Learning on ScreenPieces of Sound
Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio by Daniel Gilfillan (University of Minnesota Press, 2009., 240 pages. £18.50
About the Reviewer: Eve-Marie Oesterlen is the EUscreen Project manager for BUFVC. She was previously Information Research Assistant at the Norddeutscher Rundfunk broadcasting corporation in Hannover, Germany. Eve-Marie is completing her Ph.D. on Shakespeare’s late plays at the University of Hannover. She is co-editor of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide (2009). Follow Eve on Twitter (@Bufeve) or contact by E-mail
Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio, as the sub-title suggests, is an examination of the cultural history of German experimental radio broadcasting from the 1920s to the present. Anyone expecting a straightforward chronological account, however, will be disappointed. Focussing on three historical-technological periods considered central in the development of acoustic-based radio art, Gilfillan favours a concerted examination of selected case studies or rather, pieces of sound, within their specific political, economic and legislative surroundings.
Bringing home the fact that radio, far from having been killed by the video star, has continuously evolved as an artistic medium, Gilfillan’s imaginative study opens at the very forefront of the digital nexus. Contemporary experiments with the intermedial convergence of sound broadcast and Internet connectivity, such as ‘Wiretapping the Beast’, the interactive multimedia installation created by American-Japanese composer and digital artist Atau Tanaka for Germany’s Südwestrundfunk (SWR) in 2002, form the focus of the first chapter, making a refreshing change from those studies of German cultural broadcasting that tend to confine the history of radio art to the development of the radio play.
In a seemingly disjunctive move, the second chapter of Gilfillan’s book transports his Anglophone readers back to the early days of German radio broadcasting, the ground-breaking theoretical and experimental work of Hans Flesch, creator of the first German Hörspiel, and fellow pioneers, Friedrich Bischoff and Friedrich Wolf, whose radiophonic contributions were labeled as ‘perversions’ under National Socialist dictatorship. The radio theoretical ruminations of Bertold Brecht and Alfred Andersch are examined against the sociopolitical backdrop of the fledgling republic, while the fourth chapter considers the ways in which the nature and function of public space is interrogated by strategic or resistant uses of the medium in the age of global telecommunications. Examples here range from the pirate broadcasts of the West German Radio Grünes Fessenheim (now Radio Dreyeckland) in the 1970s to the agitprop artistry of the sonic work that has been transmitted on the Austrian Kunstradio programme of the Österreichische Rundfunk (ORF) since its inception in 1987.
What sets these various experimental ventures apart is also what holds together Gilfillan’s provocative and enlightening foray into the intersecting histories of radio and sound art: the “continued theoretical engagement with issues of sound quality, listener interactivity, and the role and function of intermediality” that has challenged the very definition and function of radio since its inception has also ensured the longlevity of radio as an artistic medium that “adapts to the impermanence of its political and legislative surroundings”.
Throughout the 240 page-long book, Gilfillan’s own writing voice clearly betrays a scholarly biography that spans both German studies and information literacy. Its address to an academic rather than a popular readership grants it the permission to assume a basic familiarity with the subject and occasionally, to become slightly demanding (if not experimental) in its long-windedness (sentences are seldom below 6 lines). As a result, while providing the reader with wide-ranging and up-to-date illustrative material, the originality of Gilfillan’s approach tends to dissipate in the labyrinthine construction of his argument. But these are minor shortcomings in a richly researched and thought-provoking book that makes an important contribution to the still under-researched field of sound media.
Eve-Marie Oesterlen
