transcultural studies 13 (2017) 239-263 brill.com/ts The Concrete ‘Sound Object’ and the Emergence of Acoustical Film and Radiophonic Art in the Modernist Avant-Garde Christopher Williams University of Technology, Sydney [email protected] Abstract Radiophonic art could not have emerged at the end of the 1920s without an intense period of experimentation across the creative fields of radio, new music, phonogra- phy, film, literature and theatre. The engagement with sound recording and broadcast technologies by artists radically expanded the scope of creative possibility within their respective practices, and more particularly, pointed to new forms of (inter-)artistic practice based in sound technologies including those of radio. This paper examines the convergence of industry, the development of technology, and creative practice that gave sound, previously understood as immaterial, a concrete objectification capable of responding to creative praxis, and so brought about the conditions that enabled a radiophonic art to materialize. Keywords radiophonic – radio – montage – Walter Ruttmann – constructivism – Grammophonmusik – Lehrstück – Dziga Vertov Absolute Beginnings It is no accident that the historical conditions that enabled the emergence of a radiophonic art intersected in Germany during the Weimar Republic, following the successful attempt to stabilize the economy previously ravaged by hyper- inflation. John Willett emphasizes the ethos of internationalism, collectivism, and a belief in the transformative power of technology for socially progressive © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/23751606-01302008Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:25:28PM via free access <UN> 240 Williams ends as characteristic of avant-garde artistic practice in the years between the advent of sound broadcasting and the ascendancy of National Socialism.1 These factors were shaped in no small part by the tumultuous events of not only the First World War (1914–18), which accelerated the military develop- ment and application of radio; but also the Russian Revolution (1917) which embraced the potential of radio for revolutionary propaganda and nation- building; and the defeat of the German Sparticist Revolution (1919), whose par- ticipants made use of radio to co-ordinate their actions on the street.2 Willett presents the extraordinarily complex ecology and international network of avant-garde creative practices and practitioners in their engagement with new media technologies, especially in the exchange and productive engagements between Germany and Russia that followed the ratification of the Treaty of Rapallo in 1923, which normalised relations between the two countries. Although the Futurists, both Italian and Russian, played a significant role early in the collective ‘wireless imagination’, it was principally the Dadaists and Constructivists who, in reaction to the excesses of both the Futurists and the Expressionists, aligned themselves with transformative social movements (mostly of the Left) and subscribed to the ethos of the Neue Sächlichkeit (‘New Sobriety’ or ‘New Objectivity’). Artists of this persuasion attested to the value of sound technologies for their capacity to reshape auditory perception via me- diation; to document everyday life as it exists; and to distance human aesthetic experience so that it could be understood on a more scientific basis, open to analysis and verification. Avant-Garde artists were seized by a determination 1 John Willett, The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917–1933 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). 2 “Within Germany all radio installations had been placed under military control—a step which meant that when the Soldiers and Workers Councils were set up in 1919 this important network was in the hands of the revolutionary forces. The soldiers involved, following the example of the Soviets, broadcast messages about the aims and progress of the Revolution by wireless telegraphy ‘To all’ and declared the principle of workers’ control of the network, which they wished to see made independent of the Post Office. A protracted struggle in which the Social Democrats had the support of the predominantly right-wing Post Office of- ficials, of the army and the Treasury, allowed the government of the new Weimar Republic to neutralise the situation and to avert what was described as ‘Bolshevism in the German radio system.’” Stuart Hood, ‘Brecht on Radio’, Screen 20(3–4) (1979): 17–18. Friedrich Kittler notes that in 1918 190,000 radio operators were demobilized from the Imperial German army but kept their equipment. During the 1919 uprisings, ex-members of the Signal Corps were granted broadcasting licence as the Central Broadcasting Bureau (zfl) by the executive of the revolutionary workers and soldiers council associated with the Inde- pendent Socialist Party. “For the simple purpose of avoiding the anarchistic abuse of military radio equipment, Germany received its first entertainment radio network.” Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999): 97. transculturalDownloaded studies from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 239-263 10:25:28PM via free access <UN> The Concrete ‘sound object’ 241 to sweep away the political systems and institutions that brought about the Great War; a passionate belief in the promise of scientific and technological progress to improve general living conditions; and the desperate need to re- make human relations and society, redefining the concept of personhood in the form of collectivity. The notion of a radiophonic practice can be usefully approached as part of the Modernist project of determining the aesthetics for autonomous art forms. Artists and critics engaged in the struggle to theorize an absolute radio art. A crisis had already erupted within music prior to the First World War, since what was understood as absolute music embodied in the score found its premise untenable with the collapse of the distinction between composer and performer occasioned by the in(ter)vention of the gramophone. The gramo- phone made clear that music was not just a notated language but performed sound; and that phonographic technology conferred equal status on both un-performed (or un-pitched) sounds and musical tones. A challenge arose: to create a new music aesthetic which embraced the gramophone not merely as a reproductive tool for documenting performances, but as a compositional tool. Sound technologies, then anticipating the sound-film or ‘talking pictures’, were already perceived as a threat to the absolute film as well, since it would destabilize the supremacy of the moving-image, rendering cinema interme- dial rather than autonomous. Film artists feared that a language-based cinema would destroy its artistic purity and autonomy, and compromise its ability to communicate across international boundaries. It would also find it difficult to resist a realist aesthetic based on narrative structures and synchronized sound, so undermining the achievements of the avant-garde cinema attained through the application of montage technique.3 Radio Utopia Before the First World War, wireless telegraphy had seized the imagination of the literary modernist avant-garde,4 most notably in the manifestos of the Futurist Marinetti who called for a ‘wireless imagination’ in new forms 3 Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov advocated the application of asynchronous montage principles to the soundfilm in a joint statement published in Zhizn Iskusstva, the 5th of August, 1928 in Leningrad (reproduced in Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form (New York: Harcourt, 1977 [1949]): 257–260). Jay Leyda notes that the optical sound-system developed by Alexander Shorin was first tested in Leningrad in September 1928 and first exhibited in March 1929. 4 See especially Timothy C. Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). transcultural studies 13 (2017) 239-263 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:25:28PM via free access <UN> 242 Williams of poetry: ‘Marconigrammes’; and for ‘words-in-freedom!’ With the arrival of sound broadcasting, Marinetti and others imagined a new radiophonic art. Enzo Ferrieri published ‘La radia, forza creativa’ (‘Radio as a Creative Force’) in 1931, preceding Marinetti by two years.5 Ferrieri demanded a “unique voice for the new medium”, that “Radio should only disseminate beautiful and radiogen- ic voices”; that radio should be “lyrical, quick and lively, without pause, wasted time, or insistence”; and that it should only broadcast dramas “conceived espe- cially for radio”. Broadcast music should be “composed for radio”, “brand new, radiogenic” with “quick, elegant” libretti “that are spirited, entertaining, and inspired by the modern world.” Radio is the “miraculous” “dissemination of true culture”. In another essay published that year, ‘Radio! Radio? Radio!’ Ferri- eri pinpointed the paradoxical source of power for any radio aesthetic: silence. For the development of a radio aesthetic, he argued, sound broadcasting must be monologic – it must still all other radio voices. Radio must have the power to withhold speech and sound – to be simultaneously present, and yet silent. It commands its audience to wait in silence and listen. While this command is no different to that pertaining in the bourgeois theatre and concert hall, it was, of course, soon to take on more sinister overtones in the emerging Fascist