Adolf Wölfli’s “Campbell’s Tomato Soup”, 1929.
P.3359 from “Funeral March”.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Adolf Wölfli, a former farmhand and laborer, produced a monumental, 25,000-page illustrated narrative in Waldau, a mental asylum near Bern, Switzerland. Through a complex web of texts, drawings, collages and musical compositions, Wölfli constructed a new history of his childhood and a glorious future with its own personal mythology. The French Surrealist André Breton described his work as “one of the three or four most important oeuveres of the twentieth century”.
From a 2003 piece in the New Yorker:
In 1921, Dr. Morgenthaler published a monograph on Wölfli; shortly thereafter, a pioneering book on the art of the insane, by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn, which included a discussion of Wölfli, excited Surrealist circles in Paris. Carl Jung was among the collectors of Wölfli. The artist responded to commercial demand with smallish, one-off drawings that he contemptuously termed “bread art.”
He was also a composer. Sort of.
Wölfli lacked any kind of musical training. That didn’t prevent him from writing a body of extraordinary musical scores. Notations with common and mysterious signs appear in his numerous drawings and texts.
There have been very few efforts to interpret Wölfi’s music. A very rare LP Gelesen und vertont exists in which this has been attempted. I’m a happy owner of one. It tells much about the project’s difficulty in that only a few purely instrumental pieces have been included in the LP, the rest being more like song poems. This doesn’t matter, however, as in Wölfli’s poetry words were chosen not primarily for their meaning but rather their rhythmic and sonorous effects. Words are split into syllables and letters and then combined into often senseless neologisms. Rhythm and repetition are essential to Wölfli’s music - as well as art in general.
MP3s of the this 1978 can be found here.
Terry Riley also attempted several adaptations of Wölfli’s work.
Also of interest for aspiring decoders: Wölfli’s Vocabulary of Forms.
