Post-War and Post-Apollinaire

Georges Auric ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Colin Roust
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Les Six ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One

After World War I, Auric’s many friendships placed him in a unique position in the Parisian avant-garde. On the one hand, he was alongside Louis Aragon, André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Tristan Tzara for the rise and fall of Paris dada. On the other, he was a member of Les Six, the group of composers led by Jean Cocteau who came to represent Parisian art music in the 1920s. Throughout the feuds between the dadaists and Cocteau, Auric preserved his friendships and functioned as an ambassador of sorts between rival avant-garde groups. In the meantime, his scores for Cocteau’s Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (with the rest of Les Six) and Molière’s Les fâcheux would lead to bigger and better opportunities in the mid-1920s.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toop
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
German Composer

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an absolutely seminal figure within the European avant-garde. By the mid-1950s, every new work of his seemed to open up new perspectives for radical composing: key notions and genres such as serialism, electronic music, variable forms, and graphic notation were all crucially affected by his work. Of all post-war composers, Stockhausen best exemplifies Chateaubriand’s dictum that ‘‘the original writer is not the one who imitates no one, but he whom no one can imitate’’; whereas other major figures had hosts of epigones, Stockhausen’s huge influence largely involved his way of thinking about composition, which was constantly evolving and re-forming, rather than attempted emulations. At the same time, by the late 1960s he was also something of a cult figure in the pop/rock world, as witness his appearance on the cover of the Beatles’ ‘‘Sergeant Pepper’’ album. Yet from the mid-1970s, Stockhausen increasingly (though never totally) withdrew from the public eye, working for just over twenty-five years on a massive cycle of seven operas collectively entitled Licht [Light], involving about thirty hours of music––probably the most ambitious (completed) project in the whole of Western art music.

Homage to Robert Aron, 1898—1975

1977 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-139
Author(s):  
Annabelle Henkin Melzer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Alfred Jarry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Young Wife ◽  
French Communist Party

I went to see Robert Aron in the summer of 1972. He was then seventy-four years old, a tall, striking man in an apartment of stuffed furniture overrun by books. In all my meetings that summer with former surrealists, people who had made avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1920s, there was always a sense of trembling at reaching out to touch cobwebbed memories. Forty-five years had passed since the events we talked about. Tristan Tzara, recalled by Gide as a charming man with a young wife who was ‘even more charming’, had since fought with the French Resistance during World War II and later joined the Communist Party. André Breton, when he died in 1966, was accompanied to his grave by ‘waves of young men and young girls often in couples, with arms entwined’. They had come from all over France to pay him tribute. Philippe Soupault is a respected editor, critic and radio commentator, Louis Aragon is at the forefront of the French Communist Party and dislikes talking about his days as a Surrealist, Roger Vitrac is an acknowledged and produced playwright while Artaud is a cult figure. There are moments when in looking back, the whole Dada-Surrealist performance world looks like some great Dada swindle perpetrated on the only too fallible researcher and critic. Robert Aron does nothing to dispel this feeling. The man who sent a telegram to Breton warning him that he would stop at no measures to keep the fervent Surrealist claque from disturbing the performance of Strindberg's A Dream Play at the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, was elected a member of the French Academy before his death.

Automatism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Donkin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Artists ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Automatic Writing ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Poetic Imagery ◽  
Psychic Automatism ◽  
Francis Picabia

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.

The Music of Magnus Lindberg

Tempo ◽  
1992 ◽  
pp. 25-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Warnaby
Keyword(s):  
Computer Technology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Studying Abroad ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One

Among composers born in the 1950s, who witnessed the decline of the post-war avant-garde – together with its most cherished principle, integral serialism – the Finn Magnus Lindberg has produced some of the most challenging responses. It is tempting to attach considerable significance to Lindberg's national origins. Born in 1958, he belongs to a particularly vital generation of Finnish composers whose output extends from traditional symphonic forms to experimental creations involving electroacoustic and computer technology. On the one hand, they have benefitted from the example of composers (such as Aulis Sallinen) who emerged from Sibelius's shadow not only by founding a strong operatic tradition, but also by generating their own brand of orchestral music. On the other, several of the younger generation have continued the practice of studying abroad, though without sacrificing their independence from the European mainstream.

scholarly journals MODERNISATION AND AVANT-GARDE IN CENTRAL-EASTERN EUROPE (1918–1939)

Muzealnictwo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 198-202
Author(s):  
Andrzej Szczerski
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The Status ◽  
Independent States ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The One

