s private consciousness, as Kagel conceives it, is a “conscience privée,” to speak with Lefebvre.

Radio’s Everydayness II: Critiques of Broadcasting

In his The Tuning of the World (1977), Canadian composer and theorist Murray Schafer argued for the study of the rhythms and tempi of radio broadcasting as a central array of his soundscape project: “Radio programing needs to be analyzed in as much detail as an epic poem or musical composition, for in its themes and rhythms will be found the pulse of modern life.”⁶⁶ As general tendencies, he found that with the rise of Western format radio “tempo of broadcasting … has been speeded up over the years, and its tone is moving from the sedate toward the slaphappy.”⁶⁷ Akin to Schafer, New radio play creators of the 1970s turned a critical ear toward the patterns and contradictions of contemporary broadcasting. Belonging to the genre of the “original sound” collage, Dieter Schnebel’s 1971 radiophonic entry piece Hörfunk (Radiostücke I–V) (Radio broadcasting (Radio pieces I–V)) and Ferdinand Kriwet’s Radioselbst (Radio-self) from 1979 both use pre-recorded material from West German radio channels.

Schnebel’s engagement with radio marks an extension of his interest in exploring listening as a compositional subject. In the 1960s, he created a piece called Ki-No, Nachtmusik für Projektoren und Hörer, for speaker, percussion, tape, and 2–4 slide projectors (Ki-No, night music for projectors and listeners). During the performance, the audience is stimulated to form sounds in their mind based on various verbal and visual stimuli as, for example, notational charts. As background accompaniment, Schnebel integrates a tape recording of environmental sounds. Hörfunk juxtaposes environmental sounds with broadcasting fragments from the second programme of the Hessian radio channel (hr2).⁶⁸ It comprises five individual radio pieces, which are framed by an introduction and a postlude, and interspersed with four short interludes, composed of time and interval signals only.⁶⁹ Schnebel, being a newcomer to radio technology at the time, created the collage with the help of a sound engineer, to whom he gave precise instructions regarding the stereophonic arrangement of sounds, their mixing, as well as other effects to be added. In the montage plan that was used to produce the collage at the facilities of the Hessian radio channel, Schnebel groups his material into four categories: (I) “Rf” (reflections) include sounds from the domestic sphere, the city of Frankfurt, exotic places, war, nature, and the human body, (II) “I” (indications of time and place) pertain to time checks and announcements of cities and places,⁷⁰ (III) “Rp” (reproductions) are documentary radio recordings of historical events, such as the moon landing, political speeches, and news coverage, and (IV) “P” (productions) comprise snippets from various hr2 radio broadcasts, organized along the daily broadcasting schedule.

Hörfunk not only recalls the genre of the 1920s documentary city portrait,⁷¹ but it also re-sounds tropes of the listening discourse that accompanied the rise of the medium and its integration into everyday life. As radio evolved into a key component of the twentieth-century media soundscape, anxieties soon arose as to its negative influence on the cultivation of taste and attentiveness. In the 1930s, alert observers like Rudolf Arnheim and Theodor W. Adorno warned about the precarious effects of broadcasting on susceptible listeners, the unruly mix of high and low culture and the “regression” of listening.⁷² However, as David Goodman has shown, their writings mark only the tip of the iceberg of a much broader public debate around the spread of distracted listening, radio’s increase of urban noise, and related issues of mental health.⁷³ Such negative notions about the medium persisted well into the second half of the twentieth century. In the West German radio debate of the 1950s, similar warnings against casual listening and mindless consumption were issued by leading radio officials.⁷⁴ Schnebel, too, disapproved of radio’s negligent treatment of esteemed “serious” music and other high cultural products and castigated the ubiquity and obtrusiveness of radio sound. As he remarked in his introduction to Hörfunk:

One is sitting over one’s work and sounds come through the wall—underneath, the monotonous beat of a piece of U-Musik (entertainment music) is stamping, whose higher frequencies have been filtered out by the ceiling. Or the obtrusive presence of a news speaker’s voice attacks from the right, breaks through the wall while shedding off comprehensibility.⁷⁵

At the same time, however, Schnebel acknowledged that listening practices had become pluralized and that concentrated hearing only marked a rare occasion within a broader spectrum of auditory modes. Among these, he included listening half-attentively to the radio, while simultaneously registering sounds from one’s surroundings as well as a vague, omnidirectional mode of listening, for example, when walking through the city, that can possibly conjure up and mix with involuntary acoustic reminiscences.⁷⁶ With the technical means at hand, i.e., through manipulation of volume and stereophonic movement, Schnebel sought to simulate such different types of listening behavior.

