Sound as language freed from meaning; the parallel cousin to Italian Futurism, founded by exiles in a Zürich back room while the war raged outside.
Dada is the cultural movement; sound poetry is the form within it that this archive's parent disciplines have absorbed most directly. The form argues that language can be detached from its meanings and treated as sonic material, that the phoneme is to the poem what the brushstroke is to the painting and that a poem made entirely of invented or non-semantic syllables can carry the same expressive force as one made of words. Hugo Ball's first formulation of the argument, on the Cabaret Voltaire stage on 23 June 1916, was framed in deliberately mystical terms: he described the experience of performing his sound poems in the magic-bishop costume as a state in which "the words rolled like a string of beads from my lips, with the rhythm of an old Catholic litany." The form's premise is that meaning leaks back into the syllables anyway; the listener cannot help but hear them as somehow saying something. The form is the structure that makes that leaking audible.
The founding event was the opening night of Cabaret Voltaire on 5 February 1916, in the back room of a tavern called the Holländische Meierei at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zürich's Niederdorf district. Hugo Ball (1886 to 1927) and Emmy Hennings had reached Zürich the previous year as wartime exiles from Munich; Ball had failed his pre-war attempts to volunteer for the German army, then witnessed the Western Front in 1914 and concluded that European civilisation had ended. The cabaret was their attempt to make a place for the avant-garde refugees crowding into neutral Switzerland. Tristan Tzara (Romanian), Marcel Janco (Romanian), Hans Arp (Alsatian), Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss), Richard Huelsenbeck (German) were present from the opening week. Lenin lived four houses up the same street, at Spiegelgasse 14, from 21 February 1916 to 2 April 1917; the most consequential political revolutionary and the most consequential aesthetic revolution of the twentieth century shared a Zürich alley for fourteen months without engaging.
The cabaret operated for a single season. From 5 February 1916 to roughly mid-July 1916 there were nightly performances of poetry, music, dance and what would shortly be called sound poetry. The word Dada was coined by Tzara in April 1916, possibly from a French children's word for a hobby-horse, possibly from a Romanian affirmative ("yes, yes"); the etymology is irrecoverably contested and Tzara himself gave several incompatible accounts. The first single issue of the magazine Cabaret Voltaire appeared on 15 June 1916 with contributions from Apollinaire, Kandinsky, Modigliani, Picasso and a cover by Arp. Hugo Ball performed his sound poems on 23 June 1916 in the cardboard cylindrical costume that has since become the form's iconic image: tube body, cardboard wings extending from the sides like a bishop's cope, tall conical mitre hat. He performed three sound poems that evening: Karawane, Gadji beri bimba, and Wolken. The first ten lines of Karawane read: jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla / grossiga m'pfa habla horem / égiga goramen / higo bloiko russula huju / hollaka hollala / anlogo bung / blago bung blago bung / bosso fataka / ü üü ü / schampa wulla wussa ólobo.
I have invented a new genre of poems: Verse ohne Worte, or sound poems. Hugo Ball, diary entry, 23 June 1916, on the night of the first performance
The Zürich phase was over almost as soon as it began. Cabaret Voltaire closed in mid-July 1916, financially exhausted and operationally chaotic. Ball read the First Dada Manifesto at the Zur Waag guildhall on 14 July 1916, the night before he and Hennings left Zürich for the Ticino countryside. Ball withdrew from Dada within eighteen months, returned to Catholicism in 1920, retreated to a small Swiss village and spent the rest of his life on early-medieval Christian mystics and saints. His Dada period was barely two years; the founder of the form abandoned it before its main practitioners had finished arriving. Tzara took over Dada's organisational and theoretical leadership through 1917 to 1922, opened the Galerie Dada at Bahnhofstrasse 19 in Zürich in March 1917, organised the famous 1918 and 1919 Zürich soirées and moved to Paris in 1919, where he was the conduit through which Dada methods became Surrealist methods. André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) is the formal end of Dada and the beginning of what Dada was rebranded as.
