Genealogy of "zang tumb tumb": Experimental phonetics, vers libre, and modernist sound art

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 43, 2011, Pages 88-117

  Brain, Robert Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79958112973     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/GREY_a_00026     Document Type: Article

References (148)

1. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 26.
2. Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 5.
3. F.T. Marinetti, Zang tumb tuuum: Adrianopoli Ottobre 1912: Parole in libertà (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di "Poesia," 1914), 145.
4. The influential essay by the British poet and critic.
5. F.S. Flint, "Contemporary French Poetry," Poetry Review 1, no. 8 (1912): 355-414.
6. Portrayed Marinetti's futurist poetics as the culmination of French vers libre.
7. Peter Demetz, Worte in Freiheit: Der italienische Futurismus und die deutsche literarische Avantgarde (1912-1934) (Munich: Piper, 1990), 42-62.
8. Shows that Germans similarly understood Marinetti's words-in-freedom as a radicalization of Kahn's poetics.
9. Gunter Berghaus, The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti's Early Career and Writings, 1899-1909 (Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 1995).
10. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
11. Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 13.
12. This paper takes up one of the few themes discussed less than exhaustively.
13. Clive Scott, Vers Libre: The Emergence of Free Verse in France 1886-1914 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1990).
14. Scott notes the importance of the laboratory turn on 58-60.
15. Robert Brain, "Standards and Semiotics," in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communications, ed. Tim Lenoir (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 249-284.
16. Ernst Brücke, Die Physiologischen Grundlagen der neuhochdeutschen Verskunst (Vienna: Carl Gerold's Sohn, 1871).
17. Paul Pierson, Métrique naturelle du langage (Paris: Vieweg, 1884).
18. Nélia Dias, La mesure des sens: Les anthropologues et le corps humain au XIXe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 2004).
19. F.T. Marinetti, Enquête internationale sur le vers libre et manifeste du FUTURISME (Milan: Editions de Poesia, 1909).
20. This futurist manifesto also appeared in several Italian newspapers and in the Parisian Le Figaro. On the effects of this initial publication, see Berghaus, The Genesis of Futurism.
21. Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10-24.
22. Mallarmé regarded Kahn as a protégé, and in 1891 named him, along with Laforgue and Vielé-Griffin, 'three of the principal poets who have contributed to the Symbolist movement.' Around the same time he pledged to the anarchist Jean Grave that Mallarmé, too, would 'contribute a few humble words to [Grave's] oeuvre.'.
23. Richard Shryock, "Becoming Political: Symbolist Literature and the Third Republic," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33 (2005): 394.
24. Scott, 74-88, 146-149.
25. Kahn: "Ce qui se détache nettement comme résultat tangible de l'année 1886, ce fut l'instauration du vers libre." Gustave Kahn, Symbolistes et de ́cadents (1902; Geneva: Slatkin Reprints, 1977), 52.
26. Richard Cándida-Smith, Mallarmé's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
27. Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique; L'avant-garde à la fin du XIXè siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
28. Moréas's 'Le symbolisme,' published in Le Figaro, both coined the term 'symbolism' and called for the 'assouplissement' of certain classical rules of verse: caesura, hiatus, alternation of rhythms, and so on. Because the article appeared ten days before Kahn's "Réponse des symbolistes," in L'événement (28 September 1886), Moréas was publicly recognized as the inventor of symbolism and vers libre. Kahn and many others argued at the time, and scholars have agreed, that Moréas's poetry was not vers libre in the strict sense they advocated.
29. Bonner Mitchell, Les manifestes littéraires de la Belle Époque 1886-1914: Anthologie critique (Paris: Seghers, 1966).
30. Paul Valery, Variété, 5 vols. (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1924-1944), 1:97-98.
31. Vers libéré refers to a 'liberated' form of regular verse that came into its own in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, especially through the efforts of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and others; it makes free with the rules of rhyme and uses a variety of devices to destabilize the rhythmic structure of the line. But, for all its liberties, vers libéré maintains the principles of isosyllabism and the indispensability of rhyme.
32. Henry objected that 'Les procédés littéraires de M. Ghil n'ont aucun rapport, de près ou de loin, avec la science. Ce sont des fantaisies individuelles, logiquement construites et qui ont toutes les raisons d'être incompréhensibles.'
33. Charles Henry, Interview, in Jules Huret, Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire (Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1891), 340.
34. Remy Gourmont, "Le vers libre," in Esthétique de la langue française (Paris: Mercure de France, 1899), 235-263.
35. Edouard Dujardin, Les premiers poètes du vers libre (Paris, 1922).
36. F.T. Marinetti, Enquête internationale sur le vers libre (Milan: Éditions de 'Poesia,' 1909).
37. T.S. Eliot, "Reflections on Vers Libre," New Statesman 8 (1917): 518-519.
38. Daniel Grojnowski, "Laforgue fumiste: l'esprit de cabaret," Romantisme 64 (1989): 5-16.
39. Félix Fénéon, "L'impressionnisme scientifique," in Au-delà de l'impressionnisme, ed. Françoise Cachin (Paris: Hermann, 1966), 80.
