For those who care about this Dada music thread:
I have a friend who specializes in Dada and Surrealist literature and
here are some things he had to say about Dada music.
Enjoy.
Andrei
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What I can recall are things not so much in the name of music as in the
name of provocation, but as far as Picabia goes, his first wife (who had
a strong influence on his ideas), Gabrielle Buffet, was a trained
pianist, as was her sister, Mauguerite, who actually performed at a
couple Dada performances in Paris. One piece she performed was Picabia's
piece, an example of "Sodomist" music (I think that's what he called it,
even though "sadist" would have made more sense), called something like
"The Nanny" (or something with nanny in the title), which was
essentially minimalism before its time: three notes played over and over
and over. It was also her that played Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes' piece
"No Curly Chicory!" at another performance, and I actually have a
description of that, culled from the Dada Almanac: the piece "had been
composed by choosing notes entirely at random and was played with
stony-faced expertise by Marguerite Buffet, a professional concert
performer. the composer was seated beside her turning the pages of his
masterpiece and later recalled being swamped in an indescribable uproar
in which music, the shouts, cries and whistles of the audience united
into a discordant harmony like the smashing of glass: 'curiously
effective,' he thought." That was March 1920. I can't find a reference
to the Picabia piece right now.
Satie's "furniture music" could be conceivably fall under the Dada
rubric, although it preceded his actual involvement with Picabia, and
that would already be after Picabia had broken with the movement. But it
is somewhat in the spirit, although its intentions were opposite. Also
Varese, but you know more about him than I do: he lived with Picabia in
NY for a summer, when Dada was just getting going, and Picabia
referenced a piece he never actually wrote more than once: a piece
written for the water faucet. There is also that Duchamp cd you probably
know about, but in that case, I think it is a whole piece constructed
around an idea to be found among his notes, so to describe him as
contributing to a Dadaist music would be stretching things.
If you include Schwitters' sound poetry as music, then there is lots of
that sort of thing, but I'm not sure I would label it all as music:
Tzara experimented a lot with African songs, nonsense words, etc. And
Scwitters' sound poetry was inspired by the output of Raoul Hausmann,
who actually precedes him. There is another Ribemont-Dessaignes thing
that had everybody on stage go "krii krii krii krii" (or something like
that) over and (again) over and over again, which annoyed Breton so much
that he had to leave the theater for a while. (He hated music, which is
why there is no surrealist music).
And there was also an actual Dada-foxtrot, which was written by a
Dadaist, and was actually something of a foxtrot, but they were amused
by it and welcomed the publicity.
Music and dancing played a part in the early Zurich stuff/Cabaret
Voltaire, but it was mostly standard music-hall stuff (although the
costumes got wild): that was the background of Hugo Ball and Emmy
Hennings (her singing drew a lot of the audience). Varese and Satie seem
to come closest to a serious idea of Dada music, and Varese seems to
have his foot equally in Futurism, and Satie was never really a Dadaist.
There might also be something to look at with the Laban dancing troupe,
who joined in with the Cabaret Voltaire sometimes. I don't know what
they were doing in terms of accompanying music, or if they were even
using any, but the fact that they probably made it subordinate to their
movement would be relevant, but I haven't read up on them. The Zurich
Dadaists were always trying to get the Laban dancers to go out with
them. But on the whole, the Zurich stuff isn't even what people
generally associate with Dada (in terms of negativity, confrontation,
scandal, etc.).
There could have been more of a development at one point, but things
went a different way: Marinetti came to Paris to give a lecture on new
sounds and futurist music, etc., which by all accounts should have
interested the Dadaists, except that he preceded his arrival with the
statement that Dada was a development of Futurism, so all they had on
their mind was sabotaging his lecture rather than paying any attention
to what he was actually saying.
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