The Music of Dada: A Lesson in Intermediality for Our Times by Peter Dayan (review)

This well-researched, well-documented study challenges what we think we know about Dadaist music, i.e., that it was noisy and unconventional, driven mostly by drumming and instrument smashing, and provoked riots on a regular basis. This is an inaccurate picture, but one promoted by Dadaists themselves. Dayan explains why it is inaccurate by examining points of continuity and rupture in performance of, and discourse about, music among Dadaists in Zurich, Paris, Berlin, New York, and Holland. Zurich Dada "had music," Paris "had both music and anti-music," whereas Berlin "had, it seems, no music; at least no composed music" (151). The Dadaists' anti-music "called itself music, in order to challenge every verbal definition of music" (106). Anti-music co-existed alongside more conventional Western art music to an extent far greater than the Dadaists themselves let on in their writings. Dayan demonstrates that in Zurich and Paris conventional tonal Western art music was often featured on Dadaist programs, performed (most often on the piano by women) and appreciated by the audience. To understand why the Dadaists essentially edited this tonal piano music out of their accounts of the movement, Dayan appeals to two kinds of music: on the one hand, audible music, about which we can say nothing because it "demands to be surrounded by silence" (14). On the other hand, "an imaginary ideal music. We cannot hear it; it cannot be performed. But we are free to talk about it, and indeed to present it, in our words, as an imaginary backdrop to all the arts" (14). By enacting these unwritten assumptions, the Dadaists participate in an aesthetic that goes back at least as far as the Symbolists, who upheld an unheard, silent music as a vehicle for talking about music. Dayan insightfully links this erasure of music to the way in which music is gendered in Dada: while male Dada poets refrain from talking about music in order to prevent it from losing its status as music by being transformed into discourse, "Dada's women, being under less of an obligation to protect that art since they do not create it, are freer to talk about music. Hence the fact that our only descriptions of Dada improvised simultaneous rhythmic poetry are from women: Suzanne Perrottet and Hannah Höch" (168). Dayan accounts for the contested place of music in Paris Dada by appealing to its "dual ancestry," Zurich's musically rich movement and New York pre-Dada, which "cast [music] out" (50). The book is rich in quoted published and archival material from many artists, writers, and musicians including Tristan Tzara, "one of the prime movers behind the presence of music at the Dada soirées in Zurich, Paris, and Weimar" (158), André Breton, Francis Picabia, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. It gives a well-rounded portrait of music in both theory and performance in the international Dada movement and is essential reading for those interested in the intersection of the arts in the early twentieth century and beyond.