Paper read in Kozani, Greece for this 2014 "Notation" Conference

Dadaphone: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music and its Debts to Dada and Futurism

Postmodern musical notation owes a direct debt to Dada and Futurist innovations in typography and layout. Although Futurist musical experiments with collage predated those in painting (1912) and Dadaist visual art (1919-20), it was Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst's work with free typography that helped to unshackle twentieth-century music from the strictures of conventional notation.

The German Dadaist Hugo Ball's final performance at the Cabaret Voltaire marked the beginning of a new genre of sound poems, which directly inspired the vocal works of composer Luciano Berio and his wife, soprano Cathy Berberian. Building on Dadaist and Russian constructivist models, Cage and other composers began to experiment with color and layout.

As a result of exposure to Dada elements guiding the Fluxus movement, postmodern musicians began to use chance procedures to incorporate noise and silence. Hans Arp's call for "a total surrender to the unconscious" inspired musical pioneers such as John Cage and Mauricio Kagel to incorporate elements of chance into printed scores. Cathy Berberian’s pivotal graphic score for Stripsody synthesized elements of Dada and Futurist typography and aved the way for hundreds of contemporary experiemnts with graphic design on musical scores.

This paper included a comprehensive annotated bibliography of printed music influenced by Dadaist ideas. These correspondences will be illustrated with excerpts from over 50 graphic scores that direct artists to employ chance techniques, to interpret colors and shapes, to incorporate noise, and to create music from non-traditional sources. Modern composers inspired by architectural forms, such as Iannis Xenakis (Greece) and Mauricio Kagel (Germany) were also be included. Leading contemporary composers) continue this work, using Dada-inspired graphic notation and chance elements.