"Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu": early Dada sound poem in original wrappers

Schwitters, Kurt. Merz 24. Ursonate.

€ 15.000,00

First edition, in the scarce original wrappers, of this seminal Dadaist sound poem by Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), one of only 1000 copies. The "Ursonate", also known as "Sonate in Urlauten" and occasionally written in English as the "Ur-sonata", was composed in different versions between 1923 and 1932 and joined Schwitters's lifelong fascination with music, especially jazz, with modern abstract art movements.

The Ursonate was one of the earliest sound poems to spring from the various Futurist and Dadaist groups across Europe, and had a notable influence on those which followed. In the Ursonate, the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded, and the conventional semantic and syntactic values of vocabulary are pushed to the margins, or disappear altogether.

The 1932 version seen here was published in issue 24 of Schwitters' journal "Merz", and was recorded on 5 May 1932 in Stuttgart. The term "Merz" emerged from Schwitters himself, to become a widely used descriptor of and sometimes synonym for Dadaist art; "Merz" became the way Schwitters described his own particular artistic approach to abstraction across the numerous mediums: music, poetry, and especially collage.

This copy is in the vanishingly rare blue wrappers, with only minor fading; a short edge tear and a light crease to the lower wrapper cover. Carefully preserved in uncommonly good condition.