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Isidore Isou’s first book, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (“Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music”), published by Gallimard in 1947, was at once theoretical, programmatic, and prophetic. In this collection of his first poems and compositions, Isou sketched out the foundations of Lettrist poetry, and of a music that had neither pitch nor instruments. The book presented his first symphony, La Guerre. The book also developed a two-phase understanding of artistic creation: an “amphlic” phase and a phase of “chiseling.” Isou asserted that every period of art history goes through a phase of amplification in which great works contribute to the development of new forms — this is the “amphlic” phase — followed by a phase in which these forms are dismantled or dissipated — this is the “chiseling” phase. This period of disintegration is followed by a radical renewal — a new amphlic phase — which in turn is followed by more chiseling. In this vein, he argued that words should be destroyed to make way for letters, and announced the arrival of a “Lettrist avalanche.”1 A second book followed, also in 1947, also published by Gallimard, L’Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie (“The Aggregation of a Name and of a Messiah”). In this autobiographical novel, Isou affirmed his role as a natural-born creator, driven by a furious desire to change society and to make a name for himself as a major cultural figure. When he published Précisions sur ma poésie et moi (“Precisions on My Poetry and Me”) in 1950, his goal, as the title indicated, was to expand the thinking presented in his first work as well as to correct and respond to certain critiques and attacks on it, notably those regarding his influences (the sound poems of the Dadaists, for example). In so doing, he sought to explain what set Lettrist poetry apart from the historical contributions of other avant-garde movements.
Isou rapidly put together a system that called into question several aesthetic and philosophical approaches that had preceded it. In their place he called for a wholly innovative global culture, which he called “Créatique” or “Novatique.” He expanded and further theorized this approach from 1941 to 1976 in thousands of pages of writing, through which he sought to build an ideal paradise, a society of creators who advance through life by constantly creating, renewing each branch of human existence through extensive knowledge of its varied disciplines, from the artistic to the scientific, from culture to communication. He called this approach “kladology,” from the Greek word klados, meaning “branches.” Isou believed in the homologation of ideas: creators should theorize and name the concepts they put forward in order to substantiate and mark them as phases of human advancement. In addition to musical creations, Isou developed innovative concepts such as the “hypergraphic” novel, “infinitesimal” and “supertemporal” art, “meca-aesthetics,” and “excordism.”
According to Isou’s system, music was just one branch of the kladology that he had explored and sought to renew. Today, we are lucky enough to be able to listen to his musical explorations, thanks to several orchestrations, productions, and recordings. These have made it possible to release a few historic records, which are more than mere “documentation” of his work, as they feature Isou’s own voice in pieces intended for diffusion through spatially arranged speakers. This type of presentation allows, and will continue to allow, listeners to hear the myriad possibilities offered by that voice.
Isou’s cult film, Traité de bave et d’éternité (“Treatise on Slime and Eternity”), made in 1951, brings to life several of his theories. It incorporates his concept of “discrepant” film, in which the sound is completely separated from the image in order to construct two distinct entities to be disrupted. Isou literally chiseled the film, scratching it, lacerating it, painting on it, and drawing symbols on it, executing a radical attack on the image. His approach would have a huge impact on experimental cinema, both in the American underground movement and on multiple directors of the New Wave. The film includes recitations of Lettrist poems, some composed and read by Isou and others by François Dufrêne (J’interroge et j’invective, in memory of Antonin Artaud). Henri Chopin, future founder of Sound Poetry, who was sixteen at the time, was riveted when he discovered Traité de bave et d’éternité. Isou’s voice played backward at the beginning of the film was one of the earliest explorations of the possibilities of tape recording, which would be widely used by certain Lettrist poets and then by sound poets.
