mode modem modus: from cabaret to conflict
Experiments in music, style and art in Britain using the British Music Collection as source and inspiration. 1900 - 1939
Introduction
Revolution, academia, activism, technology and creativity; fundamental changes to societal rules and mores are reflected in the movements that narrate time. And, while there are various sociological metrics that measure these effects, the most organic and untouched are the shifting changes in how a society celebrates itself. The creative heart of a decade and its developments are a reliable barometer of sentiment. The clothes that people wear and the art and music that moves them are immutable touchpoints. Here I look at key moments in history and contextualize these moments with prevailing changes in fashion of the time with particular reference to Great Britain. However, then, rather than equating historical incidents and experiments in art with fashion in parenthesis, I focus on specific social breakthroughs or significant events that brought about change. To illustrate and underscore the impact of these effects, I will draw points of reference from the experimental side of the British Music Collection. And this is not history in a straight line: it’s disruptive and swings back and forth. So, for example, moments from the early century are just as likely to be scored by works from some other time as they are by contemporaneous pieces. Plus, for this project, let’s define music as anything that can be listened to. And let’s define fashion as not just clothing but as something that prevails during a given time.
1900s
A new century brings a new set of changes. The vagaries of nineteenth century Bohemianism was giving way to modernism. The 1900s saw Picasso, Kandinsky and Munch holding their first exhibitions, with Picasso showing his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, widely agreed to be the first-ever abstract painting. Albert Einstein published his first exposition on his theory of relativity in 1905 and, in 1908, Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism to describe paintings exhibited by George Braque. In 1909 Marinetti Filippo Tommaso published Le Futurisme Manifesto with the Futurists invigorated by the chances and changes that the future might bring.
In Paris the influence of haute couture salons began to spread, while the women who could afford to do so were still wearing corsets with skirts that brushed the floor. Designer Paul Poiret began to preach a newer freedom in womens’ wear, with designs influenced by the Far and Middle East and less emphasis on restriction, while menswear was moving gently on from the strictures of the Victorian age. In 1907 Finland, then part of the Russian Empire, elected the world's first women MPs.
1900s Victor phonographSound and Music
In 1901 Emile Berliner’s company Victor RCA introduced the first ten-inch record. The phonograph was in mass production and music-buying habits migrated from sheet music to the new audio technology. Foundations for development in creativity were being laid with new technology bringing new possibilities. Sound and music could now be recorded and listened to. And images and moments - static and moving - could be captured thanks to advances in photography. Cameras and sound recording and playback devices were the tools with which to engineer change. It was now easier to document ideas but more importantly the decade provided artists, designers and musicians with a completely new set of ways in which to exercise their experiments. Yes, a camera could capture a scenario but what happens when a photographic plate is exposed to less (or more) light? The negative image was the juncture between exposing the plate and the finished image but could it function as a work of art in its own right? Similarly, the fact that sound could now be recorded also meant it could be disrupted: slowed down, sped up, reversed and so on. And breakthroughs in plastic technologies would soon lead to new fabrics and design materials. This was revolutionary.
Les Robes de Paul Poiret (1908) by Paul IribeSound and Music
Creatively, the late nineteenth century’s Impressionism movement still held sway. As paintings by the likes of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas suggested lightness and atmosphere, so composers in the new century sought to invoke similar impressions. Frederick Delius, Maurice Ravel, Jean Sibelius, Claude Debussy and others composed work that suggested moods and created sonic ambient environments rather than pursuing themes, an idea that was to permeate into future music-making and sound art. This mood was reflected in changes to the apparel of the time, which mixed with similar Romantic notions that - again - spilled over from the last century. The revival of the empire line, first popular in 1800s women’s wear, meant that women were less physically restricted and created a fluid silhouette that worked in tandem with the impressionistic and romantic notions in music and art. Further, the spreading success of the Ballet Russes company and their dervish-like costumes was enough to add more power to freedom of movement in dress. All this reveals a sea change in women’s opinion of their position in society. While the common standard call was for women to remain firmly in their domestic, subservient place, the women themselves had grown tired of their treatment and were starting to mobilize.
Claude DebussySound and Music
In Gabriel Jackson’s A la memoire de Claude Debussy the composer chooses text by Jean Cocteau for lyrical content in the tribute.
Michael Nyman - Man With a Movie Camera (2002)Sound and Music
Although the original film was made in 1929 and Michael Nyman added his own soundtrack in 2002, it’s worth including an extract of Man With a Movie Camera here simply as a celebration of progress in moving pictures.
78rpm shellac discSound and Music
Composer Caroline Wilkins’ 1988 work Arias utilises original 78rpm shellac disc recordings of early twentieth century Italian opera played on a phonograph. Performing live, she responds in song to operatic parts recorded during the 1900s.
