New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Music since 1900)
Cambridge University Press, 4/18/2013
EAN 9781107033290, ISBN10: 1107033292
Hardcover, 354 pages, 24.4 x 17 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
New Music at Darmstadt explores the rise and fall of the so-called 'Darmstadt School', through a wealth of primary sources and analytical commentary. Martin Iddon's book examines the creation of the Darmstadt New Music Courses and the slow development and subsequent collapse of the idea of the Darmstadt School, showing how participants in the West German new music scene, including Herbert Eimert and a range of journalistic commentators, created an image of a coherent entity, despite the very diverse range of compositional practices on display at the courses. The book also explores the collapse of the seeming collegiality of the Darmstadt composers, which crystallised around the arrival there in 1958 of the most famous, and notorious, of all post-war composers, John Cage, an event Carl Dahlhaus opined 'swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster'.
Introduction
music after catastrophe
Part I. The Accidental Serialists
1. Arrivals
2. Schools, excursus
October 1954, Donaueschingen and Cologne
Part II. A Stranger in Paradise?
3. Pre-cursors
4. The Cage shock
5. In Cage's wake
Conclusion
a stranger in paradise?
Chronology of major events at Darmstadt, 1946–61.