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Choral theatre performances of simultaneous poetry surrounded audiences with atmospheric music, voice, light, and dance to create a modern spiritual experience that reinvented the ancient Greek chorus, using Futurist ideas of polyvocal simultaneity and synaesthesia or cross-sensory perception. Autant proposed an acoustic shell structure to reflect orchestral music into full resonance, while multiple choruses sang poetic verses as vocal figures suspended in the sound-laden air. Auguste Perret's 1928 concert hall, the Salle Cortot, similarly transforms the music "like a violin." Two of Perret's churches include hollow towers that resonate music in a deep hum, as if from the earth itself. In the artistic circle of Autant and Perret, this shared immersion in sound was considered a secular form of spiritual communion.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137368683_2

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