Surrealism in music

[Ugh!]

Just read through a thread in the old forum, and since I am about to compose for a surrealist short film, thought we could resurrect this thread on surrealism and music here. Well, this is really as far as we got, this brilliant post by Peter. I hope somebody might be able to add something

Hi Karl and Eugene,
You'll understand that I wasn't able to do an in dept study of  "Music and surrealism" , and I wasn't able either to find much on the internet. However, we're definitely not the only ones who are puzzled !
I'll briefly summarize Sébastien Arfouilloux' lecture on "André Souris à la recherche d'une musique surréaliste" ( from "Centre de recherche en littérature comparée"/ Littérature et Musique / June 2002 / Université Paris/Sorbonne). (His lecture deals only with « classic » surrealism in Europe anno ca 1920-1930).

First of all, it has to be mentioned that the French surrealists, and André Breton in particular, showed little interest in music. Litterature and painting were better suited to surrealist treatment (cfr Karl).
"Que la nuit continue à tomber sur l'orchestre" (André Breton / 1925 – Le surréalisme et la peinture) – « May the night continue to fall on the orchestra ».

In those roaring years ,Le Groupe des six was France's avant-garde and Jean Cocteau their leader. The Surrealists simply didn't like them and considered Cocteau to be " a fake poet".
Furthermore, not that much music was available , not on discs ,nor on the radio. Ethnic music (Africa, Oceania) was virtually unknown.

In Belgium the situation was only slightly different. André Souris was ,among other musicians/composers, full member of the Surrealist movement and in 1925 he published (with Paul Hooreman) two tracts " Musique 1" and "Musique 2", which made fun (condemned) off all academic music.
In 1926 a concert was organised and a work by Souris played : 3 Inventions for barrel organ.: one of them was the Belgian National hymn ( La Brabançonne), played backwards.
Afterwards, Souris was given several poems to be set to music – but anonymously : the "surréalistes" despised personality! Anonymity ensures liberty!
In 1929 a concert ( a surrealist manifestation) was held in Charleroi, in a room adorned with 20 paintings by Magritte . Souris'composition " Quelques airs sur des strophes de Clarisse Juranville" ( A few songs (or ditties) on « strophes » by Clarisse Juranville - was premiered.

These Belgian surrealists want to engender a metamorphosis of both the banal object and high art. A new poetic climate should erupt from these confrontations.

To infuse an existing object (words, a ditty, sounds...) with new qualities, it is sufficient to deplace it, to distort or modify it. And that is what André Souris apparently  does (in his surrealist compositions, that is...and those I don't know.)   : he creates unease for the listener by combining a waltz with Sprechgesang, a tango or Gregorian chant with " linear and a - rhythmic" melodies ....or dissonant chords ,totally independent from the vocal line.

So, as far as I understand surrealism in music uses fairly "simple" techniques to confuse the (unprepared) listener. Darius Milhaud's Saudades do Brazil are mentioned in another article as having surrealist qualities : a consonant soft tone evolves unexpectedly into a loud, dissonant one.
Eric Satie 's name pops up, but he is associated more with DADA – to a certain extent.

The works on the Cyprès disc are all from a later period and are typical of their time : Debussy - Stravinsky - Honegger ..;Inspite of his knowledge of and interest for the avantgarde ( Darmstadt - Boulez) , Souris is an "acerbic"  late - romantic ....!

Peter

[Cato]

Just read through a thread in the old forum, and since I am about to compose for a surrealist short film, thought we could resurrect this thread on surrealism and music here. Well, this is really as far as we got, this brilliant post by Peter. I hope somebody might be able to add something

Listen to a Carl Stalling soundtrack for almost any Looney Tunes cartoon, if you want something "surreal" in music!   

In fact, there is a cartoon with Porky Pig from the late 1930's where he enters a surreal, Dalinian landscape to catch the last dodo: the music matches everything!  I think it is called "Porky Goes To Wackyland."

Surrealism as far as I know never really caught on as a musical movement, in contrast with German Expressionism, where the painting is paralleled nicely in music ( Arnold Schoenberg himself painted quite often in the Expressionist syle.)  That the Belgian Souris remains a footnote says something.

I do not hear much that can be considered surreal outside of Carl Stalling and his music for the more extreme Looney Tunes cartoons. 

Some of the Daffy Duck epics qualify as surreal in art and music!   0:)

[Ugh!]

Listen to a Carl Stalling soundtrack for almost any Looney Tunes cartoon, if you want something "surreal" in music!   

In fact, there is a cartoon with Porky Pig from the late 1930's where he enters a surreal, Dalinian landscape to catch the last dodo: the music matches everything!  I think it is called "Porky Goes To Wackyland."

Surrealism as far as I know never really caught on as a musical movement, in contrast with German Expressionism, where the painting is paralleled nicely in music ( Arnold Schoenberg himself painted quite often in the Expressionist syle.)  That the Belgian Souris remains a footnote says something.

I do not hear much that can be considered surreal outside of Carl Stalling and his music for the more extreme Looney Tunes cartoons. 

