Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie

by Nancy Perloff

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.

Paperback

First published January 6, 1994

Reviews

[Maxine]

I liked seeing the art and culture of turn-of-the-century France and how foreign influences were received, reacted to, and incorporated. Very useful.

(The book was slow to get through, due to the musical analyses which I would have appreciated more had I paid more attention to music theory years ago.)