RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

it and bring it to certain consequences was the German theoretician Helmut Jedele in his significant dissertation of 1952 entitled »Reproductivity and Productivity on the Radio«, in which this question was opened from the viewpoint of the authenticity or non-authenticity of the medium and certainly visibly delved into the formation of an authentic radiophonic medium. He analysed and evaluated individual types of broadcast on the radio but with regard to whether their message ог information (Jedele treats radio as a means of communication) аге only broadcast over the radio as a medium ог whether radio as a medium forms them and thus makes their existence possible. Those broadcasts to which the latter refers аге, in Jedele’s opinion, productive and in this sense radio drama represents to him the only type of broadcast whose productivity is more than evident and in general the only possible. In connection with this, we shall here refer to the words of Heinz Schwitzke, who thus reproduces Jedele’s thesis in his book Radio Drama: »In contrast with all other radio forms, radio drama has по connection with reproduction. Its acoustic reality is not the transfer of some acoustic reality which would really exist as it is somewhere else«, and on the basis of this fact he presents his first and most important defmition of radio drama as an autochthonous artistic genre: »The fact that radio drama as a form cannot exist without the technical base of radio makes the essential difference between it and all other forms of broadcast on radio, which are in fact only transmissions and reproductions, as long as they are not intenvoven with some elements of radio play«. Radio, however, is in a process of constant development, the same as that which dominates аП the social and existential forms of our lives, and in accordance with this change and transformation both the reproductive and productive forms of radio alter. Much has changed in the case of the latter from Jedele’s declaration until today: in this time, radiophonic style, which, we have just contended, gives radio drama the characteristic of the aesthetic, has undergone significant, almost essential changes. After the formation of the classical type of radio drama, such as Shwitzke’s book establishes, expounds and postulates as a canon, a series of new stimuli have come into being, and with them a series of new possibilities have opened up which can be adopted (and indeed are) by the very essence of radio drama. The most obvious role among them has been played by one which, with the aid of Jedele’s criteria, could be called the most productive: this concerns the exceptional, and relatively lately discovered advantage of radio as a medium, its technical condition, its style and capabilities, namely, the linking and mixing of those fundamental means of expression of individual forms of artistic appearance which were known until then to exist only in their pure forms. To present this more strikingly: if we take as an example the classical type of

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