Art and the Everyday

This study examines the early 20th-century French movement sparked by the premiere of Erik Satie's ballet "Parade" in May 1917. For the young musicians Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric, and for the poets Blaise Cendrars and Max Jacob who attended the performance in Paris, "Parade" exemplified a wish to escape Symbolist purity and to fuse art with everyday life. Their cause was quickly taken up by the poet Jean Cocteau, author of the ballet's scenario, who published his celebrated pamphlet on new French music, "The Cock and the Harlequin", in 1918. Nancy Perloff argues that Satie and his colleagues led French music away from Impressionism by infusing their compositions with French and American popular idioms. They also adopted aesthetic principles of parody, diversity, nostalgia and repetition from the Parisian cabaret, cafe-concert, circus, fair and music-hall. With their collaborators Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Francis Picabia, they shared a radical disregard for traditional divisions separating popular and classical forms of creative expression.