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New-music internationalism the ISCM festival, 1922–1939

Masters, Giles

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New-Music Internationalism: The ISCM Festival, 1922–1939

Giles Masters

PhD King’s College London 2021

Contents

Abstract 3

List of Figures 4

Acknowledgements 5

Introduction 8

Chapter 1 43 Looking Backward: Trauma, Nostalgia and Ageing

Chapter 2 74 Music and the New: The Iron Foundry and Mimetic Mechanicity

Chapter 3 110 Patchwork Internationalism: Festival-Making and National Heritage

Chapter 4 143 A ‘Musical League of Nations’: Musician-Diplomats in Times of Crisis

Epilogue 178

Appendix 1 188 Itinerary of the 1931 ISCM Festival, Oxford and London

Appendix 2 192 Musica antica italiana at the 1928 ISCM Festival, Siena

Bibliography 193

Abstract

This thesis examines the conjuncture of modernism and internationalism in European musical culture. Its focus is the festivals organised in the 1920s and 30s by the International

Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Sometimes referred to at the time as the ‘musical

League of Nations’, the ISCM was the most high-profile of the internationalist musical initiatives launched in Europe after the First World War. Its annual festival provides an unrivalled lens through which to observe shifting attitudes and approaches to the imagined symbiosis of the ‘contemporary’ and the ‘international’. Taking a cue from cross-disciplinary efforts to reappraise interwar internationalisms (long overshadowed by the two world wars),

I explore how the ideas and practices of these movements were remoulded by actors at the margins of international politics, and interrogate the enduring assumption that the moral or political value of music anointed as ‘new’ is manifest in its association with internationalism.

The Introduction situates the ISCM’s founding in the larger histories of new music and internationalism. Chapter One describes how Edward J. Dent, the ISCM’s first president, remembered the organisation’s early years; his nostalgia illuminates new-music internationalism as an affective and ethical project. Chapter Two reassesses interwar machine aesthetics by examining the intensive dissemination of Alexander Mosolov’s Iron

Foundry, following the work’s performance at the 1930 ISCM festival in Liège. Chapter

Three takes the surprising prominence of early music at ISCM gatherings as a starting point for investigating early twentieth-century conceptions of the relationship between national heritage and transnational affiliations. Chapter Four explores the fissures that arose within the ISCM in the mid- to late-1930s, as musicians struggled to agree on a collective response to the moral and political dilemmas presented by Europe’s geopolitical turmoil. The Epilogue surveys the ISCM’s waning prestige after 1945, a decline that brings into relief the distinctive conditions that facilitated the organisation’s unique standing in European musical life between the wars.

List of Figures

Figure 1 14 A group of musicians at the International Chamber Music Performances in Salzburg 1922

Figure 2 51 J. Palmer Clarke, portrait photograph of Edward J. Dent (1900)

Figure 3 72 Edmond Xavier Kapp, Professor E.J. Dent (1941)

Figure 4 93 Programme book for the 1930 ISCM festival, p. 80

Figure 5 100 Programme for the third performance of The Spirit of the Factory at the Hollywood Bowl, 12 August 1932

Figure 6 101 A rehearsal for The Spirit of the Factory at the Hollywood Bowl, 1931

Figure 7 123 Programme book for the 1931 ISCM festival, cover page

Figure 8 140 Programme book for the 1928 ISCM festival, inside cover

Figure 9 147 The Oxford meeting of the ISCM’s General Assembly, 1931

Table 1 15 ISCM festivals, 1923–1939

Acknowledgements

2020 has been, to say the least, a strange year in which to finish a PhD. The circumstances have lent a particular poignancy to the writing of these acknowledgements: in the last nine months, I’ve not once been in the same room as most of the people I’m about to mention. So it feels all the more important to show my appreciation in writing. I must begin by thanking

Heather Wiebe, who has been an extraordinarily astute and supportive supervisor. I’ve learnt enormously from her wise counsel and the elegant precision of her thinking and writing. It’s a real pleasure to express here even just a fraction of my gratitude for her generosity, patience and care.

I feel very lucky indeed that in my two stints as a Teaching Assistant I worked with

Roger Parker and Flora Willson. Both went far beyond the call of duty to take me under their wings. Roger inculcated in me something of his ruthlessness in decluttering prose (although

I still have a long way to go). Flora encouraged me to aspire for sharper and bolder ideas, and recruited me for various side hustles. Perhaps most importantly, their faith in me helped me keep believing that I could complete this project and that to do so would be worthwhile.

With mentors such as these, it has been a privilege to be associated with the

Department of Music at KCL. I feel very glad to have belonged to an academic community with such a strong ethos of collaboration and mutual respect across sub-disciplinary boundaries. Although some of them may not even remember it, Michael Fend, Andy Fry,

Katherine Fry, Emily MacGregor, Katherine Schofield, Arman Schwartz, Martin Stokes and

Gavin Williams all helped me in important ways as interlocutors, readers or administrative allies. I’m also grateful to my fellow doctoral students in the Department for their camaraderie and support, including feedback on draft chapters. Thanks especially to Cydonie

Banting, Alasdair Cameron, Lewis Coenen-Rowe, Giuliano Danieli, Sue Daniels, Mez Dubois-

Van Slageren, Caroline Gleason-Mercier, Susannah Knights, Nick Rheubottom, Sophia

Sakellaridis Mangoura, Sacha Scott, Rhys Sparey and Chris Terepin.

Many scholars beyond KCL have been generous with their time and ideas. Laura

Tunbridge was the first academic to whom I mentioned the idea of this project back in late

2015, an idea sparked in part by her teaching and research. I’m grateful for her continuing support. Laura put me in touch with Sarah Collins, who gave shrewd and inspiring advice.

Sarah, in turn, introduced me to two other scholars whose assistance proved invaluable:

Karen Arrandale taught me much about Edward J. Dent and helped me navigate his papers at the King’s College Archive Centre in Cambridge; and Astrid Kvalbein shared extensively from her own research at the ISCM Archive at the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen. I would also like to thank Melita Milin for providing information about the Serbian composers discussed in Chapter Four and Philip Bullock for his advice on Soviet music and his insightful feedback on Chapter Two.

Participating in conferences and other academic events has honed my ideas and stretched my horizons. A couple of occasions warrant special mention. Alex Marsden and

Joanna Helms were exemplary hosts at the KCL/University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Joint Graduate Music Student Conference in 2018, at which Annegret Fauser asked me some perceptive questions about Dent. Sarah Collins, Barbara Kelly and Laura Tunbridge invited me to speak at the conference ‘A “Musical League of Nations”: Music Institutions and the

Politics of Internationalism’ held in London in 2018, and to take part in the follow-up workshop in Oxford in early 2019. I’m grateful to all the participants in these events and especially Patricia Clavin, who gave a thoughtful response to my paper in London.

My doctoral studies were funded by a scholarship from KCL’s Arts and Humanities

Research Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at KCL and the Royal Musical

Association provided further grants to cover the expenses of research trips. Everywhere I went, I benefited enormously from the expertise and support of archivists and librarians.

Hearty thanks, then, to the staff at the following institutions: in the UK, the BBC Written

Archives Centre (especially Hannah Ratford), the British Library, King’s College Archive

Centre (especially Patricia McGuire and Peter Monteith), the Royal College of Music Library

(especially Michael Mullen) and Westminster Music Library (especially Ruth Walters); in

Berlin, the Akademie der Künste (especially Daniela Reinhold); in Copenhagen, the

Kongelige Bibliotek (especially Axel Teich Geertinger and Claus Røllum-Larsen); in

Switzerland, the Paul Sacher Stiftung (especially Simon Obert) and the Stadtbibliothek

Winterthur (especially Andres Betschart); and in Vienna, the Österreichische

Nationalbibliothek (especially Andrea Harrandt), the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (especially

Gerhard Hubmann) and the library of the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst

Wien (especially Katharina Krones). Special mention goes to Clemens Zoidl, whose friendship predates the inception of this project, for making me feel so welcome in Vienna and helping me access material held at the Ernst Krenek Institut. I would also like to thank the Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives (especially Meredith Reese) for sending me digitised sources relating to Adolph Bolm’s ballet The Spirit of the Factory.

For their valuable advice on my translations of sources in French, German, Italian and Spanish, I’m grateful to Henry Balme, Clara Benjamin, Giuliano Danieli and Sasha

Ockenden – excellent linguists and even better friends.

My friends and family have never allowed me to forget that there’s more to life than musicology. Ashleigh and Tim were the most wonderful housemates imaginable. Aneesh,

Amy and Wilf kept my spirits up through lockdowns and other disruption. I wouldn’t have had the chance to make such friendships if my parents, Lorraine and Robert, hadn’t instilled in me a firm sense of the value of education and supported me on every stage of the ensuing journey; I cannot thank them enough. Finally, Rosie has been my closest companion in this project as in all things. She has, heroically, read every word of what follows (often in multiple versions) – not out of compulsion, but because she knew she could help. I’m in awe of her kindness and bravery through some profound challenges. We made it.

Introduction

Throughout the two decades following the First World War, Europeans felt menaced by the threat of another major conflict. The 1930s especially saw a morbid fixation with the question of when, not if, the catastrophe would occur.1 But following his election as the president of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in 1938, the British music critic Edwin Evans was determined to strike a positive note. In his Christmas missive to the ISCM’s national sections, he wrote of his wish that ‘musicians, regardless of their nationality, their race and their political or religious beliefs, might continue to offer a resounding example of international collaboration and solidarity in the era of strife we are living through’.2 By early 1940, the first year since its founding in 1922 that the ISCM was unable to hold its annual festival, Evans’s optimism was dimmed but not extinguished:

‘Whatever else may befall the world in the hurricane of war, one thing we know beyond possibility of doubt: the art we all serve is immortal. It will, therefore, survive these present ordeals. Let us then strengthen our solidarity in order that our usefulness to the musical world may remain unimpaired.’3 The ‘hurricane of war’ might have compelled musicians to pause some of their usual activities, but it did not diminish them as artists or international citizens.

What are we to make of such sentiments today? We may feel an instinctive sympathy for Evans’s faith in the potential of music (or the arts in general) to do good in the world and to endure through social and political upheaval as a beacon of hope. Even if we are not so

1 Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939 (London: Penguin, 2010), 175–218, 314–62. 2 ‘Que les musiciens, quelles que soient leurs nationalités, leurs race et leurs croyances politiques ou religieuses continuent à fournir un example éclatant de solidarité et de collaboration internationales dans l’époque de désaccord que nous traversons’; Edward Clark [honorary secretary of the ISCM, writing on Evans’s behalf] to Max Adam [secretary of the Swiss section], 22 December 1938, Allgemeine Sammlung: Fonds IGNM (Sektion Basel), Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. The listing of nationality, race, politics and religion echoes the declaration the ISCM published in the wake of the 1935 festival in Prague, which was subsequently incorporated into the 1937 version of its statutes (see Chapter Four). 3 Evans to the national sections of the ISCM, January 1940, Allgemeine Sammlung: Fonds IGNM (Sektion Basel), Paul Sacher Stiftung. Evans was denied seeing this happier future by his sudden death in March 1945, just weeks before VE Day.

8 sentimental about music, most of us probably think of ourselves as sharing the basic values of tolerance, fellowship and cooperation he espouses. Compared to the xenophobia and aggression that coloured much of Europe’s political culture at the time, those principles might seem admirably enlightened. On the other hand, we may find Evans’s lofty rhetoric remarkably, even embarrassingly, naive. The idea that music is ‘immortal’ was, after all, a cliché of Romantic aesthetics. Evans coupled that old trope of musical transcendence with the idealistic discourse of liberal internationalism, a worldview that enjoyed great prestige and popularity in the wake of the First World War, but lost much of its lustre during the turmoil of the 1930s.

With the benefit of hindsight, there is ample evidence to support a cynical view of interwar internationalism. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was dismissed by many historians and scholars of international relations as a utopian project doomed to collapse – as complacent and self-serving hubris, inadequate for the profound challenges of the day, and with minimal bearing on the ‘real’ history of nations, nationalism and war.4 This attitude was evident in a disregard of the League of Nations, the emblematic institution of post-First World War internationalism, which had by the end of the 1930s become synonymous with failure. Since the 1990s, though, a more balanced picture has emerged. A

‘transnational turn’ in history writing has provided the platform for a reappraisal of twentieth-century internationalism, fuelled not least by a proliferation of new research on the League: work that looks beyond – if never entirely escapes – the old narrative of inevitable failure.5 Scholars have challenged previous characterisations of internationalism

4 This line of argument is foundational to the ‘realist’ school of international relations, which understands international politics as a struggle for power between self-interested actors. The paradigmatic statement of this position is E.H. Carr’s landmark critique of liberal internationalism as ‘utopianism’ in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper & Row, 1964 [1939]). 5 Susan Pedersen, ‘Review Essay: Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007), 1091–1117. See also Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For a considered overview of history’s transnational turn, see Simon Macdonald, ‘Transnational History: A Review of Past and Present Scholarship’ (2013), UCL Centre for Transnational History, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/centre- transnational-history/sites/centre-transnational-history/files/simon_macdonald_tns_review.pdf (accessed August 2020).

9 as a negligible adjunct to the truly significant events of modern history, arguing that its ideas and institutions were, to quote one recent summary, ‘central to the major political questions and themes of the twentieth century: war and peace, imperialism and nationalism, states and state-building’.6 While much of the work illustrating this claim has focused on economic, social and political issues, there has also been a growing interest in the history of cultural internationalism: the use of arts and culture to foster connections and cooperation between people of different nationalities.7 The internationalist initiatives of interwar Europe may not have prevented the crises of the 1930s or the outbreak of war, but they are increasingly recognised as having reshaped transnational fields of activity and international relations, in terms of both official diplomacy and more informal modes of exchange.8

This thesis brings the ongoing reassessment of interwar internationalism into dialogue with the history of European musical modernism. Focusing on the festivals organised by the ISCM, I explore how the ideas and practices of internationalist movements were remoulded by actors at the margins of international politics, and evaluate what it meant for a field of musical activity to be labelled international. Between the wars, music was a lively domain of cultural internationalism; it has remained so ever since. Yet this facet of music history has until recently been discussed only in passing.9 Musicology today presents an opportune crossroads for a more detailed inquiry. Like their colleagues in history – and across the humanities and social sciences more generally – musicologists have of late been much concerned with developing alternatives to what the sociologists Andreas Wimmer and

6 Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, ‘Rethinking the History of Internationalism’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3–14 (p. 6). See also Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 7 The landmark text is Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997). See also Grace Brockington, ed., Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). 8 Daniel Laqua, ed., Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Sluga and Clavin, eds., Internationalisms. 9 Work on transatlantic exchanges has made some important first steps in probing how cultural internationalism permeated musical life in the early twentieth century: Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Laura Tunbridge, Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Nina Glick Schiller term ‘methodological nationalism’: the deeply ingrained tendency to treat the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis.10 A desire to push beyond the epistemological and political limits of ‘nation-centered historiographies of music’ is apparent in studies that foreground issues such as mobility, displacement and globalisation.11

However, such scholarship risks presenting transnational affiliations and circulations involving music as mere by-products of larger economic or political forces.12 I address this problem of agency by directing attention to musicians who embraced the vibrant cultural internationalism that emerged after the First World War. Evans’s letters are paradigmatic: they document a fervent advocacy both of internationalism as a moral and political project, and of the notion that musicians might be especially – even uniquely – suited to the cause.

Evans was addressing not musicians in general, but a select group of modernist pioneers: established proponents of what was then the innovative frontier of Western art music. Expressly dedicated to ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ music, the ISCM helped to popularise the notion – ubiquitous in interwar discourse – that these contested categories had a symbiotic association with the ‘international’. This contemporary-international nexus has remained influential in musical life to this day. In this thesis, I assess how new-music internationalism was conceived, enacted and experienced in its formative period. As will become clear, I see modernist internationalism as more than just a speculative project or discursive trope. It shaped – and was shaped by – institutional structures and behaviours, permeating the culture of modernist music-making. The ISCM festival provides an

10 Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation–State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks 2, no. 4 (2002), 301–34. 11 Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12–22. See also idem, ‘Musical Modernism beyond the Nation: The Case of Stefan Wolpe’, in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert and Anne C. Shreffler (Woodbridge: Paul Sacher Stiftung/Boydell Press, 2014), 197–209. Work on transnational themes might be said to exemplify a broader impulse to interrogate and transgress various kinds of social, (geo)political and musicological borders. See Tamara Levitz (convenor), ‘Colloquy: Musicology Beyond Borders?’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 3 (2012), 821–62. 12 This issue of volition is broached, from rather different perspectives, in Martin Stokes, ‘On Musical Cosmopolitanism’, The Macalester International Roundtable 2007 (2007), https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/intlrdtable/3/ (accessed November 2019); and Sarah Collins, ‘The Political Aesthetics of Detachment: Modernism, Autonomy and the Idea of the Transnational’, Australian Humanities Review 62 (2017), 79–97.

11 unrivalled lens through which to observe this interplay between theory and practice, allowing us to track shifting attitudes and approaches during the turbulent interwar years. In each chapter, I show that the pairing of the international and the contemporary – sometimes presented as self-evident – was always contingent, provisional and multifaceted. In this way,

I interrogate the enduring assumption that the moral or political value of music anointed as

‘new’ is manifest in its association with internationalism.13

New music

The ISCM’s founding represents a conjuncture of the histories of modernism and internationalism. Accordingly, we can tell its story in two different ways. The first takes us to

Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Despite its reduced status and economic travails following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city was still a major centre for art music. But a veneration of tradition created barriers for some musicians. As in other cities across Europe and beyond, Vienna’s concert halls and opera houses had come increasingly to function as museums, preserving the canonical

‘masterworks’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One consequence was a strained and sometimes antagonistic relationship between living composers and the established institutions of bourgeois concert culture.14 In November 1918, Schoenberg founded his

Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen), which offered a kind of refuge for recently composed music, set apart from the public sphere: the extensively rehearsed concerts were open only to members, and critics were pointedly

13 A recent example of this assumption in action is Philip Clark, ‘This Isle Is Full of Noises: The Trouble with “English Music”’, The Guardian (11 December 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/dec/11/this-isle-is-full-of-noises-the-trouble-with- english-music (accessed July 2020). Clark sketches a history of British art music over the past century through the prism of contemporary political divisions, presenting a Manichean struggle between reactionary purveyors of ‘English music’ (‘a narrowly nostalgic genre with – now – Brexity overtones’) and open-minded champions of modernist internationalism. 14 William Weber, ‘Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity Between Contemporary and Classical Music’, Common Knowledge 9, no. 1 (2003), 78–99. The broader shift in concert programming over the course of the nineteenth century – from miscellany concerts of recently composed music to homogenous ones dominated by canonical works by dead composers – is charted in Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

12 barred from attending.15 The Society folded in 1921 due to financial pressures. But in August the following year, a group of young musicians launched their own project to support composers who felt unfairly marginalised by mainstream institutions: the ‘International

Chamber Music Performances in Salzburg 1922’ (Internationale Kammermusikaufführungen in Salzburg 1922). As Rudolph Réti, one of the main instigators, would later recall, this five- day festival was dedicated to music considered ‘revolutionarily, indeed rebelliously,

“modern”’.16

The Salzburg event became far more than a local affair. Looking to join forces with like-minded colleagues abroad, the organisers invited ‘distinguished composers, critics and other musicians from many countries’.17 The resulting list of participants was a veritable

Who’s Who of early twentieth-century concert music: the soprano Marya Freund, the pianist

Walter Gieseking and the violinist Joseph Szigeti all performed, while the composers in attendance included Bartók, Hindemith, Milhaud and Webern (Figure 1). As the festival went on, the prospect of creating something more enduring than a one-off event became increasingly concrete. With musicians from far and wide gathered in Salzburg, the occasion seemed ripe to establish, as Réti put it, ‘a kind of international alliance for the promotion of modern music’.18 The scheme was imaginative and ambitious: there had never previously been a musical organisation of equivalent function and scope.

So it was that on 11 August 1922, in an upstairs room of Salzburg’s Café Bazar, the

International Society for Contemporary Music was established.19 The ISCM was constituted as a federation of national sections, tasked with promoting contemporary music in their own

15 [Alban Berg], ‘From the “Prospectus of the Society for Private Musical Performances”, 1918’, in A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life, ed. Joseph Auner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 150–53. 16 ‘revolutionär, ja rebellisch, “modern” gennant’; Rudolph Réti, ‘Die Entstehung der IGNM’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 12, no. 3 (1957), 113–17 (p. 115). 17 ‘hervorragende Komponisten, Kritiker und andere Musiker in viele Länder’; Réti, ‘Die Entstehung der IGNM’, 115. 18 ‘Die Ausgangsidee war die Gründung einer Art internationaler Alliance für die Förderung moderner Musik’; Réti, ‘Die Entstehung der IGNM’, 117. 19 For a more detailed account of the ISCM’s founding, see Anton Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM): Ihre Geschichte von 1922 bis zur Gegenwart (Zurich: Atlantis, 1982), 38–59.

Figure 1: A group of musicians at the International Chamber Music Performances in Salzburg 1922 (photographer unknown). The Papers of Edward Joseph Dent, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge, EJD/5/3/1/3.

countries. Representatives from these groups came together annually for the principal activity of the umbrella organisation: an international festival of contemporary music.

Following the example of the 1922 gathering, the event started out in Salzburg, but it became peripatetic from 1924 to embody more fully the ISCM’s international purview. Until 1939, the festival was held in a different European city each year (Table 1). Within the contested category of ‘contemporary music’, the ISCM’s aesthetic remit was broad: nearly all the most prominent composers of the day – including Berg, Copland, de Falla, Malipiero, Poulenc,

Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Vaughan Williams, Villa-Lobos and Weill

– had works performed at its festivals, alongside figures who have been all but forgotten today.20 Bringing musicians and audiences together for an eclectic showcase of musical

20 For full lists of works performed on the main festival programmes, see the appendices in Haefeli, IGNM, 477–609; or the archive on the ISCM website: ‘Previous Festivals’, https://iscm.org/wnmd- world-new-music-days/previous-festivals/ (accessed October 2020).

Date Host city 2–7 August 1923 Salzburg* 31 May–2 June 1924 Prague† 5–9 August 1924 Salzburg* 15–20 May 1925 Prague† 3–8 September 1925 Venice* 18–23 June 1926 Zurich 29 June–4 July 1927 Frankfurt 10–15 September 1928 Siena* 6–10 April 1929 Geneva 1–8 September 1930 Liège and Brussels 21–28 July 1931 Oxford and London 16–23 June 1932 Vienna 9–15 June 1933 Amsterdam 2–7 April 1934 Florence 1–8 September 1935 Prague 18–25 April 1936 Barcelona 20–27 June 1937 Paris 17–24 June 1938 London 14–21 April 1939 Warsaw * Chamber music only. † Orchestral music only. Table 1: ISCM festivals, 1923–1939.

modernisms, the event was intended to serve the two intertwined ambitions announced in the ISCM’s name: to promote contemporary music and to further international cooperation.

The ISCM was a singular institution, but not an isolated one. In the years following the First World War, a plethora of organisations dedicated to contemporary music were formed. Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances inspired a successor organisation in Prague, active from 1922 to 1924. Comparable new-music societies were created in cities across the Weimar Republic.21 At around the same time, New York became home to both the International Composers’ Guild (1921) and the League of Composers

(1923). Soviet musicians, meanwhile, founded an Association for Contemporary Music

21 For an exhaustive documentation of new-music organisations in the Weimar Republic, see Martin Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis 1933, 2 vols (Bonn: Orpheus-Verlag, 1995).

(Assotsiatsiya Sovremennoy Muzyki) in 1923, the same year that a Corporation for New

Music (Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche) was established in Italy. Some of these societies served as national sections of the ISCM. The profusion of groups dedicated to contemporary music was mirrored by a flurry of new periodicals supportive of musical modernism, including Anbruch (Vienna, 1919), La Revue Musicale (Paris, 1920), Melos (Berlin, 1920) and Modern Music (New York, 1924). All these journals paid close attention to the ISCM and printed extended reviews of its annual gatherings, as well as covering other recently established contemporary music festivals, such as the Donaueschingen Music Days in southwest Germany (Donaueschinger Musiktage, from 1921) and the International Festival of Contemporary Music held in conjunction with the Venice Biennale (Festival

Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea, from 1930). While none of these societies, journals or festivals was entirely unprecedented, the widespread flowering of projects to support musical modernism in the 1920s represents a watershed moment: the rapid emergence, on an international scale, of the semi-autonomous ecosystem of ‘contemporary music’ that remains a feature of the institutional landscape of Western art music to this day.22

As this infrastructure for musical modernism developed, the expressions ‘new’ and

‘contemporary music’ became widely adopted. The ISCM played an important role in popularising these terms, which were used to refer to a repertoire that seemed at once to extend the concert-music tradition and break away into a separate domain. Despite a basic consensus in casual usage, though, there was considerable uncertainty about what precisely

‘new’ and ‘contemporary music’ meant – and how they related to other apparent synonyms,

22 For examples of precursors, we could point to the enduring influence of two groups still active in the 1920s (although neither was considered by then to be at the cutting edge): the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV), established in 1861 as a platform for the music and ideals of the New German School; and the Société Nationale de Musique, founded in Paris in 1871, which hoped to renew French music through ‘serious’ concert works (but from 1910 found itself confronted with a more modernist- inclined rival, the Société Musicale Indépendante). The ADMV especially was an important precursor to the ISCM: it held a peripatetic festival, the annual Tonkünstler-Versammlung, which moved between different German-speaking cities each year. See James Deaville, ‘Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein’, Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.45675; Michael Strasser, ‘The Société Nationale and Its Adversaries: The Musical Politics of L’Invasion germanique in the 1870s’, 19th-Century Music 24, no. 3 (2001), 225–51.

16 such as ‘modern music’ or ‘ultra-modernism’. All these categories blurred aesthetic and temporal modes of classification, giving rise to disputes about which music was really ‘new’ and the criteria according to which that judgement could be made. The ambiguity was evident in the repertoire performed at ISCM festivals, which was chosen by an elected committee of jurors. Following a stipulation in the organisation’s statutes, at least two-thirds of the scores submitted by each national section to the festival jury had to have been

‘composed during the five years preceding the festival’.23 ‘Contemporary’ was defined here as a kind of extended present.

Yet it was clear from the festival programmes that not all the music composed in the previous five years was welcome. Because the ISCM was devoted to ‘art’ music, it was taken for granted that genres such as folk music, jazz and operetta were excluded. And because the organisation adhered to a broadly modernist (if pluralist) conception of music-historical

‘progress’, composers working in late Romantic idioms tended to be marginalised. This emphasis spurred criticism and rival projects, especially from those who saw it as an attempt to erode national traditions. The ISCM’s first official festival in Salzburg in 1923 was followed by a small ‘counter-festival’ in Vienna organised by a group of young Austrian musicians led by Erich Korngold and Wilhelm Grosz, which showcased a less adventurous vision of

Austrian contemporary music. This move riled local pro-modernist figures, fuelling an ancients-versus-moderns atmosphere that led one writer to sneer that the additional concerts ‘clearly demonstrated the unimportance of the reactionary cause as contrasted with the pregnant significance of modern music’.24 In the coming years, otherwise sympathetic critics would be quick to chastise the ISCM when they felt that its festival juries had selected works that lapsed into Romantic sentimentalism or the ‘academic’ confines of a traditional conservatoire training.25 These unwritten rules of taste were nebulous, but festival attendees

23 ‘doivent avoir été composées pendant les cinq années qui précèdent le festival’; 1937 ISCM statutes, reprinted in Haefeli, IGNM, 623–28 (quoted passage at p. 626). This rule had been adopted in 1924; Haefeli, IGNM, 97. 24 Paul Bechert, ‘The “Supplementary” Festival at Salzburg’, The Musical Times 64, no. 968 (October 1923), 731–32 (p. 732). See also Haefeli, IGNM, 69. 25 For an example, see my discussion in Chapter Two of critics’ derision of Marcel Poot’s Poème de l’espace at the 1930 ISCM festival.

– a considerable proportion of whom actively participated in new-music culture as composers, performers, critics, publishers or patrons – could find common ground in identifying the most egregious violations. The audience at the 1931 festival even launched into spontaneous protest when Mario Pilati’s Piano Quintet in D arrived at the climax of its finale, an expansive major-key melody for cello recalling a tenor aria from verismo opera. As the British critic Eric Blom reported from the concert in Oxford: ‘there were signs of irreverent mirth among the cosmopolitan audience at the obvious misjudgement which had imposed such reactionary music on them. Towards the end one felt as near a riot as the

Sheldonian Theatre can ever have been in its long and dignified academic career.’26 Eclectic though the ISCM’s understanding of contemporary music may have been, limits needed to be enforced to maintain the festival’s distinctive identity.

These boundaries were, however, always contested and in flux, so much so that the founders of the ISCM could not even agree on what to call the organisation. The names used by French- and Italian-speaking musicians were directly equivalent to the English-language one: Société Internationale pour la Musique Contemporaine and Società Internazionale di

Musica Contemporanea (both abbreviated as SIMC). But in German-speaking countries, the organisation was known as the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM): the

International Society for New Music. The coining of the term Neue Musik is often credited to a 1919 essay by the influential critic Paul Bekker.27 During the 1920s, it became an established critical and historiographic concept in German-language discourse, referring to a set of compositional attitudes and approaches usually identified as having emerged in

26 Eric Blom, ‘The International Music Festival: Children’s and Chamber Music’, The Manchester Guardian (27 July 1931), 5. The Parisian critic Henry Prunières opined of Pilati: ‘alas! in the final movement, over harmonies from a nauseating platitude, he suddenly let loose a melody worthy of Leoncavallo… which provoked a genuine scandal in the auditorium’ (‘hélas! dans le dernier movement, brusquement il a, sur des accords d’une écœurante platitude, lâché une mélodie digne de Léoncavallo… qui suscita un veritable scandale dans l’auditoire’); Henry Prunières, ‘Le Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine à Oxford et à Londres’, La Revue Musicale 12, no. 119 (October 1931), 254–60 (p. 257). Part of what was at issue here was whether Italian music – and Italian opera in particular – could ever be considered ‘contemporary’, a topic to which I return in the final section of Chapter Three. 27 Paul Bekker, ‘Neue Musik’ (1919), in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3: Neue Musik (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1923), 85–118.

18 around 1910.28 Compared to, for example, zeitgenössische Musik (contemporary music),

Neue Musik was sometimes understood to imply a greater emphasis on the new as an aesthetic quality and moral imperative.29 Consequently, the ISCM’s different names were interpreted by some as revealing fundamental divergences of aim and worldview between regional cultures of musical modernism.30 A kind of strategic ambiguity – being at once the

ISCM and the IGNM – papered over some of the contradictions.31 The organisation always teetered, though, between acting as a single special interest group, which represented contemporary music in general, and serving more as a forum, in which multiple parties struggled to stake their claims. The transnational encounters facilitated by the ISCM intensified awareness of both the commonalities and the discrepancies between local inflections of the musically modern.

Not least because of its multiplicity on the international scale, modernism continues to confound satisfying definition. Over the last few decades, scholars in musicology and other fields have expended much energy agonising over what the term really means.32 In music studies, the debate became especially heated with the advent of late twentieth-century ‘new

28 For a conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) of Neue Musik, see Christoph von Blumröder, ‘Neue Musik’ (1980), in Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Albrecht Riethmüller (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1972–2006), vol. 4, 1–13. The term is best known to anglophone musicologists from Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007 [1949]). 29 In 1960, Adorno observed critically how the ISCM’s name in English ‘replaces the polemical “new” with the neutral, chronological “contemporary”’; Adorno, ‘Music and New Music’ (1960), in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 249–68 (p. 249). One classic interwar account of Schoenbergian modernism as the new music is Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser, 1963). 30 Haefeli, IGNM, 262–85; Sarah Collins, ‘What Was Contemporary Music? The New, the Modern and the Contemporary in the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM)’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Björn Heile and Charles Wilson (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), 56–85. The discussion of terminology in this and the previous two paragraphs is indebted throughout to Haefeli and Collins. 31 The ISCM’s statutes were deliberately flexible: ‘The term “modern music” must be defined by each national section as regards its own activities. For the Society as a whole, the decision must be made by the General Assembly of [national] Delegates’ (‘Le terme de “musique moderne” doit être défini par chaque section nationale en égard à ses propres activités. Pour la Société entière la décision doit être donnée par l’Assemblée Générale de Délégués’); Haefeli, IGNM, 623. 32 For an overview of the sprawling proliferation of contradictory definitions within and between disciplines – and the stakes of the attendant debates – as viewed from the vantage point of literary criticism, see Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (2001), 493–513.

19 musicology’, also sometimes styled as ‘postmodern musicology’, which saw ‘modernism’ become associated with a cluster of problematic and self-serving ideological commitments, above all a particular brand of formalism.33 In this thesis, I sidestep longstanding polemics – characteristic of early twentieth-century modernism – about which kinds of music should be considered legitimately new, by historicising ‘contemporary music’ as a project constituted by people, practices and institutions (among which the contemporary music festival has been especially significant). I focus, in other words, on the social production of new music.

This approach – which allows us to treat definitional debates as objects of study, rather than becoming mired in them – has in the last decade spurred a dynamic new wave of historical and ethnographic research on modernist and avant-garde music-making. In his

2011 study of the avant-garde music scene in 1960s New York, Benjamin Piekut draws extensively on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to chart a ‘performative ontology’ of ‘actually existing experimentalism’, as realised through ‘messy assemblages’.34 Eric Drott sets out a comparable position in his 2013 article on genre categories in twentieth-century music, in which he also looks to ANT ‘to destabilize entities that are all too often conceived as fixed, solid objects, as static containers into which pieces of music are deposited’. Genre, argues

Drott, ‘is not so much a group as a grouping, the gerund ending calling attention to the fact that it is something that must be continually produced and reproduced’.35 From this perspective, the slippages and contradictions in the interwar discourse around ‘new’ and

‘contemporary music’ do not appear surprising or problematic, but exemplify the characteristic instability of the provisional, overlapping networks through which genres are constituted.

33 Critiques along these lines have themselves attracted criticism: see Björn Heile, ‘Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism’, Twentieth-Century Music 1, no. 2 (2004), 161–78. 34 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2011), 9, 19, 175. See also idem, ‘Actor Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques’, Twentieth-Century Music 11, no. 2 (2014), 191–215. 35 Eric Drott, ‘The End(s) of Genre’, Journal of Music Theory 57, no. 1 (2013), 1–45 (pp. 3, 10). For an ethnographic application of an ANT-informed approach to a present-day contemporary music scene, see William Robin, ‘A Scene Without a Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the Twenty- First Century’ (PhD thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016).

Festivals, which bring together the dispersed members of translocal music scenes for intense shared experiences, have great power to sustain and transform genre categories.36

Because their programmes are clearly bounded – that is, they usually have a formal beginning and end – festivals prompt debate about what kinds of music are included and excluded, and on what grounds. By juxtaposing different artists and styles over a relatively condensed period of time, they also encourage audiences to make comparisons. Thanks to these qualities, festivals have played a vital role not just in nurturing the genre of ‘new music’, but also in creating it. Observers of the ISCM recognised this. ‘Were there

“contemporary” composers before the I.S.C.M.?’, one reviewer asked after the 1937 gathering in Paris. ‘One begins almost to doubt, since these festivals seem so indispensable to the life of the kind of music here cultivated.’37 This critic’s hunch about the function of such events has been cogently substantiated by Lisa Jakelski in her recent monograph on the Warsaw

Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music in the 1950s and 60s.38 Jakelski invokes the sociologist Howard Becker’s framework of ‘art worlds’, which challenges the cliché of the artist as solitary genius, by showing how art is produced through ‘patterns of collective activity’: the coordinated labour of people, sometimes large numbers of them, whose collaborative endeavours create networks that are perpetuated over time.39

Approaching musical modernism as this kind of collective undertaking, Jakelski adopts language echoing that of Piekut and Drott:

‘new music’ has never been a stable concept. Rather, ‘new music’ is something that has been made – and continually remade – by socially implicated actors acting in response to a wide variety of motivations, constraints, and possibilities. New-music festivals, Warsaw’s included, have been among the most important sites where this making and remaking have taken place.40

36 Timothy J. Dowd, Kathleen Liddle and Jenna Nelson, ‘Music Festivals as Scenes: Examples from Serious Music, Womyn’s Music, and SkatePunk’, in Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, ed. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 149–67. 37 R.C., ‘Paris Festival: The Contemporary Society and its Function’ (1937), Edwin Evans clippings collection, Westminster Music Library, London. 38 Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). The importance of festivals to mid-century modernism is further underscored by Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 39 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1982), 1; Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 1. 40 Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 163.

In this thesis, likewise, I treat new music as a historically situated culture of music-making: an art world, not simply a repertoire.

Pushing this approach back into the 1920s and 30s reveals the genealogy of attitudes and practices that subsequent generations of new-music advocates, such as those involved in the Warsaw Autumn, inherited from their predecessors. It also challenges some prevailing generalisations about musical modernism. The interwar period was an era of transition, when modernism represented neither the rebellious insurgency extolled by some of its proponents nor the oppressive hegemony maligned by some of its latter-day critics. New music was a small, emergent art world, nested within the larger culture of Western art music.