"Le Voyage dans la Lune" George Méliès 1902 (Original version, silent and black & white)Sound and Music
French silent film Voyage dans la lune (1902) directed by Georges Méliès.
1910s
The 1910s saw a short period of rapid creative change halted by the start of the First World War. Dictated by the functionality warfare brings, trends in fashion tended towards practicality. One accidental outcome was that, out of expediency, women started wearing trousers as they aided the war efforts – working the land, in factories and generally backfilling jobs that the men who were now soldiers had previously undertaken. The first four years of the 1910s decade, however, were witness to a giddying array of artistic movements and creative premieres whose impact remains.
women in trousers in the 1910sSound and Music
An enlightened, open societal approach to the possibilities of the future and the technology it ushers in enabled theorists and practitioners to break new ground. For the first time art and music began to provoke audience reactions, and to have a measurable influence on design. This was the birth of experimentation in modernism.
Vorticism in designSound and Music
The Cubist and Vorticist arts movements gave rise to changes in design. Although not as impactful as Cubism in terms of art history, it’s arguable that Vorticism’s lasting effect on textile design is just as important. And the Cubists’ eye for varied planes still echoes when it comes to working in three dimensions. Furthermore, the introduction of collage (thanks to the likes of Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris) offered a whole new palette for juxtaposition, not just of colour and shape, but of sound too.
Maud (1913) by Vanessa BellSound and Music
Along with poet Ezra Pound, London-based painter and writer Wyndham Lewis formed the Vorticist movement as an alternative to the (in their eyes) too-static Cubists and the unstructured Futurist movement. Thus structured and dynamic, the Vorticists created artwork that drew the gaze with strong, angular, highly graphic shapes. Shapes that translated very well into print design.
Béla BartókSound and Music
In terms of modernism in music and continuing down paths beaten by Bartók and Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring had audiences up in arms, such was his unorthodox use of angular stress and dissonance. In Italy and inspired by the acceleration of change, the Futurist movement advocated a new approach to sound (as they did with almost any other creative process), with movement protagonist Luigi Russolo laying down a manifesto in 1913 entitled The Art of Noises, saying …musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones. The Dadaists would take the ball and run with it but the seeds of sonic experimentation had already been sown.
Cubist costumes for the ballet SalomeSound and Music
1911 - Picasso recognised as the founder of Cubism.
1912 - John Cage is born.
1913 - first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Marcel Duchamp presents his first ready-made Roue de bicyclette. Marcel Proust publishes Du côté de chez Swann.
1914 - birth of Vorticism. James Joyce publishes The Dubliners. World War I breaks out.
1916 - Dadaism founded.
1917 - Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau compose and produce the Parade ballet performed Ballets Russes with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso.
1918 - World War I ends.
Denis Smalley - Vortex (1982)Sound and Music
Denis Smalley’s Vortex provides an interesting manifestation of the Vorticists’ modus operandi, drawing the audience into its orbit.
Arnold Schönberg by Man RaySound and Music
Patrick Nunn’s Escape Velocity is a contemporary example of the metric dissonance and sense of surprise promoted by the likes of the Futurists and endemic in Stravinsky’s work.
Frank BridgeSound and Music
English composer Frank Bridge is perhaps best known as Benjamin Britten's tutor but his 1913 piece Dance Poem saw him move from traditional, pastoral bases to embrace a more modernist approach to composition.
Igor StravinskySound and Music
Composed in 1971 as an epitaph, Peter Maxwell Davies’ Canon Memoriam Igor Stravinsky is a contemplative tribute to the composer's groundbreaking complexity.
Riot at the RiteSound and Music
Riot At the Rite - 2005 film depicting the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
1920s
Scattered by the First World War, thinkers, artists, scientists and designers began to regroup. War brings about change and the 1920s hosted social change on various levels. Variously dubbed The Jazz Age and The Roaring Twenties, this was a decade with a new attitude to life. Freedom is represented by a new fluidity in clothing and in music, and post-war Britain embraced an infectious American approach where life was there to be lived. The prevailing international suffrage movement added momentum in the British movement and, in 1928, women over the age of twenty-one were finally given the right to vote. The Flapper Girls movement - arguably the first fashion and politically-led subculture - perpetuated the new sense of liberation and independence for women, with pioneering designer Coco Chanel introducing easy cuts and outlines that no longer restricted movement. By now an established name on the haute couture circuit, Chanel’s first Parisian high street boutique signalled a move into the ready-to-wear market.
