Radioatelier: Czech radio space for acoustic art 2003–2022

Abstract

In 2003, a new radio programme called Radioatelier was launched as part of the Czech Radio 3 – Vltava broadcast, the national public service art channel. It was aimed at presenting experimental radio forms, something completely unprecedented at that time. With 213 new commissions by December 2022, the programme entered its third decade of existence, having won a number of major radio art awards, while facing threats of impending programme cancellation in 2023. The present article is quite personal, offering generational insights of the producer, who was privileged enough to set goals and scope of the programme in its initial stages and who went on to co-exist with it for the following two decades. It also presents the complete list of sound compositions commissioned by Radioatelier between 2003 and 2022.

1. A PERSONAL MATTER

In 2003, I was offered the position of producer for a new programme called Radioatelier that was being launched as part of the Czech Radio 3 – Vltava broadcast, the national public service art channel (which I happily accepted). I was not new to the institution as I had worked in the Czech radio drama department as music editor and sound designer since 1996. In addition, I was about to begin my PhD studies in music composition the same year; one of my chief interests at that time was electroacoustic music, with radio art soon becoming its main topic. This status of a producer/composer has been imprinted on the newly born radio programme and defined the production/conceptual orientation of its further development. In many ways it marked the beginning of my own professional career, including my later academic orientation in the field of music and technology in its widest sense.

2. THE 1990S AS A TURNING POINT

There is limited space to outline the history of electroacoustic music and sound art in Czechia, or Czechoslovakia respectively (for historical context, see Zajicek 1995); however, I will mention one crucial concept here – that of discontinuity, strongly affecting all fields of society, palpable literally everywhere during the 1990s. The preceding era of the so-called ‘Normalisation’, which was ushered in by the Russian invasion in 1968, is marked with the massive outflow of elites, who went into exile in the democratic West, as well as with the gradual establishing of local unofficial communities. Such communities represented an open or covert dissident force, forming so-called ‘isles of positive deviation’ in various ways (politically, intellectually, culturally, spiritually).

Despite extensive exploration of new musical avant-gardes in the 1960s, including Czechoslovak composers’ first experiences with ‘elektronische Musik’ and ‘musique concrète’ (Flašar 2012; Ferenc 2022: 74–105), as well as experimental radio art and phonic poetry productions (Novotný 2020; Ferenc 2022: 169), the main effect of those experiences is merely a pioneering one. Despite its limited impact, electroacoustic music in Czechoslovakia was to remain in the position of ‘the dangerous’ art for the following two decades until 1989. Hidden in unofficial underground studios or disguised as soundtrack in film or theatre production (Klusák 2012: 190), it was barely considered a viable creative activity that should form an integral part of contemporary music discourse.

As students who entered universities and conservatoires after the year 1989, we learned two things: first, there was no middle generation among our professors (they were either forced into exile or lost their jobs for political reasons after 1968, or they left for newly opened posts in the West immediately after 1989); and second, the state of mind in arts and technology resembled that of the 1960s and 1970s, with very few notable exceptions.

In one of our talks, Milan Slavický (1947–2009), my professor of musicology and composition, said something that was not quite clear back then. He confided to me that once he had experienced the state of development in the field of music and technology in the early 1990s (not only thanks to his visit to Bourges, France), he realised there would be no chance for him to get back on track. And he was not alone in such a decision, following all those years of discontinuity behind the Iron Curtain that for various reasons (and speaking about contemporary avant-garde music in general) turned out to be much heavier in Czechoslovakia than in Poland, East Germany, Hungary or Romania.

3. FROM RECONNECTING TO ARCHAEOLOGY

There are two major studies published in Czechia after 1989 that address topics of electroacoustic music and the wider context of acoustic arts. From today’s point of view, their nature represents the discourse shift that occurred simultaneously with the rise of a new generation of artists.

The first of them called Estetické modely evropské elektroakustické hudby a elektroakustická hudba v ČR (The Aesthetic Models of European Electroacoustic Music and Electroacoustic Music in the Czech Republic; Dohnalová 2001) attempted to reconnect the post-1989 developments with the past following individualised and localised creative activities of composers and post-war aesthetical concepts of electroacoustic music. However, this re-connection has never really happened since the contemporary reality was elsewhere – politically, socially, musically, technologically and, indeed, intellectually.

