Letter from Europe

Abstract

The proliferation of European festivals and conferences focusing on contemporary music is becoming so great that if any of the group of musicians regularly invited were to accept all his invitations, he would be kept busy almost all year simply in traveling from one country to another. For there is a small nucleus that meets over and over again, once even in Tokyo (as happened last year) but most often at the annual festivals, such as the Biennale in Venice in April, the Zagreb Festival in May, the ISCM Festival at the beginning of June-last year in London, this year in Amsterdam-and, during the summer, in the courses at Darmstadt, Dartington Hall, Cheltenham, etc.; then again in September in Warsaw, in early October either at Palermo or Berlin, and at Donaueschingen in late October. Although each of these festivals has its local supporters, performers, composers, and a special public that has grown rapidly in recent years, there is an increasingly large itinerant group of young enthusiasts that goes from one place to the other. To everyone's amazement (but to the delight of only some), music festivals are becoming increasingly successful. This year the size of the audiences for the third annual Palermo festival (about 2500 for each event) has stimulated other less thriving Italian music festivals of other types to rethink their plans for next year in an attempt to attract some of this modernistic public, even though music festivals are notoriously expensive to give, requiring sometimes extravagant numbers of rehearsals, and sometimes the assistance of one of the special group of conductors and performers accustomed to the problems of new music. The main artistic orientation of these festivals has become more and more that of the Darmstadt school, not so much because its members have made a concerted effort to control the programs, but because increasing amounts of music of an interesting nature have their source there. By now it is clear that the members of this school have become the arbiters of what it is to be modern in Europe, for the novelty of their music and their ideas have been intensively and quite intelligently promoted by many different agencies. Sometimes it seems that the very fact of such musical activity within a limited sphere, brilliant and fascinating as it sometimes is, will lead quickly to surfeit, but right now this is the lively school and its influences are felt everywhere in Europe where young composers try to strike out