# The Darmstadt School



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I hope I'm not opening a can of worms here.

The Darmstadt School, despite being possibly the most criticised school of composition in history, was one of the most important bunch of composers in the 20th century comprising many composers which are revered to this day by [a relative] many. It came about from the composers who attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in the 50s and 60s.



random Wikipedia author said:


> Coined by Luigi Nono in his 1958 lecture "Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik" (Nono 1975, 30; Fox 1999, 111-12), 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, Earle Brown, John Cage, Aldo Clementi, Franco Donatoni, Niccolò Castiglioni, Franco Evangelisti, Karel Goeyvaerts, Mauricio Kagel, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Giacomo Manzoni, and Henri Pousseur from 1951 to 1961 (Ielmini 2012, 237; Muller-Doohm 2005, 392-93; Priore 2007, 192; Schleiermacher 2000, 20-21; Schleiermacher 2004, 21-22; Whiting 2009), and even composers who never actually attended Darmstadt, such as Jean Barraqué and Iannis Xenakis (Malone 2011, 90). 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" (Fox 1999, 123). Nevertheless, composers active at Darmstadt in the early 1960s under Steinecke's successor Ernst Thomas are sometimes included by extension-Helmut Lachenmann, for example (Schleiermacher 2004, 23-24)-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 (Schleiermacher 2000, 20)


So, what do you enjoy from this time and place and these composers? Some of Boulez's compositions are probably the most famous, but some composers listed above are not nearly as famous. Any recommendations? a
Anecdotes? What do you like about the Darmstadt School?


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## Guest (Jan 6, 2014)

The Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse is still an ongoing thing.

It doesn't have the same cachet it used to have, but that's OK. It's still a fun thing.

My only anecdote for this thread is a personal one. And a sad one.

I was in Darmstadt in 1971-72 attending a school for Auslaender learning Deutsch. On the kiosks by the bus and Strassenbahn stops, there would be notices of various concerts, including ones for new music.

We would look for things we were interested in, Wagner or Tchaikovsky or Beethoven or whatever. And we would laugh at the funny names--of composers and of pieces--of the new music concerts. Mockery out of pure ignorance: we knew none of these people, and we had heard none of their music. But we were still able to have opinions about them (opinions that we were entitled to, of course).

I first heard Bartok's _Concerto for Orchestra_ in March of 1972, which was as a big a deal for me as hearing classical music generally for the first time eleven or twelve years before that. In July, I attended a performance of Stravinsky's _Les Noces_ in Stockholm. Magical!! By October, back in the U.S., I was struggling unsuccessfully with Carter. But by 1973, I was listening to Carter and Stockhausen and Mumma with ease and delight.

And reading about this marvelous new world, too. Which meant, inevitably, that I found out that Darmstadt had been a center for the music I now adored, and that I had totally missed my chance to hear any of it while I was in Darmstadt.

At least I got to meet John Cage in 1976, play chess with him, and see him and correspond with him many times over the rest of his life.

And the last eight years have been spent traveling from festival to festival, meeting dozens, hundreds, of truly delightful and important composers of new music. But still. I look back at 1972 and where I was and what I did in my ignorance.... I have few regrets in my life. That's one of them.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

The Darmstadt School were my initial introduction to classical music (I had had no exposure to classical music as a child, as no members of my family were music fans). As a youth, I was a die-hard alternative and non-commercial, primarily British and German, rock fan. Then, in about 1974, I discovered Stockhausen, Xenakis and Ligeti in some record bins at a student music shop at the university. I was immediately hooked without hope of recovery and within weeks, I had dozens upon dozens of albums by these composers, as well as Malec, Mâche, Ferrari, Henry, Nono, Kagel, Berio, Maderna, Penderecki, Messiaen, Boulez, Gerhard and... oh so many more 

I was initially attracted to the electronics, the sounds, the strangeness... My top bands, like Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel and other synthesizer bands of the time, paled in comparison. My interest and taste in rock diminished and changed as my interest in classical music increased. The more I learned of this fabulous new music, the wider became my scope. Both Kagel and Stockhausen had done works honouring Beethoven and other composers were working not only in the electronic medium, but in chamber and orchestra. This led me with little delay directly to the New Viennese School and Schoenberg and Webern became my composers of choice. From there, I began to explore Takemitsu, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach...

I had become a fan of classical music, in the most natural way possible: I started with the music of the present time and, as my knowledge and interest expanded, worked my way back to the legendary greats.

This music had become extremely important to me. Like other youths identified with Zappa (I did, too) and Black Sabbath, CCR and the Stones, I came to identify with my love for 'Neue Musik'. I couldn't begin to list my favourite compositions, being and having been the rabid collector I was


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

The other interesting connection with the Darmstadt School is the classroom of Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen taught harmony to a whole generation of the post-WWII avant-garde. Intriguingly enough, he was not terribly interested in serialism/12-tone method himself. Of Schoenberg, he said that he "was not a composer he liked more than any other". But Messiaen taught Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many others (George Benjamin has recently enjoyed some popular and critical success).

