Stripsody: Transforming Comics into Vanguard Art

Take the language of comic strips and give it to one of the most charismatic avant-garde singers. Pair her with an abstract painter who doubles in graphic design. Wrap up by putting a comic-loving semiologist in charge of it all. The result is Stripsody (1966), a multimedia project in which the musical talent of Cathy Berberian and the unique visual aesthetics of Eugenio Carmi were brought together by Umberto Eco in his capacity as cultural facilitator.

This unique project was the focus of a recent event sponsored by Interdisciplinary Italy and supported by the Fondazione Eugenio Carmi, which took place at the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin. During the evening, I had the opportunity, together with Francesca Placanica of the Department of Music at Maynooth University, to retrace the story of Stripsody and present the way in which comic strip onomatopoeias combining visual and acoustic elements, stimulated Berberian and Carmi alike.

The genesis of the project belongs to the history of music, as Stripsody was originally born as Berberian’s first composition. Already a respected interpreter of contemporary avant-garde music, and well known for her collaborations with Luciano Berio—her husband at the time—and John Cage, with Stripsody Berberian decided to turn the onomatopoeias commonly found in comic strips into music scores. She combined the ‘bang’, ‘sniff’, ‘boing’, ‘bang’ of comic books into a music composition that she then interpreted with great humour and theatricality—a technique later defined as ‘vocal clowning’[i]—on the stage of the Bremen Festival of Contemporary Music in 1966, meeting with great success (a video of the performance is available here). Designed by the Italian cartoonist Roberto Zamarin, Stripsody’s scores, too, express the convergence between music and visual elements, with musical notation being replaced with actual strips (See Figure 1).

This contamination between languages was further explored as a result of Eco’s intervention, whose personal love of and academic interest in comics is well known. Having become aware of Berberian’s composition, in 1966 he facilitated an encounter between her (she was a long-term friend whom he deeply admired), and Carmi, with whom Eco was working on a series of children books. The idea was for the painter to create a series of drawings inspired by Berberian’s voice. The visual language of comic strips, transformed into music, was thus to be returned to the visual sphere, but via a different medium: it no longer belonged to the ‘low-brow’ genre of comics, but was now part of the sophisticated one of abstract art.

Carmi’s eagerness to meddle with more commercial and popular languages was the very reason why Eco involved him in Stripsody. His interest in these themes can be clearly seen in his previous work on health and safety posters, commissioned in 1962 by the Genoese steel factory Italsider (known as ‘Acciaierie di Cornigliano’ until 1961), where Carmi worked from 1956 to 1965 as a graphic designer. Not only do these posters anticipate the same geometrical, clean lines and primary, bright colours displayed in the Stripsody tables, but they also reveal a similar fascination with a basic—and, therefore, highly communicative—visual language. In fact, these posters may well be seen as extremely concise comic strips directed towards the Italsider workers (Figure 2).

In March 1966, after spending months listening to Berberian’s recorded voice in his studio, Carmi was ready to present his fourteen tables at the Galleria Arco d’Alibert in Rome (Figure 3). Berberian, too, used his work as a stage setting for her performance in Bremen the following May (fFigure 4). Finally, in November 1966, the tables were collected in an art book, together with an introduction penned by Eco, and a 45-rpm record of the musical performance. Stripsody is often understood as the title describing this multimedia object, republished in a new version in 2013. However, like all objects, this is merely a crystallised version of a much more exciting and composite experiment, indeed an opera aperta illuminating a vibrant network of artistic collaborations, encompassing multiple spaces and genres.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] See David Osmond-Smith (1991) Berio. Oxford University Press: 60.