IGNM concert: Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters

Peter Schweiger, performance/speaker

Kurt Schwitters - Ursonate

The artist and writer Kurt Schwitters was one of the most prominent figures in the art scene of the first half of the 20th century. He played a key role in shaping concrete poetry and his performances of the Ursonate, a sound poetry based on the musical form of the sonata movement, were developed a hundred years ago. The absurd-sounding movements, written without meaning, are genuinely musical in conception and enter into a symbiosis with the classical framework of the sonata. Grotesque and shattering its meaning, the original sonata begins with 'Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu' and is visibly and audibly understood as a new kind of sound that is constantly repeated and developed. Schwitters made his first experiments with these sound poems in the great laboratory of language, and he dared to experiment with these new forms at an early stage. Guillaume Apollinaire with his 'Calligrammes' can be mentioned as a forerunner of the experimental use of language. He used words to depict a smoking pipe or the Eiffel Tower, and Erik Satie composed music with calligraphic texts in the middle of his scores.

In Peter Schweiger, we have been able to secure an outstanding narrator and performer of Kurt Schwitters' legendary Ursonate for the new 2025/26 season.

A concert of the ignm zürich
Archaeological Series