The audience at the premiere of the ballet Parade was greeted by this discomforting sign, placed on the curtain by a mischievous Picasso.

From Darius Milhaud's essay:
After the First World War, the "Group of Six" enrolled under Satie's banner. He became our friend, our "mascot", and we played his works in our concerts.
It is true that we were brought closer to him by the scandal around Parade, the ballet by Jean Cocteau with settings and costumes by Pablo Picasso, composed in 1916, created by the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev in 1917. This score marked the final break with Debussyan impressionism and the return to a melodic and harmonic frankness of great purity. In Parade, Satie, still the original thinker, initiated various innovations. Was he not the first to introduce extra-musical elements into the orchestra (sound splashes, lottery wheels, sirens, typewriters, pistol shots, etc.)?

The word "Parade" means: a burlesque scene played outside a side-show booth to try to entice spectators inside.

From notes by S.W. Bennett:
Parade - "Ballet réaliste" in one act, first performance: May 18, 1917, Paris. The setting is the entrace to the circus booth on a fair ground. Three "Managers" enter in turn, introducing various acts as "coming attractions." The Managers are costumed in heavy cubist style, indicating that they, the commercial minds who run the show, are the artificial, imprisoned people; while the actors, who have to provide entertaining illusions at the Managers' command, are the real human beings. The score divisions are: Prelude before the Red Curtain; a Chinese Conjuror; Little School Girl, who enacts the motifs of America, including a Rag-time; Acrobats, the last part of which is a wild dance of the managers, who collapse; Suite in the manner of the Prelude before the Red Curtain, in which the actors explain things to the public.

Background notes for New York Met performance, published in Opera News, Feb 28, 1981:
Of the one-act ballet Parade, first presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on May 18, 1917, Richard Buckle, biographer of Diaghilev, has written, "it opened the gates of the twenties, during which Diaghilev's company would be identified not only with the painters of the School of Paris, but with a group of young composers who revered Satie and were to become known as 'Les Six.'" Extraordinary minds collaborated with the impresario to show that the Russian Ballet was capable of heading in new directions - librettist Jean Cocteau, choreographer Léonide Massine, designer Pablo Picasso and composer Erik Satie, whose contribution has proved the most durable of the three. The consensus of public and critical opinion was that it was a failure, though not without interest. Just as Picasso's naïve curtain, which resembled the decoration of a nineteenth-century fairground, gave no hint of the Cubist novelties to be revealed behind it, the music owed nothing to Debussy and introduced jazz to the typically French idiom. (Parade in its original form is in the repertory of the Joffrey Ballet.)

In 1918, the year after Diaghilev's Russian Ballet staged Satie's Parade in Paris, Poulenc wrote that "to me, Satie's Parade is to Paris what Petrushka is to St. Petersburg." (André Gide, however, commented on its poverty-stricken pretentiousness.) Satie was thenceforth adopted as the spiritual father of 'Les Six', whose ideal was the marriage of serious music with jazz, vaudeville, and the circus. Those who only know Satie from his early Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes - take heed: Parade shuffles along its apparently aimless, deadpan and wicked way with interjections from typewriters, lottery wheels, pistols and sirens.


Mercury CD:

Satie's 'Parade' is the most audacious piece in an excellent Mercury compilation of (mostly) twentieth-century French music ... with the brass obviously relishing their slightly vulgar theme which is somewhat reminiscent of Kurt Weill .... presenting Satie's kaleidoscopic circus colors with the utmost vividness.

Ades CD:

Manuel Rosenthal was born in 1904 in Paris and grew up in the French capital that Satie knew in the last 20 uears of his life. His performances therefore have a certain air and style which one instinctively feels is right. Although from the initial brass chords in Parade it is clear the playing is not very sophisticated and the recording rather shows its age, after a while this matters less and the curious charm of this ballet score - whether stiffly archaic, ruthlessly modern, or touchingly tender - is conveyed with a sure hand. The special effects of sirens, typewriter (complete with bell and manual carriage return), pistol shots, etc. come over with infectious gusto, as does the composer's liberal use of more conventional percussion.

Parade, another difficult piece to bring off, is less happy. Its non-musical sounds (typewriter, siren, pistol, etc.) are recorded with unapologetic clarity, but as a whole the music is presented as a sequence of effects rather than as a significant ordering of outwardly disparate elements. It lacks the poetic atmosphere of Entremont's reading (CBS) which has remained the best locally obtainable version since it appeared in 1971.

Have a look at the bizzarre Vanguard CD cover picture based on Parade.

The Camarata Contemporary Chamber Orchestra used this composition as a vehicle to successfully annoy people.

Here's a tidbit about the original performance from the Ballets Russes page.

A recent performace of Parade is reviewed at Talk About Dance .

Laurie Anderson would have felt right at home in the original performance of Parade. Parade continues to appeal to avante garde performers: A jazz band from Holland, Willem Breuker Kollektief, has recorded a live performance.

Finally, check out this 1986 dance performance with music from experimental musician John Oswald.