Poetry on the Austrian Radio: Sound, Voice, and Intermediality

Radio history has many examples that illustrate the long-standing collaboration between the worlds of literature and the medial tools that the radio medium delivers. The intermediality at the heart of such collaborations understands radio production as a form that combines the textual modes bound up within the literary and the aural/spatial modes bound up within sound. Intermediality references how a discrete piece of media always exists within a series of medial configurations that provide it with a network of possible meanings and legitimacies. This chapter explores how radiophonic space organizes a notion of intermediality that features the compositional minds of artists and listeners as the site where these meanings and legitimacies take shape. It examines three poetry-based sound works by two Austrian radio artists, Petra Ganglbauer and Peter Pessl. It draws on radio theoretical writings by Otto Palitzsch and his early understanding of the Sendespiel and engages connections to the contours of the Neues Hörspiel and Ars Acustica developed by Klaus Schöning. These definitional pieces help explore the layered relationships between sound, dramaturgy, and broadcast and help uncover some of the paradoxical forces at play in creating such intermedial works within the institutional frameworks within radio production and radio consumption.