40. Félix Fénéon, "L'impressionnisme, 1887," L'émancipation sociale, 3 April 1887, in Au-delà de l'impressionnisme, ed. Cachin, 81.
41. Gustave Kahn and Félix Fénéon, "Le courrier social," La Vogue 1 (4 April 1886): 27.
42. In private letters Laforgue uncharacteristically reproached Kahn for having accused their mutual friend Henry of stealing his (Kahn's) ideas.
43. Jules Laforgue, Lettres à un ami, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Mercure de France, 1941).
44. Gustave Kahn, 'Réponse des symbolistes,' L'evenement, 28 September 1886.
45. Robert Michael Brain, "The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008): 393-417.
46. Robert L. Herbert, "'Parade de cirque' de Seurat et l'esthétique de Charles Henry," Revue de l'art 50 (1980): 9-23.
47. Michael Zimmerman, Les mondes de Seurat (Anvers, France: Fonds Mercator; Paris: Albin Michel, 1991).
48. Charles Henry, "Sur une loi générale des réactions psychomotrice," Revue philosophique (1890): 107-111.
49. Charles Henry, Rapporteur esthétique: Notice sur ses applications à l'art industriel, à l'histoire de l'art, à l'interprétation de la méthode graphique (Paris: Seguin, 1888), 15.
50. Charles Henry, Rapporteur esthétique, 5.
51. Charles Henry, "Introduction à une esthétique scientifique," La revue contemporaine 25 (1885): 466.
52. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Robert Drew Hicks (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1965).
53. T.I. Johansen, Aristotle on the Sense-Organs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
54. Vitality affects are distinguished from the categorical affects of anger, grief, elation, embarrassment, and so on that constituted much of the nineteenth-century discussion of the physiology of emotion, including Charles Darwin's Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals (1871). Henry did not distinguish these consistently; nonetheless, the importance of the vitality affect principle in his thought was indispensable for the artists who applied his ideas.
55. Charles Henry to Felix Fénéon, 18 September 1885, in Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne.
56. Kahn developed his main theoretical ideas in Gustave Kahn, "Reponse des symbolistes" (1886).
57. Gustave Kahn, Interview, in Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire.
58. Gustave Kahn, "Préface sur les vers libres," in Premiers poèmes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1897).
59. Gustave Kahn, Symbolistes et décadents (Paris: Vanier, 1902).
60. Gustave Kahn in Marinetti, Enquête internationale sur le vers libre.
61. J.C. Ireson, L'oeuvre poétique de Gustave Kahn (1859-1936) (Paris, 1936).
62. Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13-14.
63. On prosodic effects as "shapes of energy," see
64. W.K. Wimsatt Jr., and Monroe Beardsley, "The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction," PMLA 74 (1959): 597.
65. Henry, "Introduction à une esthétique scientifique," 28. On Henry's relations to experimental phonetics and symbolist poetry.
66. Georges Lote, "La poétique du symbolisme," Revue des cours et conferences 35 (1934): 120.
67. Spire, Plaisir poétique et plaisir musculaire, 13-14.
68. Howard Nemerov, Figures of Thought (Boston: David Godine, 1978), 129.
69. Hartman; and Denise Levertov, "On the Function of Line," in Light Up the Cave (New York: New Directions, 1979).
70. Henry, "Introduction à une esthétique scientifique," 29.
71. On Marey's investigations
72. Brain, "Standards and Semiotics," 249-284.
73. Ernst Brücke, Grundzüge der Physiologie und Systematik der Sprachlaute für Linguisten und Taubstummenlehrer (Vienna: Carl Gerhold's Sohn, 1876), 75-92.
74. Brücke, Die Physiologischen Grundlagen.
75. Brücke, Die Physiologischen Grundlagen, 4.
76. Brücke, Die Physiologischen Grundlagen, 4.
77. Gaston Paris, "Études historiques et philologiques sur la rime française," Romania 6 (1879): 625.
78. Gustave Kahn, "Préface" to Premiers poèmes avec une préface sur le vers libre (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1897), 24-27.
79. Kahn, "Préface," 25.
80. Kahn, "Préface," 27.
81. Kahn, "Préface," 27.
82. Emile Hennequin, "L'esthétique de Wagner et la doctrine spencérienne," La revue wagnérienne 1 (1885-1886): 282-286.
83. Kahn, "Préface," 27.
84. Kahn, "Réponse des symbolistes".
85. Gustave Kahn, "Response of the Symbolists" (1886), in Art in Theory 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998), 1016-1017.