Flapper GirlsSound and Music
Chanel also extended her influence to provide support for Igor Stravinsky’s family and to broker an introduction between Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes. The likes of Picasso had provided the company with costume designs in previous years and now it was the turn of Coco Chanel with her designs providing the perfect conflagration of dance, music and contemporary fashion. Characterized by shorter hemlines, bob haircuts and a determination not to let the male-led societal attitudes stop them from living their lives, the Flapper girls smoked, drank and went out to dance. The working classes, however, continued to dress for the practicalities of work and life, with fashion still an elusive concept learned from newspapers, magazines and via word of mouth.
The Jazz Singer - film posterSound and Music
The rise (and rise) of jazz as a popular music genre into the new decade was accelerated with breakthroughs in shared recordings and introduced a new set of attire for men that allowed them to look good and move around the dancefloor. The zoot suit was the outfit of choice and would later morph into a genuine emblem of street culture: the rock’n’roll drape coat. Jazz music also spawned new examinations of black history and the position of black culture in a modern society that continued to perpetuate segregation and violence towards the black race.
Merz Blauer Vogel (Blue Bird) (1922) by Kurt SchwittersSound and Music
Having been a key figure in the evolution of the early century’s avant-garde art movements, the 1920s saw German artist Kurt Schwitters take a prominent position in the decade’s artistic progress. His early installation explorations, collage works and MERZ concept defined him as a singular figure who sat in parallel to the Dadaists’ disruptive without compromising his own ambitions. MERZ was a nonsense word, incidentally, discovered by Schwitters when he ripped a page containing the word Kommerz in half for one of his collages. Schwitters was intrigued and inspired by the Dadaists approach to deconstructing sound and language, thus composing his Ursonate piece, which translates roughly as primitive sonata.
zoot suits in the Jazz AgeSound and Music
1920 - Robert Wiene releases his film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
1921 - Gabrielle Coco Chanel opens her first boutique in Paris. Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Sozialistishe Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (NSDAP) in Germany.
1922 - The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) begins broadcasting a radio service from a station in London. German artist Kurt Schwitters composes and performs Ursonate, an early example of sound poetry. Birth of Iannis Xenakis in Greece.
1924 - George Gershwin premieres orchestral composition Rhapsody in Blue.
1925 - first Surrealist exhibition with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. F Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby. John Logie Baird successfully transmits the first television pictures.
1926 - director Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, the first film with sound, released.
1928 - Steamboat Willy, the first animated film with sound, released.
Ursonate text by Kurt SchwittersSound and Music
Christopher Fox’s MERZsonata was created in 1993 at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1993 and employs the structure of the last movement of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate poem to frame sounds connected with his life and work.
Kurt SchwittersSound and Music
Joseph Hyde also uses Schwitters’ Ursonate as part-inspiration for his Vox Mecanix piece. In his own words: …In the composition of the piece, I also concentrated very much on abstract ‘musical’ parameters, in particular rhythm. In this, I was also inspired by the rhythmic patterning of Ursonate, but took such patterning a stage further using basic Stravinsky-esque cell techniques.
Michael Nyman - Man and Boy: Dada (excerpt) (2003)Sound and Music
Michael Nyman also used the Schwitters legacy, this time for his 2003 opera Man and Boy: Dada. The opera tells the story of a young boy who befriends Kurt Schwitters after the pair compete to collect bus tickets from local routes.
Rebecca ClarkeSound and Music
Born in Harrow in 1886 composer and musician Rebecca Clarke was a pioneer in changing society’s opinions of women and their place in the modern world. By the 1920s she had become one of the first female musicians to be admitted to a fully professional - and formerly all-male - ensemble after she joined the Queen’s Hall orchestra, had toured the globe as a performer and had become the first female composer to gain support from famed American sponsors of music, the Coolidge family. Her work was impressionistic, reflecting notions influential earlier in the century. The Rebecca Clarke Society continues to celebrate the composer’s achievements.
John Logie Baird - first television pictures - 1925
1930s
By the beginning of the 1930s the effects of the Great Depression (generally agreed to have started after 1929’s Wall Street Crash) were being felt by much of the western world. By the end of 1932 the British pound had been devalued by twenty-five per cent and unemployment has reached a record-breaking twenty per cent. Capitalizing on regional economic depression and promising a better life to those worse off, in 1933 the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (NSDAP aka Nazi party) led by Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Art, music and literature that was considered cultural Bolshevism came under government scrutiny. Books by writers who were considered to be avant-garde in outlook and theme were burnt in public along with other supposed insurrectionary literature, and art deemed avant-garde was removed from public display. The 1930s was a decade of consolidation and hunkering down, musically.
women working in a toy car factory in Walthamstow, LondonSound and Music
Interest in jazz - and its sister genre, the blues - was growing and the influences of modern classical composers, particularly Stravinsky and Schoenberg, continued to spread. Having started in the 1880s, the European Kabaret scene, its performers and its composers, suffered as the new German government shut down premises in Berlin, generally regarded as the continent’s epicentre for the high-camp, cross-dressing side of staged music. Songwriters and Kabaret celebrants Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had fled Germany in 1933, fearing persecution.
