When the Cabaret Voltaire opened as «Künstlerkneipe Voltaire» on February 5, 1916, its initial program – advertised on a poster designed by Marcel Słodki – first announced «music recitals and recitations.» Music was indeed central to the Dada impulses that unfolded during the Soirées, first at Cabaret Voltaire, then at the movement’s various venues in Zurich, and later transcending both national and European borders. Yet, neither in Dada Zurich’s historiography nor in the common conceptions of the movement, music is as prominently featured or contextualized in its full complexity. The «Interlude» program in the Vaulted Cellar unfolds in two acts from February to April 2025 and thematizes Dada’s legacy in relation to music and sound, while also creating space for contemporary practices and discourses. The title «Interlude» refers to the traditional structure of musical compositions and to what hap- pens during the interval between parts of a larger composition. At Cabaret Voltaire, «Interlude» activates the Vaulted Cellar between the usual exhibition program, inviting the audience to a different kind of immersive and reflective experience.

Dada is often associated with loud disturbing sounds as well as chaos and randomness. Yet, the program sheets and chronicles of various protagonists reveal that the Dada Soirées in Zurich brought together many opposing artistic directions of the time: experiments with noise shared the stage with pieces rooted in the Western harmonic musical tradition, played by protagonists such as Hans Heusser and Suzanne Perrottet. At Cabaret Voltaire and the later Zurich venues, one could hear romantic pieces by Saint-Saëns and Rachmaninov, as well as folk music in German, French, Danish and Russian, brought by the movement’s inter- national protagonists, most of whom were fleeing the First World War. The two founders of Cabaret Voltaire were professionally active as cabaret musicians. During the Dada Soirées, Emmy Hennings sang folk songs and Hugo Ball played ragtime music on the piano. However, against a backdrop of disillusionment stemming from the crises of the war, Dada also developed new artistic languages that often drew on anti- traditional principles and used rhythm and sound as artistic materials.

Some of these innovations were shaped by the appropriation of non-European idioms; what was problematically labeled as «primitive» was embraced as a liberating alternative to communicate more directly with the public and disrupt the established norms of traditional Western art and the values of bourgeois society. With access to examples of African poetry, Zurich’s Dada artists incorporated «Chants N_» and the bruitist works of Richard Huelsenbeck into their Soirées programs, without critically reflecting on this appropriation. On the other hand, a crucial part of the experimental sound research of Dada artists also unfolded in questioning language as a tool of propaganda, in a context where nationalism established itself exponentially, which resonates with today’s political reality.

One of Dada’s artistic strategies was to understand words no longer as signifiers but as sound and use them as rhythms and intonations. A few years before the opening of Cabaret Voltaire, the futurist Luigi Russolo published the manifesto L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises), in opposition to academism and tradition, while seeking a direct and dynamic impact on the audience. Yet, within Futurism, the reproduction and declamation of machine and war sounds is to be understood as a proto-fascist celebration of modernity. In contrast, Dada artists used language itself to question nationalist propaganda, critiquing the violence of the modern age and war. This is particularly evident in the development of the new forms of sound poetry and simultaneous poetry, used mainly by Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, in which the noise of nonsensical words stands for an opposition to normative rationality. In these sonic tactics, the body was the instrument and place of declamation, and thus, a form of opposition against structures of power and rules.

The development of experimental music in the 20th and 21st centuries owes a certain legacy to Dada. The movement’s anti-bourgeois ethos resonates with various movements, such as Fluxus, or the punk and noise music genres, all of which embrace sound as a site of opposition. Figures such as Merzbow – the stage name of the pioneering Japanese noise artist of the 1980s and 1990s Masami Akita – or the industrial band Cabaret Voltaire demonstrate these historical links, with Akita directly referencing Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau. The processes of aleatoric creation exemplified by Tzara’s «cut-up» technique, or collage and assemblage, find a particular echo in sampling cultures, in the pioneering experimental compositions of John Cage, or in musique concrète and its sound collages. The use of urban soundscapes, field recordings and various environmental sounds in today’s electronic music resonates with Ball’s sound poetry. The centrality of the body and performance in this form of poetry is also crucial to contemporary sound art practices that blur the lines between music, poetry and the visual arts. The rejection of norms and the search for raw sounds in the various directions of noise music align with the transgressive ethos of Dada.

«Interlude» bridges the gap between this history and contemporary sound practices, giving them space as an echo to Dada’s legacy.