Against Expression?: Avant-garde Aesthetics in Satie’s Parade

A thesis submitted to the

Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Cincinnati

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF MUSIC

In the division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music

2020

By Carissa Pitkin Cox 1705 Manchester Street Richland, WA 99352 [email protected]

B.A. Whitman College, 2005 M.M. The Boston Conservatory, 2007

Committee Chair: Dr. Jonathan Kregor, Ph.D.

Abstract

The 1918 ballet, Parade, and its music by Erik Satie is a fascinating, and historically

significant example of the avant-garde, yet it has not received full attention in the field of musicology. This thesis will provide a study of Parade and the avant-garde, and specifically

discuss the ways in which the avant-garde creates a dialectic between the expressiveness of the artwork and the listener’s emotional response.

Because it explores the traditional boundaries of art, the avant-garde often resides outside

the normal vein of aesthetic theoretical inquiry. However, expression theories can be effectively used to elucidate the aesthetics at play in Parade as well as the implications for expressability present in this avant-garde work. The expression theory of Jenefer Robinson allows for the distinction between expression and evocation (emotions evoked in the listener), and between the composer’s aesthetical goal and the listener’s reaction to an artwork. This has an ideal application in avant-garde works, because it is here that these two categories manifest themselves as so grossly disparate. Robinson’s theory affirms that while the avant-garde elements of Parade may distort, it does not necessarily follow that this distortion lacks significance. Through these methods, expression theory will provide a fresh aesthetical significance to Parade, and a more consummate understanding of the work.

ii

iii Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Jonathan Kregor, for his help with the many different stages of this project. I would also like to thank my reader, Dr. Cahn for his thoughtful and helpful feedback. In addition, I would like to thank my student, Yana Miakshyla, who assisted with transcription and translation of primary sources.

I would like to thank my friends (Liv, Lizzie, and Jackie) for encouraging me to continue with this labor of love. I would like to thank all my family for their love and support. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Kyle, who helped me to believe in this project and in the power of possibilities (again).

iv Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iv

Table of Contents v

Introduction 1

Chapter One – Satie before Parade 12

Chapter Two – Satie, Modernism, and the artists of Montparnasse 25

Chapter Three – Cocteau, Modernism, and the collaboration of Parade 42

Chapter Four – The music of Parade as something entirely new 73

Chapter Five – Application of Expression Theory to Parade 89

Bibliography 102

v Introduction

An enigmatic and problematic character, Erik Satie is commonly considered a progenitor of musical avant-gardism. His music is a prime example of the various modernist trends in society and art that emerged during the early twentieth century. Yet, his music is not often acknowledged as historically significant in any meaningful way. This study will focus on one of his later works, the 1917 ballet, Parade, which is a fascinating example of the avant-garde, but has yet to receive full attention in the field of musicology. Parade has been widely referred to in the music history narrative—it’s uniqueness makes it stand out as a curiosity—being notable as the first example of cubist theater, the first instance of the use of the term “surrealism”, and for a collaboration of historically significant artistic figures (Picasso, Cocteau, Satie, Massine and the

Ballet Russes). Yet, it is a quirky work that stands apart in the usual historical narrative, since it is both non-traditional, and since the work itself doesn’t lead anywhere historically significant.

Daniel Albright has noted that Parade, as a work, survives today only in fragments: “Concert

scores, sketches for backdrops, reconstructions of dimly remembered choreography…and fading

gaudy costumes worn only by mannequins. Even where a great deal of information

remains…the project is enclosed in a certain glamour of the unrecoverable.”1 Roger Shattuck has said that Parade is more a product “of its time” than a unique catalyst for any significant change in art or music. Parade was a “serious-humorous exploitation of popular elements of art, a turning to jazz and music-hall and to all the paraphernalia of modern life, not in a spirit of realism, but with a sense of exhilaration in the absurd.”2 Parade doesn’t yield anything

1 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 185.

2 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France 1885–1918 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1955), 154.

1 significant in-so-far as being the progenitor of a substantial body of music that follows in its

footsteps, and is not considered in the larger musical narrative as historically significant.

Perhaps by nature of the fact that Modernism in the arts is already so fragmented, that finding a traditional music history narrative in any case would prove a difficult task. Furthermore, it

doesn’t really yield anything productive as a musical entity itself. There is no movement in

Parade, in both a musical and historical sense. In a very avant-garde fashion, Parade doesn’t

have a project that leads anywhere in a meaningful way.

Because it explores the traditional boundaries of art, avant-garde music is particularly

wrought with challenging aesthetic questions of composer intentionality and hermeneutic

interpretation. In particular, the avant-garde in music contains important implications on

aesthetics, and specifically on the role of expression in these types of artwork. Expression is

commonly referred to as the “conveying of feeling” in a work of art or music, and thus a piece of

music can be said to have the characteristic of expressiveness if it is thought to convey feeling or

human emotion. However, there are limits to defining expression in these terms, and certainly

limits music to necessitate that in order to be meaningfully expressive, it must convey human

emotion. Indeed, there are limits to requiring that a piece of music must have the goal of

expression, or have a mode of expression to be a successful work. What defines expression then, may instead be seen as more multi-valanced than just determining whether it successfully conveys human feelings. This holds true in music of the avant-garde, since these composers

were not always after an aesthetic goal that could be readily understood or felt by the audience.

The implications of avant-garde aesthetics and their influence on the creative process of

Parade have not been given direct scholarly attention. Indeed, few have approached Parade

with a thorough consideration of its expressiveness. A multimedia artwork such as Parade

2 should be replete with expressiveness, since it is able to draw on a combination of art forms.

However, in its music, movement, scenery, as well as the interaction between these different art

forms actually repudiates any enhancement to expressiveness and in fact denies emotional

accessibility to the audience—thus adding to a scenario that is already incongruent, fragmented,

and filled with pastiche and broken references to popular culture that turn the everyday world upside-down and close the pathway for traditional expressiveness. As an avant-garde work,

Parade is art that denies its status as art. In doing so, it rejects art’s traditional mandate to

express human emotion.

This study will discuss the ways in which the avant-garde in Parade creates a dialectic

between the expressiveness of the artwork and the listener’s emotional response. Indeed, few

aesthetic considerations have approached Parade’s expressiveness—or lack thereof—and they

have not addressed the avant-garde qualities of this artwork using expression theory to explain its

unique features of aesthetics and meaning. Within the realm of aesthetics, expression theories

can be effectively used to elucidate the aesthetics at play in Parade as well as the implications

for expressability present in this avant-garde work. For this thesis, I will be drawing primarily

on Jenefer Robinson’s work on expression theory, and supplementing it with works by Peter

Kivy and Jerrold Levinson. While expression theory is an established field in philosophy and

aesthetics, the discourse often restricts itself to the theoretical, without any consideration of the

actually musical repertoire. Applying expression theory to an artwork as a means of analyzing

its aesthetics will provide one of the first applications of this kind. Aesthetic considerations of

Eric Satie’s music thus far have been too quick to dismiss his works as inaccessible. In

particular, few have approached Parade with a thorough consideration of its expressiveness, and

they have failed to apply an appropriate expression theory to answers such questions. Using the

3 theories of Robinson, as well as Kivy, Levinson and others, this study will come to a better understanding of the implications of expressability in this avant-garde artwork. In particular, the expression theory of Robinson allows for the distinction between expression and evocation

(emotions evoked in the listener), and between the composer’s aesthetical goal and the listener’s reaction to an artwork. This has an ideal application in avant-garde works, because it is here that these two categories manifest themselves as so grossly disparate. Robinson’s theory affirms that while the avant-garde elements of Parade may distort, it does not necessarily follow that this distortion lacks significance. Through these methods, expression theory will provide a fresh aesthetical significance to Parade, and a more consummate understanding of the work.

While there is little in the realm of aesthetics that deals directly with avant-garde works and expression theory together, Robinson’s work in both aesthetics and expression theory prove to be the most applicable to these works generally, and to Satie’s Parade specifically. An analysis of Satie’s Parade using expression theory will naturally include a discussion of the debate over what expression in music can be. In the case of Levinson, his definition of musical expressiveness is problematic to an analysis of Parade, because Levinson asserts that musical expressiveness is necessarily an expression by a person. Not only does Satie’s music lack narrative, or an easily applicable personna, but it negates the expressive vehicle which Levinson hopes to uphold as a common element in musical expressiveness; that of gesture. Levinson bases his argument for ‘musical gesture-as-expressiveness’ on the notion that our state of mind is comprised of our emotions, feelings, attitudes, desires, and beliefs. These mental states are revealed through outward states of behavior (outward manifestation). A more fruitful application of expression theory to an avant-garde work such as Parade comes from Robinson, who purports an inferred-expression theory, as opposed to a perceived-expression theory.

4 Robinson’s theory places the listener in charge of inferring the expression from the music,

whereas Levinson believes that the expression in the music is inherent, and it is something that

the listener must perceive directly.3 In addition, Robinson’s theory opens a window for us that allows for music to possess expressiveness without the necessity of having a personna. This

method infers the distinction that Robinson makes elsewhere of expression and evocation, which

plays an important role in the teasing out of the expressivity of Parade in this thesis. Expression

differs from evocation in that the former defines music as possessing qualities of expression

inherent in its nature, and the later denotes other qualities that the music possesses that are

capable of evoking emotion in the listener.

Despite the commonly upheld belief that art is expressive of something, not all music

needs to be defined in these terms. Indeed, Robinson and other theorists do not attempt to argue

that every piece of music can be labeled as expressive. There is plenty of good art that is really

not very interested in the emotions. Expression or evocation of emotion may not be a primary

aesthetic goal. Robinson explicates that “the emotions have been important in art over the

centuries, but they are not a sine qua non for artistic achievement.”4 To use the phrase from

Robinson, in Parade, there are no recognizable “emotion-laden gestures embodied in musical movement.”5

My study does not propose to use aesthetic theory as a means of justifying Satie’s compositional choices—rather, my purpose is to consider how an application of aesthetic theory

3 Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-expression”, in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Matthew Kieran, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 199.

4 Jenefer Robinson, “Expression in Music,” in Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, edited by Peter Kivy, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 190.

5 Ibid., 189.

5 can provide deeper understanding of the artwork as a whole. This analytical approach will therefore provide scaffolding by which a new level of understanding of Satie’s avant-garde aesthetics may be reached. While it would not be possible to draw conclusions about avant-

garde works as a whole from this study, the frame of my study will allow for an examination of the creative processes, and the production of a particular artwork. It is the intention of this study to offer a better understanding of Satie as a composer vis-à-vis this important piece, as well as shed light on how artwork of this nature—multi-medium, or non-traditional—can better benefit from a more in-depth and multi-disciplinary approach.

This thesis will be structured in five parts. The first chapter will include an introduction to Satie, his music in general, and set the stage for Parade within his musical career. This will allow in future chapters for a contextualized discussion of Parade within Satie’s avant-garde aesthetics, examples of which precede Parade, such as his Vexations from 1893.6 Concurrently, the idea of furniture music appears to have developed around the same time as Parade, with the first piece dating from the same year as the Parade premiere.7 Equally important is a historical placement of Parade within the productions of the Ballet Russes, since it was Diaghilev’s reception to new and adventurous productions that helped make Parade possible. Ultimately, this chapter establishes the historical significance of Parade, since it was the first production that

Satie, Picasso and Cocteau worked on with the Ballet Russes, and has since been heralded as one of the first examples of cubist theatre.

6 Written for a single instrument, Vexations was a short theme that was meant to be played 840 times in succession. As indicated on the score: “Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses.” Erik Satie, Vexations (Marlton, NJ: Musica Obscura, 1981).

7 Furniture music or musique d’ameublement, is background music, not intended to be listened to yet originally played by live performers. The term was coined by Erik Satie in 1917.

6 The second chapter will proceed by discussing the artistic trends in the avant-garde from c. 1900 to the premiere of Parade in 1917. This chapter will explain the artistic environment in

which Parade was created. Partly because of its historical placement, Parade is premiered at a

time when the artistic world was steeped with the avant-garde. I will be focusing my treatment

of the avant-garde to that which will have direct application to Parade; most prominent to this

discussion will be the rejection of the traditional forms and boundaries of art, and the tension

created by many avant-garde works as being anti-art, or anti-expressionist. Here, I will be

drawing on the writings of José Ortega y Gasset, namely his The Dehumanization of Art which

provides a contemporary account of such avant-garde aesthetics. I will also be consulting the

writing of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, including his Futurist Manifesto from 1909, to support my discussion of Futurist trends in Parade. Writings by Guilliame Apollinaire, Satie and

Cocteau will aide in building an understanding of the intersection of Cubism and Parade. These

contemporary sources will illustrate the ways in which avant-garde aesthetics were being

conceptualized during the time in which Parade was created. I will conclude with references to

primary source writings from several of the contributors to Parade (Cocteau and Satie) which

evoke these avant-garde sentiments during the creation of Parade.

The third chapter will explore the unique collaboration of artists, artistic media, and

artistic movements that surround the creation of Parade. In doing so, I hope to elucidate the

ways in which the avant-garde aesthetics of each artist informed that of the others. The scope of

this discussion will be different from other studies, since it will focus on the influences on Satie

in particular, with the aim of providing novel research, as well as a foundation for which an

analysis using expression theory will then be presented in Chapter Five. From a preamble

concerning the formulation of the idea for Parade by Cocteau, a discussion will progress about

7 the origins of Parade. Next, the creative process and development of the theme for Parade will

be discussed. I am interested in using this information to expose the aesthetic interactions

between Satie and the other artists involved, notably Cocteau and Picasso. This historically

based account of the collaboration of Parade will also aid in the subsequent musical analysis of

the avant-garde elements in Satie’s music and specifically, how these avant-grade elements are

mutually influenced by the other artistic media and other artists in Parade.

The penultimate chapter of this thesis will offer a musical examination of Parade which

incorporates both a consideration of the musical elements themselves and their interplay with

avant-garde elements. By applying what was established in the previous chapters about Satie’s

avant-garde aesthetics, and the influences of the other artists on his music, my analysis will be

able to show how the avant-garde and specifically, the anti-expressionist influences are present

in Satie’s music. Continuing on the path set by Shattuck, I will be blending both types of

analysis in my discussion of Satie’s music. I will be considering both the music itself as well as

the aesthetic implications of the work to draw conclusions about how the avant-garde aesthetics

are portrayed in the music and how these aesthetics inform the nature of expression in this work.

The musical discussion will consider the use of both rhythmic and melodic motives and

how they are applied in a large-scale form that subverts normal musical structures. Namely, that

the way the score is constructed—through repeated ostinatos and quickly shifting references to a disparate combination of popular references—creates a non-teleological piece of music which denies the listener access to it through normal modes of expression. My musical analysis will build on the work of Shattuck and Albright; however, the aim of my analysis will be to show a

connection between the avant-garde elements in Parade and its anti-expressionist aims.

8 The final chapter will include a discussion of the implications of avant-garde aesthetics in a new light, by scrutinizing them under the analysis of expression theories. First, I will provide an overview of the various expression theories of Levinson, Kivy and Davies, and then provide an overview of the expression theories of Jenefer Robinson. The chapter will interrogate each of these theories in terms of Parade, and will show that an application of the expression theories of

Levinson, Kivy or Davies to Parade proves inadequate. Robinson’s expression theory will

emerge as the only expression theory that accurately identifies expressivity in Parade.

Furthermore, Robinson’s theory will allow me to adequately explain how expression in Parade

functions in a unique, avant-garde way. Because Robinson allows for a differentiation between

expression and evocation, her theory allows conclusions to be drawn as to why the anti-

expressionist elements in Parade operate the way they do. For example, it provides an argument

as to why the fragmented popular elements do not provide the music with expressiveness, since

they cannot provide enough structure to produce complex emotions, and at best only aid in

providing the primitive emotions that Robinson proposes.8 In Satie’s music, the unimpressive surface is deliberately constructed using the popular elements in order to provide the agency for keeping the prosaic façade of the music, thus providing the evocation of primitive emotions.

This has the same tenor as the philosophy of furniture music, which corroborates with this theory; in Shattuck’s description of Satie’s aesthetic, he notes that “all meaning lies on the

8 In “The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music,” Robinson further differentiates between expression and evocation. Cognitive emotions, which are aroused in the listener and are separate from expression in the music, and primitive emotions that are aroused by music that may be connected to the expressive qualities that music possesses. Robinson discusses how moments in the music contain qualities of tension, relaxation, and surprise, which are directly expressed through the music. There is a continual interaction between how we feel in listening to a piece of music and what we interpret it as expressing. This theory would suggest that musical expression is not a function of isolated instances, but often is the result of the large-scale formal structures. Robinson speculates that the development of a complex piece of music can mirror the development of complex emotions. For further information see: Jenefer Robinson, “The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No.1 (Winter 1994), 13–22.

9 surface … since there is no direction or line of progression to be interrupted. Such functional

music cannot claim great value for itself except as workmanship and as style.9 While Satie’s music is not intended to provide meaning in the usual artistic modes, it still provides significance by abdicating meaning. The fact that we can draw meaning from the anti-expressionist elements in the music, such as the feeling of inaccessibility, anti-development, and fragmentation are in themselves significant. This will, I argue, provide a hermeneutic window through which we can evaluate the expressiveness of the music of Parade through aesthetic theory.

By way of conclusion, this thesis will consider how such an aesthetic analysis informs the identity of Parade as an artwork, especially since it allows that a lack of expressiveness in music does not take away its value as artwork. During its time, avant-garde art was not always received positively by contemporary critics, and there were a number of them who judged Satie’s music specifically as holding no value. In one particularly scathing article from 1919, a critic wrote: “For art has neither meaning nor value, unless as a synthetic expression of life as a whole!

Now, our intellect, our individuality, is but one of the elements of life as a whole, and not the most important, an element which in no case may insist on a predominant place for itself.”10

While the avant-garde elements of Parade may distort life for the audience, it does not follow that this distortion lacks significance, and that we cannot have an emotionally satisfying experience through a performance of Parade. By using Parade as a case study to explore the ways in which avant-garde aesthetics were used to various effects in the artworks expressivity, I hope this thesis will provide new strategies and analytical perspectives on how avant-garde

9 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 172.

10 Rudhyar D.Chennevière, “Satie and the Music of Irony,” trans. Frederick H. Martens. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4 (October 1919), 475.

10 works such as Satie’s Parade can be more deeply understood and how the implications of their

aesthetics can be more profoundly appreciated.

11 Chapter One – Satie before Parade

Erik Satie was thought by many of his contemporaries as a “precursor”—an iconoclast

who anticipated many of the advances of twentieth-century music.11 Almost a century after his death, Satie’s reputation as a composer and aesthetic experimenter remains curiously-odd, and yet one of the most marvelously influential of the century. His influence can be felt across a wide cross-section of modern artistic and social movements. This fact is even more significant, considering his relatively modest compositional output. As Robert Orledge has stated, Satie repeatedly forged a path that others followed, “foreshadowing organized total chromaticism

(1893), Surrealism and the prepared piano (1913), neo-classicism, minimalism and even muzak

(1917), and the concert of the synchronized (yet aleatoric) film score.”12 Admittedly, quite a range of conflicting interpretations of Satie’s career exist, which can prove challenging when trying to contextualize his music within one single span.13 Predominately, the reason for this issue lies in the fact that Satie’s compositional career does not follow a consistent teleological growth over his lifetime. However, the composer’s life and work do have a profound effect on his later works, namely the ballet, Parade from 1917. As this thesis will be studying this work in

particular, it is helpful to begin with an overview of his musical background, to trace the threads

of influence leading up to the point of the famous collaboration between the Ballet-Russes,

11 There are many of Satie’s contemporaries that lauded his vision of the future of music, including Debussy, Cocteau and the group known as Les Nouveaux Jeunes, who later became renamed Les Six by critic Henri Collet in an article from 16 January 1920 in Comoedia.

12 Robert Orledge, Satie Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 141.

13 As Orledge has rightfully asserted, the humor of his career’s inability to conform to an easily identifiable form would not have been lost on the composer. Indeed, the very fact that Satie’s career is hard to categorize speaks to the very diverse nature of his compositional works, as well as the myriad of influences of other artists and artforms on him throughout his life. See Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–7.