The second book, Ukryto v pásech: vybrané kapitoly z české elektroakustické hudební tvorby do roku 1989 (Hidden in Tapes: Selected Chapters of Czech Electroacoustic Music before 1989; Ferenc 2022), was published by the National Museum. Its editor gathered a cross-generational pool of authors to deliver a historical view of ‘what is hidden inside the tapes’, showing how we can understand our own history before 1989. It is a remarkable portfolio of heuristic and analytical work but it mostly deals with the field of sound archaeology. The two publications symbolically frame the present text, which covers the time span from 2003 to 2022, repeatedly pointing back to attempts at continuity and archaeology.

4. TOUCHING THE DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION

As a student of composition, I first touched the Academy of Performing Art’s only digital audio workstation (DAW) computer in 2001. The notion of real-time electronics and related fields of expertise were non-existent. In the same year, DAWs appeared in the Czech Radio studios as a part of the sound production chain for the first time.

Ironically, given my age (I was 26 at that time), I belonged to those who instructed sound engineers inside the radio studios how to work with Pro Tools. This little anecdote may illustrate how much the aforementioned discontinuity imprinted itself on the everyday life of an artist (here with an emphasis on technology in art) and how differently the youngest generation of artists was going to develop all kinds of new creative approaches. They were not influenced by too much foreknowledge of professional communities or non-existent music scenes, their assumptions, generational expectations and continuities, but were instead flooded with new information from around the world touching on the past and the present itself. Many of my peers have gone to Western countries to engage on the ground with existing tracks of study and creative practice, while others have preferred to return to or stay in the country to develop local activities. Despite my own professional experiences in the UK, Germany and the USA, my story was the latter case.

5. WITHOUT A SCENE

Two famous initiatives that were to follow at the local level at the turn of the century should be mentioned. The first one began in 1992 as an intermedia project in the West Bohemian monastery of Plasy (Vojtěchovský 2020; Hermit Foundation and Center for Metamedia Plasy n.d.). A series of interdisciplinary symposia and residencies were organised there, hosting artists in an interdisciplinary context from all over the world. Since it was held in an abandoned space of a monastery near the German border from 1992 to 1999, it represented, from the perspective of my generation, more of an artistic community as such. Its decaying atmosphere was quite formative in the first years of Radioatelier’s formation, along with the ongoing curatorial activity of its spiritus agens, Miloš Vojtěchovský, art historian, curator and intermedia artist, later a lecturer at the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Vojtěchovský’s most influential later projects included the internet radio Rádio Jelení that operated from 2000 to 2004 and in 2001 it joined the international media project Art’s Birthday for the first time (see more in section 14 on Art’s Birthday in Czechia).

The second one was the international competition of electroacoustic music Musica Nova. Founded in 1969, interrupted after the Russian invasion from 1970 to 1992, and revived for its 1993 edition, Musica Nova represented the only contact of Czech composers with the international community of electroacoustic music composers (Musica Nova n.d.). Despite the enormous investment of the organisers, the impact of the competition on the contemporary music scene and music study programmes at universities and conservatoires remained rather limited. Building on the post-war notion of the exclusivity of electroacoustic music, developing its own specific and often isolated position on a musical scene, Musica Nova sought new ways for its existence in a situation where technology had become a natural and non-exclusive part of artistic practice.

As students nearing graduation around the year 2000, we were still gathering new knowledge about the broad context of contemporary music from abroad. The notion of an acousmatic musical tradition was completely new to us, as was live performance with electronics, exploring soundscapes and interdisciplinary approaches to sound art. The fact that there was no specialised scene in our country only aroused more curiosity amongst the young, and the internet could only fill the information gap and lack of materials in libraries slowly and partially. As a result, a new, externally defined scene was slowly emerging where all new discoveries, regardless of their creative nature, were continuously presented, shared and enjoyed. From today’s perspective, this is business as usual, but 20 years ago it was something extraordinary.

