Listening with Lefebvre: The Sound of the Everyday in Postwar Radio Art
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Music and Politics
DOI: 10.3998/mp.8032
Author: Janina Müller
Institution: KU Leuven
Language: English
Topic: Sound Studies and Aurality
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411199775