Darmstadt School

File:Bundesarchiv B 145 Bild-F004566-0002, Darmstadt, Internationaler Kurs für neue Musik.jpg

July 1957, 12th International Vacation Courses for New Music, Seminar: Karlheinz Stockhausen

Darmstadt School refers to a group of composers who were associated with the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music (Darmstädter Ferienkurse) from the early 1950s to the early 1960s in Darmstadt, Germany, and who shared some aesthetic attitudes. Initially, this included only Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but others came to be added, in various ways. The term does not refer to an educational institution.

Initiated in 1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, held annually until 1970 and subsequently every two years, encompass the teaching of both composition and interpretation and also include premières of new works. After Steinecke's death in 1961, the courses were run by Template:Ill (1962–81), Friedrich Ferdinand Hommel (1981–94), Solf Schaefer (1995–2009), and Thomas Schäfer (2009– ). Thanks to these courses, Darmstadt is now a major centre of modern music, particularly for German composers, and has been referred to as "the world epicenter for exploratory musical work, which was driven by a younger generation mostly engaged with new sound technology".Template:Sfn

History

Coined by Luigi Nono in his 1958 lecture "Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik",Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn), Darmstadt School describes the uncompromisingly serial music written by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen (the three composers Nono specifically names in his lecture, along with himself), Luciano Berio, Aldo Clementi, Franco Donatoni, Niccolò Castiglioni, Franco Evangelisti, Karel Goeyvaerts, Mauricio Kagel, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Giacomo Manzoni, and Henri Pousseur from 1951 to 1961,Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn and even composers who never actually attended Darmstadt, such as Jean Barraqué and Iannis Xenakis.Template:Sfn Two years later the Darmstadt School effectively dissolved due to musical differences, expressed once again by Nono in his 1960 Darmstadt lecture "Text—Musik—Gesang".Template:Sfn Nevertheless, composers active at Darmstadt in the early 1960s under Steinecke's successor Ernst Thomas are sometimes included by extension—Helmut Lachenmann, for exampleTemplate:Sfn—and although he was only at Darmstadt before 1950, Olivier Messiaen is also sometimes included because of the influence his music had on the later Darmstadt composers.Template:Sfn However, according to one source, although Messiaen paid "a brief visit" to the courses in 1949, "he neither taught students nor lectured" there.Template:Sfn

Background, influences

Composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono were writing their music in the aftermath of World War II, during which many composers, such as Richard Strauss, had had their music politicised by the Third Reich. Boulez was taken to task by French critics for associating with Darmstadt, and especially for first publishing his book Penser la musique d'aujourd'hui in German, the language of the recent enemies of France, falsely associating Boulez's prose with the perverted language of the Nazis. All this despite the fact that Boulez never set German texts in his vocal music, choosing for Le marteau sans maître, for example, poems by René Char who, during the war, had been a member of the French Resistance and a Maquis leader in the Basses-Alpes.Template:Sfn

Key influences on the Darmstadt School were the works of Webern and Varèse—who visited Darmstadt only once, in 1950, when Nono met himTemplate:Sfn—and Olivier Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" (from the Quatre études de rythme).

Criticism

Almost from the outset, the phrase Darmstadt School was used as a belittling term by commentators like Kurt Honolka (a 1962 article is quoted in ) to describe any music written in an uncompromising style, despite the presence of many composers and schools which forbid serialism and modernism.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s the courses were charged with a perceived lack of interest on the part of some of its zealot followers in any music not matching the uncompromisingly modern views of Pierre Boulez—the "party subservience" of the "clique orthodoxy" of a "sect", in the words of Dr. Kurt Honolka, written in 1962 in an effort to "make the public believe that the most advanced music of the day was no more than a fancy cooked up by a bunch of aberrant conspirators conniving at war against music proper".Template:Sfn This led to the use of the phrase 'Darmstadt School' (coined originally in 1957 by Luigi NonoTemplate:Sfn to describe the serial music being written at that time by himself and composers such as Boulez, Maderna, Stockhausen, Berio, and Pousseur) as a pejorative term, implying a "mathematical," rule-based music.

Composer Hans Werner Henze, whose music was regularly performed at Darmstadt in the 1950s, reacted against the Darmstadt School ideologies, particularly the way in which (according to him) young composers were forced either to write in total dodecaphony or be ridiculed or ignored. In his collected writings, Henze recalls student composers rewriting their works on the train to Darmstadt in order to comply with Boulez's expectations.Template:Sfn

One of the leading figures of the Darmstadt School itself, Franco Evangelisti, was also outspoken in his criticism of the dogmatic "orthodoxy" of certain zealot disciples, labelling them the "Dodecaphonic police".Template:Sfn