6. THE ROAD TO RADIOATELIER

Radio has always been a natural media partner for various acoustic compositions, especially thanks to technology that was not commonly available outside radio institutions. Furthermore, radio could immediately broadcast the art works (more or less popular experimental radio shows were produced after the Secodn World War in Europe and in the USA). The situation changed significantly with the transfer of sound studios into artists’ bedrooms, raising a question mark regarding the borderline between the technical responsibility of the sound engineer and the technological competence of the artist (Hein 2002: 165). This is the general context in which a new radio programme called Radioatelier was launched in the winter of 2003.

Radio as a medium never creates a whole scene, but specialised and carefully curated radio programmes can do so. Where there is a scene, there is an active exchange of ideas and creative communication. Where there is no scene, there is no discourse. When we looked from Czechia to the West, North or South (not so much to the East at that time), there were many precedents for how a radio programme could co-exist with the artistic community, whether on a local or international level. I was familiar with the existence of most public service European experimental radio programmes, especially Kunstradio (AT), Studio Akustische Kunst, Klangkunst, SWR Hörspiel (DE), Atelier de création radiophonique (F), Café Sonore (NL), The Listening Room (AU) and Monitor (SE), yet several questions remained: How can such a new radio programme come into being if there is no active scene around? How can music and technology come together where creativity meets sound composition in the broadest sense? How to achieve those goals when in the radio house itself one encounters only very limited non-standard approaches to radio art? How to proceed when there is no production studio with sound engineers specialising in electroacoustic works? And last but not least: how can such a programme be transformed into a laboratory where new ideas are generated, challenging the rest of the standardised radio programme?

Only later did I realise that the answers were slowly emerging from various parallel existing processes.

An elderly radio colleague, Zdeněk Bouček (1941–2005), was just about to retire; a lonely lifelong champion of radio art’s experimental forms, he managed to ‘win a time slot’ in the broadcasting schedule of the Czech Radio’s art channel just before his retirement. At a turbulent time, I was basically given airtime on the radio as a kind of ‘carte blanche’. That was truly something special.

The Czech Radio was slowly reconnecting with the European community back then. In the media world, this was done primarily through the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). There was a small group of the major radio stations’ producers called EBU Ars Acustica (Kunstradio 2023) that focused on a wide range of experimental radio programmes. Joining this group proved crucial to how the new Czech Radio programme later developed.

No other institution at that time regularly commissioned, programmed, promoted or published acoustic artworks. If they were created at all, it was done almost invisibly in terms of public space. Radioatelier began commissioning artists on a monthly basis in February 2003.

As a composer, I was about to start my doctoral studies in electroacoustic music. Focusing on the topic of radio art in the actual radio broadcasting seemed to be a good azimuth for future research.

A new challenge has arisen: if there is a radio that disseminates art (communication), there must be ‘another radio’ that teaches us how sound can be shaped in time in order to be shared with listeners (creation). Therefore, one of the main aims of Radioatelier was to develop a new platform for creative ideas in ‘musicalizing sound’ (Kahn 2001: 18; Landy 2007: 91).

I found myself in a whole new universe inside the radio house. On the one hand, there was the solid background of radio play and documentary production, where the rich forms of the spoken word were combined with sound composition (at the time, however, extremely conservative). On the other hand, there was my own compositional career, which developed more through electroacoustic and instrumental music, and only slowly discovered the studio as a new type of real musical instrument (Eno 2017). This production double-role has imprinted itself in the creation of Radioatelier; to complicate things, there was a rather massive institutional resistance (new things are not welcome in corporations) and virtually zero production and budget support, which only much later became relatively stabilised. However, the punk way of doing things was not alien to our region.

7. BUILDING THE PROGRAMME

The feeling that accompanied the formulation of the initial principles of Radioatelier can be described as ‘tabula rasa’. At its beginning, the programme was stuck somewhere between the surviving myths of the pre-1989 period and the flood of new information that began to fill in the missing knowledge and professional experience. Moreover, the information space was flooded with new terms that were not easy to deal with. Some of them were understandable or already established (e.g., electroacoustic music, musique concrète), while most others – along with the non-existent discourse – were being disputed as academic or professional terms and marketing labels (e.g., ars acustica, ars sonora, media art, sound art, Klangkunst, radio and radiophonic art, sonic art, soundscape, audio hyperspace, computer/electronic art).

