Alix Anne Shaw

THE MECHANICS OF TRANSCENDENCE:

ON THE SOUND POETRY OF HUGO BALL AND KURT SCHWITTERS

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
1915

gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen

gaga di bling blong
gaga blung
Hugo Ball, "Gadji Beri Bimba," 1916

The Raddadist machine is just what you need.

Kurt Schwitters, "The Raddadist Machine," 1921

Ironic yet serious, by turns individualistic and political, thoroughly modern

yet intrinsically critical of modernity, Dada is one of the most self-contradictory
movements of the Twentieth-Century avantgardes. Yet even today Dada works
emit a sense of excitement and creative innovation. Dada artists felt no need to
limit themselves to a single mode of expression, freely investigating and
combining performance, visual art, and writing. Among Dada's strangest
productions are sound poems—symphonies of spoken lexical units that Hugo Ball
termed "poems without words."1 Surpassing the simple typographic and
onomatopoetic effects employed by the Italian Futurists,2 Dada sound poems
created complex aural textures that both encode meaning and celebrate pure
sensation, offering the audience a new relationship to language.
While most critics have focused on the semantic, aural and textual effects
of these works,3 few have given more than cursory treatment to the fact that they

1 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 70.
2 Stephen Scobie, "I Dreamed I Saw Hugo Ball: bp Nichol, Dada, and Sound Poetry," Boundary
3.1 (1974), 213-224.
3 See, for example, Rex W. Last, German Dadaist Literature: Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, Hans
Arp, (New York: Twayne, 1973); Rudolf E. Kuenzli, "The Semiotics of Dada Poetry," in Dada
Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, eds. Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli (Madison and Iowa
City: Coda Press, 1979), 52-70; Tobias Wilke, Tobias Wilke, "Da-da: 'Articulartory Gestures'
and the Emergence of Sound Poetry," MLN, 3 (April 2013); T.J. Demos, "Circulations: In and

1
also exist as carefully-typeset texts and as highly-scripted performances. Far
from employing mere creative chaos or nonsense, Dada sound poems are
intricately structured and meticulously staged. However, a key question is why.
Specifically, why did Dada sound poets felt such precise control was necessary
and desirable? Dada artists were certainly familiar with the idea of improvisation
and the powerful effects it could produce. Describing an impromptu performance
at the Cabaret Voltaire, Ball writes:

We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and
everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange
happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a
costume; it also demanded a quite definite, passionate
gesture, bordering on madness. Although we could not
have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking
around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and
draped with impossible objects, each one of us trying to
outdo the others in inventiveness. The motive power of
these masks was irresistibly conveyed to us.4

That these artists deliberately sought out such intense internal experiences is
exemplified by their interest in so-called "primitive" cultures, in madness, and in
the primeval. To Ball and his contemporaries, these primal states were
representative of a state of pure, unadulterated being, a oneness with the natural
world. Here it is the Cabaret performers who are transported to primal realms
by the experience of wearing the masks. As Ball's description makes clear, such a
transformation is a deeply affecting, individual experience. At the same time, it is
part of a larger collective reaction in which the performers are propelled by
energies channeled through the materials themselves. If improvisation can
produce such profound effects on the performers, to say nothing of the audience,
and if Dada sound poems aim simply at evoking strong emotion, why would these
poets not simply trust their own ability to improvise? Why fix so securely the
specific sounds and performative components of their works?

In this essay, I attempt to answer these questions in regard to two seminal works
of Dada sound poetry, Hugo Ball's "gadji beri bimba" sequence and Kurt
Schwitters' Ursonate.5 Ball's work is a sequence of six interrelated sound poems
written in 1916 and performed at the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich. The most famous of
Around Zurich Dada," October 105 (2003); and, the analysis of Ball I find most insightful and
persuasive, Erdmute Wenzel White, "Sound Poems," The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet
(Columbia, SC: Camden House), 1998. Because numerous close readings of these works have
already been undertaken, in this essay I focus less on the semantics of individual words and
sounds than on the larger conceptual framing of these works.
4 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 64.
5 Although Schwitters pioneered his own movement, Merz, his relationship to Dada was a close
one. Rejected by the Berlin Dadaists for being too bourgeois, he nonetheless maintained
relationships with a number of Dada artists and wrote of the "close artistic friendship"
between Zurich Dada and Merz. Based on the aesthetic similarities between the two
movements, I include him, as have others, as a Dada artist. For Schwitters' characterization of
Dada vs. Merz, see his essay "Merz (1920)" reprinted in Lucy Lippard's Dadas on Art: Tzara,
Arp, Duchamp and Others, (Minneola, NY: Dover 1971), 102-3.

