Новая музыка в Австрии и Германии после 1918 года: от бунта к консолидации

Abstract

The year 1918 opens a new political era as well as a new period in the history of art. It is associated with the promotion and strengthening of new music, which was accepted by the public only after the First World War. After the "heroic years" of the 1910s, new music gradually formed its own secessionist culture in the post-war period. It gave the right to compose new music as well as an opportunity to perform, listen, and evaluate it. The article covers the activities of several local new music societies in Vienna, Berlin, and Dresden (Schoenberg Society for Private Musical Performances, J. M. Hauer’s Free Movement group, The Berlin Group of H. Scherchen, The November Group, and E. Schulhoff’s circle). The article explores the repertoire which had no stylistic, national, ideological, or political restrictions. However, due to organizational and economic reasons it was limited mainly to chamber compositions. The article also focuses on the criticism of new music (Abnruch magazine in Vienna, Melos magazine in Berlin). The historical evidence analyzed in the article allows us to re-evaluate the role of the secessionist culture of new music in the post-war years, which contributed to significant changes in its performance, perception and evaluation. This, in turn, marked the beginning of the era of new music as an “organized activity"—the heyday of the festival movement in the mid-1920s. At the same time, radical art was rapidly losing its unity: the confrontation of divergent aesthetic trends (the Schoenberg school and Neoclassicism) resulted in a split. The revolutionary impulse gradually exhausted itself, new music was academized and became a tradition.