FABULOUS TIMES

FABULOUS TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE

Paris inthe 20s PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.

MUSIC

English comedian and actor Charlie Chaplin with a bulldog in the film Champion Charlie. Photo: English comedian and actor Charlie Chaplin with a bulldog in the film Champion Charlie.

Satie was closely connected with the group of Parisian composers championed by Jean Cocteau and known as Les Six. Honegger was a member of Les Six but didn't feel the deep fascination with popular Parisian entertainment of Satie and other members of the group, and so these influences can't be heard in his music. By contrast, in his first major work, Dit des Jeux du Monde, there are echoes of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, in both its theme - a sort of allegory of the creation of the world - and the instruments it uses: double string quartet, double bass, flute, trumpet, bass drum, and bouteillophone (Bottlephone). The action apparently happens "nowhere" and when it was staged at Paris's Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in December 1918 it was advertised as a "mystery" production, with words by the Belgian poet Paul Méral. Its first performance caused yet another Parisian scandal. Milhaud wrote Le Boeuf sur le Toit shortly after returning from Brazil in 1919, where he had been acting as secretary to the diplomat and poet Paul Claudel. Influenced by the music he heard there, Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toit is full of the rhythms of South American dances. On Saturday nights Milhaud had often visited Paris's fairgrounds and circuses where he was fascinated by the sounds of so much going on at once; so many colourful chance combinations. Along with the South American dance-styles in Le Boeuf, Milhaud also cleverly imitates this colourful fairground simultaneity through polytonal writing (music written in more than one key at a time). Milhaud originally called the work Cinéma Fantasie. By about 1917 Charlie Chaplin's films were beginning to be screened in Paris (Chaplin himself appeared in person at the Casino de Paris in 1917), and Milhaud saw Le Boeuf sur le Toit as a possible accompaniment to a Chaplin film. During the 1920s Milhaud and Les Six met regularly at a bar in Paris which soon moved to larger premises, re-naming itself after this work. Poulenc was a true Parisian. He grew up in the city and claimed to have "frequented the Parisian music-hall without stop" from the age of fifteen to thirty. His favourite music-hall singer was Maurice Chevalier, and it's Chevalier's unique, rubato singing style that can be heard echoing through Cocardes. During the war, music-hall stars had become more and more popular, and in the Paris of the 1920s Chevalier and the singer and dancer Mistinguett reigned supreme. Cocardes were a part of what Poulenc referred to as his "street music" side - snapshots of the Paris he grew up in.

André Breton wearing a crown of thorns. Beneath is a quote from his 'Manifeste du Surrealisme'. Photo: French surrealist artist, poet, essayist and critic André Breton wearing a crown of thorns. Beneath is a quote from his 'Manifeste du Surrealisme'

He was convinced that using popular tunes gave a national voice to modern music, a theme that chimed with Cocteau's new musical aesthetic at the time. Jean Cocteau wrote the texts, which are full of references to aspects of urban life - the circuses, fairs, cinemas and music hall - as well as lots of different kinds of confectionery … "Child's Nurse" begins: "Tecla our golden age / Pipe / Carnot Joffre / I offer to everyone who has neuralgia / Giraffe wedding / a "Good day" from Gustave / Gounod's ave Maria / Virtuous rose-queen of the village / Song by Mayol / Touring Club phonograph...Auric's Overture is his contribution to a work commissioned from him and Jean Cocteau by Rolf de Maré, director of Paris's Ballets Suédois (Swedish Ballet). Auric had suggested that it be a combined effort by all the members of Les Six, but Louis Durey declined, unhappy with his friends' radical attitudes towards Impressionism, and Ravel in particular, and so only five composers contributed. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel shows Cocteau's ideas in their extreme. It was a ballet with a difference - a ballet with dialogue, and Cocteau's dialogue, like the rest of the work, is full of his favourite everyday themes and references to popular entertainment. The action takes place on the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, and shows the eccentric antics of a wedding party gathered there. Auric's Overture sets the mood, with lots of brass and timpani, creating a bizarre, bumpy march instead of the wedding march that would normally be expected. Brass fanfares combine with melodies in different keys producing all the effects of the fairground. Antheil described his Ballet Mécanique as "the new fourth dimension of music" - as well as a dead-end. It was originally a collaboration with the French artist Fernand Léger, famous for his "machine-art" paintings. Léger had toyed with the idea of "simultanist art" which involved film-like techniques of cutting and close-ups with no logical progression or explanation. This led to his decision to attempt a film with no scenario, using a prism in front of the camera to destroy the perspective. The result was Ballet Mécanique, for which George Antheil was chosen to write the music. Having written it Antheil felt the music could also stand alone and it was premiered in its own right two years later in Paris. The incredible line up of instruments called for were 4 player-pianos (all playing simultaneously), an aeroplane propeller, gongs, rattles and a xylophone. Repetition and syncopation are powerful elements in the music, as is the influence of jazz styles. The outrageous premiere drew many of Paris's celebrities to the Théatre des Champs-Èlysées in 1926. James Joyce was there sporting an eye-patch, T. S. Eliot was spotted with an unidentified woman in black, and Diaghilev and Ezra Pound were also present. Ballet Mécanique has been described as symbolising "the acme of demented modernism" but is highly significant in that it can be seen as looking forward to minimalism.

