Territorializing Atmospherics: The Radiophonics of Public Space

Abstract

Scarlatti – A Radio Romance by Paul Carter is a radio work in the neue Hörspiel tradition broadcast in Australia in 1986. This article discusses a project in-progress, the remaking of Scarlatti in a ‘post-radio’ environment. German Hörspiel radio rehabilitated sound, often with the political (and poetic) object of developing a listening public resistant to the communicational aesthetics and tactics of mainstream media. Noise was understood as a kind of anonymous vernacular whose orchestration might contribute to the choreography of everyday life. In Scarlatti radio played multiple roles, private, public, performative: atmospherics and other markers of occasion signified a counter discourse of resistance to authority. Incorporated into the composition they represented public space. In a post-radio environment, the remaking of Scarlatti means using radio dramaturgically, in a post-representational way, to reterritorialize spaces of (resistant) listening.

Keywords:

• radiophonics
• public space
• reterritorialization
• dramaturgy
• entrainment

Notes

¹ Quoted by Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 87.

² Scarlatti – A Radio Romance, by Paul Carter, produced by Martin Harrison, acted by Andrew Tighe and Jose Farinas, trans. Rosamunda Droescher. First broadcast on Surface Tension, ABC FM Radio, September 13, 1986; second broadcast August 18, 1987; third broadcast on The Listening Room, ABC-FM, January 18, 1988.

³ Andreas Hagelüken, “Acoustic (Media) Art: Ars Acustica and the Idea of a Unique Art Form for Radio – An Examination of the Historical Conditions in Germany,” World New Music Magazine (Saarbrücken) 90, no. 102 (July 2006): 5.

⁴ Paul Carter, “Birdsong from Memory as Desire,” Scripsi, 5, no. 3 (1989): 235–44, reproduces the passages from the work relevant to this discussion.

⁵ For a brief survey of these and other radiophonic works, see Andrew McLennan, “Formes Circulaires: A Journey around the Radio Works of Paul Carter,” Southerly 66, no. 2 (2006): 81–102.

⁶ Christoph Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism,” Journal of Visual Culture 10, no. 2 (2011): 145–61, 154.

⁷ Ibid. Cox is paraphrasing Friedrich Kittler.

⁸ Anon., “The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry’s War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties” (n.d.). Available online: http://mcpress.media-commons.org/piracycrusade/chap2/music-in-the-air-radio-and-the-record-industry/.

⁹ Gerhard Rühm, quoted in McLennan, “Formes Circulaires,” 85.

¹⁰ Klaus Schöning and Mark E. Cory, “The Contours of Acoustic Art,” Theatre Journal 43 no. 3 (1991): 307–24, 322. I am indebted to the chapter “The Radiophonic Artist” in Christopher Williams’s unpublished Ph.D. for this quotation. Schöning‘s Ars Acustica comes out of the German radio Hörspiel tradition. Influenced by developments in electro-acoustical composition in the 1960s, it explored a specific treatment of sound material in the medium of radio.

¹¹ Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 262.

¹² It was the recognition that Tuned Noises was not an exercise in acoustic ethnography but an investigation of the Originalton that recommended the work to Schöning. Abgestimmte Gerausche was first broadcast on West German Radio, from the Studio Akustische Kunst, Cologne, May 24, 1994.

¹³ Jacques Attali, Noise, The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 6.

¹⁴ Albert Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis (Boston: MIT Press, 1994), 29.

¹⁵ Samuel Beckett, Disiecta (London: John Calder, 1983), 49.

¹⁶ Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 87–8.

¹⁷ Ibid., 88.

¹⁸ Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti (1953), 167.

¹⁹ Ibid., 202–3.

²⁰ A kind of mishearing or auditory parapraxis was involved in this original premise. Kirkpatrick had compared the opening phrase of this sonata to the bugle call of the Italian carabinieri. But in my recollection his observation was transposed to Spain, and for the relatively innocuous bugle I substituted the far more ominous police siren.

²¹ Paul Carter, “Exploding Scarlatti” (n.d.). Available online: http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/interweaving-performance-cultures/events/workshops/workshop_paul-carter_theater-der-welt.html/.

²² Bertolt Brecht, “Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat,” in Blätter des Hessischen Landestheaters (Darmstadt), No. 16, July 1932. Available online: http://telematic.walkerart.org/telereal/bit_brecht.html; repr. as Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” in Brecht on Theatre, trans. and ed. J. Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964).

²³ Kurt Weill, “CD Review: The Lindburgh Flight.” Classical.net. (n.d.). Available online: http://www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/c/cap60012a.php/.