2
these performances was of the title poem, the fourth in the sequence, on June 23,
1916.6 Schwitters' Ursonate, or Sonata in Primitive and Primeval Sounds, is a
virtuosic 35-minute work, composed in response to a sound poem by Raoul
Hausmann and perfected over the course of ten years, from 1921-32.7 While
extremely different in their aural textures, the two works share a similar
objective: the destruction of received language and its remaking through an
invocation of primal sounds. In this way, both poems attempt to return to the
very origins of language, the point at which expressive sound first begins to
shape itself into communicative utterance.

In this essay I argue that these works, while aiming at the experience of primeval
language, also make deliberate use of technology, or what Huyssen has termed
the technological imagination.8 Specifically, in their sound poetry, Ball and
Schwitters seek precise control in their shared project of remaking the listeners'
relationship to language and the moribund notions that accompany it. In doing
so, they are informed by the trope of the automaton, a common figure in the
works of Grosz and other Dada artists. Mindless, maimed, and deprived of
independent agency, the automaton is a human whose individuality has been
subsumed by the forces of mass production. In contrast to this eviscerated, half-
mechanized figure, Ball and Schwitters offer an alternative model of the animal-
human hybrid. This inverse automaton forcefully asserts meaningfulness of
interior experience. However, Ball and Schwitters both also employ structures of
mechanization in their works and offer the possibility of reproducibility as a form
of protest against the pressures of modernity. The sound poetics of Ball and
Schwitters are, in effect, plans for a machine that is meant to shred and
reassemble meaning, to rend and tear the listener in order to reframe her
relationship to language and to the modern world.

THE DESTRUCTION OF AURA

In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”
Walter Benjamin famously laments the effect that mechanical reproduction has
had on the production and reception of works of art. For Benjamin, the
possibility of mechanical reproduction robs a work of its aura, or sense of
uniqueness, both manipulating and impoverishing the viewer's experience.9

Writing specifically about Dada, Benjamin notes that these artists use mass-
produced materials and perform a deliberate destruction of aura in order to
6 Erdmute Wenzel White, "Sound Poems," The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Columbia,
SC: Camden House), 1998.
7 See Ubu Web for an account by Schwitters' son Ernst and a range of recordings of the work:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/schwitters.html
8 Andreas Huyssen, "The Hidden Dialectic: Avantgarde—Technology—Mass Culture," from After
the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1986), 9.
9 Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second
Version," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings
on Media, translated by Edward Jephcott and Harry Zohn, edited by Michael W. Jennings,
Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2008), 19-55.

3
perform a critique of capitalist culture: "The Dadaists attached much less
importance to the commercial value of their artworks than to the uselessness of
those works as objects of contemplative immersion," he writes. "What they
achieved by such means was a ruthless annihilation of aura in every object they
produced, which they branded as a reproduction through the very means of its
production." He notes that in doing so, "Dadaists turned the artwork into a
missile. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile quality."10

Such deliberate destruction of aura through the use of mechanically-reproduced

and reproducible materials does indeed aim at the nihilism that can be seen in
many Dada works. In the post-World War I era, not only Dada artists but theorists
such as Benjamin and writers including Brecht embraced the idea creative shock
—a moment that could jolt the audience out of complacent acceptance of
bourgeois convention and capitalist manipulation of reality. Benjamin identifies
several possible vehicles for the delivery of such shock, including new literary
forms, dream structure, photo montage, interrupted action, image, and collective
laughter.11 In the shock metaphor, the ballistic force is not only an agent of
destruction, but also one that may open space for the creation of new cultural
signs. Marcel Janco termed this the "second speed" of Dada—one that aims at
the destruction of aura in order to pave the way for new forms of meaning and
experience.12 In their sound compositions, Ball and Schwitters write at this
second speed, using several of the techniques that Benjamin identifies: use of a
new form, dream-logic, polyvocality (a form of aural collage or montage), and,
perhaps accidentally in the case of Schwitters, collective laughter.