12 Cocteau, Massine, Picasso, and Satie—or as he later became known amongst the cafés of

Montparnasse—the enigmatic “Velvet Gentleman.”

Eric Satie was born the eldest son of Alfred Satie and Jane Leslie Anton in 1866 in the charming town of Honfleur, in northern France off the coast of the English Channel. Satie began music lessons (solfege and Gregorian chant) in 1874, and in 1879 entered preparatory piano class at the Paris Conservatoire. He eventually failed to impress the examiners at the Conservatoire, and was dismissed in 1882. In the following year, he was admitted as an auditor to Antoine

Taudou’s harmony class at the Conservatoire. Satie’s first composition appeared in 1884, as a solo piano piece entitled Allegro. He was readmitted to the piano class at the Conservatoire in

1885, during which time he composed two salon pieces for piano, Valse-ballet and Fantaisie- valse. By 1887, Satie makes a break—both from his family and from the traditional musical aesthetic of the romantic salon—and moves to Montmartre to begin an independent career. He adopts a bohemian lifestyle and starts attending the cabaret artistique known as the Chat Noir.

Satie’s friend Contamine de Latour wrote that it was the Chat Noir which “revealed to him [Satie] his vocation and transformed him completely.”14 Satie was drawn to the crowd at the

Chat Noir—the poètes-chansonniers and the painters—and it is here that we see Satie’s first kindling of defiance for convention. “Their provocative, anti-art spirit,” writes Perloff,

“prefigured in a remarkable way the Dada spirit which invaded post-war Paris in 1919 and held sway until 1921…the typewriter and Morse apparatus in Parade—all of these elements

anticipated the Dadaist debunking of artistic conventions.”15 By February 1888, Satie had

14 Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 66.

15 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 66–67.

13 become assistant to the principal pianist of the Chat Noir, Albert Tinchant. He left in 1891 to go

to the Auberge du Clou, and in less than a year had moved to another post at the Café de la

Nouvelle Athènes. As a café-concert composer, he would accompany singers, arrange songs, and

play piano for the shadow plays.16 He worked as a piano-player to pay the bills, while still composing his own art music. In Montmartre, Satie was imbued with the music of the café- concerts, cabaret-artisiques, music-halls, fairs, and circuses. Satie’s time in Montmartre, including his later move to the suburb of Arcueil, was undoubtedly significant to his work on

Parade. Though his stage works prior to Parade are few, it was the very kind of music that he was both making and composing during the three decades leading up to the collaboration of

Parade that turned out to be a major influence on his score for the ballet-realiste.17

The first of the two ballets that Satie composed prior to Parade was uspud (1892). Sub-

titled by the composer as a ballet chrétien, it was more than likely inspired by the shadow play

La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1888), and the piece itself resulted in more of a publicity stunt

than anything else.18 Written with Contamine de Latour, entirely in lowercase, uspud was a

“bizarre apocalyptic” ballet that helped to furthered Satie’s reputation amongst artists in

Montmartre when he challenged the director of the Paris Opéra to a duel in order to gain a hearing of the piece.19 It remains an early experiment in Satie’s art of the absurd—some have

16 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 67.

17 Satie wrote four notable completed stage works prior to 1917; Le Fils des Étoiles (incidental music for a pastorale kaldéenne, 1891), uspud (ballet chrétien, 1892), Genéviève de Brabant (marionette opera, 1899), and Le Piège de Méduse (lyric comedy, 1913). Several unfinished stage works are known, including Jack‐in‐the Box (1900, unperformed pantomime that was later orchestrated by Milhaud in 1926), as well as an unfinished collaboration with Cocteau on Cinq Grimaces pour Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (1915), for the Ballet Russes, which was one of two direct pre-cursors to what became the collaboration of Parade (1917).

18 Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24–25.

19 Robert Orledge, ed. Satie Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 23. During this time, Satie was benefiting from his association with Joséphin Péladan’s Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, whose main use to Satie was in the publicity that it brought him. Indeed, the incident with uspud and the Paris Opera was reported

14 even called it proto-Dadist. The music itself sounds extremely minimalistic, and even architectural. As Contamine de Latour wrote, uspud was “a compendium of foolish things designed…to dumbfound the public.”20 This sort of artistic attempts to shock the public would permeate Satie’s whole career, up to and including the ballet, Parade.

Robert Orledge has suggested a significant moment in Satie’s life—which also affected

his output as a composer—occurred when he moved to the neighborhood of Arcueil in 1898.

This move closely coincided with Satie’s introduction to the performer Vincent Hyspa in 1899.

Satie began collaborating with him, going on nightly tours of the Montmartre cabarets and by

1900, Satie was not only Hyspa’s pianist, but his composer as well. Between 1900 and 1904

most of Satie’s cabaret, café-concert and music-hall music was composed for voice and piano for

either Vincent Hyspa or Paulette Darty. Examples of songs written for each singer can provide

evidence of the kinds of features that become hallmarks of Satie’s remarkably unique

compositional style. Un Diner à l’Élysée and Chez le Docteur exhibit use of asymmetrical

phrasing, while La Diva de l’Empire was a syncopated cakewalk—other examples of this

American influence on the composer can be seen in the 1904 cakewalk for solo piano called Le

Piccadilly. Indeed, the cakewalk, which was prevalent in cinemas, fairs, and circuses in Paris

during this time, is later found in Petite fille Américaine in Parade, also subtitled, Ragtime du

Paquebot.

During the first decade of the twentieth-century, Satie did produce a small output of art

music (Ogives, Trois Gymnopédies, Sarabandes), and although they constitute a relatively small

about in the papers, and was about as close to a publicity stunt at Satie got. It is also during this time period that Satie first adopted the persona of the dandified-yet-scruffy man-about-town. In 1895, he purchased seven identical velvet corduroy suits to create his “Velvet Gentleman” look.

20 Contamine de Latour, La Comoedia (3 August 1925), 2.

15 body of work, they are experimental in their form, harmony, repetition, and lack of traditional motivic development. This is first noted during Satie’s so-called Rosicrucian period (1891-

1895), where Satie’s music evidences the beginning of what Leonard Meyer called anti-

teleological music, which is not goal-oriented and is more timeless and spatial—a kind of

“furniture music” before the fact.21 Notably, Satie’s music from this time period evidence the composer’s use of reiteration, juxtaposition, and accumulation of sonorities and a disregard for use of any kind of traditional harmonic logic.22 Indeed, Orledge has asserted multiple times that

Satie’s entire oeuvre has no motivic development. An extreme example from 1893 is Vexations,

a piece to be played on piano and repeated 840 times. This avant-garde piece displays a

compositional choice that Satie often made, which was to not develop motives in the traditional

sense—if at all. With no development, Vexations takes it a step further, using repetition to an

absurd degree. Such non-traditional compositional choices are present not only in this piece, but

characterize Satie’s music in general, and thus serve in this way as compositional forerunners to

Parade. Vexations is also notable for its use of total chromaticism (that is, the use of continual

and unrelieved dissonance, with no obvious sense of direction or a tonal center), and is often

dubbed as the first minimalist piece.23 It certainly isn’t without its humor, and in characteristic

Satie style, there is a performance direction that states, “Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif,

21 Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), 82.

22 Ibid., 82.

23 Both Orledge and Gillmor provide a good discussion of the unique chromaticism of Vexations. See Orledge, Satie the Composer, 261; “Understanding Satie’s ‘Vexations’,” Music & Letters, Vol. 79, No. 3 (August 1998), 386–395; and Gillmor, Erik Satie, 102–103.

16 il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités

sérieuses.”24

During the 1890s through the early 1910s, several further interesting examples of Satie’s predilection for the absurd are present in extra-musical antidotes in his manuscripts. In

Véritables Préludes flasques of 1912, “Satie replaced traditional performance directions and expressive markings with Latin neologisms. Thus, fictitious words such as Caeremoniousus,

Paedagogus, and Corpulentus appeared above the staff in mockery of musicians who, in Satie’s

opinion, took themselves, and their music too seriously.”25 These same kinds of absurd performance directions are ubiquitous in Satie’s music, and appear five years later in the score for Parade. The ones found in the two-piano version of Parade are no less as humorous and impossible to realize: “a la carcasse” (in the manner of a skeleton), “physionomique”

(physiognomical), “gluant” (sticky), “buvez” (drink—in the imperative).

Satie lived, composed, and worked in Montparnasse in relative obscurity, known mostly in the artistic and bohemian circles in which he was a member. However, a pivotal point in

Satie’s career happens in 1911, a point which set the stage for the composer being pushed into the limelight of the beau monde, and into the path of Jean Cocteau, who consequently would be one of the main creative forces for Parade. On January 16th, 1911 at the Société Musical

Indépendante, Maurice Ravel performed several of Satie’s pieces on piano. Just over two months later on March 25th, Claude Debussy was to conduct his own orchestrations of the

Gymnopédies at the Salle Gaveau. World War I interrupted Satie’s musical output somewhat,

24 “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by a period of serious immobility.”

25 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 83.

17 but it is also during this time that Satie had his first fortuitous introduction to Jean Cocteau on

October 18th, 1915 through the artist Valentine Gross. However, it wasn’t until April 18th, 1916

that Cocteau actually heard Satie’s music for the first time at the Salle Huyghens.26 Cocteau’s wish to collaborate with Satie was triggered by a performance of Trois Morceaux at a Festival

Satie-Ravel, where Satie performed the duet with Ricardo Viñes, and—according to Ornella

Volta—after hearing the performance, Jean Cocteau was very eager to see [Satie] again to

propose a ballet for Diaghilev which would use this [Trois Morceaux] score. Volta describes the

meeting as such:

They met on April 26th at Valentine Gross’s flat. Cocteau brought along three sheets of onion skin paper on which, in picturesque language of lyrical/futurist inspiration, he proposed to illustrate the Morceaux en form de poire by three fairground turns: a Chinese conjuror (then a familiar figure in the music hall); a Little American Girl (inspired by fashionable short films featuring Pearl White or Mary Pickford); and an Acrobat, well-trained in the dangerous arts of the circus. Satie was hostile to the use of one of his old pieces (the Morceaux were composed thirteen years earlier) and would only accept to work with the poet on condition they did something completely new.27

Cocteau was enthusiastic about Satie, and helped to provide entry for him into important social

circles. This important meeting between the two artists directly lead to the collaboration of

Parade later that year, and consequently, an unexpected renaissance of the composer’s career, at

the age of fifty-one.

Satie’s output of stage or dramatic works leading up to Parade are strongly influenced by

his work in the cabarets, café-concerts, and music-halls, where his cabaret orchestral works and orchestrations of incidental music influence later larger orchestra works. Satie’s scoring for small cabaret orchestra leading up to the fateful performances at the Société Musical

26 There is some confusion in the research as to when Cocteau first heard the music of Erik Satie. Primarily due to Cocteau incorrectly giving the date of April 1915 in his retrospective account. Cocteau recounts hearing Satie’s music in April 1915, and presenting sketches to him a week later. However, Cocteau’s memory is incorrect, and this later retelling of the history of events is off.

27 Caroline Potter, Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press 2016), 73–74.

18 Indépendante set the pattern for his later orchestrations, which are characterized by conservative instrumental ranges, the absence of any doublings at the same pitch, and an almost continual mixture of separately articulated strings and wind.28 Echoes of the cabaret and the music-hall resound in such works as Jack-in-the Box (1899), Genéviève de Brabant (1900), Trois Morceaux en form de poire (1903), Le Piège de Méduse (1913), and Cinq Grimaces pour Le Songe d’une

nuit d’été (1915).29 Even though Satie professed a dislike for his work in the cabarets and cafés, it infiltrated his art music in significant ways. Parade becomes a culminating example of him bringing lowbrow art to the highbrow realm of ballet. Certainly, by the 1910s the piano pieces with humorous annotations, and the essays on music contain a blend of fantasy, wit and parody that stemmed from the Parisian cabaret.30

Satie composed popular tunes (Je te veux, and Tendrement), but he was also fond of inserting, in a manner analogous to collage, well-known popular melodies into his classical

compositions. Le Piccadilly from 1904, for example, was inspired by the Tin Pan Alley song

Hello! Ma Baby (1899) by Howard and Emerson. Likewise, in the marionette opera from 1900,

Genéviève de Brabant, fragmented quotations of “Au clair de la lune”, and “Frère Jacques”

appear.31 A 3-act play in prose and verse by Contamine de Latour, Genéviève de Brabant included music for solo violins, chorus, and piano. The choruses, in particular, have the distinct flavor of the music-halls, and the piece as a whole possesses that ironic detachment which Satie

28 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Satie, Erik,” by Robert Orledge, accessed 18 January 2020, http://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/978156`592630.article.40105

29 Trois morceaux en form de poire is a collection of pieces written between 1890-91, which include arrangements of cabaret songs.

30 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 66.

31 Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade: Street to Stage (New York: Harry Abrams and The Drawing Center, 1989), 87.

19 made his particular brand. The construction of asymmetrical phrasing, changing meter, and

“trick” cadences are additional characteristics that appear in Genéviève de Brabant, and they

become features that appear in Satie’s late ballets from the 1910s and 1920s, starting with

Parade in 1917.

Unperformed during the composer’s lifetime, Jack‐in‐the Box (1900) was a pantomime in collaboration with Jules Dépaquit. It was premiered after Satie’s death both as a ballet by

Balanchine in 1926, and as a play in 1937. The English title is notable, and Satie himself described it as a “suite anglaise,” a “pantomime,” or a “cloonerie.”32 This strange little pantomime in its music-hall style, shows a bright diatonic framework that is occasionally laced with odd-note harmonies, making the music at times piquant, with what sound like bitonal inflections.33 As Caroline Potter has shown, Jack-in-the-Box has multiple references to barrel organ players and musicians for hire; even the music itself could possibly have been made to be performed on a player piano or a barrel organ.34 The music is mechanical in its sound, featuring irregular rhythmic groupings and the use of comic repetition. A Scottish jig is even included, with its characteristic dotted rhythm. Steven Moore Whiting notes that “in composing the score to Jack-in-the-Box, Satie set for himself a task much like those given him by Hyspa. He harmonized tunes of decidedly popular character as if they were object trouvés, but in a manner far more extravagant than Hyspa (or probably even himself) would have found appropriate for cabaret chansons.”35 Jack-in-the-Box is a unique harbinger of Parade in that the music for the

32 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 30–31.

33 Gillmor, Erik Satie, 118.

34 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 35–37.

35 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 250.

20 ballet realiste also features the use of popular tunes, mechanical sounds, and comic repetition.

These features of Satie’s compositional style were incubated during his time as a practitioner in

the cabarets and music-halls.

As Ornetta Volta and others have argued, both the music and the text of Jack-in-the-Box

were likely reused in some portion for Le Piège de Méduse, a lyric comedy from 1913. It is a

one-act farce with text by Satie and “dance music by the same gentleman.” The dialogue is very

similar to Satie’s music, comprised of short fragments and non-sequiturs that seem at times inane

and confusing, and includes the character of a giant stuffed monkey who unexpectedly breaks

into dance. The score is dappled with humorous commentaries for both the pianist and the stage

performers, including: “Riez sans qu’on le sache” (Laugh, without anyone knowing) and

“Dansez intérieurement” (Dance inwardly). The music in general reinforces the music-hall style of the composer, with its quadrilles, waltz, mazurka, polka, and pair of two-steps. The piano version, which Satie premiered himself in 1914, is the first example of prepared piano. The composer slipped sheet of paper in-between the strings to give it a mechanistic timbral. The orchestral premier, which happened in 1921, is scored in a cheeky cabaret style for a small orchestra with noisy percussion parts and hearkens to the Dadaist style the composer would take up after the first World War.36 Robert Orledge has even dubbed it the first surrealist play, several years before the term was coined by Apollinaire in his review of Parade in 1917.

Cinq Grimaces pour Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (1915) was Cocteau’s second of three attempts to do a theatre piece inspired by the circus for the Ballet Russes.37 By this point, Satie had fully realized a fusion of café-concert and serious styles, and the Cinq Grimaces represent

36 Gillmor, Erik Satie, 182–183.

37 The third project—which did come to fruition—was Parade.

21 many of the features of the composer’s style that Gillmor describes: “wrong-note” harmonies, passing polyharmonies, modal ambiguity, as well as quotations of popular tunes.38 Planned for performance at the Cirque Médrano—including the Clowns Fratellini—the scenery and costumes were to be designed by the cubist painters Albert Gleizes and André Lhote. However, the rehearsals were terminated during July of 1915.

Overall, these highly experimental and absurd excursions into theatrical genres all contain the germination of ideas that would later become creative sparks in Parade. Traits that permeate these works, and give birth to later stage works such as Parade, include the shocking blend of music-hall style with art music, the fragmented and collage-like style of Satie’s music, as well as the predilection for music that is asymmetrical and anti-developmental. For Satie, these artistic attempts were attempts in the theater of the absurd, meant to disconnect and disrupt the audience visually, textually, and musically from what they expected. As Roland-Manuel

wrote in 1913, “these astounding fantasies definitively create an insurmountable partition

between the public and [Satie].”39 Humor and farce functioned as a significant barrier to engagement with Satie’s music in the normal sense. Parade would become a wonderful amalgam of these traits.

The Ballet Russes was extremely well known by 1917 when Parade premiered, having

made their debut season in Paris in 1909, followed by the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Firebird in their 1910 season. Over the next seven years, their impresario Sergei Diaghilev made a point of bringing in new and modern composers and ideas that pushed the envelope of what traditional

38 Gillmor, Erik Satie, 192–193.

39 Alexis Roland-Manuel, “Silhouettes d’Artistes: Erik satie,” L’Echo musical (Revue Mensuelle Illustré) (5 April 1913): 1–3. “Ces ahurissantes fantaisies creent definitivement entre le public et lui l’infranchissable cloison.”

22 art and dance were supposed to be. Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune as well as Ravel’s

Daphnis et Chloé debuted in 1912, followed by the sucès de scandales of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre

du Printemps in 1913. Until 1914, when World War I put an end to their regular Paris seasons,

the Ballet Russes dazzled audiences with a combination of superb dancers, luxurious sets, and

impressive costumes. The Ballet Russes was provocative in its music (Stravinsky’s savage score

for Le Sacre du Printemps), in its costumes (Bakst’s designs for Scheherazade), and in its

choreography (Nijinsky’s suggestive choreography for Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune).40

With the outbreak of World War I, Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes relocated their headquarters

to Rome, where they rehearsed, while still giving performances in other cities, including Paris

and London. On May 18th, 1917, almost a year after Cocteau had sent the idea for Parade to

Satie, Parade: ballet réaliste premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

In the 1918 publication of the score for Parade, French composer Georges Auric wrote in

the introduction, “Satie’s score is designed to serve as the musical background for percussion

instruments and onstage sounds. Thus, it very humbly yields to the same reality that drowns the

nightingale’s song under the rumble of streetcars.”41 By equating the music to set design, Auric heralds Parade as a purposeful reorganization of music’s function, suggesting that Satie’s music

was meant to remain arrantly in the peripheral of the artwork. The synopsis provided by Cocteau

is as follows:

At Country Fairs it is usual for a dancer or acrobat to give a performance in front of the booth in order to attract people to the turnstiles. The same idea, brought up-to-date and treated with accentuated realism, underlies the Ballet “Parade.”

40 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 30.

41 George Auric, “Preface,” in Parade: ballet réaliste sur un thème de Jean Cocteau (Paris: Editions Salabert, 1919). “La partition de Satie sont conçus pour servir de fond musical aux instruments de percussion et aux bruits sur scène. Ainsi il se soumet très humblement a la réalité qui étouffe le chant du rossignol sous le roulement des tramways.”

23 The scene represents a Sunday Fair in Paris. There is a traveling Theatre, and three Music Hall turns are employed as Parade. There are the Chinese Conjuror, an American Girl, and a pair of Acrobats.

