Radio Plays Politics: Musical Avant-Garde and 1968 Radio Culture

Beginning with the 1960s and continuing well into the 1980s, various experimental efforts took place in the context of West German radio art that are subsumed under the term “Neues Hörspiel.” This new type of radio play distanced itself from the postwar literary radio play by embracing advanced musical and poetic tendencies. This project investigates the politicization of sound in experimental radio plays by showing how they perform and actualize political knowledge that circulated among the New Left. It focuses on the hitherto neglected work of avant-garde composers who contributed most actively to these tendencies, i.e. Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel, and John Cage. In engaging with radio, they sought to explore how the medium could be used in novel and challenging ways that would stimulate critical thinking and political awareness. However, to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the role that radio played in conveying new leftist critical thought, the project also studies thematically affiliated radio plays by other artists, such as Elfriede Jelinek, Urs Widmer, Ferdinand Kriwet, and Ludwig Harig. In this way, it seeks to explore how different creative approaches within the field of the “Neue Hörspiel” shaped and negotiated the politics of 1968 radiophonic sound.