The Concrete 'Sound Object' and the Emergence of Acoustical

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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, phonography, 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

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 development 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 participants 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.

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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 gramophone 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).

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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 radiogenic voices”; that radio should be “lyrical, quick and lively, without pause, wasted time, or insistence”; and that it should only broadcast dramas “conceived especially 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 states. Working with the poet Pino Masnata, who was its principal author,6 Mari- netti published the manifesto La Radia in 1933. Together, they claimed: “we Futurists are perfecting the radio, which is destined to increase the creative genius of the Italian race a hundredfold, to abolish the ancient tormenting nostalgia for faraway places, and to impose Words-in-Freedom everywhere as its logical, natural mode of expression”.7 Radiophonic art would abolish theatrical space, and the physical stage, theatrical time, the unity of action, dramatic character, and the audience – whom they described as a “judgemental mass- self-electing, systematically hostile and servile, always anti-progressive and backward-looking.” Radio produces its own space – a radiophonic space – which is immense: “no longer visible nor confined to a frame”. Marinetti and Masnata dared to imagine a future in which human beings might be able to dispense with the radio apparatus altogether as they evolve into a “Pure organ- ism of radiophonic sensations”: the human radio receiver and transmitter. In their post-Symbolist aesthetic (which still flirted with metaphysics) the radio

5 Pino Masnata, Radia: Pino Masnata’s Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto (Emeryville, ca.: Second Evening Art Books, 2012 [1935]. 6 According to Gunther Berghaus editor of Marinetti, F.T., Critical Writings (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2006). 7 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti & Pino Masnata, ‘The Radio’, in Critical Writings. G. Berghaus, ed. (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2006): 411.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 243 signal carrying the sound of the human voice displaces the spirit voices of the past.8 The Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, writing in ‘The Radio of the Future’ (1921), sang the praises of the technological miracle that is radio. He imagined the radiophonic music composer

giving a concert of his works for all the people, using the instruments of the Radio in the huge hall from Vladivostok to the Baltic, under the blue [ceiling] of the sky … This evening he bewitches the people, administer- ing to them the communion of his soul, but tomorrow he is an ordinary mortal. He, the artist, has enchanted his country; he has given it the singing of the sea and the whistling of the wind. Every village and every hut is visited by the divine whistlings and all the sweet bliss of sounds.9

Absolute Radio Art

In May 1925, Dadaist filmmaker Walter Ruttmann presented an exhibition of absoluter Film, featuring works by Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, René Clair, and Fernand Leger. He reflected on the significance of this exhibition three years later: “What is an absolute film? A film where one does not have to rely on the way the film is made for it to develop into art, but a film where the theory and the idea of film as an autonomous art is the most important – a priori: “Only in this way are films aesthetic laws.”10 Composer Kurt Weill wrote ‘The Possibilities of Absolute Radio Art’ (1925) in response to Ruttmann’s exhibition. He imagined an absolute radio art that would be able to “fill a time span with the most intense experience”:11

Now, we can very well imagine that new sounds, sounds from other spheres, will join the tones and rhythms of music: calls of human and animal voices, voices of nature, the noises of winds, water, trees, and then

8 Op. cit., 410–414. 9 Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘The Radio of the Future’, in Radiotext(e). N. Strauss ed. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993 [1921]): 34. 10 Walter Ruttmann in Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: the European Avant- garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007): 55. 11 Kurt Weill, ‘Möglichkeiten absoluter Radiokunst’ [1925], quoted in Sérgio Freire & Carlos Palombini, ‘Early Impressions from Both Sides of the Loudspeaker’. Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003): 70.

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a host of new, unheard sounds that the microphone could produce in artificial ways if sound waves were raised or lowered, superimposed or interwoven, faded out or born anew. To highlight once more the most important: such an opus should engender no atmospheric picture, no symphony of nature with as realistic as possible a use of all means available, but an absolute, soulful artwork floating above the earth ….12

Taking his cue from film, Weill recognised the potential of radio to play with tempi, and to reorder events and acoustic perspectives, implying a radically different radio dramaturgy:

What new the film has brought along: the continuous change of scenery, the simultaneity of two events, the tempo of real life and the faster-than- life tempo of satire, the marionettish truthfulness of the trick- film and the possibility of following a line from its beginning to its transition to other forms – all this, transposed into acoustic relations, the microphone must also accomplish …. The “acoustic slow motion” must be invented, and many other things. And all of this could then lead to an absolute radio art.13

Weill’s ideas on new musical and sound resources for radio echoed those of Futurist composer Luigi Russolo in The Art of Noises (1913), and, in effect, anticipate electronic sound synthesis, sampling, musique concrète, and Ars Acustica, at a time when the conditions of “the electro-acoustic technology of the radio” was “still largely undeveloped”, frustrating the full realization of “a media-specific artistic material aesthetic” in practice. What was required, as implied in his essay, is the means by which ephemeral sound, a temporal phenomenon, could be transformed and fixed (traced) as concrete material as in phonography, but with the facility of film in the manipulation of moving images after their capture. Weill wrote ‘Über die Möglichkeit einer Rundfunkversuchstelle’ in 1927, calling on radio institutions to actively support specialists working on the development of just such an aesthetic: “The radio requires its own people; it must be more than just a welcome auxiliary income for otherwise interested artists; it can mature into its own independent branch of the arts if every activity

12 Op. cit., quoted in Hagener, Moving Forward Looking Back: 69. (Also quoted in Sabine Bre- itsameter, ‘1924: Radio Art – Three Basic Approaches’, in Sound Art: Zwischen Avantgarde und Popkultur. Anne Thurmann-Jajes, Sabine Breitsameter & Winfried Pauleit eds. (Köln: Salon Verlag, 2006): 99.) 13 Loc. cit.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 245 in the studio meets the requirements [and explores] the possibilities of the microphone.”14 Daniel Gilfillan notes that Weill’s insistence on the studio microphone as the piece of technology central to “the creation of radiophonic art” suggests that the “early ideas of radio could not yet determine radio as something beyond speaking or performing into a microphone”, so predicating the aesthetic potential of radio on live broadcast. Rudolph Arnheim, writing in 1933, celebrated the new art of radio, which he feared would soon be swept aside by the introduction of broadcast television much in the way the introduction of the sound film had brought about the demise of the silent film. Radio was, he said, an exclusively aural art.