Three Managers are occupied in advertising the show. They tell each other that the crowd in front is confusing the outside performance with the show, which is about to take place within, and they try, in the crudest fashion, to induce the public to come and see the entertainment within, but the crowd remains unconvinced. After the last performance the Managers make another effort, but the Theatre remains empty. The Chinaman, the Acrobats, and the American Girl, seeing that the Managers have failed, make a last appeal on their own account. But it is too late.42

The artistic collaboration for this ballet réaliste included a scenario by Cocteau and sets and costumes by Picasso. Parade constituted the first incursion of truly radical modernism into the ballet. Picasso’s décor, in particular the ten-foot constructions of two Managers and a vaudevillian two-man horse, Satie’s ambiguous half music-hall score, Léonide Massine’s pantomime-like choreography and the topicality of Cocteau’s scenario outraged the audience of the Théâtre du Châtelet at the opening performance.43 Montmartre had invaded Art with a capital A. With Parade, Satie and his collaborators had effectively changed the rules of ballet.

Rules that now incorporated modernism, new aesthetics, challenged the status of art, and as we shall see, had an effect on the nature of expression in music.

42 Jean Cocteau, Le Cahier romain, 1917. See also Jean Cocteau, Nouveau Théâtre de poche. “Le décor représente les maisons á Paris, un dimanche. Théâtre forain. Trois numéros du Music-hall servent de Parade. Prestidigitateur chinois. Acrobates. Petite fille américaine. Trois managers monstrueux organisent la réclame. Ils se communiquent dans leur langage terrible que la foule prend la parade pour le spectacle intérieur et cherchent grossièrement á le lui faire comprendre. Personne n’entre. Après le dernier numéro de la parade, les managers exténués s’écroulent les uns sur les autres. Le Chinoise, les acrobates et la petite fille sortent du théâtre vide. Voyant l’effort suprême et la chute des managers, ils essayent d’expliquer á leur tour que le spectacle se donne á l’intérieur.”

43 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 30.

24 Chapter Two – Satie, Modernism, and the artists of Montparnasse

The term Modernism has been applied to aesthetic ideals and creative thought since the late nineteenth-century. Daniel Albright has defined Modernism in arts and literature as a deliberate philosophical and practical divergence from the past—occurring especially in the course of the twentieth century—and taking form in any one of various innovative movements and styles.44 This can make it difficult to categorize certain artists from this period, not to mention their output, as they were often living at the confluence of several of these innovative movements at once. As this chapter will discuss, several Modernist movements intersected— several times—in Satie’s life, amongst the places that he frequented and worked in

Montparnasse, and had significant impact on his creative output, and notably these modernist movements are important in gaining a true understanding of Parade.

In turn-of-the-century Paris, Modernism tested the limits of aesthetic construction—a

Modernist’s artistic aim was to find the ultimate bounds of certain artistic possibilities. In

musical composition, Modernist trends were often fueled by more than aesthetic ambitions and

simply embracing the uniquely new. “Newness for newness-ess sake” wasn’t enough to keep

composers sated. Instead, many of the Modernist composers from turn-of-the-century Paris

found themselves using their music as a means to critique contemporary cultural standards as

well as provide a challenging counterpoint to the expectations of the social uses of music. Such

a brazen critique of society through music became a driving force behind many early twentieth-

century compositional innovations.45 This is not to say that other artists weren’t interested in

44 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 12.

45 Ibid., 13.

25 using their art for social commentary, or critique. Undoubtedly, many Modernist musicians and artist alike (not least of which is Satie, who perhaps embodies this more purely and enigmatically than most) worked in some way towards a destabilization of the boundary between high and low art. Indeed, this destabilization was regarded as one of the great artistic freedoms gained in the twentieth century. Cocteau, who wrote the scenario for Parade, was just as much interested in the role that music played in society as Satie was. Indeed, the nature of the scenario for Parade is all about playing with the expectations of what was appropriate use of music and dance in the highbrow context of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris as performed by the Russian-trained professional ballet dancers of the Ballet Russes. Many of the artists and poets who frequented the cabarets and music-halls where Satie worked were taking as their subjects cabaret dancers and harlequins, mixing the high art forms of their craft with the more banal trends of rising cultural and technological changes that were permeating more and more into the everyday life of

Paris. The themes and techniques of popular art found in the café-concert and the music-hall had

a strong influence on the development of various trends of Modernism—very notably the avant-

garde and Futurism, as well as Cubism. Artistic pioneers continued to acquire new sources of

inspiration from popular or everyday art, and the categorical separation between art, folk art and

anti-art began to disappear more and more.

One of the emerging Modernist trends in Paris at this time was Avant-Gardism. The word avant-garde comes from the French, meaning “advance guard” or “fore-guard.” Artists

who aligned themselves with the avant-garde aesthetic produced works that were experimental,

radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. One of the avant-garde’s key

characteristics was its aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability. By pushing the

boundaries of what was accepted as the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm, the avant-

26 garde is considered by some to be the very hallmark of Modernism. Indeed, in some ways the precise mandate of Modernism, is found in the avant-garde in its most quintessential form.

One account of the development of the avant-garde explains that the “increased

urbanization of nineteenth-century society produced a sense of spiritual discomfort in the artist,

out of which grew a feeling of instability and isolation—the estranged artist responded by

creating his own norms.”46 The avant-garde was a rejection of the past, both of the l'art pour l'art aesthetic of the Romantic period, and the petrified forms and traditions of the musical canon; the avant-garde attempted instead to construct its own versions of art-making, and subsequently, of the definition of art itself and the role that it played in society. Indeed, Satie and his followers—including Cocteau and Les Sixes—were very vocal about the rejection of

Wagnerism as well as the soft undulations of Debussyism, which were seen as pale in comparison to what Satie’s music came to embody—that of simplicity, restraint, and the everyday.

By 1925, the term “dehumanization of art” was coined by Spanish philosopher Jose

Ortega Y Gasset in reference to the avant-garde movement.47 As a means of anti-expressionism, the avant-garde was not interested in the sentimental emotionalism of the Romantic Movement and was a reaction against the residuals of that movement found in the music of Wagner and his followers. According to Renato Poggioli in his study, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, artists of the avant-garde had an inclination toward the irrational and the farcical, a penchant for obscurity

46 Alan M. Gillmor, “Satie and the Avant-Garde,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 69, No.1 (Winter 1983), 115.

47 Richard Taruskin, “Getting Rid of the Glue,” The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4:60.

27 and hermeticism, and a general tendency toward abstraction and dehumanization.48 Thus, the music of the avant-garde is art that denies its status as art; in that it denies the basic precept that traditionally art has been based on—the ability to express human emotion. Pronounced experimentalism becomes a norm of avant-garde art, and external formlessness, obscurity and inaccessibility are sought for their own sakes. Unmistakably, emergent in the avant-garde was a tendency to explore art forms to their limits.49 As evidenced in the examples of Satie’s musical output described in the previous chapter, his works are clearly steeped in the avant-garde; in the attempt to create art that denies being defined as art, or anything else so formal. His almost proto-surrealist theatrical works (such as Le Piège a Méduse), his Dada-esque pantomimes (such as Jack-in-the-Box)—and his furniture music (musique d’ameublement), first written in 1917 for the specific purpose of not being listened to—are all calling cards of the avant-garde aesthetic.

The musical devices that Satie employed, that of repetition, fragmented quotations of melodies, use of lowbrow and unexpected sources, pastiche, and non-traditional methods were also decidedly avant-garde.

Another movement that gained traction in Paris at the time, and one that manifested itself very meaningfully in the production of Parade, is Futurism. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published The Futurist Manifesto in the Gazzetta dell’Emilia in Bologna on February 5th, 1909.

Then in French as “Manifeste du futurism” in Le Figaro on February 20th, 1909.50 Several years later, Marinetti would write in Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) that the goal of

Futurism was:

48 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 184.

49 Gillmor, “Satie and the Avant-Garde,” 115.

50 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 49.

28 …to capture breath, the sensibility, and the instincts of metals, stones, wood, and so on, through the medium of free objects and whimsical motors. To substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter…The warmth of a piece of iron or wood is in our opinion more impassioned than the smile or tears of a woman.51

The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth, and violence. Advancements such as the car, the airplane and the industrialized city where glorified and came to represent the technological triumph of humanity. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality,

"however daring, however violent." Futurist music rejected tradition and introduced experimental sounds inspired by machinery. Futurist composer, Luigi Russolo, wrote The Art of

Noises in 1913, an influential text where Russolo introduced instruments he called intonarumori, which were acoustic noise generators that permitted the performer to create and control the dynamics and pitch of several different types of noises. In 1914, Russolo and Marinetti gave the first concert of Futurist music, with intonarumori on the program. Marinetti was a definitive champion of the performing arts as part of the Futurist movement. There were multiple voices calling for a rejuvenation through popular sources in the culture of the café-concert, including

Jean Huré; but even more strident was the voice of Marinetti, who decried the exhaustion of contemporary theatre and rushed to embrace “the whole gamut of stupidity, imbecility, doltishness, and absurdity, insensibly pushing the intelligence to the very border of madness” that he observed in Parisian music-hall.52 In Marinetti’s view, its “cumulus of events unfolded at great speed” had the capacity to mock through “powerful caricatures” with “grave words made ridiculous by funny gestures, bizarre disguises, mutilated words, ugly faces, pratfalls.”53 Music- hall would participate in “the Futurist destruction of immortal masterworks, plagiarizing them,

51 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 214–215.

52 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 353.

53 Ibid., 353.

29 parodying them, making them look commonplace by stripping them of their solemn apparatus as if they were mere attractions.”54 An article by Marinetti, Le Music-Hall, was published in

French around December 1913. Here Marinetti upheld variety theatre (or music-hall) as the model for artistic change because of it disregard for tradition, and through its “simplicity of means” destroyed the “Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, and the Sublime in Art with a capital

A.”55 Never to be one to be outdone or excluded in the realm of thought or art, Jean Cocteau

would exclaim in 1918— “Enough clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites, and nocturnal

scents; what we need is a music of the earth, every-day music. Enough of hammocks, garland,

and gondolas; I want someone to build me music I can live in, like a house.”56 He goes on to say that “the music-hall, the circus, and American negro-bands, all these things fertilize an artist just as life does”—Cocteau sounds very much like a Futurist when he says that these venues stimulated in the same way as “machinery, animals, natural scenery, or danger.”57 At this point,

Satie—working in the very venues which Marinetti praised—had already composed half a dozen piano pieces, as well as his numorous pieces composed for music-hall, in which the same principles that Marinetti was expounding on where given free play in the composer’s work.58

The term Cubism was first used by the critic Louis Vauxcelles in describing paintings exhibited in Paris by Georges Braque in November 1908, who pronounced the artwork as made of “geometric schemas and cubes.” Historically, the term has come to describe the work of

54 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 353.

55 Perloff, Art and the Everyday, 8.

56 Jean Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin (London: Egoist Press, 1921), 21.

57 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 23.

58 Notable examples include Nouvelles “Pièces froides” from 1907, and Descriptions automatiques from 1913.

30 Braque and Pablo Picasso, but also to a range of art produced in France during the later 1900s, the 1910s and the early 1920s. In 1909-10 Braque painted a tromp-l’oeil nail on the top of the canvas of his piece entitled, Still Life with Violin and Pitcher. This nail had a shadow cast, just as a real nail would, painted onto the surface of the canvas. With this shadow, Braque in effect shattered the principle that Western art had held as fundamental since the Renaissance that the picture’s surface was a transparent window into reality. Thus, Cubism had taken its first step into shattering the illusion between external reality and the internal reality of art. What Marinetti had called Art with a capital A. A few years later, Picasso would complete his Still Life with

Chair Caning (1911-12), which included a piece of oilcloth pasted to the lower surface of the

canvas, and introduced the first example of collage to cubist technique. In their studio, Braque

and Picasso used everyday materials and experimented with extending art into the realm of the

ordinary, into the realm of the everyday. In order to develop their idea of a popular iconography,

they used cardboard, paper of many shades and patterns, sand, combs, sawdust, metal shavings,

ripolin varnish, sheet metal stencils, razor blades and craft tools, and with their art sought to

achieve readily comprehensible simplicity.59 Simplicity achieved with everyday objects, with art

that felt modern, and entirely new.

Placing art in the everyday, in the socially pedestrian, was part of Satie’s modernist design for a rejection of the l’art pour l’art aesthetic, which at its most extreme was a rejection that took art completely outside of the traditional value system. With such an aesthetical view,

Satie was ready to plunge art firmly into the realm of the everyday, to the extremes of banality.

Taking art off its pedestal and placing it in the everyday was an effective strategy for Satie to heighten confusion and foster an element of play in his music. In the June 1920 issue of

59 Guillaume Apollinaire and Dorothea Eimert, Cubism (New York: Parkstone International, 2010), 38.

31 Cocteau’s Le Coq, Satie wrote an article stating that in each composition, he tried to use a

structure and content that would confuse his followers.60 Like his cubist painter friends, Satie’s compositional technique often used the juxtaposition of ordinary elements in order to place them in a confusing and disorienting context. One can look at the works from his time at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, as well as his texted piano works, or the various experimental theater works mentioned in the previous chapter to hear these elements in his music. Another distinction in

Satie’s music is the purposeful lack of intentionality; the celebration of the artistically transfigured everyday was a means by which Satie accomplished a deliberately shallow portrayal of his music that avoided emotional depth. A great example of the artistically transfigured everyday is present in his piano work Sports et divertissements (1914).

Innovation affected the creative world of Satie and his contemporaries, not least by giving rise to a consciously modernist movement which prized new, distinctly urban, sounds. In the first two decades of the twentieth century in Paris, cutting-edge music was indivisible from the other arts, especially literature and visual art. Poets and musicians were responding both to

older mechanical instruments such as the barrel organ, the shiny newness of electricity, and

industrialized factories. However, the poetic themes of banality and the everyday – the

relationship between the human being and the machine – remained constant, whether the

machine were a barrel organ, a typewriter, or an engine or a siren.61

60 Erik Satie, Le Coq, No. 2 (June 1920). Cocteau's broadsheet, founded on 6 March 1920, was destined to appear only four times: May, June, July/August/September, and November 1920. Numbers 3 and 4 were called Le Coq parisien. All four issues, originally printed on large folded sheets of pink paper, are reprinted in smaller facsimile in a double issue of L’Approdo musicale, Nos. 19–20 (1965), dedicated to “II Gruppo dei Sei.” Satie’s text has been reprinted in Ornella Volta, ed., Erik Satie: Ecrits (Paris, 1977), 45.

61 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 47.

32 Satie’s music can also be considered in the context of these various movements in Paris during the 1910s, many of which centered in Montparnasse and were happening at the center of the very social and artistic circles of which Satie was a part. Indeed, Satie’s music from his

Schola period (beginning in 1905) to the end of his life consists predominately of multimedia, often collaborative works that exhibit features of his counterpoint studies along with contemporary and aesthetic innovations. Simultaneous production of two or more different media or text was promoted by Italian Futurists, notably Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, as well as authors such as Apollinaire.62 Like Marinetti and others who also required their inspirations come from popular sources, Satie insisted that his music should retain its link with its popular roots. He entirely rejected the nineteenth-century concepts of Romantic expressiveness and thematic development. Satie was, first and foremost, a man of ideas, a precursor of virtually everything from neo-classicism to minimalism (and even muzak). He was the first to reject

Wagner’s influence on French music; he by-passed Impressionism and the beguiling orchestral sonorities of Debussy and Ravel; and his art derived more from painters (especially Cubists) than from any one composer.63 In his notorious broadsheet, Le Coq et le Harlequin, Cocteau wrote that Satie would title his pieces with grotesque or bizarre titles in order to “protect his works from persons obsessed by the sublime and provide an excuse for the laughter of those who do not realize their value,” and he goes on to say that, “the public is shocked at the charming absurdity of Satie’s titles and system of notation, but respects the ponderous absurdity of the libretto of

Parsifal.”64 Satie had fervently disassociated himself from the German expressionist approach,

62 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 47–50.

63 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 1.

64 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 18.

33 yet he expressed a similar disdain for the French impressionists. It could be observed that, as a matter of personal principle, Satie refused to adhere to any defined school of artistic thought or specific aesthetic philosophy.65

Satie was a writer and frequent contributor to many of the small-circulation art magazines of the period, and was closely connected to the most innovative writers, composers, and artists of his age. For example, the Italian Futurist movement had a high profile in Paris in the early twentieth century, with prominent leaders of the movement becoming well-known for communicating their ideas through the format of multiple manifestos. Critics of the time drew parallels between Satie and the Futurist movement, including Gaston Picard, who claimed in

1919 that Satie was a “disciple of Socrates, and also a follower of Marinetti.”66 One of Satie’s closest friends, Valentine de Saint-Point, wrote Manifesto of the Futurist Woman in 1912. She was connected to the rise in interest in Satie’s music which was triggered by Ravel’s promotion of his early works including the Sarabandes. She and her partner, the poet and film enthusiast

Ricciotto Canudo—also a support of Futurism and Satie’s music—hosted a salon, and on June

11th, 1912, where Florent Schmitt and Maurice Ravel played Satie’s piano piece based largely

on cabaret songs he had composed in Montmartre, Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903).67

This was both an important moment in Satie’s discovery, and also shows how closely Satie was orbiting in the Futurist circles of Paris. Marinetti himself, proclaimed in January 1924, in his manifesto, Le futurisme mondial, that Satie was one of “the creators of modernities, futurist

65 Susan Calkins, “Modernism in Music and Erik Satie’s Parade,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 41, No. 1 (June 2010), 9.

66 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 51.

67 Ibid., 53.

34 without knowing it.”68 Satie himself contributed to the Revue musicale SIM between 1913–14, a

periodical that was associated with Futurism.

Another of Satie’s friends, Guilliame Apollinaire—a key contributor to art magazines, a

prolific poet, author of manifestos, and a central figure across the arts in Paris at the start of the

twentieth century—has been called by Roger Shattuck the “Impresario of the Avant-Garde” and

a “Poet rooted in painting.”69 Apollinaire was heavily influenced by both the Cubists and the

Futurists, and his connection to Satie, Cocteau, and Parade is significant. Inspired by the first

Cubist collages of Picasso and Braque—which utilized everyday objects like newspapers and

oilcloths—he began modeling his subject-matter after newspapers, advertisements, and posters.

Apollinaire described these objects as containing the poetry of his epoch, and from this he

developed his first poems he called calligrammes, which consisted of fragmented stream-of-

consciousness speech placed spatially across the page. “Many of Apollinaire’s poems…allude to

philosophy, religion and history, while at the same time rendering matter-of-fact details of

Parisian life. Like Cubist canvases, his poems introduce street cries, signs and contemporary

urban intrusions.”70 His poetry, like Satie’s music, addressed themes connected with the

mechanical, encompassing both new and older technologies.71 Apollinaire was a friend of both

Picasso and Braque, and an early and vocal supporter of Cubism, writing as an art critic many articles in Le Mercure, and elsewhere on Cubism. In fact, Apollinaire’s first two writings on art

68 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 51.

69 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 256.

70 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 45.

71 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 66.

35 are articles on Picasso that appeared in 1905.72 With the publication of Les Peintres cubistes by

Apollinaire in 1913, he successfully solidified his backing of the Cubist movement and of its importance in the artistic life of Paris at that time. Apollinaire’s modern poems— calligrammes

—stand as a wonderful progenitor to Parade and to Cocteau’s use of the advertisement-like barks and ballyhoo of the Managers.

Apollinaire had an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary art and, like Satie, knew many of the prominent artistic figures of his time and was one of the first French artistic figures to be in close contact with the Italian Futurists. In an article from June 29th, 1913, he called for a rejection of “poetic sadness, snobby exoticism…the orchestra”, and said he preferred,

“Onomatopoeic Description/Total Music and Art of Noises…/Machinism Eiffel Tower Brooklyn and skyscrapers…Direct quivering at great free spectacles circuses music halls etc.”73 His writing, with its reference to modern technology and a rejection of the romantic artistic notions

of the previous century clearly evokes Russolo’s Futurist manifesto written in the same year.

Furthermore, Rothschild has noted the link between his characteristic stream-of-consciousness

formula of writing with that of Cocteau’s character descriptions for Parade. Cocteau was often taking up the artistic tools of his friends and trying to make them his own. Later, he would do very similar things with Picasso’s Cubist sketches during their time in Rome and Naples working on Parade. Satie also would be co-opted by Cocteau in his Le Coq et le Harlequin as his mascot for modernism and music, almost to the point that it seems like Cocteau is championing himself for the discovery of the iconoclastic composer.

