One of the intriguing things about Cage’s work, though, is that it has precedents. Erwin Schulhoff’s ‘In Futurum’ is the central movement of a work from 1919 called Five Picturesques. The New Yorker describes most of the piece as “boisterous, clanging chords”, but... well, here is that middle bit
And here’s the sheet music. It’s different to Cage’s: covered in marks, almost all of which are signs for rests, but it’s a page which is *busy* with resting (and the Italian phrase at the top means “the entire song with as much expression and feeling as you like, always, right to the end!”)
Schulhoff was an avant-garde composer with an enthusiasm for jazz and Dada, and the New Yorker says there are “directions that are not merely challenging but downright nonsensical, like the time signatures—3/5 in one hand, 7/10 in the other”. Oh, and the smiley faces are original elements
This is the piece in the context of the whole work, and I can’t help wondering, given when it was written, if the frenetic, choppy bits, contrasting with the calm of In Futurum (and the final movement) aren’t in some way a response to what had been happening from 1914-18
(Mind you, as an aside, this is his Erotic Sonata, which “calls for a female singer to moan orgasmically”, and is also from 1919 – three years before Molly Bloom said “yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”)
Unfortunately, Schulhoff was a Czech Jew, and – what with that, and being artistic, non-conformist, and politically radical – he didn’t survive the *next* world war. He tried to get to Russia (which wasn’t exactly safe for Jews either), but was caught and died (of TB) in prison in 1942
This is the full New Yorker piece. There isn’t a huge amount out there about Schulhoff, who was rather forgotten about after his early death, but this piece (from 2004) marked a weekend dedicated to his work, so he is starting to be heard more again
And, strangely, even Schulhoff had a forerunner – although this wasn’t performed. Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd (Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man) was ‘composed’ by French writer Alphonse Allais as a joke in 1897
What a thread!
Thank you!
Now this is an interesting footnote, because it reminds me of another work of Allais’...
He also produced a book, Album primo-avrilesque (roughly: April Fool-ish album), which consisted entirely of works like these
![Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige [First communion of anaemic young girls in snowy weather] – it’s an entirely white picture](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vckf3haopb3yncclmf7o2m3f/bafkreigzapzulh2kvcud4jbnxwxryfbrhzhkh7msdptili3vyeenwb7tjm@jpeg)
![Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la mer Rouge (Effet d'aurore boréale) [Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea (effect of the Aurora Borealis)] – this one is completely red](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vckf3haopb3yncclmf7o2m3f/bafkreica3hkeaplgdrnixg3zq72lvzzrsmiyagpgczp3ksaa225cgwxqvq@jpeg)
Another footnote:
this is literally just someone making counting rests as unnecessarily complicated as possible