An alluring, exciting world has been revealed, containing not only the most potent sensuous delights known to man – those of musical sounds, rhythm and harmony – but capable of reproducing actuality by transmit- ting real sounds and, what is more, commanding that most abstract and comprehensive means of expression: speech.15

Music, original sound (“actuality”), and speech, then, are the sonic materials that, from the beginning, have been at the disposal of radio art. However, the presence and use of these elements is not sufficient to configure a work as radiophonic. This requires an understanding and embrace of the creative potential of the technology associated with radio broadcast and phonography.

Learning to Listen

Kurt Weill met playwright and director Bertolt Brecht after writing a glowing review in Der deutscher Rundfunk of his play Mann ist Mann, broadcast from Berlin Radio on the 18th of March, 1927: “a genuine poet [Weill wrote] has found solutions for a substantial number of the problems posed by the Sendespiel.” Brecht was so delighted with Weill’s response that he suggested they begin collaborating at once, which they did on the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt

14 Kurt Weill, ‘On the Possibilities of an Experimental Radio Station’, in Daniel Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): 90–91. Dziga Vertov made a similar call for creative and technical specialization in dedicated production units relating to film production. Dziga Vertov, ‘The Birth of Kino- Eye’ [1924], in Kino Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 40–42. 15 Rudolph Arnheim, Radio: An Art of Sound, trans. Margaret Ludwig & Herbert Read ( London: Faber & Faber, 1936): 15–15.

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Mahagonny.16 Mann ist Mann was Brecht’s first play on radio. It was directed by Alfred Braun, who would go on to direct Brecht’s radio adaptations of Macbeth (1927), Hamlet (1931) as well as excerpts from St Joan of the Stockyards (1932). Typically, Brecht was unimpressed by the state of sound broadcasting at the time. In his view,

The results of the radio are shameful. Its possibilities are ‘boundless’. Hence the radio is a ‘good thing’.

It is a very bad thing.

If I were to believe that this bourgeoisie would live for another hundr ed years, I would be convinced that it will drivel on about the tremendous ‘possibilities’ to be found, for example, in radio. Those who appreci- ate radio do so because they see in it a possibility for which they can invent ‘something.’ They would be proven right at the moment when ‘something’ is invented for whose sake the radio – assuming it did not yet exist – would have to be invented.17

Capitalism’s technology had outrun its cultural potential; having invented radio, the bourgeoisie was now scrambling to fill airtime. This situation demonstrated how the dominant classes “simultaneously developed the means to tell the whole world what they had to say and allowed the whole world to see that they had nothing to say.”18

Such a situation demanded that the radio apparatus be developed according to the principle that “since the radio has nothing to say it must be taught to speak by the public, a public interested in realizing its publicness.”19 Brecht well understood radio’s command to be silent and wait. Writing in ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, he criticized the radio broadcast system as trivial and monologic, and its purpose, suspect.

16 Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 2006): 79–80. 17 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2016): 37. 18 Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: 70. 19 John Mowitt, Radio: Essays in Bad Reception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): 61.

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Radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: Change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers.20

Brecht conceived a pedagogical role for radio, and used it to experiment with and develop his theory and practice of the Lehrstück or ‘learning play’, which he also applied to live concert performance. In Lehrstück theory, the actor- audience divide is dissolved in favour of active participation by audience members in a form of experiential learning: “doing is better than feeling”.21 Brecht wrote Der Flug der Lindberghs for radio broadcast and concert performance with music by both Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith, and a role for listeners at home to perform, which was published in advance of the broadcast. John Willett gives this description of the work:

A flier (Lindbergh) describes his preparations for his solo flight of 1927 across the Atlantic. His enemies – Fog, Snowstorm, Sleep – express their determination to beat him; ships at sea and both continents make re- ports through the mouth of the chorus. Against this he repeats his aim (to over-come the Primitive) and also his fears. He lands, and the work ends in praise of man’s achievement in flying.22

Der Flug der Lindberghs was first performed at the 1929 Baden-Baden music Festival in two modes: first as a very localized radio transmission confined to the festival itself (to neighbouring auditoria), and then given as a concert performance. It was broadcast on radio23 the day after from Breslau (whose

20 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1964): 52. 21 Op. cit., 32. 22 John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study in Eight Aspects (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977): 33–34. 23 It was twice broadcast later before 1933—on 5th December 1929 (with Otto Klemperer conducting) and on 18th March 1930 (a recording of this broadcast survives in the German Radio Archive at Frankfurt). See Stuart Hood, ‘Brecht on Radio’, Screen 20(3–4) (1979): 16–23.

