Neue Musik Research Articles

THE ROLE OF THE DARMSTADT CONCERTINO IN THE COMPOSITIONAL OUTPUT OF ZDZISAW SZOSTAK

Both in academic publications and in the music press, little attention has been paid to the figure of Zdzisaw Szostak a conductor and a composer, who spent most of his professional life at the d Philharmonic and the Academy of Music in d. Prof. Szostak was seen by the musical community mainly through the prism of his great achievements in the field of film music. The artists later autonomous works had to contend against the success and recognition of his previous compositions. In the article, however, the author focuses on a specific autonomous work by Szostak the Darmstadt Concertino for violin, piano and orchestra, with the title clearly associated with the important 20th century centre of European avant-garde. The resulting connotation seemed particularly interesting due to Szostaks reluctance to radical compositional means used by artists associated with the famous Internationale Ferienkurse fr Neue Musik. The intriguing contradiction encoded in the title and the rudimentary knowledge of the work led the author to investigate its history based on the collected sources. These were limited to a piano reduction assembled in parts, some orchestral voices and completely amateur, poor quality recording. The only possible way to obtain information about the genesis of the piece was interviewing soloists, the violinist ukasz Baszczyk and the pianist Mariusz Drzewicki. The musicians participated in the premiere performance, which was conducted in Darmstadt in November 1998 by Zdzisaw Szostak himself. The concert crowned the celebration of the sixth edition of the Polish Music and Culture Week in Darmstadt organised by the German Chopin Society.

Maki Ishii und sein Engagement bei den Darmstädter Ferienkursen und dem Deutsch-Japanischen Festival für Neue Musik in Tokio

This article examines the legacy of the Japanese composer Maki Ishii (1936–2003) based on his works and his activities in Berlin, Darmstadt, and Tokyo. Using hitherto unknown source material in the Archives of the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD) and the Maki-Ishii-Archive in Berlin, the article demonstrates how Maki Ishii arrived at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse by presenting letters of reference by important people, as well as the reception of the events in Darmstadt in Tokyo through the interaction of this well-known composer with intercultural engagement. The relevance of the “Deutsch-Japanisches Festival für Neue Musik”, which was organized by Ishii and Yoshirō Irino in close collaboration with the directors of the Goethe Institute in Tokyo, is attested in the programmes collected at the Archives of Modern Japanese Music at the Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. The source-based approach explains Maki Ishii’s role in connecting Darmstadt with Japan and Japan with Darmstadt, and shows how he became one of the pioneers to internationalize traditional and modern Japanese music after the Second World War.

Личные библиотеки А. Шёнберга и А. Берга как источник изучения творческой биографии

Composers’ personal libraries began to be the objects of research relatively recently, only about a hundred years ago. Meanwhile, it presents a valuable source for research of composers’ artistic biographies, which bears the imprint of the personalities both of the owner of the book collection and of his or her entire generation. The library makes it possible to evaluate the tastes and the predilections of the composer in question, helps reconstruct his or her artistic ideas, at times contains various types of marginalia, which in modern source studies have acquired the status of texts. The fate of Arnold Schönberg’s library and that of his student Alban Berg unfolded differently from each other. Schönberg was not a bibliophile, his personal library served him as a working tool and reflected his multifaceted interests in various fields of knowledge. Despite his numerous relocations, his library retained its integrity. Schönberg himself compiled a partial inventory of it, arranging the books in accordance with his hierarchy of values. The systematic study of his book collection began at the Arnold Schönberg Institute in Los Angeles and was continued at the Arnold Schönberg Center after his archive was moved to Vienna. Of particular value in the Schönberg library are his polemical marginalia, in which he conducts imaginary discussions with contemporaries: Hans Pfitzner, Ferruccio Busoni, Heinrich Schenker and others. They complement the corpus of Schönberg’s published and unpublished music theory texts. Berg’s library is up to the present day located in the composer’s Vienna apartment. Researchers received access to his books at a relatively late date, after the death of Berg’s widow Helena in 1976. The systematization and cataloging of the Berg Library has not been finished up to the present time. Berg came from an antiquarian family, he inherited his bibliophilia from his father. Already from a young age, he perceived his personal library a means of cognition of himself and the world, as evidenced by the large-scale collection of quotations Von der Selbsterkenntnis [About Self-Cognition] compiled by him. Berg, like Schönberg, had a habit of polemizing with opponents in the form of marginalia (such is his polemics with Wilhelm Krug in his book Neue Musik). Of great interest to researchers are Berg’s work copies of Georg Büchner’s dramatic play Wozzeck by, as well as Frank Wedekind’s dilogy of plays Erdgesit [The Spirit of the Earth] and Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s box] which were used by Berg during his work on the librettos for each of his two operas. They make it possible to reconstruct the composer’s creative process and contain valuable instructions regarding the dramaturgy and compositional form, the protagonists’ characteristic features, as well as the formal structures of separate sections of the operas. The ongoing process of digitization of Schönberg’s and Berg’s archives makes it possible for us to hope that researchers on all the continents will be granted access to personal libraries of these two composers, as well as those of other composers.

