Backdoor Broadcasting Company

The Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway University of London (HARC)

Event Date: Friday 11 June, 2010 - 10am-6pm

The Boardroom, 2 Gower Street, London

Unsettling Scores: A Study Day on French Musico-Poetics from Banville to Duras

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Peter Dayan (Edinburgh) : Stravinsky, Satie and the ‘Cocteau Complex’

Satie and Stravinsky each produced one major work in collaboration with Cocteau: Satie’s Parade (1917), and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927). There are curious similarities between the two composers’ experience of working with Cocteau. Both accepted Cocteau’s idea of introducing extra-musical sounds into their work, then, after the work’s performance and publication, expressed their dislike of those sounds – but did not try to have them removed from the work. My contention is that the composers’ difficulty with Cocteau’s sounds is explained by a fundamental difference between Cocteau’s aesthetic principles, and those of the two composers; and a paradox inherent in the composers’ own aesthetics explains their inability to get rid of those sounds.

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