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Cultural Division was headed by Friedrich Bischoff), Frankfurt and Cologne (produced by Ernst Hardt who had previously directed Brecht’s Edward ii for the stage in Weimar and Mann ist Mann for Cologne Radio). The Frankfurt broadcast was organised by Hans Flesh, Hindemith’s brother-in-law, who was about to move to Berlin Radio where he would contribute significantly to the development of radiophonic art. He had already created the first original radio play in Germany, a landmark in the history of radio art: Zauberei auf dem Sender (1924). Flesh worked with Hindemith in programming the 1929 Baden- Baden festival with the special theme: Originalmusik für Tonfilm und Rundfunk (Original compositions for Soundfilm and Radio). Paul Hindemith was especially committed to a “policy of fostering what he called Gemeinschaftsmusik or Gebrauchsmusik (communal or utility music)” an interest shared by Weill, Paul Dessau, and particularly Eisler – probably its greatest exponent.24 Gebrauchsmusik or ‘applied music’ usually referred to music for theatre, film, radio, music for bands, community singing, school choirs, and cantatas (of which several were written by Brecht with Eisler, Weill and Hindemith as Lehrstücke).25 Paul Dessau (later another Brecht col- laborator) presented some ‘thin, pathetic’ film music at Baden-Baden in 1929, and two school operas in 1932. In 1926, the Donaueschingen festival, also pro- grammed by Hindemith, had featured “original compositions for mechanical instruments”, including works by Ernst Toch, Gerhart Münch, and Hindemith for the Welter-Mignon player-piano, and a performance of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet with music by Hindemith for mechanical organ.26 Eisler would later dismiss such experiments as “pretentious” whose exponents later sold out to commercial interest, while they “rationalized their adjustment to it as an advanced achievement of the technocratic spirit”.27 The Baden-Baden festival began presenting experiments in synchronizing film-music to film-images in 1927. In 1929, Hindemith commissioned the film Vormittagsspuk from Hans Richter for which Hindemith composed music for synchronized mechanical piano, geared to the film projector.28 Walter Ruttmann mocked Richter’s

24 Stuart Hood, ‘Brecht on Radio’, Screen 20(3–4) (1979): 20. 25 See T. Adorno & H. Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Continuum, 2007) and Eisler, A Rebel in Music (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1978). 26 Thomas Patteson, Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, Modernism (Oakland, ca.: University of California Press, 2016): 18. 27 Theodor W. Adorno & Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Continuum, 2007 [1947]): 37. 28 At Baden-Baden in 1929, Richter also presented the film Alles dreht sich – alles bewegt sich with music by Walter Gronostay.

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contribution, pointedly referring to the “poorly attended concert halls”.29 Ruttmann’s own sync-soundfilm Melodie der Welt was shown in three distinct versions (i.e., separate montage experiments) accompanied with music composed by Wolfgang Zeller. Bertolt Brecht sought “to give art an instructive character”30 instilling in the participants a revolutionary discipline as “the basis of freedom”31 This was for him the role and purpose of the modern artist. His Lindbergh piece “is value- less unless learned from” and is “not intended to be of use to the present-day radio but to alter it.” He also called for “a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer”.32 His admittedly utopian aim was not “to renovate ideological institutions [such as the radio] on the basis of the existing social order by means of innovations. Instead” he wrote, “our innovations must force them to surrender that basis”.33 Frederic Jameson attributes the development of Brecht’s Modernism to his experiments with the radio apparatus, resulting in an aesthetic approach that “demands the acknowledgement of radio’s formal uniqueness as a medium, of its fundamental properties as a specific art in its own right, a form in which the antithesis of words and music no longer holds, but a new symbiosis of these two formerly separate dimensions is effectuated and rehearsed”.34 Those experiments also marked the beginnings of Brecht’s engagement with a Marxist aesthetics.

Grammophonmusik

In the early 1920s, the gramophone was the most technologically advanced means of reproducing and conserving sounds, and of working with previously recorded sounds. Mark Katz describes how “the manipulation of pre-recorded discs” formed the basis of a 1920 Dadaist performance featuring “eight phonograph operators simultaneously playing classical and popular discs backward and forward and at differing speeds; the effect was apparently an intention- ally complex and absurd polyphony”.35 László Moholy-Nagy first broached the

29 Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: 55. 30 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: 52. 31 Op. Cit., 32. 32 Ibid., 31–32. 33 Ibid., 53. 34 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998): 166. 35 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010): 117.

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250 Williams subject in ‘Production-Reproduction’ published in De Stijl in July 1922. The task he outlined was to turn the gramophone from a reproductive apparatus into a productive tool for making music.

So far it has been the job of the phonograph to reproduce already existing acoustic phenomena. The tonal oscillations to be reproduced were incised on a wax plate by means of a needle and then retranslated into sound […]

An extension of this apparatus for productive purposes could be achieved as follows: the grooves are incised by human agency into the wax plate, without any external mechanical means, which then produce sound effects which would signify – without new instruments and without an orchestra – a fundamental innovation in sound production (of new, hith- erto unknown sounds and tonal relations) both in composition and in musical performance.36

The following year, Piet Mondrian the editor of De Stijl, published his own essay on Grammophonmusik: ‘Neoplasticism in Music: Possibilities of the Gramophone’. His ideas were influenced by the Paris concert he attended in 1921, at which Luigi Russolo, the Futurist composer or bruitist, had performed with ‘noise instruments’ or intonarumori. Also in attendance, a group of Da- daists (perhaps even the gramophone-performers of 1920) had attempted to disrupt proceedings. In particular, Mondrian was excited by the prospect of exerting technological control over sound. Here was a way of depersonalizing music in keeping with the new objectivist aesthetic impulse (Neue Sächlichkeit): new instruments for the new man in new times. Only by technological means could the artist meet the conceptual demands of a pure art of sound (absoluter Hörkunst). Soon after Mondrian’s essay appeared in German, Moholy-Nagy penned a second essay, ‘New Forms of Music: Potentialities of the Phonograph’, that enlarged on some of Mondrian’s concepts. Moholy-Nagy acknowledged that the gramophone could indeed eradi- cate the need for interpretation of music by performers, since the composer could himself record music directly to disc, or even engrave the surface of a blank disc using a stylus. He recognised the imperative of capturing the trace of sound, or sound object, in concrete material form before the necessary

36 László Moholy-Nagy, 2006 [1922/1923], ‘Production-Reception: Potentialities of the Pho- nograph’, in Audio Culture. Christoph Cox & Daniel Warner eds. (New York: Continuum, 2006 [1922/1923]): 332.

