Music and Clowning in Europe, 20th-21st Century

The course offers training that combines the development of artistic sensitivity and creativity with the learning of wordless acting techniques.

Starting from the observation that musical practices in clowning remain largely unexplored, the research project addresses the issue of musical humor in the 20th century from two different perspectives. First, it investigates how music and sound are used in European clowning traditions; secondly, it seeks to broaden the definitions of musical humor by introducing the category of the “clownesque” for a range of modern works. A musicological perspective on clowning will shed new light on this tradition; in turn, interpreting 20th-century musical humor through the lens of clown practices will highlight the physicality of musical gestures and their relationship with this little-explored form of visual comedy.

The first part of the project aims to outline the history of music in clowning based on archival research and in-depth studies of three key 20th-century figures whose performances are preserved on film. Two of these case studies concern clowns who primarily performed in concert halls and theaters, while the third focuses on a clown whose work was developed through cinema. The Swiss clown Grock, who brought his act from the circus to the music hall, was famous for his virtuosic use of music. Following in his footsteps, Dimitri, another Swiss clown, continued this musical tradition, keeping it alive through his performances and his teaching at the Teatro Dimitri School, founded in Verscio in 1975 (now Accademia Dimitri). The third case study focuses on the French filmmaker Jacques Tati, an artist fascinated by the circus world and trained in the music hall before transferring his clowning practice to cinema. Tati’s film art is characterized by unique sound effects situated at the intersection of music and sound.

Alongside this historical axis, the project will examine contemporary clowning practices based on observations conducted in two different institutions: the Accademia Teatro Dimitri and the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Observing teaching techniques will shed light on the creative processes of clowning, complemented by interviews with contemporary clowns and musicians. The description and analysis of the musical practices in clowning will focus on temporal aspects, relationships between music and gesture, music and image, music and sound, and on sound-producing means (musical instruments, objects, and voice).

The second part of the project, which concerns the notion of musical humor in 20th-century European and Russian music, will derive directly from the first. The practices of 20th-century clowns may have influenced modern instrumental music precisely because of the cross-fertilization between “high” and “low” genres characteristic of that period. By focusing on instrumental music (without text), it becomes possible to rethink certain forms of musical humor in terms of the “clownesque.” The analysis of musical humor will mirror the questions used in the first part of the project, thus highlighting strong connections between 20th-century music and clowning—such as shared gestures of opening and closure, the use of repetition and interruption, and the characteristic gesture of falling. This analysis will shed light on a particular type of “physical” humor present in much of the modern musical repertoire.

The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione).

Project leader: Anna Stoll Knecht, PhD