Listening with Lefebvre

The Sound of the Everyday in Postwar Radio Art

Bibliographic Data

ID21836075
AuthorsJanina Müller (0000-0003-1410-9843, KU Leuven, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume19
Issue0
Publication date2025-07-22
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMusic and Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1938-7687 • E-ISSN: 1938-7687
PublisherUniversity of Michigan Library (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.3998/mp.8032
OpenAlexW4411199775
LanguageEN
References cited12

This paper traces sonic engagement with the everyday in postwar West German and French radiophonic culture. While the quotidian has been seen as a preoccupation of the French, a transnational perspective reveals cross-fertilization between political-artistic circles that occurred from the 1960s onwards. Central to this argument is French post-Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose seminal three-volume Critique of Everyday Life (published between 1947 and 1981) and related writings found resonance within both the French and German New Left and thus pushed the politicization of everyday life to the forefront of “1968.” The main concern of Lefebvre lay with the negative aspects brought about by modernity, where, despite technological advancement and increasing material comfort, daily life had lost its vital force and become subjugated under the forces of capitalist society. In France, his critical project tied in with the work of the nouveaux romanciers and their interest in what Georges Perec coined the “infra-ordinary.” At the same time, this group of artists was instrumental in the rise of the “Neues Hörspiel” (New radio play) in the 1960s, which further explored the sound of the everyday, and radio’s everydayness in particular. Using Lefebvre’s Critique and affiliated writings as a conceptual framework, I demonstrate through a number of analytical case studies, including Dieter Schnebel’s 1971 sound collage Hörfunk (Radiostücke I–V), Ferdinand Kriwet’s Radioselbst (1979), and Mauricio Kagel’s radio play Rrrrrrr. . ., Hörspiel über eine Radiophantasie (1982), how authors employed techniques of montage, stereophony, speech, and voice to stage the everyday as a site of sameness, repetition, and social alienation as well as to critically interrogate the spatial and temporal qualities of radio as an everyday medium

Computer Science · Intellectual Property Law

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access