"[8]Adorno cites as the most consequent surrealist compositions those works by Kurt Weill, such as The Threepenny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, along with works by others drawn from the middle-period music of Igor Stravinsky—most particularly that of L'Histoire du soldat—and defines this surrealism as a hybrid form between the "modern" music of Arnold Schoenberg and his school, and the "objectivist" neoclassicism/folklorism of the later Stravinsky.
This surrealism is further differentiated from a fourth type of music, the so-called Gebrauchsmusik of Paul Hindemith and Hanns Eisler, which attempts to break through alienation from within itself, even at the expense of its immanent form.
[10] The early works of musique concrète by Pierre Schaeffer have a surrealist character owing to the unexpected juxtaposition of sound objects, such as the sounds of Balinese priests chanting, a barge on the River Seine, Sacha Guitry's singing and coughing, and rattling saucepans in Étude aux casseroles (1948).
[11] The composer Olivier Messiaen referred to the "surrealist anxiety" of Schaeffer's early work in contrast to the "asceticism" of the later Etude aux allures of 1958.
"[13] Schaeffer himself argued that musique concrète, in its initial phase, tended either towards atonality or surrealism, or both, rather than, as it subsequently became, the starting point of a more general musical procedure.