As for favorite pieces, I'm fond of Boulez's work, Stockhausen's Gruppen, Xenakis's Metastaseis, Berio's Sequenzas and other works involving soloists, and what I've heard of Nono intrigues me, though I haven't really taken the time to fully explore.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

brotagonist,

You came to it a lot quicker than I did.

I am still having problems with most of the members of the Darmstadt School. The ones I do get are Xenakis and Berio. I am still young enough that I may eventially figure it out.


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## scratchgolf (Nov 15, 2013)

brotagonist said:


> The Darmstadt School were my initial introduction to classical music (I had had no exposure to classical music as a child, as no members of my family were music fans). As a youth, I was a die-hard alternative and non-commercial, primarily British and German, rock fan. Then, in about 1974, I discovered Stockhausen, Xenakis and Ligeti in some record bins at a student music shop at the university. I was immediately hooked without hope of recovery and within weeks, I had dozens upon dozens of albums by these composers, as well as Malec, Mâche, Ferrari, Henry, Nono, Kagel, Berio, Maderna, Penderecki, Messiaen, Boulez, Gerhard and... oh so many more
> 
> I was initially attracted to the electronics, the sounds, the strangeness... My top bands, like Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel and other synthesizer bands of the time, paled in comparison. My interest and taste in rock diminished and changed as my interest in classical music increased. The more I learned of this fabulous new music, the wider became my scope. Both Kagel and Stockhausen had done works honouring Beethoven and other composers were working not only in the electronic medium, but in chamber and orchestra. This led me with little delay directly to the New Viennese School and Schoenberg and Webern became my composers of choice. From there, I began to explore Takemitsu, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach...
> 
> ...


This is a wonderful post and I feel the need to let you know. I've struggled with most of the music you love but reading this gives me perspective. I may never fully appreciate this music, due to a combination of time and interest. I've read all the posts about people's distaste for the Second Viennese School and the Darmstadt School, amongst others. I've found much of it to be unapproachable at the current time, but I'm open to change. I may never latch on to this variety of music but it's a no-lose situation. That which I love, I love with all my heart. There's certainly room for more and I welcome the opportunity.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

If it might help someone, here are some of my earliest favourites:

Stockhausen (florid weirdness): Kurzwellen, Gesang der Jünglinge, Kontakte, Opus 1970 (aka Beethausen Stockhoven)
Kagel (I liked the collage music): Ludwig van, 1898, Der Schall
Xenakis (electronics, sounds): Persepolis, Orient-Occident, Bohor, Eonta
Messiaen (I was fascinated by the bird music): Réveil des oiseaux, Oiseaux exotiques, Catalogue des oiseaux, Chronochromie
Schoenberg (the patterns, the cabaret style): Pierrot Lunaire, String Quartets, Variations
Webern (starkness, brevity): everything on the Quartetto Italiano and the Karajan/BPO albums
Penderecki: the two albums on Angel (Penderecki conducts Penderecki) with the classic avant garde works he is famous for
Henry (electronics): Orphée, Symphonie pour un homme seul
Boulez: Marteau sans Maître
Ligeti: Lontano, Ramifications, Lux Æterna (credit to Kubrick for using the music in 2001: A Space Odyssey)
Gerhard: The Plague (Decca Headline series)
Varèse: Déserts, Amériques, Arcana (Konstantin Simonovich album on Angel, I think)

And lots more 

Credit is due to the record companies, particularly Deutsche Grammophon and Philips, for issuing the music and making it available. Also, the budget bins full of Vox Candide and Vox Turnabout records.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Darmstadt music is interesting to listen in different ways. You can study the music beforehand, analyze the formulas, look at the score while listening (I did a little bit of that in music history this past semester). Or, you can just sit there and let the mind absorb the acoustic impressions. There is Darmstadt music that is almost too hard to analyze, perhaps this is the irony. At a certain point, we can't even be masters of the things we create. I like the stuff that is more free-hand, I think, for example the _Threnody _by Penderecki who wrote blobs of sound on the score rather than hyper-polyphonic tone rows or something like that. It's certainly not serialist, but it experiments with acoustics. Xenakis and Ligeti follow suit.

One problem I have with it is that it has been hard for me to share how I feel about it with friends and family, understandably harder than other styles. It's hard to infect others with my understanding and even passion, however, I've tried and will keep on trying.

