Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)
Judit Galácz: Avant-Garde Experiments Committed to Paper - the MA “Music and Theatre Special Issue” (1924)
towards the fine arts focus of the Bauhaus school’s theatre concepts, which unified cubist and expressionist endeavours along mechanist lines.0 Two artists connected to the Bauhaus were also published in the special issue: László Moholy-Nagy’s sketch for a film entitled Egy nagyváros dinamikája [Dynamic of the Metropolis],20 21 22 23 as well as El Lissitzky’s Die elektro-mechanische Schau [The Electro-Mechanical Show] with accompanying illustrations, including the mechanical set design for the 1923 futurist opera Victory over the Sun. Both works exemplify the Bauhaus theatre’s commitment towards mechanics and the experiments in mechanical movement of the stage. [Figs. 6-7] Artists working at the Bauhaus viewed the scene as a playground of architectonic parts, forms and colours. They thought that if theatre wanted to remain alive in the film era, then mechanics should be present on the stage. These principles were also related to the puppet designs of Georg Teltscher, which incorporated the problematics of the mechanisation of man into debates about theatre theory. [Fig. 8] The question of mechanics is further addressed by the photograph of Fernand Léger’s moving sets [Fig. 9] as well as the texts by Hans Heinz Stuck- enschmidt - Mechanisierung der Musik [The Mechanisation of Music] - and Josef Matthias Hauer’s Zur Einführung in Meine “Zwölftönenmusik" [Introduction to my Twelve-Tone Music].24 Stuckenschmidt thought in terms of the structural qualities of musical instruments and the most advanced means of musical reproduction of its time, the gramophone. He was interested in how the structure of these sound-creating and playing instruments could be further developed mechanically for music to become more enjoyable. The score and text by the Austrian composer Hauer dealt with an exceptionally provocative question from the Viennese music world of the 1920s. Hauer’s compatriot and fellow composer Arnold Schönberg, together with his students, had tried to work out a compositional practice based on a twelve-tone scale, which they called dodecaphony. This method was significant because it helped to bring 20 See Rózsa Kocsis, Igen és nem, op. cit., 188. 21 László Moholy-Nagy, Egy nagyváros dinamikája [Dynamic of a metropolis], MA, "Music and Theatre Special issue", 9/8-9., 1924, [8-10.] 22 El Lissitzky, Die elektro-mechanische Schau [The electro-mechanical show], Ibid., [5.] Originally published as Die plastische Gestaltung der elektro-mechanische Schau Sieg über Sonne, Moskau 1913, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, 1923. English translation in Timothy O. Benson- Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, op. cit., 447-448. 23 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Mechanisierung der Musik [The mechanisation of music], Ibid., 9/8-9., 1924, [12.] 24 Josef Matthias Hauer, Zur Einführung in meine “Zwölftönenmusik" [Introduction to my twelve-tone music], Ibid., [16.] 194