The establishment of new independent states in Central and Eastern Europe after 1918 not only brought changes in European geopolitical reality, but also initiated many cultural processes, stimulated by the need for modernisation of the region. They aimed at strengthening the identity of individual states based on their civilizational advancement. It was possible thanks to political independence, which many central European nations gained for the first time in their history. Their expected growth was not only to confirm their right of existence, but also of being among the leading states in Europe. Within the Old Continent the central and eastern part of Europe turned out to be a domain of modernisation par excellence. Here its progression, on the one hand, was most awaited, on the other – raised the greatest controversy. Arts and artists had their particular role in this process; it was their mission to spread the new ideas, calling for a change of the status quo. Instead of simply adopting the already existing patterns of modernity they tried, however, to work out their original concepts of reforms, based on an attempt to reconcile modernity with traditional values, which were found worth preserving within individual cultures. These processes were supported by representatives of both the avant-garde and the more moderate modernisation, which resulted in peaceful coexistence of radical programmes and endeavours to find conservative definitions of modernism. “New Europe” in the years 1918–1939 was in favour of modernity, pursuing consistently civilizational advancement, with the good use of tools brought about by the new political reality and, first and foremost, the national independence gained by many states in the aftermath of World War I.

L’Herbier, Marcel (1888–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Silent Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moral Atmosphere ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Post War

Marcel L’Herbier was a French pioneer avant-garde (impressionist) filmmaker and theorist who made more than forty films between the 1920s and the 1950s. During World War I he learned the basics of filmmaking in the Army Cinematographic Service. He wrote a seminal text, Hermès et le silence (1918), in which he stated that cinema is not an art but a new language which calls into question the traditional notion of art. One of his best attempts to put into practice his theories was the poetic Rose-France (1919). In 1921 he filmed one of his masterworks, El Dorado, mainly in Granada (Andalusia, Spain), which anticipated the German Kammerspiel. He used a range of cinematographic means—including color tinting of the image—to determine character psychology and the moral atmosphere of the space, defining a kind of "cinematic melodrama" and creating a visual music. Other similar films from his silent period include L’Inhumaine [The Inhuman Woman] (1924), a science fiction drama, and L’Argent (1928), adapted from Émile Zola’s novel. In the silent L’Argent, L’Herbier used sound in an original way, recording real sound effects, which were played back in some theaters. When talkies arrived, he renounced the avant-garde, but still made noteworthy films including Le Mystère de la chambrejaune [The Mystery of the Yellow Room] (1930) based on Gaston Leroux’s novel, and La Nuitfantastique [The Fantastic Night] (1942). L’Herbier was also the founder, in 1944, of the Institut des HautesÉtudesCinématographiques. During the post-war period he poured his energy into television productions.

Dadaism in Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Lantz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Artistic Quality ◽  
Unconventional Methods

Members of the Dada cultural and artistic movement began to experiment with film as a means to disseminate their stylistic partialities and cultural values through a new medium free of cultural respectability and aesthetic pretension. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland, by Tristan Tzara in 1916, this avant-garde movement would soon spread to France, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. Much like the surrealists who would follow, the dadaists sought to liberate their audience from the cultural allegiances, prejudices, and norms of thinking that, in their view, had been largely responsible for the catastrophes of World War I. Unlike surrealist film, dadaist film did not seek to lure its viewers into the cinematic illusion. Instead, dadaists employed unconventional methods in order to alienate the audience members and to provide them the distance with which to reflect upon the meta-artistic (and anti-artistic) quality of their productions. Film enabled the dadaists to distort reality, motion, and perspective; it revealed familiar things in radically unfamiliar but persuasive new shapes.

Parisian Debuts and World War I

Georges Auric ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Colin Roust
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
First Year ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Close Friendships ◽  
One Year ◽  
Schola Cantorum

In 1913, Georges Auric and his family moved to Paris, where he studied for one year at the Conservatoire and one year at the Schola Cantorum. During his first year in the capital, Auric published his first pieces of music criticism, performed a recital for the Société Musicale Indépendante, and had compositions performed on a recital for the Société Nationale de Musique. From these auspicious beginnings, he participated in several avant-garde art groups and was invited to join many of the most prestigious Parisian salons. In 1917, he was drafted into the army; though his military record was undistinguished, it led to close friendships with Louis Aragon and André Breton.

Satie, Erik Alfred Leslie (1866–1925)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Claude Debussy ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Piano Works ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
Les Six ◽  
Francis Picabia

Erik Satie’s compositions, writings, and humor played an important role in many modernist movements of the twentieth century. Experimenting with simple forms, neoclassicism, mysticism, satire, and Dadaism, Satie collaborated with prominent artists, musicians, and institutions including Vincent Hypsa, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Rene Clair, Francis Picabia, Claude Debussy, Man Ray, the Ballets Russe, the Ballets Suédois. Most recognized today for early his modal, pseudo-antique dances, the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, Satie also composed popular tunes, humorous piano works that mocked musical conventions, avant-garde ballets, as well as numerous mystical, irreverent, and nonsensical writings and drawings. His works and persona, sometimes whimsical, arcane, gothic, mystical, or Dadaistic inspired later generations of modernist artists and composers such as Les Six, Virgil Thomson, and John Cage.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document