Dada, Eclecticism, and Aleatory in Music – The Beginnings of Electronica
john cage, paris 1981
After the horrors of World War 1 there was a distinct movement throughout the arts driven by artists themselves to distant themselves from the logic, societal practices, norms, and values that seemingly caused this monstrosity. This reaction took a number of forms, but all had one thing in common to break down the logic and conventions of the “establishment,” and to create something new that was so stark in contrast that it’s purpose and opposition were unmistakable.
These (very different) separate resistant movements each had their own goals and characteristics, but they all are playing the same game per se in that they have a similar goal in mind, the main difference is their route of choice to get there. We as a class have identified three such movements in music that fit this description, DADA being the first. The Dada movement which started in Zurich by founders Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Hannah Hoch, Hans Arp, Jean Arp, Andre Breton, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali (better known as a surrealist), and even Marcel Duchamp among many others. The Dadaists literally took cultural products and turned them on their head. By using processes of fragmentation, recontextualization, appropriation, reordering and scrambling, Dadaist confused and warped conventional cultural information to the point of nonsense. The Dadaist preferred to work in nonsense, chaos, irrationality, and intuition, making the general point that if consensus knowledge got us to WW1, artists have a responsibility to offer an alternative to that logic. Or, in other words, that it is the faulty logic (presented as unassailably correct) of the powers-at-be that put the world into the mess it was in during the 1930s and 40s. Hugo Ball in the Dada Manifesto writes,
“It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.” (Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto)
Erik Satie – Dada Portrait
Visual artist that took part in the Dada movement were very focused on words and imagery, as it was largely propaganda, newspapers, and media of the like (whose main components are words and images) that galvanized forces to fight in the first World War. Erik Satie was one of the many composers who experimented with a Dada-esque sound (albeit at the end of his life). The association of Satie and Dada at first might seem unwarranted. Yet Satie did start developing Dadaist tendencies towards the end of his life. The main work in question is Relâche, a piece Satie wrote shortly before his death in 1924. It is a sort of bizarrely humorous multimedia extravaganza, involving music, dance, and film. Satie‘s pieces are tiny, abrupt gestures that do indeed seem, to have borrowed something from Dada’s resolute but meaningless brushstrokes. The little Ragtime Dada of 1917, not among the most-often heard of Satie‘s works, has an explicit connection with the artistic movement
The Eclecticism movement in music is much more easily explained than it’s cousin Dada. The composer Charles Ives provides a more than worthy vehicle to explore this movement as his music exhibits many of its main tenants and characteristic. Ives main musical interest was in finding a sound that was truly “American.” This quest to seek out “Americanness” in music led Ives to do something revolutionary, sample well-known tunes on top of the musical structure already in place, like memes to create a sentence. In pieces such as Putnam Camp, Ives introduces these tunes as if he were introducing a new idea to a discussion, developing meaning with appropriation, a step that looks ingenious in retrospect during the age of the remix.
Aleatory or chance music on the other hand is very much the prevue of composers such as John Cage whos famous piece entitled 4:33 rocked the music world, and asked the question, what makes a performance a performance? His answer was the intangible, the unexplainable, the unpredictable nature of live performance. Cage drew attention to the randomness that goes on during a live musical performance by composing a piece in which the player approaches the piano and sits there, suspended in time during the moment that he is about to start, for the entirety of the piece. The outcome is a inordinate amount of attention placed on everything else going on in the music hall at the same time. The lady sneezing, the alarm clock going off, the awkward mumblings of the audience, all of the above are left purely up to chance and for John Cage (and other likeminded aleatory musicians), this was where the art was located.
All of these movements were distinctly their own, and have their own ideas in terms of moving music forward; however, it is unmistakable that when one listens to these examples, there are a few qualities that bring them together. For me, this similarity starts with the fact that all three movements try to in some way escape tradition or the “establishment” if you will, and in pursuance of this goal all three (albeit differently) try to debunk the original structure, creating something altogether new sounding. For John Cage this meant eliminating the music all together and placing a premium on what is left over. For Ives it was all about layering music on top of each other as ideas are layered on each other in a well thought-out essay (hopefully this paper approaches that ideal), and finally for Satie it was the repetitive, minimalist, absurdist, musical aesthetic that he searched for in his compositions later in life. While these three movements in music all took different paths, they all were equally influential in breaking open the close-minded way the world saw music, and the things music could be. This mission to find and explore new sound and a new music that reflected modernity is what ultimately led to experimentation with recording devices, and then ultimately the creation of electronic music. It is important not to lose sight of the founding members of this musical avante-garde for they were the ones that showed us that it is okay to get weird and experimental with our sounds.
Digital Art Source 