This week’s theme is…Music About Animals! Our animated companions on Earth, animals have been our friends, food, foes, and fascination. They constantly populate the art of humans, from literature to sculpture, poetry to music. This week we listen to music inspired in some way by animals.
Music About Animals, Day 5 – The Bull on the Roof by Darius Milhaud
In the late 1970s two entrepreneurs named Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened a nightclub in New York City that quickly became incredibly famous and attractive to famous people. I think everyone has heard of Studio 54, the cultural heart of American hedonism during the era of disco. It was an immediate smash success, and its list of notable patrons and performers sparkles with celebrity:
http://www.biography.com/people/groups/studio-54-patrons
What a time that must have been, and what an experience to frequent, or even visit Studio 54, rubbing elbows with all of the larger-than-life actors, musicians, dancers, artists, writers, urban philosophers, political gadflies, and others who appeared there. In its first iteration, Studio 54 burned through its capital, of all sorts, quickly and with utter intensity. Rubell and Schrager were charged with skimming $2.5 million dollars off the top beyond their reported $7 million profit during the first year alone. This, in addition to other minor controversies, motivated the owners to sell the franchise, and it continued on for a couple decades under other owners. While it is difficult to pinpoint a cultural or aesthetic sensibility which united the performers and guests of Studio 54, beyond post-baby boomer capitalist excess and disco-era hedonism, it is undeniable that the nightclub provided gathering place and epicenter for something significant in American culture. If you hear the name “Studio 54” chances are it will evoke some kind of image based on your understanding of who it attracted and what it represented, even if those associations may be somewhat ineffable.
Studio 54 reminds me of a similar cultural epicenter from earlier in the twentieth century, another nightclub that burned with intense celebrity throughout the incomparable roaring twenties in another urban locale, Paris. The bar and cabaret which came to be called The Bull on the Roof was founded by Louis Moyses, a restaurateur with an odd penchant for moving his establishment from place to place, but always within the 8th arrondissement of Paris. Like Studio 54, which was a gathering place for those perpetuating on some level the tenets of disco-age hedonism, Moyses’ cabaret became a gathering place for proponents of another, and many would argue, considerably more fruitful philosophy, the Parisian avant-garde, which flowered half a century earlier, during the time between the cataclysmic World Wars. The first murmurings of the catalyst that The Bull on the Roof was to provide for this movement started to be felt in the early 1920s, as an earlier iteration of the Moyses’ nightclub, The Gaya, attracted the presence of authors like Jean Cocteau, composers like Darius Milhaud, and surrealists of all stripes, contributing their sensibilities to the absurdism that became the French avant-garde. Soon, the misfit congregation of artists, philosophers, musicians and writers pushed the cramped restaurant’s walls to its limits, and Moyses relocated by necessity, opening in late 1921 under a new name, The Bull on the Roof, the choice of which sits at the end of a long, convoluted story which incorporates most of the notable French musicians of the time.
Around 1920, just as The Gaya was beginning to attract its inter-war clique of Dadaist socialites, a musical subculture of that group coalesced into what could be called a confederation, or perhaps a committee, organized in an ad hoc manner, bound together in equal measure by their unifying allegiances and their collective disgusts. This group came to be known as The Six, and stories of their unification vary, but all of them agree more or less on their uniting aesthetic. All members of The Six, at this point anyway, had surveyed the state of French music and patly diagnosed its sources of nourishment and disease. Cancers included the Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel (although I’ve long considered grouping the two together as an oversimplification, even an inaccuracy – see this post) whom they decried for different reasons, and the excessive influence of Richard Wagner on the disciples of Cesar Franck and those they influenced (see this post). What was to be embraced was a Dadaist surrealism, constantly mixing elements of art music with commonplace entertainment and jazz, all viewed through an absurdly cubist prism. They found their champions and mentors in figures like Erik Satie, the grandaddy of French inter-war surrealism (see this post), and those with whom he collaborated or intersected at tangents. His groundbreaking ballet Parade, unifying the efforts of himself, Sergei Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, caused a scandal at its premiere in 1917, but the members of The Six ate it up. Parade’s bizarre, absurd tone informed their approach to similar shows like The Wedding at the Eiffel Tower (see this post). It was in the wake of Parade that The Six became a united group, with a little help from the music critics of the day who helped to group them together.
All of the collaborators involved with Parade (Diaghilev, Picasso, Satie, Cocteau) became regulars at The Bull on the Roof, as did another recognized figure to run in those circles, Igor Stravinsky. His notable, even scandalous, collaborations with Diaghilev, now the stuff of legend (see this post), were admired by the members of The Six; they saw Stravinsky as a tribute to Russian music (even if he was mixing it in equal measure with French orchestration and aesthetics) and craved a similar force in their own French music.
The Six did not last as long as the enthusiasm of their ideas indicated. After some interesting collaborations and much time spent attempting to shape the aesthetics of French music, the differences in their individual styles, talents, ambitions and eventual reputations began to strain their unity. One half of The Six – Poulenc, Honegger, and Milhaud – have become famous names in the pantheon of Western music, whereas the other half – Auric, Durey and Tailleferre – have been essentially forgotten to those whose minds are not perpetually concerned with music history. Where Poulenc is undoubtedly the best known of The Six, Darius Milhaud is a close second, having enjoyed an illustrious international career as a composer and teacher of note which spanned the years between 1913 and 1974. A prolific composer, his cataloged works total 441. As a teacher, in addition to his work at universities and music festivals, he was also a significant influence on Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach.
Of all the members of The Six, it is Milhaud who most deeply shaped the story and legacy of Moyses’ restaurant. Milhaud had spent time in Brazil toward the end of World War I, having served as the secretary to Paul Claudel, a respected poet who, at that time, was the French ambassador to the South American nation. For two years Milhaud took the opportunity to absorb all he could of Brazilian culture and music. When he returned to France, he was writing colorful music which bears a distinct resemblance to much written by Brazil’s greatest composer, Hector Villa-Lobos (see this post). Villa-Lobos and Milhaud met and influenced each other in Brazil – Milhaud brought Debussy, Satie and Stravinsky, and Villa-Lobos eagerly showed off his native folk traditions. Around this time a young, Polish pianist, named Arthur Rubinstein was touring Latin America and also became friends with Villa-Lobos. Shortly thereafter, Rubinstein could be found at The Gaya playing a six-handed version with George Auric (a forgotten member of The Six) and Darius Milhaud an arrangement of a ballet recently composed by Milhaud, and wearing on its sleeve the flavor of his South American journeys. Colorfully Brazilian, the ballet includes quotes from somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 native Brazilian folk tunes, including a tango called The Bull on the Roof, running all of them through a thick filter of polytonality, the use of which Milhaud had heavily systematized after witnessing the great effect of its embryonic use in Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
The piece became so popular at Le Gaya that when Moyses relocated the establishment in late 1921 he borrowed its name to ensure continuity with the Dadaist community that had formed around it in the previous location.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall during those heady, uncertain days in Paris between the wars, observing philosophies and aesthetics take shape among the artists, musicians, writers and philosophers of that time and place. And there would have been no better place to observe the great energy of the process than at Moyses’ wandering establishment, so integrated with the absurdist humanities of interwar Paris that it could not help but to be shaped by them at its deepest level. These communities have existed before, and they will exist again, but it is hard to imagine a meeting place that will attract a more colorful and visionary group of artists than The Bull on the Roof.
—
Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance? Super! Just click here to get started.
Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks? Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!
Do you have a comment to add to the discussion? Please leave one below and share your voice!
Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!
smartandsoulfulmusic 