Boulez would later claim to Célestin Deliège that Darmstadt was charac- terised by number fetishism of exactly the sort that Nono had warned about. They must both have had this idea from somewhere, but it is certainly not borne out in what was performed there in the period around 1953 and 1954. Boulez stated that‘[s]ome of the concerts at Darmstadt in 1953/54 were of quite lunatic sterility and academicism, and above all became totally unin- teresting. One could sense the disparity between what was written and what was heard: there was no sonic imagination, but quite simply an accumu- lation of numerical transcriptions quite devoid of any aesthetic charac- ter.’221
Notwithstanding the fact that Boulez was hardly in any position to
make this judgement – he was present in neither year, having been in
Darmstadt for only a couple of days in 1952, and did not attend the courses for their entire duration until 1956 – an examination of the music that actually was presented, taking 1954 as an example, suggests that Boulez exaggerated not only the dominance of serial thought but also his rejection of it.222There were pieces performed that might, just about, fit Boulez’s characterisation, and one of the lecture series that year, René Leibowitz’s, focussed on Webern’s late music, but Darmstadt was hardly a bastion of the most extreme of serialists.
Despite a deliciously partisan appraisal of the Piano Sonata of his fellow Briton Alexander Goehr, David Drew’s review of the 1954 courses for The Score is both accurate and lucid. Vital is his observation that the new music heard in the ‘Musik der jungen Generation’ concerts ‘constitute[d] about one-third of the music heard at Darmstadt. The other two-thirds consist[ed] of music by twentieth century masters, and by established composers of our 220 Nono to Steinecke, 11 November 1953, ALN.
221
Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège (London: Eulenburg, 1976), 64.
222 This sort of misremembering permeates composerly accounts of Darmstadt. Berio’s recollection
of hisfirst year of attendence at the courses, 1953 according to his own account, is no less erroneous. Berio claimed that ‘[i]n 1953 Stockhausen was the theoretical pivot of the Ferienkurse, Pousseur provided the speculative machinery, Boulez the analytical spirit and Maderna was a benign father-figure’ (quoted in Whittall, Serialism, 194). As already noted, Boulez was not present at Darmstadt in this year and Pousseur did not arrive at Darmstadt until 1954. Of those mentioned, only Maderna would have had anything like sufficient institutional authority to occupy a position of centrality. Stockhausen, it should be remembered, spoke in an official context at Darmstadt in 1953 for the first time; this hardly suggests that one could reasonably speak of him as the‘theoretical pivot’. His description suggests rather more that Berio is thinking of the relationships he developed on a personal level with Stockhausen, Pousseur, Boulez, and Maderna in the years following meetings at Darmstadt in 1953.
understood: there is much, much nonsense [. . . ] I will stay a long time in Cologne next year serenely: but it is not easy.?220
A question of priorities?
Boulez would later claim to Célestin Deliège that Darmstadt was charac- terised by number fetishism of exactly the sort that Nono had warned about. They must both have had this idea from somewhere, but it is certainly not borne out in what was performed there in the period around 1953 and 1954. Boulez stated that‘[s]ome of the concerts at Darmstadt in 1953/54 were of quite lunatic sterility and academicism, and above all became totally unin- teresting. One could sense the disparity between what was written and what was heard: there was no sonic imagination, but quite simply an accumu- lation of numerical transcriptions quite devoid of any aesthetic charac- ter.?221
Notwithstanding the fact that Boulez was hardly in any position to
make this judgement – he was present in neither year, having been in
Darmstadt for only a couple of days in 1952, and did not attend the courses for their entire duration until 1956 – an examination of the music that actually was presented, taking 1954 as an example, suggests that Boulez exaggerated not only the dominance of serial thought but also his rejection of it.222There were pieces performed that might, just about, fit Boulez’s characterisation, and one of the lecture series that year, René Leibowitz’s, focussed on Webern’s late music, but Darmstadt was hardly a bastion of the most extreme of serialists.
Despite a deliciously partisan appraisal of the Piano Sonata of his fellow Briton Alexander Goehr, David Drew’s review of the 1954 courses for The Score is both accurate and lucid. Vital is his observation that the new music heard in the ‘Musik der jungen Generation’ concerts ‘constitute[d] about one-third of the music heard at Darmstadt. The other two-thirds consist[ed] of music by twentieth century masters, and by established composers of our 220 Nono to Steinecke, 11 November 1953, ALN.
221
Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège (London: Eulenburg,1976), 64.
