Twentieth-Century Classical Music by Fiona Maddocks

Author:Fiona Maddocks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405932417
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Darmstadt: adventures in cults and schisms

The German city of Darmstadt was devastated by Allied bombing in the Second World War. In a quest for renewal, an International Festival for Contemporary Music was founded in 1946 – in the early years covertly funded by America’s CIA as part of a cultural propaganda war.

Soon it became a high-profile meeting place for composers in the heart of post-war Europe, flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s. Those who came helped to shape the eclectic sounds of the twentieth century. To outsiders, Darmstadt looked like an avant-garde cult ruled by serialist orthodoxy. Internally there was hot debate and often schism.

Stravinsky, now in his sixties and living in California, felt his music had no place in this brave new world: these composers were, he noted, ‘a generation which biologically [seems] to be hostile to me. What to do?’ What he did was enter a serialist phase of his own with works such as Agon (1953–7).

Electronic music burgeoned, via tape recorders, electronic instruments and computers. Karlheinz Stockhausen emerged as Darmstadt’s sorcerer-mentor.

‘[Music] has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world,’ wrote the critical theorist and composer Theodor Adorno. When he failed to understand a particularly thorny piano piece (by another Darmstadt composer), Stockhausen retorted: ‘Professor, you are looking for a chicken in an abstract painting.’

LISTEN: Nono, Variazione canoniche (1950)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.