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British Music at Darmstadt 1982–92

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Christopher Fox
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Extract

The new music summer school in Darmstadt is perhaps the most important gathering of and performers of contemporary music in Europe. Launched in 1946 in the then American Zone of occupied Germany, as part of the postwar process of internationalization (and, therefore, de-Nazification) of German culture, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse quickly gained a reputation as a forum for the promulgation of a radically abstract musical aesthetic, based on reductive analyses of the serial works of Webern in particular. While some composers saw this new aesthetic as a ‘mechanistic heresy’, the music of what came to be known as the Darmstadt School – Boulez, Maderna, Nono, Stockhausen – soon attracted official support since, like Abstract Expressionist painting, ‘a seemingly abstract art could readily be elevated as an emblem of “terrible freedom”’. This ‘terrible freedom’, the freedom to be unpopular, was a potent symbol of Western individualism in the symbolic battle that characterized the European theatre of the Cold War during the 1950s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 186 , September 1993 , pp. 21 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Henze, Hans Werner (translated by Labanyi, Peter), ‘German music in the 1940s and 1950s’, Music and Politics, Faber (1982), p. 38 Google Scholar.

2 Fuller, Peter, ‘American Painting since the last war’. Beyond the Crisis in Art, Writers and Readers (1980), p.79 Google Scholar.

3 Trudu, Antonio, La ‘Scuola’ di Darmstadt, Ricordi (1992), p.245 Google Scholar. Trudu's book is the first attempt at a comprehensive history of the Ferienkurse and I have drawn on it extensively for archival information on pre-1980 Darmstadt.

4 See for example Toop's, Richard claim in ‘Four Facets of the New Complexity’ Contact 32 (Spring 1988), p.4 Google Scholar, that Dench, Dillon, Barrett and Finnissy are ‘alongside Birtwistle and Ferneyhough… the few possible sources of light within a scene otherwise dominated by… “The New Capitulationism”.’.

5 Nonetheless, Darmstadt's official recognition of compositional achievement, the Kranischsteinerpreis, whose winners included British composers at all but one of the Ferienkurse under review, was never awarded to a ‘not-Complex’ composer. In 1982 it went to Dillon, in 1984 to Dench, in 1986 to Barrett, in 1988 to Redgate and in 1992 to James Clarke. (In 1990 it was awarded exclusively to the quite extraordinarily complex German composer, Klaus K. Hiibler.)

6 Potter, Keith, ‘Darmstadt 1988’. Contact 34 (Autumn 1989), p.29 Google Scholar.

7 Hughes, Edward, ‘British Music in Darmstadt’, New Music 89 (Oxford University Press, 1989), p.59 Google Scholar. By 1992 the hooligan tendency had largely vanished. A shame: 1 found the booing quite stimulating!

8 Darmstadt in Amsterdam (12–14 November 1987) was a series of concerts and other events at the Ijsbreker, Amsterdam, mounted by the IMD in collaboration with the Stichting Gaudeamus and was accompanied by the publication of Musique pure dans un siecle sale (compiled by Friedrich Hommel and Wilhclm Schluter), a collection of texts and photographs documenting the work of the Institut and Ferienkurse during the period of 1950 to 1960.

9 Darmstadt in Milano (January 1989) explored the Italian connection with Darmstadt and was supported by Logica e Poesia: Darmstadt ieri e oggi(also compiled by Hommel and Schluter). Both this and the Amsterdam compilation demonstrate the extraordinary riches within the IMD's archive. 1 am indebted to the staff of the IMD and, in particular, to Herren Hommel and Schluter, for making this material available to me.