222 This sort of misremembering permeates composerly accounts of Darmstadt. Berio’s recollection
of hisfirst year of attendence at the courses, 1953 according to his own account, is no less erroneous. Berio claimed that ‘[i]n 1953 Stockhausen was the theoretical pivot of the Ferienkurse, Pousseur provided the speculative machinery, Boulez the analytical spirit and Maderna was a benign father-figure’ (quoted in Whittall, Serialism, 194). As already noted, Boulez was not present at Darmstadt in this year and Pousseur did not arrive at Darmstadt until 1954. Of those mentioned, only Maderna would have had anything like sufficient institutional authority to occupy a position of centrality. Stockhausen, it should be remembered, spoke in an official context at Darmstadt in 1953 for the first time; this hardly suggests that one could reasonably speak of him as the‘theoretical pivot’. His description suggests rather more that Berio is thinking of the relationships he developed on a personal level with Stockhausen, Pousseur, Boulez, and Maderna in the years following meetings at Darmstadt in 1953.
own day.’ The list of those by the ‘established composers’ shows how inaccurate perceptions were that everything that Darmstadt touched turned
to numbers. Furthermore, some of Drew’s parenthetical comments are
notable: Gunther Schuller’s Dramatic Overture of 1951 (‘neo-Straussian’) and Giselher Klebe’s Rhapsody of 1953 were performed in ‘a concert that might have been entitled “aspects of contemporary romanticism”’; else- where there were performances of Henze’s Ode an den Westwind of 1953
(Henze had ‘become an unabashed Romantic’) and Krenek’s Medea of
1951–2 (‘another curious and unexpected lapse into the nineteenth cen- tury’). Drew suggested that Nono’s new La Victoire de Guernica (1954) showed ‘a crippling deadweight of both academic and avant-garde cliché [. . . ] and the few moments of lyrical charm (always Nono’s strong point) do not redeem the overall banality of invention’. Of the ‘masters’, it would be hard to identify a tendency to promote one trend over another. Though Webern’s orchestral Variations, op. 30, were performed, as was Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto (1942), so were Stravinsky’s Capriccio (1928–9), Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps of 1940–1 (‘abominably played, with the exception of Mlle. Loriod at the piano’) and Cantéyodjayâ (1949), Britten’s Lachrymae, op. 48 (1950), Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musi-
cale di Annalibera (1952), and even Ravel’s Frontispiece (1918) and
Debussy’s Lindraja (1901). This is hardly the programme line-up of a hotbed of fervent serialist revolutionaries.
Looking to the young composers, it is still hard to see whence Boulez’s criticism could have arisen. Two pieces were essentially tonal: Hans
Eklund’s Kleine Serenade (1954) (‘harmlessly juvenile’) and Juriaan
Andriessen’s Hommage à Milhaud (1948) (‘fulfilled the sinister expect- ations aroused by its title’). Two pieces were products of an extended tonality: a Piano Trio (1953) by Heimo Erbse and Karel Husa’s Second String Quartet (1953) (‘almost slavishly faithful to the structural procedures of Bartók [. . . ] the tonal scheme is somewhat primitive, but the argument is exceedingly well-knit’). There were also free atonal and twelve-tone pieces, including, alongside Goehr’s Piano Sonata (1951–2), Don Banks’s Violin Sonata (1953), Camillo Togni’s Flute Sonata (1953) (‘beautifully written, classically moulded’), and Jacques Wildberger’s Trio for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon (1952). These pieces seem to have been the ones for which Drew had the greatest affection.
This would leave, then, a total of four pieces that might be held to represent the more overtly serial end of the spectrum. Even of these, Drew argues that two, Pousseur’s Trois chants sacrés (1951) and Bengt Hambraeus’s Gacelas y casidas de Federico García Lorca (1953), ‘stand somewhere between these works [those of Togni and Wildberger] and the own day.’ The list of those by the ‘established composers’ shows how inaccurate perceptions were that everything that Darmstadt touched turned
to numbers. Furthermore, some of Drew’s parenthetical comments are
notable: Gunther Schuller’s Dramatic Overture of 1951 (‘neo-Straussian’) and Giselher Klebe’s Rhapsody of 1953 were performed in ‘a concert that might have been entitled “aspects of contemporary romanticism”’; else- where there were performances of Henze’s Ode an den Westwind of 1953
(Henze had ‘become an unabashed Romantic’) and Krenek’s Medea of
1951–2 (‘another curious and unexpected lapse into the nineteenth cen- tury’). Drew suggested that Nono’s new La Victoire de Guernica (1954) showed ‘a crippling deadweight of both academic and avant-garde cliché [. . . ] and the few moments of lyrical charm (always Nono’s strong point) do not redeem the overall banality of invention’. Of the ‘masters’, it would be hard to identify a tendency to promote one trend over another. Though Webern’s orchestral Variations, op. 30, were performed, as was Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto (1942), so were Stravinsky’s Capriccio (1928–9), Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps of 1940–1 (‘abominably played, with the exception of Mlle. Loriod at the piano’) and Cantéyodjayâ (1949), Britten’s Lachrymae, op. 48 (1950), Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musi-
cale di Annalibera (1952), and even Ravel’s Frontispiece (1918) and
Debussy’s Lindraja (1901). This is hardly the programme line-up of a hotbed of fervent serialist revolutionaries.