One thing was clear: it was not the institutions but the artists themselves who needed to develop a new creative discourse. The way to reach that goal was to happen both locally and globally through the existing EBU network and community and the massively expanding internet. (It is fun to remember the first podcasts of the new programme – it seemed impossible to be pushed through the Czech Radio’s internet department both technically and logistically; today most of us have no idea where the name ‘podcast’ came from.)

With almost zero budget, I began to seek out artists who showed any sign of affection for sound, including composers with traditional musical training, intermedia and visual artists, and theatre professionals interested in music theatre or the tradition of the German Hörspiel. The first surprise for me was that many artists working with sound in Czechia did not know each other very well (again: a non-existent scene). This led to the next challenge: how to create a platform that would allow more awareness of what one’s colleagues were doing. It occurred to me that it would potentially be quite interesting to invite artists with completely different backgrounds, aesthetic preferences and approaches to sound composition to join the programme. The initial vision was born.

8. THE FIRST YEAR

Radioatelier has been organised as a weekly radio programme with a premiere edition for commissioned works (PremEdition) at the end of the month. Three or four editions of Radioatelier per month featured a wide range of experimental radio works including Hörspiel, radio feature, electroacoustic music or radio-ready forms of sound art. The length of the new works could reach up to 20 minutes (after 2012 up to 50 minutes), with a relatively symbolic fee of €200 (today up to €420). Each premiere was introduced by either a short interview with the author and/or a moderation by the producer. With broadcasts on Saturdays at midnight (and later, with continuous changes, on Wednesdays at 10 pm), Radioatelier debuted on 25 January 2003. Looking at the first year from today’s perspective, the programming line-up appears quite incredible. In all likelihood, no senior producer in the world would have ever approved it.

The first show came into existence through a documentary-oriented visit to the sound department of the film school: first-year students presented their ‘sound film’ composition. I thought it was a good idea to start with what the youngsters were doing but the programme could not actually count as a real commission.

The next month (22 February 2003), a ‘theatre-in-the radio’ production was programmed, directed by Jiří Adámek. The rather standardised theatre/musical was recorded entirely outside the radio house. Neither the radio production nor the sound engineers considered it reasonable, so it was me again who took the microphone myself and served as a recording engineer. It was the first experience with sound composition for the director, who later developed the entirely new art of music theatre and who co-won the Karl Sczuka grant in 2019.

In March 2003, I had no work to broadcast, no artist to bring in. Facing an embarrassing blank airtime, I made the first and last exception and used my own soundscape on air. This never happened again.

On 26 April 2003, composer Tomáš Pálka continued with an interesting text-sound composition based on texts by Samuel Beckett. The spoken word was turned into a new musical instrument as part of his ‘DAW kitchen studio set-up’. None of the radio studios were available for the work of commissioned artists, so I often had to find unofficial solutions or help myself with my own studio equipment.

In May and June 2003, there were commissions based on texts by the Czech poet Bohuslav Reynek and the German playwright Heiner Müller. Slavomír Hořínka, now a renowned composer of instrumental and vocal music, set the latter to music in the form of Hörspiel.

In the following production, the composer Miroslav Srnka brought us with a microphone into a maternity ward. One of the most performed composers of his generation today, he recorded the sounds of women in labour and composed a piece of pure field recording, a technique he probably never returned to later.

The August commission with texts by Jan Ámos Komenský was followed by artists coming from a visual arts background. Two of their groups in September and October suddenly brought completely new accents – an alternative approach to time, conceptual ideas, referential aspects of the acousmatic tradition (which we were not yet able to identify at the time) as well as traces of pop aesthetics.

After the following PremEdition with listener contributions (an open public call for compositions), the December edition presented the work of a group of radio colleagues consisting of a director, sound engineer, composer and sound designer. It was a real treat to see a very traditional radio aesthetic and creative workflow in the context of an emerging new generation of artists.

The beginning of the second year was marked by two more artists who came from the visual arts scene. They presented a mixture of field recordings, instrumental improvisation and intervention in public space. American intermedia artist Jennifer Helia deFelice was joined by Brno-based architect and musician Ivan Palacký. Her presence opened the door to developing the international dimension of the programme.