Thus, as Huyssen points out, the relationship between the Twentieth Century
avantgarde and technology was not only oppositional, but also dialectical.13 In
particular, avantgarde work itself was profoundly influenced by the machine: "No
other single factor has influenced the emergence of the new avantgarde art as
much as technology," he observes, "which not only fueled the artist's imagination
. . . but penetrated to the core of the work itself." Huyssen links this
fundamental infiltration of the work to technologies of mechanical reproduction:

The invasion of the very fabric of the art object by

technology and what one may loosely call the
technological imagination can best be grasped in artistic
practices such as collage, assemblage, montage and
photomontage . . . art forms which can not only be
reproduced, but are in fact designed for mechanical
reproducibility (47).

In other words, these works reflected the idea of reproducibility at a deep

10 Benjamin, "The Work of Art,.”
11 Benjamin, Walter, ""The Author as Producer," Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Peter Demetz (New York:
Harcourt Brach Jovanovich, 1978), 220-238.
12 C. Russell, "Dada," in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Fourth Edition, ed
Roland Greene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 334.
13 Huyssen, "The Hidden Dialectic," 9.

4
structural level. The sound poems of Ball and Schwitters also reflect this
infiltration by technology. Specifically, they are reflective of machinery in at least
four ways: first, in their performative elements, including costuming, scripting,
and sound; second, in their compositional structures; third, in their own
availability for mechanical reproduction and fourth, in their intended—and often
accomplished—effects.

HUGO BALL'S ALCHEMICAL TECHNOLOGY

Writing specifically about Berlin Dada, Timothy Benson notes the connection
these artists made between the mechanical and the metaphysical. "Their
machine imagery represented not only a vision of a pragmatic, industrialized,
and wholly contemporary culture," he writes, "but also an attempt to resolve by
artistic means the basic issues concerning reality and the human consciousness."
According to Benson, the widespread interest among these artists in the
scientific, the pseudoscientific, and the metaphysical, "attest[s] to an
engrossment so deep that the Dada 'Machine Art' may be regarded as a kind of
latter-day alchemy, an attempt to encounter the mysteries of the transaction
between spirit and matter."14 For instance, Raoul Hausmann, a sound poet and
friend of both Ball and Schwitters, was interested in new media technologies and
in the transmission of brain waves via cosmic ether. Hausmann believed that
human beings would someday develop into "new men" with the capacities of
machines, including the transmission of radio waves.15

This interest in the productive confluence of the mechanical, the magical, and
the human may also be applied, albeit differently, to Zurich Dada. The connection
Ball makes between them is fascinatingly suggested by a diary entry of 1917, in
which he muses, "When monasticism was crushed, medieval discipline lost out to
technology and to the military. Perhaps the machine is only a secularized monk.
But art is about to regain its lost territory."16 In Ball's formulation, religion and
mechanization share a number of features: strict discipline, orderliness,
repetition, and a denial of physicality. The difference between monk and
machine, however, lies in the internal experience of devotion, in a connection
between the human and larger spiritual forces. It is these forces that Ball's art
seeks to capture and affirm.

Like Janco's masks, which Ball describes as suggestive of "Japanese or ancient

Greek theater, yet . . . wholly modern,"17 his own costume for the performance of
"gadji beri bimba" was crafted from cardboard. In his description of the
performance, this material—the cheap and disposable the refuse of
commodification—becomes as a kind of carapace or machine casing that is
reclaimed with spiritual intent. Ball writes:

14 Timothy Benson, "Mysticism, Materialism, and the Machine in Berlin Dada," Art Journal, 46.1
(Spring 1987): 46-55. Quote from page 47.
15 Arndt Niebisch, "Dada Engineering," Modernism/modernity 21.1 (2009), 169-77.
16 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 98.
17 Ibid, 64.

5
 My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which
came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Over
it I wore a huge coat collar cut of cardboard, scarlet
inside and gold outside. It was fastened at my neck in
such a way that I could give the impression of winglike
movement by raising and lowering my arms . . . I could
not walk inside the cylinder so I was carried onto the
stage . . . 18

Immobilized in a "shiny blue cylinder," Ball is rendered robotic as he pathetically

attempts to flap the wings that emanate from within.

Thus, in his performance, Ball refigures the image of the automaton, not as a
vacuous cyborg but as a shamanic human-animal hybrid. This figure is filled with
meaning and spiritual immanence. The inverse automaton is not the blind, mass-
produced tool of capitalism, but rather a vehicle for channeling and transmitting
cosmic energies, a hyper-embodied expression of meaningful experience. Yet the

18 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 70.