It was less established and independent than it would become in the second half of the twentieth century, and its boundaries were decidedly porous. Consequently, the image of musical modernism presented here diverges significantly from the suffocatingly hierarchical and secluded environment described by Georgina Born in her influential ethnographic study of Paris’s Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in the

1980s.41 Esoteric and expensive ‘research’ in electronic music could be pursued at IRCAM because, as Born details, the organisation was generously funded by the French state. As the plight of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances exemplifies, the new-music organisations of the 1920s and 30s did not enjoy the same financial security. Individual instalments of the ISCM festival received some ad hoc subsidy from national and municipal governments. But the organisation also relied heavily on the contributions of private patrons and the unpaid labour of musicians, who supported themselves financially through their careers in public concert culture (often by performing old music by dead composers) or

41 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995). The ISCM’s interwar festivals suggest the perils of trying to talk about the institutions of musical modernism in general terms, while referring only to examples from post-Second World War Europe, as in Martin Iddon, ‘Institutions, Artworlds, New Music’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Heile and Wilson, 86–107.

22 through teaching at universities and conservatoires, which had proliferated during the nineteenth century.42

By showing how the ideals, identities and habitual practices of the ‘international’ were absorbed into the culture of new music, I also hope to complicate the oft-stated claim that, in Richard Taruskin’s words, early twentieth-century musical modernists ‘insisted on representing art as divorced from the social world, subject only to internally motivated stylistic change’.43 The formalist view of musical works as abstract structures or pure sound was indeed fundamental to much early twentieth-century discourse about music, especially in modernist circles, and most musicians associated with the ISCM subscribed to the ideal of aesthetic autonomy.44 Yet the organisation’s internationalist ethos suggests it was possible to imagine an aesthetically autonomous artform being put to non-artistic ends.45 The idea that artists are, as one journalist put it in 1919, ‘the best internationalists’, for whom ‘there is no barrier of nationality’, was a common trope of early twentieth-century cultural internationalism.46 Music, often extolled for its ‘universality’, was especially amenable to such rhetoric. As we saw with Edwin Evans’s stirring letters, it was often claimed that the musicians associated with the ISCM might be model internationalists because they were elevated by an artform that supposedly transcended social, political and linguistic differences.

Modernist music was thought to have particular affinities with internationalism. As

Björn Heile has pointed out, Bekker’s foundational essays on Neue Musik from the late 1910s

42 Performers were sometimes paid for their contributions to ISCM festivals, but roles such as serving on the festival jury were not remunerated. In the 1920s especially, many of the expenses of the ISCM’s central office, including those of convening the annual jury meeting, were met by the Swiss patron Werner Reinhart. See Ulrike Thiele, ‘Musikleben und Mäzenatentum im 20. Jahrhundert: Werner Reinhart (1884–1951)’ (Doctoral thesis, University of Zurich, 2016), 22–29. 43 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. 44 On ‘absolute music’ in early twentieth-century modernist discourse, see Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 250–96. 45 The political potential of the modernist stance of autonomy has been explored in more theoretical terms elsewhere: Martin Scherzinger, ‘In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modernist Musical Aesthetics’, in The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 68–100; Collins, ‘The Political Aesthetics of Detachment’. 46 Amelia Dorothy Defries, ‘And Then We’ll Get Together’, Landmark 1 (1919), 449–51, quoted in Tunbridge, Singing in the Age of Anxiety, 52.

23 and early 1920s critiqued calls to ‘purify’ German music of foreign influences and invoked a broader notion of human community.47 The association between new music and internationalism became further entrenched during the 1920s, not least thanks to the activities of the ISCM. The perceived affiliation was grounded in the metropolitan cosmopolitanism characteristic of early twentieth-century modernism, and in the (often flawed) assumption that an open-minded and progressive aesthetic stance broadly correlated with ‘equivalent’ social and political attitudes.48 However, by yoking the two phenomena together under the rubric of ‘new-music internationalism’, I do not mean to imply a smooth or unproblematic fit: the relationship was multifaceted and often fraught, belying the habitual patterns of word association rehearsed by both the pairing’s staunchest advocates and its fiercest critics.

Internationalism

‘We are not only a Society for Contemporary Music’, declared Edward J. Dent, the ISCM’s founding president, in 1947; ‘we are above all things an International Society.’49 Such an assertion suggests, even demands, a second approach to narrating the ISCM’s formation: one that situates it as a landmark event in the history of musical internationalism. I understand

‘internationalism’ to refer, in brief, to the aspiration to extend and deepen cooperation between nations or peoples, as well as the practices and institutions proceeding from that aim. ‘International’, in this sense, should not be confused with ‘global’, ‘transnational’ or

‘cosmopolitan’, three recurring keywords in recent musicological research on phenomena that traverse national borders. Global is most readily associated with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century patterns of globalisation, often depicted teleologically. It implies the

47 Björn Heile, ‘Introduction: New Music and the Modernist Legacy’, in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. Heile (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1–10 (pp. 6–7). 48 On modernism’s fundamental urbanity (in both senses of the word), and the vital contribution of exiles and émigrés, see Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 31–35, 37–48. 49 Edward J. Dent, ‘Preface’, International Society for Contemporary Music: The 21st Festival Copenhagen May 29th–June 4th 1947 (1947), 7, British Library, London.

24 emergence of an increasingly interconnected human community on the terrestrial scale.50

Internationalism, by contrast, typically involves imagining oneself as belonging to a common framework of national units – that is, a ‘league of nations’ – whose geographical horizons might be more circumscribed.51 Some early twentieth-century musical modernists were drawn to opportunities for cross-cultural exchange, as Bartók’s and Hindemith’s attendance at the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932 demonstrates.52 But the ISCM, like the League of

Nations, was a highly Eurocentric institution.53 A draft of its original statutes reportedly defined ‘contemporary music’ as that ‘of all European countries written within the last fifteen years’ (emphasis added). After an outcry from American musicians, the word

‘European’ was removed.54 Its initial inclusion is still symptomatic, though, of a historical conception of cultural internationalism posited on the assumption that Europe was both the default location of culture and the primary arena of international affairs. Other internationalisms, such as pan-Africanism or pan-Americanism, involve quite different geographies and visions of modernity.55

On one level, it is commendable that ISCM adherents wanted to help reconcile

European citizens and reopen intra-continental channels of exchange – and thus, by the geopolitical logic of the day, to contribute as musicians to avoiding a repeat of the global catastrophe of 1914. On another, the Eurocentric musical internationalism of the interwar

50 The relationship between music and globalisation has been an important topic of research in ethnomusicology. For an overview, see Martin Stokes, ‘Music and the Global Order’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004), 42–72. 51 In Perry Anderson’s definition, internationalism refers to ‘any outlook, or practice, that tends to transcend the nation towards a wider community, of which nations continue to form the principal units’; Perry Anderson, ‘Internationalism: A Breviary’, New Left Review 14 (2002), 5–25 (p. 6). 52 Ali Jihad Racy, ‘Historical Worldviews of Early Ethnomusicologists: An East-West Encounter in Cairo, 1932’, in Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, ed. Stephen Blum, Philip V. Bohlman and Daniel M. Neuman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 68–91. 53 Patricia Clavin, ‘Europe and the League of Nations’, in Twisted Paths: Europe 1914–1945, ed. Robert Gerwarth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 325–54. 54 Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 290–91. American musicians, sensitive to the condescending attitudes of their European counterparts, frequently complained in the 1920s and 30s about being underrepresented at ISCM festivals. See, for example, E.C. Foster, ‘Modern Paris Festival: American Composers Not Represented on International Program’, The New York Times (11 July 1937), 135. 55 Some of the intersections between music and these movements are discussed in Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Carol A. Hess, Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

25 years was not just partial in its geographical reach, but exclusionary: as Tamara Levitz has argued in relation to musicology, institutionalised internationalism helped a white male elite formalise their control over prestigious cultural fields.56 Post-First World War internationalist politicians of a liberal stripe espoused the principle of national ‘self- determination’ in the European context, but were largely sympathetic to the ‘civilising mission’ of imperial rule elsewhere; indeed, the League itself was directly embroiled in colonial governance through its mandates system.57 The ISCM, of course, did not have a comparable impact on geopolitics. But it did help perpetuate a Eurocentric notion of the

‘musical world’ and, by extension, the ideology of ‘civilisation’ underpinning that idea.58 As synoptic, international overviews of musical modernism, its festivals conveyed a deceptive impression of comprehensiveness, such that one critic could describe them in 1933 as

‘assemblies of new works that give us barometric readings of music’s activities all over the world’.59 Attendees do not generally seem to have imagined that the vast areas of the globe not represented at the events experienced the trajectory of historical development required to become ‘contemporary’.60 Any given country’s status in this respect was not immutable, and the ISCM was (and still is) cherished especially by musicians from the global

‘peripheries’ of musical modernism, for whom it offered access to forms of exchange and recognition from which they were otherwise marginalised.61 But the organisation’s value in this and other respects needs to be weighed against its broader complicity in creating a culture of contemporary music that remains reluctant to address fully (and often even to

56 Tamara Levitz, ‘The Musicological Elite’, Current Musicology 102 (2018), 9–80 (esp. pp. 12–18, 43–44). 57 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 58 A promotional pamphlet for the 1932 festival complacently described the ISCM as having ‘26 branches spreading over all civilised countries’; Tenth International Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music: Vienna, 16th–23rd June 1932 (1932), n.p., British Library. 59 Hubert Foss, ‘Modern Music in Amsterdam: International Society’, The Manchester Guardian (16 June 1933), 8. 60 On musical modernism and its ‘others’, see Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music’, in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000), 1–58 (pp. 12–21). 61 Björn Heile, ‘Musical Modernism, Global: Comparative Observations’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Heile and Wilson, 175–98.

26 acknowledge) the class-, gender- and race-based prejudices of its institutional foundations.

Although the ISCM responded to Nazism by declaring its opposition to racial discrimination

(see Chapter Four), it would not be excessive to characterise its music-political project as a form of ‘white internationalism’ – especially if that framing helps puncture the widespread assumption that international cooperation is, in itself, inherently benign.62

I want to be clear from the outset, then, that this thesis does not offer a ‘global’ or

‘world’ history of music.63 A more appropriate word for the connections the ISCM was intended to promote would be transnational, a term that refers to circulations, linkages and affiliations crossing the borders between states or other political communities (excluding formal diplomacy).64 The ISCM was generated through ties of this kind, and can thus be described as a transnational network. But something more than this was signified by

‘international’: to label oneself in this way, in 1922, was to affirm an ethical-political commitment (an internationalism) and an associated subject position (as an internationalist). Music and musicians had long been travelling transnationally or producing transnational bonds, without invoking the stance or identity of internationalism: the extensive circulation of Italian opera during the nineteenth century is one well-documented example.65 By drawing the line between ‘transnationalism’ and ‘internationalism’ in this way,

I diverge from how Jakelski uses the same terms in her work on the Warsaw Autumn. Citing the anthropologist Steven Vertovec’s research on migration, she distinguishes between the

‘top-down’ internationalism of ‘formal, state-level exchanges’ and the ‘bottom-up’

62 On the historiographical association between the trans-/inter-/supra-national and ‘doing good’, and the need to question it, see Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Learning by Doing: Notes about the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History’, Journal of Modern European History 6, no. 2 (2008), 159–80 (pp. 169–71). 63 The possibilities of pursuing music history on this scale have been explored in Philip V. Bohlman, ed., The Cambridge History of World Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Reinhold Strohm, ed., Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018). 64 Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005), 421–39. 65 Benjamin Walton, ‘Italian Operatic Fantasies in Latin America’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17, no. 4 (2012), 460–71; Axel Körner, ‘From Transnational History to Transnational Opera: Questioning National Categories of Analysis’, UCL Centre for Transnational History, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/centre-transnational-history/sites/centre-transnational- history/files/from_transnational_history_to_transnational_opera_english_version.pdf (accessed September 2020).

27 transnationalism of ‘nonstate actors’.66 This distinction is important in the context of Cold

War diplomacy. But if we restrict ‘internationalism’ to apply only to official relations between states, we are deprived of a vocabulary for describing a culturally and politically significant group of ‘bottom-up’ aspirations and projects, which form a perhaps surprisingly continuous lineage from the contemporary-music culture of a century ago to that of today: a new-music internationalism that has endured through changing geopolitical conditions, even as it has been transformed by them.

In her account of the institutionalisation of musicology in the early twentieth century,

Levitz is evidently sceptical of the ideals that distinguish internationalism from transnationalism (as I am defining those terms).67 However, internationalist idealism cannot be written off entirely as a mere fig leaf, cynically wielded to mask a project of political domination. In the wake of the First World War, musicians adopted internationalist rhetoric and practices with genuine moral zeal, which needs to be taken seriously if we are to recognise the more admirable aspects of the ISCM’s achievements, or at least to understand why these historical actors believed in the ethical integrity of their actions. New-music internationalism clearly entailed a large degree of self-interest, directed in the first place at furthering the cause of musical modernism (and thus the careers of musical modernists). But if we reduce its history to a grand conspiracy of exclusion, we risk obscuring more complex – and more interesting – instances of unforeseen consequences and moral ambiguity.68

The basic principles of internationalism overlap with those of cosmopolitanism, a concept that has enjoyed something of a revival in the humanities and social sciences since

66 Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 88–89, citing Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009), 3. My version of the transnationalism/internationalism distinction follows the practice of historians working on early twentieth-century Europe. See Laqua, ‘Preface’, in Internationalism Reconfigured, ed. Laqua, xi–xvii. 67 Levitz, ‘The Musicological Elite’, 12–18, 43–44. 68 An example of this danger can be seen in Levitz’s precis of Pedersen, The Guardians, which she describes as outlining ‘a form of diplomacy that maintained Europe’s imperial control over labor and control internationally’; Levitz, ‘The Musicological Elite’, 16. In fact, Pedersen’s overarching claim is more intricate: although the mandates system did not make colonial rule any more humane on the ground, she argues, it had the longer-term effect – despite the intentions of those who designed it – of helping delegitimise colonialism by subjecting imperial powers to new forms of international scrutiny and debate.

28 the 1990s.69 Although cosmopolitanism has attracted multiple and sometimes conflicting definitions, the word usually indicates a belief in a single human community – a stance sometimes associated with Enlightenment universalism – which serves to contextualise more localised forms of belonging (without necessarily opposing or erasing them). The term is also frequently used, more casually, to refer to experiences and practices involving encounters with other nationalities or cultures, especially where such encounters derive from or help to incite an outlook of openness to alterity.70 As musicologists such as Dana Gooley have recently begun to explore, cosmopolitanism, in all these senses, played an important role in musical life long before the twentieth century.71 Post-First World War musical internationalism grew out of earlier experiences of cosmopolitan worldliness, and some of its fundamental values might well be labelled cosmopolitan. But like their contemporaries in other fields, early twentieth-century musical internationalists shared a belief in the power of organisation to extend and deepen international cooperation, and so tended to channel their efforts into institutions. The institutionalising impulse – a central concern throughout this thesis – marks a key point of difference from the experiences and attitudes associated with the much older tradition of musical cosmopolitanism, more often discussed in relation to free-floating individuals or urban culture.

As I am using the term here, then, musical internationalism was a phenomenon produced through the sometimes incongruent relationship between ideals and rhetoric, on the one hand, and practices and institutional structures, on the other.72 This dialectic could

69 The resurgence is largely thanks to the so-called ‘new cosmopolitanism’, a response by political philosophers and others to late twentieth-century patterns of globalisation and mass migration. See Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 70 Competing meanings are surveyed in Sarah Collins and Dana Gooley, ‘Music and the New Cosmopolitanism: Problems and Possibilities’, The Musical Quarterly 99, no. 2 (2016), 139–65. Collins and Gooley seek an escape from the ‘labyrinth of synonyms’ by advocating a narrower definition of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ as an ‘ethical-political mandate’ that valorises ‘belonging to, or striving to belong to, a “larger” world as a way of keeping local and parochial attachments in check’ (pp. 141, 149). 71 On the nineteenth century, see Dana Gooley (convenor), ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism, 1848–1914’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 2 (2013), 523–49; Cristina Magaldi, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Music in the Nineteenth Century’, Oxford Handbooks Online (2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.013.62. 72 The historiographical challenges of parsing the relationship between internationalism’s ideals and practices (and the dangers of reducing it to the former) are expertly outlined in Patricia Clavin,

29 accommodate varied political stances. As the art historian Grace Brockington observes:

‘internationalism has no absolute moral or political value [...] it is a floating category, compatible with reactionary and racist politics, as well as with the left-wing and progressive’.73 The ISCM had an uncomfortable relationship with its own political ambitions and import. Drawing on prevailing discourses of aesthetic autonomy, the organisation’s advocates tended to claim its activities were ‘non-political’. But as the Swiss musicologist

Anton Haefeli highlighted in his 1982 history of the ISCM, an unpolitical internationalism was a somewhat paradoxical proposition.74 The organisation claimed to be purely musical, but also espoused shared political values: these were malleable and hazily defined – the creed of the ‘non-political’ made it difficult to discuss them explicitly – but broadly corresponded with a democratic and peaceable (though often at least latently imperialist) form of liberal internationalism most closely associated in the interwar period with the

League. The left-wing German émigrés Hanns Eisler and Herman Reichenbach described the contradiction in a report they sent to Moscow in 1935, when they were attempting (as I will discuss in Chapter Four) to pull the ISCM into the orbit of the Popular Front internationalism advocated by the Comintern at the time:

this society endeavours to underscore a “non-political” character. It is clear that its founding took place under the influence of the League of Nations spirit of the time. [...] in its announcements, the society stresses in every possible way the concept of internationality and the international exchange of ideas. Through this practice it has thus acquired a pacifist character. [...] In summary, let it be said that the society has a liberal, progressive character at the same time as emphasising its non-intervention in politics.75

‘Roundtable: “Governing the World” by Mark Mazower’, History Workshop Online (2013), http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/roundtable-patricia-clavin/ (accessed September 2019). 73 Brockington, ‘Introduction: Internationalism and the Arts’, in Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Brockington, 1–24 (p. 22). 74 Haefeli, IGNM, 190–232; idem, ‘Politische Implikationen einer “unpolitischen” Organisation: Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik zwischen 1933 und 1939’, in Musik im Exil: Die Schweiz und das Ausland 1918–1945, ed. Chris Walton and Antonio Baldassare (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 103–19. 75 ‘bemüht sich diese Gesellschaft einen “unpolitischen” Charakter zu betonen. Es ist klar, dass ihre Gründung seinerzeit unter dem Einfluss der Völkerbundstimmungen erfolgte. [...] in jeder Art und Weise betont die Gesellschaft in ihren Kundgebungen den Begriff der Internationalität und des internationalen Gedankenaustausches. Sodass sie durch diese Praxis eine[n] pazifistischen Charakter bekommen hat. [...] Zusammenfassend sei gesagt, dass die Gesellschaft einen liberalen, fortschrittlichen Charakter hat unter gleichzeitiger Betonung ihrer Nichteinmischung in die Politik’; Hanns Eisler and Herman Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB mit der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Zeitgenössische Musik anlässlich des Festivals in Prag’ (1935), in Eisler, Gesammelte Schriften 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Faßhauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden:

Given their political commitments, it was hard for Eisler and Reichenbach to see the ISCM’s duality as anything other than naive or hypocritical (a view Haefeli seems to have shared).

Although there is some truth in this critique, it may obscure as much as it illuminates. The claim of ‘non-political’ internationalism is perhaps best understood as an improvised heuristic, entailing both affordances and limitations. By attending to how the contradictions played out in practice, through rapidly changing historical circumstances, I aim in this thesis to make visible the ISCM’s diffuse, unpredictable effects, without falling back on tiredly pessimistic conclusions about the hypocrisy or futile idealism of interwar internationalists.

The tradition of liberal internationalism underpinning the ISCM as a moral-political project

– one only half-camouflaged by the claim of music’s independence from politics – began to weave itself into musical life well before the First World War. As the historians Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann have observed, two of the primary ‘mechanisms’ of internationalism from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards were the international exhibition and the international congress.76 Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international exhibitions were replete with musical performances, displays of musical instruments and demonstrations of new sound technologies.77 Several of the ISCM’s interwar festivals were staged in the fringes of these larger events, which shared some of the same frictions and contradictions, especially what Annegret Fauser identifies in her study of music

Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007), 287–306 (p. 295). This appraisal chimes with more recent scholarly accounts. Sarah Collins, for instance, writes: ‘during the inter-war period, the category of the “contemporary” in music was made to lend its chimera of neutrality to the politics of internationalism’; Collins, ‘What Was Contemporary Music?’, 58. 76 Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, ‘Introduction: The Mechanics of Internationalism’, in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, ed. Geyer and Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–25 (p. 22). 77 Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005); Celia Applegate, ‘Music at the Fairs: A Paradigm of Cultural Internationalism?’, in Crosscurrents, ed. Felix Meyer et al., 59–71; Flora Willson, ‘Hearing Things: Musical Objects at the 1851 Great Exhibition’, in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851, ed. James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 227–45.

31 at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair as the ‘tension between the notion of music as national and racial signifier on the one hand, and the ideal of musical universalism on the other’.78

The first self-consciously international conferences in musicology were held in the first decade of the twentieth century under the auspices of the Internationale

Musikgesellschaft (International Music Society, IMG).79 Founded in 1899, this association was the most important predecessor to the international musical institutions of the 1920s. In his programmatic foreword to the first issue of the IMG magazine, the Berlin-based musicologist Oskar Fleischer positioned the organisation as a logical response to the times:

‘In all areas of culture and trade today, inexorable drives towards international integration are increasingly making their presence felt. This is no passing fad, manufactured artificially or occurring by accident, but a cultural-historical necessity.’80 Modernity, for Fleischer, meant unstoppable progress towards greater interconnection. This narrative – propelled in part by the encyclopaedic sweep of international exhibitions – is characteristic of what the historian Glenda Sluga has described as an ‘international turn’ at the fin de siècle: a shift towards ‘a new self-consciousness of the internationality of everyday life’. The preoccupation yielded a discourse of ‘objective internationalism’, which highlighted increasingly developed travel and communications networks, and the seemingly exponential growth since the 1850s in the number and influence of international organisations.81 Fleischer urged his colleagues to embrace this international turn, so that ‘the education of musicians is broadened and

78 Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 12. The ISCM festivals in Liège (1930), Barcelona (1936) and Paris (1937) all coincided with international exhibitions in those cities. The 1927 festival in Frankfurt took place as an adjunct to the large-scale exhibition Musik im Leben der Völker (‘Music in the Life of the Peoples’). 79 Gabriele Eder, ‘Internationale Musikgesellschaft (IMG)’, Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon Online, https://musiklexikon.ac.at/ml/musik_I/Internationale_Musikgesellschaft.xml (accessed September 2020); Martin Kirnbauer, ‘A “Prelude” to the IMS’, in The History of the IMS (1927–2017), ed. Dorothea Baumann and Dinko Fabris (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017), 11–19. The IMG organised five congresses: Leipzig 1904, Basel 1906, Vienna 1909, London 1911, Paris 1914. 80 ‘Auf allen Gebieten der Kultur und des Handels macht sich jetzt immer mehr und mehr unaufhaltsames Drängen nach internationalem Zusammenschluß bemerkbar. Das ist keine Mode, künstlich gemacht oder durch Zufall geworden, sondern eine kulturgeschichtliche Notwendigkeit’; Oskar Fleischer, ‘Zum Geleit’, Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 1, no. 1–2 (1899), 1–8 (p. 4). 81 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 12–14. The social, institutional and technological developments in question, including international exhibitions and congresses, are discussed further in Emily S. Rosenberg, Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

32 deepened, the level of music in general is also raised, the authority and influence of music and musicians is increased, and their financial situation is thereby improved’.82 Here, as so often in the history of internationalism – cultural or otherwise – international cooperation represented not simply a goal in itself, but also a means to other ends.

The ends of international cooperation, as Fleischer envisaged them, involved a certain class politics. In Sluga’s analysis, turn-of-the century proclamations of an ‘objective internationalism’ enacted a ‘gradual disambiguation of the liberal characteristics of this new internationalism from more politically radical versions of internationalism’, to produce a new narrative that emphasised ‘progress and modernity in the image of the liberal nation- state’.83 The reframing of ‘international’ endeavour became particularly urgent after the

Russian Revolution, which provoked deep fears among Europe’s political leaders of further insurgency.84 Even back in 1899, though, Fleischer was careful to distance the IMG from the class-based internationalism of the Left: ‘If even the “workers of the world” are now coming together in person’, he asked, ‘should this be any less feasible for more monied circles with nobler and finer intentions?’ Fleischer argued that musicians should direct their efforts towards ‘the most cultured public’, so that they might regain the prestige they had once enjoyed at church and court.85 This reasoning exemplifies what Levitz terms the ‘exclusive internationalism’ of musicology during the early stages of its professionalisation.86 As

Fleischer describes them, the aims deriving from this elitism suggest a Janus-faced view of industrial modernity and, in particular, the transformations wrought by new communications and media technologies: much the same forces that made an international fraternity of musicians conceivable could also be charged with undermining traditional

82 ‘die Bildung der Musiker sich erweitert und vertieft, auch das Niveau der ganzen Musik sich heben, die Machtstellung und der Einfluß der Musik und der Musiker sich mehren, und dadurch sich die pekuniäre Lage bessern’; Fleischer, ‘Zum Geleit’, 4. 83 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 17–18. 84 As Patricia Clavin writes, ‘there is no doubt communism played a central role as a defining “other” in the liberal internationalism of the interwar period’; Patricia Clavin, ‘Introduction: Conceptualising Internationalism Between the World Wars’, in Internationalism Reconfigured, ed. Laqua, 1–14 (p. 5). 85 ‘Wenn sogar die “Proletarier aller Länder” jetzt persönlich sich näher treten, – sollte dies begüterteren Kreisen mit edleren und schöneren Absichten weniger möglich sein? [...] Das gebildetste Publikum’; Fleischer, ‘Zum Geleit’, 5, 6. 86 Levitz, ‘The Musicological Elite’, 12–18.

33 couplings of aesthetic and social hierarchies. His ambivalent stance – one might say, his typically modernist attitude – would remain an important feature of musical internationalism well into the twentieth century.

Following the outbreak of war in 1914, the IMG was disbanded. In musicology, as in many other fields, the conflict ruptured much of the internationalist endeavour of the previous decades. After the Armistice, though, there was a new flourishing of internationalism, partly as a continuation of pre-war trends, and partly as a reaction against the war and the xenophobic nationalisms it induced. The League, founded in 1920, served as both a novel forum of intergovernmental cooperation and an inspiration for other internationalist actors: what Eisler and Reichenbach referred to as the ‘League of Nations spirit’ of the early 1920s was a powerful force. As Daniel Gorman has argued, the popular ascendancy of internationalist principles can be seen in the preponderance of international groups dedicated to issues including politics, law, religion, humanitarianism and sport, which collectively produced ‘a dense web of networks that sometimes included but as often as not bypassed official channels’. For Gorman, this transnational fabric of affiliation and exchange ‘constitute[s] one of the striking features of the 1920s – the emergence of international society’.87 This developing form of civil society on the international scale was bolstered by initiatives to support cultural and intellectual exchange. ‘Cultural internationalism’, states Akira Iriye, ‘came of age in the aftermath of World War I.’88 In the musical sphere, the 1920s saw the launch of international organisations in musicology, music education, folk music and more – not least the International Musicological Society

(IMS, 1927–), effectively the IMG’s direct successor, which in its first decade collaborated closely with the ISCM. The new institutions spawned festivals, exhibitions, conferences and journals, which served as vital sites of transnational exchange.89

87 Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3, 9. 88 Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order, 51. 89 Marie McCarthy, ‘The Birth of Internationalism in Music Education 1899–1938’, International Journal of Music Education 21, no. 1 (1993), 3–15; Daniel Laqua, ‘Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe: Between National and International Community’, in European Encounters: Intellectual Exchange and the Rethinking of Europe 1914–1945, ed. Carlos Reijnen and

The ISCM was the most high-profile of these projects. Its pre-eminence was reflected

– and asserted – in its unofficial nickname: the ‘musical League of Nations’ (see Chapter

Four), a moniker that also denoted the organisation’s broad alignment with the ‘liberal and progressive’ core of Gorman’s ‘international society’.90 Such prominence was a blessing and a curse. It imparted esteem and leverage, all the more valuable given a lack of material resources. But it also made the ISCM an easy target for attack, especially from those on the

Right who saw a marriage of modernism and internationalism as a grave threat to national traditions. From the moment it was founded, the organisation was vilified by radical conservatives. Such voices were particularly strident in Germany, where the League and the other internationalist enthusiasms of the 1920s were perceived by some as foreign plots against the nation.91 But the paranoid view of cosmopolitan modernism as a form of communist or Jewish agitation was widespread on the nationalist Right across Europe.92

Despite attempts to reinvent the term, ‘international’ retained associations with left-wing politics and antisemitic conspiracy theories. As we will see, attacks along these lines caused considerable anxiety for the ISCM’s adherents, who were uncertain about how to react to vitriol that was, to them, illogical and misplaced. Most often, they responded by asserting ever more emphatically that they did not seek to erase national distinctions and that their activities were ‘non-political’. But this did little to reassure their critics. Like left-wing observers such as Eisler and Reichenbach – to whom they were otherwise bitterly opposed – ultra-nationalists stood apart from the soft consensus underpinning liberal internationalism.

Marleen Rensen (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 207–23; Christiane Sibille, ‘The Politics of Music in International Organisations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, New Global Studies 10 (2016), 253–81; Dorothea Baumann and Dinko Fabris, eds., The History of the IMS (1927– 2017) (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017); Levitz, ‘The Musicological Elite’, 12–18. 90 Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, 3. 91 Attacks on the ISCM by German nationalists are summarised in Haefeli, IGNM, 77–80. The cultural-political context for such sentiments is examined in Eckhard John, Musikbolschewismus: Die Politisierung der Musik in Deutschland 1918–1938 (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1994); Nicholas Attfield, Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music 1918–33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2017). 92 Examples from Italy and France are discussed in: Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 23–27, 180–82; Jane F. Fulcher, ‘The Preparation for Vichy: Anti- Semitism in French Musical Culture between the Two World Wars’, The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (1995), 458–75; Barbara Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913– 1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), 5.

They held that a ‘musical League of Nations’ could not be anything other than political: the modernist rhetoric of aesthetic autonomy was mere obfuscation, and, if anything, confirmed that their opponents had chosen cerebral abstraction over an authentic connection with the national community. Internationalism deepened the political controversy surrounding new music, whether its proponents liked it or not.

The ISCM festival in interwar Europe

The ISCM still exists today and continues to hold its annual festival. In this thesis, though, I am concerned with the 1920s and 30s as a distinct phase in the histories of new music and internationalism. As I explore in the Epilogue, after the Second World War the ISCM re- emerged into a world that looked very different, and struggled to adapt. By the later 1950s, there was widespread consensus that the organisation would probably never recapture its

‘golden age’ before 1939. This trajectory suggests that the interwar years represent a coherent period in the history of new-music internationalism. That period was, however, a turbulent one, in which aesthetic, political and technological conditions transformed rapidly.

As a starting point for mapping some of these shifts, we might divide the ISCM’s activities between 1922 and 1939 into three phases. The first two or three years of its existence were unstable but invigorating; not least because of its novelty, the ISCM attracted a level of fervour and expectation that it would not prove easy to live up to. From the middle of the

1920s, the festival became an established fixture of the European contemporary music scene, although some observers began to pose searching questions about its continued relevance.

Finally, from the mid-1930s, the organisation was faced with new and troubling kinds of political challenges.

The following chapters, which proceed in roughly chronological order, explore some of the breaks and continuities across these thresholds. But they do not constitute a linear institutional ‘biography’. For a detailed chronological account, Anton Haefeli’s 1982 history of the ISCM, which I have already mentioned in passing, remains the standard text. It is a mammoth achievement above all of documentation, which I draw on extensively throughout.

But it is not exhaustive: my research makes use of additional archives (some of which have only been opened or catalogued since the 1980s) as well as the online resources that have fuelled the recent boom in transnational history.93 In its more interpretative passages,

Haefeli’s book displays some biases that now appear dated. With the benefit of hindsight, he takes it as self-evident that Schoenbergian modernism was the real new music of the 1920s and 30s; the resulting emphasis on the Second Viennese School is somewhat distorting. This music-historical assumption is combined with a left-leaning political stance that is fundamental to Haefeli’s project: in the context of German-language musicology in the later

Cold War, his choice to focus on an institution, rather than autonomous musical works, suggests sympathy for a Marxist intellectual tradition that saw music as a human activity entangled with social history.94 At times, this perspective permits a bracing moral clarity: he is damning, for instance, about the ISCM admitting a national section of white South African musicians in the 1950s, a gesture implying tolerance of the apartheid regime.95 Elsewhere, though, Haefeli’s preconceptions cloud his judgement. This problem is evident not only in a defensiveness about the Soviet Union and its satellites, but also in the difficulty he seems to have in taking liberal internationalism seriously as a significant historical phenomenon.96 At this remove from the end of the Cold War – and with the historical consensus on interwar internationalism having shifted considerably – we need an updated account.

93 The use of digitised materials for transnational research comes with costs as well as gains: see Lara Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’, American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016), 377–402. 94 Haefeli writes, for example: ‘The composer is either unconsciously bound to the socio-economic structures of his country, his region, or – better – comes to grips with them consciously and dialectically’ (‘Der Komponist ist entweder unbewusst an die sozio-ökonomischen Strukturen seines Landes, seiner Gegend gebunden oder – was besser ist – setzt sich bewusst und dialektisch mit ihnen auseinander’); Haefeli, IGNM, 72. The emblematic figures of the East/West divide in German musicology in the 1960s and 1970s were Georg Knepler and Carl Dahlhaus. See Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Berlin Walls: Dahlhaus, Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History’, Journal of Musicology 20, no. 4 (2003), 498–525. Haefeli’s sympathy for the Soviet Union is especially evident in his article ‘Hanns Eisler und die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM)’, Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 23, no. 2 (1981), 104–13. Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, of which Knepler was the longstanding editor-in-chief, was the official organ of the DDR’s Association of Composers and Musicologists (Verband der Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler der DDR). However, we should be careful about overstating the methodological/geopolitical binary. Haefeli’s views seem more indebted to Adorno and Eisler than Knepler, who is never referred to directly in IGNM. 95 Haefeli, IGNM, 192. 96 Haefeli, IGNM, 74–77.

For a while after Haefeli’s book was published, not much was written about the

ISCM. The predominant historiographical narrative of musical modernism remained focused on aesthetic trends and innovative compositional techniques.97 As mobility and transnationalism have moved to the forefront of musicological awareness, though, there has been renewed interest in the organisation. Anne C. Shreffler and Sarah Collins have published important essays on the ISCM in 2015 and 2019 respectively. Shreffler excavates the political context of the 1935 festival in Prague, a narrative I extend in new directions in

Chapter Four.98 Collins analyses some of the complications and flaws in the pairing of the

‘contemporary’ and the ‘international’, in ways that inform my own discussions of theoretical and political issues throughout.99 However, my more archive-based approach will also show that unresolved conceptual issues were not always limiting: shaky intellectual foundations created possibilities for international collaboration which cold precision would have foreclosed.

My aim in this thesis is to build on the existing literature on the ISCM to fashion a more developed account of how the institutionalisation of new music in the 1920s and 30s intersected with contemporaneous discourses and practices of internationalism. Compared to previous research, I attend more closely to the festival as the nexus through which new music and internationalism came to be enacted in tandem.100 International festivals of contemporary music were the primary mechanism of new-music internationalism in the

97 A number of institution- and reception-focused studies have touched on specific festivals or the activities of the national branch in a particular country, without necessarily going into detail about the ISCM as an international endeavour. See, for example, Jennifer Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212– 17; Brian S. Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and Practice at the National Theater, 1900–1938 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 150–53, 197–200; Davide Ceriani, ‘Mussolini, la critica musicale italiana e i festival della Società Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea in Italia negli anni Venti’, Journal of Music Criticism 1, no. 1 (2017), 17–71. 98 Anne C. Shreffler, ‘The International Society for Contemporary Music and Its Political Context (Prague, 1935)’, in Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 58–90. 99 Collins, ‘What Was Contemporary Music?’. 100 My sense of the musical festival as a distinctive object of study in its own right is informed by ‘festival studies’, a growing interdisciplinary field of dialogue between anthropologists, sociologists and others which is increasingly attracting the attention of musicologists. In addition to Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, see the 2020 special issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music on music festivals, guested edited by Andrew Mall (Vol. 14, no. 1).