Fragmentation of Everyday Time and Space

While radio pieces no. 2 to 5 feature documentary historical material to insert a sense of pastness into radio’s continuous flow of presentness, radio piece no. 1 (ca. 4:31–14:44) concerns itself with everyday listening in domestic and urban settings. On the upper left of the montage plan (Figure 7) Schnebel notes “Akustik eines Wohnzimmers” (acoustics of a living room). While someone is leafing through a newspaper, radio music and indistinct chattering come from behind the wall of a neighboring apartment. Noises of rumbling chairs from the adjacent kitchen and passing traffic are heard on the left and right sides of the stereo field. Our listening perspective is initially tied to that of the newspaper reader so that we become instantly aware of the radio’s intrusive presence.

Gradually then, the collage builds in complexity, as further bits and pieces from broadcasts, such as navigational data (see indications, “Navigationsangaben”) are added. In a sudden manner, cheery music from the morning program of hr2 bursts forth (see productions, “Spuren von Radiosendungen”). By manipulating the sound volume and letting the music rotate in the stereo field, Schnebel evokes a fluid, unsteady mode of listening. As the music fades the living room scenario moves to the foreground again. After a cut follows a speedy montage of various fragments from weather and traffic reports. Then we hear a train in motion (see reflections, “Im Inneren eines D-Zugs / gleichmäßiges Rattern”). Snippets from morning broadcasts circulate. A female voice announces various exotic places. The listening space changes again to a domestic scene, with clattering footsteps busily walking around the room. A radio host comments: “So meine Lieben, der Alltag hat uns wieder” (So, my dear ones, the everyday has caught up with us again.). To this, another male radio speaker adds time announcements, arranged in a non-chronological manner:

Sprecher

Und gleich, meine Damen und Herren, wird es 6:11 sein

So eben war es 7:48

In einer halben Minute ist es 7:33

Vor einer viertel Minute war es 7:45

Die genaue Zeit: In zehn Sekunden ist es 7:27 Uhr

Speaker

And in a moment, ladies and gentlemen, it will be 6:11

Just now it was 7:48

In half a minute it will be 7:33

A quarter of a minute ago it was 7:45

The exact time: in ten seconds it will be 7:27

Next, traffic sounds from the streets of Frankfurt become audible. While a radio speaker recites weather data in a monotonous tone, the ending of a piece of chamber music fades in on the right, and a host announces a string quartet by Josef Mysliveček. Soon the sound is drowned out by the siren of a passing ambulance. A door gets shut, and we hear women chattering in a store. Finally, the chamber music fades in again, gradually becoming distorted before eventually breaking off.

Radio piece no. 1 thus unfolds as a series of listening scenarios that reveal radio’s temporal integration into, as well as the structuring of, the everyday—from newspaper reading to commutation, and from household work to shopping in the city. Radio sound assumes a haunting and deliberately unnerving presence throughout. The montage style, which is characterized by harsh cuts between the individual locations and daily activities, makes us aware of the fragmentation of everyday space and the discontinuous listening it affords. The repeated time checks draw attention to the constant measurement of time in broadcasting. As the announcements are arranged in a non-chronological manner, they temporarily subvert the linear order of clock time. As we will see, Kriwet uses a similar, yet more elaborate radiogenic strategy of subversion in Radioselbst to undermine radio’s obsession with temporal organization.

Radio Around the Clock

With the introduction of new broadcasting concepts that aimed toward mainstream popularity, casual listening, and day-long engagement of its target audience, radio established a yet closer relation to the sphere of everyday life. A pioneer of this development was WDR2, the second program of the West German radio channel. Featuring a homogenous, easy-to-follow stream of moderation, music, and infotainment, it addressed the listener in a relaxed and gentle tone, evoking an atmosphere of intimacy and sociability. Radio assumed the role of a friendly companion, helping with human day-to-day affairs. With his Radioselbst, Kriwet sought to provide a critical commentary on this type of radio format.⁷⁷ To this end, he subjected his sound material, taken solely from WDR2, to a range of montage strategies, exploiting the advanced technology of the eight-track recorder. Similar to Ferrari, Kriwet gathered his material over the course of a week in November 1978, after which he cut the recordings and pasted the snippets together to create a typical radio day, compressed into approximately 52 minutes. As in his previous radio works, he used fast and rhythmical cutting, thus rushing the listener through a rapid, staccato-like flow of bits and pieces of moderation, broadcasts, music, jingles, and news.