The film, produced by Marc’O, caused uproar at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951, despite Jean Cocteau’s support of it. The film’s uncompleted second part was screened in the dark: only the soundtrack could be heard, which at any rate was completely detached from the image. Traité de bave et d’éternité paved the way for two important films released in 1951, Maurice Lemaître’s Le film est déjà commencé? and Gil J. Wolman’s Anticoncept. The latter film, screened on a meteorological balloon, alternated black and white circles at irregular intervals (marking the birth of the flicker effect, which would become a leitmotif in a certain strain of experimental filmmaking) against a soundtrack composed of scraps of sentences, sounds of breathing, body noises, and onomatopoeia. It was also a major influence on Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (“Howlings in Favor of Sade”), released the following year.
In the “new Lettrist alphabet” presented in his first book, Isou proposed adding nineteen letters symbolizing noises and noise-producing body movements to amplify the French alphabet for use in his poetry. Initially, he employed letters from the Greek alphabet as a notation system for these nineteen sounds, then subsequently replaced this system with a numerical one using the numbers 1 to 19. The sounds symbolized were:
Inhale (heavy breath), exhale (heavy breath), lisp (expulsion of air through the teeth, to produce a snake-like sound), groan, growl (as a dog about to bark), snort (harsh) made with the throat by filling the belly with air, sigh (produced simultaneously with the throat, mouth, and nose), snore, gargle (with air pushed between the tongue and the palate), whimper, hiccup, cough/slight cough, sneeze, smack of the tongue, pop (of the lips), motor sound (as to imitate the sound of a car engine), spitting sound (a kind of combined pthtpht-peh-pshaw), kiss (noisy), whistle (simple, non-melodic).2
Isou in this way opened his poetry and his music both to the letters of our alphabet and to his novel body-sound letters, as well as to potential, virtual letters — letters as yet undiscovered, emanating from a non-human sound world (animal, meteorological, etc.) or from sounds that might be imagined, or formed empirically. It should be observed that these notation systems, which Isou would include in each of his sound innovations, and his theorizations of them were among the things that set him apart from the members of the Lettrist International and from certain sound poets who broke away from the founder of Lettrism, arguing for a departure from the page, notably in favor of the tape recorder.
Starting with his first work, Isou affirmed his position quite clearly: in Lettrist music, there are no instruments, only the voice; notions of pitch and harmony are abandoned completely. Looking back over the history of avant-gardes, in the wake of Dada, Surrealism, Dodecaphonism, and Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises, Isou considered that words and notes had nothing more to say. Although he was at times outspoken in his criticism of them, Isou remained conscious of the phonetic legacy of these movements, notably Zaum, Futurism, Artaud, Mallarmé’s free verse, and Pierre Albert-Birot’s Poèmes à danser et à crier.
Isou held the art of letters in opposition to the art of notes, seeking to push back against the all-powerful reign of the instrument over the voice by deploying a non-conceptual purity he achieved by arranging letters and phonemes. More than once, Lettrism affirmed that its goal was not to create a language, but to organize letters so that they were a-semantic, suffused with contrapuntal possibilities and phonemes that used the same frequency band. The letter was seen as a “nuclear” particle or an aesthetic, an independent work system, and the point was to achieve a sound emptied of meaning, semantically chiseled down to phonetic and onomatopoeic poetry that was very different from Dada’s phonetic poems. Following the same logic, Isidore Isou considered atonal music to be a phase in the destruction of harmony and musique concrète as the same, but for instruments. Without pitch or tone, his music engaged with the primitiveness of the phoneme, exploring the sound qualities of the letter and the many possibilities bodies possessed for the production of sound, both spoken and the unspoken (through what he called “aphonism”). Indeed, the human body, as producer of sounds, was the ultimate instrument.
In 1947, Isou identified Claude Debussy as the composer who had marked the beginning of the chiseling phase of music composed with notes, and Baudelaire as the poet who had done the same for poetry written with words (which he did by doing away with the anecdote). Isou believed this phase had come to an end with Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and Maurice Ravel. He argued that it was necessary to arrive at a phase of destruction that would provoke a certain aesthetic ugliness capable of evolving into an innovative and progressive force, as Picasso had done for painting.