6
modern shaman is, first and foremost, mimetically trapped in the modernity.
Here Ball appears as what Hal Foster has identified as the traumatic mime—a
figure who both assumes and inflates the condition of modernity19

Ball's description of his own immobilized condition during the performance is

also remarkably similar to Walter Benjamin's characterization of Mickey Mouse,
another animal-human figure who is emblematic of modern conditions: "Property
relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the first time that it is
possible to have one's own arm, even one's own body, stolen," notes Benjamin.
"The route taken by Mickey Mouse is more like that of a file in an office than it is
like that of a marathon runner," he continues. This is precisely Ball's position as
he is subsequently carried between music stands by Tristan Tzara. As in a
Mickey Mouse cartoon, in Ball's performance "mankind makes preparations to
survive civilization . . . [and] proves that a creature can still survive even when it
has thrown off all resemblance to a human being." Yet, unlike Mickey Mouse,
whose adventures "disavow experience more radically that ever before [because]
in such a world, experience is not worth having,"20 Ball's poem forcefully asserts
the primacy of internality.

Encased, powerless, and laughably impotent, it is what issues from within Ball's
body that becomes most important in the performance—the primal nature of
sound. In The Magic Bishop, Erdmute Wenzel White gives a detailed and
sensitive analysis of the sounds used in all six of the poems in Ball's sequence.
"Gadji beri bimba," White notes, comprises a medley of pealing bells in words
such as "bimba" and "bimbala," magical words ("simsallabim"), musical
instruments ("viola zimbrabrim") and exotic locations and animals ("zanzibar," an
elephant "elifantolim," and a rhinoceros, "rhinozerossola.").21 Discussing both the
musical and animal sound effects in the work, White writes, "Proliferation of
orchestral parts and animal species is taken up by textual proliferation of specific
sounds within words, dispersing and suddenly leaping into free space." In other
words, the poem "exemplif[ies] language before it eludes the grasp of our own
senses."22 In the sounds emanating from his cardboard casing, Ball seeks to
transcend the realm of the expressible, allowing the audience to touch on levels
of individual experience that cannot be appropriated or eviscerated by capitalist
mass culture. As he asserts, "In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the
language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the
innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep for
poetry its last and holiest refuge. We must give up writing secondhand: that is,
accepting words (to say nothing of sentences) that are not newly invented for our
own use."23

19 Hal Foster, "Dada Mime," October 105 (2003), 166-76.

20 Benjamin, Walter, "Mickey Mouse," unpublished fragment of 1931, Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone, edited by Michael W.
Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2008), 545-6.
21 White, The Magic Bishop, 109-112.
22 Ibid, 112.
23 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 71.

7
At the same time that the poem allows the play and dispersal of sound, White
notes that "these dispersals are 'contradicted' by repetition and duplication."24
Such repetitions and reduplications are suggestive of a mechanistic process
operating in the background. This mechanistic or automatic effect of the work is
part of its deep structure: Ball's diary entry of 1916 suggests an automation is
intrinsically tied to the poem's compositional technique. "I have invented a new
genre25 of poems, " he writes, "'Verse ohne Worte' [verses without words] or
Lautgedicte [sound poetry], in which the balance of the vowels is weighted and
distributed solely according to the values of the beginning sequence"26. While he
does not elaborate on the exact procedure, the method seems to be a regularized
process set in motion by an initial word or set of words. In this way, it is
suggestive of a mechanized fabrication technique. It also bears a strong
resemblance to automatic writing procedures pioneered by Tristan Tzara,
including the poem produced via newspaper cutup. Notably, the language of
Ball's description invokes metaphors of machinery or mathematics—vowels are
"weighted" and this weight is "distributed" based not on sounds but "values."

By likening his poem to alchemy or a magical spell, Ball also suggests a form of
metaphysical technology. An alchemical process is used to transform material
from one elemental state to another. On a linguistic
level, a magical spell is an automatic process dependent only on repetition of the
right sequence of sounds to accomplish its effect, as with the word
"abracadabra" or, to use an example from Ball, "zimzalla." Ball's choice of the
word Lautgedicte to describe his poems is also telling, as it contains the
connotation of becoming audible or being made public. It is the pronunciation of
the spell that puts it into motion, the sounding of its syllables that results in its
automatic effect.