Some basic techniques employed throughout the piece are the repetition of phrases and words used by the hosts, occurring both in immediate succession as well as stretched over the course of the piece, the looping of phrases, and the doubling and clustering of voices articulating similar content. Such polyphonic textures regularly appear in connection with time indications, creating complex instances of simultaneous sound. Furthermore, the montage accentuates the recurring elements of the programme itself, with its fixed hourly components, such as news, weather, and traffic reports. A strong sense of repetitiveness and circularity emerges in the opening part of the “Radiowecker” (radio alarm clock).⁷⁸ The first sound we hear is a radio time signal consisting of a row of six beep tones, as it was typically used in pre-digital broadcasting to indicate the full hour. With the last beep sounding a little longer, music begins to play, i.e., the catchline from Daliah Lavi’s 1972 eponymous popular Schlager “Schalt dein Radio ein” (Turn your radio on), a song that self-consciously advertises the appeal of easy listening. Through its frequent quotation, it functions like a motto, bracketing the beginning and ending of the piece. In the exposition, the phrase “Schalt dein Radio ein” first sounds from the middle position, then subsequently from the left side and right positions, and both combined, as indicated in Kriwet’s montage plan (Figure 8). The table columns correspond to the five stereo positions.

Twice the music is interrupted by the beep sounds, before returning in a looped version, spread over the full stereo field. By repeatedly juxtaposing the time signal with the song, the exposition sounds out the repetitive rhythm of everydayness. As listeners, we feel trapped in a time loop, as if we are being subjected to the same wake-up routine over and over again. The exposition thus introduces two interconnected themes that receive further development in the remainder of the piece: the signaling of time and radio’s function in organizing and maintaining daily routines, such as getting up for work. In the remainder of the exposition, the appellative function of the radio voice is pervasively foregrounded through repetitive, formulaic speech, interspersed with jaunty bits of music. The hosts constantly seek to engage the listener’s attention and induce motivation for starting the day.

However, Radioselbst not only abounds with indications of clock time in the form of beep tones, gongs, jingles, and announcements, it also playfully intervenes into the linear order and temporarily disrupts it by means of elaborate montage sequences and stereophonic placement. As these instances of simultaneous sound recur, they become more and more dense and complex. The section covering the morning time from 6 to 8 o’clock, which sounds at roughly nine minutes into the piece, can serve as a case in point (Figure 9). On the mid-left position, a female voice begins with: “Es kann ja ein paar Zuhörer geben, die gerne wissen, wie spät es ist” (There might be some listeners who would like to know what time it is).

The first instance of voice doubling occurs as female and male speakers simultaneously state, “6 Uhr 20” and “6 Uhr 21,” added by another male voice on the right position stating, “Die genaue Zeit, es ist 6 Uhr 30” (The exact time, it is 6:30). Similarly, three voices at once announce the seven o’clock news, succeeded by a cut to the weather report. The next instance of simultaneous sound (see the column at the bottom) again features two radio speakers on the left and mid-position, while combining polyphonic doubling of phrases and time indications with a loop-like enumeration of the days of the week (“am Sonntag / am Montag / am Dienstag / …”). With the indications jumping rapidly forward along the circle of the clock, the montage provokes an experience of accelerating time. A similar effect is produced a bit later through a further compression of news content, as the montage cuts from the word “Autofahrer” (car drivers) to “Wetteraussichten” (weather forecast) to the title of the ensuing program. This is followed by a thick cluster of different time designations around the full hour 8 o’clock, distributed between three simultaneous speakers. At such prolonged moments of temporal confusion, linearity is suspended, as clock time is spinning out of control.

Radio, the Everyday, and the Politicization of Sound

Tracing the theme of the quotidian in French and German postwar culture has revealed the role of sound in exploring the rhythms of urban and rural daily life as well as articulating facets of estrangement across filmic, literary, and radiophonic forms. As demonstrated by the work of Perec and Ferrari, the turn to the everyday and its sonic dimension was not exclusively geared towards exposing negative features.⁷⁹ Yet, with Lefebvre’s theoretical groundwork and the entangled rise of the nouveau roman and the New radio play, concern with the ideological contours of modern daily life and its colonization by consumerist capitalism and the mass media became a dominant issue. Creating sound collages from pre-recorded broadcasting material and staging scenarios of home radio listening, artists affiliated with the New radio play registered the transformation of daily life vis-à-vis the changing media landscape of the time and presented the familiar in an unfamiliar way to confront the listeners with an acoustic critique of human existence as routinized, monotonous, and subjected to the incessant tick-tock of the clock. As we have seen, techniques of voice, stream-of-consciousness, montage, and stereophony became a central means for rendering audible tendencies of homogenization, fragmentation, and repetitiveness in the mediatized sphere of modern existence. Radiophonic sound thus gained political significance in communicating as well as negotiating critical knowledge around the everyday. While French film and radio compositions portrayed the everyday in nuanced terms, ranging from criticism to endorsement of its idyllic qualities, as seen in Ferrari’s Presque rien, New radio plays focused on the negative aspects of everyday life, thus echoing Lefebvre’s Critique as well as the works of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, which had a decisive influence on the new leftist social movement in West Germany.

List of New Radio Plays Discussed