6 - Surface Division, Deep Consensus: Classicism and Secularism and their Challenges

Summary

The secular 1920s: the spectacle of Le Boeuf sur le toit

In June 1920 Georges Auric, echoing Cocteau's Le Coq et l'arlequin, provocatively proclaimed his commitment to a music inspired by the fair, circus and the everyday:

Why do you reproach us for the circus, the music-hall, the fair at Montmartre? … Too bad if this disperses the profound seductions of debussysme, the friendly grace of M. Ravel with too little pomp…. Te jazz-band enthrals us. To create such easy, everyday music around some dance tunes, with such counterpoint, noises, rhythms, cries could well appear overwhelming. How many evenings have I preferred the banjo, the saxophone of the Casino de Paris even to Chevillard's orchestra. Hindoustan, Indianola moves me to tears.

Te rejection of Ravel and the Chevillard concerts in favour of jazz numbers such as ‘Hindustan’ and ‘Indianola’ at the Casino de Paris is probably the most famous trope of the French interwar period. Scholars such as Nancy Perloff, Steven Whiting and Mary Davis have explored the inspiration Satie and Les Six derived from ‘Parisian’ popular music. Certainly the idea of music of the everyday, as outlined by Cocteau's Le Coq et l'arlequin, is an important marker of the first years after the Great War. Memoirs by Milhaud and Jean Wiéner as well as accessible accounts by the likes of James Harding give a vivid sense of the social networks that existed among musicians and artists, involving musical soirées, often at Milhaud's house on a Saturday followed by sampling the musical entertainment of the fair, the café-concert and the bar (Le Boeuf sur le toit).