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technological control of sound could be exerted for the aesthetic purpose of producing sound, using a sound re-producing apparatus. Moholy-Nagy was to explore creative gramophone techniques at the Bauhaus in Weimar during the summer of 1923 in collaboration with music critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who later recalled:

We experimented together, playing records backward, which created sur- prising effects, especially with piano recordings. We drilled into the records in strange ways, so that they didn’t play regularly, but wobbled and produced grotesque glissando tones. We even scratched into the grooves with tiny needles and so created rhythmic figures and noises that radically altered the sense of the music.37

Moholy-Nagy (with Mondrian) aspired to an objective and plastic art of phonography, and shared the aim of Gebrauchsmusik38 in empowering ordinary people through participation in creative music-making and not merely in reproducing existing bourgeois music culture. An aspect of this idea is the use of available, accessible and familiar means at the workers’ disposal for the purpose of making and engaging with music as experienced in everyday life: on gramophone discs, the radio, and at the cinema. Moholy-Nagy also considered the potential of optical sound-on-film for synthetic sound production, creating images directly on the soundtrack to be replayed as sound. Hindemith, experimented with productive phonographic techniques using multiple gramophones to create works of Grammophonmusik, which he presented at the Neue Musik Berlin festival in 1930.39 By 1927, he had already dismissed the compositional potential of direct etching into the wax disc.40

37 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt in Patterson, Instruments for New Music: 90. 38 “Another aspect of modern music is the so called Gebrauchsmusik—a sort of departure from Modernism by those composers who were left unsatisfied writing only for the concert hall, and wanted to bring music closer to real life, even declaring that music is obliged to serve a concrete purpose. In the famous festivals of Donau-Eschingen and Baden Baden, we experimented with the media of theatre, film, radio, music for bands, community singing, schoolchildren, short operas, etc. […] The value of this music was to be measured by its usefulness to the people in their struggle. And this struggle was the struggle against reaction and fascism.” Hanns Eisler, c.1944, ‘Contemporary Music & Fascism’, in Hanns Eisler – Musik und Politik – Schriften 1924–1948, ed. Günter Mayer (veb Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig. 1973: 489–493). 39 Katz, Capturing Sound: 110. 40 Paul Hindemith, ‘Zur mechanischen Musik’, quoted in Patterson, Instruments for New Music : 91.

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Now, Hindemith and Toch were using re-recording or ‘dubbing’ techniques – combining the outputs of multiple machines in order to work with pre- recorded sounds. The Neue Musik concert on the 18th of June featured pieces by Toch and Hindemith: Originalwerke für Schallplatten (original works for disc); Trickaufnahmen (trick recordings); and works of Gesprochenemusik (spoken music). Katz suggests some of these works required more than one gramophone or phonograph to be manipulated during the performance, and these were also accompanied by vocal and musical performers. The works were prepared at the suitably equipped Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Georg Schünemann, its director, expressed his astonishment at these radically new works, a response no doubt shared by many in the festival audience:

If vowels are sung and are raised in pitch, curiously strange sounds ring out; and if they are combined with consonants in the manner of solfège syllables, a nearly instrumental sound arises. How these amazing pieces worked hardly a musician could say, and how these unusual sounds came into being no one knew, whether through combining musical instruments, voices, or even noises. And yet every compositional, logical, and tonal aspect was precisely planned.41

In the audience the night of the Grammophonmusik concert was the seven- teen year-old John Cage. Cage, too, was attracted to the creative use of sound technologies. He later incorporated into his compositional practice the radio as an indeterminate sound source in Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) and Radio Music (1956); test records as sound sources on multiple variable speed turntables in Imaginary Landscape No.1 (1939); and developed Cartridge Music (1960) by applying the needle-pickup of a record player to various objects and amplifying the result. In 1937, Cage wrote, “Every film studio has a library of ‘sound effects’ recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination”.42 Cage also understood that the use of sound-on-film fundamentally changed the composer’s relation to time: “The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The ‘frame’ or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit of measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer’s

41 Georg Schünemann in Katz, Capturing Sound: 113. 42 John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, Silence (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968 [1937]: 3.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 253 reach.”43 Cage would also go on to make extensive use of phonographic ‘film’44 or audio tape.45 Grammophonmusik was able to address two major concerns of its day: firstly, the attempt to expand the sonic palette of the composer to include both found sounds, and synthetic sounds produced by technological means alone. Secondly, the circumvention of the performer as interpreter of the composer’s score, and live performance as the sole means of its dissemination, fuelling composers’ ambitions for total control over their music, which would be pur- sued intently at the wdr Cologne studio in the 1950s. However, the application of Grammophonmusik techniques quickly fell out of favour as they were heav- ily constrained by the fixed nature of the recording medium. Experiments in using gramophone records for sound broadcasting tended to be limited to the creation of sound effects for radio drama, or for the reproduction of complete dramatic performances on multiple gramophone discs which had been pre- recorded, and which subsequently could be re-broadcast in identical form on different radio stations. Moholy-Nagy abandoned the gramophone as inadequate to the role of “an apparatus that can be operated directly and produce all manner of tones in any number and quality, without an intervening medium”. Aside from the new music scene in Weimar Germany, one other creative repurposing of disc-based phonographic technology proved significant: the experiments of Soviet artist Dziga Vertov and his “acoustic laboratory”. Vertov was a student in Pavlov’s Department at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St Petersburg. From 1916, Vertov conducted montage experiments using a Pathéphone wax disc recorder.46 Drawing inspiration from Maya- kovsky’s Futurist poetry, noted for its auditory effects and musical rhythm and structure, Vertov at first made “literary-musical montages of words”.47 He was interested in “examining in practice the effect of direct sound recordings of auditory signals” and concerned himself with “the expressive possibilities of sound” for a “new type of art – the art of life as it is”. Already, Vertov had become aware of the close relation between radio and film, and in 1923