What an odd mixture of works emerged here – they were certainly not masterpieces from today’s point of view. Yet it was a very important year that allowed for new continuities to be established. First, there were a number of pieces that, from the point of view of the radio programme, usually do not belong anywhere (e.g., they do not fit into a radio play, nor into a radio feature programme; the music can not be considered pop, jazz, classical; poetry combined with too much music does not fit into literary programmes either). Second, a new continuity of commissioned shows was introduced (albeit with ridiculously low fees – what an incredible achievement in a country where royalties are still considered to be a form of a commissioning fee). And third, new songs were officially presented and remain accessible in the online archive on the rAdioCUSTICA website (rAdioCUSTICA 2023). Artists were suddenly brought together in a way that would probably never have happened otherwise, and there was hope that the level of creative discourse would increase.

There was one more area that interested me as a producer: where did the well-placed reputation of similar radio shows comes from? My own research took me deeper into the history of radio culture in different countries in order to realise that there was always a strong intellectual concept behind the producers who were able to run radio art shows for a long period of time. I began to connect the dots between media theories and everyday radio practice.

9. AKUSTISCHE KUNST AND ARS ACUSTICA

WDR Studio Akustische Kunst’s producer, Klaus Schöning, retired in 2001, a year after I joined the Czech Radio. Therefore, I could only learn the stories and myths about his personality and career. Yet it was the continuity behind him as a producer that was more than convincing to me as a newcomer. In 2002 I received a catalogue that was published on the 30th anniversary of the founding of Studio Akustische Kunst. Only later was it possible to understand under what budget conditions the producer was able to create an incredible list of works involving the biggest names of the era. The Czech Radio’s commission fee of €200 was simply ridiculous compared with the situation in Germany, but there was one idea of Schöning’s that stayed deep in my heart: ‘The primary motivating force for these activities of the last three decades has been the attempt to develop a language of acoustic art in radio, similar to the language of film’ (Schöning 1997: 17). Although it bore deep traces of a ‘modern institutional project’, the idea of developing a new acoustic language for the radio (Schöning liked to use the term ars acustica; Schöning 1997: 12) was more than appropriate for the Czech Radio at that moment: a massive generational change was about to take place, digital technologies were slowly replacing magnetic tapes, new listening and creative experiences in the global context were shaping. For me as a producer, there was a vision of a broad portfolio of artists coming from different creative corners, whose work could resonate within the intersubjective space of the radio ether. The emergence of such a new language comes from this kind of resonance rather than an institutional act.

10. KUNSTRADIO

At the very beginning of the Radioatelier broadcast I found myself in the role of an observer; many things were happening simultaneously and it took a while for some kind of hierarchy of information and events to emerge. One of the models that helped shape Radioatelier’s identity was Kunstradio Österreich 1, which offered a very focused vision of radio within the European airwaves. In contrast to Klaus Schöning, who followed the futurist manifesto of 1913 (Russolo 1967), Kunstradio’s founder Heidi Grundmann referred more to their increasingly political manifesto La Radia of 1933 (Kahn and Whitehead 1992: 265). ¹ The concept of radio as a public information space was emphasised in Kunstradio’s weekly broadcasts from 1987 onwards. They sought to come to terms not with the aesthetics of sound (i.e., the primary creative material of radio art) but also with its modes of communication, sharing and reciprocity:

The relationship between author and user is changed to such a degree that the user becomes co-author. Under such conditions a work of art cannot be experienced as a closed or neatly repeatable original by either the author/participant nor [sic] the user/co-author/participant. The piece grows in many different places simultaneously and is kept in a state of flux by the cooperation of many unknown people, who compromise anything but a traditional ‘audience’. (Grundmann 1994)

Kunstradio thus activates the information space through acoustic art rather than bringing definitive works of art. It relies primarily on live broadcasting, with an emphasis on possible two-way communication (live feedback to the broadcast) or ways of linking multiple sites within a single radio broadcast. It is no exaggeration to say that Kunstradio brings back the real artists back on stage, which has been vacant throughout the whole era of wireless radio (Kahn and Whitehead 1992: 253), showing itself as an integral part of a new media-based musical instrument.