38 twentieth century, just as international exhibitions and conferences had been for internationalism more generally in the nineteenth. Yet we have only a sketchy, informal understanding of the historical development of such events and their shifting possibilities and limitations. The chapters that follow carve out some new paths through that larger history. To capture the multiplicity of how new-music internationalism was conceived and realised, they present the ISCM’s annual event in varied guises: a forum of international sociability; a catalyst for transnational circulation; an opportunity to display local heritage; a quasi-reenactment of diplomatic summitry. Each chapter works through its own solution to the challenge of writing about music festivals historically, and in this way illuminates different facets of the theory and practice of new-music internationalism in Europe between the wars.

Chapter One considers the nostalgia that accrued to interwar internationalism, and especially to an optimistic ‘postwar’ period lasting until around 1925. I focus on an eyewitness account of the organisation’s early years written in 1949 by the ISCM’s founding president, the Cambridge-based musicologist Edward J. Dent. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick’s distinction between ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ stances, I show that although musical modernism has usually been understood as predominantly paranoid in character,

Dent’s commitment to the ISCM was just as driven by the reparative potential of personal friendship.101 Both paranoid rebellions and reparative attachments, I argue, were associated by Dent with youth, which became the third term binding new music and internationalism together with enduring affective force. However, I go on to claim that, from the mid-1920s, an increasingly nostalgic veneration of (elite, male, European) youthfulness both sustained and hampered the ISCM, as it faced changing, ‘post-postwar’ challenges.

Chapter Two scrutinises further the contradictions arising from new music and internationalism’s shared associations with progress and modernity. I examine the dissemination and reception of the Iron Foundry, a short orchestral work by the Soviet

101 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51.

39 composer Alexander Mosolov. Following its performance at the 1930 ISCM festival in Liège, the Iron Foundry became hugely popular with audiences across Europe and beyond.

Examining the interplay of institutional structures, modes of listening and compositional idiom that enabled the work’s astonishing (if short-lived) success, I offer a reassessment of interwar machine aesthetics: one that emphasises the pleasure – and the confusion – listeners experienced when they heard a symphony orchestra imitate the sounds of modern machines. This critical framework allows me to describe how, for a defined period, Mosolov’s modernist aesthetic met a popular hunger for ‘international’ experiences that was inextricable from a fascination with mechanicity and its effects on the human body.

Chapter Three examines how the collaborative process of festival-making intersected with one of the most pressing problems facing adherents of cultural internationalism in interwar Europe: how to construe the relationship between national heritage and transnational affiliations. This question is foregrounded by the surprising prominence of early music at ISCM festivals. I explore the resulting incongruities through a focus on the

1931 instalment in Oxford and London, the first to be held in Britain, whose hosts were particularly self-conscious about how their unheralded musical tradition might be received by the international visitors. Some participants, I suggest, tried to rationalise the festival’s heterogeneity – and the blatant efforts at local self-promotion – through the idea of a

‘patchwork’ internationalism, whereby each nation was understood to make a distinctive cultural contribution to a larger shared heritage. In a final section, I consider the 1928 festival in Siena, where the challenge of reconciling local agendas with internationalist values was more fraught, since aspects of the event proved amenable to the state-sanctioned cause of fascist nationalism.

Chapter Four expands our understanding of cultural internationalism’s embattled tenacity in the 1930s by exploring how the ISCM responded to the moral and political dilemmas presented by Europe’s geopolitical turmoil. New challenges intensified a conundrum that the ISCM had contended with since its founding: how to become

‘international’ without being drawn into the political arena which, to a large degree, defined

40 the field to which the term referred. One strategy by which ISCM adherents negotiated the paradox of a non-political internationalism, I suggest, was to appropriate the conventionalised behaviour of diplomats. But with its liberal, democratic values under threat, the organisation would be compelled to decide whether to move beyond such imitation: whether, that is, to overhaul its structure and leadership, and intervene more directly in diplomatic affairs.

A brief Epilogue surveys the ISCM’s waning prestige and prominence after 1945. I outline the mid-century transformations in musical culture and international politics underpinning this decline, which bring into relief the distinctive conditions that facilitated the organisation’s unique standing in the 1920s and 30s.

What follows, then, is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the interwar convergence of modernism and internationalism. By concentrating on one unique institution and its festival,

I investigate the entanglement of culture, politics and modernity. In so doing, I address fundamental questions about music’s ethical potential and its capacity to sustain multiple kinds of community. Steering a course between the extremes of enthusiasm and cynicism that proclamations such as Evans’s letters can induce, I seek to present a more layered, equivocal view. A century on from its beginnings, new-music internationalism warrants a more considered response than either avid praise or outright condemnation. In the twenty- first century, after all, the ethos and institutions of ‘contemporary music’ still bear the imprint of an interwar model of internationalism, although most practitioners are only dimly aware of this inheritance.102 As Levitz argues, the same can also be said of musicology.103

There is a need, then, to scrutinise how these traditions of musical and musicological internationalism were forged. Their histories speak powerfully to many of the most contested

102 One sign of continuity with the early twentieth century lies in how ‘international’ institutions of contemporary music continue to reproduce whiteness as normative. See George E. Lewis, ‘A Small Act of Curation’, OnCurating 44 (2020), https://www.on-curating.org/issue-44-reader/a-small-act-of- curation.html (accessed October 2020). 103 ‘Although US musicologists have extensively critiqued the Eurocentrism of their field, they have not fully acknowledged, or perhaps even known a lot about, their profession’s internationalist bias. [...] Rather than research the historical specifics of international relations, musicologists have tended to romanticize and even naturalize internationalism as an idea’; Levitz, ‘The Musicological Elite’, 43. The argument broadly applies to musicology in Europe as well.

41 cultural and political issues of our time: a time which, like the interwar period, is consumed with fierce debates about national identity and international cooperation.

Chapter One

Looking Backward: Trauma, Nostalgia and Ageing

In June 1947, Edward J. Dent stepped down, for a second time, from his role as president of the ISCM. Dent, a Cambridge-based musicologist, had first been elected to lead the organisation when it was created in 1922 and had served until 1938. Following the death of his successor, Edwin Evans, in 1945, he took up the position again with the aspiration, as he put it, ‘to re-assemble the forces of the Society which had been scattered during the War’.

Now, aged seventy-one, he wanted to retire. The ISCM’s General Assembly accepted his wish, but they had one more proposal for him. Edward Clark, the incoming president, noted that the organisation ‘has been bombarded with requests to write the history of the I.S.C.M’, and asserted that ‘such a history should be written’. No one could be better placed to carry out this task, suggested another delegate, than Dent himself. But the soon-to-be former president was not so sure. The minutes record that he: ‘Replied this was rather embarrassing and did not wish to accept the proposal definitely. Many had proposed that he should write his autobiography, but this was so interwoven with the I.S.C.M. that it would, in fact, contain a history of the Society.’1 This is a revealing, even intimate observation: Dent saw his own life story as inseparable from that of the ISCM.

The period in which his relationship with the organisation began – the early 1920s – was, as we saw in the Introduction, a vibrant one for cultural internationalism. In recent years, scholars have begun to unearth the musical history of this postwar wave of internationalist activity. Where it has moved beyond the necessary labour of documentation, this work has tended to emphasise conceptual issues, such as the national-international

1 All quotations in this paragraph are from ‘Minutes of the Assembly of Delegates: Copenhagen, 1947’, ISCM Archive, Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Box 114.

43 dialectic.2 In this chapter, I pursue a slightly different line of inquiry. Theorists of cultural mobility have urged us to attend to ‘mobilizers’: the ‘agents, go-betweens, translators, or intermediaries’ who make cultural exchange possible.3 Following this cue, I focus on Dent as a pivotal figure in the nascent international civil society of musical modernism.4 Examining how he described the ISCM’s early years in retrospect, I ask what it felt like to be a musician committed so strongly to an internationalist institution, and how that commitment could be justified in ethical terms in the post-First World War context. Guided by Dent’s hint about the interweaving of biography and history, I seek to understand what an apparently selfless devotion to modernist music brought to the life of this non-composing, non-performing advocate. In this way, I interrogate the new-music internationalism of the 1920s as an ethical and affective project, situated at the blurred boundary between the personal and the institutional. This inquiry, in turn, sheds light on crucial facets of the ISCM’s interwar history more broadly: the myths of the organisation’s origins out of the ashes of the First

World War; the importance of friendship to how musical internationalism was conceived and experienced; and the challenges arising from the inherent transience of the ‘new’.

Dent never completed his autobiography or a formal history of the ISCM. But two years after his second retirement from the presidency, he wrote ‘Looking Backward’, a text that combines elements of the two. It was published as the lead article in the first and (as it turned out) only issue of Music Today, the ISCM’s short-lived attempt of 1949 to produce its

2 Laqua, ‘Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe’; Sibille, ‘The Politics of Music in International Organisations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’; Collins, ‘What Was Contemporary Music?’. 3 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘A Mobility Studies Manifesto’, in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri and Frederike Pannewick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–53 (p. 251). See also Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Cultures in Motion: An Introduction’, in Cultures in Motion, ed. Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman and Helmut Reimitz (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1–19 (p. 14). 4 Annegret Fauser makes a parallel case for how Dent exemplifies ‘those many individuals who tend to get ignored in a conventional musicological inquiry focused on composers, performers and institutions: the mediators and brokers who provide the social and cultural glue that binds things together’; Annegret Fauser, ‘The Scholar behind the Medal: Edward J. Dent (1876–1957) and the Politics of Music History’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139, no. 2 (2014), 235–60 (pp. 259–60).

44 own journal.5 This publication sought, as its first editorial declared, to facilitate debate about contemporary music in the ‘atmosphere of international good-fellowship which it has always been the aim of the I.S.C.M. to promote throughout the world’.6 This ethos was immediately apparent from the dual-language publication in English and French. (Before 1939, German had been the ISCM’s third official language, but this was clearly no longer considered appropriate.) As its name suggests, Music Today was chiefly concerned with the present; its sole issue was mostly devoted to position papers on current musical debates, including a forum on the theme ‘Music’s Future: Tonal or a-Tonal?’.7 By contrast, Dent’s text had a more retrospective slant: an eyewitness account of the ISCM’s history up to 1925, it is the most autobiographical of all his published writings.

Since 1949, ‘Looking Backward’ has played an oddly prominent role in shaping our understanding of the ISCM. In his 1982 history of the organisation, still the standard reference text, Anton Haefeli cites Dent’s short article more than 45 times in his account of the period up to 1925.8 However, we cannot really trust ‘Looking Backward’ as a straightforward historical record. Dent was writing over twenty years after the events he describes, and he mediated between the roles of insider and public chronicler with, as we will see, well-rehearsed anecdotal panache.9 Haefeli relied on this text (and a handful of similar retrospective accounts) as a pragmatic solution to an obstacle confronting all research on the

ISCM: the central office’s records from the interwar period have been lost.10 The problem is

5 Edward J. Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, Music Today 1 (1949), 6–22. The article was later reprinted in the posthumous collection of Dent’s Selected Essays, ed. Hugh Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 272–290. My citations refer to the original 1949 version. 6 Rollo H. Myers, ‘Foreword by the Editor’, Music Today 1 (1949), 3–5 (pp. 3–4). 7 ‘Open Forum: Variations on a Theme – Music’s Future: Tonal or a-Tonal?’, Music Today 1 (1949), 132–52. 8 Haefeli, IGNM, 19–72, 88–138. 9 Karen Arrandale, Dent’s biographer, advises that the article ‘should be taken with a large grain of salt’; Karen Arrandale, ‘The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent’, in British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950, eds. Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), 154–73 (p. 168 n. 60). 10 In his unpublished report on the state of the archival material relating to the ISCM, the Danish musicologist Axel Teich Geertinger offers support for Haefeli’s hypothesis that at least some of the material relating to the interwar years may have been lost in the chaotic period of 1952–4, when the ISCM’s leadership and the location of its headquarters changed several times; Axel Teich Geertinger, ‘Kilder til ISCM’s historie: ISCM’s arkiver fra 1922 til 1969’ (2000). I am grateful to Axel Teich Geertinger for sharing his research with me.

45 far from unique. The archives of international organisations are often incomplete or dispersed, imposing gaps and limitations on histories of internationalist initiatives of all kinds.11 I want to suggest, though, that the necessity of turning to retrospective accounts such as ‘Looking Backward’ may represent an opportunity as well as a challenge, provoking a renewed focus on what nostalgia reveals about the affects, attachments and ethics of our historical participant-observers.12

Viewed in this light, ‘Looking Backward’ is significant not merely because it provides information about what happened at the ISCM’s early festivals, but also because it illuminates what those events meant to a central figure in the early history of new-music internationalism, and, in particular, how they met a need to find solace and purpose in the aftermath of the First World War. In the 1920s, it was not unusual for European musicians of Dent’s generation to look to their vocation as a bulwark against despair. For example, as

Jeanice Brooks has shown, Nadia Boulanger threw herself into her work as ‘a form of self- redemption’ after the anguishing experiences of war. Filtered through her devout Catholic faith, music-making offered ‘a route to what she could consider an active, and thus meaningful, life’.13 Like Boulanger, Dent did not fight in the war, but was nonetheless deeply marked by its traumas, especially the deaths of students and friends. But he had little time for religious mysticism. Indeed, his sceptical attitude to Christianity was sharpened by his revulsion at the war, which he referred to in 1915 as ‘this holocaust – for which all thanks be

11 Emma Rothschild, ‘The Archives of Universal History’, Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008), 375–401. 12 My understanding of autobiographical writing as a mediated, performative act aligns with the approach advocated in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Life writing has received sustained critical attention in musicology only relatively recently. See Jolanta T. Pekacz, ‘Memory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and its Discontents’, Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 1 (2004), 39–80; Christopher Wiley, ‘Biography and the New Musicology’, in (Auto)Biography as a Musicological Discourse, ed. Tatjana Marković and Vesna Mikić (Belgrade: University of Arts in Belgrade, 2010), 3–27. Fauser draws on this research to discusses the difficulties of packaging Dent’s apparent contradictions into a neat biographical narrative, in ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 259. 13 Jeanice Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 14–15.

46 to that impotent Almighty of ours’.14 Grief instead deepened his affinity with a distinctively

English form of socially elite secular pacifism – a humanist outlook closely associated in this period with the Cambridge and Bloomsbury circles in which he moved – and strengthened his commitment to serving this larger cause through his musical endeavours.15

One of my aims here, then, is to build on the existing literature on the First World

War and cultural memory to examine how largely unspoken remembrance of the conflict spurred, but also loomed over, the musical internationalism of the 1920s.16 Reading ‘Looking

Backward’ somewhat against the grain of its ironic tone, I use the text as a starting point for evaluating new-music internationalism as a response to profound trauma. In Dent’s case, that response extended in multiple, perhaps contradictory, directions. His personality was described by one of his students as a ‘strange and highly individual blend of caustic irreverence and warm sympathy’.17 I describe this duality by drawing on the queer theorist

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoia and repair.18 Paranoia, for Sedgwick, is ‘a theory of negative affects’, a position concerned above all with avoiding humiliation and pain.19 Although Sedgwick was writing primarily about a particular mode of late twentieth- century literary theory and criticism, the paranoid posture she identified correlates with how

14 Dent to Clive Carey, December 1915, quoted in Hugh Carey, Duet for Two Voices: An Informal Biography of Edward Dent Compiled from His Letters to Clive Carey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 76. 15 On Dent’s wartime experiences and pacificism, see Karen Arrandale, ‘Artists’ Rifles and Artistic Licence: Edward Dent’s War’, First World War Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), 7–16. On Bloomsbury pacifism, see Jonathan Atkin, A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002); Christine Froula, ‘War, Peace, and Internationalism’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group, ed. Victoria Rosner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 93–111. 16 Landmark texts on the First World War and memory include Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 25th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a general survey of music and cultural memory after the Armistice, see Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 357–416. 17 Philip Radcliffe, E.J. Dent: A Centenary Memoir (Rickmansworth: Triad Press, 1976), 30. 18 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’. This essay has prompted discussion about the possibility of a ‘reparative musicology’. See Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Musicology, Torture, Repair’, Radical Musicology 3 (2008), http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Cusick.htm (accessed September 2019); William Cheng, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Kate Guthrie, ‘Why We Can’t All Just Get Along’ [review of Just Vibrations, by Cheng], Journal of the Royal Musical Association 143, no. 2 (2018), 473–482. Although this debate has informed my understanding of Sedgwick, I draw on her work here in a quite different way. 19 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, 136–138.

47 the basic attitude of early twentieth-century modernists – musicians included – has often been described.20 (To put that another way, we might say that the scholarly tradition of paranoid critique was a legacy of modernism.21) I want to augment this familiar view by showing how modernism’s intersections with internationalism also manifested the stance that Sedgwick calls ‘repair’: a ‘move toward a sustained seeking of pleasure’, leading to the ethical possibilities of ‘love and care’.22 I argue that Dent’s affinity with the ISCM was underpinned not just by his inclination for a particular style of ‘non-political’ dissidence, but also by his devotion to personal friendship: an intimate internationalism taking the form of an ‘ethics of care’. Paranoid rebellions and reparative attachments, I go on to suggest, both had connotations of youth. However, from the mid-1920s, an increasingly nostalgic veneration of (elite, male, European) youthfulness both sustained and hampered the ISCM, as it faced changing, ‘post-postwar’ challenges. ‘The ageing of the new music’, to borrow a phrase from Adorno, shadowed Dent’s emotional connection with the organisation – not so much at the abstract level of the musical material, but in the lived experiences of personal and institutional biography.23

The oppositional stance

For all that Dent was mindful of their intersections, autobiography and history involve different conventions. This tension inflects the slightly unusual structure of ‘Looking

Backward’. The article begins with an overview of musical life after the First World War, told with the narrative sweep of the professional music historian. As Dent comes to discuss the

20 Consider, for example, Andreas Huyssen’s much-cited account of modernism as an ‘adversary culture’, which ‘constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture’; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), vii. It is telling that Freud, Marx and Nietzsche – the core triumvirate of Paul Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ – are sometimes identified as the intellectual progenitors of literary modernism; see, for example, Michael Bell, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9–32 (pp. 9–10). 21 This argument is made in Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17. 22 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, 137. 23 Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’ (1955), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), 181–202.

48 activities of the ISCM more specifically, though, the text becomes more fragmentary. His experiences of the festivals until 1925 are conveyed through a chronological repository of wry anecdotes. The structure here contrasts strikingly with the narrative flow of the opening pages. ‘Looking Backward’ thus encapsulates the dilemma of a historian attempting to write about events in which they themselves have participated: the grand narrative constructions of History cannot accommodate the manifold fragments of lived experience, leading Dent to turn to the anecdotal style characteristic of early twentieth-century British autobiographical writing.24

Despite the additive way in which Dent’s anecdotes accrue, their selection and telling betray a consistent tendency to focus on moments of confrontation. In one of his landmark essays on music and sexuality, Philip Brett suggested that Dent’s scholarship offered a

‘counter-discourse’ set against the musicological mainstream. Brett attributed this

‘oppositional’ stance to Dent’s social and political experiences of homosexuality.25 That is,

Brett saw Dent’s attitude as a necessarily paranoid response to his marginalisation as a gay man in early twentieth-century Britain. ‘Dent’s various roles within and without musicology’, he argued, ‘have a certain consistency as protest against orthodoxy from within the homosexual closet that not so much confined as defined lives like his.’26 Queer opposition is

24 That style was especially evident in war memoirs. See Hope Wolf, ‘Anecdotal Remembrance: Forms of First and Second World War Life-Writing’, in A History of English Autobiography, ed. Adam Smyth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 284–97. 25 Philip Brett, ‘Musicology and Sexuality: The Example of Edward J. Dent’, in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 177–188. An earlier version of this essay was published under the same title in Musicology and Sister Disciplines: Past, Present Future – Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the International Musicological Society: London, 1997, ed. David Greer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 418–427. This earlier version slips between ‘reverse discourse’ (422) and ‘counter-discourse’ (424), an inconsistency ironed out in favour of the former in the 2002 chapter. ‘Reverse discourse’ is a borrowing from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998 [1976]), 101. Foucault’s use of this phrase has usually been interpreted as involving an affirmative reclaiming of the terms and concepts involved in the oppression of a marginalised group; a classic example would be the gay liberation movement. The term ‘counter-discourse’ seems to capture more precisely the somewhat less affirmative oppositional practices that Brett attributes to Dent. In their introduction to the volume in which the later version of the essay appears, Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell also prefer ‘counterdiscourse’; Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, ‘Introduction: Secret Passages’, in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Fuller and Whitesell, 1–21 (p. 14). Aside from this issue of terminology, all further citations of Brett’s essay refer to the 2002 version. 26 Brett, ‘Musicology and Sexuality’, 185.

49 imbricated here with tropes of heroic modernist alienation. This gesture is typical of Brett’s writings on sexuality, conceived as they were within what Sedgwick described as the paranoid paradigm of late twentieth-century queer theory.27 As Brett acknowledges, however, Dent would not have been able to take up the oppositional stance – or at least not in the ways he did – without other kinds of social leverage: he was born into the landed gentry (his father was a Conservative MP), and educated at Eton and Cambridge (Figure 2).

His life and career combined authority and vulnerability, social distinction and cultural critique, in ways that bring to mind Raymond Williams’s characterisation of the Bloomsbury

Group as ‘a true fraction of the existing English upper class [...] at once against its dominant ideas and values and still willingly, in all immediate ways, part of it’. Dent, who had many ties to Bloomsbury, inhabited the same ‘very complex and delicate position’.28 He was, as

Winton Dean put it, ‘an aristocrat who resented his upbringing and a socialist who despised public taste’.29

In ‘Looking Backward’, Dent’s oppositional stance aligns with a portrayal of new- music internationalism as an anti-hegemonic project. The text restages a plethora of incidents in which Dent confronted the arrogance of those who, whether by accident or design, threatened to derail the ISCM. Faced with these misguided interlocutors, he presents himself as having been unafraid to challenge even high-profile adversaries. He recalls a row over rehearsal time at the 1925 festival in Venice, for example, which culminated in him reprimanding Schoenberg: ‘you are not the only composer at this festival’.30 In a letter to a friend at the time, Dent was even more candid: Schoenberg was ‘incredibly offensive’, he

27 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, 126–27. The tendency to find value in anti- hegemonic opposition is most evident in Brett’s pioneering essays on Britten and sexuality: Brett, Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays, ed. George E. Haggerty (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006). More recent scholarship has queried Brett’s potential overstatement of Britten’s marginalisation and counter-cultural politics. See Heather Wiebe, review of Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays, by Philip Brett, Opera Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2007), 130–136; Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 22–23. 28 Raymond Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’ (1980), in Culture and Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 148–69 (p. 156). 29 Winton Dean, ‘Edward J. Dent: A Centenary Tribute’, Music & Letters 57, no. 4 (1976), 353–61 (p. 360). 30 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 20.

Figure 2: J. Palmer Clarke, portrait photograph of Edward J. Dent (1900). Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/5/1/1.

wrote, and ‘not the only little tin god whom I had to put in his place’.31 The principal targets of Dent’s derision in ‘Looking Backward’, though, are not self-centred composers, but crusty authority figures who failed to understand the value of the ISCM, such as the myopic local officials in Salzburg.32 He is especially keen to ridicule the unthinking hostility of old- fashioned critics, among whom the distinguished Viennese critic Julius Korngold (the father of the composer) serves to epitomise the closed-mindedness of an old guard that needed to be overcome.33

31 Dent to Clive Carey, 1925, quoted in Hugh Carey, Duet for Two Voices, 116. Schoenberg was even more incensed about this row and remained furious about it for years afterwards. See Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 243–45. In correspondence, Schoenberg and Berg subsequently referred to the ISCM as ‘Internationale Gaunerbande für Neue Musik’ (international gang of crooks for new music) and ‘Internationale Gesellschaft für leck’ mich im Arsch’ (international society for lick my arse); Berg to Schoenberg, 13 July 1926 and Schoenberg to Berg, 3 March 1928, in The Berg- Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, ed. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey and Donald Harris (London: Macmillan, 1987), 348, 365. 32 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 7, 14, 16. 33 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 7. In 1924, Dent suggested drily that Korngold’s ‘attacks on me are always one of the delights of the festival’; Dent to Lawrence Haward, 28 August 1924, The Papers of Edward Joseph Dent, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge, EJD/4/111/10/7.

A desire to combat received attitudes is also evident in Dent’s tales of puncturing nationalist bravado in ‘Looking Backward’. He recalls challenging Alfredo Casella’s claim at the 1923 festival that ‘Italy had a right to all sorts of special privileges just because she was

Italy’.34 A few paragraphs later, he relishes the astonished response of the German composer

Heinrich Kaminski to the ease with which the Czech Philharmonic sight-read his Concerto grosso for double orchestra at rehearsals for the 1925 festival in Prague.35 For Dent,

Kaminski’s astonishment betrayed ignorance and a patronising attitude towards music- making outside Germany. ‘I replied that it was not very surprising,’ Dent writes, ‘as the

Czechs were undoubtedly by far the most musical people of Europe.’ Faced with this apparently unexpected proposition, Kaminski ‘was too shocked to say another word’.36

Through such exchanges, Dent presents his unclouded discernment as ensuring international harmony by exposing the lazy prejudices of his colleagues.

Yet his story about Kaminski retains the idea of music as an arena for competition between nations. In several other anecdotes in ‘Looking Backward’, the humour depends on a confrontation between national stereotypes, as in the account of Eduard Erdmann performing Arthur Schnabel’s Piano Sonata in Venice:

The German section had sent down a special pianoforte from Bechstein’s, but as the stage of the Fenice has a steep rake, it was necessary to stand the front leg on a brick in order to make the keyboard approximately level. Erdmann, besides being a truly great artist, is one of those happy-natured people who are always ready to accommodate themselves to anything. He also had, and needed, a sense of humour. Schnabel’s sonata was very romantic and went beyond Liszt in mysterious recitatives at the extreme ends of the keyboard, punctuated by soul-shattering silences, and during one of these a high-pitched voice from the gallery screamed out ‘E ora BAS- TAAA!’ Erdmann kept his face; I think that was his greatest achievement.37

The droll punchline – and the climactic howl of protest that precedes it – are set up by establishing a conflict between a German tendency towards excessively serious instrumental music and an Italian passion for operatic lyricism.38 This clash between two differing

34 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 14. 35 Dent mistakenly includes this episode in his account of the 1924 festival, also held in Prague. 36 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 16. 37 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 19–20. 38 Dent’s account may rely on stereotypes, but it is true that Italian audiences and critics were largely hostile to the music performed in Venice in 1925. See Ceriani, ‘Mussolini, la critica musicale italiana e i festival della SIMC in Italia negli anni Venti’, 28–30.

52 traditions of overemotional European Romanticism is foreshadowed by the awkward mismatch between the Bechstein piano and the sloping stage. To stretch this analogy further, we might say that Dent thought his role was to provide the bricks: the practical and refreshingly informal interventions mediating between national types.

This scenario glosses over the particular contexts in which Dent’s own perspective was situated. Within the logic of his oppositional stance, critique and conflict provided the resistance that gave shape to his public profile, not least in generating the energy of his distinctive voice as a writer. At the same time, though, his persona remained amorphous: his

‘counter-discourse’ shifted the spotlight away from himself onto the stifling orthodoxies to be challenged and mocked. As Brett demonstrated, this strategy allowed Dent to play the role of a witty provocateur, while maintaining discretion about his personal life. It also helped him in his internationalist endeavours to position himself apart from the supposed dogmas and squabbles of continental Europeans. This apparent neutrality relied on well-established tropes of Anglo-Saxon rationalism and pragmatism. As Sarah Collins has suggested, Dent inherited a liberal tradition of imagining ‘the English temperament as being committed to collective exchange and freedom of communication’.39 He propagated the view that British

(and sometimes also American) musicians’ distance from European antagonisms made them more fair-minded musical internationalists.40 This idea surfaces in ‘Looking Backward’ in the claim that London was chosen as the ISCM’s headquarters partly because it was remote from continental rivalries.41 Such a narrative about the role of English-speaking musicians turned

39 Sarah Collins, ‘The Elision of Difference, Newness and Participation: Edward J. Dent’s Cosmopolitan Ethics of Opera Performance’, in Music History and Cosmopolitanism, ed. Anastasia Belina, Kaarina Kilpiö and Derek B. Scott (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), 117–30 (p. 124). 40 In an unpublished text from 1943, for example, Dent wrote of his experience of chairing the ISCM’s annual juries that the ‘most cosmopolitan [jury members] in their appreciation, as far as I could judge, were the Americans and the British’; Dent, ‘Introduction’ [1943], typescript draft of the introduction to an ultimately unpublished book, provisionally titled Music Between Two Wars, celebrating the 21st anniversary of the ISCM’s founding, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/1/1/1/2. 41 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 9–10. In a source referred to by Dent in ‘Looking Backward’, Edwin Evans reported in 1922 that London had been chosen ‘most of all because London is more free than most other capitals from the tendency-squabbles to which Vienna is perhaps most of all addicted’; Evans, ‘The Salzburg Festival’, The Musical Times 63, no. 955 (September 1922), 628–31 (p. 629).

53 a weakness – their perceived peripherality to the new-music scene – into a strength. It also served, of course, to legitimise Dent’s long presidency of the ISCM.

Dent’s focus was directed at reining in one national group in particular: the Germans.

It is telling that so many of the figures with whom Dent recalls clashing in ‘Looking

Backward’ (including Kaminski, Korngold and Schoenberg) were German-speaking. As

Annegret Fauser has pointed out, the orthodoxy of mainstream musical opinion that Dent struggled against was – in musicology especially – a specifically German one.42 In British universities, musicology was only just beginning to become institutionalised in the 1920s and

30s.43 As a key contributor to the establishment of music history as a university discipline in

Britain, Dent repeatedly claimed that a distinction needed to be made between the flexible, common-sense approach of British-style ‘music research’ and the dogmatic, pedantic model of Musikwissenschaft.44 Positioning himself in an oppositional stance and evoking certain tropes of Englishness were thus allied gestures of refusal of the international musical establishment. It would be too simple to describe Dent as ‘anti-German’ – although some

German musicians certainly saw him this way – and his vision of international exchange never excluded Germany.45 Nonetheless, by the time he wrote ‘Looking Backward’ in 1949,

42 Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 248–49. Dent’s aforementioned statement to Kaminski that ‘the Czechs were undoubtedly by far the most musical people of Europe’ exemplifies his repudiation of the myth of Germans as the ‘people of music’, on which see Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, ‘Germans as the “People of Music”: Genealogy of an Identity’, in Music and German National Identity, ed. Applegate and Potter (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–35. 43 Christian Kennett, ‘Criticism and Theory’, in The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: The Twentieth Century, ed. Stephen Banfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 503–18. On the implications of a semi-institutionalised musicology for Dent’s career, see Arrandale, ‘The Scholar as Critic’. 44 Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 248–58. Another example of Dent’s attempts to counter German musical hegemony is his 1933 biography of Busoni; see Sarah Collins, ‘What is Cosmopolitan? Busoni and Other Germans’, The Musical Quarterly 99, no. 2 (2016), 201–29 (pp. 209–12). 45 Tales of Dent’s slights circulated among disgruntled German-speaking musicians. Writing to his wife from the first official ISCM festival in 1923, the conductor Hermann Scherchen explained how Erich Steinhard, who led the ‘German’ half of the ISCM’s Czechoslovakian section, had been told by the Berlin-based critic Adolf Weissmann that at the first formal meeting of ISCM delegates earlier in the year: ‘Dent at the end expressed his thanks to all the delegates, but not to the German. When I heard this, it went through me like a thunderbolt, and I could only think of how Dent took his leave of us in Zurich [after the meeting of the festival jury], and how after his heartfelt thanks to Caplet, Wellesz and Ansermet he had nothing to say to us’ (‘Er [Steinhard] erzählt mir (von Weißmann), daß auf der Londoner Delegiertenkonferenz Dent am Schluß allen Delegierten seinen Dank ausgesprochen habe, nicht aber dem deutschen. Wie ein Blitz durchfuhr es mich, als ich das hörte u. daran denken mußte, wie Dent von uns in Zürich Abschied nahm u. nach seinem herzlichen Dank an Caplet, Wellesz u. Ansermet uns nichts zu sagen wußte’); Hermann Scherchen to Auguste Maria Scherchen, 4 August 1923, in ...alles hörbar machen: Briefe eines Dirigenten 1920 bis 1939, ed. Eberhardt Klemm (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1976), 59.

54 he had witnessed catastrophes beyond even his worst fears about the destructive imperialism of German nationalist claims to cultural hegemony.

For Brett, Dent made productive use of his marginalised position in a homophobic society by challenging the kinds of orthodoxies that compelled him to the margins in the first place. Although the personal consequences of his nationality were far less severe, there is a parallel to be drawn with how he used Britain’s relatively peripheral status in the world of musical modernism as a position from which the assumptions and values that engendered that status might be resisted.46 A completely serious calling thus lay behind the witty tone of

‘Looking Backward’, one in which nationalism and internationalism could proceed side-by- side in their shared resistance to musical hegemony.

Friendship

Dent’s ‘counter-discourse’ made it clearer what the ISCM was against than what it was for.

There was a degree of constructive ambiguity in this, enabling collaboration and even apparent coherence among musicians with quite different aesthetic and political views. (In the 1930s, as we will see in Chapter Four, the fragility of this arrangement would be revealed.) The anecdotes in ‘Looking Backward’ exemplify Dent’s improvisatory pragmatism: their vividness and humour seem almost designed to crowd out troublesome questions about the organisation’s ultimate significance and purpose, beyond a series of local skirmishes with the musical establishment. But the text does hint at a partial answer to those questions, one which shows that Dent cherished the early 1920s not only as an era of rebellion, but also, and just as crucially, as one of connection and reconciliation.

For Dent, the ISCM’s reparative potential seems to have been epitomised by the very first event he attended at the 1922 chamber music festival in Salzburg: a rehearsal of Rout, an early composition by Arthur Bliss. Dent’s descriptions of the ISCM and its origins

46 Collins also observes how the example of the ISCM’s British participants demonstrates how ‘those who perceived themselves to be peripheral in relation to a centre, or belated in relation to something or somewhere more timely’ have called on the category of ‘contemporary music’ as a means of attempting ‘to reduce the power of a dominant value system by democratizing the field’; Collins, ‘What Was Contemporary Music?’, 59.

55 consistently return to this moment. In ‘Looking Backward’, he makes a point of listing the nationalities of the musicians involved:

My first and unforgettable impression of the festival was a rehearsal to which I went with Wilhelm Pijper; Arthur Bliss was conducting his Rout (why do we never hear that delightful work now?) – Dorothy Moulton singing the soprano solo (it consisted mostly of piercing shrieks on high A) with the Hindemith Quartet – two Germans, a Dutchman and a Turk – two Frenchmen playing wind instruments, a double bass from Salzburg and Louis Dunton Green, another Dutchman, at the pianoforte in default of a harp as the Salzburg harpist had found the part quite beyond her comprehension. Evans acted as interpreter.47 One reason Dent found this tableau so memorable, prompting his almost obsessive retelling of it over three decades, was that it provided a basis for arguing that the 1922 festival represented the first truly international event of its kind since 1914. A possible rival in this respect was a series of concerts of contemporary chamber music staged alongside the 1920

Mahler Festival in Amsterdam, which concluded with an international group of prominent musicians signing a lofty manifesto about ‘rebuild[ing] the broken spiritual bridges between the peoples’.48 Even though the event in Amsterdam had taken place two years earlier, Dent always insisted that the festival in Salzburg was:

the first international music-meeting since the war: to claim this honor for the Mahler festival at Amsterdam, as has been done, is hardly justifiable, however international the audience may have been. No one could regard Mahler as a composer of international significance, and the organization of the performances at Amsterdam was purely Dutch. At Salzburg the performances were as international as the music performed, and players of once hostile nationalities sat down side by side to take part in the same piece of music.49

Unable to resist a sideswipe at Mahler, whom he accused elsewhere of composing

‘symphonic monstrosities’, Dent argues here that a truly international musical event after the

First World War must involve direct collaboration between musicians from formerly belligerent countries.50 Thanks to Rout, the 1922 festival at Salzburg would, conveniently

47 Dent, ‘Looking Backward, 8. Dent’s other descriptions of the same scene include: ‘British Music in Europe: The International Society’, The Observer (28 June 1925), 7; Dent, ‘Modern Music’s Vitality in a War-Vexed World’, The Daily Telegraph (10 June 1938), 14; idem, ‘Edwin Evans’, Adam: International Review 14, no. 161 (August 1946), 24–26 (pp. 24–25). 48 Quoted in Paul Op de Coul, ‘Modern Chamber Music at the 1920 Mahler Festival: A Prelude to the International Society for Contemporary Music’, in Gustav Mahler: The World Listens, ed. Donald Mitchell (Haarlem: TEMA Uitgevers, 1995), 1.77–1.86 (p. 1.83). 49 Dent, ‘Plans for Salzburg’, The Nation and Athenaeum 32, no. 18 (3 February 1923), 696–98 (p. 696). 50 Dent, Terpander: Or, Music and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926), 60.

