At Darmstadt in 1955 Steinecke tested a new forum. Though he had often placed value on music criticism as a part of the Ferienkurse– from 1946 to 1950, there was always at least one music critic on the faculty: Fred Hamel, Heinrich Strobel, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, and Adorno himself had all acted for Darmstadt in this respect– the practice had, to some extent, fallen away as composers, especially young ones, came into the limelight. In 1955, Steinecke put music criticism back at the centre of the agenda, inviting Claude Rostand, Luigi Rognoni, and Stuckenschmidt to offer three round-
table discussions on ‘Music since 1945’, ‘The New Works of Young
Composers’, and ‘New Aspects and Tendencies’. That Steinecke’s selected critics came from France, Italy, and Germany, respectively, mirroring Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen, hardly seems likely to have been a coinci- dence. Yet precisely this sort of roundtable discussion was not one to which 27
Theodor W. Adorno,‘New Music Today’ [1955], in Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, tr. Wieland Hoban (Calcutta: Seagull, 2009), 398–9.
28 Ibid., 400.
29 See, for example, Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge University Press, 1997
[1993]), 265.
Late Webern combines an undreamed-of density of twelve-note relationships with stark compositional simplicity, in a fashion comparable to the paintings of Mondrian. This reduction has often made his music‘pointillist’ [punktuell]; but even the barest of those contructs contain barely a note that does not have some highly precise and convincing meaning, however skeletal. It is against such musical sense that the rebellion of this group of young composers– highly diverse within itself– is directed; it includes Boulez in France, Stockhausen in Germany and Maderna and Nono in Italy. Objective construction is now supposed to encapsulate all elements mathematically, in particular rhythmic ones; the aim, to put it drastically, is the liquidation of composition in each composition [. . . ] Some have compared their aims to the cybernetic efforts of science and industrial automation; they are so automatic in their realization that, as E. I. Kahn put it, a form of‘robot music’ is beginning to emerge.27
If meeting Boulez had caused Adorno to modify his position, it was only by a little. He stated at the close of‘New Music Today’ that ‘Stockhausen has admitted a threshold of“indeterminacy”, and an eminently talented com- poser such as Boulez seems capable of casting off his self-imposed shackles and, drawing on all the experiences gained through ascetic discipline, writing convincing music’.28It is significant, too, that regardless of claims for Adorno’s influence on the direction of compositional practice, the composers were already well ahead of him.29
Getting institutionalised: an atelier for autonomous music?
At Darmstadt in 1955 Steinecke tested a new forum. Though he had often placed value on music criticism as a part of the Ferienkurse– from 1946 to 1950, there was always at least one music critic on the faculty: Fred Hamel, Heinrich Strobel, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, and Adorno himself had all acted for Darmstadt in this respect– the practice had, to some extent, fallen away as composers, especially young ones, came into the limelight. In 1955, Steinecke put music criticism back at the centre of the agenda, inviting Claude Rostand, Luigi Rognoni, and Stuckenschmidt to offer three round-
table discussions on ‘Music since 1945’, ‘The New Works of Young
Composers’, and ‘New Aspects and Tendencies’. That Steinecke’s selected critics came from France, Italy, and Germany, respectively, mirroring Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen, hardly seems likely to have been a coinci- dence. Yet precisely this sort of roundtable discussion was not one to which 27
Theodor W. Adorno,‘New Music Today’ [1955], in Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, tr. Wieland Hoban (Calcutta: Seagull, 2009), 398–9.
28 Ibid., 400.
29 See, for example, Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge University Press,
1997
Steinecke returned, though it was obviously, given his commitment to compositional working groups run by several of the young composers in common, the sort of idea that appealed to him. Part of the reason why the idea was dropped may have been that it led to little debate or interest. The Darmstädter Tagblatt’s correspondent noted that, first, the three critics impressed by not backing their own ‘national horses’ and that they were in agreement to a remarkable degree, but that, second, the best debates were heard by only a handful of listeners.30 Like it or not, it seemed that the participants came to Darmstadt to listen to composers, not to critics. One of the few points of disagreement, however, was notable, since it concerned Stockhausen: while one of the critics (and the report gives no indication as to who said what in this respect) defended Stockhausen, another painted him as an‘uncalled-for martyr, who has no desire to be understood, even though the public this year has shown itself willing to engage with the most extreme matters’.31
Other correspondents gave little indication that there had been any debate on the matter, however; Herchenröder gave the impression that the judgement of all three critics on the young composers (he suggests that it was the names of Boulez and Stockhausen that came repeatedly into the debate) was that ‘[t]hey themselves have no desire to compose, but are, rather, obedient to the material which is already complete in and of itself. The music they create is not an art which the listener who has no experience of theory and psychoacoustics can understand. It is open only a few.’ This, then, was ‘music on the borders of silence’.32It is hardly difficult to hear the voice of Adorno ventriloquised through this critique, especially since the proximity of music to silence is such a distinctive mark of his own understanding of Webern.