At the same time, in his early theoretical work, Isou, by harkening back to the oral tradition of the Greek aoidos (classical singer), sought to bring poetry and music (back) together. This means that any boundary drawn between the two forms of expression is quite thin, but this essay will focus on his musical works, either because they were put together as such or because they were performed using musical methods and media, recorded, or orchestrated. Several of Isou’s works are located at this border, and are at times even structured according to the genres of the musical world, while maintaining their links to poetry, albeit poetry that is capable of departing from the page, through sound and recitation. This is true of Concerto pour œil et oreille (“Concerto for Eye and Ear,” 1984) and Suite baudelairienne (1985), published by L’Inéditeur. Other poetic pieces in the Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique and in Précisions sur ma poésie et moi were recorded on vinyl or on CD, thus becoming sound pieces without fully entering the realm of music. Further examples include Lettries blanches ou Anti-lettries (“White Lettries or Anti-Lettries,” 1958) and the Chœur Polyautomatique (“Polyautomatic Choir,” 1963), both of which play with this tension between poetry and music.
Isou’s so-called musical works adapt Lettrist poetry to musical structures and modalities: they follow traditional genres, employing choruses, notation, scores, etc., with a work of arranging, orchestrating, producing, recording, staging (symphonies), and performing (as in the “aphonistic” performances). It should be noted that numerous Lettrist recitals were given, notably at the Tabou Club in 1950, at the Odéon in 1964, at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris during the Festival d’Automne in 1973 (for an evening titled “Music Revisited through Lettrism, Aphonism, and the Supertemporal”), at the Salle Gaveau in 1976, and at the Centre Pompidou in 2019.
From the outset, Isou composed music in a specific genre, and no minor one at that: the symphony. Despite the many innovative concepts whose existence he affirmed through often complex neologisms, his choice of the term “symphony” is explained by his ongoing desire to use academic notions that are historical and exist in the collective consciousness, as well as by his need for institutional recognition (thus his desire, from the beginning, to be published by Gallimard). Choosing the symphony framework, anchored as it was in the history of music, was also what made it possible for Isou to break it, to deeply question its aesthetic workings. He did this first by replacing instruments with the human voice, in its relationship to letters, inscribing his symphony in a tradition of “non-orthodox approaches”3 (which include, for example, La Symphonie pour un homme seul by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry).
In La Guerre, Isou used his own notation system, employing several voices and types of voice, as well as, surprisingly, certain words he considered interesting for the sounds they made, rather than for the concepts they contained. These words were included as an accompaniment to purely Lettrist harmonies. The piece is punctuated with several substantives from the lexicon of the Second World War, in French and in German: he inserted utterances such as “Heil Hitler!,” “marche,” “Stalin,” “Stalingrad,” and “Vichy” as concrete sound objects with a provocative edge. The symphony was influenced by Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and its orchestral opening, in addition to the Marseillaise. Use of the latter, according to Isou, helped him to “understand” the music.
Through a parallel he drew between his own work and innovators in cinema, Isou affirmed that the text of La Guerre, because of its visual nature and its original alphabet, was “stupefying to the eye.”4 He placed it in the tradition of graphic scores (the ones to follow would be different in that they were directly intended for orchestration and sound performance). His unusual typography was not actually printable using the printed presses available at the time, and was thus reproduced by facsimile in the book. The score is presented in simplified writing that is directly accessible, without staffs (a visual element that appears, out of context, in his 1950 hypergraphic novel Les journaux des dieux). The piece uses a 2/4 time signature and seven voices (bass, basso cantante, “pedal bass,” baritone, tenor, alto, soprano) vertically aligned; each is responsible for a series of different combinations of letters (taken from both the French alphabet and the body alphabet), syllables, body sounds, and words, arranged horizontally. Isou also indicated that “the counterpoint accepts the given of a primary *grund ton.”5 His Trois Pièces Joyeuses revisit genres of popular music such as swing, tango, and waltz, again with a 2/4 time signature, with voice combinations such as basso cantante, baritone, alto, mezzo soprano; or bass, tenor, soprano; or three basses, tenor, baritone. The silences, pauses, and sighs are precisely notated with black dots that include specifications such as “one second” or “one measure,” giving a kind of syncopated rhythm to the composition.