56 enough, fit the bill. As he writes in ‘Looking Backward’, ‘The ill-feeling engendered by the war was completely forgotten; Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans and Austrians could all sit down together and take part in playing the same piece of music.’51

Part of the nostalgia-inducing legend of the 1922 festival, then, was rooted in a claim to primacy: the claim, that is, that the event marked the dawn of international reconciliation among musicians in the postwar era.52 That assertion was often nested within a larger narrative, whereby it was contended that, as Evans put it in 1940, ‘on the morrow of a great war, we musicians were among the first in our efforts to repair the moral havoc’.53 As Dent’s repeated evocations of Rout suggest, the aspiration to become musical peacemakers was driven by the hope that the ISCM might generate new forms of community through music- making. It is telling that he was so taken with a rehearsal, rather than a performance: his priority was not so much to create a new kind of international public, and certainly not an international marketplace, but to facilitate connections between individual musicians. Dent had long been drawn to the forms of collectivity afforded by musical participation. As Collins has argued, when he was involved in an amateur production of The Magic Flute at

Cambridge in 1911, he was concerned especially with ‘the labour of producing the opera’. She writes, ‘The performances were not intended to carry political import in the manner of cultural philanthropy, in fact – which would be contrary to his belief in the autonomy of art – but they did partake of “the political”, in the sense of being a practice or process intended to have an impact on social relations.’54 In Dent’s accounts of the Rout rehearsal, the communal effort of realising autonomous works is presented as the basis for a specifically musical

51 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 9. 52 In a 1928 ISCM prospectus, quite possibly written by Dent himself, the 1922 festival is described as ‘the first occasion since the war of 1914–18 on which musicians from both neutral and belligerent countries met together on friendly terms and together took active part in the performance of music’; International Society for Contemporary Music [1928], 3, Alban Berg Nachlass, Musiksammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, F21.Berg.450/1. Dent made this claim repeatedly with only minor variants in wording. See, for example, Società Internationale per la Musica Contemporanea: Terzo Festival di Musica da Camera: Venezia Settembre 1925 (Venice: 1925), 5, British Library; Dent, ‘Modern Music’s Vitality in a War-Vexed World’. 53 Evans to the national sections of the ISCM, January 1940, Allgemeine Sammlung: Fonds IGNM (Sektion Basel), Paul Sacher Stiftung. 54 Collins, ‘The Elision of Difference, Newness and Participation’, 128.

57 internationalism. Although his assertions about what constituted a truly ‘international’ event may have been motivated in part by his desire to bolster the ISCM’s claim to primacy, they also expressed one of his core moral principles.

The word he used for that principle was ‘friendship’. In what Fauser refers to as

Dent’s ‘people-centered vision of international exchange’, international institutions were ultimately constituted by interpersonal affiliations.55 As he wrote in 1924, the ISCM ‘can only be run on a basis of personal friendship’.56 Although the desire to challenge orthodoxy is more overtly expressed in Dent’s published writing, this more reparative mode was just as important to him. To shift attention to it is not to contradict Brett’s claim that Dent was made vulnerable by the homophobic society in which he lived. Rather, it is to insist, with

Sedgwick, that paranoia is not the only rational response to oppression, and that more generative, relational strategies are also possible.57 At the same time, it would be too simplistic to propose Dent’s sexuality as a single, totalising explanation for his friendship ideal. As the historian Daniel Gorman observes, British internationalists of the 1920s generally ‘favoured interpersonal relations that either existed outside the bounds of official international relations or permeated them to varying degrees’.58 Dent’s framing of these informal connections in terms of ‘friendship’ suggests the influence of a sentimental tradition that extolled interpersonal sympathy as a means of forging bonds across cultural difference.59 Although the ISCM largely repudiated nineteenth-century sentimentality in aesthetic terms (as exemplified by Dent’s distaste for Mahler), the broader aims of the organisation, at least as Dent construed them, were very much shaped by its legacy.

55 Annegret Fauser, ‘Edward J. Dent (1932–49)’, in The History of the IMS (1927–2017), ed. Dorothea Baumann and Dinko Fabris (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017), 45–49 (p. 45). 56 Dent to Clive Carey, 10 April 1924, The Papers of Francis Clive Savill (‘Clive’) Carey, King’s College Archive Centre, FCSC/1/1/9. 57 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, 127–128, 138. See also Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ (1981), in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 135–40. 58 Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, 9. 59 This sentimental impulse was no mere Victorian anachronism: as Christina Klein has demonstrated, it went on to inform discourses and practices of internationalism well into the Cold War; Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003).

There was also a more local context for Dent’s beliefs: friendship was perhaps the defining ideal of his Cambridge and Bloomsbury circles.60 Sceptical of general systems or theories, these artists and intellectuals tended to imagine friendship as the basis for a noncoercive, open-ended form of community that would promote, in Williams’s words, ‘the unobstructed free expression of the civilized individual’.61 They found inspiration and validation in their experiences of collegiate university life at Cambridge, and in the thought of turn-of-the-century figures including the moral philosopher G.E. Moore and the homophile writer Edward Carpenter.62 From these foundations, Dent’s generation developed a shared ideal of interpersonal connection and sympathy, one perhaps most familiar today from the writing of E.M. Forster, an old friend of Dent from King’s College, Cambridge. In

1939, Forster famously declared: ‘if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’.63 This credo underpinned what Lauren M.E. Goodlad has termed Forster’s ‘queer internationalism’: a stance that was rooted, she argues, not so much in an ethics of justice, ‘allegedly universal, centering on the formulation of abstract rights and principles’, but in an ethics of care, ‘a contextual ethics, situating morality in terms of concrete relationships’.64 Dent’s internationalism, likewise, privileged nurturing kinships with specific individuals over asserting abstract moral laws.

Travel was significant to this project. As he notes in ‘Looking Backward’, Dent pushed for the ISCM festival to become peripatetic from 1924.65 He was driven, in part, by his

60 Collins situates Dent’s commitment to friendship in related contexts, in ‘The Elision of Difference, Newness and Participation’, 119–20. 61 Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, 165. 62 W.C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Barbara Caine, ‘Bloomsbury Friendship and Its Victorian Antecedents’, Literature & History 17, no. 1 (2008), 48–61. As Brett highlighted, Dent travelled to Derbyshire to meet Carpenter in 1913 and 1915; Brett, ‘Musicology and Sexuality’, 182. 63 E.M. Forster, ‘What I Believe’ (1939), in Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1951), 77–85 (p. 78). 64 Lauren M.E. Goodlad, ‘Where Liberals Fear to Tread: E.M. Forster’s Queer Internationalism and the Ethics of Care’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39, no. 2 (2006), 307–36 (p. 310). The term ‘ethics of care’ was first coined by feminist psychologists in the 1980s; there have since been efforts to develop it as a strand of moral philosophy. See, for example, Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 65 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 16.

59 desires to escape the supposedly tyrannical local officials in Salzburg, and to pull the festival from the control of German-speaking musicians.66 But he also wanted to preserve an openness and fluidity of caring social relations that might have been foreclosed by the rigidity of a fixed location and routine. We might draw a parallel here with Lloyd Whitesell’s account of how Benjamin Britten uses ‘limbo’ situations in operas such as Billy Budd (1951), whose libretto was co-written by Forster, to ‘permit a disconnection from social precedents’, such that ‘geographic isolation creates the crucible-like conditions of a contained culture in which social bonds can be reforged’.67 Given how festivals have been characterised by anthropologists in terms of a liminal ‘time out of time’, we can see why such an event – and especially a peripatetic one – suggested analogous possibilities for reframing ethical perspectives and social relations, allowing musicians to discover elective affinities, unconstrained by the social positions that defined them at home.68

In ‘Looking Backward’, Dent’s ideal of international sociability emerges most clearly in an emphasis on the informal, unpretentious character of the early festivals. In his description of the Rout rehearsal, the last-minute substitution of piano for harp seems a key detail, emblematic of what is described earlier in the same paragraph as the festival’s

‘delightful atmosphere of friendliness and informality’, in which ‘evening dress, even for performers, was considered quite bad form’.69 The ‘tin gods’ Dent mocks are ridiculous because they try to cling onto the very social hierarchies to which the festival provides an alternative. Their intransigence is, inevitably, epitomised by a German: Dent recalls an encounter at the Venice festival in 1925 in which he pretends not to know the identity of the

66 As Dent wrote to a friend in 1924: ‘it is very desirable to take the festival away from the atmosphere of the German and Austrian set [...] as a body the German and Austrian critics easily get into the way of thinking that the whole festival exists for them, as one meets exactly the same crowd at Salzburg, at Prague, at Donaueschingen and at Frankfurt or wherever the annual Tonkünstler fest happens to be’; Dent to Lawrence Haward, 28 August 1924, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/4/111/10/7. 67 Lloyd Whitesell, ‘Britten’s Dubious Trysts’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (2003), 637–94 (pp. 653, 657). 68 Alessandro Falassi, ed., Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). Perhaps inspired by his experiences of ISCM gatherings in the 1930s, Britten infused a related ideal of festival community into the Aldeburgh Festival (founded in 1948). See Danielle Ward-Griffin, ‘Theme Park Britten: Staging the English Village at the Aldeburgh Festival’, Cambridge Opera Journal 27, no. 1 (2015), 63–95 (esp. pp. 78–82). 69 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 8.

60 music critic Leopold Schmidt, ‘a pompous little man with a colossal idea of his own importance’. Enraged by the seating arrangements at one of the concerts, Schmidt declares that he had ‘never been so insulted in my life’. His undignified cry of outrage – ‘I am Leopold

Schmidt!!’ – encapsulates the absurdity of attempting to impose a certain kind of status in this social environment, as Dent imagined it.70

Given the underlying message about the freedom of social relations valued in the

ISCM setting, it is, of course, ironic that Dent’s ridicule of Schmidt relies on stereotyping generalisations about the self-importance of German music critics. This is just one way in which his ethos of forging affinities with others as individuals only went so far. As noted in the Introduction, the ISCM embodied a historical vision of internationalism that was deeply

Eurocentric.71 Even within the largely upper-middle-class sphere of Western art music, it represented a small (though influential) faction. For Dent, part of the appeal of musical modernism was that it was removed from the commercialised concert culture indulged in uncritically by bourgeois audiences.72 With intimate music-making as the ideal, as in the

Rout rehearsal, there was little motivation to broaden the ISCM’s scope towards a greater integration of the public at large. Indeed, Dent positively relished seclusion: in his opening address at the 1928 festival in Siena, he described how the city had been selected ‘because its location – far from heavy traffic – and its aristocratic character would guarantee the intimacy and exclusivity on which the ISCM depended’.73

This statement might lead some to think that Dent’s rhetoric of friendship was really just a pretext for consolidating a nepotistic coterie of ‘exclusive internationalists’, to borrow

70 Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 17. 71 As Leela Gandhi has shown, the queer, Bloomsbury-esque friendship ideal inspired a distinctive tradition of metropolitan anti-imperialism in Britain. Dent’s own politics were never so radical, though, and his horizon of awareness does not really seem to have stretched to colonised parts of the world. See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006). 72 On Dent’s suspicion of canonical nineteenth-century repertoire, see Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 245–48. 73 ‘In seiner Eröffnungsansprache betonte Professor Dent ausdrücklich, man habe Siena deshalb zum internationalen Festort gewählt, weil seine Lage abseits vom großen Verkehr, sein aristokratisches Gepräge jene Intimität und Exklusivität garantieren würde, auf welche es der IGNM ankäme’; Heinrich Strobel, ‘Die Internationale in Siena’, Melos 7, no. 10 (October 1928), 494–97 (p. 495). Strobel found disappointing evidence in Dent’s words for ‘the growing isolation of the ISCM’ (‘die zunehmende Isolierung der I.G.N.M.’, p. 495).

Tamara Levitz’s phrase.74 It would certainly seem fair to say that, for Dent, the interpersonal possibilities of care – predicated on a degree of individual personality that the suburban middle classes seemed to lack – were not open to all members of society.75 Lauding what he called the ‘élite of artistic understanding’, among whom ‘cultivated amateurs’ were central,

Dent argued in 1933: ‘It is only amongst this élite that international exchanges in music can be promoted for purely artistic motives.’76 Such a sentiment may seem to sit awkwardly with his Fabian politics and his commitment in other projects, especially in what became English

National Opera, to a much broader idea of community.77 But as Collins argues, Dent’s adherence to modernist conceptions of autonomy and newness, on the one hand, and to international cooperation and egalitarian access to art, on the other, were not necessarily contradictory, but derived from an overarching aspiration for ‘autonomy from the consumer market’: a vision of aesthetic self-sufficiency that ‘supported practices of social engagement, contrary to the usual association between autonomy and withdrawal or non-participation’.78

The extent to which all those forms of social engagement were productive politically is, of course, another question. A note of caution is sounded by Williams’s characterisation of the

Bloomsbury Group’s ‘social conscience’ as ‘the specific association of what are really quite unchanged class feelings – a persistent sense of a quite clear line between an upper and a

74 Levitz, ‘The Musicological Elite’, 12–18. Such a critique would still need to reckon with both what many early twentieth-century musical modernists described as their neglect by mainstream musical institutions, and the marginalisation experienced by Dent and other queer internationalists in his Cambridge milieu on account of their sexuality. Another important example of such a figure would be the political scientist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, also based at King’s College, Cambridge, who campaigned during the First World War for the formation of a ‘League of Nations’ (a term he is often credited with coining). See E.M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1934). 75 Compare the critique of English modernist writers in John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 76 Dent, ‘International Exchange in Music’, in Atti del primo congresso internazionale di musica, Firenze, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1933 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1935), 226–33 (p. 230). Dent expressed the anti-middle-class sentiment implicit here more vigorously in an earlier article on Busoni: ‘The bourgeois […] cannot enter into the mind of a foreigner, since neither he nor the foreigner of the corresponding class has a conception of beauty’; Dent, ‘The Italian Busoni’, trans. Richard Capell, Monthly Musical Record 61, no. 729 (September 1931), 257–60 (p. 258). 77 Susie Gilbert, Opera for Everybody: The Story of English National Opera (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 29–119. 78 Collins, ‘The Elision of Difference, Newness and Participation’, 122.

62 lower class – with very strong and effective feelings of sympathy with the lower class as victims’.79

Dent’s friendship ideal harboured prejudices relating not just to class but also to gender. Because the ISCM festival served for him as a kind of cosmopolitan Cambridge, the relatively marginal role of women at the event seemed unremarkable, and perhaps even desirable. As Goodlad notes, Forster’s yearning to escape existing social institutions sometimes brought forth a misogynistic strain, whereby he depicted women as representatives or even enforcers of a stifling domestic order.80 Similar attitudes can be detected in what Fauser refers to as Dent’s ‘aversion […] for “wives” of all kinds’.81 Women were not barred from contributing to the ISCM, and Dent admired specific individuals, such as Boulanger, who served on the international jury in 1932, 1934 and 1951.82 But Boulanger was the only woman to be elected as a juror until 1979. The marginalisation of women even extended to the accommodation arrangements at the 1931 festival in Oxford (‘the ideal place for concentration in monastic seclusion’, as one visiting critic put it).83 Male attendees were encouraged to book rooms at New College, a short walk from the concert venues; but women and married couples were put up in Somerville College, half a mile from the city centre, and so quite literally at the festival’s periphery.84

The reparative side of Dent’s new-music internationalism was grounded in the homosocial connections among a geographically dispersed elite. The form of international sociability he envisaged would transcend geopolitics, nationalist prejudices and the market economy. But it was also constantly threatened by these forces, so needed to be shielded through ironic critique. In this sense, paranoia and repair were two sides of the same coin:

79 Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, 155. 80 Goodlad, ‘Where Liberals Fear to Tread’, 311–317. 81 Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 250 n. 72. This observation is based on comments made by Philip Radcliffe, communicated to Fauser by Byron Adams. 82 On Dent’s admiration for Boulanger, see Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 246 n. 49, 250 n. 72. 83 ‘idealer Platz für Konzentration in mönchischer Abgeschiedenheit’; Erich Steinhard, ‘Das internationale Musikfest in Oxford und London’, Der Auftakt 11, nos. 8–9 (1931), 212–16 (p. 212). 84 The International Society for Contemporary Music: The Ninth Annual Festival will be held in Oxford, England, July 21–28, 1931 [Festival Prospectus] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1931]), 2, Ernst Henschel Collection, British Library, Box 20.

63 one that demonstrates, like the works of Forster and Britten, that cold Stravinskian detachment or pessimistic Adornian angst were not the inevitable endpoints of modernist alienation. However, there was always a slightly unreal quality to Dent’s sentimental vision of unfettered personal relationships, as the turmoil of the 1930s and the emergent Cold War standoff at mid-century would show. Without the buffers of privilege enjoyed at Cambridge

– tacitly underpinned by national and imperial power – fleeting moments such as the Rout rehearsal, when war and politics could seem to have been ‘forgotten’, would become increasingly difficult to generate. Optimism would be succeeded by nostalgia.

Postwar

Paranoid rebellions and reparative friendships both had connotations of youth. The conflict presupposed by Dent’s oppositional stance, between a complacent establishment and those it marginalises, was intrinsically inter-generational. In 1938, he imagined the ISCM’s role in this struggle renewing itself in perpetuity: ‘The work of our society will never be finished.

There will always be a younger generation coming on whose music is looked at with suspicion by the orthodox.’85 Challenging ‘the orthodox’ meant taking the side of youth, both in a literal sense of championing young people, and a more figurative one of upholding broadly progressive or nonconformist attitudes (without, however, advancing any radical political critique). Contemporary music was, almost by definition, strongly tied to youthfulness in both these respects. The association is readily apparent in Rout, a work in which Bliss, then in his late twenties, drew on the example of Stravinsky – and especially

Petrushka – to create an irreverent, carnivalesque atmosphere that implicitly rebuked the

85 Dent, ‘Modern Music’s Vitality in a War-Vexed World’, The Daily Telegraph (10 June 1938), 14. This statement echoes an official ISCM pamphlet from 1928: ‘Its [the ISCM’s] work can never be finished. Music that was regarded as startling in 1922 may already be accepted now as normal. The hostility to what is new remains unchanged, and the pioneers will always have need of the support and encouragement which the International Society sets out to provide’; International Society for Contemporary Music [1928], 5, Berg Nachlass, Musiksammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, F21.Berg.450/1.

Romanticism of previous generations. When Rout was staged as a ballet in 1927, the scenario involved ‘the “revolt” of modern youth against the conventions of an older generation’.86

Like modernism, internationalism was – and still is – commonly imagined as driven by or directed at the young.87 This political mode was, after all, understood to have been facilitated by the technological and social developments of modernity, and was strongly oriented towards the future – partly because of its visionary, even utopian sensibility, and partly because it lacked the myths of shared ancestry or history that underpin many nationalisms. New-music internationalism was, then, a doubly youthful cause. In his statement from 1938, Dent seems almost to relish the enduring friction between it and the established order. Yet the knowingly ironic tone of ‘Looking Backward’ also implies an alternative perspective: one way of reading the article would be as a reminder of what the

‘bad old days’ were like, when a previous generation faced ignorance and hostility, but also felt the excitement of breaking new ground. If the situation had changed to the extent that such a reminder was necessary, though, what role did that leave for the ISCM?

Whereas the paranoid side of Dent’s new-music internationalism entailed inter- generational conflict, the reparative one arose from a feeling of inter-generational responsibility. He was a committed teacher and took great fulfilment from acting in a fatherly capacity, especially towards young men.88 ‘The most enjoyable thing’, he wrote from the 1934 ISCM gathering in Florence, ‘is the number of young musicians from different

86 The Dancing Times (February 1928), 673, quoted in Kathrine Sorley Walker, ‘The Festival and the Abbey: Ninette de Valois’ Early Choreography, 1925–1934, Part One’, Dance Chronicle 7, no. 4 (1984– 5), 379–412 (p. 392). 87 As Patricia Clavin puts it: ‘Whether writing in 1919 or 1939, the battle for internationalism adopted a self-conscious generational language’; Clavin, ‘Conceptualising Internationalism Between the World Wars’, 8. The association between internationalism and young people was strengthened in the 1920s by a mushrooming of international student organisations, which helped facilitate endeavours such as study abroad schemes. See Daniel Laqua, ‘Activism in the “Students’ League of Nations”: International Student Politics and the Confédération Internationale des Étudiants, 1919–1939’, English Historical Review 132, no. 556 (2017), 605–37. The anthropologist Liisa Malkki also observes the tendency for internationalism to be ‘so easily imagined as a specifically youthful phenomenon’; Liisa Malkki, ‘Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 3, no. 1 (1994), 41–68 (p. 49). 88 Dent’s pedagogy is preserved in publications such as his Notes on Fugue for Beginners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958 [1941]). He was also heavily involved in Music and the Community: The Cambridgeshire Report on the Teaching of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933).

65 countries, many of them here for the first time in their lives, like Benjamin Britten. They make friends with each other as far as languages permit, and all seem very happy together.’89

Dent’s nurturing side can be linked to his sexuality just as plausibly as his ‘counter- discourse’: living in a homophobic society, he was excluded from marriage and the nuclear family, the traditional social structures of begetting and inheritance; forging cross- generational friendships provided an alternative script for making a life meaningful beyond its temporal boundaries.90 In any case, it is clear that a sense of duty to support the next generation was fundamental to his ethics of care, and helped animate his enthusiasm for the

ISCM, which he unwaveringly argued had an especial responsibility to support young musicians.91

In Europe in the 1920s, affirmations of youth – and young men in particular – were inevitably coloured by the postwar context. The First World War had shaken Dent’s faith in the value of the arts: ‘I would gladly destroy all the museums in the world’, he wrote to a friend, ‘if that would stop the destruction of young life.’92 As a pacifist, he saw the conflict as an inter-generational betrayal, for which there was a responsibility to atone. The almost ritualistic invocations of the Rout rehearsal had a sombre subtext in this respect. Bliss had served in the infantry and was injured at the Somme in 1916; his brother Kennard, also a talented musician, was killed at the same battle. Dent had been a mentor to both brothers at

Cambridge. Shortly before his death, Kennard Bliss has written to Dent about what he described sceptically as ‘your chimerical scheme for refounding decent relations with

Germany by getting Germans & Belgians to play at the same desk in the orchestra’.93 When

89 Dent to Herbert Thomson, 4 April 1934, in From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters 1900– 1945, ed. Lewis Foreman (London: B.T. Batsford, 1987), 173. 90 This would suggest further parallels with themes explored by Forster in his novels. See Robert K. Martin, ‘“It Must Have Been the Umbrella”: Forster’s Queer Begetting’, in Queer Forster, ed. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 255–73. 91 In 1937, for example, Dent complained: ‘the older men, the original founders of the Society in Salzburg [...] take little notice of the much younger ones. [...] But it is precisely all these much younger ones, in all countries, whom we must help’ (‘die älteren Herren, die ursp[r]ünglich[en] Gründer der Gesellschaft in Salzburg [...] kümmern sich wenig um die ganz Jungen. [...] Aber es sind gerade alle diese ganz Jungen, in allen Ländern, denen wir helfen müssen’); Dent to Paul Sacher, 2 June 1937, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. 92 Dent to Clive Carey, quoted in Hugh Carey, Duet for Two Voices, 77. 93 Kennard Bliss to Dent, quoted in Arrandale, ‘Edward Dent’s War’, 11.

Dent arrived in Salzburg in 1922, he finally witnessed something akin to the realisation of this idea, under the baton of Kennard’s older brother; the other musicians included

Hindemith, who had also fought on the Western Front, but for the German army. These young men were the survivors of a generation who had suffered in unprecedented ways; the ghosts of the less fortunate were never far away.94 It was in these conditions of hauntedness that youth became the third term binding together new music and internationalism with enduring affective force.

Post-postwar

Within just a few years, however, that trinity – contemporary, international, young – began to show signs of strain. Dent avoided addressing this issue in ‘Looking Backward’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its additive structure, the text’s ending is awkwardly abrupt: it simply cuts off after one last episode from the 1925 festival in Venice, in which Arturo Toscanini serves (despite his later reputation as an anti-fascist) as yet another disdainful representative of the musical establishment to be resisted.95 Dent’s stream of anecdotes dries up at just the moment when the optimism and excitement surrounding the ISCM in the immediate postwar period were coming under pressure from a ‘post-postwar’ sense of disillusionment.96

As the organisation became more established, the discourse around it shifted to a tone of scepticism and even crisis. Its annual event, initially so innovative and exciting, was by the mid-1920s an accepted feature of the European festival calendar. Although Dent depicted the organisation as being at odds with officials in Salzburg, it went on to secure support from

94 Arthur Bliss suffered from recurring war nightmares during the 1920s. These only eased, he claimed, after composing his choral symphony Morning Heroes (1930), dedicated to ‘the Memory of my brother Francis Kennard Bliss and all other Comrades killed in battle’. See Andrew Burn, ‘“Now, Trumpeter for Thy Close”: The Symphony “Morning Heroes”: Bliss’s Requiem for His Brother’, The Musical Times 126, no. 1713 (1985), 666–68. 95 ‘After the concert was ended Toscanini came in to my box to say good-bye to Madame Busoni. “Now that the festival is over we must disinfect the theatre.” “Time you did, Maestro, and all the other Italian theatres too. The boxes are always full of fleas”’; Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 22. 96 The idea of a ‘post-postwar’ epoch was in the air at the time. As Tyrus Miller notes, in his autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), Wyndham Lewis divided recent history into ‘three historical “segments” – the War, the Post-War, and the post-Post-War’ (with the last of these beginning in 1926); Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), 27.

67 various national and municipal authorities, eager for the cachet of hosting an international event (see Chapter Three). The 1927 instalment in Frankfurt, for example, was organised in conjunction with the large-scale exhibition Musik im Leben der Völker (‘Music in the Life of the Peoples’), an event that received substantial backing from the local council.97 Festival attendees benefited from generous hospitality, which culminated in a lavish dinner for over four hundred guests hosted in the medieval city hall by the Mayor of Frankfurt.98

When Adorno titled his review of the 1927 festival ‘Die stabilisierte Musik’ (‘Stabilised

Music’), the taste of the ‘international’-themed bombe glacée served at this dinner was, perhaps, still fresh in his memory:

When the International Society for Contemporary Music was founded, it had the character of a secession […] But Europe is at peace [now], and the secession went the way of all secessions within the existing order: it became established, adopted the requirements of the existing society and was, in turn, adopted by it.99

For Adorno, the ISCM festival no longer represented an anti-hegemonic insurgency, but ‘an event which wants of its own accord to make a pact with all that already exists and cannot escape the compulsion to make pacts’ – a claim that anticipates by nearly thirty years the diagnosis of ‘symptoms of false satisfaction’ in his influential essay on ‘The Ageing of the

New Music’.100 From the perspective of twentieth-century music’s most notoriously paranoid observer, Dent’s positioning of the ISCM in terms of an oppositional ‘counter-discourse’ was delusional.

Adorno was hardly the only critic otherwise sympathetic to musical modernism to question whether the ISCM was still necessary. In 1925, The New York Times reported that

97 On the exhibition, see Laqua, ‘Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe’, 211–14. 98 An invitation, menu and seating plan for this dinner are held in the Henschel Collection, British Library, Box 16. 99 ‘Als die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik gegründet wurde, hatte sie den Charak[t]er der Sezession […] Aber Europa hat Ruhe, und die Sezession ging den Weg aller Sezessionen im Raum der bestehenden Ordnung, sie verfestigte sich, rezipierte die Bedürfnisse der bestehenden Gesellschaft und wurde zum Lohn von ihr rezipiert’; Adorno, ‘Die stabilisierte Musik: Zum fünften Fest der I.G.N.M. in Frankfurt am Main’ (1927), in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19: Musikalische Schriften VI, ed. Rolf Tiedermann and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 100–12 (pp. 100–101). 100 ‘eine Veranstaltung, die von sich aus mit allem Bestehenden paktieren will und dem Zwang zu paktieren nicht ausweichen kann’; Adorno, ‘Die stabilisierte Musik’, 112; idem, ‘The Aging of the New Music’, 181. Adorno himself refers back to ‘Die stabilisierte Musik’ in the second paragraph of ‘The Ageing of the New Music’ (p. 181).

68 within just three years, the organisation’s mission had become ‘a Don Quixotean battle against windmills. Schönberg, Stravinsky, Bartók and all the others have since been accepted

– although with some reluctance from certain quarters – not as revolutionaries but as leaders of the world’s music.’101 In the same year, the prominent German critic Paul Bekker made a similar claim to justify his refusal to collaborate with specialist new-music societies:

I was and am of the opinion that today we no longer need such societies, and that the time when they were able to accomplish beneficial work is over. […] We must comprehend that the situation in 1925 is different to those of 1920 and 1915 […] the fight for the “new music” has in fact been played out. Played out in the sense that the attempt to suppress it by force has ultimately failed. It has seized its place; it is there.102

As Haefeli points out, Bekker’s portrayal of musical modernism may have applied in Berlin; but it did not necessarily hold true in more ‘peripheral’ settings, where the ISCM continued to be valued highly for the connections and opportunities it afforded.103 Nevertheless, the growing sense that modernist music had ‘seized its place’ compromised Dent’s underdog narrative, and cast doubt on the ISCM’s role going forward.

1925 also marked a crucial transition in economic and political affairs in Western

Europe. The shift was facilitated – and symbolised – by the Locarno Treaties, which signalled a new normalisation of relations between the Weimar Republic and the Allied powers, as confirmed by Germany’s entry into the League of Nations in 1926.104 The summer-long music exhibition in Frankfurt in 1927 served as a platform for celebrating

Franco-German rapprochement and the re-acceptance of Germany into the international

101 Paul Beckert, quoted in ‘Resume of the Prague Music Festival; Janacek’s Opera, “Das Kluge Fuchslein”’, The New York Times (14 June 1925), X5. The basic argument here was repeated many times. For example: ‘The primary purpose of the I.S.C.M. was to give “new music” a place in the world. This object has been attained. If it is impossible to find a new and worthy reason for its continued existence, its activities should cease’; Hans Gutman, ‘The Festivals as Music Barometers’, Modern Music 8, no. 1 (November–December 1930), 27–32 (p. 29). 102 ‘ich war und bin der Meinung, dass wir solcher Gesellschaften heute nicht mehr bedürfen und dass die Zeit, in der sie positive Arbeit zu leisten hatten, vorbei ist. […] Wir müssen begreifen, daß die Situation von 1925 eine andere ist, als die von 1920 und 1915 […] der Kampf um die “neue Musik” eigentlich ausgekämpft ist. Ausgekämpft in dem Sinne, als das Bemühen, sie gewaltsam niederzuhalten, endgültig mißlungen ist. Sie hat sich ihren Platz erobert, sie ist da’; Paul Bekker, ‘Evolution oder Restauration?’, Der Auftakt 5, nos. 5–6 (1925), 128–32 (pp. 128–129). 103 Haefeli, IGNM, 113–14. 104 Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 387–456.

69 community.105 This backdrop informed how the ISCM festival was understood as well.

Adorno, for one, drew a link between the event’s loss of radicalism and the emergence of a new European order: ‘who would expect much revolution’, he asked, ‘from a musical

Locarno?’106

For the ISCM’s more enthusiastic supporters, who saw the League as a model for their own efforts, the achievement of a more peaceful order in Europe was something to celebrate. But the changing political atmosphere still raised difficult questions. Back in 1923, it had been possible to praise the staging of an international festival featuring music from sixteen different countries as ‘in music-cultural and music-political terms, one of the most significant events for many years’.107 This impression of self-evident significance was hard to sustain, not least because Europe’s restored stability made it much easier for new music to circulate internationally. After the 1931 ISCM festival, the Parisian critic Henry Prunières remarked:

The aim of the Society is necessarily changing. At the beginning, it was a question of gathering each year to take the pulse of music and diagnose its state. Now the various peoples know what kind of music is being produced by each of the others. The barriers erected by the war have collapsed. Hindemith triumphs in Paris, like Ravel or Milhaud in Berlin.108

For Prunières – who gives little sign here that by 1931 that the fragile Locarno order was already beginning to crumble – the main purpose of the ISCM was now ‘to bring out new talents’: in other words, its role even more than before was to support the young.109 Others would resist this change of emphasis.110 Such disagreements spoke to a broader problem:

105 Laqua, ‘Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe’, 211–212. 106 ‘wer wird schon von einem musikalischen Locarno viel Revolution erwarten?’; Adorno, ‘Die stabilisierte Musik’, 101. 107 ‘musikkulturell und musikpolitisch eines der grössten Ereignisse seit vielen Jahren’; Erich Steinhard, ‘Das Salzburger Musikfest’, Der Auftakt 3 (1923), 155, quoted in Haefeli, IGNM, 70. 108 ‘L’objet de la Société change par la force des choses. À l’origine, il s’agissait de se réunir chaque année pour tâter le pouls de la musique et diagnostiquer son état. Maintenant les divers peuples savent quel genre de musique s’élabore chez chacun d’eux. Les barriers dressées par la guerre se sont écroulées. Hindemith triomphe à Paris, comme Ravel ou Milhaud à Berlin’; Henry Prunières, ‘Le Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine à Oxford et à Londres’, La Revue Musicale 12, no. 119 (October 1931), 254–60 (p. 254). 109 ‘Maintenant les festivals […] font apparaître des talents nouveaux’; Prunières, ‘Le Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine à Oxford et à Londres’, 254. 110 In his memoirs, Alfredo Casella recalled his efforts in 1934 to influence the jury ‘to return, at least this time, to the plan of the first programs, which had included the names of great personalities. This would, of course, reduce the recognition given young, unknown, and often inferior composers’;

70 once the organisation’s work was no longer so obviously pioneering and contacts between musicians had been re-established, what objectives should drive new-music internationalism?

The development of a more sceptical attitude to the ISCM in the mid-1920s complicates the straightforward contrast sometimes drawn between the ‘optimistic’ 1920s and the ‘pessimistic’ 1930s. It is probably no coincidence that, just as cultural and political life became ‘stabilised’ around 1925, a nostalgic discourse about the ISCM’s early festivals began to emerge.111 As ‘Looking Backward’ demonstrates, this fixation with the early 1920s retained its power over two decades later. By breaking off his account in 1925, Dent created the illusion of preserving the early festivals in a kind of time capsule. But his nostalgia for the immediate post-First World War period indicates the double-bind involved in both the

ISCM’s advocacy of contemporary music and its internationalism: the organisation’s legitimacy and relevance were staked on the continuation of the very conditions – geopolitical tensions and hostile attitudes towards contemporary music – which, in theory, it sought to resist.112 In the absence of a more formal and precise agenda, it was not clear what success would look like for the ISCM: if international relations and the position of contemporary music were perceived to improve, as in the later 1920s, then who needed its festivals? And if things got worse, as they would in the 1930s, then had it failed? Given how

Dent’s identity was entangled with the ISCM, these post-postwar quandaries were difficult for him to countenance. Basking in the memory of a golden era offered an escape from the cruel inevitability of growing old.

Alfredo Casella, Music in My Time: The Memoirs of Alfredo Casella, trans. Spencer Norton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955 [1941]), 200. 111 From 1924–5 onwards, as Haefeli shows, critics repeatedly compared the ISCM’s most recent events unfavourably to an idealised, rose-tinted image of the artistic standards and music-historical import of its first festivals; Haefeli, IGNM, 109–110, 121–122. Collins also observes ‘the nostalgic adherence to a narrative of harmonious international cooperation in the organization’s later years – a narrative that perhaps best described the potential of the ideals of the ISCM, rather than its actuality’; Collins, ‘What Was Contemporary Music?’, 75. 112 Lisa Jakelski makes a related argument about the Warsaw Autumn Festival: the event’s relevance during the Cold War depended on the perception of fundamental geopolitical and aesthetic divides, since one of its core functions was to enable music and musicians to move across these otherwise imposing boundaries. She concludes: ‘borders not only constrain; they can also be enabling’; Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 138.

Figure 3: Edmond Xavier Kapp, Professor E.J. Dent (1941). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. By courtesy of Chris Beetles Gallery on behalf of the Kapp Estate.

For the ISCM, the emotional weight attached to the youthful achievements of the early 1920s was a blessing and a curse. Nostalgia provided an abiding source of sustenance and legitimacy through challenges to come. But in the end, the power of youth lies in its transience. Dent’s efforts to keep pace with changing generations could be turned against him. By the late 1930s, he had become one of those whom Ernest Newman (no spring chicken himself) would describe snidely as the ISCM’s ‘elderly gentlemen’:

still not only running round and shouting ‘rah! Rah!’ with the boys but trying to persuade himself and us that he is one of the boys and to hell with Time, and obviously suffering more and more, as the years go on, from the infirmities of reversionary adolescence[.]113

When he wrote ‘Looking Backward’ in the late 1940s, Dent was growing deaf, and his daily life was blighted by ill health (Figure 3). In a letter from the 1948 festival in Amsterdam, he admitted withdrawing from the festival community he had once found so enriching: ‘I find

113 Ernest Newman, ‘Reflections after the Feast – I: What is “Contemporary Music”?’, The Sunday Times (3 July 1938), 7.

72 life very exhausting. I shirk all the receptions & entertainments, as far as I can, and keep to myself as much as possible. […] Thank goodness I am no longer president.’114 These personal sufferings suggest a melancholy undertone to the witty vignettes of ‘Looking Backward’: the retired professor remembers his energy and conviction as a younger man. At mid-century,

Dent was surely aware that, as we will see in the Epilogue, an emerging generation of modernist and avant-garde iconoclasts were themselves beginning to rebel against the old men in the ISCM. Over the course of the twentieth century, new-music internationalism became deeply embedded into the culture of musical modernism, but it never quite recaptured the thrill of being genuinely new.

