Poetry loves music because it will give it a charm that it is not capable of on its own. Poetry seems to expect from music to draw powers that are not attributed to it enough. For example, music allows poetry to be more popular. From this point of view, poetry can approach song in the same way that it can tend toward folkloric language, according to a remark made by Tzara in The Locks of Poetry:

(...) the introduction into poetry of processes parallel to those of folkloric language combined with this poetry's inclination toward song, indicate one of its generalized tendencies toward a kind of poetry with popular resonance.

But instead of rushing at these powers, Tzara is rather concerned with a renewal that music can give to poetry, even if renewal does not seem to appear to him as a value in itself, where it is a candidate for being the best means to prolong the said "popular resonance."

Aragon, speaking of song, an inherent quality of lyricism from the troubadours to Rimbaud and Apollinaire, showed the way of a possible renewal of poetry which, in this manner, would be put in accordance with the poetic instincts of the popular masses 1.

In Tzara's First Poems, we find a certain number of texts whose titles directly refer to lyricism: "The Storm and the Deserter's Song," "War Song," "Old Song," "The Bride's Song," "Sing, Sing Again." And we find in these poems presented as song, an address that is not so obvious in the other poems. Thus, "Old Song" begins with "It is near the sea that I made this song / Listen to them – and tell it to her if you meet her / She is tall, her eyes are good and calm / And like the grass she is blonde who has felt the scythe's shiver 2." Or, in "The Bride's Song": "Oh, my love in prayer take your hands yourself / Listen to the end of everything buzzing in the ears" (ibid., p. 82).

It's as if, by becoming song, the poem undertakes itself in a tighter interlocution, to make heard by more contrast the scope of the stakes it wants to stir. But at the same time – and perhaps even in this, each time the poem makes song, one would say that music makes poetry aging. This does not mean that a requirement for novelty can do something about it: the problem must be deeper, it's the entire power of expression that is affected. As proof, there is not one composer to catch up with the other. This is at least what issue no. 18 of the magazine Littérature suggests: in March 1921, the magazine (directed by Aragon, Breton and Soupault) proposes to friends to note nearly two hundred great names of intellectual history, with the idea of putting an end to problems of glory. The great score table is thus announced:

We no longer expected to find famous names in LITTERATURE. But, wanting to put an end to all this glory we thought it good to meet to award each one the praise he deserves. To this end we have drawn up the following list and established a scale ranging from -25 to 20.

The different participants like Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, had the leisure to attribute a more or less contemptuous score to celebrities such as Poussin, Mistinguett or Lenin. And in this little game, Tristan Tzara clearly appears as a severe scorer, we can verify this by the number of times he distributes the minimum score of -25: 121 times out of 191 scored names, where Breton whose severity is nevertheless reputed never gives more than 21 times the score -25 supposed to display without ambiguity "the greatest aversion."

If we want to assert the evaluation of the scope of contempt by stopping at the panel of scores, we notice that Tzara very rarely gives a positive score (this must happen less than 50 times). He is even regularly anti-consensual: when, for Mallarmé, the scores of some and others range from Breton's -1 to Eluard's 15, Tzara's score is -25. He often appears as a dissident when, for Baudelaire, everyone puts scores between 11 and 18, except Gabrielle Buffet who puts 0 and Tzara who puts a -25 (and who bring the average down to 9). Same for Goethe to whom everyone put between 10 and 20, while Buffet and Tzara put respectively 0 and -25 (and who bring the average down to 7.63). The precision having been given earlier that the scale goes from "-25 to 20 (-25 expressing the greatest aversion, 0 absolute indifference)." Same for Dostoevsky: Gabrielle Buffet put 0, Philippe Soupault 2, everyone between 14 and 20 and Tzara: – 25. It's like a little ritual: for Hegel, Philippe Soupault puts 0 while everyone puts between 4 and 20, except Gabrielle Buffet and Tzara who put -25.