Some of the Daffy Duck epics qualify as surreal in art and music!   0:)

Thanks for the reply. I actually started a thread on cartoon scores back on the old board as well:
http://www.good-music-guide.com/forum/index.php/topic,12950.0.html

Scott Bradley over at MGM is another cartoon composer worth considering in this context. I would tend to agree with you that the juxtaposition of so many musical quotes (which compose a musical short-hand for emotions and ideas) coupled with imaginative foley design gives these cartoon scores a surrealist quality. That would perhaps also imply that Stravinsky's Petrushka has certain surrealist qualities?

[Dax]

Try Surrealist suite, a piano work by Vernon Duke.

On the subject of a piano with cartoon music, there's some rather good piano playing (by Jakob Gimpel) at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cjYMpuMFsQ

[Ugh!]

Found a wikipedia article on the subject which seems to be based on this book:
Lochhead, Judith and Joseph Auner. Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. New York: Routledge, 2002.

In the 1920s several composers were influenced by surrealism, or by individuals in the surrealist movement. Among these were Bohuslav Martinů,[citation needed] André Souris,[citation needed] and Edgard Varèse, who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence.[cite this quote] Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long, if sometimes spotty, relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nouge's publication Adieu Marie.[citation needed] The two composers most associated with surrealism during this period were Erik Satie, who wrote the score for the ballet Parade which caused Guillaume Apollinaire to coin the term surrealism, 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"[cite this quote]. Later French composer Pierre Boulez wrote a piece called explosante-fixe (1971–72), inspired by Breton's collection of poems mad love.[citation needed] Germaine Tailleferre of the group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be[weasel words] inspired by Surrealism, including the 1948 Ballet "Paris-Magie" (scenario by Lise Delarme, who was closely linked to Breton[citation needed]), the Operas "La Petite Sirène" (book by Philippe Soupault) and "Le Maître" (book by Eugène Ionesco).[citation needed] Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s

any links to soundclips, etc of any of Souris works would be appreciated....

[Maciek]

Aha! I (vaguely) remember that discussion. Thanks for reviving it!

[pjme]

Hmm, yes! good idea. A couple of weeks ago some early ( ca 1925) surrealist films from the Belgian Cinémathèque were shown ( after restauration & digitalisation) - with contemporary soundtracks. I'll check that out...next week.

Peter

ps : see the Nicole & Hugo clip at "Embarrasing CD"...

[Ugh!]

Hmm, yes! good idea. A couple of weeks ago some early ( ca 1925) surrealist films from the Belgian Cinémathèque were shown ( after restauration & digitalisation) - with contemporary soundtracks. I'll check that out...next week.

Peter

ps : see the Nicole & Hugo clip at "Embarrasing CD"...

As far as I have gathered, the Belgian surrealists were the only group really into music (Souris, E.L.T. Mesens, printing music in publications, using musical symbols in art, etc).Whereas Breton and Chirico did not trust music: "One never knows what music is about....There is no mystery in music.... [Music] is something one takes before the meal or after, but which is not a meal in itself".

Anyhow, we should have attended this public lecture:

Levy, Silvano (1993) Dangerous Music: Belgian Theories of Musical Surrealism, The Scene of the Crime, Eugène Vinaver International Colloquium, University of Manchester (with Barbara Kelly)

[Ugh!]

Finally managed to listen to the mentioned Souris CD's. The influences of Satie and Stravinsky are obvious IMO: juxtapositions, interpolations, parody, bitonality, minimalism etc. I really enjoyed his works, but as far as I can tell at this point, he makes use of techniques that were well known at the time, with the exception of aleatory techniques (which incidentally were common whenMozart lived). According to Leon Botstein (http://www.americansymphony.org/dialogue.php?id=413&season=1992-1993), Souris experimented with chance music as early as 1926, a fact that seems to have been largely overlooked in writing musical history where Cage is commonly credited with inventing aleatoric music.

However, the general approach of Souris was not chance music (the Belgians apparently did not take to automatic writing either), but "to take commonplace material not in order to produce something fantastical, dream-like or dealing with the unconscious, but in order to attempt to give a new poetic meaning to ready-made, existent objects. Nougé often conceived his poems by starting with pre-existent texts such as advertising slogans, a poem by Baudelaire, a serialised erotic tale, rules of grammar. The new work emerged through addition, suppression, interpolation. Codified pre-existent structures, taken out of context or slightly distorted thus generated new meanings. Magritte made this process the very basis of his painting from the years 1925-26 onwards. Souris transposed these procedures into music. In most of his works he made use of patterns taken from well assimilated types of music - popular, traditional or well-known art music - which retained something of their original expressive power despite the new language into which they had been inserted. Of most of Souris's works it may be said that, like Magritte's paintings, they are "exercises in transformation". The starting point is usually some very ordinary material (melodic, rhythmic, formal, verbal) that is then reinvigorated and illuminated with constantly unexpected meanings. It is by its integration into a musical syntax that it becomes unsettling, and it is this unsettling quality that brings out the poetic flash, as in Magritte's paintings of a woman turned fish, or a wall turned cloudy sky."