I don't think I'll ever truly adore the _sounds _themselves, but the music rarely ever was just about the sounds. The theory behind it which is the motivation to explore for the sake of posterity is respectable to me. The "What if" of music is a good question, though it's not certainly the only one. Their innovations are used in post-modern music of all kinds today, even pop forms such as soundtracks. It may take 100+ years before we fully understand the impact of the Darmstadt school, and so I think their influence on all kinds of music will live on just as long.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> One problem I have with it is that it has been hard for me to share how I feel about it with friends and family, understandably harder than other styles. It's hard to infect others with my understanding and even passion, however, I've tried and will keep on trying.


I know what you mean. I used to try to share my excitement, but I have given up trying... but it is not just the Darmstadt School: try to infect someone with your love of Bach or Beethoven. The result will be pretty much the same: talking to an impenetrable wall. That used to bug me somewhat, but I realize that they must feel the same way about me when they try to infect me with their love of Bieber or Rush or Arcade Fire  For me, this music was the initial seed that grew into a lifelong love of classical music in general. There is nostalgia attached to it: it was the music of my late teens and early adulthood, not just the music I chose, but the music of the time.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

There's some sort of Modern music revival going on around here. I dig. 

Schoenberg was the one who first opened my eyes to the modern world, and then came the rest. What's great about this school and its ilk is these are the artist who are both bold and open enough to ride the wave of evolution as it's unfolding. Nothing wrong with traditions, but I feel it's vital to also have the pioneers who are willing to take that step into unknown territory. 

This is still a much alive discovery for me, and I feel I'm getting closer and closer to the cusp of where fresh ideas first enter manifestation.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Great replies, thanks everyone. 

Could anyone recommend CDs or works by some of the lessor known composers of the Darmstadt School?


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I hope others have more to add 

It depends on how you define "lesser known."

Bruno Maderna is pretty well known for a lesser known DS composer. His most famous album appeared on DG and was reissued by Brilliant. It contains the orchestral works _Quadrivium, Aura, Biogramma_, conducted by Sinopoli.

A composer I know and enjoy who is likely less known is Franco Donatoni. Etcetera issued some of his works, performed by the Nieuw Ensemble; Adda issued some, performed by the Ensemble 2E2M/Paul Méfano. These are definitely worth locating. There is also a series that I have not yet heard on Stradivarius.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Yeah, I remember that Maderna DG recording. There's a box set of actual recordings from Darmstadt, going back to its beginnings in the 50s. Very interesting. Also, a box set of the early Boulez & Domaine Musical. Get David Tudor's recording of the Klavierstucke; it's definitive, a live recording, with Stockhausen in the audience. Tudor was the only pianist who could pull off this feat at the time.


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## Copperears (Nov 10, 2013)

It's interesting, I got excited about the results from Darmstadt without ever really knowing about it in the early '70's, when I started to discover Xenakis, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Charles Dodge and others in the discount classical recording bins. Ironically, the low price of the then-LPs was a big factor in helping me, poor, young student of the time, experiment.

Plus the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in my neighborhood of that time, had done a wonderful job both in live performances I'd attended and in recording, of revealing the richness of Olivier Messiaen's music.

That, combined with an early interest in electronic music, and its evolution from the experiments in electronic sound and sound synthesis that arose out of musical schools in some ways converging from a different direction on principles and passions and goals inherent to Darmstadt, led to it all making sense to me at the time.

But my knowledge of that history is superficial, with only a few albums' worth of attention paid. It's fascinating that it was happening at relatively the same time as, for instance, the Black Mountain poetry experiments that Charles Olson among others was engaging in.

All of this influenced by a scientific optimism that a future could in fact be built out of the ashes left by the World Wars, on different terms, with different principles and a freedom from traditions that had clearly failed by leading to genocide and wholesale cultural destruction as their then-seemingly inevitable endpoints. Why not make it new, as William Carlos Williams also wrote?

But the more interesting phenomenon to me, since I'd been caught up in the furor of postmodernism, something that really originated in the late '60's in France but caught on in the US 20 years later, and turned into more of a cultural here than historical, linguistic and philosophical phenomenon as it had been in '60's-'70's France, is the absolutely vicious, emotional hatred such iconoclasm inspired in the more traditionally-inclined of the same period.

Why should art, music, philosophy, linguistics suddenly matter so much? Seem to be so much of a threat to some arbitrary notion of a cultural establishment (the word we used back then)?

It derived, I think, in both the Darmstadt, Black Mountain (and later, Concrete Poetry) and postmodernist moments out of the belief that in fact if enough people started to think radically differently about the fundamentals, all tradition and concept of the inevitable, true and natural taken for granted by a generation _would_ be utterly washed away, in an instant, without rabid defense.

I think in fact and in retrospect that such a dissolution of previous cultural (and with them, political and economic) forms was already happening, dramatically, and that rather than "causing" them, the arts were reflecting them, perhaps helping to articulate them clearly and crystallize and thus help with the dissolution.

