17 - Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75

Summary

Darmstadt after Steinecke

When Wolfgang Steinecke – the originator of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse – died at the end of 1961, much of the increasingly fragile spirit of collegiality within the Cologne/Darmstadt-centred avant-garde died with him. Boulez and Stockhausen in particular were already fiercely competitive, and when in 1960 Steinecke had assigned direction of the Darmstadt composition course to Boulez, Stockhausen had pointedly stayed away. Cage’s work and significance was a constant source of acrimonious debate, and Nono’s bitter opposition to him was one reason for the Italian composer being marginalized by the Cologne inner circle as a structuralist reactionary. Other Cologne figures were starting to assert their creative personalities, and look for their place in the sun: Argentinian-born Mauricio Kagel, whose Anagrama (1959) had upstaged the premiere of Stockhausen’s Kontakte at the 1960 ISCM Festival in Cologne, was starting to rebel against Stockhausen’s assumptions of supremacy; the Hungarian György Ligeti, disenchanted by the incessant conflicts, had left Cologne for Vienna just at the moment where his own distinctive compositional voice was starting to emerge in the orchestral work Apparitions (1960); and Gottfried Michael Koenig (b. 1926), who had been Stockhausen’s right-hand man in the electronic studios since the mid-1950s, and whose Klangfiguren II (1956) had been the only work one could think of setting beside Gesang der Jünglinge, would shortly leave for Holland.