There were more influences discerned than Webern, however. While for
Werner Oehlmann, Webern was the ‘central figure in the music of our
epoch’ so far as the young composers were concerned,33 Claude Rostand had said in the discussion sessions with Rognoni and Stuckenschmidt that the new post-war music should be traced back to the curious students whom Messiaen had taught and that, thus, the ‘new style’ had already existed, from a French perspective at least, since 1944 or 1945.34 When Ernst Thomas came to review the courses, it was Schoenberg whom he placed at the beginning, literally and figuratively: ‘The decisive symptom: serial 30
[ski],‘Die Diskussion der Kritiker: Stuckenschmidt, Rostand und Rognoni zur neuen Musik’, Darmstädter Tagblatt, 8 June 1955.
31
Ibid.
32
G. N. Herchenröder,‘Musik an der Grenze des Schweigens’, Abendpost, 8 June 1955.
33 Werner Oehlmann,‘Die junge Generation in Darmstadt: Instrumentale und elektronische
Musik’, Der Tagespiegel, 10 June 1955.
34 Ibid.
Steinecke returned, though it was obviously, given his commitment to compositional working groups run by several of the young composers in common, the sort of idea that appealed to him. Part of the reason why the idea was dropped may have been that it led to little debate or interest. The Darmstädter Tagblatt’s correspondent noted that, first, the three critics impressed by not backing their own ‘national horses’ and that they were in agreement to a remarkable degree, but that, second, the best debates were heard by only a handful of listeners.30 Like it or not, it seemed that the participants came to Darmstadt to listen to composers, not to critics. One of the few points of disagreement, however, was notable, since it concerned Stockhausen: while one of the critics (and the report gives no indication as to who said what in this respect) defended Stockhausen, another painted him as an‘uncalled-for martyr, who has no desire to be understood, even though the public this year has shown itself willing to engage with the most extreme matters’.31
Other correspondents gave little indication that there had been any debate on the matter, however; Herchenröder gave the impression that the judgement of all three critics on the young composers (he suggests that it was the names of Boulez and Stockhausen that came repeatedly into the debate) was that ‘[t]hey themselves have no desire to compose, but are, rather, obedient to the material which is already complete in and of itself. The music they create is not an art which the listener who has no experience of theory and psychoacoustics can understand. It is open only a few.’ This, then, was ‘music on the borders of silence’.32It is hardly difficult to hear the voice of Adorno ventriloquised through this critique, especially since the proximity of music to silence is such a distinctive mark of his own understanding of Webern.
There were more influences discerned than Webern, however. While for
Werner Oehlmann, Webern was the ‘central figure in the music of our
epoch’ so far as the young composers were concerned,33 Claude Rostand had said in the discussion sessions with Rognoni and Stuckenschmidt that the new post-war music should be traced back to the curious students whom Messiaen had taught and that, thus, the ‘new style’ had already existed, from a French perspective at least, since 1944 or 1945.34 When Ernst Thomas came to review the courses, it was Schoenberg whom he placed at the beginning, literally and figuratively: ‘The decisive symptom: serial 30
[ski],‘Die Diskussion der Kritiker: Stuckenschmidt, Rostand und Rognoni zur neuen Musik’, Darmstädter Tagblatt, 8 June1955.
31
Ibid.
