"Since the appearance of the wireless, everyone has predicted, albeit in fairly vague terms, the rise of a truly radiophonic literature and dramatic art. And so, in every country, radio stations have invited us to listen to the story of the lighthouse keeper driven crazy by a tempest where, alone and powerless in his lighthouse he can only report to the listener what he sees, accompanied by elaborate noise-effects and the sirens of ships in distress; or else there is the story of the scholar in need of silence for his research, who is constantly interrupted by the piano of his neighbor, the trumpet of the faucet-seller, and the cries of the new-born. Today, however, it is no longer enough to shoot a pistol in the air in order to scare the audience or to pretend to be deaf, mad, or a stutterer in order to make them laugh. Why have we, in this new domain and public sphere, not yet come up with truly new forms of expression?
I am convinced that today's minds have a need for an imagination and lyrical transformation that cannot be satisfied by any conventional or even recent art forms, except by a radiophonic art. The taste for the unreal is part of this need, and it announces itself, among other examples, in the pleasure that an average audience, one not necessarily uneducated but young, takes in a film replete with special effects where human beings float in the air or turn into smoke, objects become animated and interfere in the action, and things refuse to abide by the rules that normally govern them. It seems to me that the waves of the wireless, remote and mysterious like the sources of our thought, can and should feed our imagination with the new inspiration that it deserves." (Paul Deharme)
Source : Deharme, Paul (1928), "Proposition for a Radiophonic Art", La Nouvelle Revue Française, vol. XXX (1928): 413–23.
In his 1928 article "Proposition d'un art radiophonique" Deharme even sounds like a surrealist theorist. Listeners to the radio, he states, need to pay attention to their own individual "théâtre interieur", and his desire was to encourage this process. He goes so far as to link his ideas explicitly to surrealism : "In effect, surrealism draws its source and life from the subconscious (as it is called today). And it is indeed in the subsconscious that we hope, with radio, to arouse feelings, directly, without awakening the interference of consciousness." On a practical level Robert Desnos worked with this idea of the interior theater in his plans fro broadcasts. In notes for a radio spot advertising Saint-Michel cigarettes, for example, Desnos proposed to recreate the noises and the atmosphere of a cabaret (where people, of course, smoke), and to include "cabaret" performances of "first-class stars" (he mentioned by name Marie Dubas, Damia, Mistinguett, Fernandel, Tino Rossi, and Maurice Chevalier), which would permit the "advertisement" to function as a kind of mini-concert. The scene was to be suggested by "the habitual sounds of a cabaret" in order to "create an atmosphere, an ambiance", so that the listeners culd close their eyes and pretend they were present, listening to "the most important part of the show (...) constituted by the singer and the songs he or she might sing". He consciously set out to evoke the aural effects of "being in two places at one" for his listeners, of what Scannell considers the "magic" of radio. (Katharine Conley)
Source : Conley, Katharine (2003), "Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous on Everyday Life", University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpt of the NMSAT (Networked Music & SoundArt Timeline)
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