Other Darmstadts: An IntroductionChristopher Fox

Other Darmstadts? There is, of course, only one German city with a Jugendstilartists’ colony, a permanent Joseph Beuys installation, and a biennial new music

summer school founded in 1946, the Darmstadter Ferienkurse fur neue Musik. Onthe other hand, each visitor to Darmstadt constructs their own version of the city,and each participant in the ‘Darmstadt’ which is centred on the activities of the

Ferienkurse leaves the city with their own mix of remembered music, spectacle andargument.

In music history there are canonic Darmstadts, the Darmstadt of serial experimentin the 1950s, the Darmstadt of Stockhausen hegemony in the 1960s, the Darmstadt of

New Complexity in the 1980s, but there are other Darmstadts too. Some of theseother Darmstadts consist of no more than informal groupings constructed around

friendship or enmity, the exchange of music and information. There is, however, aterritory between the canonic and the informal, inhabited by constellations ofindividuals and their ideas whose significance has emerged over time, in spite of their

absence from, or mis-representation in, canonic accounts of Darmstadt. It is withthese other Darmstadts that this issue of Contemporary Music Review is concerned.

Perhaps inevitably, the subject matter of Other Darmstadts is primarily located inthe 1950s, the period in which Darmstadt became established as the locus classicus of

the post-war new music. My ‘Music after Zero Hour’ originated as a series of radioscripts for BBC Radio 3, first broadcast in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of

the end of the Second World War, and is a re-consideration of what remains theconventional music-historical view of Darmstadt. In it I suggest that the history of

the development of music at the courses in Darmstadt is more complicated than thisconventional view. In particular I propose a significant inter-relationship between theemerging politics of Cold War Europe and new music; I also suggest that the role of

older music and music from outside the western art music tradition in the work ofthe composers principally associated with Darmstadt in the 1950s is of greater

importance than is usually thought.Paul Attinello’s work on Darmstadt has consistently extended the debate beyond

the founding fathers of the Darmstadt School, Nono, Maderna, Stockhausen andBoulez. Attinello is especially concerned with the composers whom he describes as

the ‘second generation’ of Darmstadt composers: Berio, Bussotti, Kagel, Ligeti, andPousseur, among others. In the work of these composers he finds tendencies which

Contemporary Music ReviewVol. 26, No. 1, February 2007, pp. 1 – 3

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/07494460601069119

one might describe as post-modern: above all, a critical complicity with the formal

techniques of post-war serial techniques. His ‘Postmodern or Modern: A DifferentApproach to Darmstadt’ draws together some of the defining characteristics of this

new direction, while his examination of Dieter Schnebel’s fur stimmen (. . . missa est)offers a fascinating discourse on the compositional aesthetic and reception history of

a major score by one of these second-generation composers.Gianmario Borio’s work as editor of the imposing four volumes of Im Zenit der

Moderne, to date the most comprehensive documentation of the Ferienkurse between

1946 and 1966, places him at the centre of recent Darmstadt scholarship, and his‘Reflections on Adorno’s Analyses for Interpretation’ draws attention to an area of

musical thought at Darmstadt which is often neglected. Throughout their history theDarmstadt courses have been a forum for the dissemination and discussion of new

music performance practice, but most accounts of the courses focus on composersrather than on performers. Adorno presented a series of Darmstadt seminars in the

mid-1950s which attempted to assess the role of analytical understanding in formingmusicians’ interpretative response to a musical work and Borio’s careful explicationof Adorno’s ideas establishes the aesthetic context in which those ideas took shape

while also demonstrating the problematic nature of Adorno’s thought.Above all Borio makes clear the extent to which Adorno’s philosophical project

was concerned with the ways in which modernity drew upon varied, fragmentedparadigms from previous music. Necessarily this was a retrospective process and the

occasional impatience of the young composers of Darmstadt in the 1950s withAdorno’s critique is well documented; from their perspective, their own musical ideas

were well in advance of Adorno’s. Adorno would surely have approved of thethoroughness which David Tudor, for example, brought to the preparation of each

new work he was to perform, a preparation which would involve not only a detailedstudy of the score but also extensive research into the composer’s aestheticpreoccupations. Nevertheless, Adorno’s commitment to the continuity of develop-

ment in the European art music tradition inevitably meant that he could not approveof the radical discontinuities represented by so much of the music Tudor chose to

perform.Amy C. Beal’s survey of Tudor’s association with Darmstadt is testament to the

importance of Tudor as a bridge between the North American and continentalEuropean versions of modernism, bringing exemplary performances of the music of

Wolpe, Cage and Wolff to Europe while also taking on an important role in thepromotion of the work of Boulez and Stockhausen both in Europe and in the USA.Beal reminds us that there was much more to Tudor’s work at Darmstadt than his

infamous appearance with John Cage in the events of the 1958 Ferienkurse; MartinIddon reminds us that there was much more to those events than the Cage – Tudor

performance of Variations I on 3 September which has acquired historical notorietyas the moment when European serialism confronted American indeterminacy.

Iddon’s ‘Gained in Translation’ pays particular attention to the way in whichCage’s ideas subtly changed shape in their translation from English into German,

2 C. Fox

a translation in which the German musicologist Heinz-Klaus Metzger was especially

instrumental, to the extent that ‘John Cage in Darmstadt’ might be regarded assomething of a Metzger construction. Metzger figures again in ‘Gay Darmstadt’,

which examines a nexus of personal relationships at the heart of some of the mostsignificant aesthetic debates of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In collaboration with

David Osmond-Smith, perhaps the most distinguished writer in English on modernItalian music today, Paul Attinello explores the shifting alliances between Metzgerand Boulez, Bussotti and Cage, alliances tempered by both musical and sexual

considerations. The atmosphere at the Ferienkurse has often been sexually charged;Attinello and Osmond-Smith have taken a bold first step in drawing this into a more

formal Darmstadt discourse.My ‘Darmstadt and the Institutionalisation of Modernism’ began life as a con-

ference paper at the 1998 ‘Neue Musik in Darmstadt’ conference, organised by theMusikwissenschaftliches Institut of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz. Like

‘Music after Zero Hour’, it is also in print here for the first time, but it takes aparticularly Anglophone perspective on the Darmstadt legacy, tracing the evolutionof a modernist orthodoxy in the UK and the USA whose origins lie in Darmstadt.

I suggest that the ‘hardening of the categories’ (as Morton Feldman would have putit) suffered by this orthodoxy has left it open to revisionist attack.

It is the intention of my fellow editors and me that this issue of ContemporaryMusic Review should play its part in countering these attacks. If ‘Darmstadt’ was once

a byword for a rigid orthodoxy, ‘Other Darmstadts’ is a reminder that the reality ofthe musical life in and around the Ferienkurse has always been much more fluid,

much more surprising. Our survey of these ‘Other Darmstadts’ may only be a seriesof signposts in the direction of territories for further scholarly exploration, but it

does, we believe, indicate how interesting those territories promise to be.

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