114 Dent to Lawrence Haward, 9 June 1948, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/4/111/10/10.

Chapter Two

Music and the New: The Iron Foundry and Mimetic Mechanicity

The previous chapter suggested that new music and internationalism were readily paired because they shared connotations of youth. Underlying this chain of association was the presumption that both phenomena were closely connected with progress and modernity.

‘From the turn of the twentieth century’, observes the historian Glenda Sluga,

‘internationalism captured imaginations as “new” because its characteristics were the product of the social and political modernity of the times’.1 Advocates of internationalism often depicted their cause as the inevitable future outcome of a process of social evolution.

Modernity, they argued, had enabled the formation of larger and larger human collectives: just as the national community had become a lived reality, an international community would surely emerge.2 Modern technologies, such as the telegraph and the aeroplane, were understood to be the primary drivers of this process.3 Henry Ford, the leading personality of industrial innovation in the early twentieth century, predicted in 1928 that the development of machinery would ultimately engender a global polity: the United States of the World.4 Like internationalism, new music was unmistakably ‘modern’; almost by definition, it broke radically with past traditions. But the terms of its relationship with modernity were more disputed. The 1920s and 30s saw widespread discussions about how new music related to its social and political environment, and, in particular, to the modes of production and reproduction that defined the so-called ‘machine age’.5

1 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 2. 2 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 1–7, 11–18. 3 Waqar Zaidi, ‘Liberal Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology in Interwar Britain and the United States’, in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 17–43. 4 Henry Ford, ‘Machinery – The New Messiah’, The Forum 79 (March 1928), 363–64, cited in Frank Mehring, ‘Welcome to the Machine! The Representation of Technology in Zeitopern’, Cambridge Opera Journal 11, no. 2 (1999), 159–78 (p. 170). 5 See, for example, Oja, Making Music Modern, 59–94.

The ISCM often instigated debates along these lines. For example, on 10 July 1931, when the BBC was seeking to publicise the forthcoming ISCM festival in Oxford and London

(discussed in Chapter Three), the Radio Times featured as its lead article an apologia for musical modernism. Its author, Robin Hey, declared: ‘The symbol of the age is the machine.

The hardness of steel and the efficiency of the dynamo give the prevailing tone and tempo to our mental life.’ For Hey, contemporary music expressed this Zeitgeist of ‘machines, mass production, and standardized perfection’. The meaning of new music, he argued further, was understood intuitively by the general public: when ‘the musical layman [...] hears Mossoloff’s

Music of the Machines or Honegger’s Rugby, he is perhaps more likely to grasp its significance as an expression of contemporary life than is the critic who, by his training, necessarily hears it primarily as music conditioned by rules’.6 A fortnight later, when the

ISCM festival was underway, the Radio Times led with a riposte from the critic W.R.

Anderson. He asserted that not ‘one per cent.’ of the British public displayed ‘enthusiasm for

[musical] extremism’. Faced with what he saw as Hey’s faddish materialism, Anderson invoked the supposedly timeless ideals of truth and beauty: music, he believed, has a ‘greater function’ than merely mirroring contemporary life. Thus, for Anderson: ‘Your Mossolovs have their part to play in rounding off the picture, just as the daily paper does; but we cannot think them the master-delineators of truth.’7

For the twenty-first-century musicologist, what is perhaps most striking about this exchange is not the pro- and anti-modernist arguments, which were conventional in themselves, but the repeated references to the Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov as an emblematic personality of contemporary music. Today, Mosolov is an obscure figure, certainly compared to the other composers named in the Radio Times articles: Hindemith,

Honegger, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But in 1931, Hey and Anderson could casually mention Mosolov in this esteemed company, on the front page of a magazine whose weekly

6 Robin Hey, ‘Music That Expresses Contemporary Life’, Radio Times 32, no. 406 (10 July 1931), 59. 7 W.R. Anderson, ‘Modern Music Battle: Anderson v. Hey’, Radio Times 32, no. 408 (24 July 1931), 167, 190.

75 circulation in that year averaged over 1.5 million.8 Mosolov, it seems, was a far more familiar name to the public of the 1930s than we might imagine.

He owed this status to the ISCM. Mosolov’s international reputation in the 1930s – and now, to the extent that it has endured – rested almost exclusively on the renown of a single orchestral work, which only lasts around three-and-a-half minutes: Zavod: muzyka mashin (‘Factory: the music of machines’), usually known in the West as the Iron Foundry.

This piece belonged to a distinctive sub-genre of interwar musical modernism: works that used traditional orchestral instruments to depict the noisy technologies of production and transportation characteristic of early twentieth-century industrialism. Honegger’s Pacific 231

(1923), named after a high-speed locomotive, was the best-known of these compositions.9 As we will see, in the wake of its performance at the 1930 ISCM festival in Liège, the Iron

Foundry followed in the tracks, so to speak, of Pacific 231 and became hugely popular with concert audiences across Europe and beyond.

The existing literature on works such as the Iron Foundry and Pacific 231 has explained the appeal of machines to composers in search of post-Romantic modes of expression, highlighting the affinities with broader artistic movements such as Futurism and

New Objectivity. Scholars have also interrogated the political meanings of these works, as well as showing how composers’ efforts were shaped by the transnational and transmedial mobility of ideas and techniques associated with machine aesthetics.10 In this chapter, I focus

8 Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 2: The Golden Age of Wireless (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 261. Anderson, for instance, referred to ‘extremist music’ as a ‘convenient label – the Mossolov Machines, and most of the later Stravinsky and Schönberg and Co.’; Anderson, ‘Modern Music Battle’, 167. 9 Pacific 231 was performed at the 1924 ISCM festival in Prague. Other examples of machine-inspired works from this period include: Edgard Varèse, Amériques (1921, rev. 1927); George Antheil, Ballet Mécanique (1924); Vladimir Deshevov, Rails (1926); Sergei Prokofiev, Le Pas d’Acier (1926); Frederick Shepherd Converse, Flivver Ten Million (1927); Maurice Ravel, Boléro (1928); Dmitri Shostakovich, The Bolt (1931); and Carlos Chávez, H.P. (1932). 10 Notable studies include: Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988), 235–52; Erik Levi, ‘Futurist Influences Upon Early Twentieth-Century Music’, in International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 322–52; Deborah Mawer, ‘Musical Objects and Machines’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47–67; Oja, Making Music Modern, 59–94; Lesley-Anne Sayers and Simon Morrison, ‘Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier: How the Steel Was Tempered’, in Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin, ed. Neil Edmunds (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 81–104; Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008),

76 more squarely on matters of dissemination and reception, asking why this aesthetic appealed so powerfully to audiences and how it lent itself to international circulation. The Iron

Foundry’s astonishing success in the 1930s was the outcome of an explosively productive convergence of institutional structures, modes of listening and compositional idiom. By examining the interplay between these factors, I offer a reassessment of machine aesthetics in the interwar period, which serves to illuminate some of the foundational tensions of new- music internationalism.

That reassessment centres on the pleasure – and the confusion – interwar listeners experienced when they heard a symphony orchestra imitate the sounds of modern machines.

Mosolov’s quasi-programmatic gambit ostensibly established a straightforward stance towards modernity: ‘Music That Expresses Contemporary Life’, as the title of Hey’s article had it. Yet the meaning of the Iron Foundry proved contentious and surprisingly difficult to pin down. The orchestra ‘became’ a factory, but not one that actually produced material commodities; mimetic similitude bridged the difference between a musical ensemble and heavy machinery, but did not erase it. Mosolov’s composition bears out the philosopher

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim that ‘the logical matrix of the paradox is the very structure of mimesis’:

the logic of paradox is always a logic of semblance, articulated around the division between appearance and reality, presence and absence, the same and the other, or identity and difference. This is the division that grounds (and that constantly unsteadies) mimesis.11

For 1930s audiences, the Iron Foundry’s ‘logic of semblance’ generated interwoven layers of paradox. I unravel these by drawing on the example of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s synchronic account of the year 1926. Gumbrecht describes a transnational cultural environment structured by a series of ‘binary codes’. These ‘generate discourses which transform [...]

137–58; Hess, Representing the Good Neighbor, 50–80. For a more general overview of the machine ‘topic’ in early twentieth-century music, see Allison Wente, ‘Queue the Roll: Taylorized Labor Practices and Music of the Machine Age’, Music Theory Online 24, no. 4 (2018), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.18.24.4/mto.18.24.4.wente.html (accessed May 2020). 11 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis’, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 248– 66 (p. 260).

77 confusion into the – deparadoxifying – form of alternative options’ (such as ‘Authenticity vs.

Artificiality’ or ‘Individuality vs. Collectivity’); but their polarities could also collapse into one another, generating paradox anew (‘Authenticity = Artificiality’, ‘Individuality =

Collectivity’).12

Gumbrecht’s synchronic approach offers a persuasive model for seeking to understand the Iron Foundry through the senses and sensibilities of listeners in the 1930s, a move that extricates Mosolov from reductively grand narratives about noise in twentieth- century music and sound art.13 But above all, it provides an apt framework for investigating the core interpretative problem posed by mimetic mechanicity: to make sense of the ambiguous ways in which it set seemingly antithetical terms into relation. Charting the Iron

Foundry’s international reception in the 1930s, I propose that the work’s imitation of machines, its play of presence and absence, invoked four unstable binary codes. I move through these oppositions in a sequence of increasing complexity and scope – the ultra- modern and the primitive, the national and the international, artistic creation and mechanical reproduction, modernism and mass entertainment – working towards the larger paradox of the ephemeral newness of ‘new music’ in a period of spectacularly conspicuous social and technological change. This critical frame allows me to describe how, for a defined period, Mosolov’s modernist aesthetic met a particular kind of popular hunger for

‘international’ experiences, one that was inextricable from a fascination with mechanicity and its effects on the human body. In this way, I use the Iron Foundry to excavate the aesthetic and sensory dimensions of what we might call the ‘vernacular’ internationalism of the interwar middle classes: a mode of belonging to the modern world that was distinct from

12 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 434–35. Gumbrecht borrows the basic concept of ‘binary codes’ from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. 13 Robert P. Morgan, for example, describes Luigi Russolo, the Italian Futurist, as ‘initiat[ing] an important and enduring line in twentieth-century music, regardless of specific, much less acknowledged influence’ – a lineage of notated ‘noise’ in which he includes not only Honegger and Mosolov, but also Cage and Penderecki; Robert P. Morgan, ‘“A New Musical Reality”: Futurism, Modernism, and “The Art of Noises”’, Modernism/modernity 1, no. 3 (1994), 129–51 (p. 141).

– but also buttressed and intersected with – the elite-led internationalism of high-cultural institutions such as the ISCM.14

Networks and trajectories On first listen, the Iron Foundry might not seem an obvious candidate for popular success.

The work begins with an array of ostinato cells: a snaking chromatic figure in the clarinets and violas is set against groaning basses, tuba and contrabassoon and pounding tritone crotchets in the timpani. Further repeated motifs are gradually added, building a texture of increasing complexity, dissonance and clamour. This dense mesh of recurrent patterns provides the backdrop for two devices of orchestration often commented on in the 1930s.

The first is the blazing entry of the horns, which marks the climax of the opening section’s process of accumulation: entrusted with a relatively expansive quasi-modal theme, in contrast to the churning chromatic activity around them, they are instructed not only to play their unison line fortississimo, but also to stand and raise their bells in the air. The blasting of sirens is refracted into a cry of triumph – or, perhaps, something more ominously violent.

The other notable device comes at the return of the ostinato-based texture after a faster, more freely composed interlude: at this pivotal moment in the simple ternary structure, an actual sheet of steel is introduced into the percussion section. Its shaking adds to a pummelling tumult of timpani, cymbals, bass drum and tam-tam. The unusual ‘instrument’ appears to collapse the distinction between the subject matter announced in the work’s title and its musical representation. It is almost as if, through its frantic labouring, the orchestra itself has forged the steel.

The circulation of this ferocious music – its transformation into an unlikely hit – offers a distilled example of how the ISCM festival made new music ‘international’ by serving as a site of display and discovery; in this respect, it foregrounds not the ethos of the

14 ‘Vernacular’ is inspired by Miriam Hansen’s use of this term as one that ‘combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability’; Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999), 59–77 (p. 60). I return to Hansen’s account of early twentieth-century cinema below.

79 organisation’s new-music internationalism, but one dimension of its effects. The ISCM’s annual gathering showcased works and composers, often previously obscure, to an international audience including performers, critics, publishers and other new-music insiders. Before a note was played, the music on these programmes had accrued prestige, since it had been selected by the eminent figures on that year’s festival jury.15 The attention accompanying this seal of approval was especially valuable to composers from the

‘peripheries’, who otherwise faced an uphill struggle for recognition from the centre.

The centre-periphery dynamic was evident in the case of the Soviet Union. The ISCM was affiliated to Moscow’s Association of Contemporary Music (ASM, founded 1923), which represented the modernist camp in Soviet music. For ASM, the partnership was not so much about ‘keeping up’ with the West. In the 1920s, it was hardly necessary to leave the Soviet

Union to hear the kind of repertoire performed at ISCM festivals. Esteemed Western musicians, including Bartók and Casella, toured to Moscow and Leningrad, and contemporary works from abroad including Pacific 231 were regularly performed – lending credence to the notion that Mosolov’s factory was inspired, at least in part, by Honegger’s locomotive.16 But Soviet musicians found it difficult to attain permission to travel abroad, which hindered the dissemination of their work.17 The ISCM offered a valuable channel for making their music known internationally, even if they could rarely attend the festivals in person. From 1924 to 1931, scores by ASM-associated composers were regularly performed at ISCM festivals. This pathway into the West was further bolstered by an agreement between the Soviet State Publishing House and the Vienna-based publisher Universal

15 To have a composition selected for an ISCM festival was, in effect, to win a prize. For a Bourdieusian account of how cultural prizes served in the twentieth century as mechanisms for the exchange of various kinds of capital, see James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005). 16 For performances of Pacific 231, see the tables detailing the repertoire of the Leningrad Philharmonia, in Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 61–62, 85, 112–13. 17 This combination of cosmopolitan concert culture and travel restrictions is discussed further in Pauline Fairclough, ‘The Russian Revolution and Music’, Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 1 (2019), 157–64 (p. 161).

Edition (UE), through which the latter attained the rights to distribute new Soviet scores internationally.

The mutually beneficial connections between ASM, the ISCM, the Soviet State

Publishing House and UE formed a composite network of patronage and circulation that decisively shaped Mosolov’s career. With the support of Reinhold Glière and Nikolay

Myaskovsky, his composition teachers at the Moscow Conservatory, Mosolov became established in the mid-1920s as a rising talent in ASM circles. Two events in 1927 confirmed his status. In the summer, his First String Quartet was performed at the ISCM festival in

Frankfurt. Although by 1930 Mosolov’s quartet seems to have been largely forgotten by

Western critics – otherwise they might have realised that layered ostinato constructions were characteristic of his musical language beyond the Iron Foundry – the generally favourable reviews it received marked a significant milestone in his career.18 In December, his reputation at home was further underscored at the concert organised by ASM in Moscow to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution. This event –

‘undoubtedly the zenith of ASM’s concert activities’, according to one recent survey of Soviet music in the 1920s – offered a prestigious setting for the premiere of the four-part suite from his ballet Stal’ (‘Steel’), whose first movement was the Iron Foundry.19

In 1929, UE published the international edition of the Iron Foundry score – which did not explain that it was an excerpt from a ballet suite – and in the following year it began to be performed internationally as a standalone orchestral miniature. The work was first

18 Favourable reviews included: Edwin Evans, ‘Frankfort Festival’, The Musical Times 68, no. 1014 (August 1927), 733–35 (p. 733); Paul Stefan, ‘Ein Sommer der Musik’, Anbruch 9, no. 7 (August– September 1927), 269–72 (p. 271); Erich Steinhard, ‘Über das internationale Musikfest in Frankfurt: dazu sechs Parallelstellen aus der Kritik einer anderen Musikzeitschrift als Marginalien’, Der Auftakt 7, no. 9 (1927), 209–13 (p. 210). On layered ostinato cells in Mosolov’s music, see Larry Sitsky, ‘Aleksandr V. Mosolov: The Man of Steel’, in Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900– 1929 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 60–86 (pp. 64–76). 19 Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 185. The other movements of the suite have been lost. On this, and for a synopsis of the ballet, see Laurel E. Fay, ‘Alexander Mosolov, the Iron Foundry, from the Ballet Steel, Op. 19’, (2008), https://americansymphony.org/concert-notes/the-iron-foundry-from-the-ballet-steel-op19- 1928/ (accessed December 2020).

81 heard outside the Soviet Union in Berlin in March 1930.20 But what seems to have been the breakthrough moment came six months later, at the ISCM festival in Liège, where the Iron

Foundry was programmed as the final item of the second orchestral concert on 6 September.

Mosolov’s music proved memorable on this occasion not only because it was unorthodox and arresting, but also thanks to the contingent circumstances of the performance. The Iron

Foundry was flattered by comparisons with another machine-inspired work that featured in the first orchestral concert two days earlier: Poème de l’espace by Marcel Poot, a young

Belgian composer, which depicted a Transatlantic flight (a nod to the then-recent achievements of Charles Lindbergh). Critics at Liège derided Poot’s juxtaposition of up-to- date subject matter with an outmoded compositional idiom. ‘Is it possible that this young

Flemish musician thinks he is modern because he sometimes dares to use a bunch of dissonant chords?’, asked Henry Prunières. ‘Nothing could be more clichéd than this symphonic poem which brings back the memory of the compositions perpetrated around

1890 by composers influenced by Wagnerism and the Russian school. One must still admit that he knows how to orchestrate, but what taste!’21 Mosolov, by contrast, created monumental orchestral effects without seeming stuck in the nineteenth century, even if his strident horn theme suggests that Romantic symphonism was far from entirely expunged.

Whereas Poème de l’espace sank into obscurity, the Iron Foundry’s punch helped it stand out in the ISCM’s notoriously crammed concert programmes. A perennial problem of audience fatigue at the festivals was compounded at Liège by the concurrent hosting of the first congress of the International Musicological Society. By 6 September, the festival

20 This performance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Max Rudolf was erroneously described in at least one report as a ‘world premiere’; Alfred Einstein, ‘Sinfonie-Konzerte’, Die Musik 22, no. 7 (April 1930), 524–27 (p. 525). 21 ‘Est-il possible que ce jeune musicien flamand pense être moderne parce qu’il ose parfois employer des paquets d’accords dissonants? Rien de plus poncif que ce poème symphonique qui évoque le souvenir des compositions perpétrées vers 1890 par des compositeurs influencés par le wagnérisme et l’école russe. Il faut pourtant reconnaître qu’il sait orchestrer, mais quel gout!’; Henry Prunières, ‘S.I.M.C.: Le VIIIe Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine à Liége’, La Revue Musicale 11, no. 108 (October 1930), 257–62 (p. 260). Other critics were especially scathing about the concluding chorale: ‘so incredibly banal that listeners looked at one another with amazement that such things were still written’; Edwin Evans, ‘The Liége Festival’, The Musical Times 71, no. 1053 (October 1930), 898–902 (p. 900).

82 attendees were worn out from a long week of concerts, musicological presentations and social events. The previous evening they had made a tiring round trip to Aachen in Germany for a much-praised staging of Berg’s Wozzeck. With frustration already rife at the perceived mediocrity of the main festival programmes, most of the second orchestral concert was met with restlessness.22 One critic admitted afterwards that he could recall only a ‘blurred impression’ of the concert, because of ‘the overwhelming impression which we received in

Aachen of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck”, physical weariness, or renderings not always faithful to the authors’ intention of works presenting many and great difficulties’.23 Concluding with a blast of Mosolov, though, seems to have been just the thing to revive the audience, or at least to allow a ‘tired public [...] to relax its strained nerves’.24 The Iron Foundry may have been

‘the only thing in the festival to evoke hisses’, but this counted for much more than bored indifference.25

After Liège, the floodgates opened. As one 1930s dictionary of modern composers reported, the ‘success of this amazingly vital work was so instantaneous’ that performances were scheduled ‘thru-out the entire music world’.26 Within twelve months of the festival, the

Iron Foundry had been played in cities including Düsseldorf, Naples, New York, Paris and

Vienna.27 The first London performance in February 1931 was broadcast by the BBC, which helps explain why Mosolov could be mentioned offhandedly in the Radio Times.28 In the next few years, the piece continued to enjoy regular performances and broadcasts in Western

Europe and America. It benefited especially from being taken up by celebrity conductors, including Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, since performances by the great

22 The dissatisfactions with the jury in 1930 are summarised in Haefeli, IGNM, 163–67. 23 L. Dunton Green, ‘The International Music Festival in Liège’, The Chesterian 12, no. 89 (September–October 1930), 18–22 (p. 20). 24 Frederick Jacobi, ‘Liege, 1930’, Modern Music 8, no. 1 (November–December 1930), 10–20 (p. 16). 25 H.E.W., ‘International Music: Next Year’s Meeting in Oxford’, The Daily Telegraph (8 September 1930), 6. 26 David Ewen, Composers of Today: A Comprehensive Biographical and Critical Guide to Modern Composers of All Nations (New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1934), 179. 27 Düsseldorf: ‘Notizen’, Anbruch 12, no. 9–10 (November–December 1930), 299–303 (p. 300); Paris: Florent Schmitt, ‘Les Concerts’, Le Temps (14 February 1931), 3; Naples: G.-L. Garnier, ‘Italie’, Le Ménestrel 93, no. 25 (19 June 1931), 272; New York: Oja, Making Music Modern, 65; Vienna: Karl Geiringer, ‘Lettera da Vienna’, La Rassegna Musicale 4, no. 3 (May 1931), 175–76. 28 Nicholas Kenyon, The BBC Symphony Orchestra: The First Fifty Years, 1930–1980 (London: BBC, 1981), 61.

83 maestros attracted extensive newspaper coverage, which, in turn, stirred up further curiosity and demand.29 The Iron Foundry also reached more ‘peripheral’ sites of concert culture, such as Bucharest, Buenos Aires and Manila.30 A performance in Sydney in 1936 was attended by the Queen of Tonga.31 Soon enough, recordings were issued: two in late 1933 by

Parlophone and Pathé/Columbia and another in early 1938 by Victor.32 These companies were looking to capitalise on a public demand for Mosolov’s work that was more voracious and widespread than has previously been recognised. In an increasingly global marketplace, the Iron Foundry became a highly productive commodity, disseminated to its multi- continental audience through pathways closely tied to the imperialist-capitalist world order

– to which the Soviet Union itself was, of course, ideologically opposed.

Less than a year after the Liège performance, the Iron Foundry even arrived in

Hollywood. In early 1931, the choreographer Adolph Bolm, a former member of the Ballets

Russes, was contracted by Warner Brothers to work on a film called The Mad Genius, a melodrama loosely based on the relationship between Diaghilev and Nijinsky.33 Reportedly inspired by visits to a Ford assembly line and the printing press for The New York Times – those two paradigmatic sites of American mass production – Bolm conceived the idea of a

‘factory’ ballet, to be accompanied by the Iron Foundry. Mosolov’s music and most of the factory sequence were cut from the final edit of the film, but Bolm ensured that his work did

29 In November 1932, for example, The Washington Post reported: ‘The playing of Mossolov’s “Iron Foundry” is in response to a flood of letters, asking that the patrons of the Sunday concerts be given the opportunity to hear this highly controversial composition’; ‘National Symphony in Sunday Concert Starring Grainger’, The Washington Post (20 November 1932), A2. 30 Bucharest: X., ‘Roumanie’, Le Ménestrel 96, no. 21 (25 May 1934), 199; Buenos Aires: Carlos A. Hegi, ‘République Argentine’, Le Ménestrel 99, no. 24 (11 June 1937), 183; Manila: F.B. Icasiano, ‘“Iron Foundry” Stands Out at Concert’, The Tribune [Manila] (26 September 1939), 5. 31 ‘Celebrity Concert’, The Sun [Sydney] (22 July 1936), 17. 32 The Pathé/Columbia version is Mosolov, Fonderie d’Acier: Musique de Machines, Grand Orchestre Symphonique, cond. Julius Ehrlich (Pathé X. 96.300 [1933]). Victor de Sabata’s version with the RAI Symphony Orchestra for Parlophone – also from late 1933 – has been reissued on CD: Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’, Rome Santa Cecilia Academy Orchestra and Turin Orchestra of the Italian Broadcasting Authority, cond. Victor de Sabata (Naxos Historical 8.110859, 2002), track 2. The Victor version – recorded in June 1936, but not put on the market until February 1938 – is Mosolov, Soviet Iron Foundry, Boston Pops Orchestra, cond. Arthur Fiedler (Victor 4378, 1938). 33 My account of Bolm’s ballet draws chiefly on Les Hammer, ‘“The Spirit of the Factory”: Adolph Bolm’s Post-Moderne Masterpiece’, Dance Chronicle 20, no. 2 (1997), 191–208. See also Lorin Johnson and Mark Konecny, ‘Adolph Bolm’s Cinematic Ballet: The Spirit of the Factory’, Experiment 20 (2014), 196–228.

84 not go to waste. On 28 July 1931, his new ballet, now given the title The Spirit of the Factory, was performed for the first time at the Hollywood Bowl, which could hold approximately

20,000 spectators. The ballet was revived ‘by popular request’ for the following summer’s

Hollywood Bowl programme and restaged thereafter at various American venues, exemplifying the wide appeal of its increasingly well-known score.34

There is a sad irony to the timing of the Iron Foundry’s international success. With the beginnings of Stalin’s ‘cultural revolution’ in 1928–9, ASM lost ground to its cultural- political rival, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), who decried modernism as Western decadence and sought instead to promote a truly ‘proletarian’ music

(meaning, primarily, mass songs for the workers).35 This development almost scuppered the

Iron Foundry’s international success: in 1931, RAPM adherents at the State Publisher tried to block a second edition, only relenting after UE protested to the USSR’s Foreign Ministry.36

From 1932, when the founding of the state-run Union of Soviet Composers put an end to the old ASM/RAPM rivalry, Mosolov was partially rehabilitated, even if the emerging dictate of socialist realism demanded a shift in compositional style.37 But in late 1937, he became caught up in the persecutions of the Great Terror: accused of drunken hooliganism, he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in the gulags (he was released after nine months, after the intercession of Myaskovsky and Glière, his dependable former teachers).38 The details of this mistreatment did not become known in the West until the late twentieth century. For us now, though, the diverging paths of Mosolov and his famous composition – one trapped in a labour camp, while the other continued to traverse the globe – underscore

34 Hammer, ‘“The Spirit of the Factory”’, 202–5. 35 The twists and turns of the ASM/RAPM rivalry are situated in the broader landscape of Soviet music-making in the 1920s in Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Frolova-Walker and Walker, Music and Soviet Power. 36 Wolfgang Mende, ‘Zensur – Klassenkampf – Säuberung – Beugung – Strafverfolgung: Aleksandr Mosolov und Nikolaj Roslavec im repressiven Netzwerk der sowjetischen Musikpolitik’, in Musik zwischen Emigration und Stalinismus: Russische Komponisten in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren, ed. Friedrich Geiger and Eckhard John (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2004), 70–118 (p. 109). 37 Mende, ‘Zensur – Klassenkampf – Säuberung – Beugung – Strafverfolgung’, 111–13. 38 Inna Barsova, ‘Dokumente zu den Repressionen gegen Aleksandr Mosolov’, ed. and trans. Wolfgang Mende, in Musik zwischen Emigration und Stalinismus, ed. Geiger and John, 137–48.

85 the extent to which the Iron Foundry became detached from the life of its creator. He had no control over how his international hit was disseminated and understood; at Liège, it became an agent in its own right, with its own biography.

Unearthing the ensuing profusion of performances, recordings and broadcasts raises more questions than it answers. Why this piece and not some other, when so much of the music performed at ISCM festivals fell instantly into obscurity? How did listeners in the

1930s interpret Mosolov’s music, and why were so many of them so entertained by it? To capture something of the multiplicity of plausible answers to these questions, I turn now to the ‘binary codes’ framework introduced above. Situating the Iron Foundry in a progressively broadening set of contexts, I shuttle between Mosolov’s music and its presence in the world – how it was performed, promoted and received – to trace how four entangled paradoxes played out in the encounters the work staged between the concert-going public and a mediated form of industrial noise.

The ultra-modern and the primitive

Since the Enlightenment, mastery of science and technology has been used to ‘measure’ the distance between Western civilization and its supposedly less sophisticated Others.39 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, International Exhibitions were central to how this comparison was experienced. The ISCM came to Belgium in 1930 because an International

Exhibition was being held there, with Antwerp presenting the colonial exotica and Liège the scientific and industrial exhibits.40 Liège was an apt choice for this assignment: it was located in the country’s industrial backbone, the so-called sillon industriel (‘industrial furrow’). One could hardly have invented a more fitting site for the Iron Foundry to make its international breakthrough. Apart from the ISCM festival, spin-off events from the Exhibition included manifold international conferences, one of which was (of course!) the International Foundry

39 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). 40 Paul Greenhalgh, ‘Antwerp/Liège 1930’, in Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions, ed. John E. Findling and Kimberley D. Pelle, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC and London: MacFarland & Company, 2008), 257–59.

Congress (Congrès International de Fonderie). Liège was felt particularly well suited for this event, because the city boasted, as a brochure for the Exhibition stated, ‘foundries remarkable for their importance or their specialisation’.41

In the sillon industriel, foundries were emblems of progress and prosperity. Thanks to the Iron Foundry, the vaunted local plants formed more than a mere backdrop to the

ISCM festival: the steel sheet demanded by Mosolov’s score was, reportedly, cast specially for this performance by a local foundry.42 In this rendition, the music made audible a characteristic material product of Belgian modernity. Especially in the context of the

International Exhibition, such a spectacle was redolent of familiar imperialist and gendered tropes about modern man conquering the natural world. In his short essay on Mosolov and the Iron Foundry for the ISCM festival programme book – the only information about the composer available to the audience at Liège – the Soviet conductor Nikolai Anosov laid claim to precisely these ideas: the composer, he argued, ‘rises to the exalted pathos of the power of the human genius that has subjugated the forces of nature’.43

Anosov’s interpretation was repeated almost verbatim in several press reports.44 Yet in the age of mass production and industrialised warfare, this was just one possible way to parse the sprawling field of symbolism associated with machines. Charting the racial imagination that underpinned George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique – another paradigmatic machine-inspired composition of the 1920s – Carol Oja has demonstrated the proximity and, in terms of compositional technique, the frequent indistinguishability of the ultra-modern and the primitive.45 Conceived as an emblem of enormous power and brutal indifference to a bourgeois aesthetics of subjectivity, the machine came to perform some of the same

41 ‘fonderies remarquables par leur importance ou leur spécialité’; Léon Michel, Congrès et Concours organisés à l’occasion de l’Exposition Internationale de Liége 1930 (Liège: Larock, 1930), 29. 42 H.E.W., ‘A Modern Music Festival: Works of Eleven Nations’, The Daily Telegraph (1 September 1930), 6. 43 ‘s’élève au pathos exalté de la puissance du génie humain ayant asservi les forces de la nature’; Nikolai Anosov, ‘Alexandre Mossolov’, trans. N.H., in VIIIme Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine/Premier Congrès de la Société Internationale de Musicologie: Liége Septembre 1930 (Brussels, 1930), 80–82 (p. 82), British Library. 44 See, for example, H.E.W., ‘A Modern Music Festival’; Schmitt, ‘Les Concerts’. 45 Oja, Making Music Modern, 91–92. See also Hess, Representing the Good Neighbor, 50–80.

87 polemical work in modernist art as, say, pre-modern folk ritual. So it was that, in 1921, T.S.

Eliot could famously describe Stravinsky’s evocation of pagan Russia in The Rite of Spring as

‘seem[ing] to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor-horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric noises of modern life’.46

To communicate mechanicity or primitivism, early twentieth-century composers pushed two musical parameters to their extremes. The first was repetition. In the Iron

Foundry, the ‘relentlessness of mechanical motion’, as one critic at Liège described it, seemed to defy inherited conceptions of musical form.47 The work’s ‘obstinate repetition’, as another critic put it, negated development in the traditional symphonic sense; machine-like replication forestalled organic growth.48 To some early twentieth-century critics, this state of suspended animation would have rendered the music deeply suspect: in his notorious critique of Stravinsky in Philosophy of New Music (1949), Adorno treated compulsive repetition quasi-psychoanalytically as a symptom of infantilism and regression.49 The second parameter emphasised in the mechanical/primitive idiom was noise, the transgression of a naturalised sonic limit. Mosolov achieved this through brutal dissonance and massive orchestral power. At Liège, the unsparing onslaught of sound was amplified by the ‘extreme resonance’ of the hall, leading one critic to assert that the Iron Foundry was ‘one of the noisiest pieces of music ever written’.50 The clamour even prompted some to refer ironically to contemporary anxieties about the health threats of industrial noise: Imogen Holst, for

46 T.S. Eliot, ‘London Letter’, The Dial (October 1921), quoted in Daniel Albright, Stravinsky: The Music Box and the Nightingale (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1989), 16. 47 Edwin Evans, ‘The Liége Festival’, The Bulletin of The British Music Society n.s. 1 (October 1930), 3–4 (p. 3). This may be why the work was described as exhibiting ‘complete formlessness’, even though the main junctures of its ternary structure could hardly be more audible; Charles O’Connell, The Victor Book of the Symphony, rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941), 337. 48 ‘Steel Foundry Music: “Noisy but Brilliant” Liège Festival Work’, Daily Mail (8 September 1930), 4. Russian orchestral music has often been criticised (and sometimes praised) for its apparent refusal of Austro-German conceptions of development and structural integrity. See Philip Ross Bullock, ‘Tsar’s Hall: Russian Music in London, 1895–1926’, in Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, ed. Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 113–28; Benedict Taylor, ‘Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music and the Notion of Development’, Music & Letters 94, no. 1 (2013), 78–118. 49 Adorno, ‘Stravinsky and the Restoration’, in Philosophy of New Music, 103–58. 50 ‘Contemporary Music: The Liege Festival’, The Times (9 September 1930), 10; J.B. Trend, ‘The Liége Festival’, Monthly Musical Record 60, no. 718 (October 1930), 300–302 (p. 301).

88 example, described the Liège gathering as ‘the noisiest festival on record: – towards the end our nerves got somewhat frayed at the edges, and the mere sound of a bicycle bell was enough to make us leap and turn pale’.51

In the Iron Foundry, repetition and noise were inseparable: Mosolov’s chief cacophony-generating strategy was to layer ostinato cells. Although some found the din intolerable, others revelled in its rhythmic clamour. As the historian of sound Karin

Bijsterveld has observed, early twentieth-century listeners tended to distinguish between different categories of loud noise. ‘Intrusive’ sound, such as the unexpected passing of a train or aeroplane, was perceived negatively: it was irregular and unpredictable, and thus seemed to threaten the listener. But ‘sensational’ sound, such as ‘the running of machines’, was marvelled at: it was regular and predictable, and could ‘fill the environment and surround the subject’, creating feelings of wonder and awe.52 Through its poundingly repetitive noisiness, the Iron Foundry (re)produced the sensational soundscape of the ‘technological sublime’.53

The compositional means for achieving this effect seem indebted above all to The Rite of Spring.54 For Mosolov, as for Stravinsky, ostinato technique served to strip the orchestra of its human essence.55 The only element in the Iron Foundry that recalled the human voice was the blasting horn theme; but this was a cry of the collective, not the utterance of a

51 Quoted in Christopher Grogan and Rosamund Strode, ‘“Wandering about Europe”, 1930–31’, in Imogen Holst: A Life in Music, ed. Christopher Grogan, rev. ed. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 78–94 (p. 80). On interwar anxieties about noise, see Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound; James G. Mansell, The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 52 Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound, 41–50. 53 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994). 54 Stravinsky scholars have tended to dismiss the Iron Foundry as derivative of The Rite’s most obvious surface features: Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), vol. 1, 963; Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39, 104. Another possible model was Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite (1915), also a landmark work of Russian musical primitivism. Prokofiev himself recognised the affinities, as he told Myaskovsky in 1931: ‘I feel irritated by the constant repetition of bars [in the Iron Foundry], though I myself made the same in the times of the Scythian Suite’; quoted in Levon Hakobian, Music of the Soviet Age, 1917–1987 (Stockholm: Melos Music Literature, 1998), 53, n. 83. 55 Apart from Adorno, the classic account of dehumanisation in Stravinsky’s music is: Taruskin, ‘Stravinsky and the Subhuman: A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and “The Music Itself”’, in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 360–467.

89 particular subject. This deindividualised music had the potential to induce Rite-like feelings of dread: one reviewer of The Spirit of the Factory labelled the ballet a ‘startling, even terrifying picture of a roboticized humanity’.56 But even though they sounded similar, there was a crucial distinction between The Rite and the Iron Foundry: whereas Stravinsky’s work could be heard, despite its primitivist scenario, as evocative of modernity’s soundscape,

Mosolov’s was explicitly mimetic. To refer, as so many did, to the ‘noise’ of the Iron Foundry was not simply to describe its sonic excess; it was also to ponder the imitative relationship between this music and industrialism’s sounds and rhythms. Sublime visions of ‘exalted pathos’ or ‘roboticized humanity’ notwithstanding, the mimetic gambit was not usually felt to warrant the fundamental seriousness accorded to The Rite.

The national and the international

The Iron Foundry’s debts to The Rite demonstrated continuities with an identifiably Russian musical tradition. But Mosolov lived in a society that had been radically reorganised since

Stravinsky had emigrated. In the reception of the Iron Foundry, we see audiences in the

West struggling to determine the extent to which they lived in a common present with Soviet citizens. Did factories in Moscow sound the same as those in Liège? And did these different societies hear industrial noise in the same way? The circulation of the Iron Foundry confronted international audiences with what is now a historiographical problem: evaluating whether the Soviet Union belonged to a shared modernity or represented one distinct form among a gamut of modernities.57

In 1930, there was a gap in the market for a quintessentially ‘Soviet’ musician. In other fields, above all cinema and visual art, Western audiences could access culture with distinctively Soviet qualities. But the limited body of Soviet music that circulated internationally during the 1920s, such as Myaskovsky’s symphonies and piano sonatas,

56 Los Angeles Examiner (29 July 1931), quoted in Hammer, ‘“The Spirit of the Factory”’, 200. 57 Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 1 (2001), 111–64; Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

90 seemed disappointingly consistent with pre-revolutionary aesthetic norms.58 There was one significant exception: Prokofiev’s ballet Le Pas d’Acier (‘The Steel Step’), first staged in 1927 in Paris. As Lesley-Anne Sayers and Simon Morrison have described, the factory-based scenario was Diaghilev’s attempt ‘to bring the “new Russia”’ to the West.59 There was confusion, though, about how Bolshevik this ‘Bolshevik ballet’ was: Russian émigrés were prominent among the contributors, and Massine’s choreography for the Ballets Russes undercut the pro-Soviet message by ‘allowing the factory to be interpreted as a symbol of oppression’.60 Sharing Le Pas d’Acier’s industrialised aesthetic but less ambiguous in its origins, the Iron Foundry seemed to mark the arrival of a truly Soviet music: the product of a distinctive form of modernity. As one Austrian critic put it, Mosolov was not one of those composers who ‘despite revolution and societal chaos, clings on to the old, grand musical forms’; his work was one of the ‘natural healthy children of the revolution’.61 The Iron

Foundry, it was claimed elsewhere, was ‘Russia’s five-year plan set to music’.62

These ideas seeped into the imagining of Mosolov himself as the ‘robust voice of musical Soviet Russia’, as the aforementioned dictionary of modern composers had it.63 In this period, the Western cliché of the Soviet artist-intellectual was of a man who had overcome pre-revolutionary hardship, fought in the Civil War and now worked in an industrial setting.64 Mosolov could be slotted neatly into this mould: while the Iron Foundry confirmed a stereotypically Soviet infatuation with industrialism, Anasov’s biographical note dutifully recorded the composer’s service in the Red Army between 1917–1920 (although it steered clear of what we now know to have been his middle-class childhood).65 Combined

58 Julius Mattfield, ‘Music of the New Russia: Revolution’s Effect on Native Art Called Negligible – State Publishes Works’, The New York Times (9 June 1929), X8. 59 Sayers and Morrison, ‘Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier’, 83. 60 Sayers and Morrison, ‘Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier’, 90, 99. 61 ‘trotz Revolution und gesellschaftlichem Chaos an den alten, großen Musikformen festhält [...] natürliche gesunde Kinder der Revolution’; Erwin Felber, ‘Neue Orchestermusik’, Anbruch 12, no. 9– 10 (November–December 1930), 281–83 (p. 281). 62 ‘Radios Groan as Russian Sets Industry to Music’, The Washington Post (6 April 1931), 10. In reality, Mosolov had composed the Iron Foundry before the first five-year plan began in late 1928. 63 Ewen, Composers of Today, 178. 64 Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1940: From Red Square to the Left Bank (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 15. 65 Anosov, ‘Alexandre Mossolov’, 80.

91 with the shadowy moodiness of the photograph of the composer in the ISCM festival programme book (Figure 4), such tantalising biographical details fed an image of Mosolov as committed revolutionary. The French composer and critic Florent Schmitt was, despite his right-wing political views, among the more extravagant of those to fetishise Mosolov’s

Sovietness: he lingered on the ‘hardened face’ and ‘eyes of flame’ of ‘this ex-combatant of the

Red Army’, and reported that ‘the acuity and intransigence of his art are classified, it seems, as belonging to a left no less extreme than his political opinions’.66 Many came to assume that the Iron Foundry epitomised the musical culture of post-revolutionary Russia, a situation that led some pro-Soviet ideologues to try to challenge the misleading generalisations that the work’s international exposure inspired.67

The ISCM festival context at Liège may have strengthened the idea of Mosolov as a distinctively Russian/Soviet composer: as synchronic overviews of an international field, these occasions often led attendees to compare and catalogue what they heard, modes of listening that encouraged essentialising claims about nationality and race. Yet as annual snapshots of the diachronic unfolding of music history, the events also proffered an experience of the shared, supranational present of ‘contemporary music’. The acts of genre

‘grouping’ fostered by the festival also pulled Mosolov into more cosmopolitan categories.68

We see this most obviously in the frequent comparisons with Honegger, a gesture repeated ad infinitum over the years to come, which contributed significantly to shoring up machine-

66 ‘ex-combattant de l’armée rouge, au visage durci, yeux de flamme [...] l’acuité et l’instransigeance de son art on, paraît-il, range à une gauche non moins extreme que ses opinions politiques’; Schmitt, ‘Les Concerts’, 3. The latter part of this quotation was a gloss on Anasov, who described Mosolov as belonging to ‘the extreme left of Russian contemporary music’ (‘l’extrême gauche de la musique russe contemporaine’); Anasov, ‘Alexander Mossolov’, 82. ‘Extreme left’ was a label that ASM adherents appropriated to describe their own modernism, so as to lend appropriate political associations to predilections that might otherwise have been understood as suspiciously bourgeois. This cultural- political context was missed when the phrase circulated beyond the USSR, leading to potential misunderstandings, as would surely have arisen when Mosolov was introduced to British readers, without qualification, as ‘the representative of the Extreme Left in Russian music’; H.E.W., ‘A Modern Music Festival’, 6. 67 Sergei Radamsky, ‘Russia and Machine Music [Letter to the Editor]’, The New York Times (24 April 1932), X7. Despite this intervention, the work remained widely known in the US as ‘the Soviet Iron Foundry’ (which is the title used on Victor’s 1938 recording). See also ‘Our London Correspondence’, The Manchester Guardian (29 Nov 1934), 10. 68 Drott, ‘The End(s) of Genre’.

Figure 4: VIIIme Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine/Premier Congrès de la Société Internationale de Musicologie: Liége Septembre 1930 (Brussels, 1930), 80. British Library.

imitating works as an established category of modernist music.69 As a recognised contributor to this international genre, Mosolov became a symbol not only of Sovietness but also of new music in general; so it was that a correspondent to The Musical Times in 1939 could refer casually to music ‘from Palestrina to Mossolov’.70

As a border-crossing genre, machine-inspired works seemed to mediate the unprecedented sounds of a shared present. The Iron Foundry and Pacific 231, claimed one

French writer in 1937, ‘provide a true reflection of the active, breathless, noisy life of the

69 Frederick Jacobi was just one of those to suggest that the Iron Foundry’s ‘sounds will not be unfamiliar to the admirers of Pacific 231’; Jacobi, ‘Liege, 1930’, 16. 70 Gordon T. Stubbs, ‘Bach at the “Proms” [Letter to the Editor]’, The Musical Times 80, no. 1151 (January 1939), 58–59 (p. 59).

93 twentieth century, of which they are the vibrant witness’.71 As we are about to see, nearly all critics agreed that the Iron Foundry was startlingly ‘realistic’. One striking thing about this consensus is that Western listeners felt so confident in making such a judgement. Industrial technology, most seem to have supposed, was a universally legible ground, a pre-ideological building block of modern societies. A foundry was a foundry, regardless of who controlled the means of production.72 The prevalence of this assumption indicates how commonplace it was to imagine the world as bound together by processes of modernisation that ran deeper than cultural or political differences. It was this conviction that lent credibility to early twentieth-century claims that the future would inevitably be international.

Artistic creation and mechanical reproduction

Some critics thought the Iron Foundry so realistic that they described the work as a

‘photograph’ or Mosolov as a ‘photographer’.73 Sound recording might have provided a more straightforward analogy; but the choice of photography said something about the quality, as well as the extent, of the music’s perceived literalism. As we saw earlier regarding Mosolov’s debts to The Rite, the Iron Foundry’s obsessive repetition did not project a musical subjectivity that developed over time. Mosolov’s work seemed, like a photograph, static and flat: it captured a frozen snapshot, and did not meet the criteria of ‘depth’ against which the aesthetic value of instrumental music was conventionally judged, especially in the Austro-

German tradition.74 The Iron Foundry had a captivating surface, but an absent centre; as

71 ‘apportent un reflet fidèle de la vie active, haletante, bruyante du XXe siècle, dont elles sont le vibrant témoin’; W.-L. Landowski, ‘Évolution de la Musique descriptive du XVe au XXe siècle’, Le Ménestrel 99, no. 46 (12 November 1937), 297–99 (p. 298). 72 We might draw a parallel with the contemporaneous efforts of the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White to document giant factories in the United States and the Soviet Union, a project that, as Joshua B. Freeman puts it, ‘implicitly suggested a fundamental similarity of the factory as an institution in the communist world and the capitalist one’; Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Norton, 2018), 218. 73 For approving and disparaging examples, see, respectively, Heinrich Strobel, ‘An die deutsche Sektion der I.G.N.M.’, Melos 9, no. 10 (October 1930), 433–35 (p. 435) and M.J. Rouêt de Journel, ‘Chronique Musicale: De La Création du Monde à la Fonderie d’acier’, Études 73, no. 226 (January– March 1936), 805–12 (p. 812). Heavy industry was a common subject of interwar photography, as exemplified by the work of Margaret Bourke-White (see previous note). 74 Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E.T.A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Schoenberg might have put it, the music had superficial ‘style’, but lacked an abstract ‘idea’.75

The young Benjamin Britten came to a similar conclusion when he heard the work at the

Proms in September 1931: the Iron Foundry, he recorded in his diary, was ‘amusing – nothing more’.76

The charge of hollowness echoed a longstanding unease among elite musicians and critics in the West about the popularity of Russian music they dismissed as superficially programmatic.77 The reproach also seems characteristic of broader misgivings about musical realism and, in particular, musical mimesis.78 Late eighteenth-century music was saturated with mimetic gestures, above all in opera buffa; but with the rise of ‘absolute’ music, direct imitation of external phenomena’s sensory or physical attributes came to be regarded with suspicion.79 Mimesis was difficult to reconcile with Romantic and modernist notions of artistic originality, since it seemed to require a renunciation of individual personality.

Glossing Diderot’s ‘Paradox of the Actor’ (1773), in which it is claimed that actors can only imitate others because they lack a fixed identity of their own, Lacoue-Labarthe argues: ‘The paradox states a law of impropriety, which is also the very law of mimesis: only the “man without qualities”, the being without properties or specificity, the subjectless subject (absent from himself, distracted from himself, deprived of self) is able to present or produce in

75 Schoenberg, ‘New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea’ (1946), in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 113–24. 76 Journeying Boy: The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten 1928–1938, ed. John Evans (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 83. 77 Bullock, ‘Tsar’s Hall’. Following a 1934 concert of Soviet music including the Iron Foundry, the Swiss critic Robert-Aloys Mooser (who had actually lived in Saint Petersburg for ten years, before the Revolution) rehearsed the terms of this tradition of criticising Russian music: the musical language of Soviet composers, he claimed, ‘shows itself almost always incapable of nuance, and seems to aim above all at exterior effect or to obey prescriptions of a descriptive kind’ (‘se montre presque toujours incapable de nuances, et semble viser, avant toutes choses, à l’effet extérieur, ou obéir à des préoccupations d’ordre descriptif’); Robert-Aloys Mooser, Regards sur la musique contemporaine, 1921–1946 (Lausanne: Librairie F. Rouge & Cie, [1946]), 212. 78 On turn-of-the-century anxieties about excess realism leading to a kind of musical lack (or even a kind of anti-music), see Arman Schwartz, ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Versimo Reconsidered’, 19th- Century Music 31, no. 3 (2008), 228–44. 79 Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004); Wye Jamison Allanbrook, The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Richard Taruskin and Mary Ann Smart (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014).

95 general.’80 Mimesis, by this account, is itself a kind of mechanical procedure, devoid of full subjectivity. This logic underpinned descriptions of Mosolov as a kind of machine, capable of objective reproduction but not artistic creativity. As the British critic W.J. Turner sniffed in

1931, Mosolov ‘shows no more mind than a photographic plate which records a scene impinged upon it’.81 When used in this derisive way, the photography metaphor implied that the Iron Foundry was not just about mechanical production, but was also an object that had itself been mechanically produced, and thus lacked the ‘aura’ of an authentic artwork.82

Turner was far from alone in complaining that Mosolov’s realistic depiction of a foundry was not convincing as music. For those who critiqued the Iron Foundry on this basis, the work’s noisiness was problematic not so much because it was painful to listen to, but because it demonstrated that Mosolov’s compositional project was one of naive imitation rather than transubstantiating musicalisation – an appraisal that pulled the work into longstanding debates about the status of representation and programmaticism in orchestral music.83 After the Liège performance, the Italian critic Guido Gatti complained that the Iron

Foundry could be assessed ‘as a demonstration of skilful instrumentation adequate for the realistic reproduction of noises, but not as a work of art’.84 Another sceptic, at least initially, was the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch. When he heard Mosolov’s work in Prague in

1931, he decried its ‘childish idea of one-upmanship. The Symphony of Machines has sirens wailing and turbines whirring in the same way that the orchestra of [Beethoven’s] Pastoral

80 Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Diderot’, 258–59. 81 W.J. Turner, ‘The Music of Automata and Adolescents’, New Statesman and Nation 1, no. 2 (7 March 1931), 63–64 (p. 64). 82 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 211–44. 83 ‘No attempt has been made to add imagination to realism’, complained one British critic; ‘it is as though Wagner had given us only the noise of the anvils of Nibelheim [in Das Rheingold] and left it at that’; N.C., ‘Gramophone Music: Some Contemporary Russians’, The Manchester Guardian (12 Oct 1934), 7 84 ‘come saggio di abile istrumentazione adeguata alla riproduzione realistica dei rumori, ma non come opera d’arte’; Guido M. Gatti, ‘Lettera Da Liegi’, La Rassegna Musicale 3, no. 5 (September 1930), 419–23 (p. 421). The distinction Gatti draws here exemplifies the typical anti-materialist stance of Italian musical modernists of his generation, for whom Benedetto Croce’s idealist aesthetics served as a touchstone. See Arman Schwartz, ‘Don’t Choose the Nightingale: Timbre, Index, and Birdsong in Respighi’s Pini di Roma’, in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily Dolan and Alexander Rehding (Oxford University Press), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.18.

96 has sheep bleating and cows mooing. It is enough to make one weep.’85 By the time he came to write Music and the Ineffable (1961), though, Jankélévitch saw Mosolov’s literalism in a different light: he praised the Iron Foundry as a work in which the ‘atonal racket of the machines resounds as it is’, and thus as an example of ‘inexpressive music’ that ‘allows things themselves to speak, in their primal rawness, without necessitating intermediaries of any kind’.86 Jankélévitch’s conversion from detractor to advocate did not require him to relinquish the widespread view of the Iron Foundry as quasi-photographically realistic; this conception of Mosolov’s music could support antithetical aesthetic judgements.

The accuracy of representation in the Iron Foundry did not go entirely unquestioned.

After the performance in Berlin in March 1930, Mosolov’s music came under attack from an unexpected source: the Giesserei-Zeitung, the ‘Foundry Newspaper’, the German trade journal for those working in the industry. This publication ridiculed Alfred Einstein’s claim in Die Musik that the foundry environment was ‘astonishingly well observed’.87 ‘The critic has certainly never visited an iron foundry’, the writer for the Giesserei-Zeitung remarked:

The blasting furnace, steelworks, rolling mill and hammer mill or the smeltery not only convey a completely different optical impression from the iron foundry, but also have a completely different acoustic effect. The iron foundry is a relatively quiet enterprise, in which the heaving and roaring of machines is almost entirely absent. [...] The manager of a foundry would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who put on a spectacle in his plant like the one the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra staged under the instructions of Mr Mosolov. And the factory inspectors would intervene as quickly as possible and shut down the whole enterprise!88

85 ‘idée puérile de surenchère. La Symphonie des machines fait hurler les sirens et ronfler les turbines tout comme l’orchestre de la Pastorale fait bêler les moutons et mugir les vaches. Il y a de quoi pleurer’; Vladimir Jankélévitch, ‘La Musique’, La Revue française de Prague: organe de la Fédération des sections de l’Alliance française en Tchécoslovaquie 12 (1931), 420–22 (p. 420). 86 Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 32–33. 87 ‘erstaunlich gut beobachtet’; Einstein, ‘Sinfonie-Konzerte’, 525. 88 ‘Der Kritiker hat sicher noch keine Eisengießerei besucht [...] Das Hochofen-, Stahl-, Walz- und Hammerwerk oder das Hüttenwerk vermittelt ja nicht nur ganz anders geartete optische Eindrücke wie die Gießerei, sondern wirkt auch akustisch gänzlich anders. Die Gießerei ist ein relativ ruhiger Betrieb, in welchem das Wuchten und Dröhnen der Maschinen fast völlig fehlt. [...] Der Betriebsleiter einer Gießerei würde mit einem Donnerwetter dazwischen fahren, wenn in seinem Betrieb ein Spektakel veranstaltet würde, wie ihn das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester nach der Vorschrift des Herrn Mossolow in Szene setzte. Und die Gewerbeaufsicht würde schnellstens eingreifen und den ganzen Betrieb stillegen!’; ‘Die Eisengiesserie Als – Tonschöpfung’, Giesserei-Zeitung: Zeitschrift für das gesamte Giessereiwesen 27, no. 6 (15 March 1930), 169.

As Bijsterveld has shown, early twentieth-century industrial workers were highly discriminating about noise, which could reassure them that mechanisms were running properly or alert them to inefficiencies and faults.89 By these standards of aural expertise, the

Iron Foundry was laughable.90

There is a cautionary tale here: upper-middle-class music critics probably cannot tell us what industrialism really sounded like. There is a telling contrast between their proclamations of precise literalism and the confusing proliferation of names by which

Mosolov’s work was known internationally: although ‘Iron Foundry’ was the most common rendering (after Eisengiesserei in the UE edition), the work was also referred to by various other titles including ‘Factory’ and ‘The Symphony of Machines’. Yet should we assume, as the writer for the Giesserei-Zeitung did, that what listeners found so compellingly realistic was necessarily a literal reproduction of a particular sonic environment? The British critic

Edwin Evans argued after the Liège performance that noise was a red herring, insisting instead that what mattered was: ‘the essential dynamism of the music. It is loud, of course, as the subject demands, but loudness is a relative factor and I believe the ruthless pulsation would make it scarcely less impressive without the loudness.’91 Other critics agreed that the

Iron Foundry was an ‘essay in rhythm’,92 in which ‘Mossolov contrived to give an impression of musical pattern allied with the mechanised certainty of foundry work’.93 Taking our cue from these readings, we might conclude that the Iron Foundry did not seem realistic to so many listeners because it achieved the phonograph-like recreation of a sound source. Rather,

89 Karin Bijsterveld, ‘Listening to Machines: Industrial Noise, Hearing Loss, and the Cultural Meaning of Sound’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 31, no. 4 (2006), 323–37 (pp. 331–33). 90 The Giesserei-Zeitung’s objections were gleefully cited in the conservative Zeitschrift für Musik as evidence of the folly of the modernist fascination with machines. See Helmut Kirchmeyer, Igor Strawinsky: Zeitgeschichte im Persönlichkeitsbild: Grundlagen und Voraussetzungen zur modernen Konstruktionstechnik (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1958), 234–35. 91 Edwin Evans, ‘The Liege Festival: A Change of Atmosphere’, The Musical Mirror and Fanfare 10, no. 10 (October 1930), 277, 308 (p. 277). 92 ‘Wireless Notes and Programmes: To-Day’s Features: The “Brighter” Poetry Recital; “Music of the Machines”’, The Manchester Guardian (22 September 1931), 10. 93 ‘Music Abroad: Modern Works Produced’, The Argus [Melbourne] (25 October 1930), 7.

98 the synchronised, repetitive movements of the musicians replicated, in sight and sound, the novel and much-discussed somatic experience of working on an assembly line.94

This scripting of the body was accentuated in The Spirit of the Factory, Bolm’s ballet for the Hollywood Bowl. The choreography suggests that Bolm was drawn to Mosolov’s score not only because he was following the general vogue for machine aesthetics, but also because he wanted to exploit a more specific fascination with the embodied mimesis of mechanicity.

He divided his large corps de ballet into groups that imitated various kinds of mechanisms moving in synchrony: parallel lines of ‘Gears’, ‘Switches’ and ‘Pendulars’ in the centre, four

‘Principal Pistons’ to one side, five ‘Spring Valves’ to the other (Figures 5 and 6). The result was a vast array of quasi-mechanical movement. This choreography represented the most concrete elaboration of the Iron Foundry as mimetic display; but the qualities it mined were also evident in concert performances and even in radio broadcasts and gramophone recordings. After hearing Ernest Ansermet conduct the work in Geneva in 1934, one Swiss critic asserted that the music ‘describes and stylises, in a way, the grinding and vertiginous gyration of the gears and immense drive wheels, the thrust of the gigantic connecting rods, the jerks of the levers that operate an entire complicated mechanism’.95 Playing off the longstanding tradition of imagining the orchestra as a giant machine, the Iron Foundry induced musicians to personify the dynamism of mechanical parts.96 Its mimetic gestures drew out the parallels between the specialised labour of orchestral musicians, tessellating into a complex output that no individual could produce alone, and the repetitive, rationalised movements that defined the worker-machine interface in the age of Ford.

94 Gumbrecht, ‘Assembly Lines’, in In 1926, 22–25. 95 ‘elle décrit et stylise, en quelque sorte, le grincement et la giration vertigneuse des engrenages et des immenses roues motrices, la poussée des bielles gigantesques, les saccades des leviers qui actionnent tout un mécanisme compliqué’; Mooser, Regards sur la musique contemporaine, 213. 96 The orchestra-as-machine metaphor dates back to the late eighteenth century. See John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 519–21.

Figure 5: Hollywood Bowl Association, Symphonies under the Stars: 1932: Aug. 9, 11, 12, 13: Program Magazine: Sixth Week (1932), 39. Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives, Los Angeles, LA2281410. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives.

100

Figure 6: Rehearsal of The Spirit of the Factory at the Hollywood Bowl, believed to have taken place shortly before the first performance in 1931 (photographer unknown). Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives, LA2281410. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives.

Modernism and mass entertainment

Mosolov’s severe dissonances did not literally transcribe the sounds of a foundry. But they were integral to his international reputation as a modernist innovator who could be named alongside the likes of Krenek and Walton as one of the most promising young composers of his generation.97 Even in the ISCM context, Mosolov’s discordant raucousness seemed extreme to some – hence the hissing in Liège, which recalled what was by 1930 a venerable tradition of protest against modernist music (epitomised by the notoriously rowdy premiere of The Rite in 1913). However, Mosolov’s dissonances were not put to the abstract ends of

‘secret languages’ or ‘structural listening’ sometimes understood as foundational to musical

97 Adolfo Salazar, ‘El arte musical en la Europa contemporánea’, in La música actual en Europa y sus problemas (Madrid: 1935), 9–38 (pp. 34–35).

101 modernism.98 Instead of the mysteries of ‘depth’, the Iron Foundry offered mimetic gestures that listeners could grasp intuitively without any special effort or expertise. As was evident in their questioning of whether Mosolov’s ‘photograph’ was really Art, some critics were sceptical of music that seemed so readily comprehensible.

Part of the problem, one suspects, is that the mimetic gambit was immediately recognised as appealing to a broad public. ‘A Saturday night audience at the “Proms” would enjoy it at least as much as Honegger’s “Pacific 231”’, remarked the critic for The Times after the Liège performance.99 This observation was prescient: during the 1930s, Henry Wood regularly included the Iron Foundry on his popular all-Russian programmes at the Proms, and in 1932 he conducted it at the Last Night.100 Elsewhere, Mosolov was inserted into even more squarely ‘middlebrow’ contexts, such as children’s concerts.101 Some performers even embraced full-blown slapstick: playing the Iron Foundry at a Christmas concert in 1937, the

Toronto Symphony Orchestra donned workers’ overalls, while their conductor Ernest

MacMillan wielded a monkey wrench as a baton; when the piece finished, as MacMillan himself recalled, ‘a factory whistle blew and the players knocked off work and opened lunch boxes, the contents of which were consumed on stage’.102 Noting that Pacific 231 and the

Iron Foundry ‘never fail to bring the house down whenever they are performed’, one British critic concluded in 1931 that ‘the public will tolerate almost any degree of cacophony provided it has an illustrative intention’.103 But that tolerance was not universal: in France and the US, some conductors adopted the practice of making the Iron Foundry the last item

98 Robert P. Morgan, ‘Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism’, Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (1984), 442–61; Rose Rosengard Subotnik, ‘Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky’, in Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 148–76. 99 ‘Contemporary Music: The Liege Festival’, 10. 100 Between 1931 and 1940, the Iron Foundry was played seven times at the Proms. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/events/works/f3ed917c-e8b1-4b3e-85f1-134c9e29dd3f (accessed December 2019). 101 Performances of Mosolov for children infuriated some conservative commentators: ‘Concerts for Young: Music Good and Bad’, The Argus (27 August 1936), 16. 102 Ernest MacMillan, ‘Memoirs’ (n.d.), quoted in Ezra Schabas, Sir Ernest MacMillan: The Importance of Being Canadian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 116. 103 C.G., ‘B.B.C. Symphony Concert’, The Observer (19 November 1931), 8.

102 on a concert programme and providing time for patrons offended by its abrasiveness to leave early, while the rest stayed to enjoy the amusing finale.104

For the Iron Foundry, the rift between modernism and mass culture – the so-called

‘great divide’ of the early twentieth century – did not prove impassable.105 As The Spirit of the Factory demonstrates vividly, Mosolov’s music belonged not only in the highbrow orbit of Stravinsky and Futurism, but also in a lineage of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century popular entertainments that generated spectacle and humour from mechanical movement. One notable specimen of this tradition was the ballet Excelsior, first staged in

Milan in 1881 and then performed in numerous tours and revivals through to the mid- twentieth century. As Gavin Williams has described, the ‘proto-robotic dance’ of this long- running extravaganza embraced the pleasures of ‘mass choreography’ and ‘geometry in motion’.106 Excelsior, argues Williams, can be thought of as what Siegfried Kracauer called a

‘mass ornament’: a kaleidoscopic spectacle of patterned movement devoid of substantive content – devoid, that is, of ‘depth’ – whose dehumanising effects reduced human beings to

‘clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics’, and exemplified how the latest capitalist production methods accommodated the individual only as ‘a tiny piece of the mass’.107 The Iron Foundry transformed the orchestra into just such a burlesque of rationalised production; it actualised the analogy between embodied movement and economic system. Mosolov’s ostinato patterns deindividualised the players of the orchestra for the good of the corporate ‘machine’, controlled by the god-like figure of the authoritarian patriarch at its head – hence, we might think, the appeal of this crowd-pleasing showpiece to

104 See, for example, H.B., ‘Bordeaux’, Le Ménestrel 94, no. 11 (11 March 1932), 119; ‘National Symphony in Sunday Concert Starring Grainger’. 105 Huyssen, After the Great Divide. 106 Gavin Williams, ‘Excelsior as Mass Ornament: The Reproduction of Gesture’, in Nineteenth- Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, ed. David Trippett and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 251–68 (pp. 251, 256). In 1934, Constant Lambert highlighted the same connection, albeit more scathingly: ‘Our latter-day mechanical romantics [i.e. composers such as Mosolov or Honegger] are indeed only filling in a corner which – save for a few ludicrous exploits like Marenco’s Excelsior – was left unexploited by the nineteenth-century aesthetic romanticists’; Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 245. 107 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–86 (pp. 76, 78).

103 conductors such as Stokowski and Toscanini, looking to burnish their own mythical charismas.108 In Bolm’s Hollywood Bowl spectacular, this patterning of movement was brought into stark relief, realising Kracauer’s most famous pronouncement in startlingly literal terms: ‘The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls.’109

As the objections of the Giesserei-Zeitung suggest, it was not those who really worked in iron foundries who were amused. The Iron Foundry’s international audience was primarily a middle-class one. For these listeners, the cognitive dissonance of encountering, simultaneously, orchestral music and industrial noise involved an enjoyable dip in the dressing-up box: the inspired and highly trained artists of a bourgeois institution slumming it as a faceless mass of unskilled labourers appended to an assembly line (a joke realised in a crudely literal-minded way by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, with their overalls and lunchboxes). As one critic reported from a Melbourne performance of the Iron Foundry in

1936: ‘Ostensibly it glorifies the “worker”. Actually it depends for a hearing upon the tolerance of leisured and wealthy patrons. [...] the spectacle of trained musicians manipulating steel plates and emulating the roar and rattle of machinery excited on Saturday night a hilarious response.’110 A mimetic ‘logic of semblance’ underscored, rather than closed, the gap between those present in the concert hall and a seemingly dehumanised industrial proletariat. Here, despite its origins in the world’s first communist state, Mosolov’s work made explicit the class politics of Henri Bergson’s much-cited definition of humour as a collective purging of ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’.111

In this reading, the Iron Foundry’s comedy stemmed from the disjunction between the organic and the mechanical, between ‘music’ and ‘noise’. An alternative approach might emphasise the mutual interpenetration of the two in rhythmic entrainment. In a riposte to

108 In Adorno’s polemical account, the conductor is a charismatic demagogue, whose relationship with rank-and-file orchestral musicians is marked by deep ambivalence and even aggressive antagonism; Adorno, ‘Conductor and Orchestra: Aspects of Social Psychology’, in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976 [1962]), 104–17. 109 Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, 79. 110 ‘Noisy Novelty: Orchestral Surprises’, The Argus (13 July 1936), 3. 111 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914 [1900]), 37.

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Bergson and other theorists who espouse ahistorical models in which humour is always caused by conflict or surprise, the literary critic Michael North has proposed that ‘the machine age seems to have brought, along with all its other dislocations, a new motive for laughter and perhaps a new form of comedy’.112 This ‘machine-age comedy’, he argues, extracted humour from the very predictability of repetitive mechanical movement, since ‘the most thorough mechanization can produce, out of its very regularity, a new form of nonsense’.113 Just as Charlie Chaplin fascinated so many intellectuals of the day, this comic style cut across the divides between high and low culture.114 If we open out the category to include sound and live performance, ‘machine-age comedy’ illuminates the Iron Foundry’s appeal as popular entertainment, especially when, with Edwin Evans, we listen for rhythm as the work’s primary parameter. This mass-ornamental music derived humour not only from a conflict between organic life and mechanical repetition, but also from the latter’s own distinctive pleasures.

North’s perspective places the trope of Mosolov as ‘photographer’ in a new light: what if that metaphor actually reveals an impulse to connect the Iron Foundry with the moving pictures? This proposition lends new significance to how quickly the work made it to

Hollywood, if not, in the end, into the movies. Cinema was, after all, not only the artform par excellence of machine-age comedy, but also the one in which the Soviet avant-garde of the

1920s achieved its greatest international esteem. And what if the work’s allegedly startling realism should thus be credited to a correspondence between its distinctive rhythmic patterns and the reproduction of mechanical movement so widely disseminated in this period via the mechanically reproduced medium of film? As Miriam Hansen argued, cinema in this period became ‘something like the first global vernacular’, ‘an international modernist idiom on a mass basis’, which ‘articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experience’. The resulting ‘mass production of the senses’ may have done much to enable the

112 Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5. 113 North, Machine-Age Comedy, 18. This passage is an elaborating gloss on Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of Charlie Chaplin. 114 North, Machine-Age Comedy, 19–23.

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Iron Foundry’s success, rendering its mimetic gestures both legible and instantly appealing across a vast geographical span.115 The work’s widespread popularity might therefore be taken as evidence that new technologies really had forged a more genuinely ‘international’ culture. But if so, it was media machines, not industrial ones, that were chiefly responsible.

Novelty and obsolescence

The Mosolov craze was a transient affair. Already in the mid-1930s, there are signs that his star was beginning to fade; by the end of the Second World War, he had all but been forgotten. After the composer’s death in 1973, a steady trickle of performances and recordings re-emerged, partly as a result of the efforts of scholars in the West to rescue, in retrospect, the early Soviet modernists they viewed as victims of Stalin’s regime.116 But the necessity of a revival movement demonstrates that the Iron Foundry’s early renown had not translated into canonicity. The work was to some extent a victim of its own success. By the end of the 1930s, its novelty had been blunted by ubiquity; even humour based on repetition can only bear being repeated so many times. Meanwhile, Shostakovich’s international breakthroughs were broadening ideas about the possibilities of Soviet music.117

Perhaps more crucially, the heyday of machine-age comedy was drawing to a close.

As everyday experiences of technology changed, the symbol of ‘the machine’ also transformed. In his description of the 1920s machine aesthetic, the architectural historian

Richard Guy Wilson provides, in effect, a recipe for the Mosolovian mass ornament: one begins from a ‘perception of the machine as a combination of parts – gears, cams, axles’, and

115 Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses’, 68. 116 To give one representative example of this performance history: after 1940, the Iron Foundry was not heard again at the Proms until 2010. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/events/works/f3ed917c- e8b1-4b3e-85f1-134c9e29dd3f (accessed December 2019). One of the pioneering figures in the rediscovery of 1920s Soviet modernism was the West German musicologist Detlef Gojowy; see his Neue sowjetische Musik der 20er Jahre (Regensburg: Laaber-Verlag, 1980). See also William Quillen, ‘The Idea of the 1920s in Russian Music Today’, in Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery, ed. Patrick Zuk and Marina Frolova-Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2017), 376–95. 117 Christopher H. Gibbs, ‘“The Phenomenon of the Seventh”: A Documentary Essay on Shostakovich’s “War” Symphony’, in Shostakovich and His World, ed. Laurel E. Fay (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 59–113; Pauline Fairclough, ‘The “Old Shostakovich”: Reception in the British Press’, Music & Letters 88, no. 2 (2007), 266–96.

106 then arranges these ‘simple geometrical elements’ into ‘complex patterns’.118 Especially after

1930, this ‘machine-as-parts syndrome’ gave way, by Wilson’s account, to various kinds of black-boxing: neoclassical purity, streamlined forms, biomorphic design.119 With this shift,

Mosolov started to suffer the same fate as Marcel Poot in 1930: he sounded embarrassingly outdated. In 1934, Constant Lambert derided the programmaticism of works such as the

Iron Foundry and Pacific 231 as ‘mechanical romanticism’, predicting:

The present vogue for mechanical romanticism, being based primarily on the picturesque aspects of machinery, is bound to disappear as the mechanic more and more comes to resemble the bank clerk, and as the Turneresque steam engine gives way to the unphotogenic electric train. It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about Pacific 231 and Le Pas d’Acier.120

For Lambert, new kinds of machines had superseded the propinquity of high technology and the ‘primitive’ that the Iron Foundry’s musical language denoted. By the end of the 1930s, other critics also came to consider Mosolov’s ‘painful realism [...] as old-fashioned as a 1922 fox-trot’.121 The Iron Foundry had become obsolete.122

The ephemerality of Mosolov’s international success suggests that Hey and Anderson, the writers who quarrelled in the Radio Times in 1931, were both partially correct. Hey was right to argue that certain forms of musical modernism, especially those that ‘expressed contemporary life’, could appeal to a broad public, despite the resistance of some strait-laced critics. But as Anderson implied by comparing the Iron Foundry to the ‘daily paper’, music of this kind came with a sell-by date. It did not find a stable niche in ‘the imaginary museum of musical works’.123 In its intense yet transient cycle of circulation, the Iron Foundry offers a concentrated example of the basic predicament faced by adherents of ‘new music’ in this

118 Richard Guy Wilson, ‘Machine Aesthetics’, in Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 1918–1941 (New York: The Brooklyn Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 43–63 (p. 47). 119 Wilson, ‘Machine Aesthetics’, 45, 51–63. 120 Lambert, Music Ho!, 245. 121 Katharine Scherman, ‘Music: Refugee Music Enriches America; Records – Modern Composers’, North American Review 247, no. 1 (Spring 1939), 161–67 (p. 163). 122 As Heather Wiebe observes, ‘obsolescence’ connotes ‘overtones of the technological, suggesting those objects that most quickly fall from the height of modernity and usefulness to becoming embarrassing encumbrances’; Heather Wiebe, ‘A Note from the Guest Editor’, The Opera Quarterly 25, no. 1–2 (2009), 3–5 (p. 3). 123 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

107 period. Composers had been schooled to believe that their duty was to create work that would push forward the inevitable progress of music history and thus earn them a place in the museum culture of concert performance.124 By the 1920s, though, that museum was all but full; the compositional tradition it preserved was in essence complete.125 Modernist music was becoming a semi-independent culture on the margins of musical life, sustained by the support of specialist organisations such as the ISCM. The Iron Foundry exemplifies one function fulfilled by music that made the uncommon leap from this sequestered sphere to mainstream concert life: it was an entertaining novelty item, a diverting refreshment from the established canon, but not a fundamental augmentation or challenge to it.

