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Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker: “Fünf Mann Menschen” (1968)
From the album Musik für Radio, 1950-2000
This is part of a feature on the Austrian poet and experimentalist Ernst Jandl (1925-2000), in collaboration with Continuo’s Weblog. At Continuo’s you can find a wonderful album of Jandl’s sound poetry recorded at the BBC in 1966.
Fünf Mann Menschen (Five Man Mankind) was first broadcast on Stuttgart’s Southwestern Radio on November 14, 1968. Created by Jandl and his companion, the poet Friederike Mayröcker, Fünf Mann Menschen was credited with turning the genre of the Hörspiel (radio play) away from its literary postwar form back toward its experimental roots in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). While the so-called “classical” Hörspiel that took shape after World War II was usually a straightforward spoken text (a kind of “audiobook” avant la lettre), the new Hörspiel of the 1960s sought to exploit the unique potential of the radio medium, which included the entire spectrum of sound recently unleashed in electronic music studios around the world. (An excellent source on all this is Mark E. Cory’s essay “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art,” in the wonderful anthology Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde.)
Only 14 minutes in length (the typical Hörspiel was at least twice as long), Fünf Mann Menschen consists of a number of vignettes that evoke the successive stages of modern life and ironically undermine the conformist tendencies of contemporary society. Although much of the effect of the piece is language-specific, and thus meaningless to those who don’t speak German, it can also be appreciated as a kind of voice-based musique concrète. The creative use of stereophony in this work was also largely without precedent in the Hörspiel. It is presented here in an excerpted version.
Played 100 time(s).
July 06, 2010, 11:00pm