11. RADIO AS SOUND INSTALLATION IN SWR

Meeting Hans Burkhard Schlichting, the long-time soul of Southwest German Radio, was one of the most influential impulses for me in the development of the new Radioatelier. This was not only because he brought to my attention the whole acoustic world of the Karl Sczuka Prize ² (that was virtually unknown in Czechia), but especially because he introduced me to the broader intellectual concept of the idea of turning radio into a sound installation (Schlichting 2015: 242). Schlichting was keen to emphasise new spatial relations between broadcaster and listener, where a whole new intersubjective listening space is created, encompassing different modes of listening seen through the ideas of Roland Barthes (Schlichting 1994). The notion of a media-specific approach to sound composition and space had a huge impact on me, a ‘baby producer’ that I was at the time. It influenced not only the way in which other PremEditions commissions were organised, but also the way in which one-dimensional radio broadcast was to be extended towards the development of on-site events and live broadcasts.

12. SWEDISH TRIANGLE

There was yet another strong influence that I learned about through my Swedish radio colleague Erik Mikael Karlsson. It had nothing to do with aesthetics or philosophy of art, but rather with practical openness and permeability between institutions and artistic communities: the ongoing collaboration between Swedish Radio, the Electronic Music Studio (EMS) and Fylkingen, a non-profit association for experimental music and art. They seemed to have created a kind of ‘modus vivendi’, at least back then: radio as a public service institution, EMS as an experimental creative space supporting a thriving artistic community, and Fylkingen as an independent label and live performance venue.

The three places represent the three modes of production, reception and distribution. If there is permeability between institutions (the population of Sweden is approximately the same as Czechia), the impact of joint activities increases exponentially.

13. CANCEL IF SUCCESSFUL

The Listening Room was a successful radio art show of the Classical FM channel of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC; however, it was cancelled in 2003 (Richards 2003). In September 2003, I visited the Prix Italia festival in Catania, Sicily. The Radio Music Award went to Australian radio art composer Colin Black for his 2002 composition The Ears Outside My Listening Room – The Listening Room production. I could hardly understand why such a successful show with a major new award should be cancelled; it just made no sense at all. As we shall see below, 20 years later my own corporate naivety was to encounter its practical consequences when facing a similar situation with Radioatelier.

14. THE FIRST DECADE OF RADIOATELIER

These sources of inspiration helped shape the entire design of the first decade of the programme’s existence. The predominantly local pool of artists was continuously internationalised. First through those who came to Czechia and were interested in sound. The radio studio soon became a natural target of interest for artists, and a regularly maintained online sound archive (radiocustica.cz) with new commissions helped increase the international awareness and visibility of the initiative.

It was very interesting to see how Central and Eastern Europe was reconnecting culturally with the rest of the continent and the UK at that time. As early as the turn of the millennium, there was a remarkable interest from Austria and Germany in particular – their cultural ambassadors came see for themselves what was actually happening on the Czech musical/acoustic art scene in order to increase mutual cultural understanding. Among other things, the interest gave rise to remarkable publications (Niedermayr and Scheib 2003; Babias and Klingan 2010; Seiffarth, Stabenow and Föllmer 2012).

Inspired by Kunstradio and motivated by the EBU Ars Acustica group, Czech Radio joined the global radio network in 2004 on the occasion of Art’s Birthday. This was four years after the aforementioned Internet Radio Jelení (2000–4) joined the network. Commemorating the Whispered History of Art by Fluxus artist Robert Filliou and his idea of ‘permanent creation’, a vast interactive network of art initiatives is presenting its works around the world on this day to celebrate Art’s Birthday (Art’s Birthday 2023) (Figures 1 and 2). In recent times, venues all over the world have been connected via the internet, telephone lines or even – in the case of radio stations – via satellites. Art performances from around the world are live-streamed to the radio, but also local scenes and challenged once the radio is brought to the venues. The unique chance to produce the first Art’s Birthday event happened to be on the eve of 17 January 2005. It seemed that the Art’s Birthday platform might present an opportunity to invite artists from different backgrounds and art scenes to share their work in a way they normally would not. Thus, intermedia artists performed with jazz musicians, theatre artists and electronic musicians. During subsequent issues of Art’s Birthday, experimental rock or drum and bass musicians met with sound artists who created live sound installations at the venues. Indie stars teamed up with composers of classical music, theatre artists met the DYI community or acoustic ecologists. The Czech Radio’s Art’s Birthday evening was always a combination of live broadcast and on-site events at various venues including theatres, galleries, public libraries and music clubs. Local non-profit organisations were usually approached to join in. The event encouraged mutual exchange among different creative discourses and scenes that would otherwise be confined within their own communities.

