Ever since the beginnings of our cultural history, experimental American artists have gone abroad to work (and reap rewards) in ways not possible at home. What has long been true for advanced American art in general is now particularly true for radio art. The center for avant-garde American radio production for the past decade has been in Cologne, Germany, the home of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the largest of the German stations.
Of the Americans producing programs for WDR, as it is commonly called, nearly all initially earned their reputations in arts other than radio: the composers John Cage, Malcolm Goldstein, Sorrel Hays, Alvin Curran, Charles Amirkhanian, Tom Johnson, Pauline Oliveros, and Charlie Morrow; the poets Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and Jerome Rothenberg; and the visual artists Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Stephan von Huene, Faith Wilding, and Bill Fontana. Some of the extraordinary programs made by them are heard from time to time over WNYC-FM in New York City. Most are available at Goethe House, where they may be heard on tapes in the library.
Ear-Play
The principal patron for this beneficence has been Klaus Schoning, a staff producer for WDR's Horspiel department since the 1960s. Horspiel, pronounced "her-speel," translates literally as "ear-play"; and within the bureaucracies of the huge German radio stations, such departments are distinct from "literature" and "feature." A comparable phrase here has been "radio drama," which has been defined as an acoustic art in which actors talk emphatically at each other, abetted by sound effects. One reason not to use that English epithet now is that the American artists working for Schoning have been doing something else; indeed, they use the term Horspiel to define their own work, sometimes even dropping the umlaut and italics, thus making the word American.
Born in 1936 in Konigsberg, then in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, USSR), Schoning studied theater in West Berlin and Munich before going to work at WDR in the early 1960s. Becoming a staff producer in the Horspiel department, he began twenty years ago to work with avant-garde German writers, sponsoring innovative programs that he called "Neues Horspiel," as they represented a departure not only from American kinds of radio theater, epitomized by soap opera with its semblance of live theater, but also from the more literary German radio play, customarily a dreamily evocative poetic text. Learning from the sound poets, Schoning realized that language could express in terms other than syntax; and from composers he learned that the musical organization of speech could be just as valid for radio as the traditional theatrical sound. The key term in his esthetic became "acoustic."
Schoning first came to America in 1980. The turning point in his executive career, as he describes it, came two years before, when he commissioned the famed American composer John Cage to do Roaratorio, a magnificent hour-long mix of sounds with reference to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Working with John David Fullemann, an American sound designer now residing in Sweden, Cage composed an expansive collection of freshly gathered sounds from all the places mentioned in Joyce's book. Underneath the mix was the cantus firmus, so to speak, of Cage himself reading one of his own "Writings Through Finnegans Wake." A masterpiece even in Cage's own oeuvre, Roaratorio won the coveted Karl-Sczuka Pries of German radio. More recently,
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