These early works demonstrated that Isou’s Lettrist vocal system could work in both classical and popular genres and formats: vocalized letters and mixed-up phonemes could definitively replace instruments, amplified by body sounds and their notations. Beyond its place in his system of amphlic and chiseling phases, this corporeality marked a stylistic evolution in Isou’s music. Over time, the presence of the body would become stronger and more central, from his mixing of body alphabet and classic letters and phonemes all the way to his Fifth Symphony and aphonistic compositions, when the body became an instrument in its own right.
Isou’s First Symphony was not taken seriously by contemporary musicians, and it was not recorded until fifty years after its composition, when the composer Frédéric Acquaviva, astounded to learn this fact, suggested to Isou that he record it and perform new ones. These included Symphony No. 3, in which Acquaviva “symphonizes” and deconstructs Isou’s solo voice (as a “cantus firmus”). He orchestrates it in seven sound layers, for a construction symmetrical to the one used in La Guerre. At times, the seven voices are layered in a cacophony of several channels. The film director Frédérique Devaux recorded Symphony No. 2 in 1991, which is also comprised of Isou’s solo voice, but it was never released and is unavailable in any audible form.
Symphony No. 4 was orchestrated and directed by Acquaviva using a score Isou wrote for the occasion. It features a choir of Lettrists, ex-Lettrists, and Lettrism sympathizers, a soloist (Maria Faustino, also a choreographer) and Isou’s voice, preserving some of its moments of “audible fatigue.”6 The manuscript for Isou’s solo alone is sixty-three pages. The piece itself is sixty-two minutes long, because Isou wanted to create a symphony that was longer than Beethoven’s symphonies. He described it as a “spatial and sound exploration of the perceptible qualities of the letter.”7 The only indication he gives to the choir is the phrase “Panem et circenses,” which is actually an ironic reference to Juvenal’s Satire X; the name of this Roman poet is also the symphony’s subtitle. In his orchestration and his recording, Acquaviva worked with the voices not to achieve a trance-like state, as had been done, he felt, in Traité de Bave et d’Éternité — and, indeed, one hears vocal loops in Isou’s works that in no small measure prefigure minimalism — but rather in the interest of integrating “speed, ambitus, space, simultaneous opposing loops, etc.”8
Symphony No. 5 grew out of an idea from Acquaviva. Wishing to immortalize a last creative impulse by the founder of Lettrism, who was now disabled by illness and unable to speak, Acquaviva directed a microphone at Isou’s left and right nostrils, alternately. As he recorded, he captured micro-variations in the sounds from Isou’s mouth and the rattles and exhalations of his damaged throat. The piece is a continuous and unedited recording of “the possibilities or impossibilities of his breath, in accordance with his old pioneering alphabet of the Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique.”9
These symphonies evolve by exploring the various sounds and perceptible qualities of letters, phonemes, and onomatopoeias and ways to arrange them, in amphlic and chiseling phases. The choir expands from seven voices (or seven layers of Isou’s voice) in the first symphonies to twenty in the fourth. In the latter, Isou, as the soloist, recites his part in his rasping voice (his Romanian accent lending unique vocal color to the piece) in counterpoint to a generous, orchestrated choir working through the syllabic and letteric possibilities of a single Latin phrase, similarly to how words were stripped of their meaning in the First Symphony. The Fifth Symphony, simple and moving, is full of silences and extra-vocal, bodily sounds — the letter can no longer be heard but the voice is present, even if speech is lacking.
