New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (review)

Abstract

New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification. By Amy C. Beal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xvi, 340 p. ISBN 0-520-24755-8. $49.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. In music, no less than other fieldshistorical, political and cultural-the relationship between the United States of America and West Germany is one that clearly defines the post-1945 world. The close association of the Federal Republic and the United States has been considered recent years volumes such as Detlef Junker's two edited volumes The United States and Germany the Era of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Thomas A. Schwartz's America's Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), Ralph Willett's The Americanization of Germany (New York: Routledge, 1989), and John Willoughby's Remaking the Conquering Heroes (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Yet despite the importance of this connection, until relatively recently, little work had been undertaken that considered detail the broader cultural, artistic, and musical contexts of this relationship. Amy C. Beal's new volume will doubtless play a prominent part this developing area, begun with Frances Stonor Saunders's Who Paid the Piper? (London: Granta Books, 1999) and continued David Monod's Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945-1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Beal's chief focus is an examination of the ways which West German patronage affected American composers of experimental music, most prominently the members of the so-called New York SchoolEarle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff-but also David Tudor, La Monte Young, Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Steve Reich, and Alvin Lucier. In a period when support for their music at home was often at a premium, this is hardly an exhaustive list of North American composers who, like Earle Brown, might have said that in Europe you feel like you've got a real career (p. 137). The scene rapidly moves from a Germany under Allied occupation-where the direction of military government dominated musical re-education-to the Germany of the early 1950s, where Heinrich Strobel's revitalised Donaueschingen Festival, Herbert Eimert's late night radio broadcasts on NWDR and Wolfgang Rebner's 1954 lecture began to introduce German audiences to the experimentalism of Cage and Cowell, not always with entirely positive responses from their various audiences. Reminding us of performances of the music of William Grant Still Baden-Baden, for instance, Beal is rightly careful to avoid the impression that, as she puts it, all roads lead to Darmstadt (p. 253). Nonetheless, by the mid-1950s was swiftly becoming the primary focus for new music West Germany, with American experimental music represented 1956 by Stefan Wolpe and David Tudor and 1958 by Cage's own controversial presence. Implicit within Beal's narrative is the way which developing friendships directed precisely who was promoted where and when. Perhaps the most significant example of this is the manner which the ebullient first director of the courses, Wolfgang Steinecke, went about bringing everything and everybody he could to Darmstadt, often on the advice of trusted friends and junior colleagues like Maderna and Stockhausen. As the 1960s approached, Darmstadt's premier position as the only major venue for new music was on the wane: Beal outlines the growing variety of outlets and promoters for American experimentalism West Germany, including Mary Bauermeister's studio Cologne, Radio Bremen's Pro Musica Nova Festival under Hans Otte, and the German Academic Exchange Service's Berlin Artist Program, Beal does not forget the citadel of the avant-garde, though, examining Darmstadt's trajectory under its second director, Ernst Thomas, after Wolfgang Steinecke's untimely death 1961. …