One might still see the circulation of the Iron Foundry in the 1930s as demonstrating the promise of modernist music as an internationalist medium. Mosolov’s composition appealed to geographically dispersed audiences who spoke diverse languages and were self- consciously participating in a transnational cultural experience. Yet these listeners found immediate enjoyment in Mosolov’s work not because either music or factories were

‘universal’, but because they were well versed in the multimedia phenomenon of machine aesthetics. The Iron Foundry’s popularity was grounded in a fluidly transmedial form of intertextuality. The work’s performance history and reception also suggest, though, that manifestations of machine aesthetics in music – which is to say, ‘music’ as constituted by enduring nineteenth-century bourgeois institutions – were distinctive to the artform. They signified differently to those in new media such as cinema or avant-garde practices such as

Futurism, which were not encumbered by the weight of a tradition that belonged to a different technological era. By keeping faith with the orchestra, the Iron Foundry’s mimetic mechanicity implied one more paradox, which has haunted musical modernism ever since:

‘new music’ itself was something of an oxymoron. The perceived disjunction between the

124 J. Peter Burkholder, ‘Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years’, Journal of Musicology 2, no. 2 (1983), 115–34. 125 Weber, ‘Consequences of Canon’. An attendant sense of belatedness was evident across diverse genres and styles: Joseph N. Straus, ‘The “Anxiety of Influence” in Twentieth-Century Music’, Journal of Musicology 9, no. 4 (1991), 430–47; Laura Tunbridge, The Song Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 123–43; Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 456–548.

108 technologies of the orchestral museum and those of mass production could not be reconciled. This discrepancy implied a profound challenge to the project of new-music internationalism: if the technological sublimity of factories, airplanes and media machines seemed to portend an inevitably ‘international’ future, it was not at all clear what the place of orchestras and concert halls would be in that brave new world. Insofar as its rationale depended on utopian visions of a high-technological future, an International Society for

Contemporary Music contained the promise of its own obsolescence.

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Chapter Three

Patchwork Internationalism: Festival-Making and National Heritage

International festivals of contemporary music are commonplace today; but in the early twentieth century, they were novel. With each instalment of their pioneering event, ISCM adherents discovered more about the possibilities it afforded; what they learnt determined much about how new-music internationalism was envisaged and practised. As we discovered in Chapter One, Dent cherished the potential of the festival, as an ephemeral gathering, to produce a distinctive form of international sociability. In Chapter Two, by contrast, we saw the power of the event to make new music ‘international’ in a more literal sense: by serving as a launchpad for the transnational circulation of musical works.

These were but two of the ways in which festivals had evident promise as a means of attempting to realise the ISCM’s aspirations. Yet the staging of such events was also ridden with complications and contradictions. One reason was that festival-making necessarily involves networks of collaboration, consisting of diverse actors. At the ISCM’s peripatetic event, an international organisation perforce entered into temporary partnerships with local individuals and institutions.1 This marriage of the international and the local intensified the plurality characteristic of festivals in general.2 Produced through collaboration, the ISCM festival was a multi-authored, decentred and contingent assemblage, far more contradictory than its self-proclaimed agenda might seem to imply.3

1 My emphasis on this point is indebted to Daniel Laqua’s account of the interactions between internationalist, nationalist and local agendas in the staging of international music congresses and exhibitions in interwar Europe; Laqua, ‘Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe’. 2 The theatre scholar Temple Hauptfleisch has observed that a festival is really ‘a poly-system of linked sub-festivals, each with its own aims, objectives, supporters, processes and impact – in other words an uneasy composite of (potentially) competing activities’; Temple Hauptfleisch, ‘Festivals as Eventifying Systems’, in Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, ed. Temple Hauptfleisch et al. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 39–47 (p. 42). 3 Because they are exceptional events, demanding extensive collaboration, festivals bring into relief the way in which all musical activities are produced socially through open-ended ‘actor networks’ (though there is not space here to take up the debates about non-human agency precipitated by this theoretical vocabulary). See Piekut, ‘Actor Networks in Music History’.

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This chapter charts some of these complexities and scrutinises how those associated with the ISCM attempted to rationalise them. I focus especially on two instalments of the festival, which both took place during what I referred to in Chapter One as the ‘post-postwar’ period of the organisation’s interwar activities. In this phase of the ISCM’s history, which began in around 1925, the conventions of the festival had become established; but the organisation was yet to confront the challenges arising from the geopolitical crises of the mid- to late-1930s (see Chapter Four). My central case study is the 1931 festival in Oxford and London, the first to be hosted in Britain. This occasion exemplifies how an international festival offered its hosts an opportunity to display their musical tradition, in this case by conveying a historically particular vision of Englishness. Efforts at local self-promotion were especially conspicuous in 1931, because British musicians were enduringly touchy about their country’s musical reputation and self-conscious about residing in a semi-periphery of musical modernism. These anxieties would fuel disagreement amongst local collaborators about how to present themselves to their guests. In the final section, I also consider the 1928 festival, hosted in Siena. Italian musicians shared some of the same insecurities as their

British counterparts. But the difficulty of reconciling local agendas with the ISCM’s internationalist values was more fraught in the Italian context, because elements of the festival proved amenable to the state-sanctioned cause of fascist nationalism.

Some of the multiplicity of ISCM festivals emerged in the main concerts of contemporary music. The programmes were stipulated by an international jury of eminent musical modernists, whose differing perspectives generated some bracingly eclectic programming. At the 1931 festival, the composers on the main programme included

Hindemith, Roussel, Webern and even Gershwin. As has been discussed extensively elsewhere, the attendant variety of compositional styles reflected (and fuelled) larger debates about the definition and boundaries of ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ music.4 However, a focus on collaboration pushes us towards recognising the eclecticism of these festivals in broader

4 Haefeli, IGNM, 262–85; Collins, ‘What Was Contemporary Music?’.

111 terms. The full schedule of the 1931 gathering was forged by not only the ISCM, but also a coalition of local actors including the BBC, Oxford University and the travel agent Thomas

Cook. Collectively, they produced a programme of events far more varied than has previously been described (see Appendix 1).5 In addition to Webern et al., the festival featured a substantial quantity of early music, with special emphasis on English choral works from the

Tudor era, and even an open-air presentation of Morris dancing. How are we to understand this miscellaneous jumble of events? And what are we to make of the emphasis on the national and the old at a festival supposedly dedicated to the international and the new? In offering a more complete and messier view of the ISCM’s nomadic festival – Morris dancing not excluded – this chapter interrogates how the collaborative process of festival-making intersected with one of the most pressing dilemmas facing those who embraced the cultural internationalism of interwar Europe: how to construe the relationship between national heritage and transnational affiliations.

Hosts and guests

Modernism and internationalism are easily imagined – and have often been denigrated – as sets of abstract, universalising ideals. Yet attempts to fulfil those ideals always possessed distinctive geographies. From its beginnings in Salzburg, the ISCM gravitated towards

‘festival cities’, which offered a distinctive cultural heritage, facilities for international visitors and convenient travel connections (these events would have been unthinkable without the European train network).6 The host cities displayed a degree of isomorphism in

5 Standard accounts of the 1931 festival focus almost exclusively on the contemporary music concerts: Haefeli, IGNM, 170–75; Kenyon, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, 66–68; Doctor, The BBC and Ultra- Modern Music, 212–17. This is typical of how supplementary activities have been omitted from the historical record of ISCM gatherings. In the late twentieth century, it was above all the potent esteem of ‘Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and others’ (as the Grove article on the ISCM lists them) that seemed to verify the music-historical significance of the festivals – hence why, in Haefeli’s account, it is taken as read that other kinds of events were incidental; Anton Haefeli, revised by Reinhard Oehlschlägel, ‘International Society for Contemporary Music’, Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.13859. Although the recent spate of scholarly interest in the ISCM does not display the same assumptions, this work has drawn heavily on Haefeli’s record of the festivals without challenging this aspect of his partiality; his documentation is, perhaps, so impressive an achievement as to appear deceptively complete. 6 When scholars have thematised the geography of ISCM festivals, it is usually because there was dissent within the organisation about a particular choice of city; in these instances, competition

112 these respects, indicating the ISCM’s reliance on the international tourist industry that had emerged during the nineteenth century in the wake of the old Grand Tour. Within this shared pattern, though, the fabric of each festival was distinctive. The particularities were especially evident in the supplementary events, beyond the main concerts of contemporary music, which reveal much about how the gatherings were produced through temporary networks of collaboration, and how they functioned as stages for the self-conscious performance of locality. These issues are crucial if we wish to understand the festival as a festival, not simply a series of concerts.7

Patterns of collaboration directly shaped the format of the festival. Describing the

1928 gathering, which he helped to organise, Alfredo Casella explained that the programme could be divided into a ‘picture’, the main concerts of contemporary music, and a ‘frame’, the other performances and miscellaneous happenings.8 This metaphor neatly expressed a hierarchical arrangement in which the supplementary events were understood as marginal to the festival proper. Part of what determined this hierarchy was who organised what. As noted previously, the contemporary repertoire was stipulated by the ISCM’s international committee of jurors. For chamber music, each national section decided who would perform in pieces by composers from that country and met any expenses. In those festivals with symphonic concerts, the local organisers provided the orchestra and covered its costs. The basic format persisted throughout the interwar period, providing the continuity necessary for the instalments of this peripatetic gathering to be thought manifestations of the same festival.

regarding location made manifest underlying cultural-political or ideological antagonisms. See, for example, Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 71–74. 7 As one group of sociologists has argued: ‘an attention to the situatedness of the festivals as cultural artefacts and organizations appears fundamental, especially to avoid interpreting them in the light of their position within a specific genre or art world only, which would mean missing their specificity as festivals’; Jasper Chalcraft, Gerard Delanty and Monica Sassatelli, ‘Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Art Festivals’, in The Festivalization of Culture, ed. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 109–29 (p. 112). 8 Alfredo Casella, ‘Siena’s Festival’, Modern Music 6, no. 1 (November–December 1928), 35–38 (p. 35).

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By contrast, the ‘frame’ varied significantly between festivals, since it was organised independently by the national section in that year’s host country, in collaboration with other local actors. Some of the musical performances featured additional contemporary repertoire, supplementing that selected by the jury.9 Further auxiliary events, more important for us here, showcased the cultural heritage of the host location, usually through performances of early music or folk music. Although there were some informal conventions, the hosts were effectively free to put on whichever additional events they wanted; the ISCM as a whole had no formal jurisdiction over this part of the festival. As a result, the ‘frame’ was especially likely to reveal impulses that appear at odds with the ISCM’s aspirations or even directly antagonistic to them.

The festival format was determined, as much as anything, by finance. In the literature on cultural internationalism, the importance of money has often been underplayed, since scholars have tended to focus more on ideas and aspirations than the practicalities of their realisation.10 In the case of the ISCM, the problem is complicated by the loss of archival records from the interwar years, which makes it difficult to discuss finances with precision.

We can say, though, that the organisation struggled to realise some of the grander hopes invested in it, a problem shared by most internationalist bodies of the era and ever since. The

ISCM possessed symbolic cachet but could only act through forming alliances. Early ambitions, such as creating an international lending library of scores, were quickly jettisoned as they proved too expensive.11

9 Some of the supplementary contemporary works were by composers from the host country; others were felt to warrant inclusion out of their own intrinsic interest, either because the composer was widely accepted as a major international figure or because they involved non-standard performing forces. Additional contemporary music could also include opera, which, because of its expense, required there to be a production already running at a nearby theatre. (As noted in Chapter Two, at the 1930 festival in Liège, attendees travelled across the Belgian-German border to see Berg’s Wozzeck at Aachen.) 10 In his landmark history of cultural internationalism, Akira Iriye rarely considers how the manifold initiatives he mentions were funded; Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order. By contrast, Christiane Sibille emphasises how early twentieth-century musical internationalists oriented themselves towards projects that attracted state subsidy; Sibille, ‘The Politics of Music in International Organisations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’. 11 The idea to establish a library is mentioned in Dent, ‘Plans for Salzburg’, The Nation and Athenaeum 32, no. 18 (3 February 1923), 696–98 (p. 696).

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The conventions of the festival made it possible to offload most of the financial burden onto the national sections and the host country. The ISCM gathering had begun life in 1922–23 as a Salzburg-based event; the decision to make it peripatetic was motivated, in part, by the search for possibilities beyond those of economically ravaged Austria in the early

1920s. The first instalment outside Salzburg – in Prague, 1924 – was also, not coincidentally, the first to include orchestral concerts. The ‘core’ programmes were performed by the country’s prestigious national ensemble, the Czech Philharmonic, and the event as a whole was generously sponsored by the Czechoslovakian government. (The state’s fabled founding president, Tomáš Masaryk, even attended the ISCM’s opening concert.12) The festival’s mobility made it possible for the ISCM to seek out this kind of largesse without becoming over-dependent on any one source. Amidst the political and economic turbulence of interwar

Europe, this relative independence would help ensure the organisation’s survival.13

For local actors, hosting an ISCM festival was an attractive proposition; cities competed for the privilege.14 An obvious benefit was to bolster the status of their location as an international hub. When in April 1936 Barcelona welcomed both the ISCM and the third congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS), a proud Pablo Casals declared to the Catalonian parliament that the city ‘is, for a week, the musical centre of the world’.15 This claim to international significance, especially cherished by musicians from the ‘peripheries’, was embodied in the presence of the visitors who travelled from abroad. These guests held a symbolic importance exceeding their actual number in any given year, since many of them –

12 Haefeli, IGNM, 101. 13 In 1934, Dent could attempt to shrug off the recent dissolution off the German section, which had been one of the most active during the 1920s, by telling Nazi-sympathising musicians that ‘we [the ISCM] have some 20 sections, and will still pull through with 19 or even with fewer, if Germany is under anaesthetic at present’ (‘wir haben etwa 20 Sektionen, und werden mit 19 oder sogar mit weniger noch durchkommen, wenn Deutschland zur Zeit unter Narkose ist’); Dent (quoting himself) to Alois Hába, 17 July 1934, in Vlasta Reittererová and Hubert Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik: Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik im Spiegel des brieflichen Nachlasses von Alois Hába 1931–1938’, Miscellanea Musicologica 36 (1999), 129–310 (p. 155). 14 In the case of the 1933 festival, for instance, Amsterdam, Florence and Warsaw were all proposed as host cities; ‘Bericht über die Delegierten-Versammlung der I.S.C.M. in Oxford, Rhodes House, am 25. Juli 1931, 10 Uhr vorm’, Heinz-Tiessen-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2109. 15 ‘Barcelona ist für eine Woche das musikalische Zentrum der Welt’; quoted in Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez, ‘Internationale Musiktage in Barcelona’, Basler Nachrichten (22 April 1936), Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Programme und Rezensionen – Paul Sacher: Dirigent (1936–1937).

115 composers, performers, critics or other taste-makers – were prominent and influential in musical circles.16 Their endorsement could impact lastingly on the host city’s musical reputation.

The hosts worked hard to manage the impressions of their illustrious visitors. This project to win over international guests was appealing to governments – such as that of the young Czechoslovakian Republic – for whom the ISCM festival could serve as a means of cultural diplomacy, displaying their enlightened support for the arts, the strength of their artistic institutions and the riches of their national heritage. In Prague, the ISCM’s orchestral concerts (31 May–2 June) were folded into a larger festival (25 May–8 June), which included an ambitious cycle of Smetana’s operas staged at the National Theatre.17 The mission of national propaganda was embraced by Prague’s native music critics, who, as Brian Locke observes, were more concerned to assess the impact of performances of Czech music than to engage seriously with the international programmes.18 By the later 1920s, it became an established convention for the ‘frame’ of an ISCM festival to include stage-managed, site- specific performances of early music or other national heritage: the 1933 instalment in

Amsterdam, for example, included an open-air concert of Dutch folksongs in the city’s iconic

Dam Square, where the voices mingled in the air with the chiming clock of the Royal Palace; at Paris in 1937, visitors enjoyed French music from the era of Louis XIV at the Grand

Trianon palace at Versailles.19 Flicking through the programme books of these festivals, one is almost as likely to happen upon Ockeghem or Couperin as Bartók or Stravinsky.

16 Compare Lisa Jakelski’s description of how, at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in the early 1960s, ‘travelers from afar assumed an importance that overshadowed their actual numerical proportions’; Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 92. 17 The International Music Festival in Prague 1924 [Promotional Pamphlet] (Prague: Grafia, 1924), British Library; Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, 150–53. On further state-sanctioned uses of Smetana in the 1920s for the purposes of cultural diplomacy, see Christopher Campo-Bowen, ‘An Operatic Locarno: The Paris Premiere of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and Czechoslovak-French Cultural Diplomacy’, Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 3 (2017), 283–312. 18 Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, 153. 19 ‘Zaterdag 10 Juni, 19.30: Openluchtuitvoering: Oud-Nederl. Liederen / Saturday, June 10, 7.30p.m.: Open Air Performance: Old Dutch Folk Songs’, in Officieel Programma Elfde Muziekfeest / Official Programme Eleventh Festival: Amsterdam, 9–15 Juni 1933 (1933), 17–20, British Library; ‘Réception et concert à Versailles en l’honneur de la S.I.M.C.: Mecredi 23 Juin 1937: Concert à 5 heures à la Grande Galerie du Trianon: Concert Versaillais à l’Époque de Louis XIV’, in Société Internationale pour la Musique Contemporaine: XVe Festival (1937), 25, British Library. The chiming

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The peripatetic festival represented a partial, temporary reconciliation between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitan and transnational culture of musical modernism, and on the other, the enduring power of nationality as a category for taxonomizing cultures and the continued concentration of art music’s institutional resources in national and municipal organisations.20 For the ISCM and its local collaborators, this arrangement represented a mutually beneficially exchange: the former gained access to the resources needed for festival- making, while the latter were rewarded with a high-profile stage on which to present themselves internationally. Even so, it was never easy to balance the interests and agendas of the multiple parties involved. One strategy was to insist on the compartmentalisation of the programme. We can observe this in Casella’s picture/frame distinction, which served not simply as a way of describing the festival, but also as a basis for arguing that its constituent parts were independent and incommensurable. After the Siena festival, Casella noted, some attendees ‘protested that the frame was better than the picture’.21 1928 was not a unique year in this respect: critics regularly fretted that the supplementary events had been superior in quality and interest to the main concerts, an inversion of the expected hierarchy often taken as evidence of a state of crisis, either for the ISCM specifically or contemporary music more generally.22 For Casella, though, such ‘insinuations’ could be ignored, since ‘no comparison can be made between an ultra-modern musical “picture” and a frame which is historic or of an ancient art’.23 But if they diverged so radically, why did the ‘ultra-modern’ and the

‘historic’ belong together in the same festival? And why bother to insist so firmly that the

of the clock is described in Erich Steinhard, ‘Das Internationale Musikfest in Amsterdam’, Der Auftakt 9, no. 7–8 (1933), 102–6 (p. 102). 20 On cosmopolitanisms and nationalisms as mutually generative, see Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Gooley (convenor), ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism, 1848–1914’. Compare Patricia Clavin’s observation that a ‘transnational community’ does not necessarily erode national boundaries, but can act as ‘a honeycomb, a structure which sustains and gives shape to the identities of nation-states, institutions and particular social and geographic space’; Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, 438–39. 21 Casella, ‘Siena’s Festival’, 35. 22 See, for example, Henry Prunières, ‘S.I.M.C.: Le VIIIe Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine à Liége’, La Revue Musicale 11, no. 108 (October 1930), 257–262. 23 Casella, ‘Siena’s Festival’, 35.

117 frontier between them was impermeable, unless the relationship was, in reality, more uncertain?

Deep England

No host country of an interwar ISCM festival had a more tortured relationship with its own musical tradition than Britain. Das Land ohne Musik, Oscar Schmitz’s pejorative coinage of

1914, continued to haunt British musicians in the 1920s and 30s.24 In the aftermath of the

1930 ISCM festival, Henry Prunières, the eminent Parisian critic, had provocatively suggested that the quantity of British works far outweighed their quality, an imbalance he attributed to a sense of obligation to the British section for having provided an office in

London for the organisation’s headquarters.25 He clearly touched a nerve: the Monthly

Musical Record, bristling with indignation, declared that Prunières had ‘allowed himself a reflection which went, in our opinion, beyond the bounds of fair criticism, used though

English musicians are to the typical attitude of Continental criticism, which seems to regard it as in some way an affront to the order of things that we should have a music of our own’.26

In the run-up to the 1931 ISCM festival, held in Oxford and London, such insecurities fed an anxious atmosphere. Dent had long been concerned with bolstering the international standing of British music, and cherished the ISCM’s potential as a means to achieve this end.27 But with less than two weeks to go, he admitted to a friend: ‘I shall be glad when the

24 See Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 83–111. 25 Prunières, ‘Le VIIIe Festival de la SIMC à Liége’, 258. 26 ‘Notes of the Day’, Monthly Musical Record 60, no. 720 (December 1930), 357–59 (p. 359). 27 The overlap between Dent’s nationalism and his internationalism is discussed further in Chapter One. In his introduction to the festival programme book, Dent noted: ‘Although the Society’s aims and principles are strictly international, it may yet be opportune to point out to English readers that the Society has already been of great value to English music’; Dent, ‘Introductory Note’, in International Society for Contemporary Music: Ninth Annual Festival, 21–28 July, Oxford and London, England (1931), 3–4 (p. 4), British Library. Some were sceptical of his attitude, however: his friend Vaughan Williams described Dent as ‘too frightened of the foreigner – he is always wondering nervously what the opinion of the foreigner is about us’; Vaughan Williams to Peter Montgomery, June 1930, in Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams, ed. Hugh Cobbe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 181.

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Oxford Festival is over. Somehow I feel more nervous about it than any of the Continental

Festivals[.]’28

Anxieties about how Britain would be viewed by outsiders centred, in the first place, on the resources necessary for an ISCM festival. Although the British section had long hoped to host the festival, in the absence of centralised funding for the arts – a legacy of the laissez- faire economic policies associated with Victorian liberalism – the task was daunting.29 By

1931, though, as its chairman Edwin Evans recounted, ‘the British section felt that it could commit this country to a Festival without fear of humiliating comparisons’.30 The most significant reason was that it had support from a novel kind of a semi-public institution: the

BBC. The broadcaster lent the services of the newly founded BBC Symphony Orchestra

(BBCSO), a securely funded, elite ensemble adequate to the technical challenges of the modernist music programmed at ISCM festivals.31 The BBC also broadcast portions of the main programmes, as well as providing two of its vocal ensembles, deploying its considerable heft as a promoter and taking financial responsibility for the concerts held in the Queen’s

Hall in London.32 Such largesse was not disinterested. The occasion presented the BBC with an opportunity to demonstrate its ambitions to national leadership as a new kind of musical patron: to unveil, as an editorial in the Radio Times declared, ‘the possibility of a new era in

English corporate musical life’.33

28 Dent to Lawrence Haward, 10 July 1931, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/4/111/10/8. 29 As Edwin Evans put it: ‘Elsewhere public bodies, State or Municipal, not only supported the festivals, but took the initiative in offering facilities for them. [...] In England such amenities were privately owned and controlled, and the British Section [...] was in no position to rent them for the purpose. The ambition [to host an ISCM festival] seemed destined to remain a dream’; Evans, ‘The Oxford Festival’, The Bulletin of The British Music Society n.s. 2 (March 1931), 10–11 (p. 10). 30 Evans, ‘New Music from the World’s Four Corners’, Radio Times 32, no. 407 (17 July 1931), 117. 31 Before the founding of the BBCSO, standards of orchestral playing in 1920s London had been low, a situation highlighted all too clearly by a visit from the precise and professional Berlin Philharmonic in December 1928. See Kenyon, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, 8–15; Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 204–8. 32 For a table of what was broadcast, see Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 216. Internal BBC documentation suggests that it made a substantial loss on the festival. The box office receipts for the two Queen’s Hall concerts totalled £272.1.8. The budgets for publicity (£175), printing tickets (£13.10.0) and providing the National Chorus with refreshments (£10) – surely only a fraction of all the costs involved – came to nearly £200; Radio Files, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, R30/2/399/1: Outside Broadcasts – Queen’s Hall, International Festival, 12 June 1931, 29 July 1931. 33 Editorial, Radio Times 32, no. 410 (7 August 1931) 274.

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The BBC’s contributions were limited to the main programmes of contemporary music. None of the other concerts was broadcast, an arrangement that seems to confirm that the supplementary events were aimed more at the international visitors than a domestic audience. The festival’s ‘frame’ was organised by a temporary coalition, which included the

Camargo Society, the recently formed ballet company, and the music department at Oxford

University Press.34 Of these additional collaborators, Oxford University and its colleges played the most substantial role, providing concert venues, accommodation and musical entertainments. Although it was necessary to decamp to London for the orchestral concerts, the support of the University enabled the first six days of the festival to be held in Oxford. To the consternation of the BBC, given its financial outlay on the Queen’s Hall concerts, promotion and discussion of the festival tended to focus far more on Oxford than London; it was often referred to simply as ‘the Oxford festival’.35

The ‘dead city of Oxford’, ancient ghosts at every corner, might seem an unlikely candidate to host a festival of cutting-edge modernism.36 As the ‘frame’ events reveal, though, Oxford became central to the effort to showcase national heritage, and thus to demonstrate that Britain was not an inherently unmusical country. There were some tensions among the organisers about how this should be achieved. Resisting the demands of

34 The involvement of these additional collaborators was driven by a mixture of affinities with the ISCM’s aims, personal ties with other figures involved in the festival and ambitions to enhance international reputations. Evans was a driving force in the Camargo Society, as well as the ISCM. At a committee meeting following the festival, he is said to have remarked that the ballet company had now ‘stepped on to the map of Europe’; Lydia Lopokova to Geoffrey Keynes, 7 August 1931, in From Parry to Britten, ed. Foreman, 148. Hubert Foss, who ran the music department at Oxford University Press (OUP), was an enthusiast of contemporary music and generally supportive of the ISCM; see Duncan Hinnells, An Extraordinary Performance: Hubert Foss and the Early Years of Music Publishing at the Oxford University Press (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). As well as offering Foss the opportunity to strengthen his international standing and connections, the festival also served to advertise several works published by OUP; see Oxford University Press, ‘Modern Music in the Oxford Catalogue: A Miscellany of Notable Issues’, in International Society for Contemporary Music: Ninth Annual Festival, 30. Moreover, much of the English choral music performed in the ‘frame’ events had been published in OUP’s landmark series Tudor Church Music (1922–29). 35 In May 1931, the BBC’s W.W. Thompson observed in a memo that the promotional material, ‘in spite of our requests for its inclusion, omits “London” from the announcement of the Festival’ – a point that was swiftly raised with the British section of the ISCM; Radio Files, BBC Written Archives Centre, R30/2/399/1: Outside Broadcasts – Queen’s Hall, International Festival, 15 May 1931, 18 May 1931. 36 Adolfo Salazar, ‘Oxford (1931)’, in La música actual en Europa y sus problemas (Madrid, 1935), 195–241 (p. 197).

120 the BBC, Dent protested any efforts to make the capital more prominent. After a meeting about the festival in the summer of 1930, he complained:

apparently Evans is doing his best to shift the centre of gravity (or levity) to London instead of Oxford. The BBC orchestra must play its 2 concerts for them in London: and Evans wants to rope in the Lord Mayor and a garden party at Buckingham Palace – It all sounds like a top-hat festival – which is a bloody nuisance. If this is carried through I shall resign the presidency definitely on grounds of health.37

As we saw in Chapter One, Dent strongly favoured intimacy and authenticity over pomp and circumstance. He also had a vested interest in ensuring the international renown of

Oxbridge. These preferences emerged as dominant at the 1931 festival; there would be little trace of the metropolitan grandeur apparently favoured by Evans. Instead, the ‘frame’ events at Oxford fell into a pattern also seen at the ‘Cambridge Festival of English Music A.D. 1200 to 1700’ that Dent would organise in 1933, for the benefit of the visiting delegates at that year’s IMS congress.38 On both occasions, the more understated brand of national culture involved was specifically English, even though the ISCM festival was organised by the British section (since it was decreed in the organisation’s statutes that the national branches must map onto nation-states). In contrast to international exhibits and musical activities that celebrated London as an imperial metropolis, there was no acknowledgement at Oxford that the British Empire even existed.39 Instead, the festival invoked what the historian Angus

Calder called ‘deep England’: a nationalist myth, especially prevalent in the interwar period, that fused cherished cultural heritage with an idealised vision of rural areas in the south.40

One reason Dent was so obstinate about Oxford was that its associations were integral to how this vision of Englishness was to be projected. In an article preparing

German-language readers for the forthcoming festival, he suggested that visitors ‘will soon

37 Dent to J.B. Trend, 30 June 1930, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/4/111/17/6. 38 Cambridge Festival of English Music A.D. 1200 to 1700: July 29th to August 3rd, 1933 (1933), Centre for Performance History: Keith Falkner Collection, Royal College of Music Library, London. 39 One prominent example would be the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley Park from April 1924 to October 1925, which attracted visitors in their millions. Compare, too, the musical practices described in Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 40 Angus Calder, ‘Deep England’, in The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 180–208. See also Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880– 1920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–111.

121 discover that London is not the whole of England. The inner life of England is to be found in the provinces and the countryside.’41 The additional travel beyond the capital was thus framed as a pilgrimage of discovery. In a situation akin to non-metropolitan opera festivals such as Bayreuth and Salzburg – or, in Britain, Glyndebourne and Aldeburgh – the journey offered an escape from the potentially corrupting forces of large cities, in search of more

‘authentic’ experience. As with these opera festivals, this was a highly convenient pilgrimage: sufficiently remote to feel like an escape, yet easily reached from larger centres.42

Before they made that journey, visitors were primed to view Oxford through the optics of ‘deep England’. The 1931 festival’s promotional materials talked up the city’s appeal by describing its significance as a cultural heritage site and the beauty of the surrounding countryside.43 In a similar vein, the quaintly picturesque imagery of the programme book – which showed Oxford’s famous spires emerging serenely from behind open fields (Figure 7)

– was far removed from what we might expect to find at a festival of musical modernism.

The city was also conveniently situated for accessing heritage sites such as Stratford-upon-

Avon and Warwick Castle, which guests visited on coach tours specially organised by

Thomas Cook. These trips also celebrated the rural: on Saturday 25 July, for instance, attendees were offered an excursion to quaint villages in the Cotswolds – Burford, Bibury and Fairford – taking in what J.B. Priestley would describe in 1934 as ‘the most English and the least spoiled of all our countrysides’.44

41 ‘er wird bald entdecken, daß London nicht ganz England ist. Das innere Leben Englands ist in der Provinz und auf dem Lande zu finden’; Dent, ‘Englische Musik’, Der Auftakt 11, no. 6–7 (1931), 158– 61 (p. 158). 42 ‘Special travel facilities and cheap tickets for journeys to and from Oxford to London’ were arranged for the festival; editorial, The Musical Mirror and Fanfare 11, no. 7 (July 1931), 201. Suzanne Aspden has recently described the journey from an urban centre to a rural milieu – ‘made to feel both achievably straightforward and enticingly removed’ – as a core component of the ‘experiential economy’ of English country-house opera, with its nostalgic and elitist escapism; Suzanne Aspden, ‘“A Great Private Party”: The Participatory Theatrics of Country-House Operagoing’, The Opera Quarterly 35, no. 1–2 (2019), 96–117 (pp. 98, 107). See also Ward-Griffin, ‘Theme Park Britten’, 73, 78–79. 43 A promotional pamphlet for the festival described Oxford as ‘rich in associations with learning, scholarship, and culture for over 800 years’, and noted its location ‘in the heart of rural England’; The International Society for Contemporary Music: The Ninth Annual Festival will be held in Oxford, England, July 21-28, 1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 6, Henschel Collection, British Library, Box 20. 44 J.B. Priestley, English Journey (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934), 37.

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Figure 7: International Society for Contemporary Music: Ninth Annual Festival, 21–28 July, Oxford and London, England (1931), cover page. British Library.

The nostalgic form of national myth-making involved in the privileging of Oxford and its environs has been referred to in accounts of early twentieth-century musical culture as

‘historical-pastoral’ Englishness; it has been associated especially with Ralph Vaughan

Williams, and his passions for folksong and Tudor music.45 The concerts organised at Oxford invoked much the same corpus of national musical heritage. This conveniently enabled them to skip over the awkward period – from Bach to Brahms, as Dent put it – in which Britain had failed to produce any composers of international repute.46 Jumping back past the supposedly barren years, the Oxford concerts emphasised choral music from the Tudor era

45 Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 74–82. 46 Dent, ‘Englische Musik’, 159.

123

(with pride of place for Byrd, Gibbons and Tallis), whose revival over the previous three decades had always involved ‘historical-pastoral’ invocations of ‘merrie England’.47

On the opening night of the festival, the illustrious international visitors – who included Aaron Copland, Alois Hába and the presumably sceptical Prunières – were greeted at Oxford Town Hall with a concert by the choirs of New College and Christ Church. They sang a selection of old English vocal works, sacred and secular, mostly dating from the sixteenth century, but also ranging to the famous thirteenth-century rota ‘Sumer is icumen in’ and pieces by Purcell and Blow. Local critics were delighted with this showcase of the

‘ancient glory of English Music’, which was thought to present ‘an imposing array of some of the finest music written for choir’.48 Such reports indicate the depth of shared pride in a choral repertoire and performance style which, given the distinctive history of the Anglican liturgy, could be understood as a unique national achievement.49 But facing the scrutiny of outsiders, pride came hand-in-hand with defensiveness. ‘The variety and astonishing vitality of our early vocal music’, wrote the critic Eric Blom, ‘did not fail to arouse admiration, and more than admiration among those who may have thought that they had come to a country which would give a week’s music only by borrowing from the Continental schools.’50

In the days that followed, the core concerts of contemporary chamber music featured works by Roger Sessions, Egon Wellesz and other forward-thinking composers of the day.

But the Oxford part of the festival concluded by again looking back, with a second concert of old English music at Christ Church Cathedral, where listeners were struck by the affinities

47 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 36–38; Suzanne Cole, ‘“A Great National Heritage”: The Early Twentieth-Century Tudor Church Music Revival’, in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2011), 79–96. 48 L. Dunton Green, ‘The International Music Festival at Oxford and London’, The Chesterian 13, no. 97 (September–October 1931), 15–22 (p. 15). 49 This idea fed into the wider claim that a singular emphasis on particular kinds of voices and vocality distinguished English music from the instrumental foundations of continental traditions (and especially the Austro-German one); see Dent, ‘On the Composition of English Songs’, Music & Letters 6, no. 3 (1925), 224–35; idem, ‘Englische Musik’, 160. On this trope more generally, and the ties between early twentieth-century attempts to recover an authentic, pre-modern English voice and the imagining of an idealised rural past, see Ceri Owen, ‘Making an English Voice: Performing National Identity During the English Musical Renaissance’, Twentieth-Century Music 13, no. 1 (2016), 77–107. 50 Eric Blom, ‘Modern Music at Oxford: The International Society’s Festival’, The Manchester Guardian (23 July 1931), 12.