Ende der Neuen Musik

The term "Neue Musik" was coined for a special concept of fundamental musical innovation within Austro-German music theory of the early 20th century, and it found no terminological equivalent beyond the German language. Established by Paul Bekker with his lecture “Neue Musik” in 1919, composers such as Stockhausen or Ligeti embraced the term with its emphatic claim to innovation and new departures. However, one hundred years on the term "Neue Musik" is often used mainly as a synonym for any type of contemporary music. This article questions whether the term "Neue Musik" is still an appropriate framework for a current theory of musical composition. Not only have the specific musical circumstances changed within the course of the 20th century, but also the political and social conditions have altered drastically after two world wars which had given special impulses to those composers who strove for a new foundation of music after 1918 and 1945 respectively. This article argues that the age of "Neue Musik" has come to an end in the late 20th century, and thus it is now necessary to introduce alternative terminological concepts and methodical directions for music historiography.

Wet Hot Kranichstein Summer: Darmstadt 2016

The 2016 Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik took place from 29 July to 14 August. That's more than two weeks of concerts and lectures. As anyone who has been to a New Music festival knows, you can't see everything, and you'll end up missing stuff that winds up being extremely important.

Preface to Gesprochene Musik , 1. “O-a” and 2. “Ta-tam”

Think of the great composers of German and Austrian music in the last century, and certain names spring to mind: Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill. Among those names should be Ernst Toch. That for many musicians and music lovers this is not yet so is due not to the character of Toch's music but to the curtailment of his meteoric early career by the Nazi regime, which drove the composer into exile in 1933. In the United States, where Toch eventually settled, his major achievements in orchestral, chamber, and operatic music remain less familiar than those of his American and European peers. Toch has long been best known for The Geographical Fugue, which is such a repertory staple that today it seems hardly a choral singer in the United States passes through high school and college without performing the piece at least once. The work is equally popular among avocational choruses of all kinds, and professional choirs of course also sing it. Given the Fugue's renown, it is strange that the oddly stoic little note Toch (1950, 12) appended to the published score has apparently excited little curiosity over the years: "This piece is the last movement of a suite GESPROCHENE MUSIK (Spoken Music), which, from different angles, tries to produce musical effects from speech. The suite was performed and recorded at the Berlin Festival of Contemporary music [sic] in 1930. The record got lost or was destroyed, likewise the music, except the manuscript." Ernst Toch You might think conductors would have been tumbling over one another trying to get hold of the other movements of this suite: the existence of the manuscript for more music related to the Fugue has been no secret for decades. The full story is stranger still. Toch's note would lead the reader to imagine a live public performance and a commercially released live or studio recording. Yet there was no such show, nor any such album. It may come as a shock to its fans that, far from being designed as the reliable choral showpiece it has since become, the Fugue was not originally intended for performance by live singers at all. As Toch indicates, the Fugue premiered with its original German text as Der Fuge aus der Geographie during the Neue Musik Berlin festival in July 1930 as part of a three-movement suite, whose first two movements are published here for the first time. As Mark Katz (2001, 176; 2004, 99-113) recounts, the suite was one of the works debuted on the program of Grammophonmusik (gramophone music) as Originalwerke fur Schallplatten (original works for record albums) shared by Toch and Hindemith, both then rising young stars of German new music, during which the composers used phonographs in various ways to play prerecorded sounds onstage. This explains why there was only ever one "record" of Spoken Music, not records. Toch's suite in performance was not played back at the speed at which it had been recorded--78 RPM--but much faster: that was the whole point. The score was conceived for the purpose of providing material for a pioneering experiment in the mechanical manipulation of sound: specifically, an investigation into the acoustical properties of speech as raw material for music that focused on how vocal sounds change when speeded up--to such an extent that, as Toch perhaps to his surprise discovered, they may be distorted beyond recognition. As the composer explained in the program notes he wrote for the concert, he sought to explore the spoken word, and let a four-part mixed chamber choir speak specifically determined rhythms, vowels, consonants, syllables, and words, which by involving the mechanical possibilities of the recording (increasing the tempo, and the resulting pitch level) created a type of instrumental music, which leads the listener to forget that it originated from speaking. (Toch 1930, 221-22) (1) It must have been a weird sight: Berlin's hippest aficionados of avant-garde composition (as I picture them) assembled before a phonograph onstage out of whose great horn-shaped speaker piped the sounds of, well, Alvin and the Chipmunks on amphetamines chanting "Ratibor! …