Sound poetry as a form survived Dada's organisational collapse because it propagated outward into Berlin Dada (Raoul Hausmann's poster poems and phonetic poems from 1918 onward) and into the Hanover-Berlin-Paris avant-garde axis of the 1920s. The form's mature defining statement, and the work this file files at anchor status, is Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1922 to 1932). Schwitters (1887 to 1948) was a Hanover painter, collagist and poet who had been rejected by Richard Huelsenbeck from joining Berlin Dada in 1919; in response he founded his own one-man parallel movement called Merz, named for a syllable he extracted from the word Kommerzbank on a torn newspaper advertisement. The Ursonate (the title means "primordial sonata"; the subtitle Sonate in Urlauten means "sonata in primordial sounds") is a forty-minute, four-movement phonetic composition organised in sonata form, with rondo, largo, scherzo and presto movements. Schwitters worked on the piece for ten years and published the score in the twenty-fourth and final issue of his magazine Merz in 1932. His own performed recording, made on 5 May 1932 at Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Frankfurt, is one of the most cited audio documents in twentieth-century avant-garde music; Schwitters performed the work himself and his voice carries the form's mature idiom.
The political context. By the early 1930s the form's practitioners were under pressure from the Nazi state. Schwitters was declared a degenerate artist, fled Germany for Norway in 1937 and from there to Britain in 1940 ahead of the German invasion. He was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man for over a year, released in 1941 and lived out his life in Kendal, in the English Lake District, where he died in 1948. Hausmann fled Berlin for the south of France in 1933. The Zürich Dadaists had largely scattered to Paris and elsewhere by the late 1920s. The form's continuity through the 1930s and 40s was a continuity of dispersal; the working group never reassembled and the post-war revival had to start from the surviving texts rather than from any continuing thread.
The form's downstream propagation is unusually direct, given the historical disruption. The post-war Lettrist movement in Paris (Isidore Isou, late 1940s onward) extended the sound-poetry argument through the 1950s. Schaeffer's GRMC and GRM (F·01) absorbed the sound-poetry tradition through Pierre Henry's collaborations with vocal artists; Berio's Visage (1961) and Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958) at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan brought sound poetry into electroacoustic practice formally. The American Beat poets (Burroughs and Gysin, who built the cut-up technique partly out of Dada chance procedures, see F·05) read the Dada manifestos carefully through the late 1950s. Henri Chopin's OU magazine (1964 onward) and the European sound-poetry scene that emerged around the Stockholm Text-Sound Festival and the Toronto Sound Poetry Festival from 1968 onward kept the form actively practised through the 1970s. The form did not stop being made; Dada organisational collapse was not the form's end.
The form's connection to the genre this archive otherwise covers runs through three points. First, the Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire took its name directly from the Zürich venue in 1973; the band's tape-collage method is partly a Dada cut-up procedure translated into post-punk manner. Second, Throbbing Gristle's method drew explicitly on the Dada manifestos; P-Orridge cited Tzara repeatedly through the late 1970s and the 1980 Psychic TV-era manifestos quote Dada material directly. Third, the industrial and post-industrial vocal experimentation (Diamanda Galás's Plague Mass palette; Jarboe's vocal work in Swans; the post-1990 noise-vocal traditions) runs downstream of the sound-poetry inheritance more than of the musique concrète one. Where F·01 propagates forward through tape and the laboratory, F·04 propagates forward through the human voice and the cabaret stage; the two routes converge in the post-1976 industrial catalogue but remain methodologically distinguishable.
Filing the form at F·04 is filing the parallel cousin to F·03. Same era, same anti-rationalist impulse, same European avant-garde matrix, opposite political mode (Italian Futurism celebrated the war that drove the Zürich Dadaists into exile). Both forms made their argument in advance of any technical infrastructure being available to support it. The argument was the apparatus, in both cases and the manifestos were the recordings. The Bureau files them adjacently because they should be read together.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Restoration · last revised c. Classical Antiquity