In the design and haute couture news, Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli had become on a par with the likes of Coco Chanel, thanks largely to her use of contemporary art tropes and motifs, particularly those related to Surrealism. Her collaborations with Salvador Dali remain her best-known works; specifically the Shoe Hat, and the Tears and the Lobster dresses. The spirit of these collaborations - and its open-minded approach to design - had an effect that reached into the future and can still be felt today.
Salvador Dali designed Vogue magazine cover - 1939Sound and Music
Recent breakthroughs in technology had spun off cheaper fashion manufacturing elements - man-made fibres and fabrics, the zipper - that aided mass factory production. However economic restraints saw the flamboyance of the 1920s give way to austerity and rationing. Acceleration in design trends slowed as the Second World War approached and progenitors fled to safer climes. On the streets, the ordinary people readied themselves for the unthinkable.
still from Cocteau's film Le sang d'un poeteSound and Music
1930 - American aviators Clyde Edward Pangborn and Hugh Herndon, Jr complete the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean. Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali collaborate on their film L’Âge d’Or. Jean Cocteau premieres his film Le Sang d’un poète.
1931 - British electronics engineer Alan Blumlein invents stereophonic sound. George Beauchamp invents the electric guitar. Spanish avant-garde writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna identifies 25 -isms (art movements) in his book Ismos. Aldous Huxley publishes his Brave New World novel.
1934 - German company Telefunken begin mass production of cathode ray televisions.
1935 - while working at Radiodiffusion Française Pierre Schaeffer begins to experiment with sound recordings. La Monte Young born. Terry Riley born. DuPont chemist Gérard Berchet synthesizes the synthetic polymer nylon.
1936 - start of the Spanish Civil War. 1937 - Picasso completes work on his Guernica mural.
1938 - Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galérie Beaux-Arts, Paris.
1939 - World War II breaks out.
Constant Lambert (1926) by Christopher WoodSound and Music
A polymath who took an interest in all areas of the arts and probably best known for his ballet compositions, Constant Lambert is considered one of the earliest more formal composers to understand the importance of jazz music. Written in 1931, his Concerto For Piano and Nine Instruments does a remarkable job in invoking a cosmopolitan, free thinking, quasi-syncopated state of mind, almost out-Gershwin-ing George Gershwin.
George Gershwin (1936) by Arthur KaufmanSound and Music
Speaking of Gershwin, composer Michael Finnissy’s theoretical approach to music and composition is well placed in his readings of George Gershwin’s work. Finnissy argues that a composer’s work embodies the culture of the time in which it is written. So his arrangement of Gershwin’s 1938 song Love Is Here To Stay re-frames the piece in order to encompass the radical political and social change that the world was experiencing at the time.
W.H. Auden and Benjamin BrittenSound and Music
The cabaret live theatre format was thriving by the 1930s, providing composers with a new field of experimentation. A young Benjamin Britten had hooked up with writer W.H. Auden and the pair put together a suite of Cabaret Songs. Auden had experienced Berlin cabaret nightlife first hand and poured his experiences into the suite with Britten employing new, jazz-influenced syncopations.
Although he wouldn’t reach the height of his fame until the next decade Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers - composed and realised in collaboration once again with W.H. Auden in 1936 - marked an important time in British creative history. When the piece debuted audiences were puzzled by what was still considered an avant garde approach to music, specifically the vocal gymnastics employed. More importantly, the composition’s theme of man’s treatment of other living beings barely disguised its true political theme. Britten was a life-long pacifist and Our Hunting Fathers was his lamentation of man’s inhumanity to man, made more apposite in the shadow of the forthcoming war.
Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali - Shoe HatSound and Music
The success of Alan Rawsthorne’s 1937 piece Themes and Variations was due, at least in part, to the composer’s debt to Bela Bartok and Bartok’s own work with the string quartet format. Rawsthorne would go on to write scores for films including 1953’s The Cruel Sea that portrayed World War II’s Battle of the Atlantic and marry the British painter Isobel Nicholas, a contemporary and confidante of Alberto Giacometti and Joan Leigh Fermor, Elsa Schiaperelli’s muse and model.
Grey Tube Shelter (1940) by Henry MooreSound and Music
In 2005 Peter Maxwell Davies composed the commissioned piece Commemoration Sixty as part of a series of events marking the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second Word War. The piece concludes with a prayer from the Latin Mass.
1930s Soho night clubSound and Music
1930s jazz club in Soho, London
Simone de BeauvoirSound and Music
With thanks to Harry Cooper at Sound and Music, Davide Cavagnino and Louise Rytter at Google and Denise Coates (for her patience).