43 Op. cit., 5. 44 Walter Ruttmann describes sound-on-film as “photographic sound art”. See Jean- paul Goergen Walter Ruttmanns Tonmontagen als Ars Acustica (Siegen: Universität- Gesamthochschule-Siegen, 1994): 25. 45 See ‘Radio and Audiotape’ in Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Rout- ledge, 2003): 163–177. 46 Tim Crook, Radio Drama: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1999): 35. 47 Vlada Petrić, Constructivism in Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 25.

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254 Williams would adopt the slogan “Radio-ear – the montage “I hear!”.48 Vlada Petrić traces Dziga Vertov’s adoption of Formalist critical approaches to writing and poetry, under the sway of Mayakovsky, in both his montage theory and in his sound- and film-making practice. He later referred to himself as “writing on film” and described himself as a “cinematic poet”.49 Vertov began by experimenting with creative writing in a Futurist vein. Having verified the insufficiency of writing for notating sound events, he concluded: “In addition to vowels and consonants, there were different melodies to hear, with motifs hardly susceptible to reproduction. We would have to reproduce them with some new musical sign. Yet, musical signs that corresponded to natural sounds did not exist”.50 In ‘The Birth of Kino-Eye’ (1923) Vertov described his early experiments: “It then turned into an enthusiasm for editing shorthand records, gramophone recordings. Into a special interest in the possibility of documentary sound recordings. Into experiments in recording, with words and letters, the noise of a waterfall, the sounds of a lumbermill, etc.”51 After two years of experimentation, he became frustrated by the limitations of the available technology.

And one day in the spring of 1918 … returning from a train station. There lingered in my ears the sighs and rumble of the departing train … someone’s swearing … a kiss … someone’s exclamation … laughter, a whistle, voices, the ringing of the station bell, the puffing of the locomotive … whispers, cries, farewells …. And [I thought] while walking: I must get a piece of equipment that won’t describe, but will record, photograph these sounds. Otherwise it’s impossible to organize, edit them. They rush past, like time.52

Finding the state of development in sound recording equipment inadequate to the task of working creatively with recorded sounds as concrete (but plastic) material, Vertov abandoned the purely acoustic realm; and turned instead to the ciné-camera. Dziga Vertov described his film montage technique as “film writing”, “the art of writing in film shots”, and so, by analogy, sound-montage

48 Dziga Vertov, Kino Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov. ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 18. 49 See ‘Vertov and Mayakovsky’ and ‘Futurist and formalist expression’ in Petrić, Constructiv- ism in Film: 25–35 and 35–44, respectively. 50 Dziga Vertov in Freire & Palombini ‘Early Impressions from Both Sides of the Loudspeak- er’: 70. 51 Dziga Vertov, Kino Eye: 40. 52 Loc. cit.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 255 would in the ensuing years take the form of “sound-writing” (literally: phonography), or “writing with sound”: “This is the art of writing in film-shots. […] Shots enter into organic interaction; they enrich one another, combine their efforts, form a collective body, thereby releasing surplus energy.”53 The need for a sound recording medium with the flexibility of film was becoming increas- ingly evident. Klaus Schöning54 was paying homage indirectly to Dziga Vertov and his pioneering work in montage technique, when he described sound production in the neues Hörspiel as “Writing on Tape”.55

Acoustical Film

Rudolph Arnheim acknowledged that sound recording technology for broadcasting, “makes us independent of the time and place of production”.56 Gramophone technology already allowed for the incorporation of pre-r ecorded sounds and even short montage sequences into live radio drama, but it still left problems of timing and balance unresolved. It placed significant artistic control in the hands of a technician, who effectively became a performer, rather than in the hands of the producer, whom Arnheim identified as the true radiophonic artist. After declaring that “the development of radio art is more pow- erfully retarded than we imagine”,57 Arnheim advocated applying film-editing technique to radio production. He suggested that, if the producer

works with mechanical records, he has then like the film producer, the possibility of choosing the best of several shots. And if the records are

53 Op cit., 272. However, it is not to Dziga Vertov (born Denis Arkadyevich Kaufman) but to his younger brother and cameraman Mikhail Kaufman that we should perhaps attribute the inspiration for the montage technique that Walter Ruttmann explored first in his film Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927). Kaufman had made Moscow in 1926, depicting a day in the life of a city, which inspired not only The Man with the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov (1929) but also Rain by Joris Ivens (1929), which portrayed the city of Amsterdam during a rainstorm. Nor should the contribution of Vertov’s editor, co-director, and wife (and also one of The Council of Three) Elizaveta Svilova. See biographical note in Dziga Vertov, Kino Eye: 12. 54 From 1968–1991 the Director of the West Deutscher Rundfunk Hörspielstudio and from 1991–2001 the Head of the wdr Studio Akustische Kunst. 55 Mark Ensign Cory, The Emergence of an Acoustical Art Form (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1974): 103. 56 Arnheim, Radio: 128. 57 Op. cit., 129.

