The preface that I give to read here results from my reflections following the colloquium organized by Sébastien Arfouilloux within our surrealism research center on June 9 and 10, 2011. It was not the subject of an oral presentation. In truth, all the merit of this meeting goes to Sébastien Arfouilloux, who was my student from the first university year until the defense of his thesis (see below), through a master's thesis on Dada and music, and who animated many discussions within the Research Center, both through his pertinent interventions and through his saxophone! It is therefore he who organized the colloquium and published the Proceedings in 2013 (reprint 2014), my role being limited to material aspects...

Back cover: The surrealists have an ambivalent relationship with music. In this respect, silence constitutes a means of translating the experience of music as much as of poetry. This work questions the silence of the surrealists, torn between the refusal of poetry as song, distrust towards a certain form of emphasis, and the attraction of the sonorous. If it is now accepted that the meeting between the surrealist movement and music did not take place, due to the exclusivity granted to poetry and painting by André Breton, this work also raises the question of the possibility of a refoundation of the two arts: music and poetry. We will therefore follow the crossed trajectories of André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Pierre Reverdy, Benjamin Péret, Tristan Tzara, René Char, Jean Genbach, Giovanna, Yves Bonnefoy, Salvador Dalí, by putting them in relation with the musical milieu of their time, from Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez to popular song. We will also question the artistic gesture through Dada practices that we will try to bring closer to Fluxus.

The Golden Silence of the Surrealists, by Sébastien Arfouilloux, Caroline Barbier de Reulle, Henri Béhar, Olivier Belin, Paulo F. de Castro, Christine Chemetov Soupault, Alain Chevrier, David Christoffel, Franck Dalmas, Julie Dekens, Michela Landi, Gilles Losseroy, Olivier Lussac, Valentine Oncins, Yoanna Papaspyridou, Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, Laura Santone, Yannick Séité, Pierre Taminiaux.

