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Music since 1900
New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, And Boulez
New Music at Darmstadt explores the rise and fall of the so-called 'Darmstadt School,' through a wealth of primary sources and analytical commentary. Martin Iddon's book examines the creation of the Darmstadt New Music Courses and the slow development and subsequent collapse of the idea of the Darmstadt School, showing how participants in the West German new music scene, including Herbert Eimert and a range of journalistic commentators, created an image of a coherent entity, despite the very diverse range of compositional practices on display at the courses. The book also explores the collapse of the seeming collegiality of the Darmstadt composers, which crystallised around the arrival there in 1958 of the most famous, and notorious, of all post-war composers, John Cage, an event Carl Dahlhaus opined 'swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster.'
- GenresMusicNonfiction
329 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 25, 2015
This book by Martin Iddon is a history of some of the polemics at the summer new music courses in Darmstadt from their founding right after World War II to the death of their first organizer, Wolfgang Steinecke in 1962. While Darmstadt is often looked back on as a “school”, a group of composers united in a certain avant-garde direction, disagreement was in fact rife, with a number of divergent approaches at any particular time. After sketching the beginnings of the Darmstadt courses in the late 1940s, Iddon describes the rise and fall of two general modernist trends over the 1950s: multiple serialism, and after John Cage’s arrival in Europe and especially his 1958 Darmstadt lectures, the adoption of musical chance procedures. Besides Cage, the composers Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono were some of the most forceful voices for what new music should be, which gives Iddon’s book its subtitle. No less important in these debates, however, are critics like Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Theodor Adorno. In exploring this era, Iddon draws on a great deal of press coverage and personal correspondence.
The popular image of Darmstadt – a misconception even I, a longtime fan of mid-century modernism, had – was that it was a perennial haunt of total serialists and dominated by Stockhausen and Boulez from nearly the very start. In fact, Darmstadt began with a great deal of Hindemith on the program, and even in the mid-1950s avant-garde premieres were just a slice of a larger program of older works. The first famous modernists to commit themselves to the Ferienkurse and make a splash were Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono, with Karel Goeyvaerts being the first to raise a scandal through a total serialist piece. While Stockhausen and Boulez did serve as a lightning rod for critics of serialism, their Fifties heyday lasted only a few years, from roughly 1955 to 1958, and while Boulez was a respected figure in European music and well-known to Darmstadt’s organizers and many participants, he was absent for a number of years in the 1950s.
The main thrust of Iddon’s book is how each composer took serialism or chance procedures in their own personal direction. For example, even within chance procedures, there was an enormous difference between John Cage’s attempt to eliminate the ego by generating a piece by flipping a coin, and Stockhausen and Boulez’s work that simply allowed the performer to choose the order that sections of more conventional music were played in. Often, while pursuing their own style, composers would disparage the way other composers did things, such as Stockhausen’s infamous complaint about Nono’s Il canto sospeso, or Nono’s own 1959 anti-Cage lecture “Music and History”. Critics’ attacks on composers or composers’ attacks on their peers were often based on misunderstandings of how the music was actually written or performed, and it often seems that certain composers were simply used as pawns in one critic’s sniping at another critic, facts be damned. There was a widespread misunderstanding, for example, that pianist David Tudor was improvising when performing Cage, but in fact the elements of chance had been decided already by the composer, and Tudor had to prepare his performance carefully from the score.
The section of the book on total serialism does look at a few pieces in depth, with extracts from the score and an expectation that the reader has a firm grounding in theory. However, the era of the “Cage shock” lacks that: while Iddon repeatedly mentions the fad of graphic scores, there are sadly none reproduced in the book. It is also worth mentioning that Iddon’s coverage of stylistic trends ends with the “Cage shock”, and while I understand that, say, the “sound mass” music of Ligeti is outside the scope of the book, I would have appreciated some mention in the afterword of what replaced Iddon’s two 1950s trends.
The popular image of Darmstadt – a misconception even I, a longtime fan of mid-century modernism, had – was that it was a perennial haunt of total serialists and dominated by Stockhausen and Boulez from nearly the very start. In fact, Darmstadt began with a great deal of Hindemith on the program, and even in the mid-1950s avant-garde premieres were just a slice of a larger program of older works. The first famous modernists to commit themselves to the Ferienkurse and make a splash were Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono, with Karel Goeyvaerts being the first to raise a scandal through a total serialist piece. While Stockhausen and Boulez did serve as a lightning rod for critics of serialism, their Fifties heyday lasted only a few years, from roughly 1955 to 1958, and while Boulez was a respected figure in European music and well-known to Darmstadt’s organizers and many participants, he was absent for a number of years in the 1950s.
The main thrust of Iddon’s book is how each composer took serialism or chance procedures in their own personal direction. For example, even within chance procedures, there was an enormous difference between John Cage’s attempt to eliminate the ego by generating a piece by flipping a coin, and Stockhausen and Boulez’s work that simply allowed the performer to choose the order that sections of more conventional music were played in. Often, while pursuing their own style, composers would disparage the way other composers did things, such as Stockhausen’s infamous complaint about Nono’s Il canto sospeso, or Nono’s own 1959 anti-Cage lecture “Music and History”. Critics’ attacks on composers or composers’ attacks on their peers were often based on misunderstandings of how the music was actually written or performed, and it often seems that certain composers were simply used as pawns in one critic’s sniping at another critic, facts be damned. There was a widespread misunderstanding, for example, that pianist David Tudor was improvising when performing Cage, but in fact the elements of chance had been decided already by the composer, and Tudor had to prepare his performance carefully from the score.
The section of the book on total serialism does look at a few pieces in depth, with extracts from the score and an expectation that the reader has a firm grounding in theory. However, the era of the “Cage shock” lacks that: while Iddon repeatedly mentions the fad of graphic scores, there are sadly none reproduced in the book. It is also worth mentioning that Iddon’s coverage of stylistic trends ends with the “Cage shock”, and while I understand that, say, the “sound mass” music of Ligeti is outside the scope of the book, I would have appreciated some mention in the afterword of what replaced Iddon’s two 1950s trends.
December 13, 2016
Iddon presents an in depth study of the history of ideas of the Darmstadt summer course, from the beginnings after the war until the death of Steinecke in 1961. After a very promising introductory chapter, the books gets too up close on the details for my taste. Iddon has his microscope zoomed in on the various lectures given by Adorno, Nono, Stockhausen and Cage (with Boulez as a mostly absent side character) and reviews of some of the concerts. If one is turned on by the inner workings of the Darmstadt circle, this is a must-read. For me, the book didn't offer much more than a reference.
October 16, 2023
Los cursos de verano de Darmstadt siempre se han visto rodeados de una cierta leyenda, casi mística. Este libro esclarece con bastante precisión lo acontecido en estos cursos, centrándose en las figuras de Nono, Stockhausen, Cage y Boulez (Maderna también es ampliamente mencionado). Una lectura recomendable para cualquier amante de la música de la postguerra y de la gran evolución que estos cursos supusieron.
July 6, 2020
Couldn't finish. Sad to take such an interesting topic and make it so dreadfully dull.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews