Surrealism, Dadaism, Musique Concrete: Three Manifestos

The major strains of thought in the worlds of avant garde art and music were influenced by the writings of these three pioneering and revolutionary thinkers. Andre Breton penned The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, setting the art world on its ear with his philosophy of chance occurrences, strange juxtapositions and dream-logic, as a furtherance of a new and more vital art. Hugo Ball, one of the masterful renegades behind the DADA art movement, penned his manifesto to rebellion and absurdism in 1916, as a protest to the inhuman and barbaric war being raged across the face of the world. Finally, radical Futurist composer Luigi Russolo, who began recording lavatory noises as a droning, ambient form of music, laid out his philosophy of "noise composition" in his revolutionay and classic piece, The Art of Noises (1914), which predates the rise of electronic music and industrial music by many decades. Bold, illuminating, and provocative, these timeless intellectual offerings are presented here for the modern reader.