Music before everything else by Sébastien Arfouilloux, October 23, 2021: https://www.melusine-surrealisme.fr/en/wp/de-la-musique-avant-toute-chose Read a critical review: https://www.musicologie.org/publirem/la_silence_d_or_des_surrealistes.html Preface by Henri Béhar: There you go! "Go music" (I. Ducasse, Poems I) Have you noticed how many times we use the preposition "there you go" in spoken language today, not to present a thing, emphasize an argument, specify a new circumstance, but simply as an expletive particle, letting it be understood that we have much to say but that we prefer to leave in suspense the development that this would imply. I would willingly use this linguistic artifice to present this colloquium to which Sébastien Arfouilloux devoted himself with all the energy of youth, so much does it seem sufficient to me to leaf through the following pages to hear the new score that he wants to signify to us. I am surprised by the general astonishment. It is strange that we always ask the same question about surrealism (in the artistic domain, which was the least of its concerns), why did this movement lose interest in music? Why is there no surrealist music, as there exists romantic or futurist music? Why don't we ask the same question about each of the movements that have succeeded each other in literature? Where is the music of the Pléiade, of Humanism, of the Baroque (which is not musical baroque), of classicism (which is not classical music), of the Enlightenment, of romanticism (which is not romantic music), of realism, of naturalism, of symbolism, of cubism, of the New Novel, etc.? The truth is that, just as there is no longer a hierarchy of the arts, nothing objectively links the arts to each other. There is no cause and effect relationship between poetry, painting and music, any more than between a brushstroke, a musical note and a letter, even if it happened, in the past, that letters were used to designate the elementary particles of song. One wonders if this is not an effect (not to say a misdeed) of Wagnerism, which seized France at the end of the 19th century, and especially of its conception of total art, taken up by the futurists, in a confusionist spirit, to speak like André Breton. Thus, one would like each grouping pointing to the literary horizon to have its equivalent in the musical domain. Moreover, one demands that each poet double as a composer. What to do then if he declares himself indifferent to anything other than what he considers his unique vocation? Is poetry not autonomous? Would it no longer be sufficient unto itself? Certainly, there is song. Some, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Languages, suppose that in the beginning, song came naturally to women around the well, from which poetry was born. Tristan Tzara, in his surrealist period, explicitly took up this thesis in Grains et issues (1935), while André Breton never departed from it in his reflections on poetic language, no more than Éluard. As for the relations of surrealism with music, the question has been, it seems, settled once and for all by André Breton declaring: "Let the night continue to fall on the orchestra, and let me, who still seeks something in the world, let me have my eyes open, my eyes closed — it is broad daylight — to my silent contemplation." As is fitting, we contented ourselves with extracting a fragment of a sentence from an otherwise more substantial discourse, entitled "Surrealism and Painting", and we lost the essential. Reflecting on the conditions of existence of a so-called surrealist painting, he prudently examined the relationship of one to the other, without envisaging any annexation, any assimilation. Based on his own experience, he held auditory images to be confusionist, while visual images, especially inner vision, would never have deceived him. This is not to say that there cannot be multiple and all-directional relations from surrealism to music. The important thing is in the coordinating conjunction, not in the substantives. Questioned by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, about his aversion to music, Breton replied that, if he and most of his friends were hostile to "organized noise", he was not insensitive to song, and notably to humor in song. Here, an anecdote: Jacques Baron, whom I was questioning about Breton's favorite tunes, repeated to me word for word the lyrics that his friend hummed while shaving, and the imperishable refrain of Dranem: "There's a quay in my street. And there's a hole in my quay. So without bothering me I have the view Of the quay of my street And that of the hole in my ass." Attesting to his taste for the music of Offenbach, Claude Terrasse and especially Erik Satie (despite their past controversies), the letter to Barr attempts to find theoretical reasons for this surrealist exclusive. In the end, Breton refers to Hegel's aesthetic classification to mark the preeminence of poetry over music. In fact, this letter of December 28, 1941, presented and commented on by Sébastien Arfouilloux in Mélusine XXXI, turns out to be the beginning of a seriously articulated article that Breton publishes in the journal Modern Music at the end of his American stay, "Golden Silence". Besides defending the autonomy of poets with respect to other arts, or at least their indifference, he postulates a future convergence between poetry and song: "The poet and the musician will degenerate if they persist in acting as if these two forces should never meet again." And to plead for a reunification of hearing, while recalling his youthful remarks concerning the primacy of the verbo-auditory over the visual for great poets. In short, he returns to automatic writing, the true foundation of surrealism, source of all poetry. It is clear that the automatic message can only manifest itself in a state of dream or half-sleep, and that it cannot occur in the hubbub. In this case, more than elsewhere, silence is golden, and it is indeed to the examination of this silence that Sébastien Arfouilloux invited us in June 2011, based on the thoroughly researched response he had provided in his thesis on surrealism and music (published by Fayard the same year). To those who held it to be a misunderstanding, a globally missed meeting between the one and the other, Sébastien Arfouilloux held it to be a temporal gap, responding, in a way, to the wish formulated by the founder of surrealism. His argumentation develops in four parts, complementary and strongly articulated. Going back to the origins, the first deals with music in Dada's time: it envisages Erik Satie's paradoxical contribution, the first uses of the term "surrealism/ist" by Apollinaire, Alberto Savinio's contributions, Auric and Milhaud's articles in the first issues of the journal Littérature. Then it determines the part of music in Dadaist shows, to end with a theoretical reflection defining the traits of Dadaist music. The second part examines in detail the motives for André Breton's refusal of music (musical deafness, primacy of painting, accusation brought against an art judged "confusionist", social context...). Poetry must be sufficient unto itself, it rejects any connivance with music. Nuancing Bretonian determinations, the third part, entitled "Surrealists' attraction to music" (I would have preferred the reciprocal formulation: music's attraction to surrealists) emphasizes the playful aspect of the movement and devotes a long chapter to the presence of jazz in the existence, if not the practice of surrealists. The last part is devoted to "musicians associated with surrealism". Prudent formulation, modeled on Breton's with regard to painting: with the exception of André Souris, himself a theorist of the question, no musician claimed to belong to the movement. However, many are those who frequented it, who brought their contribution to it through the setting to music of poems (Poulenc for Éluard, Boulez for Char). An opening is made towards musicians ensuring today the surrealist heritage, serial music, apprehended as a consequence of surrealism in music. In short, there were no surrealist musicians, with the exception of André Souris and George Antheil. According to him, music was an ideal experimental means for a movement that wanted to surpass literature, and to conclude: "If the existence of surrealist music remains debatable, in the sense that one would struggle to define the characteristics of this music, on the other hand many experiments have taken place." I will not have the impertinence to discuss the pertinence of this important pioneering thesis, which opens the way to many reflections. If it was indispensable to situate the place of music in Dadaist performance and in the concerns of its main actors, it seems to me necessary to mark the exact frontier between Dada and surrealism on this point. Advocating spontaneity, the first indulges in the games of humor and chance and, on the verbo-auditory level, imbues itself with all the sonorities of the world, as shown by both Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate and Tristan Tzara's Twenty-Five Poems or even the disappeared musical compositions that Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes had the kindness to evoke for me when I was preparing a dossier of the journal Dada-Surréalisme on "Dada and music" (1968). At the same time, Belgian surrealism, which I hold to be a geographical-temporal extension of Dada, is evacuated from the initial problematic. And Clarisse Juranville, text collage, music collage by André Souris, falls exclusively under Dada aesthetics. If it were up to me, there you have surrealist music reduced to a little sorrow. Fortunately, many young researchers rushed to contradict me and bring their own answer during this colloquium which, let us recall, aimed at poets in the first place.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Colloquium: The "Golden Silence" of Surrealist Poets"