According to his diary, during the performance itself, Ball finds himself inside the
mechanism of the sound machine, where he is rent apart and remade. "The
stresses became heavier," he writes, "the emphasis was increased as the sound
of the consonants became sharper."27 Caught in this "heavy" and "sharp"
machinery, Ball becomes both performer and performed. The magical spell takes
over, creating a metaphysical result: "I noticed that my voice had no choice but
to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation, that style of liturgical
singing that wails in all the Catholic churches of the East and West."28 As detailed
in his diary, the performance had a powerful, semi-traumatic effect on Ball that
lasted well beyond the evening. As with the masks, the power of the materials—
in this case, the material of text and sound—takes over, both eviscerating and
transforming its audience. The magical spell was in this case an effective
technology, at least for Ball himself.

24 Ibid, 111.
25 Ball uses the word "Gattung," which can be taken to mean both "genre" and "genus." Given
Ball's project of invoking the primal through language, the choice of words implies a deep
conceptual connection between the textual and the animal in these poems.
26 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 70.
27 Ibid, 70.
28 Ibid, 71.

8
Beyond the direct effects of his (repeated) performances, Ball made his magic
available to his audience through other means of technological reproduction.
Although no original recording of Ball performing the poems has been found, a
famous photograph shows him in his shamanic cardboard outfit. Similarly,
"Karawane," one of the poems in the sequence was published by Richard
Hülsenbeck in Dada Almanach. Here it was typeset with each line rendered in a
different typeface, a deliberate reference to mechanical reproducibility.

Rejecting a singular typography, the printed page embraces many standardized

forms, a choice that may be intended to foreground the poem's polyvocality or to
suggest its emotional inflections. As White notes, Ball also intended to publish
the entire sequence of Lautgedicte but could not afford to do so.29 These
reduplications provide another example of the use of media technologies to
promote a work that was deeply critical of modernity.

SHOCK AND AWE: KURT SCHWITTERS' URSONATE

Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, or Sonata in Primitive and Primeval Sounds, is

perhaps the most ambitious of the Dada sound poems. More deeply engaged with
music than Ball, Schwitters' work, as its title suggests. closely follows the form of
the classical sonata. Its four sections include an opening rondo with four distinct
"themes"; a slow movement, or largo; a dance movement, or scherzo-trio, and a
finale with a cadenza. According to musicologist Nancy Perloff, "Schwitters
applies the techniques of a classical development, so that the themes' different
29 White, "Sound Poems," Footnote 1, 117.

9
characters are heard in combination. Recapitulations may occur in each of these
movements, but development is most audible."30 The sonata, in other words,
creates a finished product out of component parts.

While Schwitters does not engage the figure of the traumatic mime or inverse
automaton to the degree that Ball does, his costuming and performance both
make use of modern conventionality. Dressed in a suit and tie, Schwitters
appears blandly bourgeois in photographs of his performance. The work, too,
seems innocent; its invocation of the sonata form sets up the expectation of a
pleasant and perhaps somewhat transporting experience for the cultured
listener. Yet both performer and work are poised to deliver creative shock and a
radical reframing of language.

As with Ball, the important components of the work issue from within—both from
the interior of the performer's body and from the sound and structure of the
poem itself. In his performances, Schwitters becomes maestro and instrument;
animal, human, and machine. Recordings of the piece open with him producing a
bewildering array of sounds. While Ball's "Gadji beri bimba" costume obscured
and immobilized Ball's body, in Schwitters' work the focus is on the physical act
of utterance. Images of his performance, taken in sequence, emphasize its raw
vocality. He is shown with his mouth open and with a wide range of facial
expressions. Notably, this sequences resembles those that were
contemporaneously being produced in research on linguistics.31 Such images
were meant to record the moment of sound-production and coincided with the
theories of linguist Wilhelm Wundt, who wrote extensively on the connection
between emotion and the muscular movements that accompany speech.
According to this theory, "muscular movements not only result from, but in turn
also modify psychic emotion in its unfolding, either by discharging affective
energies from the organism or by amplifying them in accordance with a
physiological feedback mechanism."32 Thus, Schwitters' use of these images in
conjunction with his poem suggest the physicality of the speech act, an act that
not only remakes semantic meaning but channels emotion through both listener
and performer. Put into motion, the Ursonate becomes a sound machine that
includes snippets suggestive of machinery, infant language, and birdcalls.33 Like
Ball, Schwitters channels both the animal and the human, offsetting them with
reduplications suggestive of a relentless automatic mechanism.

