Open Your Ears, Paris Dada! Where Is Your Music Coming From?

Abstract

The historical record tells us that music of many kinds was played at Paris Dada events. There was piano music from the contemporary high art tradition; there was jazz; and there was also ‘anti-music’, later described (not entirely credibly) by its composer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. None of this music finds an audible echo in the Paris Dada manifestos of Tristan Tzara. Music is central to his discourse on Dada; but it is music as incarnated, out of time, by the physical musical instrument, not music as it was played in live performance and received by an audience in real time. The reason is the Dada refusal to see art as anything that can be defined, or as the communication of a message sent by a human agent. The instrument, as a physical object, cannot, in Dada, be seen through to the art or the artist beyond. This is in many ways a logically untenable position, because we never cease to believe that the music we hear is something more than the instrument on which it is played. Lies have to be told in order for Dada to occupy that untenable position. But Tzara assumes those lies, and the necessity for them; and so do I.