²⁴ Brecht, “Radio as an Apparatus of Communication.”

²⁵ Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (Boston: MIT Press, 2002), 271.

²⁶ Arturo Barea, Lorca: The Poet and his People, trans. I. Barea (London: Faber & Faber, 1949). Barea was also a reporter broadcasting during the Civil War to Latin America from Spain as “The Unknown Voice of Madrid.”

²⁷ Dan Lander, “Radiocastings: Musings on Radio and Art,” in Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, ed. D. Augaitis and D. Lander (Banff: Banff Centre for the Arts, 1994). Available online: http://cec.sonus.ca/econtact/Radiophonic/Radiocasting.htm/.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Brecht, “Radio as an Apparatus of Communication.”

³¹ Michael Bull, “Thinking about Sound, Proximity and Distance in Western Experience: The Case of Odysseus’s Walkman,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. V. Erlmann (New York: Berg, 2004).

³² James Martin Harding, Adorno and ‘A Writing of the Ruins’: Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 56.

³³ Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’ironie (Paris: Flammarion, 1964).

³⁴ There is a learned debate about Scarlatti’s attitude to the pianoforte, but in Scarlatti the radio voices commenting on the sound action remark: “At the depression of a pedal to prolong the pain. […] This decadence destroys feeling.”

³⁵ Jankélévitch, L’ironie, 37.

³⁶ Again, this notion is well-known within the utopian discourse of neue Hörspiel. Heisenbuttel makes the point that the New Hörspiel represented “an ‘open’ dramaturgy,” a critique of traditional “narrative Hörspiel dramaturgy.” There emerges in relation to this “a kind of ‘Hörspielmacher,’ who often carried over the creative process into the production studio as director. This new kind of writer– composer–director expanded the inventory of artistic tools available and put them to new tests.” ; Schöning and Cory, “Contours of Acoustic Art,” 320.

³⁷ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76.

³⁸ Ibid., 44.

³⁹ Kai van Eikels, “Suggestions for an Un-creative Collectivity.”

⁴⁰ Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will, “In Time with the Music: The Concept of Entrainment and its Significance for Ethnomusicology” (paper presented at European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, 11, 2005, 3–142, 20. Available online: http://oro.open.ac.uk/2661/1/InTimeWithTheMusic.pdf).

⁴¹ Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, 303.

⁴² Brecht, “Radio as an Apparatus of Communication.”

⁴³ William Hellerman and Don Goddard, Sound/Art. Exhibition catalog, The Sculpture Center, New York City, May 1–30, 1983; and BACA/DCC Gallery June 1–30, 1983.

⁴⁴ Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Swarm Rhythm Refrain Singularity,” in Kukkia, ed. K. Kucia and T. Nauha (c.2008), 92–7, 93. Available online: http://www.academia.edu/7817648/Kukkia_book/.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ “In Brecht’s staging the orchestra/chorus bears a placard marked ‘The Radio’ (Das Radio), while The Flier’s placard reads ‘The Listener’ (Der Hörer). A large sign along the back wall exhorts the audience to join the performance by singing loudly with the Flier. The audience, then, both performs and witnesses a lesson in how to listen to the radio. It performs this lesson by actively participating in the work while it witnesses this proper relation by following the Lindbergh character (at once designated as Hero and Listener) as he takes control of the Apparat against all odds. Wilson Smith quotes Brecht as saying, “in this way a collaboration develops between participant and Apparat”; Wilson Smith, Total Work of Art, 85.

⁴⁷ Katja Rothe, “Topologie der Verhaltensfuhrung: Resonanzen zwischen Kurt Lewin und Bertolt Brecht,” 11 (n.d.). Available online: http://www.udk-berlin.de/sites/theaterforschung/content/e164830/e164837/e164838/infoboxContent166894/TopologiederVerhaltensfhrung2010_ger.pdf/.

⁴⁸ Javier Lezaun and Nera Calvillo, “In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin’s Atmospherics, Journal of Cultural Economy 1–33, 19–22. Available online: http://www.academia.edu/8318342/Lezaun_and_Calvillo_In_the_Political_Laboratory_Kurt_Lewins_Atmospheres/.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 23.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Carter

Paul Carter is a writer and artist whose recent books include Dark Writing (University of Hawaii Press, 2008), Ground Truthing (University of Western Australia Publishing., 2010) and Meeting Place (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). His new book due out later this year from University of Western Australia Publishing is Places Made After Their Stories: design and the art of choreotopography. He recently guest edited Performance Research 16, no. 5, “On Turbulence.” He is Professor of Design (Urbanism) at the School of Architecture & Design/Design Research Institute, RMIT University (Melbourne).