The poem's textures and sudden shifts between sets of sounds emphasize vocalic
virtuosity, the ability to produce a wide range of sounds in rapid succession. Its
relentless repetitions, aggressive sounds, and particular refrains create a texture
of modern noise against which birdcalls emerge. For instance, the opening
movement includes sound combinations such as "rinnzekete bee bee," (rin-za-
keta bay-bay in Schwitters' pronunciation); "rakete bee bee," and "rakete
30 Nancy Perloff, "Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde: A Musicologist's Perspective," in
The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, eds. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), 108.
31 Tobias Wilke, "Da-da: 'Articulartory Gestures'", 646.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.

10
rinnzekete / rakete rinnzekete / rakete rinnzekete." After establishment of these
sonic themes, Schwitters includes the birdcall: "Rrummpff tillff too?" Similarly,
the presto includes "grimm glimm gninn bimbimm," a relentlessly mechanical
theme set against "tilla loola luula loola" and, later, "taa taa taa taa" and "tuii tuii
tuii tuii." This kind of dialectic recalls Schwitters' characterization of his work as
playing "sense against nonsense"34 and poetry as playing "word against word,"
"concept against concept," and "letters and groups of letters against each
other."35 They also fit with Schwitters' methods of composition in his visual
works, which made use of individual elements, often refuse, collaged together so
as to create a new and carefully-structured whole.

As Perloff points out in her examination of sound poetry and its relationship to
music, contemporaneous developments in recording technology allowed for
effects such as splicing and layering.36 Schwitters' repetitions are suggestive of
such mechanical processes. His visual works also often included machines,
particularly coffee grinders and cogs. Christoph Bigens connects these machines
not only to Schwitters' workplace, a "sooty factory," but also to an interest in
transformative processes. He writes that when Schwtters' coffee mills display an
interest in "the fact that mills can transform solid materials into homogeneous
powders. Exactly as his motto prescribed: Merz wanted to convert, reconcile,
and redistribute. Other examples of such redistributing devices are the metal
funnels used to pour fluids from one container to another, which Schwitters
occasionally integrated into his drawings and montages." Connecting these
devices to Schwitters' documented interest in alchemy, he continues, "[Alchemy]
was used . . . to transform a less valuable material into a valuable one . . . . A
parallel to the Merz principle, which transforms refuse into art, is clearly
evident."37

Schwitters himself makes explicit connections between art, mechanics, and

transformation in his short essay, "The Raddadist Machine." The essay first
appearing in 1921, around the time that he began working on the Ursonate:

The Raddadist machine is just what you need. It is a

strange combination of wheels, axles and rollers along
with cadavers, nitric acid and Merz constructed in such a
way that you go in totally sane and come out totally
mindless . . . . You enter the funnel as a capitalist, pass
between several rollers and are dipped in an acid bath.
Then you come in contact with a few corpses . . . . After
you have been spun to and fro, you will be read my latest
poems until you collapse senseless. Then you will be
tumbled and raddadated, and all of a sudden you will
34 Schwitters, "Merz," in Lippard.
35 Kurt Schwitters, "Consistent Poetry," in PPPPPP: Kurt Schwitters: Poems Performance Pieces
Proses Plays Poetics, ed and trans. Jerome Rothenbergy and Pierre Joris (Cambridge: Exact
Change, 2002), 223-25.
36 Perloff, "Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde," 97-117.
37 Christoph Bigens, "Cogs and Wheels" in Merz — A Total Vision of the World, eds. Annja Müller-
Alsbach, Heinz Stahlhut (Warben/Bern: Benteli, 2004), 110-11.

11
 appear outside the machine as a freshly-trimmed
antibourgeois.38

While not explicitly identifying his poems as machines, in Schwitters'

characterization they are components of a larger mechanism. Notably,
"Raddadist" recalls the sound of a pneumatic drill, as well as implying the dual
processes of etching and erasing.39 As in Ball's work, the listener / viewer is
subjected to this machine and torn apart in order to be remade by it. The stated
aim, perhaps tongue-in-cheek40, is political—to transform the bourgeois into an
"antibourgeois." As with Ball, this transformation is to take place through sound,
through the rending and reassembling of the listener's relationship to language.