Figure 1. Main poster Art’s Birthday 2006. Graphic by Aleš Killian.

Figure 2. Art’s Birthday cake in 2013.

15. OTHER MEDIA

In order to intensify wider media coverage, annual CDs with selected commissions were launched between 2003 and 2012. Through various partnerships with newspapers or music magazines, several hundred copies per year were distributed to reach different types of listeners.

In 2010, the English version of my PhD thesis as published by Pfau Verlag; one of the aims of the thesis was to describe the initial context of Radioatelier and its efforts to take root in the wider network of the European radio scene (Rataj 2010).

On the occasion of Radioatelier’s 10th anniversary, 22 authors were invited to submit texts on the contemporary acoustic art scene in the broadest sense of the word. The resulting book was published by the Academy of Performing Arts Press, documenting the changes and development of the local scene (Rataj 2012).

In 2017, after 15 years of the programme’s existence, a DVD with most of the commissioned works was released as an mp3 catalogue. In the same year, Radioatelier accepted its 150th commission. The anniversary piece, Mezihlas – Přeshlas – Nahlas (Radio – Voice – Overs) was composed by Leigh Landy; it was a kind of celebration of live media broadcasting in the form of a radio collage. It combined samples of national radio broadcasts open to both national and internation interpretation and thus developed the original focus of the programme. A special evening with artists and guests was organised for the occasion (on 22 September 2017), during which Landy’s work was also available to the audience as a sound installation.

16. AWARDS AND ALL THAT JAZZ

A producer’s greatest joy is the belief in what the chosen artists are doing. He does not judge because he must always be part of the creative process. It is only when many productions are created that some of them can resonate in a unique way. But without the ‘many’, uniqueness is meaningless; only among the ‘many’, progress can be observed; only among the ‘many’, a new language can emerge. If there is no progress, we are dealing with the petrification of the ‘familiar’.

There is no better way to realise this than listening to different pieces by the same artists over time: a truly rewarding experience in itself. One travels in time and observes how the creative approach and personal aesthetic changes along with the overall quality of expression.

One of the most striking artists that can be followed this way is the Hörspiel author Lukáš Jiřička. He created his first radical text-sound composition in 2004; since then he has composed 10 more pieces with various musical partners. Intermedia artist Miloš Vojtěchovský worked on six productions between 2004 and 2018, and in 2005 he was the main creative soul behind the first Czech Art’s Birthday broadcast. Jiří Adámek (joined later by his vocal group Boca Loca Lab) has evolved from his first rather conservative theatre-radio production in 2003 to one of the most radical theatre artists of his generation, focusing on text-and-sound material, case in point being his latest work from 2013, Dedicated to the Bathtub. The distinctive musical language of Brno-based intermedia artist Jiří Suchánek can be approached in all three of his works through an acousmatic musical paradigm, albeit with traces of pop culture. In his eight radiophonic compositions from 2008 to 2023, Alex Švamberk draws a poignant border between sound composition and radio feature. Always relying on a strong storyline, he is one of the most prolific authors searching for new forms of radiophonic creativity. Award-winning feature maker Pavel Novotný brings a simple musical line into the context of his acoustic poetry. He composed five unique sound features, including Tramvesty, which inspired composer Petr Wajsar to compose a new opera for the National Theatre in Prague (Novotný 2016). I should also mention Jan Trojan, Stanislav Abrahám, Jakub Rataj, Miroslav Tóth and Ladislav Železný, composers and sound artists who contributed their diverse sound compositions to Radioatelier and later joined the Czech Radio as sound designers or radio artists. Thus, another of the programme’s original visions came true.

