ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains why Dada itself was born not only to the sound of music, but from a principled refusal to write about that sound. The evolution of Dada after 1918 can be read as a playing out of this contradictory dynamic around music: at once the very heart of Dada, and necessarily unspeakable. The struggle between Dada's musical and anti-musical factions may be seen as the root cause of the violent death of Dada in Paris as a performing enterprise in 1923. New York Dada never knew that struggle, because it never knew how to make room for music; that was why it was never able to put on soirees to match those in Zurich and Paris. The book argues that the concealment of music is the foundational gesture of the art of the twentieth century.
