Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1956 Author(S): Amy C
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
American Musicological Society Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1956 Author(s): Amy C. Beal Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 105- 139 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831871 Accessed: 22/11/2010 15:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society. http://www.jstor.org Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1956 AMY C. BEAL The storyof musicin postwarGermany rests on assumptionsthat have won acceptance through sheer repetition. Some reexaminationmay be in order. This is not to deny that the destruction of Germancities, especiallyin the spring of 1945, was devastatingand dramatic,or that centers for new music seemed to sprout from the rubble. But such descriptionsare only a starting point for understandingwhy certain areas of Germany-for example, Cologne, Donaueschingen, and Darmstadt-became era-defining meccas for new music. Germany's Nachholbediirfnis,the postwar race to "make up for lost time" in a national deficit of modern music, illustratesa dominantnarrative in twentieth-centurymusic history. As a paradigmaticcase of this narrative,the story of Darmstadt'srebirth embodies the myth of Germany'scultural apparatus rising like a phoenix from the ashesof the Second WorldWar. Insofar as institutions and performancevenues are examined as factors in the history of composition since 1945, English-language texts sometimes portray Darmstadt's Internationale Ferienkursefiir Neue Musik (hereafter IFNM or Ferienkurse)as a summer camp dedicatedto the explorationof elec- tronic music and European serialism.1Recent German-languagepublications Researchfor this articlewas supported in part by a DAAD fellowshipto Germany,1997-98. An earlier version of the text was read at the Sixty-fourth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Boston, October-November 1998. I am grateful to Richard Crawford, Danielle Fosler-Lussier,Christopher Fox, Jean Missud, David Nicholls, Anne Shreffler, and RichardTaruskin for offering valuablesuggestions. I offer specialthanks to Doris Rebner, for al- lowing me to publish my translationof Wolfgang Edward Rebner's Darmstadtlecture here, to Wilhelm Schiuiterfor making so many Darmstadt documents available,and to Ralf Dietrich for proofreadingthe translation.All translationsare mine unless otherwise noted. 1. For example Eric Salzman, Twentieth-CenturyMusic: An Introduction(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974); Donald Jay Grout and Claude Palisca,A History of WesternMusic, 4th ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988); Norman Lebrecht, The Companionto Twentieth-CenturyMusic (New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Robert P. Morgan, ed., ModernTimes: From WorldWar I to the Present(London: Macmillan,1993); Glenn Watkins,Pyramids at theLouvre: Music, Culture,and Collagefrom Stravinskyto the Postmodernists (Cambridge:Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 1994); and Paul Griffiths,Modern Music and After:Directions Since 1945 (New York:Oxford UniversityPress, 1995). [Journalofthe American Musicological Society 2000, vol. 53, no. 1] ? 2000 by the AmericanMusicological Society. All rightsreserved. 0003-0139/00/5301-0004$2.00 106 Journalof the AmericanMusicological Society on earlyIFNM history,such as GianmarioBorio and Hermann Danuser'sIm Zenit der Moderne, suggest a more balanced picture of the variety offered by the IFNM.2 Pioneers of early modernism whose music was still largely unknown-Bart6k, Berg, Debussy, Hindemith, Honegger, Krenek,Messiaen, Milhaud, Schoenberg, Stravinsky,and Webern-found an eager audience there. The IFNM also provided fertile ground for the European avant-garde to explore a new musical language, and composers like Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and KarlheinzStockhausen did indeed often dominate a central dis- course during the fifties. The first director of the courses, Dr. Wolfgang Steinecke (1910-1961), encouraged young Europeans like Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen,and Bruno Maderna.But he also brought innovativeAmericans to Darmstadt, as well as German 6migr6s living in the United States who could report on musical life there. Less well known is that in the earlyyears, the Ferienkursewere actively supported by American officers working for the occupying militarygovernment's Theater and Music Branch. Eventually a network of mutual support helped create for American composers a controversial-but influential-presence in Germany. Well-known figures like John Cage, David Tudor, and the German musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidtcontributed to this network. But so did lesser-knownfigures, including Steinecke himself, Everett Helm, John Evarts, and Wolfgang EdwardRebner. This article traces the relationships among American music officers, German patrons, and representativesof American music in Darmstadtin the context of postwar and Cold War politics, and describesevents at the IFNM that led to the recognition of the possibilitiesopened up by Americanexperi- mental music. An English translationof Rebner's 1954 Ferienkurselecture, "AmericanExperimental Music," is included as an appendix.3The lecture's historicalsignificance lies in its apparentlack of models; a survey of the litera- ture on American experimentalmusic suggests that, in Darmstadt in 1954, Rebner may have made the first public attempt to portrayAmerican experi- mentalismas an independent branchof Americanmusical history. (Though it is not the purpose of this articleto offer a definition of Americanexperimental music, a historical study of the idea would be worthwhile.) In his lecture, Rebner constructed a tradition of American experimentalmusic, a tradition that would come to occupy an influentialspace in West German new music circlesduring the Cold Warera. I hope that this translationof Rebner'slecture 2. The most extensive sources on IFNM history are Rudolf Stephan et al., eds., Von Kranichsteinzur Gegenwart:50Jahre DarmstadterFerienkurse (Stuttgart: DACO Verlag, 1996); Borio and Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne:Die Internationalen Ferienkursefir Neue Musik, Darmstadt 1946-1966, 4 vols. (Freiburg:Rombach Verlag,1997); and Heinz-KlausMetzger and RainerRiehn, eds., Darmstadt-DokumenteI: Musik-KonzepteSonderband (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 1999). The summer courses, originally called KranichsteinerFerienkurse ftir Neue Musik, were laterrenamed to emphasizeinternationalism. 3. Rebner'slecture was firstpublished in the originalGerman in Borio and Danuser,Im Zenit der Moderne3:178-89. Negotiating Cultural Allies 107 will contributeto our understandingof transatlanticmusical relationships dur- ing the fifties along the lines provided by Austin Clarkson,for example, with his translationof Stefan Wolpe's Darmstadtlecture "On New (and Not-So- New) Music in America"(1956).4 Cultural Reeducation at the Zero Hour West Germany's commitment to new music immediately after the end of WorldWar II-beginning with the so-called Zero Hour (Stunde Null)-is a story that has appealed to scholarsof recent music history.5With respect to musicallife, however, the familiarconcept of a Zero Hour is flawedfor several reasons.First, contemporary musical life in Germany,though severelylimited, hardlyceased between 1933 and 1945.6 Second, Germanydid not yield to the Allied invasionall at once. The war, and with it the Nazi era, did not end at the same time for all Germans. As early as 24 November 1944, the American MilitaryGovernment Control Branchissued a law prohibitingGerman public activity,including publishing and recordingmusic, broadcastingon the radio, and any type of live musical performance.7Many localitieswere occupied by the Allies in advanceof the fall of Berlin, and in these places "normal"activi- ties-including newspaper production and musical performance-resumed before Germany'ssurrender was signed on 8 May 1945, or even before the fighting in the Reich's capital had ended.8 Finally, many musicians and 4. StefanWolpe, "On New (and Not-So-New) Music in America,"trans. with commentary by Austin Clarkson,Journal ofMusic Theory28 (1984): 1-45. 5. For a survey of German historians' interpretations of the Zero Hour, see Theodor Eschenburg, "Stunde Null," in Jahre unseresLebens, 1945-1949, ed. Dieter