British Music at Darmstadt 1982–92

Abstract

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.