A self-declared member of the school, Konrad Boehmer states: Template:Quote

References

Cited sources

• Boehmer, Konrad. 1987. "The Sanctification of Misapprehension into a Doctrine: Darmstadt Epigones and Xenophobes". English translation by Sonia Prescod Jokel. Key Notes 24:43–47.
• Fox, Christopher. 1999. "Luigi Nono and the Darmstadt School". Contemporary Music Review 18/2: 111–130.
• Fox, Christopher. 2006. "Darmstadt School." Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 20 August 2006).
• Henze, Hans Werner. 1982. Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953–1981. Translated by Peter Labanyi. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Template:ISBN.
• Iddon, Martin. 2013. New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez. Music since 1900. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN (cloth); Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Ielmini, David. 2012. "Orchestral Thoughts: Jazz Composition in Europe and America: An Interview with Composer-Director Giorgio Gaslini". In Eurojazzland: Jazz and European Sources, Dynamics, and Contexts, edited by Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, Franz Kerschbaumer, 235–252. Lebanon, New Hampshire: Northeastern University Press. Template:ISBN.
• Malone, Gareth. 2011. Music for the People: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Classical Music. London: Collins UK. Template:ISBN.
• Muller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge (UK) and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. Template:ISBN. Paperback reprint 2009. Template:ISBN.
• Nono, Luigi. 1975. Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik Edited by J. Stenzl. Zürich and Freiburg im Breisgau: Atlantis-Verlag.
• Olivier, Philippe. 2005. Pierre Boulez: Le maître et son marteau. Collection Points d'Orgue. Paris: Hermann Éditeurs des Sciences et des Artes. Template:ISBN.
• Priore, Irna. 2007. "Vestiges of Twelve-tone Practice as Compositional Process in Berio's Sequenza I for Solo Flute". In Berio's Sequenzas: Essays on Composition Performance Analysis and Analysis, edited by Janet K. Halfyard, with an introduction by David Osmond-Smith, 191–208. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Template:ISBN.
• Schleiermacher, Steffen. 2000. [Untitled essay], in booklet for Piano Music of the Darmstadt School, vol. 1, 18–21. English translation by Susan Marie Praeder, 4–7; French translation by Sylvie Gomez, 9–16. Steffen Schleiermacher, piano. CD recording, 1 disc: stereo, digital. MDG 613 1004-2. Detmold: Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm.
• Schleiermacher, Steffen. 2004. [Untitled essay], in booklet for Piano Music of the Darmstadt School, vol. 2, 21–26. English translation by Susan Marie Praeder, 4–8; French translation by Sylvie Gomez, 10–19. Steffen Schleiermacher, piano. CD recording, 1 disc: stereo, digital. MDG 613 1005-2. Detmold: Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm.
• Whiting, John. 2009. "Henri Pousseur: Avant-garde Composer Seeking a Synthesis of Sound and Image". The Guardian (10 June).

Further reading

• Attinello, Paul, Christopher Fox, and Martin Iddon (eds.). 2007. Other Darmstadts. Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 1 [thematic issue].
• Borio, Gianmario, and Hermann Danuser (eds.). 1997. Im Zenit der Moderne. Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966. Geschichte und Dokumentation. 4 vols. Rombach Wissenschaft: Reihe Musicae 2. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach. Template:ISBN.
• Donin, Nicolas, and Jonathan Goldman. 2005. Souvenirs de Darmstadt: Retour sur la musique contemporaine du dernier demi-siècle Circuit 15, no. 3 [thematic issue].
• Döring, Gerd. 2008. "Experimentelle Klangbastler: 44. Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in DarmstadtTemplate:Dead link". Allgemeine Zeitung (25 July).
• Evangelisti, Franco. 1991. Dal silenzio a un nuovo mondo sonoro. Prefazione di Enzo Restagno. Rome: [Semar][1].
• Fox, Christopher. 2007. "Music after Zero Hour". Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 1 (February): 5–24.
• Fure, Ashley. 2016. "GRID: Gender Research in Darmstadt". Darmstadt.
• Heile, Björn, and Martin Iddon (eds.). 2009. Mauricio Kagel bei den Internationalen Ferienkursen für Neue Musik in Darmstadt: eine Dokumentation. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Henze, Hans Werner. 1998. Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography. Translated by Stewart Spencer. London: Faber and Faber. Template:ISBN. (German original: Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten: autobiographische Mitteilungen 1926–1995. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996.)
• Iddon, Martin. 2011. "Darmstadt Schools: Darmstadt as a Plural Phenomenon". Tempo 65, no. 256:2–8.
• Kurtz, Michael. 1992. Stockhausen: A Biography. Translated by Richard Toop. London: Faber and Faber.
• Misch, Imke, and Markus Bandur. 2001. Karlheinz Stockhausen bei den Internationalen Ferienkursen für Neue Musik in Darmstadt 1951–1996: Dokumente und Briefe. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag.
• Thomas, Ernst, and Wilhelm Schlüter. 2001. "Darmstadt". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.

External links

• Darmstädter Ferienkurse