32
G. N. Herchenröder,‘Musik an der Grenze des Schweigens’, Abendpost, 8 June1955.
33 Werner Oehlmann,‘Die junge Generation in Darmstadt: Instrumentale und elektronische
Musik’, Der Tagespiegel, 10 June1955.
composition, a massive evolution of Schoenbergian principles, has taken hold. Schoenberg’s name stands symbolically at the beginning of the repre- sentative concert series.’35 This was not a proxy way of a correspondent making a tacit claim for the composer whom he was, personally,‘backing’ (Messiaen standing for Boulez, Schoenberg for Nono, and Webern for Stockhausen), though there may well have been a hint of that too, but rather a signal that, even if later it would become‘obvious’ that it had been Webern all along who had been the exemplaryfigure, in 1955 it was still not clear how the mythology would be constructed. It should go without saying that the state of affairs in 1955 feels rather closer to the truth of the matter – a flood of influences, and not only Messiaen, Schoenberg, and Webern, of differing weights of significance for the different composers – even if the press had already started to tilt at a more unified narrative.
That the story of new music at Darmstadt was already far from unified ought really to have been symbolised in Boulez’s lecture that year, which explicitly aligned his own output with not only Webern, but also Debussy. The point, as Boulez saw it, was that what he found in Debussy had little to do with calculation– the serial transformations of the series – as one might find in Webern, but much to do with morphology and with form, as well as with orchestration.36 Where Webern’s formal principles, however ‘advanced’ the materials inserted into them, harked back to classical models– and here Boulez distanced himself from Eimert’s position that Adorno had erroneously found the fusion of fugue and the sonata principle in Webern– in Debussy one found fluid formal principles which were developed from the chromatic material in play, even in pieces which appeared, atfirst blush, to be composed according to a simplistic ABA schema. The Second Viennese School, Boulez opined, had not written for orchestra, but had, on the contrary, done little more in their orchestral scores than orchestrated what was truly chamber music.37 It was obvious in Boulez’s presentation that he was describing a manoeuvre which he felt a composer ought to effect: it was Boulez who needed to fuse the Debussian with the Webernian, rather than that the two composers could be heard already in relationship to one another. That that relationship could, literally, be heard in Boulez’s contemporaneous music is signalled by Arnold Whittall’s observation that, at the beginning of the third movement of Le Marteau sans maître, there is already‘a sense of the not-so-distant presence of one of Boulez’s most admired precursors, Debussy’.38
35
Ernst Thomas,‘Werkstatt für Neue Musik: Die Darmstädter Ferienkurse im Jubiläumsjahr’, Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, 9 June 1955.
36 Pierre Boulez,‘Claude Debussy et Anton Webern’ [1955], tr. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, in Metzger
and Riehn (eds.), Darmstadt-Dokumente I, 75.
37 Ibid., 77–9. 38Whittall, Serialism, 178.
composition, a massive evolution of Schoenbergian principles, has taken hold. Schoenberg’s name stands symbolically at the beginning of the repre- sentative concert series.?35 This was not a proxy way of a correspondent making a tacit claim for the composer whom he was, personally,‘backing’ (Messiaen standing for Boulez, Schoenberg for Nono, and Webern for Stockhausen), though there may well have been a hint of that too, but rather a signal that, even if later it would become‘obvious’ that it had been Webern all along who had been the exemplaryfigure, in 1955 it was still not clear how the mythology would be constructed. It should go without saying that the state of affairs in 1955 feels rather closer to the truth of the matter – a flood of influences, and not only Messiaen, Schoenberg, and Webern, of differing weights of significance for the different composers – even if the press had already started to tilt at a more unified narrative.
That the story of new music at Darmstadt was already far from unified ought really to have been symbolised in Boulez’s lecture that year, which explicitly aligned his own output with not only Webern, but also Debussy. The point, as Boulez saw it, was that what he found in Debussy had little to do with calculation– the serial transformations of the series – as one might find in Webern, but much to do with morphology and with form, as well as with orchestration.36 Where Webern’s formal principles, however ‘advanced’ the materials inserted into them, harked back to classical models– and here Boulez distanced himself from Eimert’s position that Adorno had erroneously found the fusion of fugue and the sonata principle in Webern– in Debussy one found fluid formal principles which were developed from the chromatic material in play, even in pieces which appeared, atfirst blush, to be composed according to a simplistic ABA schema. The Second Viennese School, Boulez opined, had not written for orchestra, but had, on the contrary, done little more in their orchestral scores than orchestrated what was truly chamber music.37 It was obvious in Boulez’s presentation that he was describing a manoeuvre which he felt a composer ought to effect: it was Boulez who needed to fuse the Debussian with the Webernian, rather than that the two composers could be heard already in relationship to one another. That that relationship could, literally, be heard in Boulez’s contemporaneous music is signalled by Arnold Whittall’s observation that, at the beginning of the third movement of Le Marteau sans maître, there is already‘a sense of the not-so-distant presence of one of Boulez’s most admired precursors, Debussy’.38
35
Ernst Thomas,‘Werkstatt für Neue Musik: Die Darmstädter Ferienkurse im Jubiläumsjahr’, Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, 9 June1955.