Ultraschall Berlin, Festival für neue Musik, 2014

Ultraschall, jointly presented by Deutschlandradio Kultur and Kulturradio vom RBB (Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg), and this year officially renamed Ultraschall Berlin, has been a fixture of the city's concert life since 1999. Festival directors Rainer Pöllmann (Deutschlandradio Kultur) and Andreas Göbel (replacing Margarete Zander for Kulturradio vom RBB) chose to emphasise the two major broadcasters' partnership this year with what they called a ‘duo idea’ running through the festival's programme. Illustrating this theme, orchestral concerts (a pair) opened and closed the festival, the project New Forum Jeune Création paired each of three ensembles with two young composers, and performing duos included GranSchumacher Piano Duo, Claudia Barainsky and Axel Bauni in a concert for voice and piano, and a concert of string duos by members of Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin (who were however not appearing as representatives of this ensemble) with the featured composer/zither player Leopold Hurt, to name but a few. Additionally, a so-called epilogue after the festival's official ending was paired with something that one might have called a prologue, seemingly tacked on as an afterthought: an evening of Klangkunst, electro-acoustic music and performance entitled ‘Art's Birthday’ presented works by Hanna Hartman, Jana Winderen and Nicolas Bernier at the hub of Berlin's club culture, Berghain. Though internationally known in the techno scene for drugs, dancing and dark rooms, Berghain has also long been used as a venue for contemporary and experimental music concerts. The otherwise conservative choices of venue (Radialsystem V, Haus des Rundfunks, and HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) Theatres) and programme – Ultraschall sees itself more as a repertoire-establishing festival, with an emphasis not on premieres but on second and third performances alongside ‘masterpieces’ of contemporary and modern music – made this first concert appear a half-hearted jumping on the ‘new contexts’ bandwagon. And, alongside the repeated, excited announcements of the festival now having its own website (yes in 2014!), there was something of the sense of embarrassment one feels as a teenager bumping into one's parents at a night club.

Paris, Darmstadt, New York: The Beginnings of the ‘New Music’ Quartet

As a European musical avant-garde starts to emerge around 1950, two locations assume a particular importance. One is Paris, where a group of radical young composers emerges around Messiaen, and Pierre Schaeffer founds musique concrète. The other is the town of Darmstadt, where an annual New Music Summer School (Ferienkurse für neue Musik) soon starts to attract young avant-gardists from all over Europe. Although this avant-garde broadly rejects all previous forms and conventions, one genre seems to retain its respect: the string quartet. Two early exemplars of the ‘new music string quartet’, by Cage and Boulez, were completed in Paris, and many of their successors were either premiered at the Darmstadt courses, or at least composed by Darmstadt habitués. The most significant of these, nearly all characterised by a strong inclination to rigorous constructivism, are discussed here. Composers featured include Berio, Boulez, Cage, Evangelisti, Koenig, Maderna, and Pousseur.