72 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 264.

73 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 60.

36 Apollinaire was closely aligned with the entire group of artists who worked on Parade,

and would supply the program notes for its premiere in 1917. Yet another artistic link between

Apollinaire and Satie is the poet’s move to do away with punctuation (calligrammes), which he

formally called for a ban on in his article L’antitradition futuriste from 1913. Likewise, Satie’s

omission of barlines, and use of phrases (whether regular or irregular) provide a musical parallel.

Satie and others in his artistic circle of friends were responding in similar ways to the

modernization and urbanization of Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the

same way, Satie was also responding to the Cubist movement of the time. Robert Orledge has

asserted that Satie’s art derived more from Cubist painters than from any composer.74 Satie knew several cubist painters and was frequently present at salons and cafés with such artists. For example, in February of 1912, his close friend Valentine de Saint-Point held a salon which Satie attended, along with Ravel, as well as the Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Léon Bakst.75 In the artistic circles that Satie, Picasso, and others frequented, Satie was regarded as possessing a uniquely uncluttered vision of Cubism and its various stages of development. Fernande Olivier,

Picasso’s mistress in his Montmartre days (1904-12) said:

The only person that I heard argue clearly and simply about Cubism was Erik Satie. I believe that he alone, if he had written on Cubism, could have made it easily comprehensible. But he would doubtless have done it in such a manner that the painters concerned would have disowned it. It would have been too clear!76

By 1913, Satie’s music was showing the influence of Cubist techniques. The use of parody and

allusion to pre-composed melodies in Satie’s music was similar to the collage work that Picasso

74 Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1.

75 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 54.

76 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 226. For the original translation of this text, see also Ornella Volta, L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie (Paris: Edition Van de Velde, 1979).

37 and Baskt had begun to use. Vieux sequins et vielles cuirasses from 1913 is a composite of text

and musical quotations and allusions, that are not reconcilable individually but that together

comprise the work. Whether or not Satie had already taken an interest in Cubist art by 1913, he

had certainly arrived at a kind of composition analogous to the Cubists’ composite of multiple

perspectives, akin to analytical cubism.77 The quotations in this work range from motivic allusion to arrangement of an entire song, and they stem from the same range of sources that served the chansonniers of Montmartre: military tunes, folk-songs, children’s songs, and opera.

Often in parody, as both Shattuck and Whiting have noted, Satie would keep the rhythm but change the pitches. As with the quotation of the “Mysterious Rag” by Irving Berlin in the Little

American Girl’s Steamboat Rag in Parade.78 In much the same manner that Cubist visual artists constructed works out of interpolated fragments (synthetic cubism), Satie’s music was a collage- like interpolation of thematic musical fragments, taken from a variety of sources. The themes, shattered into motifs, were reconfigured as linear melodies.79 Satie deconstructed his music into something else—transforming it through the devices of surrealist poets, Futurist visionaries, and

Cubist painters alike. But as always, doing so in a way that achieved a synthesis of something unique his, through his own methods, peculiar logic, and aesthetics.

Often, what is strikingly modern about Satie’s music is the “anti-teleological” quality.

Meaning that it does not have an end goal, nor does it or its parts serve a function in any traditional sense. It is music that takes up time, without seeming to move forward in time. Even when the chords are not strange, even when the chord progression are not strange, Satie’s music

77 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 395.

78 Ibid., 182.

79 Calkins, “Modernism in Music and Erik Satie’s Parade,” 14.

38 is conspicuously lacking in the outward thrust typical of Western tonal music. The sonorities seem to exist for their own sake, rather than pointing toward any sort of grand harmonic

culmination outside their brief local context.80 Cocteau once described Satie’s music as pre- existing in a room—not unlike a piece of furniture—which Satie would walked around and examine from different angles, before writing down on paper. With his avant-garde aesthetics, his bohemian lifestyle, and his iconoclastic ways, Satie used music not as expression, but as a barrier against expression. Even his famously unusual titles—Pièces froides (Cold Pieces), and

Préludes flasques (pour un chien) (Flabby Preludes (For a Dog))—suggest an additional barrier against accessibility. Such musical titles suggest that this music should be regarded not as a feast, but rather as something profoundly unappetizing.81

As an anti-expressionist, Satie often composed his music in a new or experimental way.

One such example is his invention of musique d’ameublement, or music-as-furniture. This is perhaps his most avant-garde—even proto-Dadaist—conception. It is music that questions its identity as music. Here, music functions as atmospheric background, it is music that is not meant to be directly heard, just experienced or felt. Satie composed his musique d’ameublement for situations where focused listening was not supposed to be happening. In one performance, on March 8th, 1920, his music was to be played during an intermission of a play, while patrons were looking at artwork. Satie, with the help of Darius Milhaud, placed five musicians in separate areas around the hall. This effectively allowed the music to occupy the space in the room outside the confines of the stage or the focused attention by the listeners. Satie described the reason behind this 1920 project using decidedly anti-expressionist terms: “You know, there’s

80 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 190–191.

81 Ibid., 191.

39 a need to create furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding

noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it out completely, without imposing itself. It would fill up the awkward silences…it would neutralize the street noises.”82 However, the performance of

Satie’s furniture-as-music caused a very different effect than the composer wanted. He had to keep shouting “Don’t listen!” to the audience around the room. Satie’s effrontery was to challenge the role that music played in human life. Instead of a Wagnerian, semantically dense, emotionally quickening music, a music that heightened the vivacity of the listener’s responses to the world, Satie intended to produce music that receded into the background, an unobtrusive continuo to daily action. For Satie, music was not supposed to aspire toward an instant of devastating apprehension of meaning.83 This contentious relationship between the listener and the music becomes important, as we shall see, in an aesthetic interpretation of Parade.

In Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts, Daniel

Albright buttresses his discussion of Satie with the belief that, “for Satie, music was not expression, but a barrier against expression.” Much of Satie’s music is “no more an expression of disgust than of any other emotion, except insofar as the audience is disgusted not to find any conventional reflexes of sentiment.” 84 With his musique d’ameublement, Satie challenged the role that music plays in life. Music’s role should not induce emotional response, but instead be

82 Gillmor, Erik Satie, 232.

83 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 191.

84 Ibid., 191.

40 merely placed in the background. Music then becomes environment. To use Satie’s analogy, it just lies there, like furniture.

The conscious attempt in Futurism, Cubism, and the blending of such movements in the works of Apollinaire, Cocteau, Satie and others were all united in their interest in breaking away from hallowed traditions of the past and trying to fuse art with commonplace materials and with the everyday. Even artists such as Charles Martin, who supplied the famous illustrations for

Satie’s 1914 Sports et divertissements felt the need to provide a second set of illustrations in the

1922 edition, that are markedly different because they show a strong influence of Cubism. Satie,

Picasso, and Cocteau conceived Parade according to the art movements with which they were familiar, principally Cubism and Futurism; and with the premiere of Parade, would inspire the

coinage of a new term—surrealism—one that would lead to a whole different aesthetic

movement in Modernism.85

85 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 244.

41 Chapter Three – Cocteau, Modernism, and the collaboration of Parade

Cocteau’s wish to collaborate with Satie was triggered by a performance of Trois

morceaux en form de poire at a Festival Satie-Ravel at 6 rue Huyghens on April 18th, 1916.

Satie and Ricardo Viñes performed the piece as a piano duet, and according to Ornella Volta,

Jean Cocteau was eager to see Satie again to propose a ballet for Diaghilev which would use this

score. When Cocteau heard Trois morceaux, he would have recognized the popular sources, if

not the actual cabaret chanson from which it was taken from.86 This is likely what most impressed Cocteau – as he had been wanting to do a fairground-themed ballet since 1913 when he had first hoped to interest Stravinsky in such a project.

Cocteau had been in Diaghilev’s entourage since 1910, having received an introduction through Misa Edwards Sert. His artistic contributions to the Ballets Russes began with designing posters and promoting the famous dancer, Nijinsky, in articles and cartoons. He supplied the scenario for Le Dieu Bleu, which the Russian ballet company premiered in 1912. It was poorly

received, and consequently Diaghilev dropped it from their repertory. Cocteau’s next attempt at

writing a ballet was the circus-themed ballet, David. He began work on the project about a year

after the failure of Le Dieu Bleu. Cocteau retrospectively wrote about the scenario for David:

On the stage, in front of a booth at a fair, an acrobat would be doing a come-on for DAVID, a spectacle intended to be given inside the booth. A clown, who is later transformed into a box (theatrical pastiche of the phonograph played at fairs – modern form of the ancient mask), was to celebrate David’s exploits through a loud-speaker and urge the public to enter the booth and see the show. In a way it was the first sketch for PARADE, but unnecessarily complicated by biblical reference and a text.87

86 The popular songs quoted in Trois Morceaux are: the café-concert song Le Roi soleil de plomb, c. 1901 quoted in Prolongation du même, and the cabaret song Imperial-Napolean, c. 1902 quoted in Morceau II. Throughout the seven pieces of this set Satie also quotes himself, including his Gnossienne from Act I of Le Fils des Etoiles (1891).

87 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 43-44. The original text can be found in the David notebooks by Cocteau.

42 David was conceived to be a short ballet, with a musical score composed by Stravinsky.

Cocteau—like many who saw the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps—was struck by the shocking nature of the ballet, drawn to the succès de scandale that it created, and eager to collaborate with the composer himself. During the winter months of 1913, Cocteau also gathered interest in his David project from his attendance to the newly opened eurhythmics school in Paris by Dalcroze’s pupil, Paul Thevenaz. By February 4th, 1914, Cocteau had selected Stravinsky and Thevenaz as his chosen collaborators for the doomed forerunner to

Parade. On February 12th, 1914 Cocteau wrote to Stravinsky, who was in Switzerland, about his ideas for David.88 Stravinsky agreed to the project, however, it wasn’t long before he

abruptly abandoned it during the summer of 1914, supposedly frustrated with Cocteau’s

overbearing artistic ideas, and after having been warned by Diaghilev against collaborating with

Cocteau.

David was to be a Parade en trois tours (in three parts), in which a voice directly addressed the audience—“Come in ladies and gentlemen! Come inside – join us! In the back!

Inside!”89 Cocteau’s somewhat heavy-handed message in David was that the triumph of art over philistinism could only be seen by making the effort to go inside the booth.90 Cocteau aesthetic beliefs, shaped in part by the influence of Russian actor Vsevolod Metershold, and the circuses and fairgrounds of Paris, was that theater by its very nature was an artificial experience.

Evidence of this can be seen as early as 1910 in Cocteau’s one-act play, entitled La Patience de

88 Gillmor, Erik Satie, 194.

89 Christine Reynolds, “Parade: ballet réaliste”, in Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 140. Taken from the four David Notebooks by Cocteau, all in the Carlton Lake Collection in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

90 Ibid., 140.

43 Penelope. Subtitled mensonge, or “lie,” this short play reveals the writer’s penchant for aesthetic

games was established well before he dreamed up the concept for Parade. For Penelope,

Cocteau required that the audience dressed in costume and promoted an interactive experience

between the audience and the actors. Such an incongruous element in traditional theater would

have been designed to jolt people out of their complacency. A few years later in Parade,

Cocteau and his collaborators would do almost the same thing, playing at the expectations of the

audience to attempt to access the real performance inside the tent that they are never able to see.

Such avant-garde theatrical stunts would have been very much at odds with the elite audiences of

Paris and of the Ballet Russes, who would have been going to the theater—not to be presented

with a theatrical experience that brought the artificial nature of the artform to the foreground—

but to be shown a more bright, vivid, and true view of life, through the suspended disbelief of

stage-drama.

Cocteau’s second unrealized circus-themed project was a version of Shakespeare’s A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was to be staged at the Cirque Médrano and include their

famous clowns, Paul, François, and Albert Fratellini. In June of 1913, the Russian actor

Vsevolod Meterhold came to Paris to work on the play La Pisanelle for Ida Rubinstein’s

company.91 Cocteau attended the rehearsals, no doubt inspired by Meterhold’s production of La

Pisanelle and his views of vaudeville theater, and on August 30th, 1913 wrote to the impresario

Gabriel Astruc. Cocteau convinced Astruc (who was also Diaghilev’s producer) to present A

Midsummer Night’s Dream. Cocteau chose as his musical director, the young Edgard Verèse.

91 Metershold’s central tenant was that theater should return to the fairground booth principle, to the purely theatrical traditions of vaudeville theater. His 1912 essay, “The Fairground Booth”, proclaimed that “the public expects invention, play-acting and skill. But what it gets is either life or a slavish imitation of life.” Meyerhold, like Cocteau in his La patience de Penelope, promoted an interactive experience between the audience and the actors. There is much in common with Meyerhold’s views on theater and Marinetti’s views on Music-hall. Interesting, Marinetti’s Le Music-Hall would be published a few months later in September of 1913.

44 By 1914, although likely still suffering the disappointment of David not materializing, Cocteau was fortunate to be introduced to the cubist painter Albert Gleizes, who Cocteau would waste no time in asking to be one of the set-designers for his Midsummer project.

Both Erik Satie and Edgard Verèse attended gatherings held at the residence of Valentine

Saint-Point and Ricardo Canudo. According to Ornella Volta, Satie and Verèse met around

1914, and afterwards, Verèse had the idea for a collaboration, conceived as an hommage à Satie, in which they would contribute incidental music alongside Florent Schmitt, Igor Stravinsky, and

Maurice Ravel for Cocteau’s reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Only Satie completed the music for the project, now known as Cinq Grimaces pour “Le Song d’une nuit d’ete.”92

Verèse said in an interview in 1961:

We did not want Mendelssohn at that time [during World War I], so consequently it was: Satie, and then Florent Schmitt, Satie, and then Ravel, Satie, and then Stravinsky, and then Satie, myself, and then ending by Satie. Five things by Satie, and four people to put the whole thing together. Just a Hommage a Satie.93

The cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Andre Lhote were to be in charge of sets and costumes.

Gleizes wrote, “The sets would be schematically represented on a backdrop. Projected on it,

through the use of magic lanterns, would be different colors and images.”94 Cocteau’s production seems to have been a spoken drama, coupled with circus acrobatics. Rather than setting scenes to music, Varèse chose incidental music that would be played during the scene changes. Varèse considered the music to be an independent element from the text, rather than a setting of it. Cocteau also viewed it as independent of the text, and Satie concurred with them

92 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 63. Cinq Grimaces was composed March-April 2, 1915.

93 Ibid., 64.

94 Olivia Mattis, “Theater as Circus: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’,” The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, Vol. 23, No. 4 (1993), 59.

45 both, opting to compose music between the stage action, rather than directly being a part of it.

Rehearsals were supposedly begun during the summer of 1915, but stopped suddenly. Each

artist of the group blamed the demise on a different factor: Varese, on the war; Gleizes, on a lack

of funding; Cocteau on the refusal of the actors to work with the clowns.95 The failure of the project was also prompted by the departure of Gleizes to New York in September of that year— and Varese soon followed. These two overlapping projects for the Ballet Russes—David, and

Midsummer—show Cocteau’s great interest in taking the low-brow and popular entertainment genres that were a prominent part of modern Parisian life, and bringing them to the high-brow arena of the concert stage. It was Cocteau’s desire to promote such avant-garde aesthetics that provided a sustaining catalyst to his work with the Ballet Russes. The succès de scandale that he so desperately desired would come the following year with Parade.

Satie’s music is one of the few fragments of the Midsummer endeavor that remain, having been found in his apartment after his death. In some ways, these Cinq Grimaces pour

“Le Songe d’une nuit d’été” show a compositional link to the music for Parade that Satie would compose several years later. In the score of Cinq Grimaces, there are the same combination of classic and popular orchestration, what has characteristically been described as “half Rimsky, half dance-hall.”96 The Grimaces show many of the parodistic traits of the 1913 piano suites,

and show the composer’s fully realized fusion between café-concert and serious styles. The five

movements are each titled: Preamble (Préambule), Fiddle-Faddle (Coquecigrue), Chase

(Chasse), Bluster (Fanfaronnade), and For Exit (Pour sortir). Characteristic of Satie's

95 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 466.

96 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 44. This was originally what Cocteau’s friend, Paul Morand said on May 19, 1917 about Parade.

46 compositional style by this time, Cinq Grimaces displays wrong-note harmonies which date back to numerous early works including Jack-in-the-Box (1900) and Genevieve de Brabant (1900).

Occasional modal ambiguity in the melodic line harkens back to pieces like the Trois Mélodies

(1887) and Ogives (1886). Similar to the Trois morceaux en form de poire that Cocteau would

have heard in April 1916, Cinq Grimaces included quotations of popular tunes (these appear in

Coquecigrue and Fanfaronnade). Such quotation of popular tunes would continue in Satie’s

composing for Parade, in the music for the Little American Girl.

Of these two scenarios by Cocteau, the unfinished project of David more closely serves

as the forerunner of scenario and concept to Parade, being an avant-garde ballet about the inner

and outer world of the circus. Complete with barking managers and a real show that is

inaccessible to the audience. While Cocteau was concurrently attempting to get the David

project off the ground, he was also fostering the collaboration for Midsummer, which seemed to

have progressed farther in its collaboration, but ultimately also did not materialize into a finished

work. Midsummer shows Cocteau’s germinal ideas of taking art of the everyday and his

obsession with pushing it into the concert hall, and these ideas are a direct and important

aesthetic precursor to Parade. In addition, both conceptually and musically, Midsummer (and

Cinq Grimaces) use popular art and entertainment as raw material, showing that for both

Cocteau and Satie, modernism, avant-gardism, and the mixing of genres in these aborted

projects, would become useful and artistically significant fodder in their collaboration of Parade.

During the winter of 1915-16 while stationed at Coxyde, Belgium, Cocteau began

reworking David into Parade. When he returned to Paris in April 1916, he began to conceive

the work more fully, writing on the cover of one of his notebooks a definition of the word parade

from the Dictionnaire Larousse: “A burlesque scene played outside a sideshow booth to entice

47 spectators inside.”97 Before his break was over on May 6th, 1916, Cocteau sent Satie a bunch of notes, which consisted in part of three characters whom he had invented to play the sideshow.

The notes were meant to be megaphone monologues which described the various acts and catalogued in stream of consciousness (à la Apollinaire) their attributes and characteristics. In an interview for Nord-Sud in the June/July 1917 issue, Cocteau recalled that:

I returned to the front, leaving with Satie a bundle of notes and sketches which were to provide him with the theme of the Chinaman, the Little American Girl and the Acrobat (there was then only one acrobat). These indications were not in the least humorous. They emphasized, on the contrary, the prolongation of these characters on the other side of our showman’s booth. The Chinaman could there torture missionaries, the little girl go down with the Titanic, and the acrobat win the confidence of the angels. Gradually there came to birth a score in which Satie seems to have discovered an unknown dimension, thanks to which one can listen simultaneously both to the “Parade” and the show going on inside.98

From this earliest stage of collaboration then, there existed a purposeful tension between the outdoor Parade and what was imagined to happened dramatically inside the tent. The inner- outer world was absolutely a part of the drama. In a letter to Stravinsky on 11 August 1916,

Cocteau wrote about the likelihood of Picasso joining in the collaboration of Parade, and also explaining that the aim of the project was to “distill all the involuntary emotion given off by circuses, music halls, carrousels, public balls, factories, seaports, the movies, etc. etc.”99 It was not until August 24th, 1916 that Cocteau and Satie could jointly write Valentine Gross that

“Picasso is doing Parade with us.”100 However, Satie soon became much more exuberant about

Picasso’s ideas than Cocteau’s for the project. Cocteau glumly reported to Valentine Gross on

97 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 46.