It took more than 10 years of Radioatelier’s existence before it received international recognition. Since 2014, there have been several artists who have won the EBU Palma Ars Acustica international award for their works commissioned by Radioatelier. They were Sivan Eldar in 2014, Alessandro Bosetti in 2015, Veronika Svobodová in 2020 and Elia Moretti in 2022. Elia was also awarded the Prix Phonurgia Nova for Once Enea Stuck an Apple Seed to My Ear, and so was Pablo Sanz for his Strange Strangers in 2020.

The preceding very first Radioatelier commission brought together theatre director Jiří Adámek and Ladislav Železný, resulting in their Karl Sczuka grant in 2019, awarded for the text-sound composition Hra na uši (The Ears Game; Adámek and Železný n.d.).

In the 20th edition of Radioatelier, two productions were – rather symbolically – awarded major media prizes. The Prix Italia 2021 went to the project Music for Sirens, a series of site-specific compositions to be performed together with a siren warning test in the capital city of Prague. The project was proposed by the Prague Berg Orchestra (Music for Sirens 2022). The sirens are tested in Czechia on the first Wednesday of every month. Since October 2017, Radioatelier has been broadcasting every Wednesday at 10 pm: what a nice coincidence.

The beautiful concept of the Concert for Animals by the current Radioatelier producer Ladislav Železný was later awarded the Prix Europa (Železný 2022). Both awards made amazing anniversary gifts.

17. AS TIME GOES BY

I left my producer’s post in the radio in 2013 and have been freelancing as an independent producer on a good half of all productions since then. This distance from the organisation has helped me eventually take a detached view of the radical changes I was involved in after 2000. This is basically why this text could be written in the first place.

I handed my post over to Ladislav Železný, an intermedia artist who was one of the pioneering souls of acoustic art and independent internet radio broadcasting and who has been cooperating with Radioatelier since its very the beginning. This fact has ensured the continuity of Radioatelier and all associated activities up to the present day.

On 21 October 2021, we celebrated the 200th edition of the premiere edition of Radioatelier with a composition by ambient music composer and publisher Michal Kořán. His Music from Airports was a tribute to Brian Eno, as well as to all the previous pieces that have been brought to the airwaves since 2003.

18. CONCLUSION

When the programme started in 2003, the most challenging vision was to bring non-mainstream experimental acoustic art production to the airwaves to help a scene emerge. In reality, however, there are now multiple scenes that have emerged since then. It has been fascinating for me to watch the growth of new artistic communities and collectives across the country; some of them occasionally meet in the radio broadcast. Alongside the jazz, electronic and contemporary music scenes, there are diverse improvisational scenes; sound installations are now appearing in public spaces, bringing sound art into galleries; contemporary music eschews petrified concert halls, inhabiting new spaces with new sonic ideas. However, those scenes often do not overlap at all.

I believe that the importance of local scenes has grown immensely with the pandemic experience behind us. Bringing evidence of their existence and intrinsic richness to the public is still one of radio’s most important tasks as a public service institution. At the same time, it is increasingly evident that the public service’s orientation towards the massification of audiences across Europe means reserving less and less space for borderline curatorial activities.

Sadly, all those prestigious media prizes that were awarded for radio art activities within the Czech Radio had zero supportive effect. Au contraire, for 2023, the number of new commissions was reduced by 50 per cent to just six, and the volume of non-primetime weekly Radioatelier broadcasts was reduced by the same amount. This is bad news for the programme’s third decade, especially given how the economic support for artists will be affected. Yet there are things that can be seen as rather positive in the wider context.

The paradigm of radio as a medium that is linear in time has mostly been replaced by the paradigm of multiple on-demand network services. The incredible global rise of podcast culture may hold great promise for the future, even though the overall quality of their output varies widely, as do the listening habits of end users. The widespread availability of recording and post-production technology means that many new users still have to work hard to get it right. On the one hand, this trend presents a huge challenge. On the other hand, there has already been a huge rise of audio culture in our country, as a result of which much of the cultural heritage of radio may be revised and transformed into a completely new media paradigm and listening habits of users. I believe that the obsession with sound as a creative material, which has accompanied us since the beginning of Radioatelier, will find new forms of presence. It will do so not only in communities of artists, but also in a broader social context where the huge emphasis on the visual and visibility can be balanced by an emphasis on sound in a whole new way.