And then, we can verify the degree of contempt of which the 11 scorers are capable by comparing the score they respectively give themselves compared to the average they obtain. Aragon grants himself a pleasant 16 while his average is 14, (Tzara's score remaining below the obtained average):

Apollinaire (3 against an average of 12.45), Arp 12, Bach (2 against an average of 5.09: I'll come back to this), Bolo 3, Bonnot 7, Charlot (10 against 16.09), Johnie Coulon 2, Cravan 4, Ducasse (5 against 14.27), Morand 1, Pansaers 3, Paulhan 4, Picasso (3 against 7.90 – that is almost 5 points difference, which was my limit of mention), Reverdy 3, Synge (1 against 8.45), Vaché (7 against 11.9).

What is very clear is the difference in activity of the great names that Tzara scores better than the average:

Beethoven (1 against -3.81), Claude Bernard (3 against -8.63), Birot (1 against -13.45), Cendrars 2, Duchamp 12, Edison 5, Einstein 10, Ernst 10, Fatty 9, Hart (W) (8 against 1.18), Max Jacob 3, Man Ray (11 against 3), Picabia 12, Satie 3, Stravinsky 4, Trotzky (3 against -3.63).

Many visual artists, scientists and three musicians. Finally, if we take up all the notations of composers, beyond more or less random aversions, there are some categorical traits:

Twice, Tzara gives a positive score to a composer whose average is zero or negative: this is the case for Beethoven -whose average of -3.81 does not prevent Tzara from giving him 1) and Stravinsky (who has 0.00 average, despite a 4 from Tzara) – which is therefore a good score for Tzara, at least the best score he gives to a composer. Then comes Satie to whom he gives 3 (average of 2.72): Satie being the only French composer to receive a somewhat respectable score, not only from Tzara, but also from the magazine Littérature since Debussy receives -9.18 average, including a -25 from Tzara, while Berlioz even has -10.27 average, including a -25 from Tzara... that said, he also puts -25 to Wagner (who has -3.36 average), while he puts a positive score, a 2, to Bach (who has 5.09 average).

Following the musical boundaries of the time, one might feel obliged to dig into the Franco-German border: abstracting from Stravinsky, the fact is that he does not like emblematic French musicians (Berlioz and Debussy) and makes an exception for Satie, while he likes German musicians (Bach and Beethoven) and makes an exception for Wagner.

One could formulate the hypothesis that he likes Satie for the Embryons desséchés side, the manipulation of aged materials which has the advantage of being able to easily manipulate different types. So much so that it is one of the most interesting specificities of Tzara's songs to use writing procedures that are usual to the point of being worn out, notably in the collection of 40 songs and unchants.

The 40 Songs and Unchants clearly say that it is a matter of making contradictory imperatives coexist and that there is no reason to stop for that. Contradictory because there is the self-legitimate project of advancing into the field of song. Because there is a mistrust – otherwise self-legitimate – toward what making song could make us do. This is how song seems to encourage tapping one's distress or magnifying one's confinement for what its picturesque could be worth for new light on the world. Thus, the fourth:

they are more than two
the lovers
they don't like people talking about them
seemingly nothing
I extract poems from them

There is therefore a difference in motivation between making song and making poem. "I extract poems from them" de-dramatizes the banality of "seemingly nothing" that the cherished lovers prefer to avoid making people talk about them. Seemingly nothing, Tzara clearly shows that song, as a poetic form, is very condensed, but by saying that there is still poem, should we understand, regarding the poems presented as songs and unchants, that they function as parodies of poems? Be that as it may, these are poems without poetic pretension and, by their lightness of form, capable of authorizing these levels of view: the seventh:

I speak as I live
I see as the voice
I take as I offer
my life is thus
I owe nothing to anyone
*I owe everything to all men