This approach seems to predate common post-modernist "remix" techniques ala Bryar, Thommesen, Zorn etc (but already explored by Stravinsky in Petrushka). I find this particularly interesting since it seems like a recipe for some of my own works as well (Assemblages, 2005; Menura Superbae (Piano Assemblages), 2007). There is certainly a surrealistic touch in this work, not least produced by interpolating musique concrete, electronic music, symphonic music and improvisation. In this way, an Amazonian tree frog is made to converse with a chord from Stravinsky's Petrushka (a nod), and a swarm of bees echo a snare drum roll... Plenty of chance meetings between sewing machines and umbrellas on an operating table there

However, in the mentioned score for the surrealistic short film I am working on now, I plan to take it much further 

Eugene

[Dax]

Souris experimented with chance music as early as 1926

Any more information? Like how?

[Ugh!]

Any more information? Like how?

I needed to dig into this quite a bit, and finally found a passage in Auner and Lockhead "Postmodern music/Postmodern thought" Routledge, 2002.

Hooreman and Souris tried to come up with a way to transfer automatic writing into the musical medium. The result was their tribute to Satie: Tombeau de Socrate (1925). This was the same year that Equisite Corpse was born, and they modelled their approach on surrealist procedures of collective creation. It was published in the first of the two issues of their Magazine Musique . According to Auner and Lockhead, the syntax of music was not yet expanded sufficiently enough to allow for transmissions of the very factors that were so intrinsically identified with corpse - the abrupt shifts and fantastical shifts were missing in the simple Mazurka.

Unfortunately no more details were given in the book, but it is fascinating to see that Cage and Harrison's Double Music actually had a predecessor, probably unknown to them.... The poor results may have led Souris to look for other ways to transfer surrealist procedures into music - landing on juxtapositions and interpolations - which was basically the essence of much of theatre music and silent movie scores and eventually cartoon scores  - Carl Stalling again.... Souris was also heavily influenced by Stravinsky, so he was familiar with Petrushka...

[sul G]

There's always Mozart's dice music for those looking for early chance procedures! Not that it's quite the same thing...

Apparently there are 8,099,130,339,328 possible versions of this piece which last over 5,136,435 years played end to end (though at what tempo is not specified)!

[Dax]

There's Percy Grainger's Random Round - first formulated between 1912-4. This involves individual procedures not unlike those encountered in Terry Riley's In C, as suggested by the title. In addition the order and length of sections is decided by the conductor during performance. No doubt Cowell was aware of this work - his Mosaic Quartet (1935) is an example of "elastic" form, an adjective familiar to those interested in Grainger.

[Ugh!]

There's Percy Grainger's Random Round - first formulated between 1912-4. This involves individual procedures not unlike those encountered in Terry Riley's In C, as suggested by the title. In addition the order and length of sections is decided by the conductor during performance. No doubt Cowell was aware of this work - his Mosaic Quartet (1935) is an example of "elastic" form, an adjective familiar to those interested in Grainger.

That's right, thanks for reminding me about Grainger 

[snyprrr]

szymanowski?

scriabin?

what is the most hallucinatory music piece of composer music (barring the stalling, though you are correct)? over perfumed and opulent, decadent?

one of the wildest pieces i've heard is carlos chavez' "energia" from the early 20s.

[Ugh!]

szymanowski?

scriabin?

what is the most hallucinatory music piece of composer music (barring the stalling, though you are correct)? over perfumed and opulent, decadent?

one of the wildest pieces i've heard is carlos chavez' "energia" from the early 20s.

Good question. I must admit I was mildly disappointed with the Andre Souris in the end, although if I hadn't been looking for surrealist music he would have been a nice little discovery (with the Stravinsky influence) for me... Let me think about it....

[Ugh!]

A release in 1990 involved a musical translation of Exquisite Corpse:

http://closetcurios2.blogspot.com/2009/04/exquisite-corpses-from-ps-122.html

Will get back to it when I have listened to it.

Anyway, for now, the surrealistic short film I was composing for seems to have been shelved for a while, so my composition is pending, I guess....

[techniquest]

There's always Mozart's dice music for those looking for early chance procedures! Not that it's quite the same thing...
Apparently there are 8,099,130,339,328 possible versions of this piece which last over 5,136,435 years played end to end (though at what tempo is not specified)!

Just about the best definition of pergutary I've ever come across...
So glad that the Warner Brothers cartoons have been mentioned - particularly Daffy Duck / Porky Pig - there were some supreme 'surrealist' moments in some of those and, whatever they were doing, the music always worked. Artistry at it's very best.

[jochanaan]

...what is the most hallucinatory music piece of composer music (barring the stalling, though you are correct)? over perfumed and opulent, decadent?...

I've never thought that "hallucinatory," "opulent" and "decadent" were synonyms for "surrealist."  In fact, the better-known surrealists such as Dali and Magritte often combined quasi-photographic technique with jarringly juxtaposed visual subjects, as in Dali's "Persistence of Memory" and most of Magritte's later work.  Magritte especially gets his power from restraint, not opulence.

I'm not familiar with Souris' music, but I sometimes think that Erik Satie qualifies as a proto-surrealist composer.