98 Jean Cocteau, “La Collaboration de ‘Parade’,” Nord-Sud: Revue littéraire, Nos. 4–5 (June/July 1917), 29.

99 Steegmuller, Cocteau: a biography (Boston: Little & Brown, 1970), 162.

100 Ibid., 165.

48 August 31st, 1916, “Picasso and Satie get on like Misia and Serge.”101 Cocteau felt excluded from the party, all the more so because Satie now started to make real headway in his composition. He finished the first tableau, Le Prestidigitateaur Chinois on September 1st, 1916, and proceeded directly on to the second, La Petite Fille américaine. Separately, on September

5th, 1916, Cocteau wrote to Valentine saying: “I believe Parade to be a kind of renewal of the theater and not a mere opportunity for music.”102 According to Cocteau, the first version of

Parade did not include managers. After each music-hall turn an anonymous voice was to call out from a megaphone—a theatrical imitation of the showman’s gramophone, a modern variation of the “mask” of the ancients—and sing a type-phrase, summing up the different aspects of the character, and opening a window into the inner world of the tent, or what Cocteau called, “a breach into the world of dreams.”103 However, when Picasso showed Cocteau and Satie his sketches, they realized how interesting it would be to introduce, in contrast to the three music- hall numbers, “unhuman or superhuman characters,” who would assume a false reality on the stage and reduce the real dancers to the stature of puppets.104 Some research (including Whiting) suggests, however, that the Cubist Managers were Picasso’s ideas from his sketches, and

Cocteau in his account was merely trying to co-opt the idea for himself. The Managers were then conceived by Cocteau as “wild, uncultured, vulgar, and noisy,” and even wanted to break the fourth wall, and make the audience aware of the artificial nature of theater, he hoped—and his hopes were not in vain—that these large Cubist carcasses would arouse hatred, laughter and

101 Whiting, Satie the bohemian, 469.

102 Reynolds, Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature, 141.

103 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 54.

104 Ibid., 54.

49 scorn of the crowd; in this case the crowd being the audience of the Ballet Russes at the premiere

of Parade. During this earlier phase of collaboration, three actors were to be seated in the

orchestra and announce through megaphones, “as loudly as posters, the names of advertisements

such as Pears Soaps, etc., while the orchestra was settling down.”105

By 7 October 1916 the project was ready for a formal presentation to Diaghilev.

Cocteau, ever insistent on reminding himself and others of his own crucial role in projects, wrote to Misia Edwards on October 10th, 1916, “that Serge likes our work and that he understood perfectly the seemingly very simply motivation I provided for the union of musician and painter.

I stand between them, giving a hand to each.”106 Satie finished the Little American Girl’s tableau in mid-October, and the Acrobat’s the following month. The Prelude du rideau rouge was completed by 2 December 1916. Satie requested that Valentine Gross organize a read- through, which took place in early January at the home of Ricardo Viñes. And on 9 January

1917, the music, scored for piano duet, was finished. Diaghilev invited Satie, Cocteau, and

Picasso to come to Rome, to weld together the parts of Parade, and begin rehearsals. Satie intended to go and even purchased luggage, but evidently, he decided he would work better on the orchestrations from home, and remained in Paris.107 By 17 February 1917, Picasso and

Cocteau left Paris for the Gare de Lyon to begin work on Parade in Rome, where the Ballet

Russes was headquartered for the duration of World War I. Subsequently in Rome, the artists would realize that in order to wed scenery, costumes and choreography, the type-phase character descriptions as well as the advertisement declamations from the orchestra would have to be cut.

105 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 54–55.

106 Steegmuller, Cocteau, 169.

107 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 471.

50 Cocteau, ever the sycophant, claimed that it would have amounted to straying too far from their

modernist principles of simplicity.

Cocteau and Picasso would stay with Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes in Rome and

Naples until April of 1917. Massine recounted of the Ballet Russes’s Roman headquarters:

During the winter of 1916-17 our studio in the Piazza Venezia was the meeting-place of an ever- widening circle of artists…we were seriously considering one of Cocteau’s suggestions for a ballet incorporating elements of the circus and music-hall. We decided to set the scene in front of a circus tent, bringing on such characters as acrobats, tightrope walkers and conjurers, and incorporating jazz and cinematography techniques into balletic form.108

Satie, who stayed in Paris, composed mostly at Le Lion, a café-tabac in Montparnasse. From the manuscripts, it is believed that Satie was working on Parade up through April of 1917, the same month as the premiere.109 Satie characteristically took scrupulous care over his musical design.

The Ragtime theme for Parade underwent fifteen revisions (eight reharmonizations and seven trial orchestrations).110 While Satie worked at this stage independently, it was Picasso, more than Cocteau, who inspired him the most in the collaboration, and whom he most identified with aesthetically. Ironically, many historians have called this work, Picasso’s Parade, and Satie is

usually not given top billing for the endeavor. But neither is Cocteau. Throughout the

production of the work, there was always the constant presence of Cocteau, attempting to exert

his influence, and try his best to be the most aesthetically significant and influential one of the

collaborators. Indeed, he is present at every step of the creative process, and is involved with

Picasso, Satie and Massine, individually. He was constantly jockeying for position with each

one, and even after the premiere of Parade, was not hesitant to revise history as needed to make

108 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 49.

109 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 20.

110 Ibid., 77.

51 sure he was most closely aligned with the artistic successes of the project. However, the fact is that by the time the ballet actually reached the stage, many of Cocteau’s more avant-garde ideas are cut out last minute—either due to logistical constraints, or more likely, because Diaghilev voted against them. To understand the creative process of Parade, then, is ultimately to trace the influence of Cocteau, and understand fully how he was and was not involved in the creation of this artwork.

On the first page of Cocteau’s Roman notebook, he emblazoned, “SOYONS

VULGAIRES” (Let’s be Vulgar) and underneath in small letters he added “puisque c’est impossible” (since it is impossible).111 Embracing the modern age with all of its vulgarity as well as vitality, he and Picasso wanted their ballet to parody music-hall entertainments while hinting at something of the sadness inherent in the lot of socially outcast performers (and, by implication, artist) whose lives are based on masquerade, imitation, and illusion.112 Yet another example of duality and tension that seemed to be so appealing to Cocteau and the other collaborators of Parade. Massine recalled that Cocteau told him to take crudity and tackiness to the limit in his choreography, adding that he could never be coarse enough. Taking his own advice, Cocteau’s unpublished Italian notebook features drawings of managers copulating as well as a number of pages depicting single phalluses.113 The libretto for Parade, which includes the unspoken ballyhoos of the Managers in a stream-of-consciousness type of word association

111 A facsimile of Cocteau’s Le Cahier roman can be found in the Illustrations section of Richard Axom’s Parade: Cubism as theater.

112 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 61.

113 Jean Cocteau, Cart italian, 5 microfilm reels : negative, ill. ; 35 mm. Fonds Kochno Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts. Filmed by: Bibliothèque Nationale Service Photographique, Paris, 1983–1985. Originals in: Bibliothèque et Musée de l'Opéra, Palais Garnier, Paris.

52 that is at once part-Apollinaire and part-modern advertising, indicates that Cocteau understood

the power and pervasiveness of advertising as well as its vulgar associations.

Parade’s milieu is the forain, a form of travelling fair that was popular in France from late in the seventeenth century. As early as 1764, its vulgarity and lowbrow appeal has been recorded in Léris’s Dictionnaire portatif des Théâtres where the parade is defined as a farce or little comedy without any rule, artificial and ridiculous in style, full of jokes and gross antics,

very indecent and satirical, which [is presented] upon an elevated platform at the entrance of their playhouse, in order to attract the populace.”114 Alongside the façade of the théâtre forain was an elevated platform or parade, where barkers would ballyhoo the merits of the performers who gave excerpts of their acts, in an effort to entice the audience to pay and see the full stage show inside the booths.115 Of the five categories of théâtre forain, Cocteau chose Théâtres de

Magie, Variété-Music-Hall, and tableaux vivants et pantomimes for his scenario.116 These entertainments were seen as anti-authoritarian in spirit, anarchic in content. In keeping with the tradition of the forain and fairground, Picasso’s monstrous Managers stomp, bang and plea for money. Ironically, or perhaps tragically, they unwittingly undermine their three acts, missing the poetry and creative artistry symbolized by the three performances. The unrealized spiels of the

Managers promised remedies to the audience’s maladies of boredom, lack of curiosity, lack of perception, timidity, and being un-modern. The futility of the Manager’s cries are deepened by the fact that the remedies that they entice their audience with are present in the three acts they are each advertising for, yet they are unable to give the audience what they want, or what they think

114 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 73.

115 Ibid., 73.

116 Ibid., 75.

53 they want. The Managers’ commentaries for the acts read like remedies to the unconventional life as defined by the avant-garde of 1917—a life that appreciates mystery, a love of adventure,

and a willingness to take risks in the name of personal freedom. Each of the three acts embodies

some of these qualities. The Chinese Conjurer represents wisdom and mystery (including the

acceptance of man’s potential for evil as well as for good); the Little American Girl – daring,

optimism, resourcefulness and courage; and the Acrobats – imagination, inventiveness and a soaring spirit.

According to Cocteau, Parade had two parts: the fore-spectacles (the Chinese Conjurer, the Acrobats, and the Little American Girl) and the acts inside the tent, never seen by the audience. Thus, the hidden interior spectacle of Parade is never seen, and the first cognitive and

artistic dissonance is formed.117 The second, comes in the clash between the subject of the

scenario, the low-brow and everyday art forms of music-hall, circus and fête-foraines, and the

high-brow nature of the Ballet Russes and its audience. It was not, however, Cocteau’s intention

to erase the distinction between high art and low: he simply wanted to relish the clash between

the highbrow and the lowbrow by bringing them face-to-face. Cocteau enjoyed the dissonance

that accompanied such spectacles.118 Certainly the rest of the collaborators for the ballet also viewed the importance of the inner-outer world of Parade. Satie imagined the setting as that of a cabaret, or boite (box)—with the later addition of the opening Choral being like opening up that

same box to reveal the entertainment inside.119 The paradox that lays at the heart of Parade, was

117 The setting of Parade is a street fair, or fête foraine, which was a feature of French life for centuries and was still popular as late as 1914. Performers for a circus or fete would stand on a platform, or parade, and entice people in to see the show.

118 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 200–201.

119 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 6. The Choral and Final were added April-May 1919 for performances that year.

54 one of Cocteau’s favorite themes: the confusion in the minds of the audience between the foretaste and the feast-to-come, between the sideshow and the main event, between the exterior spectacle and the interior one. The hectic advertising meant to lure spectators inside actually holds them outside, sates them prematurely, blunts their curiosity by bludgeoning their senses.120

Picasso and Satie rendered this paradoxical relationship between exterior and interior with particular eloquence. The theater curtain, once raised, revealed Picasso’s Rideau rouge, a painting upon a curtain, of a curtain parted to reveal what curtains usually hide. This painted curtain, in turn, is raised to reveal what usually takes place in front of a curtain, namely the ballyhoo or parade, and Picasso’s set depicts a circus booth with its curtain drawn. Satie’s music is analogous to this inversion of perspectives through the devise of a fugal exposition to accompany the Rideau rouge. An interiorized musical style to accord with the glimpse of the stage interior. As Picasso’s curtain rises, the musical style becomes more extroverted and poplar. Just as Satie described, as a box opening at the beginning, and then closing at the end, when Picasso’s curtain closes, the fugue resumes. In both cases, the interior paradoxically framers the exterior.121 The duality of the Parade scenario was important from beginning to end

in the evolution of the work, and in thid way the avant-garde aesthetics in each artistic medium

play off the others to inform the work as a whole.

The first act in Parade is the Chinese Conjuror, one that was common in circus or music-

hall acts of the time.122 The French Manager’s text that is supposed to be barked during the

120 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 201.

121 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 473–474.

122 Parade’s Chinese Conjurer is based on Ching Ling Foo, who was originally from China, appearing for the first time in Paris in 1909. Foo’s rival—Chung Ling Soo, who was not from China—was an astute advertiser and businessman and master self-publicist, and actually drove Foo out of Europe and back to China. See Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 76–79.

55 Conjuror’s performance used the common methods of threatening, insulting, cajoling, and

making outlandish promises to the audience to lure them inside. Cocteau here is also

commenting on the state of the unsympathetic audience. The unspoken text found in Satie score

reads:

A MAN WELL-WARNED IS WORTH TWO! – IF YOU WANT TO BECOME RICH – IF YOU FEEL SICK – IF YOU HAVE LANGUORS – ENTER TO SEE THE WISE CHINAMAN – MISSIONARIES – DENTISTS – THE PLAGUE – GOLD – GONGS – PIGS THAT EAT LITTLE CHILDREN – THE EMPEROR OF CHINA IN HIS ARMCHAIR. (Mig Mig Liong Tchon) THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT ENTERED FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE SHOW CAN ENTER TO SEE THE KING OF DRAMAS – THE BIG SUCCESS OF LAUGHTER AND OF TERROR! (Beijing Beijing) THE MOST BEAUITFUL THEATER IN THE WORLD – THE MOST BEAUTIFUL STAGE IN THE WORLD – THE MOST BEAUTIFUL STAGELIGHTS IN THE WORLD.

(crossed out) BEWARE MADAME! MONSIEUR! BOREDOM IS LYING IN WAIT FOR YOU! YOU ARE SLEEPING WITHOUT BEING AWARE OF IT! WAKE UP! ENTER! ENTER! EVERYONE MAKES A PLAY THAT HE LISTENS TO, ENTER TO SEE A PLAY ABOUT YOURSELF! 123

Both Cocteau and Picasso intended the Chinese Conjurer to draw attention to the crassness and

hard-sell of contemporary advertising—the fact that the hyperbolic claims of the French

Manager for the Chinese Conjurer parallel those used in reality by such music-hall performers as

Chung Ling Soo, would not have been accidental.124

The part of the Little American Girl is an amalgam of music-hall and fairground as well as silent screen figures, which would have filled the Parisian consciousness in the first part of the century. American dance and pantomime acts had been a constant commodity in Parisian music- halls since the turn of the century. Ragtime and cakewalk performers, jazz bands, acts such as

Bib and Bob, Barbette, and later Josephine Baker, with their freedom from convention found a welcoming audience with the French public and were thought of as very Modern. Early Western

123 Satie’s score for Parade, in the Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT, 13bis–14bis.

124 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 79.

56 films, cliff-hanger serials, and footage of Manhattan and Chicago skyscrapers from early silent films fed the romantic myth of America as a land of freedom and adventure. The French viewed

America as modern and daring, a country populated by outlaws, bandits, Indians, as well as

larger-than-life heroes and heroines who defied authority. Cocteau’s Apollinaire-like words of

the American Manager for the Little American Girl portray the view of such modern and

industrialized attributes that were associated with American culture. The Manager’s cries and

music for the Little American Girl were to be accompanied by an un-interrupted cinema bell, and

punctuated by revolver shot, just like a true American western. The American Manager’s

excised text reads:

IT IS A CRIME TO KILL YOUR OWN CURIOSITY – WHAT DO YOU NEED TO MAKE A DEICISON? ONE MINUTE! YOU WILL HAVE A LIFE OF REGRET IF YOU DON’T TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY! ARE YOU DEAD? NO? THEN YOU MUST LIVE! MAKE SURE YOU GET THIS IDEA THROUGH YOUR HEAD! A TIMID MAN IS A DEAD MAN. ENTER TO LEARN ABOUT AMERICAN LIFE – THE FEARS – SHORT CIRCUITS – DETECTIVES – THE HUDSON – RAGTIMES – FACTORIES – TRAINS THAT DERAIL – OCEAN LINERS THAT SINK!

(crossed-out) I WAS PALE, SULKY, PUNY – I WAS POOR, BALD, ALONE – THEN I BECAME A NEGRE ROUGE – IF YOU DO NOT LEAVE HERE HEALED! BEWARE!

HESITATE AND YOU WILL LOSE! ENTER! ENTER! DEMAND THE K!125

The Little American Girl is derived from the immensely popular film serials starring

Pearl White, including The Perils of Pauline, which were released by Pathé Studios from 1913 to

1916. Cocteau and Picasso, as avid movie-goers, numbered among Pearl White’s fans, and

Massine mentions her as a source for the Little American Girl.126 Mary Pickford, known as

“America’s Sweetheart,” was also very popular in France, and her roles in movies like Poor

Little Rich Girl fed into Cocteau’s conception of the music-hall performer’s archetype. A real

125 Satie’s score for Parade, 15bis–16bis.

126 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 81.

57 similarity exists between Pickford’s signature look of cork-screw curls, flounced dresses and big bow, and that of Picasso’s costume he designed for the Little American Girl in Parade. Clearly

Cocteau’s intention in Parade was to tap into the positive feelings surrounding these popular cult figures. Pearl White, whose courage made her a heroine loved by a fighting French nation, and

Mary Pickford, whose sweetness, optimism and childlike innocence disarm the jaded public.127

Parade’s third act, the Acrobats, derived from contemporary Music-Hall as well as circus and fairground acts. Cocteau's initial notes to Satie evoke modern man's desire for the conquest of air or sea, hoping to achieve higher states of being by defying gravity, while still hinting that such conquest might ultimately prove to be empty illusions:

Médrano – Orion – two biplanes in the morning…the archangel Gabriel balancing himself on the edge of the window…the diver’s lantern…Sodom and Gomorrah at the bottom of the sea…the meteorologist- the telescope…the parachutist who killed himself on the Eiffel Tower – the sadness of gravity – soles of lead – the sun – man slave of the sun.128

Cocteau’s marginal note in the score indicates that his earlier mention of the Cirque Médrano

was later augmented by the addition of variety theater, or Music-Hall, as another key influence.

In the music, he wrote: “Imitate the classic Music-Hall scene: mad laughter of the Negro manager - the Acrobat stops. Smiling he wipes his hands; continues to smile he shows the manager to the public and shrugs his shoulders (you know what I mean).”129 This note shows that Cocteau was aware of how Music Hall performers interacted with their audience and were often known to break the fourth wall. This appealed to modern sensibilities because such interaction became a kind of communion across the footlights that was unheard of in classical theater or the ballet. With Parade, Cocteau was trying to capture this more modern artistic

127 Ibid., 82.

128 Ibid., 84-85. From one of the original onion skin pages that Cocteau gave to Satie in May 1916.

129 Satie’s score for Parade, 31bis and 32.

58 sensibility. Just as the Futurist Marinetti had said of variety theater, such new and avant-garde trends were aimed at breaking down barriers between the performer and the audience and pushing their sensibility forward into the future. This also would have resonated with Cocteau’s already formed sensibility that art, or at least theater, was meant to reveal to the audience its own artificiality. The Acrobat’s Manager was meant to encourage the audience through its ballyhoo towards the bright lights of Modernism, accompanied by the sound of an airplane engine and a steam machine, his spiel proclaims the rebellious modernity of Parade:

HURRY UP AND RUN, GET AWAY FROM BOREDOM! THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SPECTACLE IN THE WORLD. THE PAST! THE PRESENT! THE FUTURE! A FILM OF 50,000 METERS! A GREAT SUCCESS OF LAUGHTER AND FRIGHT. THE MAN OFFERS A CURE AGAINST ALL THE AFFECTIONS OF THE HEART, THE BRAIN, THE SPLEEN. THIS IS A CONSEQUENCE OF A WISH! THE MODERN MAN IS ENTERING THE WORLD.130

The cries of the Negro Manager for the Acrobats were meant to express how Mankind could

commune with angels, through their own daring and know-how, could become, in a sense, Gods

of the Earth.

