Surrealist music
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Early surrealist music
In the 1920s several composers were influenced by surrealism, or by individuals in the surrealist movement. The two composers most associated with surrealism during this period were Erik Satie,[5] who wrote the score for the ballet Parade, causing Guillaume Apollinaire to coin the term surrealism,[6] and George Antheil who wrote that, "The Surrealist movement had, from the very beginning, been my friend. In one of its manifestos it had been declared that all music was unbearable—excepting, possibly, mine—a beautiful and appreciated condescension."[7] Early surrealist music was also linked to film; according to Hannah Lewis:
perhaps one of the most famous early film scores was Satie's music for René Clair's film Entr'acte. Shown between the acts of Satie's ballet Relâche performed by the Ballets suédois in 1924, the film, featuring a scenario by Dadaist artist Francis Picabia, was an important precursor to surrealist cinema. The film, too, featured unusual juxtapositions and dream logic, and some have considered the film, and by extension Satie's score, to be surrealist."[8]
Adorno cites as the most consequent surrealist compositions those works by
The early works of musique concrète by Pierre Schaeffer have a surrealist character owing to the unexpected juxtaposition of sound objects, such as the sounds of Balinese priests chanting, a barge on the River Seine, Sacha Guitry's singing and coughing, and rattling saucepans in Étude aux casseroles (1948).[11] The composer Olivier Messiaen referred to the "surrealist anxiety" of Schaeffer's early work in contrast to the "asceticism" of the later Etude aux allures of 1958.[12] After the first concert of musique concrète (Concert de bruits, 5 October 1948) Schaeffer received a letter from one member of the audience (identified only as G. M.) describing it as "the music heard, by themselves alone, by Poe and Lautréamont, and Raymond Roussel. The concert of noises represents not only the first concert of surrealist music, but also contains, in my view, a musical revolution."[13] Schaeffer himself argued that musique concrète, in its initial phase, tended either towards atonality or surrealism, or both, rather than, as it subsequently became, the starting point of a more general musical procedure.[14]
References
- ^ Paddison 1993, 90.
- ^ Whitesell 2004, 118.
- ^ LeBaron 2002, 27.
- ^ Whitesell 2004, 107, 118n18.
- ^ LeBaron 2002, 30.
- ^ Calkins 2010, 13.
- ^ LeBaron 2002, 30–31.
- ^ Lewis 2018, 7.
- ^ Adorno 2002, 396.
- ^ Adorno 2002, 396–397.
- ^ Palombini 1993, p. 6.
- ^ Messiaen 1959, 5–6.
- ^ Schaeffer 1952, 30–33.
- ^ Schaeffer 1957, 19–20.
Sources
- ISBN 0-520-23159-7(pbk).
- Calkins, Susan (2010). "Modernism in Music and Erik Satie's Parade". International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 41, no. 1 (June): 3–19.
- ISBN 0-8153-3820-1.
- Lewis, Hannah (18 October 2018). "Surrealist Sounds". French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. OCLC 1101181263.
- Messiaen, Olivier (1959). "Préface". La Revue musicale, no. 244 (Experiences musicales: musiques concrète, electronique, exotique, par le Groupe de recherches musicales de la Radiodiffusion Télévision française) : 5-6.
- Paddison, Max (1993), Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-43321-5
- Palombini, Carlos Vincente de Lima (1993). Pierre Schaeffers typo-morphology of sonic objects (doctoral thesis). Durham University. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
- Schaeffer, Pierre (1952), A la recherche d'une musique concrète, Paris: Éditions du Seuil
- Schaeffer, Pierre (1957). Schaeffer, Pierre (ed.). "Vers une musique expérimentale." La Revue musicale, no. 236.
- Whitesell, Lloyd (2004). "Twentieth-Century Tonality, or, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do". In The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, edited by Arved Mark Ashby. Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
Further reading
- Gonnard, Henri (2012). "Ravel, Falla, Casella, Poulenc: Néoclassicism ou surréalisme?" Revue musicale de Suisse romande 65, no. 3 (September): 44–57.
- Price, Sally, and Jean Jamin (1988). "A Conversation with Michel Leiris". Current Anthropology 29, no. 1 (February): 157–174.
- Schaeffer, Pierre (1959a). "Situation actuelle de la musique expérimentale". La Revue musicale, no. 244 (Experiences musicales: musiques concrète, electronique, exotique, par le Groupe de recherches musicales de la Radiodiffusion Télévision française): 10–17.
- Schaeffer, Pierre (1959b). "Le Groupe de recherches musicales". La Revue musicale, no. 244 (Experiences musicales: musiques concrète, electronique, exotique, par le Groupe de recherches musicales de la Radiodiffusion Télévision française): 49–51.
- Schloesser, Stephen (2005). Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Séité, Yannick. 2010. Le Jazz, à la lettre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN 978-2130582397.
- Shi, X. J., Y. Y. Cai, and C. W. Chan (2007). "Electronic Music for Bio-Molecules Using Short Music Phrases". Leonardo 40, no. 2:137–141.
- Taminiaux, Pierre. 2013. "Automatisme et improvisation: Des rapports entre le surréalisme et le jazz". In Le silence d'or des poètes surréalistes, edited by Sébastien Arfouilloux, with a preface by Henri Behar, 219–231. Château-Gontier: Aedam musicae. ISBN 978-2-919046-10-2.
- Tibbetts, John C. (2005). Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
- Wangermée, Robert. 1995. André Souris et le complexe d'Orphée: entre surréalisme et musique sérielle. Collection Musique, Musicologie. Liège: P. Mardaga. ISBN 9782870096055.