Preface to Gesprochene Musik , 1. “O-a” and 2. “Ta-tam”

Think of the great composers of German and Austrian music in the last century, and certain names spring to mind: Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill. Among those names should be Ernst Toch. That for many musicians and music lovers this is not yet so is due not to the character of Toch's music but to the curtailment of his meteoric early career by the Nazi regime, which drove the composer into exile in 1933. In the United States, where Toch eventually settled, his major achievements in orchestral, chamber, and operatic music remain less familiar than those of his American and European peers. Toch has long been best known for The Geographical Fugue, which is such a repertory staple that today it seems hardly a choral singer in the United States passes through high school and college without performing the piece at least once. The work is equally popular among avocational choruses of all kinds, and professional choirs of course also sing it. Given the Fugue's renown, it is strange that the oddly stoic little note Toch (1950, 12) appended to the published score has apparently excited little curiosity over the years: piece is the last movement of a suite GESPROCHENE MUSIK (Spoken Music), which, from different angles, tries to produce musical effects from speech. The suite was performed and recorded at the Berlin Festival of Contemporary music [sic] in 1930. The got lost or was destroyed, likewise the music, except the manuscript. Ernst Toch You might think conductors would have been tumbling over one another trying to get hold of the other movements of this suite: the existence of the manuscript for more music related to the Fugue has been no secret for decades. The full story is stranger still. Toch's note would lead the reader to imagine a live public performance and a commercially released live or studio recording. Yet there was no such show, nor any such album. It may come as a shock to its fans that, far from being designed as the reliable choral showpiece it has since become, the Fugue was not originally intended for performance by live singers at all. As Toch indicates, the Fugue premiered with its original German text as Der Fuge aus der Geographie during the Neue Musik Berlin festival in July 1930 as part of a three-movement suite, whose first two movements are published here for the first time. As Mark Katz (2001, 176; 2004, 99-113) recounts, the suite was one of the works debuted on the program of Grammophonmusik (gramophone music) as Originalwerke fur Schallplatten (original works for albums) shared by Toch and Hindemith, both then rising young stars of German new music, during which the composers used phonographs in various ways to play prerecorded sounds onstage. This explains why there was only ever one record of Spoken Music, not records. Toch's suite in performance was not played back at the speed at which it had been recorded--78 RPM--but much faster: that was the whole point. The score was conceived for the purpose of providing material for a pioneering experiment in the mechanical manipulation of sound: specifically, an investigation into the acoustical properties of speech as raw material for music that focused on how vocal sounds change when speeded up--to such an extent that, as Toch perhaps to his surprise discovered, they may be distorted beyond recognition. As the composer explained in the program notes he wrote for the concert, he sought to explore the spoken word, and let a four-part mixed chamber choir speak specifically determined rhythms, vowels, consonants, syllables, and words, which by involving the mechanical possibilities of the recording (increasing the tempo, and the resulting pitch level) created a type of instrumental music, which leads the listener to forget that it originated from speaking. (Toch 1930, 221-22) (1) It must have been a weird sight: Berlin's hippest aficionados of avant-garde composition (as I picture them) assembled before a phonograph onstage out of whose great horn-shaped speaker piped the sounds of, well, Alvin and the Chipmunks on amphetamines chanting Ratibor! …

‘LA NOTATION NE PEUT RENDRE COMPTE DU FAIT’: PERFORMING MURAIL'S ‘TERRITOIRES DE L'OUBLI’