36 Pierre Boulez,‘Claude Debussy et Anton Webern’ [1955], tr. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, in Metzger
and Riehn (eds.), Darmstadt-Dokumente I, 75.
A year later, Boulez would go rather further– admittedly in a publication in France rather than Germany on this occasion– suggesting that one might consider setting up‘a Debussy–Cézanne–Mallarmé axis as the root of all modernism’.39
While Boulez was probably not wholly serious, it was becom- ing clear in both Germany and France that he was outlining a gradual distancing from Webern. Boulez’s lecture was given an impromptu trans- lation into German by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, whose translations in more formal ways– not least of Boulez’s later lecture, ‘Alea’, and of Cage’s third Darmstadt lecture,‘Communication’ – would have an impact on the devel- opment of the aesthetic debate at Darmstadt.
The link, too, was emphasised in performance. Directly following Boulez’s lecture, Yvonne Loriod performed the third, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth of Debussy’s Douze études (1915) juxtaposed with a performance, the German première, of thefirst book of Structures by Loriod and Hans Alexander Kaul. Neither the performance nor the lecture elicited much response at the time, with Structures representing, for Lewinski at least, nothing very important in terms of its own musical substance and forming instead a vital point of departure.40 Yet, even for Boulez, Structures was no real point of departure, but more– much like Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, whose pitch material Boulez adapted into the series for Structure Ia– an experiment at the limits of a particular mode of serial organisation, and it is hardly typical for Boulez’s working in more general terms.41
Nevertheless, Stuckenschmidt took thefirst book of Structures to be ‘symptomatic’ of the problems of the new serial music. He raised one of the regular concerns regarding pre-determination of serial material:‘when fortissimo and pianissimo have equal rights, the stronger always wins.’ Whether Stuckenschmidt intentionally meant to make the poli- tical comparison explicit or not, his use of the word Stimmrecht, more literally ‘suffrage’ or ‘franchise’, to mean equal rights, was certainly suggestive of the Adornian notion that a fully pre-determined serial system was redolent of totalitarian political ones. In any case, he argued that one of the other difficulties was the degree to which the ear tired of such textures, and suggested that Boulez had overstepped the maximum duration for which such music could be tolerated.42
As far as the reception of Stockhausen’s music at the 1955 Darmstadt New Music Courses was concerned, it was, as Ernst Rittel said, amongst 39
Pierre Boulez,‘Corruption in the Censers’ [1956], in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, tr. Stephen Walsh (Oxford University Press, 1991), 20.
40
Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski,‘Debussy – Webern – Boulez: Yvonne Loriod und H. A. Kaul spielten auf der Marienhöhe’, Darmstädter Tagblatt, 4 June 1955.
41 See Bösche,‘Auf der Suche nach dem Unbekannten’, 46–50. 42
Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt,‘Leidenschaftlich suchen Komponisten nach neuen Ordnungen und Formen der Musik’, Die Welt, 8 June 1955.
A year later, Boulez would go rather further– admittedly in a publication in France rather than Germany on this occasion– suggesting that one might consider setting up‘a Debussy–Cézanne–Mallarmé axis as the root of all modernism’.39
While Boulez was probably not wholly serious, it was becom- ing clear in both Germany and France that he was outlining a gradual distancing from Webern. Boulez’s lecture was given an impromptu trans- lation into German by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, whose translations in more formal ways– not least of Boulez’s later lecture, ‘Alea’, and of Cage’s third Darmstadt lecture,‘Communication’ – would have an impact on the devel-