86. On Henry's critical role in the early vers-libristes' turn to phonetics.
87. Georges Lote, "La poétique du symbolisme," Revue des cours et conferences 35, no. 2 (1934): 120.
88. Spire, Plaisir poétique et plaisir musculaire, 13-14.
89. Kahn, "Préface," 29.
90. Scott, 127-128.
91. Kahn, "Préface," 33.
92. Camille Mauclair, [Untitled], in Enquête internationale, ed. Marinetti, 64.
93. Mauclair, [Untitled], 66.
94. Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
95. Mauclair, [Untitled], 65.
96. Mauclair, [Untitled], 65.
97. Robert de Souza, La poésie populaire et le lyrisme sentimental (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1899).
98. Eugène Landry, La théorie du rythme et le rythme du français declamé (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1911), 7.
99. 'Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / to purify the dialect of the tribe /And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.'.
100. T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944).
101. Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
102. Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).
103. This work was disparagingly described by fellow Rousselot student Marcel Jousse, who, in lectures at the École d'Anthropologie, alleged that Rousselot was alarmed by the agenda of de Souza and Spire.
104. Rémy Guérinel, "De la phonétique vivante et expérimentale du professeur Jean-Pierre Rousselot (1846-1924) à l'anthropologie du geste et du rythme du professeur Marcel Jousse (1886-1961)," unpub. ms., 8-9.
105. De Souza and Spire's project invites comparison with Erik Satie's efforts to bring the musical forms of the cabaret to the concert hall. Around 1912 Satie even jocularly described himself as a 'phonometrician' and wrote a humorous piece on 'the first time I used a phonoscope' for the 'filthy business' of 'cleaning sounds.'.
106. Erik Satie, "What I Am," in The Writings of Erik Satie, ed. and trans. Nigel Wilkins (London: Eulenburg, 1980), 58.
107. Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
108. Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999).
109. Canales. On discussions of rhythm in industrial life.
110. Robert M. Brain, "The Ontology of the Questionnaire: Max Weber on Measurement and Mass Investigation," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001): 647-684.
111. F.T. Marinetti, "The Variety Theater," in Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006), 185-192.
112. Berghaus, The Genesis of Futurism.
113. On the 1909 manifesto.
114. Jean-Pierre A. de Villers, Le premier manifeste du futurisme, edition critique avec, en fac-similé, le manuscrit original de F.T. Marinetti (Ottawa: Éditions de l'Université d'Ottawa, 1986).
115. Marinetti, "The Variety Theater," 185-192.
116. F.T. Marinetti, "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," in Critical Writings, ed. Berghaus, 113.
117. Marinetti, "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," 107.
118. Marinetti, "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," 124.
119. F.T. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax-Untrammeled Imagination-Words-in-Freedom," in Critical Writings, ed. Berghaus, 124.
120. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Le mystère dans les lettres," in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and Georges Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 385.
121. Richard Cándida Smith, Mallarmé's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 26.
122. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax," in Critical Writings, 131.
123. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax," in Critical Writings, 123.
124. F.T. Marinetti, "Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and Sensitivity toward Numbers," in Critical Writings, ed. Berghaus, 140.
125. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax," in Critical Writings, 131.
126. F.T. Marinetti, "Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine," in Critical Writings, ed. Berghaus, 86.
127. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Propeller Talk," Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (1994): 153-178.
128. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax," 131.
129. Marinetti, "Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor," 139.
130. Gunter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998).
131. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914-1926), 2nd ed. (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), 37.
132. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 33.
133. F.T. Marinetti, "Dynamic, Multichanneled Recitation," in Critical Writings, ed. Berghaus, 199.
134. Walter Nevinson, Newark Evening News, as quoted in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 104.
135. Henry Newbolt, "Futurism and Form in Poetry," Fortnightly Review 569 (1914): 812.
136. Doug Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
137. Harold B. Segal, Turn of the Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
138. Hugo Ball, "Die Reise nach Dresden," in Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Hans-Burkhard Schlichtling (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 315.
139. Hugo Ball, "Das erste dadaistische Manifest" (1916), in Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit, 40.
140. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 59.
141. Hugo Ball, "Gadji Beri Bimba," in Gesammelte Gedichte (Zurich: Die Arche, 1963), 27.
142. Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto 1918," trans. Ralph Mannheim, in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap Press, 1981), 79.
143. For performances of Ball's phonetic poems, see UbuWeb Sound: Hugo Ball, http://www.ubu.com/sound/ball.html.
144. Remy de Gourmont, Le problème du style (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902), 9.
145. Sherry, 5-7.
146. Remy de Gourmont, Esthétique de la langue française (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), 315-316.
147. Julien Benda, Belphégor (1918), trans S.J.I. Lawson (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), 144.
148. The full original title is Belphégor: Essai sur l'esthétique de la présente société française.