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Zurich Dada's forgotten music master
Citation for published version:
Dayan, P 2015, 'Zurich Dada's forgotten music master: Hans Heusser', Modern Language Review, vol. 110,
no. 2, pp. 491-509. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.110.2.0491
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):
10.5699/modelangrevi.110.2.0491
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©Dayan, P. (2015). Zurich Dada's Forgotten Music Master: Hans Heusser. Modern Language Review, 110(2),
491-509.
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ZURICH DADA’S FORGOTTEN MUSIC MASTER: HANS HEUSSER
The eight Zurich Dada soirées, from 1916 to 1919, were the central event in the founding of
Dada as a spectacular international phenomenon. They have remained famous ever since in
the history of the development of European art. But a key figure in those soirées has been
almost completely forgotten: the composer Hans Heusser. He provided the first work to be
performed at the first soirée, and the last work programmed at the final soirée; his work was
performed at all but two of the soirées, and occupied the entirety of one of them. And yet
most specialists of the period hardly recognize his name.
This essay has three aims. The first is to resuscitate the figure of Hans Heusser, and to
sketch his contribution to the Dada soirées. The second is to relate how he was immediately
and efficiently erased from the history of Dada. And the third is to suggest that this process of
erasure was not a simple omission. It was (and remains) motivated by the extraordinarily
complex and paradoxical relationship between the fundamental principles of Zurich Dada,
and the very concept of music.
The few hard facts known about Hans Heusser’s life are quickly summarized. He was
born in Zurich in 1892. His early published compositions were songs and short piano pieces;
and it was indeed works for piano and voice, and short piano pieces, that constituted his main
contribution to the Zurich Dada soirées, from 1916 to 1919. However, his subsequent career
took him in a different direction. He specialized in a capella choral music for female voices,
and wind band music. In 1924, he became director of music for the town of Sankt Gallen, in
Switzerland. There he remained until his death in 1942. The only music by Heusser that is
still performed today, and still readily available, is his wind band music. The music web site
notendatenbank.ch, for example, lists a dozen pieces by Heusser for wind band, including
probably his most famous, the ‘Sankt Gallen Marsch’ and the ‘Russische Rapsodie’, for
which one can order parts. None of the songs or piano works from his earlier period are thus
available. Indeed, the general opinion seems to be that they are largely lost – and if they are
not lost, they might as well be.
Almost nothing is known about Heusser’s life in Zurich during the Dada years.
Raimund Meyer, in Dada in Zürich, provides a full and careful assessment of the available
biographical facts, and gives their sources, which are of only three types: contemporary
newspapers; the accounts of other Dadaists; and the brief obituary of Heusser that appeared in
the Sankt Galler Tagblatt in 1942. He was unable to find out more: ‘Nachforschungen bei
den Nachverlassverwaltern und Bekannten aus dem Kreise um Heusser haben keine weiteren
Informationen über das Zürcher Leben von Heusser gebracht’ [Enquiries directed to
Heusser’s executors and to those acquainted with his circle have not yielded any further
information concerning Heusser’s life in Zurich].
1
At least Meyer took the trouble to
scrutinize those few available sources of biographical information, and draw what
conclusions he could from them. Heusser’s music of the Dada period has, on the other hand,
been scrutinized by nobody.
The academic neglect of Heusser’s music is symptomatic of a more general critical
reluctance to acknowledge the place of composed music in Zurich Dada. In his article
‘Duchamp: Dada Composer’, Leigh Landy writes:
Inspecting documents which include lists of programmes of Dada soirées, one sees
that relatively little accent was given to composed – as opposed to an occasional
improvised – music. In Zürich Hans Heussen [sic] presented ‘antitunes’, and equally
1
Raimund Meyer, Dada in Zürich: Die Akteure, die Schauplätze (Frankfurt am Main:
Luchterhand, 1990), p. 162. All translations throughout this article are mine.
unknown composers H. Samuel Sulzberger and Suzanne Perrottet are named.
Surprisingly a couple of the young Schönberg’s works were played there as well. If
ever there was an undadaist personality, it was he!
2
This reflects quite accurately the stereotypical view of Dada music. Factually, however, it is
quite misleading. Why does Landy characterize Heusser’s music as ‘antitunes’? This
description does not correspond at all, as we shall see, to what we find in the pieces by
Heusser that have come down to us. I find it difficult not to suspect that, like almost all the
other scholars who have written about Dada music, Landy had not actually looked at
Heusser’s published scores. Furthermore, the programmes of the Zurich Dada soirées make it
perfectly clear that ‘composed – as opposed to an occasional improvised – music’, by
contemporary composers, was in fact a regular feature of the soirées. Satie and Cyril Scott are
listed on those programmes, as well as Schoenberg, Heusser, Sulzberger, Laban, and
Perrottet. Schoenberg seems quite at home in this company, if one considers that these are all
composers, born between 1860 and 1880, who were lucidly aware of the ties, as well as the
rifts, between their music and the great nineteenth-century melodic and tonal traditions.
Certainly, in the history of Dada, there were types of music which completely rejected
those melodic and tonal traditions. Richard Huelsenbeck, in En avant Dada: eine Geschichte
des Dadaismus, published in 1920,
3
provides a wonderfully clear account of the historical
conflict within Dada between the composed music with its roots in the nineteenth-century
2
Leigh Landy, ‘Duchamp: Dada Composer and his vast influence on Post-World War II
Avant-Garde Music’, in Marcel Duchamp ed. by Klaus Beekman and Antje von Graevenitz
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 131-44 (p. 131).
3
Richard Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada: eine Geschichte des Dadaismus (Hanover: Paul
Steegemann, 1920).
artistic tradition, and a new type of music, based on noise, which contested not only that
tradition, but the very concept of art that subtended it, and with it, the word ‘music’ itself. He
begins from a firm distinction between ‘Musik’ and ‘Bruitismus’. Both, he says, were present
in Zurich Dada. They corresponded to two distinct strands of its aesthetic. He makes it clear
that for his own brand of politicized post-war Berlin Dada, it was ‘Bruitismus’ that mattered,
not music. But Zurich Dada was very different.
One of the main concerns of Zurich Dada was, Huelsenbeck tells us, the movement
towards the identification of true art with abstraction. In that movement, music was of central
importance, as it had been throughout the previous half-century. The very concept of abstract
art had grown to maturity through the development in the nineteenth century of the notion of
absolute music, and through the subsequent application of that notion of absoluteness to the
other arts. Music had thus become the keystone in the edifice of abstract art, hence of art in
general as the Zurich Dadaists wished it to become. Huelsenbeck, proclaiming a new post-
war phase in the history of Dada, wanted to remove that keystone from the edifice, to remove
music from Dada by replacing it with ‘Bruitismus’, and thus to cause the construction of art
to collapse. But he never sought to deny that music, together with a profound belief in art,
had been present in the earlier phase of Dada, at the Cabaret Voltaire (where Heusser also
performed) and during the Zurich soirées. All the evidence from the Zurich Dada period itself
confirms that Huelsenbeck was right. When the Zurich Dadaists wrote about, programmed,
and performed music, their concept of that art remained firmly rooted in the nineteenth-
century concept of music as an art form with an exemplary tendency towards abstraction.
Sébastien Arfouilloux, in his article ‘La musique aux temps de Dada’, has very little
to say about the Zurich Dada soirées. Like Landy, he does not note the full number of
contemporary composers cited in the programmes. Like Landy again, he dismisses Heusser in