Looking to the young composers, it is still hard to see whence Boulez’s criticism could have arisen. Two pieces were essentially tonal: Hans
Eklund’s Kleine Serenade (1954) (‘harmlessly juvenile’) and Juriaan
Andriessen’s Hommage à Milhaud (1948) (‘fulfilled the sinister expect- ations aroused by its title’). Two pieces were products of an extended tonality: a Piano Trio (1953) by Heimo Erbse and Karel Husa’s Second String Quartet (1953) (‘almost slavishly faithful to the structural procedures of Bartók [. . . ] the tonal scheme is somewhat primitive, but the argument is exceedingly well-knit’). There were also free atonal and twelve-tone pieces, including, alongside Goehr’s Piano Sonata (1951–2), Don Banks’s Violin Sonata (1953), Camillo Togni’s Flute Sonata (1953) (‘beautifully written, classically moulded’), and Jacques Wildberger’s Trio for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon (1952). These pieces seem to have been the ones for which Drew had the greatest affection.
This would leave, then, a total of four pieces that might be held to represent the more overtly serial end of the spectrum. Even of these, Drew argues that two, Pousseur’s Trois chants sacrés (1951) and Bengt Hambraeus’s Gacelas y casidas de Federico García Lorca (1953), ‘stand somewhere between these works [those of Togni and Wildberger] and the
extreme avant-garde’.223This was not to say, though, that Drew had much affection for Hambraeus’s piece:
Hambraeus’s position is rather a strange one, for whilst he borrows from the avant-garde the principle of continual series-permutation, and, like other composers of this persuasion, applies it to questions of rhythm, tone-colour, etc., he permits certain liberties in the interests of expression. In other words some elements in his compositions are entirely controlled by a series, while others are partly or wholly free. Morphologically, this is nonsense, for the methods he uses intermittently were evolved by Boulez, Stockhausen and others expressly as a means of investigating pure form. These methods are no more concerned with emotional values than is the work-plan of a scientist, and an attempt to soften their severity by loosening the internal relationships is about as logical as it would be if a physicist substituted one chemical for another during the course of an experiment, simply because he preferred the smell.224
In short, in 1954 only Michel Fano’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1952) and Stockhausen’s first five Klavierstücke (I–IV, 1952–3; V, 1954) really fitted the bill if one were determined to look for pieces which, as Drew described it,‘carry the principles of serialisation as far as they will go – which is some distance beyond the boundaries of music as we know it’.225
While Drew may have had a point in stating that Stockhausen was some way beyond the bounds of the‘known’ at this stage, a brief examination of Klavierstück III may be instructive to show that, though there is serial- isation, there is only a limited degree of pre-ordering (or, at any rate, that very great liberties are taken with the pre-ordered gamut of material). The influence of Goeyvaerts is still visible, though now in much modified form.
Rather than Goeyvaerts’s heptachords, Stockhausen operated in
Klavierstück III with six sets of tetrachords and two sets of trichords. The six tetrachords are partitioned into two groups, thus of twelve pitch classes each, but in thefirst group the tetrachords are overlaid, avoiding the total chromatic, and developing pitch repetition. This pitch repetition is exag- gerated by the fact that, in this first group of pitches, the first tetrachord actually appears twice, the third tetrachord three times, and the central tetrachord only once. Though the tetrachords now do not overlap and thus present the total chromatic, the second group is arranged with similar repetitions, thus preserving the repetition of pitches (see Figure 1.9).
223
David Drew,‘The Darmstadt Summer School of New Music, 1954’, The Score and IMA Magazine, no. 10 (December 1954), 77–81.