The poem itself also encodes ideas of rending and remaking. Interestingly,
"raddadist" is similar in sound and structure to sound textures occurring in the
Ursonate, including "rakete" and "rinnekete." This sense of insistent pounding is,
as noted above, linked with the words "bee bee" (pronounced bay-bay in
Schwitters' performance). In his notes to the poem, Schwitters calls one of the
sections in which this theme occurs, the largo, "metallic and incorruptible;" he
also specifies that "rakete" means "rocket."41 When paired with "bee bee" the
phrase implies the idea not of a rocked but a "rocket baby." This figure recalls
Benjamin's characterization of Dada works as a "missile," one that explodes at
the second speed in order to create new meaning. Similarly, Schwitters writes of
the Ursonate that many of the sound connections are suggested "by shortened
inscriptions on company plaques or on printed matter, but especially by the
interesting inscriptions on railroad switch towers."42 Thus, mechanically
reproduced text is recombined, even as "switch towers" symbolically suggest
enormous textual energy channeled in a new direction. That Schwitters links
notions of un-and re-making specifically to language is suggested by his notes on
the finale, which contains four " inverse sounding[s] of the alphabet from z back
to a." 43 This invocation, too, seems remarkably like a magical incantation such as
"abracadabra" or "alakazam." However, three of the four soundings are to end
with "b," allowing for a sense of incompletion that avoids "banality" and closure.

Schwitters, even more than Ball, makes use of modern media including sound
recordings and photography in order to ensure that his work is not only
mechanically reproduced but also reproducible by others. Publishing the score in
Merz 24 in 1932, Schwitters included precise instructions on how various
sections were to be performed. For instance, of the largo he writes, "Each
successive line is spoken a quarter tone lower than the last, therefore the piece
should start proportionately."44 In his subsequent essay on the work, he includes
a detailed explanation of his phonetic notation and further instruction for
38 Kurt Schwitters, "The Raddadist Machine," in Merz — A Total Vision, 120.
39 Translator's note in Merz—A Total Vision, 120.
40 An interesting stance given Schwitters' rejection by Hulsenbeck on the grounds that he was
too bourgeois to participate in Berlin Dada.
41 Kurt Schwitters, "My Sonata in Primal Sounds," PPPPPP, 235
42 Ibid, 235.
43 Ibid, 237.
44 Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata," 65.

12
performance. However, as if to foreground the possibility for new meanings,
Schwitters also specifies improvisation in the final section:

The cadenza is ad libitum and every performer can put

together his or her own cadenza . . . I have limited myself
to proposing one possible version for a performer lacking
imagination. I myself perform a different version each
time, which allows the cadenza—as the rest of the piece is
performed word for word—to sound especially alive and to
create a strong countermovement to the more rigid part of
the sonata.

Thus, Schwitters seeks to create a work that is not only technologically precise
but also organic, imbued with a sense of living energy.

Schwitters' success in using the Ursonate as a tool of transformation is attested

to by numerous sources. Unlike Ball, he has little to say about his own
experience of performing the piece, other than the fact that he enjoyed doing
so.45 However, several writers have documented the profound effects the work
had on its listeners. For instance, Hans Richter writes:

I remember Schwitters' first public reading of the

Ursonate . .. about 1924 or 25. Those invited were the
'better sort' of people . . . a crowd of retired generals and
other people of rank. Schwitters stood on the podium,
drew himself up to his full six feet plus, and began to
perform the Ursonate, complete with hisses, roars and
crowings, before an audience who had no experience
whatever of anything modern. Aft first they were
completely baffled, but after a couple of minutes the
shock began to wear off. For another five mutes, protest
was held in check....but this restraint served only to
increase the inner tension. I watched delightedly as two
generals in front of me pursed their lips as hard as they
could to stop themselves laughing, Their faces, above
their upright collars, turned first red, then slightly bluish.
And then they lost control. They burst out laughing, and
the whole audience, freed from the pressure that had
been building up inside them, expelled in an orgy of
laughter. The dignified old ladies, the stiff generals,
shrieked with laughter, gasped for breath, slapped their
thighs, choked themselves.

Here, Benjamin's notion of laughter as a form of creative shock is

vividly put into action. Richter continues:

Kurtchen [Schwitters] was not in the least put out by this.