Between "I owe nothing" and "I owe everything" to bring out the opposition between "anyone" and "all men": the chiasmus produces generality so well immature that the poem needs a song-like intention to go that far. It's especially the little music that will have some power to make truths that are a bit too proverbial to be endearing bounce. The perspective of song and its cadenced contentions gives a particular humor, but also particularly effective: the twelfth sounds as much like a life lesson as a joke:

the boss says to the boss lady
we bosses
I mean we're leaving

leave leave said the employee
may we never see you again

Beyond the farce, one can extend the anagram game P A T R O N S / P A R T O N S, could also give TRANSPO, PORSANT or PAR TONS in two words (in the sense of the scale "by tones"): at length, listening in the practice of anagram a reinscription of his poems in a tradition at least as old as Villon. "Reinscription," because it is precisely from the fact of making "song" that these reactivations are notable. The games of associations and permutations to provoke coincidences are not the property of poems that take song as a model (we can find them in many other poems by Tzara), but: these songs and unchants reactivate their traditional, if not ancestral, dimension.

And then, at an existential level: this way of being very brief while embracing sequences full of life, comes down to shortening what life can be full of: by sequencing existence with time units not much longer than word games. We deduce from this that there is no place here for revolutionary hopes that suppose more extended time spans. What confirms the example of an individual destiny sucked in by desires too beautiful, as in the fourteenth:

he took the key to the fields
to open the horizon
entered it alive
never came back from it

One would almost be tempted to add an -e to "open" to be able to have only 7-syllable verses. Without that, we still hear the swaying of 3s and 4s that make up school recitation: 1 2 3, 1 2 3 (that's the age) and since it's a matter of not saying it: questioning the song space as corset of the said force, since put in a vise of the sentence. It's the post-nihilo side: creation lies in the fact that the world exists, a principle of action consistent enough to skip over how to create when there is no longer anything very sensible to expect from everything that happens.

Since thought is concerned with the dimension that sentences will take from this singing, exposing its logic to the space of its projection, it's all the carefreeness – or what defines itself in avant-garde in the literal sense. But since the projection is here highlighted, in addition to its exposure to the gratuitousness of events, the question can consist in seeking what the intensity of this projection is a symptom of? It's a bit like the problem of the shooting star... It passes, they make wishes, does it concern it? And can it do anything other than make them make wishes even if it doesn't do more than let them do it or does many other things that we don't want to see all the time we are, seeing it, making wishes.

When there is superposition of speaking and music, there is an enunciative change of speech, but also of music which then appears as a sound object, as the melodrama historian Jacqueline Waeber explains who spots the phenomenon as early as Benda's Ariane à Naxos, even in the Bard tradition. Wagner hates melodrama as an impure genre that mixes musical and non-musical. And the fact is that, as we have seen, that Tzara hates Wagner: can we suppose that, conversely, Tzara loves the impurity of mixing musical and non-musical. The paradox would then be that the mixing of musical and non-musical is all the more envisaged by Tzara that he recognizes no significance to music and that he perhaps even maintains an attraction for the characteristically non-significant character of music. Now, comparing Tzara's poetry to learned melodramas might not seem serious. Which is doubly interesting. First: it suggests a clash of cultures that thematizes Tzara and learned melodrama as incomparable. We had the opportunity, in a previous investigation on Tzara and music (The Contempt of Tsoin-Tsoin) to note that in Tzara's poetry, music must be the object of mistrust. But it's a matter of mistrust that are the object of great interests. We can read, in the poem Approximation "don't be the dupe of sound attractions 5" and "you sometimes run after the clear unlimited why of your actions" (ibid.) so much is music commonly involved by Tzara in the description of intellectual entanglements. This is to say how interested he is in the power of disorganization of ideas to which music exposes us, insofar as his collections seem to want to capture, on behalf of poetry, the force of renewal of thought that its disorganization by music can promise.

So, what to think, of the resonances and resonances welcomed in The Approximate Man where, from the first poem: "the bells ring without reason and so do we 6." To say the importance of the observation, Alain Corbin's The Bells of the Earth well reminds us that:

Mastering the use of bells is to possess the monopoly of instant information and injunction: a considerable privilege at a time when, alone, the rounds of the postman and the rural guard allow informing the majority of members of a community 7.

If the world from which Tzara inherits is a world in which the spirit of the bell tower can be literal, the bells are the sound emblems of a moral order where everything is a question of reputation, where people ring with reason...

