‘We wanted to abandon a language that had been devastated and rendered impossible by journalism!’ This is how Hugo Ball described the Dadaists’ motivation for leaving words behind at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire. Many artists began experimenting with the possibilities of phonetic poetry, based solely on the musical expression of the voice. This so called Sprachmusik was inspired by such diverse things as magic spells, tongue twisters and the transposition of parts of words. In 1919, the self-proclaimed Berlin Dadasoph Raoul Hausmann took the singing of birds as a model for his sound poem Oiseautal.
Say Something