Referenced Music in Radio Drama: Jef Geeraerts’ Concerto (1970) and Samuel Vriezen’s Schade (2017)

Radio drama has two possibilities to include music: (1) the music is part of the soundtrack, (2) the characters or the narrator explicitly refer to music by means of language. Because of its medial affordances, the radio play can evoke both possibilities simultaneously. This chapter looks at the productive interaction between the semiotic systems of language and music in two radio plays. Both case studies conceptualise music as a locus to address and think through political-ideological issues that are indicative of the different political contexts in which these radio plays were conceived.