Before the creation of these three symphonies in the last years of Isou’s life, a second phase in Lettrist poetry occurred in 1955, when he introduced “mono-lettrism.” This approach streamlined the arrangement of letters down to a single phoneme-letter, open to a multitude of voices, rhythms, and interpretations. One of these works, Isou’s poem with the title Ligne unique de consonnes (“Single line of consonants,” 1966), was performed by the London-based composer and mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg (who has given several recitals of Isou’s work) as a prelude to the spatialized playback of Symphony No. 4 at the Centre Pompidou. This highlights the complex shift from the poetic to the sonic, driven by Lixenberg’s remarkable vocal abilities.
Aphonism, which is an act of chiseling in Lettrist music, is another artistic and musical discovery that Isou developed — and another of Isou’s specially coined words. In it, the mouth and body are moved without the intent to produce sound. The emblematic work of Aphonism is Opus aphonistique No. 1. Several pieces, grouped together under the title Œuvres Aphonistiques and published by Roberto Altmann, were intended by Isou to make silence “concrete,” as he instructed in Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique.
Isou’s Aphonism is distinct from John Cage’s 4’33’’, which is a piece about silence, performed as a negation of it, or an interrogation of our relationship with it in our everyday lives. Aphonism, by contrast, works with silence after sound has been taken away, showcasing body movements and non-pronunciation in inaudible performances or recitations, chiseling the letter down to nothingness while returning to the primitive sounds of the performer’s body during everyday gestures, in ways that prefigured parts of the Fluxus movement.
This approach makes it possible to open up our listening to corporeal interstices that approach silence, to listen to the inaudible through particles created by the openings, half-openings, and closings of the mouth. Lettrists describe this as the “art of silence” or of the “music of silence.” Where Cage sought to listen to the body — notably by isolating himself in an anechoic chamber, where he discovered that silence did not exist — Isou sought to make the body audible, using mute yet creative particles.
With Infinitesimal Art, Isou proposed a system of notation for non-phonetic signs, which are open to interpretation and imagination. In this way, letters gave way to unpronounceable symbols, further enlarging the Lettrist’s sphere of sound.
Using instructive commands with performative intent, aphonistic pieces work — and work with — silence, using the body and its gestures, gesticulations, facial expressions, and grimaces, as well as everyday objects. These unremarkable objects become “new music instruments,” “aphonic instruments,” or “instruments of silence.”10 Among the most incongruous that Isou uses are a glass of water, a razor, a pocket mirror, cigarettes, brooms, books and newspapers, a blackboard and chalk, a trouser zip, apple peelings, and dice. These pieces decontextualize everyday situations and objects. Some of them integrate metaphorical actions, such as cleaning the stage or tearing up books, to “musicalize” or “de-musicalize” the objects.
Instead of “instrumentalists,” Isou sometimes referred to “aphonists,” thus constructing a new category of musician. He nevertheless continued to employ specific musical notions and framings: words such as cantata, hymn, cadence, orchestra conductor, solo, stage, choir, tempo, leitmotiv, and execution appear frequently in his work, even if he does pull them out of their traditional frames by modifying or adapting them into neologisms (for example “hermetic solo” and “sym-aphonie”).11
Furthermore, Isou integrated theoretical concepts relating to his chiseling understanding of music history. He imagined aphonistic performances of the classical repertoire, such as scores by Bach, Debussy, and Schönberg. One notable act involves that literal and symbolic trampling of The Well-Tempered Clavier, accompanied by a call for a silent reading of the score. This act metaphorizes Isou’s struggle for a new art form against what he saw as the banality of traditional art, reinforcing his drive for continual transcendence.
Another unique feature of these works is the inclusion of directions addressed to the audience within the scores themselves. These range from instructions on applause (which becomes a crucial, albeit parodied, moment, as it breaks the silence of the pieces) to evoking specific emotions in the spectators. Isou imagines them annoyed, impassive, bored, or aware of the innovative dimension of the performance they are attending.