45 Kurt Schwitters, "My Sonata."

13
 He turned up the volume of his enormous voice to Force
Ten and simply swamped the storm of laughter in the
audience, so that the latter almost seemed to be an
accompaniment to the Ursonate. The din raged round
him . . . . Schwitters spoke the rest of his Ursonate,
without further interruption. The result was fantastic.
The game generals, the same rich ladies, who had
previously laughed until they cried, now came to
Schwitters, again with tears in their eyes. almost
stuttering with admiration and gratitude. Something had
been opened up within them, something they had never
expected to feel: a great joy.46

That Schwitters' work functions as an effective vehicle of creative shock,

independent of its performance by the artist, is supported by musician George
Melly's further recollection of an incident in which he himself pronounced lines
from the work. Writing of an incident that occurred in the mid 1950s, Melly
recalls being threatened by "a band of yobs" outside a club where he had been
performing. They were, he writes,

threatening to rearrange [my face] with broken bottles in

a dark cul-de-sac . . . . At the end of the session, I had
gone out of the pub to take a little air, and they'd been
waiting. They had not yet broken the bottles, but had
begun to beat rhythmically against the brick walls which
enclosed us.
Suddenly, I thought of Schwitters.
'Rakete Rinnzekete,' I shouted. 'Rakete Rinnzekete.
Rakete Rinnzekete. Kwii Eee. Fumms bö wö taä zzä. Uu.
Ziiuu rinnzkrrmüü.'
They turned and fled.47

Interestingly, it is the most mechanistic and aggressive moment of the poem that
Melly chooses to recite in this episode. Schwitters might have been pleased with
this disruption of a culturally-scripted moment of violence by using the sound-
machine of his poem. In combination with the human voice, it delivered a
creative shock that was able to diffuse violence and reframe experience—key
parts of the project that Dada artists originally proposed.

RESONANCES AND REDUPLICATIONS

Like the animal-human figures they invoke, sound poems are themselves hybrids,
hovering between the realms of performance, music, and poetry. As a result, the

46 Hans Richter, "Hanover Dada," in Dada: Art and Anti-Art, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), 142-
2.
47 George Melly, in "Revolution Now!," The Grove Book of Art Writing: Brilliant Words on Writing
from Pliny the Elder to Damien Hirst, eds. Martin Gayford and Karen Wright (New York: Grove
Press, 1998), 190-1.

14
works of Ball and Schwitters continue to have a strange and unlikely life of their
own in a range of venues. For instance, host Marie Osmond unexpectedly
recited Ball's "gadji beri bimba" on an epidose of Ripley's Believe It or Not! and
the piece was set to music by the Talking Heads as the song "I Zimba."
Schwitters' work, too, has been set to music, performed by contemporary sound
poets and musicians including Christian Bok and Jap Blonk. It has even been
performed for children.

For subsequent generations of poets, the use of automatically-driven processes

became an important strategy for generating works that would create new and
unexpected effects. Ball and Schwitters had broad influences that included not
only the Surrealists but, later, Oulipo and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Like
their Dada predecessors, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets were especially engaged
with the communicative nature of language, with the problematic relationship
between sign and signifier. Unlike Dada poets, however, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poets such as Charles Bernstein largely sought to highlight the limitations of
language rather than to propose alternate models of how it might function.

In their shared project of creating a new linguistic experience, then, Ball and
Schwitters are fundamentally utopian. As Rosemarie Haag Bletter notes of Paul
Scheerbart, another poet and an Expressionist architect, their works engage
and use technology in the service of human transformation. The focus is on
"transmuting the normally stable architecture"—in this case, the architecture of
language—"into a kaleidoscopic abstraction, altering both nature and man-made
[sic] constructions into an environment that is evanescent and without clearly
visible outlines."48 Both :gadji beri bimba" and the Ursonate use devices of
technology and mechanization to create a dialectic relationship between the
spiritual and the modern; both Ball and Schwitters then reduplicated their
reclaimed spiritual ground via mechanical reproduction. The project of using
modernity in order to critique it is a classic, self-contradictory Dada move.
Although the utopian vision of a new language was at best only partially realized,
thanks to mechanical reproduction, the sound poetry of Ball, Schwitters, and
other Dada poets continues to resonate.

48 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, "Expressionist Architecture," in German Expressionism: Documents

from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed Rose-Carol
Washton Long (New York: Macmillan 1993), 127.

15