The careful reading of archival documents shows that the majority of conflicts that tear apart communes then have as their fundamental stake the preservation of a symbolic capital. The concern for honor, the fear of humiliation are at the heart of almost all these jousts, too long judged insignificant. The mayor and the priest live in fear of being treated like children by the sub-prefect. Both fear, permanently, being humiliated by their rival; and these same feelings extend to members of the municipal council and those of the fabric council. Challenge, vexation, derision, concern for vengeance order communal conflicts. Pride, esteem constitute the major stakes. This results from the very structure of the society of inter-knowledge and the design of the area of reputation. The anonymity of today's big city prevents understanding the heightened sensitivity to everything that calls into question honor, or rather esteem, and therefore representations of self, family, community 8.

All this would suggest that it is a certain state of the industrialization of the world, of the urbanization of social relations that leads Tzara to dwell so much on the sound disorder to which we are exposed, because of which we might even find ourselves mentally deformed.

Looking at the instrumentation chosen for the rhythmic interlude of "The Admiral Seeks a House to Rent": between Janko's whistle, Tzara's Cliquette and Huelsenbeck's bass drum, one can have the impression that the noise imperative was internalized by the Cabaret Voltaire of Zurich in 1916. But reading the manifesto that Russolo publishes in 1913, instead of a provocation, we find in The Art of Noises an aesthetic concern for these musically unworthy, yet interesting, sonorities:

In the resounding atmosphere of large cities as well as in the countryside formerly silent, the machine creates today such a great number of varied noises that pure sound, by its smallness and monotony, no longer arouses any emotion 9.

Russolo intends, through the musical valorization of the sound of machines, to broaden the panel of phonic colors while bringing it closer to the urban environment. Without being yet as voluptuous to the ear as music, the environment is heard, even in its mechanisms, as increasingly equal in aesthetic dignity with music. One could speak of a Russolo paradox which consists in accusing a multiplication of sounds linked to industry, that The Art of Noises prolongs as much in defiance toward musicians in their difficulty to integrate these noises as in optimism toward the world to see its musical criteria extend to these new sonorities.

Following these 40 songs and unchants, let's seek how to hear these poems by Tzara that make the world ring in the order of what we call today sound ecology which would like to let us think that we have advanced in the aesthetic reception of these extra-musical sounds, in our way of listening to the world as if it were music. Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue have warned us that "noiseism has entered the current sound baggage of the composer 10" to deduce that sound ecology was born from the cinematic education of the ear, following the idea that the sound environment is heard with as much acuity as symphonic music and, consequently, can deserve as much aesthetic attention as the great repertoire. To forge this idea, the authors go so far as to establish a list of categories that instruct an intelligence of listening to nourish the sound perception of the environment as an aesthetic experience. For example, the effect of persistence: Augoyard and Torgue make a point of reading Murray Schafer in the hope of a re-education of sound sensitivity:

The persistence effect is very used as a compositional element in a certain number of sound landscapes recorded by Murray Schafer. The foggy horns and sirens that open the sequence of the entrance into Vancouver's port, provoke such a strong persistence that the rest of the landscape is deeply impregnated with it 11.

Following Russolo, we find in this way of posing the stakes of sound ecology, the idea of a continuity to revalorize between music-music and the sound manifestations of the world:

"If different musical forms play on the persistence effect, we can consider that this effect, strictly defined, intervenes in every effort of sound communication 12._"

This actualization of sound sensitivity to the world is accompanied by a poetic apparatus that leads Augoyard and Torgue to this quote: "So much the trembling of his tacit temple / Conspires to the spacious silence of such a site / You murmur to me, branches! ... Oh rumors 13...," three verses extracted from Paul Valéry's Fragments of Narcissus – Paul Valéry who, in the Littérature ranking, received -25 from Tzara for a general average of 1.09!

