ABSTRACT
The music in which Dada was born was in continuity with long musical traditions known to its founders. Dada performed piano music by late Romantic composers, and by those who knew they were the successors of those composers. Music of which one says nothing, then, retains, in Dada, a unique function, because it retains a link with tradition which becomes the marker of the permanence and true identity of art. Paris Dada was played on musical instruments. It borrowed structural references and features from music. The poetry and visual art of Dada soirees and exhibitions often created for those events and distinctive in style, were decisive turning points in the history of Western art because of the way they renewed the relationship between artist, medium, work, and audience. Dada logic explains the special place of music, as the art which can only be an art, and on which the other arts rely for the proof of their own existence.