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made, not on gramophone records but on sound-strips, he has the fur- ther possibility of exactly determining the ‘cutting’, that is, specifying the beginning and the end of every piece of montage exactly to a second.58 [my emphasis]

If radio drama production were to be modelled after that of film – a “filmic wireless play” or “acoustical film” – involving “careful montage-work which is finished before the broadcast begins”, it would be “a step of great importance for the development of the art of radio”, freeing it from the time and place of an originary performance. Alfred Braun, Intendant of Radio Berlin, described an acoustical film as a work that “through its dreamlike, quickly moving sequence of images gliding, jumping, over-lapping each other, alternating between close-ups and distance shots blending in and out, deliberately transferred the techniques of moving pictures to the radio”.59 The aesthetic of the acoustical film was made possible by the use of optical sound-on-film.60 One of the most technologically successful was that developed by Tri-Ergon in Berlin. The benefits of using optical sound included the fact that

it allowed one to freeze and visually preserve a sound for study. These sound pictures could also be manipulated and altered, generating en- tirely new sounds and sound arrangements. Parts of a sound might be excised while individual sounds or entire pieces of music could be reor- dered, reversed, and superimposed by cutting, rearranging, and splicing the film.61

Gramophone technology allowed for the variation in playback speed, reverse playback, loop playback and dub-editing between multiple machines, but precise editing and sequencing had been unavailable prior to the introduction of optical sound-on-film, which also made practical for the first time certain pro- cesses of sound manipulation and sound synthesis. Two basic approaches to

58 Ibid., 131. 59 Alfred Braun in Klaus Schöning & Mark Ensign Cory, ‘The Contours of Acoustic Art’, Theatre Journal 43(3 Radio Drama) (1991): 316. 60 Aside from the gramophone, available sound recording techniques included wire recording, paper and steel tape (Marconi/Stille & Blattnerphone) which all preceded the 1935 aeg Magnetophon, acknowledged as the first successful magnetic tape recorder, but which was restricted (predominantly to the military) until after 1945. 61 Richard S. James, ‘Avant-Garde Sound-on-Film Techniques and Their Relationship to Electro-Acoustic Music’, Music Quarterly lxxii (1): 74.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 257 the use of montage with optical sound emerged: that of working with recorded sound or music; and that made with animated or drawn images photographed directly onto the soundtrack to create synthetic sound, known at the time as Syntonfilm, in effect anticipating synthesized electronic music by decades. Guido Bagier was artistic director of the sound-film department at ufa, which supported the development of the Tri-Ergon system. In 1926 he wrote the article “The Talking Film” for the Musik und Maschine special edition of the Musikblätter des Anbruch, proclaiming, “we will have to abandon the concept of music based in reality and its imitation through the machine, […] rather, the machine will produce its own acoustic content in accordance with its nature”.62 Bagier saw that sound recording gave concrete material form to the traces of sounds, so opening up new ways of both ‘notating’ sounds and composing with them directly. Bagier demonstrated the Tri-Ergon system at the 1927 Baden-Baden music festival. On the 26th of June 1928, Bagier presented three short optical sound-film experiments made using the Tri-Ergon system on the Berlin Funkstunde. Actual soundtracks from existing films were broadcast, rather than autonomous sound works recorded on film for reproduction on air.63 The event was judged such a success that the following year Hans Flesh at Berlin Radio commissioned Walter Ruttmann to make an acoustical film using the Tri-Ergon system. Flesch had been station director at Radio Frankfurt when he collaborated with Brecht and Weill on the broadcast project Der Flug des Lindberghs, and in 1929 had become director at Radio Berlin’s Funkstunde. He was among those who recognised the creative potential of sound recording technology, as critical to the development of radiophonic art, and took a particular interest in the possibilities presented by ‘sound-on-film’.

Today’s radio drama director works too much in front of the microphone, and not enough from out of the microphone …. However, if he wants to create from out of the microphone, then there is a path that leads in this direction – activating a medium between artist and machine (the microphone), which makes the moral expression and the production of the artist with the machine appropriate. We believe that this medium is the sound film …. The primary characteristic of the machine is precision. If something artistic should emanate from a machine, then this primary feature must not be damaged. However, a radio drama for instance, can

62 Guido Bagier, ‘Der sprechende Film’, Musikblätter des Anbruch (‘Musik und Maschine’ nos. 8–9) (1926): 380–4 in Patterson, Instruments for New Music: 83. 63 Goergen Walter, Ruttmanns Tonmontagen als Ars Acustica: 4.

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never be performed with the types of precision demanded by the machine. This is possible when the film is activated as intermediary, as it eliminates all contingencies, all disturbances, and all improvisations …. In the case of a radio drama recorded through this optical sound process, a shape can be created after playback through cutting, crossfade(s), splicing etc., which the director considers completely successful and then presents to listeners in the evening.64

Weekend

In 1929 Hans Flesh commissioned Walter Ruttmann and Friedrich Bischoff to produce Hörfilme in a joint experiment by the radio and film industries to explore the potential of optical sound-on-film for use in broadcasting. The presentation of these experiments were timed to coincide with the celebration of five years broadcasting at Radio Berlin. Ruttmann, who had already become well known for his “absolute film” Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a City) (1927) offered to make the acoustical film Weekend.

