ARTHUR PETRONIO: Cosmosmose (1965)

Cosmosmose (1965)

Performed by Claude and Lydia Kilian, Odette and Guislain Versaille, Jacqueline Witier from the LP Futura Poesia Sonora (Cramps Records, Milan)

The polyphonic concept was resumed by Arthur Pétronio in "Verbophonie Syncritique". He produced his best work after the Second World War: " Tellurgie" 1964, "Nouvelle Innocence" 1965 and "Cosmosmose" 1968, which we have given in its entirety. it is a type of symphonic poem in which the pre-eminent element, verbal polyphonym is underlined by sound instruments and by rhythms produced by percussion instruments. Pétronio confined the verbal intervention to a few key-words, which illuminate the mental screen of the listener, words immersed in the obsessive world of the language of things: sounds, percussions, whispered phonemes, breathing. Sometimes he uses ah alf-voice choral polyphony as a background, its harmonic constants integrating with the symphonic structure of the whole. The generative idea of Pétronio's verbophonic theory came in 1919, the year of the public performance of "La course à la lune", a poem for six voices, double-bass and drums, at the Salle Heystée, Amsterdam. Pétronio describes e emotion he experienced in an Amsterdam café in 1917 on listening to a simultaneous recitation in different languages of a poem by Apollinaire, with a rhythm and timbre accompaniment improvised by a group of artists: Kandinski, Le Fauconnier, Gustave De Smet and Pétronio himself. And he points out that "in the brouhaha of confused conversations the play of the vowels stands out, despite the complexity of the whole, creating a sonic environment of timbre-sounds, an idea of verbal symphony". Kandinski, himself the author of poems much appreciated by.Hans Arp and published in the collection "Mange" (Sounds - Piper Verlag, Munich, 1913), was interested in sound poetry and, at a subsequent meeting with Pétronio, proposed a symphony of noises in which the words were no more than a pretext for the expression of sounds which words themselves cannot express. Source UbuWeb & Cotninuo http://www.ubu.com/sound/petronio.htmlhttps://continuo.wordpress.com/