The Manager’s lines were meant to poke fun at the outrageous promises that advertisers

used to sell their products, and how they played on human vanity, frailty, and hope. For

example, at the end of the ballet, the three Managers were to come back on stage and make one

last failed attempt to draw the audience into the tent, exclaiming together before they collapsed:

IF YOU WANT TO NOT GET SICK! IF YOU WANT TO BE POWERFUL! IF YOU WANTED TO BE LOVED! DEMAND THE K! IF YOU ARE DECIEVED! YES! YES! YES! IF YOU WANT TO TRAVEL FOR NOTHING! IF YOU WANT US TO LOVE YOU! MADAME! IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A NICE CHEST. MONSIEUR, IF YOU WANT TO OBTAIN A PREEMINENT SITUATION! DEMAND THE K! YES! YES! YES! DEMAND THE K! IF YOU WANT TO WIN THE GAME! IF YOU WANT TO MAKE A GOOD MARRIAGE! IF YOU WANT TO BE RICH! YES! YES! YES! YES!131

130 Satie’s score for Parade, 33.

131 Satie’s score for Parade, 43bis-44bis.

59 During their time in Rome, Cocteau described the Managers in his Italian Notebook as “a

race of terrible vulgar gods of advertising.”132 Not only did Cocteau using a style of poetry closely mirroring that of Apollinaire, he also drew inspiration from the very same sources that

Apollinaire believed to be the basis for an avant-garde language. Apollinaire wrote on several occasions (an October 1916 article in Sic as well as his lecture in November 1917, L’Espirit nouveau et les poetes, which was then published in Mercure de France on December 1st, 1918) about the commercialization of the avant-garde, which called upon artists to create a modern language based on leisure technology – such as films, phonographs and advertising.133 It is here, at the intersection of Modernism, where artists like Cocteau and his collaborators for Parade, were attempting to simultaneously comment on their modern, rapidly changing world, as well as co-opt those new modern elements to help create a greater meaning for both themselves and their world. It is interesting to note, however, how Cocteau diverges from Apollinaire in this regard in that the text for Parade’s Managers are notably darker and more sinister. The Managers, if anything, by the end of the ballet are portraying a very vulgar (in the sense of ‘common’) and base view of the advertising world. Yet they are still regarded as gods – somehow both powerful yet impotent, since their attempts to gain their audience are ultimately in vain. However, like so many of his fellow contemporaries, what Cocteau was trying to do was celebrate the common, and the vulgar. SOYONS VULGAIRES! Let’s be Vulgar! Let’s be common. Let’s be part of this new, fast-paced, secular, modern world that promotes Mankind and his abilities over all else.

Because it is impossible not to be.

132 Cocteau, Cart Italian, 32. (une race terrible-espèces de dieux vulgaires de la réclame).

133 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 45.

60 Parade is subtitled a ballet réaliste. This helped to make an important distinction between Parade and other ballets, and ultimately an important distinction between Parade’s aesthetic aims as differentiated from what came before. Unlike other ballets whose libretti were based on myth, fairytales or folklore, Parade takes place in the present, on a Paris street, with street-fair characters. It is distinctly modern and unsentimental in its attempts to capture the brash, vulgar, and vital side of human nature. Unlike Petrouchka or Giselle, there are no supernatural elements. It is no wonder that Cocteau pursued Picasso for the role of décor designer. Picasso had been responding to and incorporating the brash, vulgar and vital side of modern life into his work since the beginning of the century. The vulgar, commonplace quality of Parade was the main source of its originality. Parade was the first of the non-sublime, non- folkloristic, non-exotic spectacles that would so greatly influence ballet repertoire in the twentieth century. In this respect it was a true theatrical innovation, the first totally modern ballet.134 Fellow cubist, Juan Gris said, “I like Parade because it is unpretentious, gay and distinctly comic. Picasso’s décor has lots of style and is simple…It is not figurative, has no fairy-tale element, no lavish effects, no dramatic subject. It’s a sort of musical joke in the best of taste and without high artistic pretention.”135 Like a Cubist painting, Parade can be viewed from multiple angles of meaning; simultaneously as commonplace and fantastical. Its subject is commonplace in the context of modern life in Paris at that time, and commonplace in contrast to the venue of the highbrow concert hall in which it premiered. However, it is simultaneously fantastical—a Conjuror from the Far East, the illusion to théâtre forain with its marvelous and fantastical draw, a spunky American girl who show off her daring-do, and Acrobats who

134 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 70–71.

135 Ibid., 72.

61 magically defy gravity and show off Mankind’s potential to achieve a status closer to God. Yet the performers themselves were considered lowbrow. In reality, Parade is an amalgamation of many diverse aspects of Modernism and the avant-garde in art that all existed together in society at that time in which it was created. Real, pedestrian, and common—and yet Parade is also conceived as a simulacrum, a false reality at odds with what it is trying to convey.

During the collaboration, Picasso would transform the Barkers from the orchestra into the three wordless Managers on stage, who—much to Cocteau’s dismay—were never allowed to speak in the realized production. Picasso asked Satie to humor Cocteau and pretend the spoken text and sound effects were going to be included even though Diaghilev, Picasso and Satie had long decided they would never be performed. Picasso’s costumes for the Managers used everyday objects in the dancer’s costumes, constructing with cardboard and incorporating an unusual and whimsical iconography (skyscrapers, for example, in the case of the American

Manager). In the finished Parade, the masque antique à la mode moderne was no longer a hidden surface for projecting a loud voice, but a silent and extremely conspicuous thing. The

French Manager, who introduced the Chinese Conjuror, became a dancer encased in a huge cardboard caricature of Diaghilev, smoking a pipe the size of a trombone. The American

Manager, who introduced the Little American Girl, became a dancer trying to move within a great cubist reconstruction of a skyscraper. The Manager who introduced the Acrobats was intended to be a dummy astride a pantomime horse, but when the dummy kept falling off, the pantomime horse performed the role bareback, and became a general object of displeasure for audience and performers alike—the audience complained, understandably, that such cheap tricks could be seen elsewhere for far less money.

62 Though the costumes for the Managers are like living Cubist sculpture, with skyscrapers,

and trees attached to their shoulders, and Cubist profiles for their faces, Cocteau thought that the

four main characters (The Chinese Conjuror, The Little American Girl, and the two Acrobats) were more cubist than the Managers.136 Cocteau noted that, “the Managers are a sort of human scenery, animated pictures by Picasso, and their very structure necessitates a certain choreographic formula. In the case of these four characters the problem was to take a series of natural gestures and to metamorphose them into a dance without depriving them of their realistic force.”137 Here, Cocteau believed that the representational nature of the popular elements into

the ballet constituted a collage, akin to that of analytical Cubism. In the set of Parade, Picasso

created a theatrical reproduction of how to live inside a Cubist painting. The backdrop for

Parade shows buildings leanings outwards at crazy angles over a proscenium arch, itself tilted;

when the American Manager ambles out, he is a strange combination of a man and a building—

an homme-décor, to use Cocteau’s phrase.138

Cocteau wrote on the collaboration of Parade, in Nord-Surd, which is also published as an appendix in Le Coq et le Harlequin. He likened Satie’s music as background, upon which are overlaid certain noises that Cocteau judged as indispensable to delineating the atmosphere of the characters.139 Cocteau likens these ‘noises’ to that of newspaper, cornices, and false wood-grains

136 Picasso thought that his cubist paintings were like flattened-out sculptures, and so the translation from cubist painting to cubist sculpture with the Manager’s costumes is a natural progression, and one that Picasso was certainly eager to make. Daniel Albright has noted that to some extent the whole cubist revolution consists of the discovery that objects and the space around objects could be treated in a uniform manner. In a sense, to represent the visual space that separates objects from each other. This in-between space became just as important as the objects themselves.

137 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 56.

138 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 205.

139 This note is written in Cocteau’s hand in autograph score of Parade on page 8.

63 that Cubist artists were integrating into their paintings. These “trompe l’oreille” sounds are found in Satie’s score for Parade, though they were dispensed with for both practical and

aesthetic reasons. The sirens, typewriters, lottery wheel, Morse code apparatus, and various

other sound effects, now commonly regarded as an integral part of the unique sonority of

Parade, were not present at the premiere.140 On Satie’s manuscript, Cocteau wrote “The Little

American Girl’s entire number is accompanied by the uninterrupted chime of an electronic cinema bell.”141 Cocteau claimed that it was material difficulties which deprived them the use of

“those ear-deceivers—dynamo, Morse apparatus, sirens, express-train, airplane—which I

employed with the same object as the eye-deceivers—newspapers, cornices, imitation wood-

work, which the [Cubist] painters use.”142 Though in reality, it may likely have been Diaghilev who excised them from the final production. Cocteau was so disappointed that these cuts were made, that “the piece was played incomplete and without its principle clou. Our Parade was so far from being what I could have wished that I never went to see it from the front.”143 Satie’s score has cues for a typewriter, a pistol, a high siren, a low siren, a lottery wheel, and flaques sonores [sound-puddles], which according to Cocteau were made by dropping a cymbal on a hard floor.144 Also peppered throughout Satie’s autograph score are paroles supprimées

[suppressed words] written by Cocteau, and labeled as such, which also never make it to the final production but are very useful in understanding the Cubist and aesthetic goals of the author.

140 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 224.

141 Satie’s score for Parade, 17.

142 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 56–57.

143 Ibid., 25.

144 Satie’s score for Parade, 18.

64 During the music for the Chinese Conjuror, for example, are written the words: “Ils lui crevèrent les yeux lui arrachèrent la langue” [They gouge out his eyes, tear out his tongue] into the measure of the music, with an arrow which labels these words as paroles supprimées.145 A few measures later, the words “bruit de la rue de loterie” [noise of the lottery wheel] are written in, also by Cocteau. Paroles supprimées occur two more times in the score. The second instance occurs during The Little American Girls turn, where Cocteau writes words in time with the music: “tic tic tic le ti-ta-nic s’en fon-ce e-clai-ré dans la mer” [tic tic tic the titanic is sinking lit in the sea].146 The final example of Cocteau’s suppressed words occur during the Acrobats turn, and appear to be gibberish vowels set to the rhythm of the music: “aé-oa-éu-aé-oéaé-iaoé-ié-é- iéoé.”147 Parade is, then, a buffer between the audience and an expressionist spectacle. Cocteau wanted the mechanical noises, and the suppressed words in the score to mimic the din of modern life, and felt that it would serve the same purpose as bits of papier collé and trompe l’œil in a

Cubist composition.148

In Parade, it is not only the costumes, set, and unspoken text that are Cubist in nature.

Satie’s music can be heard as a kind of academic exercise in auditory Cubism, similar to

analytical Cubism, in which the notes are seen repeated over and over again from multiple angles

simultaneously—like sculpture.149 The Cubist’s rejection of conventional perspective, and their non-imitative art, with its linear approach and flattened-out surfaces, synchronized well with

145 Satie’s score for Parade, 16.

146 Ibid., 32.

147 Satie’s score for Parade, 42–44.

148 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 76.

149 Orledge has noted that Satie was more interested in analytical cubism (1909 to 1912) then synthetic cubism (1912 to 1914).

65 what Satie was trying to achieve in music in the same way—by playing with the structure and teleological nature of music, much as the Cubist painters played with the structure and perspective of visual art. Satie realized that a new reality could be created in Parade by the way that simplified blocks of sound co-existed in time and space. Thus, the music for Parade is mostly constructed from non-expressive ostinatos. It sounds repetitive and non-teleological, and has a constant and unvarying tempo of 62, equal to that of a human heartbeat. The Chinese

Conjuror’s music features several notable repeating scale-degree patterns (often formed by angled three-note figures), which Albright describes as so common throughout the rest of the

score of Parade, and are metaphors for musical cubes.150 Constant Lambert would say in 1934 that Satie’s progressions have a strange logic of their own, but they have none of the usual sense of concord and discord, no trace of the point d’appui that we usually associate with the word

“progression.” They may be said to lack harmonic perspective in much the same way that a

Cubist painting lacks spatial perspective.151 The music of Parade, then, serves as a repetitive backdrop, its tunes constantly rotating around a small number of notes. And when it appears to be going somewhere in traditional musical terms, as in the introductory fugue, he cuts it off abruptly and moves on to a new, trivial idea.152 Cocteau himself likened Satie’s music for

Parade to architecture, going on to say that:

A fugue comes bustling along and gives birth to the actual melancholy rhythm of the fair. Then comes the three dances. Their numerous themes each distinct from the other, like separate objects, succeed one another, without being developed, and do not get entangled….The Chinaman, the Little American Girl, and the Acrobats, represent varieties of “nostalgia” hitherto unknown, so great is the degree of verisimilitude with which they are expressed. No humbug, no repetition, no underhand caresses, no feverishness or miasma.153

150 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 207.

151 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 225.

152 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 76.

153 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 27.

66 While Satie’s music will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 4, it is sufficient to say here that the Cubist nature of the other art forms in Parade where interacting in significant ways with the

Cubist elements present in Satie’s music.

Picasso and Cocteau also made contact with Futurist artists living in Rome, while working on Parade. For several years Diaghilev had been interested in Futurism, a movement that found inspiration in the speed of urban life and machine technology. A Futurist who was also in residence with the Ballet Russes in Rome, Giacomo Balla was working on the set for

Fireworks, a new symphonic poem by Stravinsky, to accompany a dancerless ballet consisting

only of changing lights and moving three-dimensional abstract forms. Balla met Picasso and

Cocteau when they were in Rome. When Picasso was working on the Manager’s costume,

Diaghilev enlisted the aid of Balla and his fellow-Futurist, Fortunato Depero, in constructing the

frames of the costumes.154 Indeed, Cocteau would later note the Futurist influence on Parade.

In 1913 Marinetti had called for a “new marvelousness” in theater through the adoption of music-hall ploys such as improvisation, topicality, and audience interaction. Cocteau’s desire to inject a “spirit of buffoonery,” as well as unconventional audience involvement into classical ballet owes a great deal to Marinetti’s earlier pronouncements. Futurist notions had also infiltrated Apollinaire’s writing as early as 1913, who is known to be one of Cocteau’s strongest influences. In his essay L’Antitradition Futuriste, the ideals of purity and variety were to be achieved by the use of “Free words/Invention of Words/…onomatopoeic Description/Total music and Art of Noises…/Machinism/Eiffel Tower/Brooklyn and skyscrapers…Direct quivers

154 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 51.

67 at great free spectacles circuses music halls, etc.”155 Apollinaire’s stream-of-consciousness formula is too close to Cocteau’s character descriptions for Parade to be mere coincidence.

This extra-musical sounds in Parade in a way share equal influence with both Cubism

and Futurism. The Futurist pursued, more vehemently than the Cubists, an assault on the

distinction between foreground and background, between object and environment. Just in the

same way that Futurist Luigi Russolo had the notion of an orchestra of noises, Parade brought

into the theater a simulation of the general background static of the twentieth century, through

the use of non-instrumental sound effects.156 And in doing so, brought the background noise of

Modern life into the forefront and into the minds of the audience. The duality and dissonance that so attracted Cocteau and his collaborators to this project were ideas that they shared with their fellow Futurists. Cocteau clearly conceived the Acrobats as personifications of technological adventure, investigating the ultimate verges of human experience in airplanes and diving devices. The notes that Cocteau wrote for Satie at the beginning of their collaboration speak of Modernism in a way that mimics the writing of Futurists like Russolo and Marinetti:

The Acrobats in Parade are humans that are metamorphized into “two biplanes” and then into

“the archangel Gabriel balancing himself on the edge of the window.”157 If Parade had evolved according to Cocteau’s wishes, the audience would have been conscious not only of this modern soundtrack of Futurist noises, but also of the sense of backstage torture, and through “les cris du

Managers” [screams of the Managers] and the paroles supprimées, the keen possibility that the

155 Ibid., 51.

156 Potter, Satie: A Parisian Composer and his World, 60.

157 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 84-85. From one of the original onion skin pages that Cocteau gave to Satie in May 1916.

68 Acrobats would crash to their deaths… or like the parachutist, “[kill] himself on the Eiffel

Tower.”158 Futurists like Marinetti believed that the goal of Futurism was to find breath and life in metal and machinery, and believed that human psychology was exhausted, and no more meaning could come from it. According to Albright, just as the Futurist would have chosen, it was then that the materials of the artwork themselves, would gained the meaning:

The achievement of Parade was its discovery that the artistic medium, the sheer materiality of sound, of paint, of cardboard, could become a stage spectacle independent of any psychological expressivity. No one is the auteur of Parade—and [it] thus falls apart into various congruent but independent art-forms, each stressing its own materiality, its own blocked, chunked adequacy to itself.159

If there is to be some sort of coherent interpretation of Parade as a multi-media artwork, it must then, be found by some other means.

Eighteen days before the premiere of Parade at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Picasso and a team of decorators painted the immense drop curtain and scenery in a studio on Buttes-

Chaumont. The costumes for the three acts were fabricated in Paris. The Managers whose construction had begun in Rome were completed from cardboard and other materials that Picasso found lying around the basement of the Théâtre du Châtelet.160 On the day of the premiere, an article by Cocteau appeared in the Excelsior, which the poet used to explain the meaning of the new ballet:

Our wish is that the public may consider Parade as a work which conceals poetry beneath the coarse outer skin of slapstick. Laughter is natural to Frenchmen: it is important to keep this in mind to not be afraid to laugh even at this most difficult time. Laughter is too Latin a weapon to be neglected…it was appropriate…to do justice for the first time to the true meaning of “realism” in theatrical terms. What had hitherto been called “realistic art” is in a way pleonastic art, especially in the theater, where “realism” consists in admitting onto the stage real objects which lose their reality the moment

158 Ibid., 84–85. From one of the original onion skin pages that Cocteau gave to Satie in May 1916. Through Satie’s score for Parade, Cocteau refers to the Manager’s texts as screams [les cris].

159 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 215.

160 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 59.

69 they are placed in nonreal surroundings. The elements of tromp-l’oeil and trompe-l’oreille in Parade create reality—which alone has the power to move us, well disguised though it may be.161

When Parade premiered on May 18th, 1917, it was different from other succès de

scandales of the Ballet Russes, because it was contemporary, popular and typically French.

Rothschild asserts that it was more the use of popular low-brow entertainments that shocked

people, than the Cubist elements.162 At the premiere, Francis Poulenc said, “For the first time…music-hall invaded Art with a capital A. A one-step is danced in Parade! When that

began the audience let loose with boos and applause…It was real bedlam.”163 Parade’s characters mirrored specific and identifiable acts currently on view in Parisian circus, cinema and music-hall. It was shocking to view thinly disguised imitations of popular headliners performed by highly trained Russian dancers. Cocteau’s account of the premiere in a September 1917 article in Vanity Fair recalls that it was the Little American Girl and the two-man horse that cause patrons to boo and walk out. The fact that Parade was not variety theatre, but an artistic transformation of it, was apparently lost on its first audiences. Cocteau later wrote, that the public took the transposition of music-hall for bad music-hall.164 Paul Morand, a friend of

Cocteau, wrote in his diary on May 19th, 1917 that the reception of the modern ideas by the audience was mixed:

Full house yesterday at the Châtelet for Parade. Scenery by Picasso, like a traveling show, graceful music by Satie, sometimes Rimsky, sometimes dance-hall. The Managers, cubist constructions, caused surprise. The little American girl and the characters doing tricks had lovely costumes. Massine good, too, as the Chinese juggler. But Cocteau's central idea – freeing dance from its

161 Jean Cocteau, “Avant ‘Parade’,” L’Excelsior, 18 May 1917, 5. Also quoted in Steegmuller, Cocteau, 183–184.

162 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 32.

163 Ibid., 32.

164 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 27.

70 conventions in favor of lifelike gestures and his modern themes (the cranking of a car, photography, etc.), stylized in movement, didn't seem quite right. Lots of applause and a few hisses.165

Unfortunately, the collaborators and Diaghilev had miscalculated. The glamour-deprived, war- weary audience attending Parade’s premiere was not in the mood for théâtre forain, but for serious classical dance, through which to escape from contemporary life, not have it shoved in their faces. They didn’t want Cocteau and his collaborators to show them the artificiality of theater, they wanted escapism. What the collaborators wanted to achieve, and what the audience saw, was thus completely different. Despite Diaghilev advertising the premiere as being for the benefit of various war charities, the public (a mixture of high society, and artists from

Montmartre and Montparnasse on complimentary tickets) was understandably hostile. The perpetrators of Parade were branded as Boches, which troubled Satie greatly for a long while.166

The artists had missed their mark. As Léonide Massine wrote, “Parade was not so much a satire on popular art as an attempt to translate it into a totally new form. It is true we utilized certain elements of contemporary show business – ragtime music, jazz, the cinema, billboard advertising, circus and music-hall techniques – but we took only their salient features, adapting them to our own ends.”167

While the audience at the premiere may not have been enthusiastic about the fact that the collaborators were attempting to create something new, it found a more understanding reception amongst their fellow artists. A sympathetic fellow artist, Apollinaire wrote an encomium to

Parade that was reprinted in the program booklet for the Ballet Russes: “[Parade] is a stage poem that the innovating musician Erik Satie has transposed into astonishingly expressive music,

165 Paul Morand, Journal d’un attache d’ambassade 1916–1917 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 243.

166 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 66.

167 Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet (London: Macmillan, 1968), 103.