224 Ibid. 225
Ibid. It is worth adding that the music of Fano, Stockhausen, and Hambraeus also appeared in the same concert.
extreme avant-garde’.223This was not to say, though, that Drew had much affection for Hambraeus’s piece:
Hambraeus’s position is rather a strange one, for whilst he borrows from the avant-garde the principle of continual series-permutation, and, like other composers of this persuasion, applies it to questions of rhythm, tone-colour, etc., he permits certain liberties in the interests of expression. In other words some elements in his compositions are entirely controlled by a series, while others are partly or wholly free. Morphologically, this is nonsense, for the methods he uses intermittently were evolved by Boulez, Stockhausen and others expressly as a means of investigating pure form. These methods are no more concerned with emotional values than is the work-plan of a scientist, and an attempt to soften their severity by loosening the internal relationships is about as logical as it would be if a physicist substituted one chemical for another during the course of an experiment, simply because he preferred the smell.224
In short, in 1954 only Michel Fano’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1952) and Stockhausen’s first five Klavierstücke (I–IV, 1952–3; V, 1954) really fitted the bill if one were determined to look for pieces which, as Drew described it,‘carry the principles of serialisation as far as they will go ? which is some distance beyond the boundaries of music as we know it’.225
While Drew may have had a point in stating that Stockhausen was some way beyond the bounds of the‘known’ at this stage, a brief examination of Klavierstück III may be instructive to show that, though there is serial- isation, there is only a limited degree of pre-ordering (or, at any rate, that very great liberties are taken with the pre-ordered gamut of material). The influence of Goeyvaerts is still visible, though now in much modified form.
Rather than Goeyvaerts’s heptachords, Stockhausen operated in
Klavierstück III with six sets of tetrachords and two sets of trichords. The six tetrachords are partitioned into two groups, thus of twelve pitch classes each, but in thefirst group the tetrachords are overlaid, avoiding the total chromatic, and developing pitch repetition. This pitch repetition is exag- gerated by the fact that, in this first group of pitches, the first tetrachord actually appears twice, the third tetrachord three times, and the central tetrachord only once. Though the tetrachords now do not overlap and thus present the total chromatic, the second group is arranged with similar repetitions, thus preserving the repetition of pitches (seeFigure 1.9).
223
David Drew,‘The Darmstadt Summer School of New Music, 1954’, The Score and IMA Magazine, no. 10 (December1954), 77–81.
224 Ibid. 225
Ibid. It is worth adding that the music of Fano, Stockhausen, and Hambraeus also appeared in the same concert.
Ex. 1.9 Dispersal of pitches from underlying skeleton in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klavierstück III
Fig. 1.9 Blumröder’s table of pitch distribution and proportions in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klavierstück III
Ex. 1.9 Dispersal of pitches from underlying skeleton in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klavierstück III
Fig. 1.9 Blumröder’s table of pitch distribution and proportions in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klavierstück III
In the dispersal of the material through the piece, however, there is great flexibility, with Stockhausen seemingly selecting relatively freely from this pre-determinedfield, as Blumröder shows (see Example 1.9).
It is, perhaps, plausible that there is some systematic procedure to determine the order of selection, but it hardly matters, since the effect is that of free choice in any case. In short, though the pitch material of Klavierstück III is dispersed in the way it is, it could have been distributed in any number of other ways, without fundamentally altering the pitch spine of the piece.226It comes as little surprise that Stockhausen would typically characterise his work with statistical possibilities as aleatoric, in the sense he had learned from Meyer-Eppler.227To be sure, one could not possibly hear this sort of organisation, especially not given the shuffling of the pitch resources that go to make up the pre-compositional planning. Indeed, the shuffling is such that it is hardly plausible that one was really supposed to hear any such thing in any case, even if Stockhausen may have hoped that the devices used would lend a certain degree of consistency to the piece.
None of this is to say that some of the concerts were not deathly– they must have been– but it is to assert strongly that they were not dominated by serial number crunching, and certainly not by the transcription of numer- ical elements into sounding form. There was, after all, not much serialism on offer, and, in any case, that which was present (according to the example of Stockhausen at least) involved much more choice and decision than it did pre-determination, which is not to deny that certain pre-compositional structures were constructed. It is not the case either that 1954 was an exceptional year in this regard.
It is vital to recall that the progress from participation at Darmstadt to taking a leading role was an extremely slow one. Darmstadt provided a forum for the music of Stockhausen, Maderna, and Nono (and, to a lesser extent, Goeyvaerts and Boulez, though Boulez was relativelyfirmly estab- lished in Parisian musical life and hardly craved validation from the Kranichsteiner). It had also, if only on one occasion, provided an outlet for them to express their views. Yet none of the young composers was quite afixture. Only by 1956 could one truly make such a claim and, by that stage, the young composers had been faced with a withering assault on their activities from the pen of Theodor W. Adorno. Not only that, but even if