When we think of Dada, we think of an art movement-or anti-art movement-that embraced chance operations, futurism, and experimentation and rejected all of the previous doctrines of the formal art world as moribund and fraudulent.

One medium we don't often associate with Dada, however, is music. And yet, those same artists who waged war on the establishment with readymade urinals and rambling manifestos also did so with musical compositions that were as influential as the painting, film, and poetry. Dada, and its immediate successor, surrealism. Dada exerted a pervasive influence on 20th-century music, but the presence of Dada and surrealism is generally unrecognized or forgotten in discussions of mid-century avant-garde composers in New York, like Stefan Wolpe, Morton Feldman, and John Cage. And yet, the repetitive, machine-like qualities we associate with mid-century minimalism come more or less directly from the Dadaists, as does the high concept experimentation.