Petronio, Arthur

Biographical/Historical Note

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).

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