Description
Small archive of Arthur Petronio, composer of verbophonic works, or works at the intersection of poetry and music.
Background
Arthur Petronio was born in Switzerland in 1897. His father was Leopoldo Fregoli, a music hall artist, and Arthur was trained
as a classical musician. He shared in the World War I era avant-garde fascination with sound poetry, visual poetry and the
music of ambient sounds, and under the influence of Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Le Fauconnier developed in 1919 a verbophonic
theory for incorporating vowel sounds as elements of a musical score. He also founded several magazines that investigated
connections among the arts, including La Revue de Feu, and Créer. Throughout the 1920s, Créer served as an important forum for a diverse group that included Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, E.L.T. Mesens,
and others interested in the fusion of word, image, and sound into the creation of a total language. Among Petronio's most
admired verbophonic works are Tellurgie (1964) and Cosmosmose (1968).