But, as with anything new, strange, different, unfamiliar, the herd reaction is one of fear, hatred and, as Rene Girard wrote in his most excellent analysis, "The Scapegoat," ultimately, scapegoating.

Ditto with anti-serialism. The past attempts to bully the future into silence, but that bullying is in fact evidence of its imminent passing, and thus, despite its ugliness, its existence is in fact a very hopeful sign that the future is about to break out all over.

As with, say, something like this:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...s-millennials-should-be-fighting-for-20140103



It's all one.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Mahlerian said:


> The other interesting connection with the Darmstadt School is the classroom of Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen taught harmony to a whole generation of the post-WWII avant-garde. Intriguingly enough, he was not terribly interested in serialism/12-tone method himself. Of Schoenberg, he said that he "was not a composer he liked more than any other". But Messiaen taught Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many others (George Benjamin has recently enjoyed some popular and critical success).
> .


I know that Messiaen was significant there in that early period, I have read similar things about Henze (of course he was in the younger generation), but he kind of went Romantic at some point thus crossing the line from being 'cutting edge' to 'retrograde.' I think the split for him happened in the 1950's, as the situation became increasingly factionalised between composers with one approach and those with another. But I actually like the earliest product of the lessons that Henze took there, his Violin Concerto #1 (composed around 1946-7) is similarly couched in the flexible serialism of Berg, and its got the same expressive quality. Henze thought little of it, thought it little more than juvenilia, but I like it quite a lot.


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Could anyone recommend CDs or works by some of the lessor known composers of the Darmstadt School?


I'm not sure what constitutes a composer who is lesser known or is simply infrequently represented (not only on disc, but within academia).

But - yeah - I got some recommendations! 

In one of his interviews, composer/conducter Bruno Maderna had indicated that the only "great" French composer to come _after_ Pierre Boulez is Gilbert Amy.

This interview probably transpired during the 1960s or - at the latest - the early 1970s since Mr. Maderna passed away in 1973.

Speaking for myself, I think there's more than one great French composer born after 1925, but I do cherish my sole album of music by Gilbert Amy:










Amy's "Missa Cum Jubilo" is my favorite Mass. And the record label Erato deserves more attention and acclaim than it seems to receive (both in the world out there and within TalkClassical).


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

Bruno Maderna also mentioned that, of the younger Italian composers, both Sylvano Bussotti and Franco Donatoni showed the greated promise for the future.

I'd recommend Timpani's 2-CD release of Bussotti's _Il catalogo è questo_ conducted by Arturo Tamayo ...










... and volume #2 of Donatoni's orchestral music on the Stradivarius label (also by Tamayo):


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

Lastly ... but not least ... an album on the Adda label by the inexplicably neglected Henri Pousseur called _Traverser la Foret_:


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

The summer of 1949 must have been one of Darmstadt's banner years in retrospect:

Instructors:
Olivier Messiaen
Wolfgang Fortner
Antoine Golea
Rolf Liebermann

In attendance:
Ton De Leeuw
Humphrey Searle
Michael Tippett
Antony Hopkins
Peter Racine Frickner
Boris Blacher
Werner Egk
Hans Werner Henze
Giselher Klebe


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Prodromides said:


> Lastly ... but not least ... an album on the Adda label by the inexplicably neglected Henri Pousseur called _Traverser la Foret_:


Wow, Gilbert Amy and Henri Poussueur: I'm impressed, Prodromides. I don't have those, either.

I've got something from that era that I bet nobody else has: 8 volumes of the journal Die Rhie (The Row), pub. by Universal Edition. I sent off for them way back in 1973, from a distributor here in the US.

Stephen Schleffermier (sp) has a disc out called "Piano Music of the Darmstadt School." I think it's on that Netherlands label GD.


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## SimonNZ (Jul 12, 2012)

Has anybody read or heard anything about the book New Music At Darmstadt by Marton Iddon? I'm considering purchasing at the moment, but its quite pricey.


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

millionrainbows said:


> Wow, Gilbert Amy and Henri Poussueur: I'm impressed, Prodromides. I don't have those, either.
> 
> I've got something from that era that I bet nobody else has: 8 volumes of the journal Die Rhie (The Row), pub. by Universal Edition. I sent off for them way back in 1973, from a distributor here in the US.
> 
> Stephen Schleffermier (sp) has a disc out called "Piano Music of the Darmstadt School." I think it's on that Netherlands label GD.


Good luck, millionrainbows, in your search for any of those albums!

You're right, I don't have that 8 volume set you mention - in '73, I was in 1st grade.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I have the Cambridge book* Serialism *from that series, and it's excellent. I love British typography and their use of language, and the way they seem to always be seeking a "bird's eye view" of the subject. They think like I do.


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