FABULOUS TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.

ART

La Conquete de l'Air (conquest of the air), 1913 by Roger de la Fresnaye. Photo: La Conquète de l'Air (conquest of the air) by Roger de la Fresnaye, 1913.

And you thought Cubism was a bit odd? It was the art form that shocked people in 1906 but seemed positively tame compared with the Dada-tinged nihilism that was to come. The work of Marcel Duchamp made fun of everyone, including himself, (mocking Cubism in "Nude Descending A Stair", sticking a moustache on the Mona Lisa). In 1924 the more po-faced Surrealists began to dominate the art scene, that André Breton was soooo dogmatic.

The years surrounding the First World War saw the visual arts treating new subjects in new ways. As in music and literature, there was a radical break with tradition, and a completely altered attitude to the work of art itself. Paris was full of young artists keen to turn away from the languid colours and images of the Impressionists. The new vision was one which represented the world in terms of geometrical shapes and altered perspectives. Things were never to look the same again. New subjects included machine-like images and the city in both its glory and its ugliness, while the traditional subjects - the still-life and the portrait - became less and less popular. Cubism was the first to emphasise these flat two-dimensional shapes and geometrical figures. Another real innovation was its use of collage techniques with everyday items - newspaper, tickets, pieces of cloth - being pasted onto the painting. This broke completely with the traditional idea that works of art must be produced with pencils or paint alone to create an illusion of reality. As Cubism steadily infiltrated other creative art forms such as film, the Italian Futurism of Filippo Marinetti hit Paris with an exhibition of Futurist Italian works in 1912. Although an early influence and not a French development itself, the art world owed a debt to this movement which heralded a violent departure from traditional artistic values. Its influence can be heard resonating in the aesthetics of Cocteau, and its glorifying of the beauty and sleekness of the machine in many ways pre-figured the future fascination with "machine-art". This fusing of art and the everyday world was mirrored in music and poetry too, and also extended into Dadaism.

Photo:Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, Italian author and initiator of Futurism.

The Dadaists believed in total freedom to experiment and their Parisian exhibitions were sometimes so outrageous that the audience pelted them with eggs and vegetables. Dada also poked fun at art itself, showing a special contempt for the notion of "high art". The most memorable image of Dada's subversive, fun side is probably Marcel Duchamp's La Gioconde - the Mona Lisa... with a moustache. Duchamp was one of Dada's leading artists. He claimed that an object was art if an artist says it is, and produced a series of Ready-Mades which were based on everyday objects. Francis Picabia, who had taken up with Dada's founder, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, when he arrived in Paris in 1920, echoed this in his statement that "Art is, and can only be, the expression of contemporary life". Both Picabia and Duchamp's ideas can be seen as leading to the pop art of the late 1950s and 1960s. Ezra Pound was particularly taken with Dada and how it had "satirised the sanctimonious attitude towards the arts". Dada's nihilism was to be short-lived though. By 1924, with the publication of the Manifeste du Surréalisme it gave way to Surrealism. André Breton, one of Surrealism's leading figures, described it as "pure psychic automatism" - a means of expression uncensored by reason, which allowed putting down on paper whatever should come into the artist's head. A final sign of the times was that artists no longer limited themselves to exhibiting canvases and sculptures in galleries, with Picasso, Picabia and Léger branching out into the world of music and dance. The greatest collaborations of the time involved Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Rolf de Maré's Ballet Suedois (Swedish Ballet) who both premiered important avant-garde ballets in Paris during the early decades of the century, for which the artists provided Cubist and Dadaist set and costume designs.