Theodor W. Adorno raadioteooria: tõlgenduskatse Eesti vaatenurgast 1920. ja 1930. aastatel

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s radio receivers were advertised as the most wonderful invention of the century, making music and news from all over Europe easily accessible to everyone. What radio broadcasting brought to the musical scene was supposedly a perfect bond between technological innovation and the democratization of culture. According to Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), however, these idyllic perspectives had their aesthetic and political drawbacks. Although Adorno’s essays on radio broadcasting (Current of Music, 2009) were written in 1938–1941 with American radio stations in mind, the motivation behind his radio scepticism can also be explained from an Estonian point of view. An analysis of radio listening and public reception in Estonia, with the focus on the years immediately following the beginning of regular radio broadcasts in Tallinn on 18th December 1926, reveals a considerable degree of similarity in the ideology surrounding radio broadcasts in their early days in Estonia and the US. While Adorno’s remarks about the “standardisation” of radio broadcasts were not fully pertinent in the more varied and fragmented European context, the main problem he posed remains highly relevant: what is the intellectual and political price one has to pay for music to be easily accessible on the air?