The relatively new term «musical surrealism» describes a musical style which, between the two World Wars, represents another way of thinking musical composition, in addition to Dodecaphony and Neoclassicism. It springs from the latter, for it works with preexisting materials, but it has also strong links with the modernist, especially cubist and surrealist, technique of collage. The term «musical surrealism» was first invented by Theodor W. Adorno and it refers to a music which juxtaposes fragments of preexisting music in a single aesthetical unit: It tries to draw new meanings from the dialectic among those musical fragments. In this paper I explore the meaning of «musical surrealism», and the several ways in which Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) makes a surrealist musical collage by juxtaposing fragments that are neither mere citations nor completely new pieces of music – they are rather pictures of preexisting music.

KEYWORDS: Surrealism, Surrealist, Neoclassicism, Music, Poulenc, Adorno.