71 so clean cut and so simple that it mirrors the marvelously lucid spirit of France itself.”168

Apollinaire also wrote an article on Parade, which appeared in L’Excelsior on 11 May 1917, and spoke of the cross-fertilization between the arts that was achieved, and also succeeded in coining a new term:

The new union – for up until now stage sets and costumes on the one hand and choreography on the other were only superficially linked – has given rise in Parade to a kind of super-realism [sur- réalisme]. This I see as the starting point of a succession of manifestations of the esprit nouveau: now that it has had an opportunity to reveal itself … Picasso’s Cubist sets and costumes bear witness to the realism of his art. This realism, or this Cubism, whichever you prefer, is what has most deeply stirred the arts during the last ten years.169

Surrealism, as it is now defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as an avant-garde twentieth- cenutry movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example, by the irrational juxtaposition of images. Interestingly, at the first use of the word, Apollinaire seems to be hinting at the fact that Parade wasn’t merely a ballet réaliste, but a ballet sur-réaliste, and it is through the different artistic media working together, though concord or discord that help to create a super-reality. Though how accurate this description is to what is really happening in Parade, is contentious. Cocteau wrote after the premiere for Parade that:

In Parade I attempted to do good work, but whatever comes into contact with the theatre is corrupted. The luxurious setting characteristic of the only European impresario who was sufficiently courageous and sufficiently interested to accept our work, circumstances in general, and fatigue, made me unable to realize my piece which remains, as it stands, in my opinion, an open window through which may be had a glimpse of what the modern theatre ought to be.170

Ultimately, with Parade, Cocteau and his fellow artistic collaborators were attempting to do something new, and with that, they did succeed.

168 Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 482–483.

169 Guilliame Apollinaire, L’Excelsior, 11 May 1917.

170 Cocteau, Le Coq, 25.

72 Chapter Four – The music of Parade as something entirely new

Satie was not afraid of absurdity in his art. Neither was Satie afraid of being confronted

with the ultimate meaninglessness of art—and life—in his works throughout his career. In both

his life and music, Satie embodied the avant-garde and its aesthetic, showing that art could be

seen as ridiculous, self-referential, and artificial. The interplay between Satie’s avant-garde

ideals of obscurity and inaccessibility and their portrayal in the music of Parade is evident even

at this initial stage of consideration. This Chapter will provide a further discussion of the way in

which these avant-garde elements, as outlined in Chapter 2—inaccessibility, parody, and the

promotion of lowbrow art—are present in the music of Parade itself and show how the avant-

garde provided a means by which Satie and his collaborators questioned the very nature of art

and expressivity in music.

In the 1918 publication of the score for Parade, French composer Georges Auric wrote in

the introduction, “Satie’s score is designed to serve as the musical background for percussion

instruments and onstage sounds. Thus, it very humbly yields to the same reality that drowns the

nightingale’s song under the rumble of streetcars.”171 Here, Auric makes explicit that Parade was intended to challenge the function of music as an art form. By equating the music to set design, Auric heralds Parade as a purposeful reorganization of music’s role amongst other art

forms. In addition, this quote suggests that Satie’s music for Parade was meant to remain

arrantly on the periphery of the artwork, rather than serve a more traditional role in the

foreground as a dynamic element.

171 George Auric, Preface to Parade (Paris: Rouart-Lerolle, October 1917).

73 As discussed in previous chapters, Satie conceived his own music, including Parade,

with avant-garde characteristics that served to confound expectations with paradoxes, to re- invent the role of music, and as Adam Gopnik has phrased it, “to create a pas de deux between

high art and low art.”172 Satie’s disregard for accepted methods of composition allowed him freedom from the rules of normal and expected musical structures. This anti-authoritarian posture that is Satie’s calling card permeates the music of Parade, and goes hand in hand with the avant-garde and anti-expressionist elements that Satie so often employed. Satie’s compositional aesthetic forms in part around extremes – extreme brevity, which exists outside of conventional form in art, and extreme repetition; both are suggestive of the absurd in his music, and are essential devices in his innovative approach to Parade.

In order to understand what the nature of expression is in an avant-garde piece such as

Parade, it is necessary to look more closely at the music—to consider the music as a piece of art in itself, and then to look at how the other media in this multi-media art work inform or interact with the music and it’s aesthetic content. In addition, a discussion of the musical construction of

Parade will provide context for Chapter 5, in which expression theories may then be applied to this piece and a definition of the modes of expression that an avant-garde artwork can or cannot have will be formed.

First, a discussion of the structure and compositional elements exhibiting avant-garde techniques in Satie’s music will illuminate the ways in which they deny normal mode of expression. And secondly, an expanded discussion will show how the other artistic media

172 Adam Gopnik, “High and Low: Caricature, Primitivism, and the Cubist Portrait,” Art Journal, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter 1983), 374.

74 inform the avant-garde aesthetic value of Parade. With this analysis the question may be addressed in Chapter 5 as to the nature of expressiveness in this work.

In the score for Parade, one of the most prominent features is repetition, in both melodic and rhythmic material. Furthermore, the repetitions in Parade lack any developmental sections—a convention that would be expected in traditional methods of composition.173

Through the combination of overemphasized use of repetition, and the lack of development, the result is an obstruction to meaning in any traditional mode. Repetition without development creates a non-progressive action that limits accessibility. This makes the repetition even more jarring and avant-garde. Thus, Satie’s use of repetition denies access to the listener (this is also true of the scenario itself).174 The combination of repetition and economy of material determines the musical meta-structure of Parade, which is constructed around rhythms of relentless repetition. These rhythmic motives are brief, lasting between 1 and 2 beats, and are pervasive throughout the individual movements of Parade. The score is rattled with terse ostinatos that

layer these rhythmic motives, and which remain virtually continuous and unchanged throughout

the score. With a sense of exhilaration toward the absurd in the economy of musical material,

many of these germinal motives are built on similar principals and share underlying properties.

One example is a succession of 3 or 4 eighth notes either in a single instrument or in alternation

between instruments (which I have labeled R1 and R3 respectively). Examples of the rhythmic

motives R1-R3 found in the first two movements of Parade are found in Examples 4.1 and 4.2:

173 Indeed, development—a traditional method of composition—is normally considered a progressive action, featuring stretches of unsettled, rapidly shifting music. Satie’s music for Parade lacks such shifts. Nothing progresses in Parade.

174 See Orledge, Albright, and Roger Shattuck. For a contemporary account of Satie and repetition in his music, see Rudhyar Chennevière.

75 Example 4.1 Eric Satie, Parade, “Prélude du rideau rouge”

Rhythmic motif R1, mm. 41-44

R1

Example 4.2 Eric Satie, Parade, “Prestidigitateur chinois”

Rhythmic motif R1, mm. 87-92 R1

Rhythmic motif R2, mm. 45-49

R2

Rhythmic motif R3, mm. 115-120

R3

Since the single difference between these motives is dependent upon the time signature used (3/8 or 2/4), Satie is able to further economize the rhythmic material of the movements by using varied lengths of a rhythmic figure to create the same effect. The rhythmic motives R1-R3 are present in every movement of the work, and reappear in the following turns of the Little

76 American Girl, the Acrobats and the Finale (Examples of the rhythmic motives R1-R3 found in

the following three movements of Parade are found in Examples 4.3-4.5):

Example 4.3 Eric Satie, Parade, “Petite fille américaine”

Rhythmic motif R2, mm. 231-235

R2

Rhythmic motif R3, mm. 252 - 257

R3

Example 4.4 Eric Satie, Parade, “Acrobates” Rhythmic motif R1, mm. 438-442 R1

Rhythmic motif R2, mm. 553-556

R2

77 Example 4.5 Eric Satie, Parade, “Final” Rhythmic motif R2, mm. 658-662

R2

These rhythmic motives are the very building blocks that Satie uses to construct this piece, and

subsequently occur in their various guises within each movement, and throughout the entire work

itself. These terse, rigid rhythmic ostinatos are then brought to an absurd extreme by the

treatment of repetition.

Roger Shattuck has noted that Satie’s compositional approach frequently scrutinizes a

very simple musical object: a short unchanging ostinato accompaniment plus a fragmentary

melody.175 And with Parade, the repetition occurs not only in the ostinatos, but also in the small melodic material, which Satie has a penchant for repeating in an almost frenzied manner. Such a non-traditional approach to music amounts to a sort of musical Cubism. Indeed, Parade is often considered the most Cubist of all Satie’s compositions, likened to the Cubists in the visual arts who investigated the complexity in time and space of a simple object studied simultaneously from several points of view.176 One of the ways that Satie is able to achieve a similar effect in the music of Parade is through the stagnant repetition of simple musical objects. Cocteau described Satie’s score for Parade in this manner: “The numerous motifs, each distinct from the other, like objects, follow one another without development.”177 This effectively unshackles this

175 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 141.

176 Ibid., 141.

177 Jean Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 27.

78 work from the inexorable unraveling of time.178 The repetition of any melodic objects in Parade are never developed, and only stand out in their fragmented appearances.

Another device for suspending time is the enclosing of the musical meta-structure through the mirroring of themes. Each of the three main movements is bracketed by the appearance of a unique theme at the beginning and end of each movement; such an effect likens these movements to closed musical objects. Not unlike the analogy that Satie himself used to describe his music for Parade as a “boite” or box, that is opened to reveal the spectacle inside.

The appearances of the Chinese Conjuror theme at the beginning and end of “The Chinese

Conjurer” are provided in Example 4.6 and 4.7:

Example 4.6 Eric Satie, Parade, “Prestidigitateur chinois”, mm.101-105

178 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 142.

79 Example 4.7 Eric Satie, Parade, “Prestidigitateur chinois”, mm. 208-211

The Little American Girl, and the Acrobats movements also have their own themes,

which appear at the opening and closing of their movements. In addition to these smaller loops,

or closed systems, there is a loop that encompasses the three main movements of Parade,

articulated by the Manager’s Theme, which first appears in m. 46 and recurs in the Final (m.

656) to create one large closed structure. The first appearance of the Manager’s Theme can be

seen in Examples 4.8:

Example 4.8 Eric Satie, Parade, “Prestidigitateur chinois”, mm.45-48

The Manager’s Theme

80 The reoccurrence of such themes carries further significance in that the reappearances of the themes are not developed. This creates both a stagnant non-developmental status, but also

creates a large loop that closes off the music to any traditional feeling of progression. Such a description of Parade leaves the impression that the ballet is composed of a great number of

small units following one another rapidly and with little preparation. Part of the quality of

Parade resides in just such a nervous shifting of mood and theme and in the avoidance of any long development section.179 As Orledge has well asserted: “Satie was not concerned with through-composition and the normal perception of music “getting somewhere” through functional forms and harmonies. He instead explored the effects of monotony, and concerned himself with the way our perceptions of time could be expanded and telescoped, and how music could function as a spatial element of time.”180 It is in this revised look at musical composition

Satie saw a new possibility in the concept of time, like the Cubists, of perceiving the multiplicity of the world in an instant.

Furthermore, these looped themes continue to appear throughout the whole of the ballet, and create a mirrored image, including the opening theme for the red curtain, as well as the repetition of each of the performing act’s themes at the beginning and end of each turn. A diagram of this mirrored structure is shown in example 4.9. This creates a large, closed structure that seems to underline that the music has gone nowhere.

179 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 157.

180 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 142.

81 Example 4.9 Diagram of mirrored themes in Parade.

The Cubist project of reordering reality through the subjective vision of the artist

synchronized well with Satie’s penchant for altering the perception of music through fragmentation of common musical objects, and he subsequently realized that a new reality could be created in Parade by the use of simplified blocks of sound coexisted in time and space.181

Constant Lambert said in 1934 that Satie’s “progressions have a strange logic of their own, but they have none of the usual sense of concord and discord, no trace of the point d’appui that we usually associate with the word progression. They may be said to lack harmonic perspective in much the same way that a Cubist painting lacks spatial perspective.”182 Satie’s Cubist music for

Parade, with its large-scale musical symmetry, is what gives the work its self-sufficiency and

181 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 225.

182 Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Studio of Music in Decline (London: Faber, 1934), 118–119.

82 loops it into a closed system. This is highly appropriate to its role as a musical backcloth to a theatrical spectacle, “from whose dramatic antics it largely claims exemption – both as musique d’ameublement and in its objective structural balance.”183 Structurally, Satie’s flattening out of the music, and the non-teleological aspect of Parade, are profoundly Cubist. The music of

Parade does not contain traditional syntax since it lacks the harmonic thrust and arrival typically associated with Western tonal music. Parade’s harmonic conception is without direction;

coupled with the lack of development, the resulting music is one that does not cue emotions in

any expected way. To use Satie’s analogy, it just lies there like furniture. Satie’s music exposes

the purposeful lack of intentionality; the celebration of the artistically transfigured everyday was

a means by which Satie accomplished a deliberately shallow portrayal of his music. In

Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright states, “for Satie, music was not expression, but a barrier

against expression.”184 With Parade, Satie challenges the role that music plays in life. Music’s role should not be one that induces emotional response, but something that is instead merely placed in the background.

Yet another element to consider that aids in Parade’s inaccessibility is the fragmented

nature of the music through the use of pastiche, in which Satie makes frequent use of quotations,

recognizable dance and musical genres such as waltz and fugue, as well as frequent illusions to

ragtime, jazz, cabaret, and music hall. Here, Satie also appears to have made a conscious effort

to obscure the lines between “high” and “low” art forms.185 All these musical elements are

183 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 174.

184 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 191.

185 Calkins, “Modernism in Music and Erik Satie’s Parade,” 13.

83 employed in the creation of blocks of “coordinated incongruity.”186 Thus, the music of Parade is purposefully fragmented, in such a way that the parts are contrived to weaken the whole. In fact, the aesthetic drive behind the creation of Parade is found in the use of everyday and

recognizable elements (in the music and other artistic media), which are then transfigured by this

avant-garde aesthetic into barriers of inaccessibility. Placing art in the socially pedestrian, Satie

was ready to plunge into the extremes of banality. His compositional technique juxtaposes

ordinary elements in order to place them in a confusing and disorienting context. In Parade, the

repetitive loops are fragmented, jolting the listener and aiding in the sense of

incomprehensibility. The recognizable world is subverted by de-contextualization in a collage-

type artwork without a cohesive narrative. Roger Shattuck aptly describes this effect as “a

serious-humorous exploitation of popular elements in art, a turning to jazz and music hall and to

all the paraphernalia of modern life, not in a spirit of realism, but with a sense of exhilaration in

the absurd.”187 Pairing the absurd repetition with the exploitation of popular elements creates a surrealist artwork that is profoundly avant-garde. It becomes apparent in Parade that Satie took delight in both debunking the sacred and in elevating the base; he achieved this end by infusing fashionable elements into his music and severely altering the teleological construction of the music.188

The parodied use of popular Parisian culture in Parade is also a ubiquitous element in the

other artistic media. One such example comes from the choreographer Léonide Massine, who

wrote in his memoirs the following: “A curtain was drawn, and in music hall fashion a placard

186 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 185.

187 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 154.

188 Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade, 6.

84 appeared announcing "Number One." This was the cue for my entrance as the Chinese Conjurer,

whom I envisaged as a parody of the usual pseudo-oriental entertainer with endless tricks up his sleeve.”189 The rest of the scenes in Parade continue in this manner, constructed from a collage of musical and visual pastiche, drawn from the streets of Paris. The Prelude of the Red Curtain is a fugue (mm. 20-44), after which the ubiquitous Manager’s Theme is introduced; one of many ostinatos figures that permeates the music in its relentless repetitions. Perhaps the scene most replete with visual and musical pastiche is the Little American Girl scene, which includes illusions to film music, particularly The Perils of Pauline (mm. 226-295), “The Mysterious Rag” by Irving Berlin (mm. 296-319), and a quotation of the short song “Tic, Tic, Tic, le Titanic s’enfonce” (mm. 365-380). Satie’s use of the everyday as pastiche, as well as the various sound effects scored for non-instruments (lottery wheel, typewriter, etc.), aide in bringing Parade to a unique realm of humor; one that championed the juxtaposition of the poignant with the base and ridiculous, and also provided a medium for Satie’s bold innovations. Other examples of the composer’s blatant borrowing of themes can be observed in some of his direct melodic and orchestral references to Stravinsky and Debussy in the cabaret melodies and circus music themes in the third movement, Acrobats. In these passages, Satie exploited the work of his

contemporaries with an almost mocking inflection.190 The use of such an avant-garde technique as comedy through paradox, to the point of fragmentation and parody was motivated by what

Shattuck has described as Satie’s vision of the world, which was “one in which distortion is at the same time comic and deeply revealing.”191 Satie’s compositional aesthetic was one where

189 Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet (London: Macmillan, 1968), 166.

190 Calkins, “Modernism in Music and Erik Satie’s Parade,” 11.

191 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 178.

85 the intersection of the philosophic and serious with the comical and unrefined was employed to

portray a new and avant-garde view of art; and this is perhaps in essence, at the core the

creativeness in Parade. All of these elements aide in bringing Parade to a unique realm of

humor: one that championed the juxtaposition of the poignant with the ridiculous and also

promoted inaccessibility.

The interaction of artistic media is an important consideration in the nature of expression

in Parade. Apollinaire’s article on Parade, which appeared in Excelsior on May 11, 1917, spoke

of the cross-fertilization between the arts that was achieved: “The new union – for up until now

stage sets and costumes on the one hand and choreography on the other were only superficially

linked – has given rise in Parade to a kind of super-realism [sur-réalisme].”192 Perhaps most interesting is how the Cubist influences in Parade set up a parallel between the music and the set and costume designs of Picasso. One such manifestation is the use of performers inhabiting separate performing spaces, with the music highlighting this in its blocks of distinctly separate and incongruent background. Each of the three performers, the Chinese Conjuror, the Acrobats, and the Little American Girl appear on stage separately and are accompanied by their own individual musical background. Cocteau purported such a view of Satie’s score: “a masterpiece of architecture; that’s what ears accustomed to vagueness and thrills can’t understand… Never any sortileges, reprises, sleazy caresses, fevers, miasmas. Never does Satie stir up the swamp.”193 Likening Satie’s music to architecture is just one of the ways that Parade expresses dialectics and incongruities. These incongruities deepen as we realize that each of the artistic media in combination with the others only aid in showing how fragmented the work is as a

192 Apollinaire, L’Excelsior, 11 May 1917.

193 Cocteau, Cock and Harlequin, 27.

86 whole. The combination of the Cubist elements in the costumes of the Three Managers, the set

and the score appear to bond these different media together, but in an unanticipated way. Their

common purpose is to disrupt, both the audience’s expectations, as well as their perceptions of

time and space. Even the cabaret and popular elements, seen in the choreography of the Little

American Girl when she pantomimes silent movie film stars and the popular quotations in Satie’s

score are seen in a distorted surrealist reality.

Ultimately, Parade is a parade in vain. Throughout the scenario there is an increased and

frenzied repetition of music and dance that does not succeed in accomplishing its task of enticing

the crowd inside the tent. It goes nowhere dramatically, and neither develop nor attempt to

achieve any musical goal. As Albright has noted:

The great Modernist collaborations all survive as fragments…What is Parade today? Picasso’s sketches belong to the world of Picasso studies; Satie’s score is an artifact of musicology; Cocteau’s scenario, which seemed so dispensable to Satie and Picasso, has been fully dispensed with…it was from beginning to end, an exercise in coordinated incongruity.194

Satie’s score is comprised of patterned units that take no notice of one another. Orledge has described Satie’s musical technique as “laying blocks of contrasting sound end to end, virtually irrespective of context.”195 The repetitiveness in the music of Parade is not simply loops, but fragmented loops that are jolting and aid in the incomprehensibility. Not only does the music exemplify the avant-garde aesthetic, it does so by subverting the normal teleological structure of music. Parade becomes a whorl in time, a parody of an event that demonstrates that nothing whatsoever has happened.196 It is striking that the ending of the score is a return to the beginning

194 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 185.

195 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 262.

196 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 190.

87 creating a large-scale loop in the music that creates a closed system, as if to underline that the

music has not gone anywhere. Indeed, the final section, labeled the Continuation of the Prelude

to the Red Curtain, which is a repeat of the same opening fugal section that began the Prelude to

the Red Curtain at the start of the ballet, creates a meta-structure that closes off the audience musically as well as figuratively from entry into the tent and into a deeper artistic meaning.

