Raymond Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is a remarkable book: four poems, describing sites in Africa, each digressing into an elaborate structure of nested parentheses. Roussel published it himself; and to thicken it, commissioned 59 illustrations. Characteristically, he avoided contact with the illustrator, preferring to hire a detective agency to find an artist, who then drew the illustrations without reading the book — or even knowing who wrote it. In fact, the artist, Henri Zo, was dismayed when he received a printed copy, since he thought his pictures were too plain for Roussel’s unusual imagination.
I set seven of Roussel’s “Indications pour 59 dessins,” his directions to Zo. In each, the right hand of the piano part is a translation of the text into Solrésol, the artificial musical language developed by François Sudre. The bass line and vocal part were written around it.