FIRST PART: SILENCES Introduction to the colloquium Sébastien Arfouilloux (Surrealism Research Center, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris III; Comparative Literature Research Center, Paris-Sorbonne University, Paris IV)

1. Orpheus' Sigh: mythical silence on the surrealist staff Julie Dekens (Comparative Literature Research Center, Paris-Sorbonne University, Paris IV; Poetic Studies Center, University of Zurich)

2. Sonorities and Silence. Philippe Soupault Christine Chemetov Soupault and Valentine Oncins (Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne)

3. An "outdated art and almost fallen into lethargy"? On the intermittences of the Zeitgeist and the paradox of the musical exception Paulo F. de Castro (CESEM/Dept. Musical Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

SECOND PART: CROSSROADS BETWEEN ARTS AND CROSSROADS

4. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes: a Dada who knows music Gilles Losseroy (Jean Mourot Literary Studies Center, Nancy 2 University)

5. After the Ritual of Forgetting François-Bernard Mâche (Member of the Academy of Fine Arts, musical composition section)

6. The setting to music of Pierre Reverdy's poems and the poet's shadow music Franck Dalmas (State University of New York-Stony Brook University, USA)

7. Benjamin Péret's "intermittent noises" Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Pomona College, Claremont, USA)

8. In contempt of tsoin-tsoin (the mistake of music in Tzara's poetry) David Christoffel (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences)

9. The "musician body" in René Char's poetry Olivier Belin (20th Century French Literatures Team - EA 2577 -, Paris-Sorbonne University)

THIRD PART: GOING TOWARDS MUSIC

10. Greek surrealist poetry: songs on paper? Yoanna Papaspyridou (University of Athens, Greece)

11. In the roaring twenties: Breton and Aragon before popular song Alain Chevrier (Psychiatrist; specialist in the history of poetic forms and surrealism; director of the journal Formules)

12. Diabolus in musica or Jean Genbach in jazz hell Yannick Séité (Paris Diderot University-Paris 7)

13. Automatism and improvisation: possible relationships between surrealism and jazz Pierre Taminiaux (Georgetown University, Washington, USA)

FOURTH PART: A TRANSMISSION IN QUESTION

14. Listening to the unheard. Sound painting and phônè in Giovanna Laura Santone (Roma Tre University, Italy)

15. A surrealist work? On Yves Bonnefoy's "Treatise on the Pianist" Michela Landi (University of Florence, Italy)

16. Salvador Dalí and music, an ambivalent relationship Caroline Barbier de Reulle (Research Group "Music and Plastic Arts" - "French Musical Observatory", Paris-Sorbonne University, Paris IV)

17. The Boulez-Char correspondence Robert Piencikowski (Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Switzerland)

18. Fluxus music Olivier Lussac (Institute of Aesthetics of Arts and Technologies, Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne University)

See: Sébastien Arfouilloux's thesis (directed by Pierre Brunel) directly edited by Fayard: Let the night fall on the orchestra. Surrealism and music Paris: Fayard, coll. "The paths of music", 2009, 350 p. https://www.fayard.fr/auteur/sebastien-arfouilloux/

Presentation by the author:
Of the relations between surrealism and music, we know the striking allegorical image given by André Breton: "Let the night continue to fall on the orchestra." For the representative of surrealist thought, only the images aroused by painting and poetry are apt to give access to unconscious representations and dreams; musical expression, judged too confusionist, cannot account for the interior model. Breton thus condemns music in the name of a reversal of values: the beautiful will henceforth be what reveals itself when the artist leans towards the inner abyss of the unconscious. However, does surrealism, as a constituted artistic movement, refuse a place to music? What is at stake behind this displayed refusal? Let us try to open a curtain that fell too quickly on the stage and glimpse what is being plotted backstage. Music holds an important place in the surrealist work of experimentation and absolute revision of values, to such an extent that, affirms Sébastien Arfouilloux, it is part of the surrealist spirit. The author proposes here a return to the game of mutual fascination and repulsion between the founding artistic movement of the early 20th century and musicians. The hegemonic figure of André Breton but also all those who gravitated in the orbit of the surrealist movement (from Tristan Tzara to Paul Éluard, from Apollinaire to André Souris) are here solicited, through manifestos, declarations and especially works, and feed a reflection likely to upset many representations.