Following on Isou’s theatrical-musical vocal proposals and the revolutions that musique concrète set in motion in 1945, Lemaître — who joined Isou and his movement in 1949 — developed what he called “hyperphonie.” Hyperphonie was visual “hypergraphia” (a truly groundbreaking concept) applied to music, calling for the use of all possible sounds. Henry and Schaeffer had already included this in their first studies, while pioneering the revolutionary practice of acousmatic listening. Even before that, several composers had incorporated everyday sounds and noises, including sounds from various objects, into their works; for example, the bruiteurs and Russolo with his innovative intonarumori. Hyperphonie, however, remains relevant in its ability to fuse disciplines, once again navigating the boundaries between the poetic and the musical. It expands the field of Lettrist sound possibilities in Isou’s wake.
Isou’s musical theories opened the way for radical poetic-sound innovations, such as those of Wolman, who went on to create the separatist art movement and who chiseled the letter down to breath in his “Mégapneumes,” to which Isou expressed opposition many times. Isou’s theories influenced Dufrêne’s “Crirythmes,” which used the tape recorder, as well as Jean-Louis Brau’s “Instrumentations verbales,” inspired by the ideas of René Ghil (and borrowing Ghil’s term), and Brau’s Concerto de janvier (1952), Lemaître’s symphony Le mariaje du Don et de la Volga (1952), and various sound works by Lettrist comrades, notably Broutin’s 1976 Concerto pour une bouche et quatre membres and the chiseling improvisations of François Poyet. It is worth noting that Isou considered Symphonie en K (1947) by his comrade Gabriel Pomerand — and whose recording is as yet unreleased — to be the first chiseling choral work in the history of Lettrism.
Isou also aspired to create a novel music theory, though he never elaborated on it, and no trace of this project remains. His theories had a notable influence on composers such as György Ligeti in Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures as well as in his abstract language, and on Cage, who cited him in Mesostics. Yves Klein, whose first publication was in a Lettrist journal, released his Monotone-Silence Symphony with knowledge of Isou’s theories. Georges Aperghis attended a Lettrist recital at the Festival d’Automne in 1973, which was a source of inspiration for the composition of his Récitations (1977-1978).
During a retrospective of Isou’s paintings at the Centre Pompidou in 2019, his Symphony No. 4 was presented and spatialized by Acquaviva in the main auditorium. Symphony No. 5 was showcased at the closing event of a monographic exhibition of Isou’s work at La Plaque Tournante in Berlin in August and September 2017, titled “Isou: From Lettrism to Eternity.” Additionally, all of his symphonies were played at the Centre International de Poésie in Marseille in 2007.
In his ideas, his innovative concepts, his Créatique, his recordings, and his extensive bibliography, Isou left an instructive artistic and theoretical legacy. His work undeniably forged a path for numerous figures within the avant-garde.
1. Isidore Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, Paris, Gallimard, 1947. ↩
2. Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, op. cit. (note 1). ↩
3. Frédéric Acquaviva, “Three New World Symphonies,” in Kaira M. Cabañas (ed.) (with the collaboration of Frédéric Acquaviva), Specters of Artaud, Language and the Arts in the 1950s, Exhibit catalog, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 18 September – 17 December 2012. ↩
4. Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, op.cit. (note 1). ↩
5. Ibid. ↩
6. Frédéric Acquaviva, “Isou, Juvénal et moi,” in Isidore Isou, Symphonie No. 4: Juvénal, CD, Paris, Al Dante, 2004, Booklet. ↩
7. Ibid. ↩
8. Ibid. ↩
9. Frédéric Acquaviva (ed.), Le Cahier du Refuge, numéro 163: Isidore Isou, Marseille, Centre International de Poésie, cipM, Novembre 2007, published on the occasion of an exhibit titled “Introduction à un nouveau poète et à un nouveau musicien,” 26 October 2007 – 19 January 2008, curated by Frédéric Acquaviva. ↩
10. Isidore Isou, Œuvres Aphonistiques, Paris, Éditions Roberto Altmann, “Avant Garde” Collection No. 14, 1967. ↩
11. Ibid. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?