He records the sound where others content themselves with looking. It is difficult to know if the approximate man is therefore a theory of approximation or of humanity or if the level of intricacy makes separate considerations unfeasible. But it appears useful to consider as paradigmatic, in The Gas Heart, the dialogue of organs; the fact for example that Mouth says "The conversation becomes boring doesn't it?" and that Eye responds "Yes, doesn't it?": if all the organs of the face agreed to say the same thing, this could produce a facial polyphony. Henri Béhar evokes simultaneism as a prefiguration of automatism and as a pooling of thought. This is where song is rallying and insofar as rallying reputes the cry. Except that song makes the text much more regular and contained. And regularity and containment don't help to make thought so common.

In form, there is nothing more different than a simultaneous poem such as Boxe (p. 263) and, to follow in the collection De nos oiseaux, the "Dada Song" (p. 265). But we can deduce from this that, by its rhythms, its rhymes and what they force in containment, the hyper-regularity of the song text plays as a way of amplifying the variety of forms. From there to drawing general conclusions about Tzara's relationship to music, several hypotheses are possible: he is willing to sing provided he has previously unchanted, up to: one must have fun with song since there has been unchant: or or: it's not because the hypotheses seem contradictory that they cannot coexist. On the contrary: the simultaneous poem defines itself, with typographic heterogeneity as support, as a place of coexistence of different voices, if not the most different possible; where song can be heard as would be in the order of the A.B.C of the "Dada Manifesto 1918": "I write this manifesto to show that one can do opposite actions together, in a single fresh breath; I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I don't explain because I hate common sense 14." (which comes after "Imposing one's A.B.C. is a natural thing, therefore regrettable.." p. 279).

Slightly further on, Tzara evokes the writers who "persist in seeing the categories dance when they beat time" (p. 282) and still a little further on, regarding "all the other beautiful qualities that different very intelligent people have discussed in so many books"", among other deductions: "authority of the mystical baton formulated in bouquet of ghost-orchestra to mute bows" (p. 283). This is to say if music in the sense of the good organization of a personal style is worth bourgeoisification of the spirit or: intellectuality in good father of family management mode. From this point of view, Tzara and music, it's especially poetry as bad conscience in the face of the privative way – "to say that all the same each has danced according to his personal boumboum..." (p. 283)

Hence the affirmation, in "Proclamation without Pretension": "If each says the opposite it's because he's right" (p. 288-289) and the hypothesis that "Mister Aa the antiphilosopher" in Aa by return to the previous stage of the principle of non-contradiction which is first formulated as exclusion of coexistence of A and non-A, which allows to note the antiphilosophical force in the sense of rhymes that rhyme and of important phonophonies so that in addition to saying the opposite, they manage to do it while saying yet the same thing. Or else: the paradox of tasting which, supposing a bit of mastication of the same thing, intends to put its rapture in the greediness of an evolving flavor, but not too long, if we deduce from the advice given in the text Tristan Tzara: "Call between family on the phone and piss in the hole reserved for musical gastronomic and sacred stupidities." (p. 293)

1. Tristan Tzara, The Locks of Poetry, Paris, Flammarion, Complete Works vol. V, 1982, p. 241.

2. Tristan Tzara, First Poems, in Complete Poems, Paris, Flammarion, 2011, p. 80.

3. "The human locks of reason," Grains and Issues, OC III, p. 141.

4. "The military music brushes," The Antitête, OC II, p. 369.

5. "Approximation," The Travelers' Tree, 1930, OC II, p. 31.

6. Song I, The Approximate Man, 1931, OC II, p. 79, p. 80...

7. Alain Corbin, The Bells of the Earth, Paris, Albin Michel, 2004, p. 200.

8. Id., ibid., p. 199-200.

9. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, Futurist Manifesto 1913, Paris, Allia, 2006, p. 12-13.

10. Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, Listening to the Environment. Repertoire of Sound Effects, Editions Parenthèses, 1995, p. 97.

12. Ibidem, p. 99.

13. P. Valéry, Fragments of Narcissus, 1938, Works 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1957, pp. 123 and 125.

14. Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto 1918," Complete Poems, 2011, p. 279-280.