Orledge eludes to such intentionality on the part of the composer, when he comments on the way in which Satie envisioned the addition of the Chorale at the beginning (added in 1919), as a means of showing “the ‘box’ being opened up to reveal the cabaret within, just as Picasso’s red curtain is then opened up to reveal the stage set behind.”197 And thus begins the series of optical and aural illusions. In the scenario, the managers shout entreaties like carnival barkers, trying to entice audience to enter. But the interior of the tent is still inaccessible and unseen to the audience. The combined effect of the scenario on stage with the music is that Parade becomes an “in-between” – an artwork that is meant to be the epitome of insignificance and the everyday, since it is a portrayal of a side-show to a main artistic event that will never materialize and is forever unattainable. Parade is presented not as the aim of the audience, only as the sideshow for the real entertainment to come, but that is all the audience gets. Nothing happens and nothing is achieved. Parade is, then, a buffer between the audience and an expressionist spectacle. The question becomes, if both the scenario and the music promote inaccessibility – is there anything there to access behind the curtain, or underneath the apparent surface of the music?

197 Orledge, Satie the Composer, 130.

88 Chapter Five – Application of Expression Theory to Parade

In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright talks at length about how interpreting meaning

in Modernist multi-media collaborations often proves problematic; when each work, and its

separate parts, may at first appear so incongruous from each other as to confound the interpreter.

Albright provides an intriguing explanation for how such works can either be looked at vertically

or horizontally. Parade is an outstanding example of horizontal theater. It is a spectacle in

which the constituent arts refuse to fit together into transmediating chords; Albright explain that:

“reading Parade vertically yield only confusion and various sorts of lexical outrage. It is an

abyss of ismlessness: parts of it are expressionist, parts are cubist, parts are futurist, and the

whole is contrived to make the parts weaken one another.”198 According to Albright, the different parts can’t be reintegrated because they never truly were together in the first place.

Parade’s charm is a function of the dissonance among the arts that constitute it. A closer look at such a Modernist, multi-media artwork is thus necessary in order to discover not only its dialectics and incongruities, but a deeper meaning and understanding because of them. For example, the combination of the Cubist elements in the costumes of the Three Managers, the set and the score appear to bond these different media together, but in an unanticipated way. Their common purpose is to disrupt, both the audience’s expectations, as well as their perceptions of time and space. Further dissonance is found at the end of Parade when ultimately it is a parade in vain: the lack of success to usher the audience into the tent drives the performers to

198 Alright, Untwisting the Serpent, 185. Despite several contemporary statements made about Parade at the time of its premiere, notably Apollinaire’s dubbing the interaction between the different artistic mediums as ‘surreal’, Albright’s historical view of Parade and other Modernist avant-garde works, provides a more clear view of how the different part of such a multi-media artwork, really do create an artistic dissonance that is significant to understanding the artwork.

89 increasingly frenzied repetitions in order to attract the onlookers, but no one will bite. The ballet is a series of nonprogressive actions, and Parade as a whole is nothing but a sum of such

zeros.199 The music is, in this sense, its own avant-garde project, separate from the other avant- garde elements of the ballet.

With an understanding of the music of Parade (Chapter 4) and the implications of avant-

garde aesthetics at play in this artwork (Chapters 2-3), we are now at liberty to enter a discussion

of the problematic nature of emotion and expressiveness. In order to analyze Satie’s Parade in

terms of expression, it must first be determined what expression is in music. Jerrold Levinson

defines expression as “something outward giving evidence of something inward.”200 In most cases of art, this is a manifesting or externalizing of mind or psychology. Thus, an artwork can be said to have the quality of expressiveness if there is an expression that the musical work manages to achieve. Implicit in Levinson’s argument is that not all music (or art) be expressive

(have the quality of expressiveness).201 However, such a definition of musical expressiveness quickly becomes problematic, because Levinson asserts that musical expressiveness is necessarily an expression by a person. There is no personna in Parade, as Albright explains,

“Parade lacks any intelligible correlation to a human subject-no one is the auteur of Parade-and

thus falls apart into various congruent but independent art-forms.”202 Not only does Satie’s music lack narrative, or an easily applicable personna, but it negates the expressive vehicle

199 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 190.

200 Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness and Hearability-as-expression,” edited by Matthew Kieran, Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 192.

201 Robinson agrees with Levinson on this point. See Robinson, “Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No.1 (Winter 1994), 13–22. See also Robinson, Deeper than Reason: emotion and its role in literature, music, and art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

202 Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 215.

90 which Levinson hopes to uphold as a common element in musical expressiveness; that of gesture. Levinson bases his argument for “musical gesture-as-expressiveness” on the notion that our state of mind is comprised of our emotions, feelings, attitudes, desires, and beliefs. These mental states are revealed through outward states of behavior (outward manifestation). Levinson

claims that musical gesture is related to behavioral gesture (related to mental states), and thus the

vehicle for expressing of mental states in music is gesture. Consequently, the importance of

movement in music is in part linked to its quality of expressiveness. Certainly, in other more

traditional music, this analogy would hold. However, as has already been considered through a

discussion of the artwork, the constant repetition, disjunction, and loops projected by this music

(and the other artistic media) in Parade nullifies movement.

Similarly, many other expression theories incorporate gesture as a means of explaining

how expression can be a property of music itself.203 Stephen Davies also supports the idea that the expressive character in the music resides in its own nature through gesture. However, this again falls short of application to Satie’s Parade. The gestures in Parade at best suggest a state

of dyskinesia – incoherent and without any means to resemble a human movement (gesture), and

thus expression. Peter Kivy’s contour theory is also not helpful in the case of Parade, since

neither the contours of human communication nor those of conventionality are present in the

music. Davies echoes Kivy when he writes that musical movement:

…like human action and behavior (and unlike random process) …displays order and purposiveness… [and] provides a sense of unity and purpose. We recognize in the progress of music a logic such that what follows arises naturally … musical movement is more akin to human action than to random movement or to the fully determined movements of a nonhuman mechanism.204

203 See Kivy, Langer and Davies.

204 Jenefer Robinson, “Music and the Emotions,” in Deeper than Reason: emotion and its role in literature, music, and art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 306.

91 Davies’ articulates a belief that is in binary opposition to the aesthetics aims in Parade.

However, there is perhaps an element of truth in what Davies suggest, if simply for the fact that

it is for this very reason that we find Parade so jarring. The music is effectively liquidated of

such attempts to communicate through conventionally contoured musical gestures; they are

blocked by its banality and repetition. Neither is this theory adequate to explain the unique

aspects of this piece, such as its pastiche, which may allude to other musical concepts, but does

so in a way that does not promote an aggregate of meaning. Jenefer Robinson critiques Kivy’s

theory as being really about the attribution of expressive qualities to works of music conceived

according to the classical line, in which expression is just one form of imitation (as opposed to

the expressive line).205 Parade’s fragmented nature doesn’t allow us to grasp onto anything long enough to have a coherent emotion. Rather, the fragmented nature, as a structural property of the music, produces a response rather than a musical property inherently possessing a coherent composite of gestures that create meaning. If there is no movement or gesture, there can be no expressing of mental states. If Parade is to be deemed as containing any quality of expressiveness, it must be analyzed by other means.

What we can perhaps take from Levinson’s theory is the following: music ‘expresses’ emotion to the extent that the listener is disposed to hear the music as an expression of an emotion, not the expression of an emotion experienced by the music or the composer. Thus, expressiveness is based on our perception of the music as expressive. Nevertheless, a more fruitful application of expression theory to Parade comes from Jenefer Robinson, who purports an inferred-expression theory, as opposed to a perceived-expression theory. That is to say that

205 Jenefer Robinson, “Two Concepts of Expression,” in Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer 1997), 13.

92 Robinson’s theory places the listener in charge of inferring the expression from the music,

whereas Levinson believes that the expression in the music is inherent, and is something that the

listener must perceive directly.206 In addition, Robinson’s theory opens a window for us that allows for music to possess expressiveness without the necessity of having a personna. She

writes that, “in general, artworks can manifest emotions either by analogy with a person who is

expressing an emotion or by mirroring the way the world appears to a person in an emotional

state.”207 To base the expressiveness of an artwork on the notion that we see the world as expressive and that expressiveness is mirrored in art, is supported by Robinson by the

observation that humans see so many of their encounters with the environment in emotional

terms.208 This method infers the distinction that Robinson makes elsewhere of expression and evocation, which will prove to be an important distinction when the teasing out of the expressivity of Parade. Expression differs from evocation in that the former defines music as possessing qualities of expression inherent in its nature, and the later denotes other qualities that the music possesses that are capable of evoking emotion in the listener. This theory distinguishes emotional qualities as separate from the qualities that may ‘produce’ them

(emotions). That is to say that music may not possess emotional qualities, but may possess other qualities that produce emotions (assumedly in the listener). Simply, evocation is an emotional response by the listener. It is commonly upheld that emotions are involved in a musical experience, but it does not necessarily follow that such emotions are inherent in the music itself.

206 Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-expression,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 199.

207 Jenefer Robinson, “Expression in Music,” in Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 181.

208 Ibid., 184.

93 The need for an emotional experience with an artwork however, is certainly accepted by

Robinson: “For many works it is mandatory to respond emotionally if we want to understand the work as fully as possible as well as its lessons for our own lives.”209 The possibility for Satie’s music to evoke reactions in the listener seems a more readily available possibility, even if the music itself does not express anything. Initially, this appears to set up a dialectic between the potential emotional response of the listener and the avant-garde aesthetics at play in Parade, which are aimed at achieving anti-expressionist results. Parade effectively is a reaction against a

Romantic aesthetic that purports the potential of an emotional response. And while the composer’s goal in Parade would seem to be to deny expressiveness to the listener, the listener is engaged in the work through their negative reaction to its own anti-expressionist aesthetic.

This evokes a negative reaction to Parade’s inaccessibility, and thus, in Robinson’s words,

“invites and encourages us to reflect upon them.”210

Despite the commonly upheld belief that art is expressive of something, it should not be imperative that all music be defined in these terms. Indeed, Robinson and other theorists do not attempt to argue that every piece of music can be labeled as expressive. There is plenty of good

art that is really not very interested in the emotions. Expression or evocation of emotion may not

be a primary aesthetic goal. Robinson explains that “the emotions have been important in art

over the centuries, but they are not a sine qua non for artistic achievement.”211 However, to deny an artwork’s expressivity, seems to require that we establish another form of significance for that artwork. It would be unsettling to deny an artwork’s significance as an expressive medium,

209 Robinson, “Expression in Music,” in Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 186.

210 Ibid., 186.

211 Robinson, “Expression in Music,” in Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 190.

94 without allowing for it to have significance in some other manner. For this, we must turn again

to Robinson’s theories and attempt to apply them more fully to Satie’s Parade.

In Robinson article, “Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music”, she poses the question as to whether there is a connection between music expressing emotion and music arousing emotion (affecting us emotionally). This question has important implications to an analysis of Parade, since if we are to deny it expression, and say that only the arousal of emotions or the evocation of emotions in the listener is possible, we must firmly establish that these qualities operate in separate spheres to a music’s expressiveness, and are not in a causal relationship.

Robinson attempts to elucidate the relationship between expressiveness and arousal through a critique of Kivy and Levinson, both of which are dismissed as being two sides of the extreme. Kivy wishes to place expression and arousal in completely different systems. Kivy holds that there is a distinction between expression in music and arousal by music, and that they are entirely independent. Having one’s emotions aroused by a piece of music is different than perceiving a particular emotional quality in that piece. Sad music may or may not make me feel anything.212 It does not follow that the emotion aroused by the music is the emotion detected in

the music. Robinson says that Kivy only acknowledges emotions in music that are cognitive;

those that are either musical mirroring of gesture or musical conventionality associated with

certain emotions. A common example in this theory is the conventionality of the diminished

seventh chord being associated with sad or negative emotions. However, being moved by the

craftsmanship of Josquin’s counterpoint is a cognitive emotional response, and Robinson

believes that there are more primal reactions present in music that are in fact capable of

212 Robinson, The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music, 17.

95 informing our understanding of music expressiveness.213 To use the phrase from Robinson, in

Parade, there are no recognizable “emotion-laden gestures embodied in musical movement.”

Additionally, while the listener may recognize the potentially conventional musical vocabulary in the music of Parade, Satie provides a different context for them, which does not allow the same environment to have the recognizable musical connotation or movement. Robinson contests that Kivy has not successfully severed the potential tie between expression in a piece of music and evocation of emotion by that music in the listener.

In contrast to Kivy, Levinson proposes that the only expression of emotion that music is capable of displaying is that which the listener is able to detect as a reaction of the musical gestures in the music. In essence, Levinson wishes to conflate both expressiveness and evocation and view them as synonymous. Robinson’s critique of Levinson is that he does not say how we detect or empathetically feel these emotions, and disagrees that we are able to recognize these emotions as being necessarily present in the music. It does not follow that the listener will necessarily recreate the emotions expressed by the music, in themselves.

What then, is the connection between music’s expressiveness and arousal? Kivy theorized that if melody or harmonic elements affect our emotions, this requires a familiarity with the stylistic norms of a piece. Yet these are cognitive responses to the music, and do not mean that the music is expressive of the emotions aroused simply because of these musical elements. Robinson suggests that in addition to these cognitive emotions aroused in the listener

(which are separate from expression in the music), there are also primitive emotions that are aroused by music that may be connected to the expressive qualities that music possesses.214

213 Robinson, The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music, 17.

214 Robinson, Expression in Music, 18.

96 These emotions are in contrast to the cognitively informed emotions aroused through a defined understanding of the music. Robinson discusses how moments in the music contain qualities of

tension, relaxation, and surprise, which are directly expressed through the music. There is a

continual interaction between how we feel in listening to a piece of music and what we interpret it as expressing.215 This theory would suggest that musical expression is not a function of isolated instances, but often is the result of the large-scale formal structures. Robinson speculates that the development of a complex piece of music can mirror the development of complex emotions. In order to explain how complex cognitive emotions can be expressed musically, we need to look at the overall structure of the piece and at the feelings aroused by the music over time. To support this claim, Robinson expands on the theory of Leonard Meyer, to explain how these aroused primitive emotions may be linked to musical expression. The listener’s expectations of the musical form map onto emotional expectations, which becomes expressiveness in music.216 In this way, Robinson is suggesting that our emotional experience

(what emotions are aroused in us as listeners) inform our understanding, or uncovering of the expression in the music. The emotions in the music will often be different than the emotions experienced, but unlike Levinson, Robinson shows that they need not be mutually exclusive.

“Much music evokes emotional responses, and by cognitively monitoring or reflecting upon those responses, we can come to grasp the structure of the music as well as what it expresses.”217

In Deeper than Reason, Robinson explains that these primitive emotions evoked are directed towards the music as its cognitive object. She asserts that when a listener is surprised or puzzled,

215 Robinson, Deeper than Reason, 357.

216 See Robinson, “Expression and Arousal of Emotions in Music,” and Robinson, Deeper than Reason.

217 Robinson, Deeper than Reason, 348.

97 or unexpectedly relieved by what is going on in the music, they are affectively appraising a musical event as surprising or puzzling, or unexpected. In other words, when the listener cognitively monitors their emotional responses, they may realize that they are responding to what is expressed by the music as well as to its purely musical structure.218

Robinson’s theory shows that complex emotions are not apparently present in music, however, through a large-scale progression in the piece, the music may gradually produce a more complex emotion. While this theory is appealing and has many readily identifiable applications, in the end, it falls short as a means of qualifying the music of Parade as expressive. Ultimately,

Parade cannot produce complex emotions, which the listener can then recognize as expressed, because of the nature of its meta-structure. Robinson’s theory rest on the condition that the music be able to express complex emotions through its complex musical form, and Satie constructed a musical collage that does not provide us with a cohesive form with which to recognize these emotions. Thus, if Parade has any expressiveness, it is only in the appearance of the primitive emotions that are recognizable at individual instances through the piece. In this way, Robinson’s theory may be helpful in understanding our reactions to Parade through her concept of primitive emotions. However, even this is open to skepticism, as the listener is constantly inundated with fragmented gestures, that even these may not be discernable.

Robinson certainly acknowledges that listeners hear and react to music differently, and ascribe different emotions to their experience of the music. While Parade might present the characteristic of an emotion in its aural appearance (immediate), it cannot present the appearance of a pattern of feelings through the order of its expressive development.

218 Ibid., 369.

98 Nevertheless, this theory of expression has import for our analysis of Satie’s music. In

Parade, it provides an argument as to why the fragmented elements of pastiche do not provide the music with expressiveness, since at best they only aid in providing the primitive emotions that Robinson proposes. In Satie’s music, the unimpressive surface is deliberately constructed

using popular elements in order to provide the agency for keeping the prosaic façade of the

music, thus providing the evocation of primitive emotions. This has the same tenor as the

philosophy of furniture music, which corroborates with this theory; in Shattuck’s description of

Satie’s aesthetic, he notes that “all meaning lies on the surface … since there is no direction or

line of progression to be interrupted. Such functional music cannot claim great value for itself

except as workmanship and as style.”219 In a performance of Parade, the listener, recognizing that they are hearing a juxtaposition of various musical pastiche elements, can only cause an emotional reaction of surprise or discomfort in the listener that might allow them to recognize and identify the music as expressing surprise or discomfort. Since Parade doesn’t develop, it lacks the next step, that the emotions aroused or experienced by the listener alert the listener to the expressive content of the music’s meta-structure. Satie’s score has a liquidation of these sort of musical elements, motivated by the avant-garde aesthetic, and thus is meant to be simplistic and repetitive and is incapable of appealing to any direct expressiveness in the music.

In Deeper than Reason, Robinson provides a diagnosis for what constitutes a successful work of artistic expression. For this to occur, an artist has carefully constructed a work so as to articulate a particular emotion, and audience members must be actively encouraged to respond emotionally to the work in such a way that their own emotional responses help them to understand what the work expresses. Satie, according to Robinson’s assessment, is unsuccessful

219 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 172.

99 in Parade because he does not attempt, or successfully express something in the music that achieves an emotional response. The audience’s emotional response alerts them to the knowledge of denied access to expressiveness in music, thus it is an extra-musical response, and does not correspond to any emotion articulated by Satie in the music.

As we have already noted, not all music has the property of expressiveness.

Additionally, it can now be said that it may be true that we can be equally moved by music, which has no marked emotional qualities. Satie’s music effectively etiolates the normal potential for expressiveness in music. The paradox of Satie’s music lies in the fact that it does not attempt to engage the audience in perceptual activity, and is content to be spatial, like furniture. In this sense, the artistic intention is to not achieve a perceptual significance in the artwork, and he succeeds in doing so, but consequently leaves an opening for the audience to recognize his intention. Subsequently, the significance of that artistic intention becomes the significance in the artwork itself, and provides a hermeneutic window through which we can evaluate the expressiveness of the music of Parade through aesthetic theory. While Satie’s music is not intended to provide meaning in the usual artistic modes, it still provides significance by abdicating meaning. Yet the fact that we can draw meaning from the anti-expressionist elements in the music, such as the feeling of inaccessibility, anti-development, and fragmentation are in themselves significant. While there is not an identifiable way to characterize the expressiveness of this piece, it is sufficed to say that it differs from the traditional mode of expressiveness in music, while still being able to uphold the arousal theory of expressiveness.

This analysis has deeply informed the identity of Parade as an artwork, especially since it has shown that the lack of expressiveness in music does not take away its value as artwork.

Perhaps this is an even more fulfilling achievement when considering that many contemporary

100 critics of Satie judged his music as holding no value. In one particularly scathing article from

1919, a critic wrote: “For art has neither meaning nor value, unless as a synthetic expression of life as a whole! Now, our intellect, our individuality, is but one of the elements of life as a whole, and not the most important, an element which in no case may insist on a predominant place for itself.”220 While the avant-garde elements of Parade may distort life for the audience,

it does not follow that this distortion lacks significance, and that we cannot have an emotionally

satisfying experience through a performance of Parade.

220 Chennevière, “Satie and the Music of Irony,” 475.

101 Bibliography

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