Weekend is a study in sound montage. I used the film strip to record sound exclusively, yielding what amounts to a blind film. My research aimed at revealing overarching rules that govern the sequencing and combining of sound elements in an organic whole, an approach akin to what we used to do with visual elements in silent film.65

Ruttmann worked on Weekend at the Tri-Ergon studios. He published an article in Film-Kürier declaring, “the way is open to perfecting a new acoustic art – new in its means and in its effect.”66 He worked from a mobile recording van, collecting sounds throughout 1929. Weekend features sounds from U-Bahn stations, railway sidings, factories and many other Berlin locations. Ruttmann also recorded additional sounds such as gongs and drum rolls (which he later reversed) in Tri-Ergon’s Mariendorf studios. Ruttmann’s cityscape echoes the city-symphony genre in film, which he had helped to develop. In keeping with

64 Hans Flesh in Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound: 78. 65 Walter Ruttmann in Andy Birtwistle, ‘Photographic Sound Art and the Silent Modernity of Walter Ruttmann’s ‘Weekend’ (1930)’. The New Soundtrack 6 (2) (2016): 121. 66 W. Ruttmann, ‘Neue Gestaltung von Tonfilm und Rundfunk: Programm einer photogra- phischen Hörkunst’, Film-Kürier 11(255) (Berlin: 26 October, 1929) reproduced in Goergen, Walter Ruttmanns Tonmontagen als Ars Acustica: 25.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 259 his commitment to the aesthetics of the Neue Sächlichkeit, Ruttmann worked “With amateurs rather than professional actors; he recorded words, phrases, snatches of conversation, songs, and rhymes spoken and sung by people whom he brought in from their workplaces.”67 This approach to the recording process clearly indicates a conscious intention to use montage technique to construct the work, as Ruttmann described to Lotte Eisner during his work on Weekend,

And now the real work begins: cutting and montage. Cutting here is en- tirely different than for visual film, where the image already exists. With practice, it is possible to recognise what sound is represented by the dashes that make up the sound image. But a montage of the individual sounds has to be far more precise than with images. Ruttmann says, ‘With sound montage one-fifth of a second counts’.68

In shaping Weekend, Ruttmann worked with musical forms organizing “a strong rhythmic counterpoint” as he had previously in the film Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt (1927). He also made explicit reference to jazz in his complex rhythmic montage sequence Jazz der Arbeit, placed at both the beginning and at the end of Weekend. Ruttmann makes use here of the inher- ent rhythmic patterns in the sounds of sawing, hammering, typing and other forms of work. The sounds of Berlin workers heading for their weekend desti- nation naturally includes the rhythms of a train. The recording of particular sounds in the Tri-Ergon studio also allowed Ruttmann to isolate such sounds from their sonic environment, facilitating their rhythmic treatment. Compos- ing by ear, and the musicalization of ‘noise’, marks Weekend out as an early example of electroacoustic composition, and a precursor to musique concrète and the original-Ton Hörspiel. Daniel Gilfillan describes Weekend as:

a collage of mechanical, spoken word and transactional sound that evokes one weekend in the city of Berlin. The rhythm of the piece is formed by six movements, which charts a particularly modern experience of time through a progression of sounds that move from situations of work to brief moments of leisure. The first movement, referred to as “Jazz der Arbeit” (Jazz of Work), assembles the sounds of typewriters, telephone rings, cash registers, saws, hammers, and dictation. The piece transitions into “Feierabend” (Quitting Time) with the striking of clocks, the knell

67 Lotte Eisner quoted in Birtwistle, ‘Photographic Sound Art: 113. 68 Lotte Eisner, op. cit., 116.

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of factory sirens, and the gradual calming of typewriters to indicate the end of the workday. This is followed by “Fahrt ins Freie” (Journey to the Country), which begins with the sounds of departure: cranks of autos, train whistles, conductors voices; and equally mechanical sounds of arrival. The fourth movement, “Pastorale,” includes roosters crowing, birds singing, and the blending of cowbells and church bells to evoke a sense of time outside of the pace of the city. Yet this leisurely pace, these fleet- ing moments of relaxation are not able to offset the end of the weekend, signified in the final two movements, which announce the return of the work week and the syncopated rhythms of a time not one’s own.69

The first public presentation of Weekend was at an acousmatic concert given on the 15th of May, 1930 to invited guests at the Berlin Radio headquarters to celebrate five years of broadcasting. The first broadcast of Weekend took place on the 13th of June, on the Berlin Funkstunde along with Hallo! Hier Werde Erd- ball! by Friedrich Walter Bischoff, Director of Breslau Radio. Gilfillan notes that Bischoff made use of sound-on-film to create montage passages, but his work was in fact broadcast from four gramophone discs; itself a limited experiment in additive composition, using discs that could only run for four minutes each. If disc playback could be sequenced across numerous discs, it would be possible to broadcast longer pre-recorded works, which could be archived for re- broadcast. Bischoff subtitled his work Ein Hörsymphonie (an aural symphony) which related it to recent experiments in radiophonic music. The critical response to Weekend was enthusiastic.