For contemporary music in America and Europe, the 1970s were a time in which the old order was changing, giving place to a new avant-garde. In Germany, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik was stagnating under the inept leadership of Ernst Thomas, savaged by the press and ridden with inner squabbling and politics. For 25 years a bastion of musical innovation and experimentation, Darmstadt now seemed little more than ‘the crumbling edifice of the avant-garde's chief fortress’. The focus was shifting to Paris, where, in 1977, IRCAM opened beneath the Centre Georges Pompidou. Led by Pierre Boulez and staffed by Luciano Berio, Vinko Globokar, Max Mathews, and Jean-Claude Risset, its stated mission was to reunite science and music and create new modes of performance. Across the Channel, the composers of the New Complexity (Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon, Richard Barrett, and Chris Dench) were also redefining performance practice, focusing not on technology but on notation and its implications for virtuosity. And in America, different schools of musical thought were colliding in the streets and the academy. Leonard Bernstein delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, then presented his ‘unanswered question’ to the American public, on television, in 1976. And uptown and downtown were ensconced, with Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman appointed to the faculties at the Juilliard School and the State University of New York at Buffalo, respectively. On both sides of the Atlantic, seminal artistic statements were being made, heralding the unruly adolescence of a new and disparate avant-garde no longer directly connected to the Second World War.

Different Images: A Case Study on Bartók Reception in Denmark

This paper addresses the early Bartok reception in Denmark in the 1920's and 1930's. The Danish Bartok reception undergoes significant changes and constitutes at least two distinct Bartok images. First we meet the 'international', 'modernist' Bartok, seen as one of the representatives of the 'Neue Musik', in the German sense of genuinely new, contemporary music. This is due to the fact, that Bartok's music from the first moment on was well represented in the repertoire of the Danish societies for contemporary music. The second image is quite different. It emerges in the late 1920s and is present at the latest in the reception of the three concerts, Bartok gave in Copenhagen in 1929. This is an image referring to Bartok as one of the leaders of what is referred to as the 'real new music', which has overcome the destructive powers of modernist expressionism and has formed a genuinely new music founded on the vital forces of unspoiled, original folk music. This second image includes other works as important ...

Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1956

In the context of postwar and Cold War cultural politics, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik set the stage for Germany's ambivalent reception of American music in the decades following World War II. This article weighs the catalytic role of American music in Darmstadt between 1946 and 1956; traces the relationships among U. S. cultural officers, German patrons, and representatives of American music in Darmstadt; and describes events in Darmstadt that led to a growing interest in American experimental music in West Germany. An English translation of Wolfgang Edward Rebner's 1954 Ferienkurse lecture "American Experimental Music" is included as an appendix.

Luigi Nono and the Darmstadt School: Form and meaning in the early works (1950–1959)

Three works from the first decade of Nono's career — Variazioni canoniche, Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica and Il canto sospeso — are discussed both analytically and within the context of the evolving aesthetic of the 1950s avant-garde and the ‘Darmstadt School’. Particular attention is given to Nono's developing serial practice in these works and to Nono's use of existing musical models to locate his work both politically and within history. The role of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für neue Musik as a forum within which modernist thinking was reinstated in European musical culture after the Second World war is discussed. The article concludes with an account of the aesthetic disputes between Nono and Stockhausen between 1958 and 1960 which marked the effective dissolution of the ‘Darmstadt School’.

Dieter Schnebel and his ‘Sinfonie X’

The German composer Dieter Schnebel was born in March 1930, in Lahr, Baden. He began serious piano studies at the age of 10, and made his first attempts at composition around the end of the war, in his mid-teens. His principal music studies took place at the Musik Hochschule, Freiburg from 1949 to 1952; having encountered the music of Hindemith in 1949, he became aware of Bartók, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School during the early 1950s, and studied at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, where he came into contact with Krenek, Varèse, Adorno, Henze, Nono and Boulez.

UCSD at Darmstadt 1988

THE VISIT TO Southern California in March of 1987 and attendance at the several-day festival of Robert Erickson's music at the University of California, San Diego by Friederich Hommel, director of the Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany, resulted in an invitation to UCSD's Music Department, its then chairman, Cecil Lytle, and its resident new music ensemble, SONOR, to participate in the 1988 Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik. During the first week of the Ferienkurse, SONOR presented three concerts of newer music by UCSD faculty and graduate student composers, as well as compositions by its first emeritus faculty colleague, Robert Erickson. That first week was literally dominated by lecture and performance offerings of members of UCSD's Music Department and in recognition of this situation, Director Hommel designated English to be the official language of that first week. A

Two Works of the Neue Musik Composed on the Languages of Ancient Cultures

Two Works of the Neue Musik Composed on the Languages of Ancient Cultures