Author Description

This book examines the early twentieth-century movement that was sparked by the premiere of Erik Satie's ballet Parade in May 1917. Perloff argues that Satie and his colleagues, including Darius Millhaud, Francis Poulenc, Max Jacob, and Jean Cocteau, 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 Legér, and Francis Picabia, they shared a radical disregard for traditional divisions separating popular and classical forms of creative expression.