There was no picture, just sound (which was broadcast). It was the story of a weekend, from the moment the train leaves the city until the whis- pering lovers are separated by the approaching [crowd struggling to get home]. It was a symphony of sound, speech-fragments and silence woven into a poem. If I had to choose between all of Ruttmannn’s works, I would give this one the prize as the most inspired. It re-created with perfect ease in sound the principle of picture poetry, which was the characteristic of the “absolute film.” (Hans Richter)70

Richter credited Ruttmann with having “established the artistic domain for sound film”, a problem that had vexed film-makers internationally for some

69 Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound: 3. 70 Hans Richter in Mark Ensign Cory, ‘Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art’, in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Douglas Kahn & Gregory Whitehead eds. (Cambridge Mass.: The mit Press, 1992): 340–341.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 261 time.71 Vsevolod Pudovkin, the great Soviet filmmaker credited Ruttmann with solving the theoretical and practical problem of sound in film. By applying the principles of film montage, sound and image could be edited independently with their own dialectical logic. Arranging sounds using optical sound-strips meant that Ruttmann could draw on the constructivist film-montage techniques he had employed in making the film Berlin (1927), and those advocated also by Dziga Vertov, with whose film technique Ruttmann’s can be usefully compared. Siegfried Kracauer compares Ruttmann’s work unfavourably to Dziga Vertov’s on The Man with the Movie Camera, citing Berlin’s apparent indifference to its subject matter.72 Even as Ruttmann was recording Berlin street sounds onto optical film discretely from a van, in Russia, Vertov was recording onto optical film using portable equipment made by Alexander Shorin for Vertov’s film Enthusiasm: the Symphony of the Donbass (1930): the first Soviet film to record sound in the field.73 The release of Enthusiasm was postponed, so the honour of being the first Soviet sound-film passed to Abram Room’s Pialtiletka released in March 1930 with sound design by Arseny Avraamov. Andrey Smirnov emphasizes Dziga Vertov’s “acoustical approach” to sound cinema, inferring that Dziga Vertov may have cut film to sound. He describes a contrapuntal method of film montage which “led to the creation of self-sufficient soundtracks,” that was “very close to the future Musique Concrète, invented by Pierre Schaeffer in Paris.

The Emergence of Radiophonic Art

Walter Ruttmann’s application of film-montage principles to optical sound was correct, because the development of sound-montage was understood as critical to the emergence of a radiophonic art. Radio thinkers and practitioners such as Arnheim, Braun, Flesch and Ruttmann, recognized that for a creative radiophonic praxis, sound had to become objectified in recordings, to become materialized so that it could be replayed repeatedly, worked, manipulated, cut, rearranged, combined, transformed, organised, mixed, and archived. To transform sounds into concrete materials for aesthetic purposes, radiophonic

71 Hans Richter in Patterson, Instruments for New Music: 105–106. 72 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: a Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947): 182–189. 73 Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia (London: Koenig Books, 2013): 167.

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artists first used the photo-chemical process of the optical sound-on-film. The historical conditions that allowed the emergence of a ‘purely’ radiophonic art first intersected in the production of Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 acoustical film, Weekend. This phenomenon was short-lived. Within three years of the first broadcast of Weekend, the National Socialist Party had seized power in Germany and Josef Goebbels had been appointed head of all German radio and film production, including that of ufa. Progres- sive radio artists Hans Flesch, Friedrich Walter Bischoff and Friedrich Wolf (the first kpd member to have a work broadcast), all fell foul of the National Social- ists who labelled their innovations “perversities”; and, in 1932, the party moved to dismiss them, arrest them, and intern or exile them. Wolf and Bischoff emi- grated after a period of detention. Ruttmann opted to fall in with the Nazis and worked with Leni Riefenstahl on Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will 1935) (script-editor, camera), and Olympia (1938) (editor). Hans Flesch ended up in Oranienberg concentration camp. Walter Benjamin committed suicide when he was refused permission to cross the Franco-Spanish border as he fled the German forces invading France. Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Bertolt Brecht, and Moholy-Nagy all fled to the usa. Marinetti opted to serve Mussolini’s Fascist cause. Brian Hanrahan, writing on the Hörfilm in the Weimar period, notes that the use of sound-on-film using the Tri-Ergon process proved too expensive for radio broadcast institutions to adopt, so they almost immediately reverted to a new iteration of disc-recording technology developed by Siemens especially for use in field recording.74 Within five years of the broadcast of Weekend, aeg had developed the Magnetophon, the first successful magnetic tape recording apparatus, perfecting the technology that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, would enable a fledgling radiophonic art to re-emerge and mature under more sympathetic conditions.75 Radiophonic art would rapidly expand with the widespread adoption of magnetic audio tape using electronic phonographic technique from about 1952, when Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry took delivery of the first tape machines at the Club d’Essai in Paris. The Futurist, Marxist and Constructivist approaches to sound broadcasting still manifest tendencies within the field of Radiophonic Art today. Firstly , there are those who follow the Futurists in celebrating the technology of

74 Brian Hanrahan (2009). ‘The Art of Actuality: Radio, Realism and the Hörfilm, 1924–1932’, PhD thesis, Arts & Sciences, Columbia University: 23–24. 75 See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter ((Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999): 105) on the capture of the Magnetophon by us forces in 1944, although Kittler notes that Alan Turing had one prior to that, at Bletchley Park.

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The Concrete ‘sound object’ 263

instantaneous dissemination of mediated sound, foregrounding live studio performance. Then there are the Marxists (or at least activists) who still agi- tate for a community of listener/producers creating their own content, who see promise in networked mobile computer-based technology, or alternative- ly, in the appropriation of older low-powered broadcast technology: micro- broadcasting. The heirs to the Constructivist approach continue to explore the potential of phonography for the generation, recording, and manipulation of concrete material ‘sound objects’ through sound studio production using flex- ible recording and storage media. Radiophonic art continues to engage its audience in the process of learning to listen as a means of achieving a critical understanding one’s own relation to – and situation in – the world at large. New works continue to emerge “of- fering the listening audience new modes of perception.”76 For all these artists one of their “utopias is an acoustic space accessible to everyone: the radio.”77

Acknowledgement

This research has been supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

76 Breitsameter, ‘1924: Radio Art’: 101. 77 Schöning & Cory, ‘Contours of Acoustic Art’: 312.

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