124 between the repertoire and the venue.51 ‘There could be no better setting for such music than

Christ Church,’ wrote one local journalist, ‘and both the scene and the performance were typically English, and should have provided the foreign members of the festival, on the eve of their departure, with a lingering flavour of Oxford at its supreme best.’52 As others noted, the

Purcell Fantasias performed by the International String Quartet ‘sounded very beautiful with the slight additional resonance imparted by the building’; the cathedral’s acoustic, in other words, rendered audible the synthesis of music and architecture.53

While the concert at Christ Church represented the festival’s ‘historical’ apotheosis, the most vivid experiences of the ‘pastoral’ came at the garden party held at Wytham Abbey the previous afternoon. Amidst the ancient woodlands of the 3000-acre estate, visitors enjoyed the famous national tradition of afternoon tea.54 As they did so, they were treated to one of the pillars of England’s turn-of-the-century folk music revival: the Morris dancing of

Oxfordshire.55 At Wytham, said Blom, ‘the foreign visitors saw English folk dances performed on the lawn, not by any society organised for their resurrection, but by the country people who still keep them alive’.56 The involvement of these ‘country people’ must have seemed to affirm Dent’s claim in the run-up to the festival that folk traditions in

England had not been absorbed into bourgeois culture (as he said they had in nineteenth- century Germany), but ‘had remained buried in the memory of the true peasantry’.57

Because of the collaborative nature of festival-making, alternative visions of national heritage could not be banished entirely: in London, an additional, ‘unofficial’ concert,

51 The connections were deliberately foregrounded through programming. The concert began with a group of compositions by John Taverner, who had been the first director of its choir in 1526–30; this link was highlighted to visitors by the festival programme book, as was the fact that the concert’s opening item, the motet ‘Christe Jesus, Pastor Bone’, was ‘from a manuscript in Christ Church library’; International Society for Contemporary Music: Ninth Annual Festival, 41. 52 ‘International Music Festival: Ballets at New Theatre: Brilliant Performances of Modern Work’, The Oxford Times (31 July 1931), 15. 53 ‘Old Music and New’, The Times (27 July 1931), 8. See also Salazar, ‘Oxford (1931)’, 223. 54 On the history of the woods and manor, see C.M. Perrins, ‘Introduction’, in Wytham Woods: Oxford’s Ecological Laboratory, ed. P.S. Savill et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–17. 55 It was in Headington in 1899 that Cecil Sharp had his transformative encounter with Morris dancing, supposedly the initial inspiration for his later activities as a collector and promotor of folk traditions. See Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 24–26. 56 Eric Blom, ‘Music of the Month’, The Listener 6, no. 135 (12 August 1931), 251. 57 ‘waren im Gedächtnis des echten Landvolkes verborgen geblieben’; Dent, ‘Englische Musik’, 159.

125 subsidised by the philanthropist Percy Malcolm Stewart, offered a survey of English music that incorporated varied works by living and late-nineteenth-century composers, including part-songs by Parry, Stanford and Elgar.58 Yet even in this concert – which began with yet more Tudor madrigals and ended with folksong arrangements by Vaughan Williams and others – the ‘historical-pastoral’ remained a key frame of reference. It was a relatively recent invention, which reduced a complex history into a readily identifiable cluster of symbols.59 At the 1931 festival, simplification was necessary: the task of providing inquisitive visitors with the authentic essence of musical Englishness in a week required a shorthand that could be easily exported, a situation that reminds us of the need to study even the most insular- seeming nationalisms in their transnational context. In the Oxford portion of the festival, a flimsily reductive image of national culture was realised as compellingly full-bodied immersion, thanks to the power of multi-sensory experiences that cut across the boundary between the ‘musical’ and the ‘non-musical’. As in Danielle Ward-Griffin’s account of the

Aldeburgh Festival as ‘theme park Britten’, such events absorbed their visitors into enveloping, touristic experiences of a constructed version of local culture, in which music and the environment of its performance became inextricably entwined.60

In the aftermath of the 1931 festival, the British organisers were pleased with the effects of their efforts to impress their guests. Evans may not have got his party at

Buckingham Palace, but he still felt that the festival ‘has done something to dispel the

58 Monday, July 27, 3 p.m., in the QUEEN’S HALL, LONDON: A Concert of English Music: By kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. P. Malcolm Stewart [1931], Heinz-Tiessen-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, 2109. As one British critic wrote, whereas ‘[t]he English music at Oxford had all been music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, the ‘unofficial concert of modern English music [...] was designed to show our guests some of the fruits of the Victorian renaissance’; ‘Modern English Music: Festival Concert at Queen’s Hall’, The Times (28 July 1931), 10. 59 The ‘historical-pastoral’ term has been criticised by some scholars of British music, who view it as crudely reductive of interwar musical culture (and the work of Vaughan Williams more specifically). See Alain Frogley’s trenchant review of Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance: ‘Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music Since 1840’, Music & Letters 84, no. 2 (2003), 241–57. Two landmark efforts to reassess Vaughan Williams’s pastoralism are: Eric Saylor, ‘‘“It’s Not Lambkins Frisking at All”: English Pastoral Music and the Great War’, The Musical Quarterly 91, no. 1–2 (2008), 39–59; Daniel M. Grimley, ‘Landscape and Distance: Vaughan Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral’, in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 147–74. 60 Ward-Griffin, ‘Theme Park Britten’.

126 ignorance which prevails concerning our musical status’.61 Dent singled out the impact of the supplementary events, claiming that the international visitors:

were delighted with Colonel ffennell’s garden-party and the folk-dances and folksongs performed at it. They were lost in admiration for the Tudor music and the singing of it by the choirs of Christ Church and New College. That was something new as well as beautiful, and something which no Continental country could produce at all.62

It was true that responses to the presentation of national culture in the festival’s auxiliary events were generally favourable. With an eye, perhaps, to the nationalist-inflected early music movement in his own country, Guido Gatti informed Italian readers that, thanks to the revival of works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English composers, ‘the slandered

“land without music” is legitimately reclaiming the honour of the first ranks’.63 Gatti shared with his British hosts the experience of living in a semi-periphery of musical modernism.

Those residing in the centre took a more condescending view: to Paul Stefan, writing for the prestigious Viennese journal Anbruch, it seemed by the end of the festival that ‘one of the future countries of music is arising here’.64 This is back-handed praise indeed, revealing its author’s conviction in the superiority of Austro-German traditions. In the face of such deep- rooted hierarchies, it would take more than one festival to shake off the dubious reputation of British music.

Patchwork internationalism

We can well understand why the 1931 festival’s British organisers were keen to offer a display of their slighted national heritage. But why were the festival’s international visitors generally so enthusiastic about programmes which they knew were driven by self-interested

61 Evans, ‘Music: The International Festival II. – London’, Time and Tide (15 August 1931), Press Cuttings, BBC Written Archives Centre, P449/5: Broadcasting Press Cuttings – Outside Broadcasts – Concerts etc (1931): Contemporary Music. 62 Dent, ‘British Music Abroad’, Monthly Musical Record 61, no. 731 (November 1931), 321–24 (p. 323). 63 ‘la calunniata “terra senza musica” reclama legittimamente l’onore delle prime file’; Guido M. Gatti, ‘Lettera da Oxford: Il nono festival della “S.I.M.C.”’, La Rassegna Musicale 4, no. 5 (September 1931), 297–301 (p. 300). 64 ‘hier eines der Zukunftsländer der Musik erwächst’; Paul Stefan, ‘Herbst 1931’, Anbruch 6, no. 7 (September–October 1931), 141–44 (p. 142).

127 nationalism? And why did nobody find it incongruous to hear college choirs sing Byrd and

Tallis at a festival of contemporary music? One factor here was the widespread belief that early music possessed significant and instructive affinities with contemporary styles. This broadly ‘neoclassical’, anti-Romantic impulse – diagnosed and promulgated by Dent among others – was evident across a range of interwar musical modernisms.65 It helped establish a modernist strategy of concert programming in which old and new were juxtaposed.66 Such concerts were underpinned by a rapport that was social as well as aesthetic: contemporary and early music were niche areas that drew in smaller, more elite audiences, keen to venture beyond the familiar classics enjoyed by the public at large in major concert halls and opera houses.

One notable and expanding group of early music devotees was musicologists. They often had close relations in this period with modernist composers, with whom they shared an ambition to look beyond the canon (one group into the past, the other into the future). A substantial proportion of those who travelled to ISCM gatherings – Dent emblematic among them – were active in musicology. For such an audience, already predisposed towards antiquarianism as well as modernism, hearing early music at these festivals was exciting because, in contrast to the institutionalised canon of mainstream concert life, its repertories were distinctive to different countries.67 With the exception of a handful of big names (above all Bach and Handel), the early music revival remained to a large extent driven by nationalist

65 At the concurrent gatherings of the ISCM and IMS in Barcelona in 1936, Dent is reported to have declared: ‘One can only love and understand new music if one loves and studies the old – and vice versa’ (‘Man kann die neue Musik nur lieben und verstehen, wenn man die alte liebt und studiert – und umgekehrt’); quoted in Cherbuliez, ‘Internationale Musiktage in Barcelona’. This ‘neoclassical’ strand of Dent’s thinking is described further in Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 245–46. In English culture specifically, there was a developing trend across the arts of attempting to fuse modernism with local heritage and pastoralism; see Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010). 66 Compare, for example, the strategies of concert programming described in Brooks, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger. 67 The Spanish critic Adolfo Salazar, one international visitor to the 1931 festival, welcomed the opportunity to hear old English music, which ‘is very little known outside the island kingdom’ (‘se conoce muy poco fuera del reino isleño’); Salazar, ‘Oxford (1931)’, 219. Evans reported that ‘Sumer is icumen in’ had to be repeated at the opening concert, because ‘some of those present had hitherto believed that it existed only on paper!’; Evans, ‘The Oxford Festival’, The Musical Times 72, no. 1063 (September 1931), 803–6 (p. 804).

128 agendas and divided into national silos. Given visitors’ appetites to discover local traditions, displays of national heritage could be presented as selfless and neighbourly. Concerts of early music could thus be placed alongside, say, the provision of alcohol as evidence of the hosts’ generous welcome.68

Some modes of nationalistic early music performance were more amenable to this framing than others. Given Dent’s aversion to public spectacle, there was nothing at the 1931 festival resembling the massed performances of Handel’s oratorios held at London’s Crystal

Palace from the 1850s until 1926.69 Drawing on the supposedly ‘universal’ qualities of

Handel’s achievement, these gargantuan events had celebrated Victorian values – communal effort, public education, muscular Christianity – associated less with Englishness than with

Britishness and Empire.70 The ‘monumentalised’ approach to early music, with performers and listeners in their thousands, was far removed from the ISCM’s modernist aesthetics.71 As a participatory experience of massed communitas, a monumental Messiah would have been little suited to a mode of internationalist hospitality in which foreign visitors were welcomed, but retained their distinct identities as outsiders. The displays of early music favoured at

ISCM festivals conjured a touristic sense of immersion in the traditions of a certain place; but they remained fully ‘presentational’ performances, rather than ‘participatory’ ones, and thus preserved a respectful distance between the local hosts and the international guests.72

This differentiation needed to be sustained for the performances to be understood as hospitable acts of gift-giving between distinct groups. Opening an international festival of

68 Drinking at the 1931 festival – including beer from a silver tankard at the Mayor’s office and wine in the cellars of New College – is described at length in Salazar, ‘Oxford (1931)’, 198–201. 69 Michael Musgrave, ‘The Handel Festivals, 1857–1926’, in The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27–57; Fiona M. Palmer, ‘The Large-Scale Oratorio Chorus in Nineteenth-Century England: Choral Power and the Role of Handel’s Messiah’, in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe, ed. Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 99–110. 70 Palmer, ‘The Large-Scale Oratorio Chorus in Nineteenth-Century England’, 99–100. Handel’s ‘real’ nationality was, of course, a more complicated question than Byrd’s or Purcell’s. 71 Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth- Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). On large-scale Handel performances falling out of fashion in the early twentieth-century, see Musgrave, ‘The Handel Festivals’, 54–57. 72 The distinction between ‘participatory’ and ‘presentational’ performance is borrowed from Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 23–65.

129 contemporary music with a concert of English madrigals and motets may appear a

‘seemingly paradoxical plan of action’, wrote one British critic at Oxford, but it is

‘fundamentally justified’ because:

The essence of internationalism in art, as in everything else, lies in mutual knowledge and understanding, and the clue to present activities can only be found in the past. [...] Consequently a concert which seeks to make the great English art of the past more familiar and accessible to our distinguished foreign visitors is indirectly performing a service of both international and contemporary importance.73

By this logic, nationalist and internationalist interests were perfectly aligned: by helping others to appreciate your own traditions, you also helped them become better world citizens.

In these kinds of accounts, the traditional cosmopolitan virtue of hospitality towards strangers was refracted through a vision of internationalism in which it was taken for granted that cultural exchange necessarily occurred between pre-existing national blocs. As another British critic explained when the festival returned to Britain for the London instalment of 1938, the custom of the host country displaying ‘its national art’ was:

partly that of a host bringing out from his store special treasures for his guest, who would not find these particular things in his own country, but still more is it a deliberate attempt to foster a healthy international spirit based on the sound doctrine that it is better to contribute to the common stock what is distinctive than to strive for a cosmopolitan uniformity.74

The argument here is premised on what we might call ‘patchwork’ internationalism: the idea that each nation best contributes to the world at large by pursuing its inherent uniqueness, and that international understanding is served by helping outsiders to recognise the singular traditions and capabilities of other countries.

This cultural and political framework had its roots in nineteenth-century ‘nationalist cosmopolitics’, a worldview in which national particularism was conceived as the necessary intermediary through which individuals served the universal human community.75 In the

1850s, Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the era’s most influential nationalist cosmopolitans,

73 Cecil Gray, ‘The Oxford Festival: Concert of Choral Music’, The Daily Telegraph (23 July 1931), 8. 74 ‘International Music Festival: English Traditional Dances’ (1938), Edwin Evans clippings collection, Westminster Music Library. 75 Daniel S. Malachuk, ‘Nationalist Cosmopolitics in the Nineteenth Century’, in Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future, ed. Diane Morgan and Gary Banham (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 139–62.

130 envisaged a peaceful brotherhood of sovereign nation-states, which would be ‘the citizens of humanity, just as individuals are the citizens of the nation’.76 Such ideas had their complement in the musical sphere: many a nineteenth-century musical nationalist believed, as Celia Applegate states, that ‘people could actively assert their membership in human society through their own national culture and its dissemination abroad’.77 After the First

World War, this Romantic inheritance gained renewed impetus; it became a widespread and even dominant discourse.78 With the fall of the Romanov and Hapsburg Empires, Europe had been radically reorganised to conform, for the first time, with Mazzini’s vision of independent nation-states, whose legitimacy lay in their supposed capacity for ‘self- determination’. The new European order was firmly inter-national. It was embodied in the

League of Nations: the ‘emphatically descriptive name’, as Patricia Clavin observes, of an organisation that ‘presented a vision of the world where the unit that counted was the nation state’.79

In the transformed geopolitical situation, patchwork internationalism spoke to the pressing question of how international relations would now be practised. Amidst the reconciliations of the 1920s, it offered a political rhetoric with which to assert that compromise was not the same as capitulation: after the signing of the Locarno treaties in

1925, which confirmed an emerging Franco-German rapprochement (as discussed in

Chapter One), the French president Aristide Briand optimistically predicted ‘the renewal of

76 Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘The Holy Alliance of the Peoples’ (1849), quoted in Malkki, ‘Citizens of Humanity’, 41. On Mazzini as proto-internationalist thinker, see Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 48–54. 77 Celia Applegate, ‘The Internationalism of Nationalism: Adolf Bernhard Marx and German Music in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Modern European History 5, no. 1 (2007), 139–59 (p. 157). On ‘nationalist cosmopolitics’ in nineteenth-century musical culture, see Gooley, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism’, ed. Gooley, 523–29. See also Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth- Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989), 35–41. 78 In musical culture, one high-profile advocate was Vaughan Williams, who argued in 1932: ‘It is because Palestrina and Verdi are essentially Italian and because Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner are essentially German that their message transcends their frontiers. [...] When the United States of the World becomes, as I hope it will, an established fact, those will serve that universal State best who bring into the common fund something that they and they only can bring’; Vaughan Williams, ‘National Music’ (1932), in National Music and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1–82 (pp. 9, 71). 79 Clavin, Securing the World Economy, 6–7.

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Europe, its investment with its true character, by means of a general union in which all nations will be invited to participate each according to their specific qualifications’.80 Two years later, in a speech delivered at the large-scale international music exhibition held in

Frankfurt (whose programme of spin-off events included that year’s ISCM festival, again as discussed in Chapter One), Éduoard Herriot, France’s Minister for Public Education, declared: ‘Whoever wants to have the right to call themselves international should in the first instance be national’ – a statement met, it was reported, with ‘frenetic applause’.81

The acclaim was probably also an outburst of relief. For in 1920s Europe, many felt the integrity and independence of the nation to be imperilled. Such fears were, in part, a legacy of total war: the threats of violence, domination and utter destruction remained fresh memories. But they stemmed just as much from the social and cultural transformations wrought by early twentieth-century modernity: the growing interconnectedness of the world raised fears that it would become either blandly homogenous or compliant to one set of hegemonic interests. Especially among the politically conservative, the word ‘international’ was suspect, both because of its associations with communism, and because it seemed to imply complicity with historical processes that threatened to overwhelm distinctive national traditions. In musical culture, these phobias were epitomised by the writings of Hans

Pfitzner, who, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, railed against a cluster of supposed anti-

German conspiracies: internationalism, modernism, jazz, Americanisation, communism,

Jews.82 (In late 1922, Pfitzner was invited to become a founding member of the German section of the ISCM; predictably, he declined.83) Anxieties about the erasure of national identity were not, however, exclusive to the xenophobic Right: they drew oxygen across the

80 Le Figaro (2 December 1925), quoted in Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, 47. Emphasis added. 81 Frankfurter Zeitung (12 June 1927), quoted in Laqua, ‘Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe’, 211. 82 Marc A. Weiner, ‘Music in the Modern Imagination: The Polemics of Hans Pfitzner’, in Undertones of Insurrection: Music and Cultural Politics in the Modern German Narrative, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 33–71. 83 Adolf Weissmann to Pfitzner, 10 November 1922; Pfitzner to German section of the ISCM, 11 December 1922, Hans Pfitzner Nachlass, Musiksammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, F68.Pfitzner.2100/1, F68.Pfitzner.407.

132 political spectrum from what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht identifies as the broadly shared unease during the 1920s about whether individuality could ‘maintain its independence against a hostile and overwhelmingly powerful society’.84

In response to such concerns, by the end of the First World War it became conventional, as the historian Glenda Sluga has shown, to distinguish between ‘good’ and

‘bad’ internationalism. The former was ‘the complement of nationalism’; the latter was

‘antinationalist and took the specific name of cosmopolitan internationalism’.85 This distinction can be observed in any number of sources from the interwar years. ‘An internationalism worthy of the name’, wrote the French sociologist Marcel Mauss in 1920, ‘is the opposite of cosmopolitanism. It does not deny the nation. It situates it.’86 This binary powerfully shaped discourse about musical internationalism, as we see in the account of the

1938 ISCM festival that distinguished between ‘healthy international spirit’ and

‘cosmopolitan uniformity’. The distinction was entangled with metaphors of breeding and heredity – our critic from 1938 speaks of ‘the common stock’ – which indicate the enduring association of culture and race in this period. Although this style of articulating internationalism was often tied to progressive causes, seeking to reign in nationalist excesses, the concomitant disavowal of cosmopolitan had a dark side: it was closely tied to phobias of subversion, impurity and miscegenation. In a tradition inherited from the nineteenth century (familiar to music historians from Wagner’s most repugnant writings),

‘cosmopolitanism’ was used as a shorthand for Others cast out by the inter-national order and thus representing an apparent threat to it. As Sluga puts it, the word served ‘as a code for

84 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Individuality vs. Collectivity’, in In 1926, 293–302 (p. 293). 85 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 43. 86 Marcel Mauss, ‘La nation et l’internationalisme’ (1920), quoted in Malkki, ‘Citizens of Humanity’, 55. In his acceptance speech for the 1921 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian historian and internationalist organiser Christian Lange drew much the same distinction: internationalism ‘will develop national characteristics, protect their existence, and free their development’, whereas cosmopolitanism ‘wants to wipe out or at least to minimize all national characteristics, even in the spiritual field’; Christian Lange, ‘Internationalism’ (Nobel Lecture, 1921), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1921/lange/lecture/ (accessed February 2020).

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Jews – as a race without nation – and for the proletarian class-based internationalism perpetrated by revolutionaries everywhere’.87

Those associated with the ISCM were nervous about being tarred with the same brush. As Dent would later recall: ‘Our detractors from the first went about saying (if not writing too) that we were all of us Bolshevists and Jews.’88 From the moment of its founding, the organisation had been attacked on the Right as a subversive promotor of ‘international music’: that is, the dangerously a-national music of cosmopolitan modernism. In contrast to artistic fields where ‘international style’ was embraced as a modernist slogan, those associated with the ISCM insisted that the word ‘international’ in its name referred to the institution’s organisational structure, not its aesthetic principles.89 Rather than directly addressing the moral and political values underpinning the accusations levelled at them, which were often bound up with antisemitic attitudes, the ISCM’s advocates tended to deny their factual accuracy. The ISCM wasn’t an anti-national insurgency, they said, but an innocent forum for cultural exchange; they weren’t bad cosmopolitans, but good internationalists.

It was difficult to extend this claim to all aspects of the ISCM’s activity. As the 1931 festival indicates, the discourse of patchwork internationalism tended to appeal especially to those who lived on the peripheries of musical modernism, since a framework of equivalent national blocs implied a relativizing impulse, flattening the received hierarchy of musical

87 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 44. 88 Dent, ‘Introduction’ [1943], typescript draft of the introduction to an ultimately unpublished book celebrating the 21st anniversary of the ISCM’s founding, provisionally titled Music Between Two Wars, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/1/1/1/2. Such claims were made most vehemently in Germany, though they were not exclusive to there. See Haefeli, IGNM, 77–80. 89 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York and London: Norton, 1995 [1932]). In 1934, Ernst Krenek wrote of ‘the spiteful accusation that has always been made of the existing music society [the ISCM] by nationalists: namely, that it strives for the development of an “international music”. [...] if these hostile insinuations about it [the ISCM] were accurate, then it would need to be named the Society for International Music – which is, however, not the case. Its internationality refers to its organisation, not to the object of its activity’ (‘den gehässigen Vorwurf hinsauslaufen, den man der bisherigen Musikgesellschaft von nationalistischer Seite immer gemacht hat: daß die nämlich die Bildung einer “internationalen Musik” anstrebe. [...] wäre sie das, was man ihr feindselig unterschiebt, so müßte sie Gesellschaft für Internationale Musik heißen, was aber nicht der Fall ist. Ihre Internationalität bezieht sich auf ihre Organisation, nicht auf den Gegenstand ihrer Tätigkeit’); Austriacus [Ernst Krenek], ‘Blubo-Sektion Oesterreich’, 23: Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift, no. 17–19 (15 December 1934), 39–44 (pp. 40–41).

134 nations. (Dent, for one, always insisted that ‘no country [in the ISCM] had any right to make special claims on account of its past history in music’.90) But those residing in the centre, such as Stefan, were more reluctant to think of countries as equal partners. In Vienna and other major centres, influential writers on music continued to use ‘international’ as if it were a cognate of ‘universal’: the opposite, that is, of national provincialism.91 Accordingly, the

‘good internationalist’ emphasis on nationalist particularism co-existed, sometimes awkwardly, with Romantic notions of music as a universal language and the formalist view, fundamental to much interwar modernist discourse, of musical works as abstract structures or pure sound. The belief that music was ‘absolute’ – and could therefore transcend the national – was baked into the jury system, which presupposed that musicians of a certain international stature could stand in judgement over the efforts of composers from other countries. Given these more ambiguous elements of the ISCM’s new-music internationalism, the showcasing of local heritage in the auxiliary events served almost as an alibi: framed as an act of hospitality, it seemed to provide irrefutable evidence that the organisation’s internationalism nurtured national culture, rather than undermined it.

This strategy was impeded by some basic problems. As the tensions between London and Oxford in 1931 exemplify, all countries were internally divided as to what exactly their national culture was. This was most evident where nation and state were not felt to align: where, that is, communities claimed to belong to a national collective distinct from the state of which they were citizens. In the cases of Czechoslovakia and Spain, competing claims to nationhood could not be ignored: as a makeshift solution, both countries came to be represented at the ISCM by two sub-sections – Czech and German-Czech, Spanish and

Catalan – an arrangement which substantially shaped how local culture was displayed at the

90 Dent, ‘Plans for Salzburg’, 696. 91 Guido Adler, ‘Internationalism in Music’, trans. Theodore Baker, The Musical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1925), 281–300. On Adler’s ‘nationalist discourse of hybridity’, which privileged those traditions (especially Austro-German instrumental music) that seemed to synthesise diverse national styles, see Rachel Mundy, ‘Evolutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to America’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (2014), 735–68 (p. 747).

135 festivals in Prague and Barcelona.92 (Casals’s pride in Barcelona – not Madrid – as ‘the musical centre of the world’ certainly emerges in a different light.)

Even where greater consensus could be achieved, as with the dominance of the

‘historical-pastoral’ mode in 1931, other difficulties remained. The use of early music and folk music to display distinctive national traditions begs, rather than addresses, the question of whether the decidedly transnational phenomenon of musical modernism could really be reconciled with a simplistic schema of homologous national units.93 And the outsourcing of the performance of authenticity to local ‘country people’ – as with the Morris dances at

Wytham – seems if anything to underscore the distance between the cosmopolitan, mobile musicians who attended these festivals and other social groups from the same countries.

Once we begin to pick at its threads, the patchwork quickly begins to fray.

Inter-nationalism

The strength of patchwork internationalism lay in its apparent capacity to mask its foundational tensions, lending a veneer of integration and common purpose to the heterogeneity of collaborative festival-making. By providing an internationalist rationale for nationalist display, its rhetoric helped to enable international exchange on a scale that the

ISCM, lacking in material resources, simply could not have achieved without help. But at what costs? Where was the home, in this vision of the ‘international’, for those who fell between the cracks running across and between nation-states, and so could not put on the

92 At the 1924 festival in Prague, the Deutsches Landestheater – where Alexander Zemlinsky, a leading figure in the German-Czech musical community, was the music director – put on its own series of additional concerts, which included the premieres of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Zemlinksy’s Lyric Symphony. On tensions between the Spanish and Catalan groups within the ISCM’s Spanish section, especially around the 1936 festival, see César Calmell i Piguillem, ‘El III Congreso Internacional de Musicología en Barcelona 1936, a partir de la documentación guardada en el Fondo Higini Anglès de la Biblioteca de Catalunya’, Anuario Musical 70 (2015), 161– 78; and Francisco J. Giménez-Rodríguez, ‘Manuel de Falla’s Music in Letters: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Modernism in His Correspondence with Enrique F. Arbós (1916–1939)’, Music & Letters 100, no. 1 (2019), 61–98 (pp. 84–91). 93 This way of imagining the international sphere was also undermined by the cosmopolitanisms of past eras predating the emergence of the modern nation-state. The itinerant careers of Renaissance polyphonists, for instance, could rub awkwardly against a ‘patchwork’ view of international culture; a young composer submitting works to the ISCM could only hope to be as successful as Orlando di Lasso, whose sacred music was heard in the ‘frame’ events of three different festivals (Siena 1928, Liège 1930, Amsterdam 1933) because multiple countries claimed it as their own.

136 kind of showcases of national heritage witnessed at Oxford?94 During the refugee crises of the mid-1930s, individual figures in the ISCM, including Dent, were eager to support their displaced colleagues. But the institution as a whole struggled to develop a coherent response.

One proposal was to establish a special section for ‘independent’ musicians – that is, those who had been forced to emigrate. But this request, which ran counter to the basic logic of patchwork internationalism, was denied.95

The European refugee crisis of the 1930s was precipitated by extreme nationalisms, which appear antithetical to the convivial hospitality evident at Oxford. Yet within the framework of patchwork internationalism, how was it possible to identify – let alone oppose

– forms of nationalism destructive to the common good? And just how great was the distance between ‘good internationalism’ and ultra-nationalism? These problems emerge most forcefully from the three interwar ISCM festivals hosted in Italy: Venice 1925, Siena

1928, Florence 1934. Of the three, Siena had the strongest emphasis on early music. What

Casella called its historical ‘frame’ – the ‘picture’ consisted of concerts of recent works by composers including de Falla, Ravel and Zemlinsky – had much in common with that of the

Oxford festival. It consisted of two concerts, both held in the Basilica of San Francesco (see

Appendix 2). Rome’s Augusteo Orchestra opened the festival on 10 September by performing

Italian music from the baroque and classical periods, including Vivaldi’s Quattro stagioni.

94 The anthropologist Liisa Malkki has critiqued this mode of internationalist thought along the same lines: ‘Only by abandoning the image of world order as an array of distinct nations can we conceptualize difference and global inequality without at the same time producing [...] ambiguous (because nonnational) social and political locations that are cast beyond the bounds of an internationalistically imagined humanity’; Malkki, ‘Citizens of Humanity’, 57. 95 The composer Wladimir Vogel, who had fled Germany in 1933, was left angry and disillusioned by the ISCM’s refusal to take up the plan; Haefeli, IGNM, 255. While the problem was exacerbated in the 1930s, migration had presented a challenge for the ISCM from its foundation. Back in the 1920s, in the context of broader American anxieties about immigration, there had been a fierce debate within the US section about whether it could submit to the ISCM’s international jury the works of composers who were not American citizens; see David Gresham, ‘The International Society for Contemporary Music, United States Section: 1923–1961’ (DMA thesis, The Juilliard School, 1999), 41–43. In a parallel case, Federico Lazzaro has traced the difficulties faced by the Hungarian-born composer Tibor Harsányi, who lived in Paris from 1923, in persuading the French section to submit his music to the jury; Federico Lazzaro, ‘Présentez vos passeports! Les frontières musicales de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, paper presented at the conference ‘Music and Nation, 1918–1945 – Europe-Americas (II): Music, Nationalism and Transnationalism: Diplomacy, Politics, Aesthetics’ (Royal Northern College of Music, November 2016). I am grateful to Federico Lazzaro for sending me the slides from his presentation.

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Three days later, the Polifonica Romana gave a programme of unaccompanied Renaissance polyphony, with a strong emphasis on Palestrina. A further display of local heritage was provided by a specially organised Palio, the famed horserace held by longstanding tradition in Siena’s Piazza del Campo. The race was preceded by a pageant, which offered not only the visual spectacle of traditional costumes, but also the aural enchantments of ‘bells, drums of all sizes, trumpets of silver and the shouting of the crowd’.96 As at Oxford three years later, these touristic events served to immerse the international visitors in heritage that its inheritors felt was misunderstood and underappreciated elsewhere.97

Yet these two festivals also diverged in significant ways. Both events sought to make their visitors forget the nineteenth century, but for contrasting reasons. Whereas British musicians were keen to move on from an era with an inglorious reputation, some of their

Italian equivalents were discomforted by the enduring public popularity of Puccini, Mascagni and other commercially successful turn-of-the-century opera composers. Italian modernists were determined to demonstrate that their country was more than just the home of verismo, a nationalist (and anti-bourgeois) project to which early music was central.98 However, if the supplementary events at the Siena festival were intended to challenge preconceptions about

Italian music, the results were mixed. Some international visitors, committed to a rigorous ideal of Werktreue, were disturbed that Bernadino Molinari, the Augusteo’s director, performed early music in expansively orchestrated, late Romantic arrangements.99 The

96 ‘le campane, i tamburi d’ogni dimensione, le trombe d’argento, il vociare della folla’; Renzo Massarani, ‘Il sesto convegno internazionale di musica moderna a Siena’, Musica d’oggi 10, no. 10 (October 1928), 341–45 (p. 341). 97 The Italian section’s relationship with the rest of the ISCM had been coloured from the off by resentments about perceived slights; after the announcement of the programmes for the first ‘official’ festival in 1923, the section published a letter of protest – complaining that ‘for the second time, Italy is to be represented at Salzburg under conditions of obvious inferiority’ – and almost withdrew from the ISCM entirely; ‘Occasional Notes’, The Musical Times 64, no. 966 (August 1923), 548–551 (p. 549). See also Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei Festivals tra le due guerre’, in Musica italiana del primo Novecento: “La Generazione dell’80”: Atti del Convegno Firenze 9-10-11 maggio 1980, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 141–203 (pp. 144–56). 98 Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 145–47. Class politics are emphasised in Ben Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41. 99 On the symphonic, Romanticised style of Molinari’s Vivaldi arrangements, including the version of the Four Seasons performed at the 1928 festival, see Cesare Fertonani, ‘Edizioni e revisioni vivaldiane in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento (1919–1943)’, Chigiana: Rassegna annuale di studi

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German musicologist Alfred Einstein claimed that the lament from Monteverdi’s Arianna, performed in Ottorino Respighi’s colourful orchestration from 1910, proved that ‘for

Molinari the past exists only to provide show pieces for the present in the spirit of an extremely remote century – the nineteenth’.100 To those who saw themselves as being at the cutting-edge of modern scholarship, sentimental Italy still lagged behind.101

Another crucial difference to the 1931 instalment was that the Italian festivals received direct support from the national government. As the first page of the programme book announced (Figure 8), the Siena festival was held ‘Under the Patronage of His

Eminence the Prime Minister, the Head of the Government’: Benito Mussolini. As well as having the authority of Mussolini’s approval bestowed on it, the festival received 30,000 lire in public funds and was also granted discounted train travel for its delegates (the man who made the trains run on time could also cut their prices).102 For the fascist government, the event provided an international forum in which to present itself as enlightened, generous and effective.103 The festival’s historical ‘frame’ was consistent with the agenda to present a flattering image of the ‘new Italy’; as has been argued elsewhere, proponents of early music in interwar Italy tended to call upon the ideas of strength, vigour and ancient splendour

musicologici 41, n.s. 21 (1989), 235–66 (pp. 240–50). In 1942, Molinari made the first electric recording of the Four Seasons, which gives vivid insight into his luscious, emotive style (especially startling, to twenty-first-century ears, in the slow movement from ‘Winter’): Bernardino Molinari dirige Vivaldi ‘Le Quattro Stagioni’, Orchestra dell’Accademia di San Cecilia, cond. Bernardino Molinari (Ermitage ERM 116S, 1991). 100 Alfred Einstein, ‘The Siena Music Festival: Few Novelties of Real Significance Heard – “Vocal Band” a Unique Feature of International Gathering’, The New York Times (7 October 1928), X8. See also Heinrich Strobel, ‘Die Internationale in Siena’, Melos 7, no. 10 (October 1928), 494–97 (p. 496). 101 The impression would be further confirmed when some locals in the audience at Siena reacted with outrage against the performance of Webern’s String Trio, which almost prompted a fistfight; for the more urbane visitors, this incident (reminiscent of the cry of ‘E ora basta!’ at Venice in 1925, discussed in Chapter One) revealed the Italians’ temperamental incapacity to keep up with modern music; see Haefeli, IGNM, 156–57; Ceriani, ‘Mussolini, la critica musicale italiana e i festival della SIMC in Italia negli anni Venti’, 41–43. 102 Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei Festivals tra le due guerre’, 159–61. 103 By the time the ISCM returned to Italy in 1934, the propagandistic side of the enterprise had become more crudely authoritarian: Mussolini’s Press Office demanded that local critics gave positive write-ups to Italian composers. See Davide Ceriani, ‘“Under the Florentine Sky, with the Clarity of Latin Thought”: Italian Music Critics and the 1934 Meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Music’, in Music Criticism 1900–1950, ed. Jordi Ballester and Germán Gan Quesada (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 421–40.

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Figure 8: Settimana Musicale Senese: VI Festival Internazionale di Musica Moderna della S.I.M.C. organizzato dalla C.D.N.M.: Siena – 10–15 Settembre 1928 – VI (Siena: 1928), inside cover. British Library.

associated with fascist nationalism.104 Siena’s display of a renewed italianità certainly impressed some visitors: after the festival, Dent would write ingratiatingly to Mussolini of how ‘we felt not only the traditional poetry and beauty of the Italian spirit, but also the new stamp imprinted by Your Excellency onto the life of this marvellous Nation’.105

In retrospect, the festivals hosted in fascist Italy have been seen by some as evidence of the ISCM’s political naivety: intoxicated with their own idealism, these musicians appear

104 Andrew Dell’Antonio, ‘Il divino Claudio: Monteverdi and Lyric Nostalgia in Fascist Italy’, Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 3 (1996), 271–84; Iain Fenlon, ‘Malipiero, Monteverdi, Mussolini and Musicology’, in Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr’s Seventieth Birthday, ed. Alison Latham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 241–56; Catherine E. Paul, ‘The Fascist Cultural Nationalism of the Vivaldi Revival’, in Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016), 159–98. 105 ‘noi abbiamo sentito non soltanto la poesia e la bellezza tradizionali dello spirito italiano ma anche l’impronta nuova impressa dall’E.V. alla vita di questa Nazione meravigliosa’; Dent to Mussolini, 15 September 1928, quoted in Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei Festivals tra le due guerre’, 161.

140 to have been easy prey for the canny operators of the fascist state.106 But this perspective oversimplifies the situation, not least because it implies a thoroughly top-down model of culture in totalitarian society – one that seems ill-suited to the multivalent, eclectic approach to arts patronage evident in Mussolini’s Italy, especially up to the mid-1930s.107 Making an international festival always involved an opportunistic scrabble for local support. It was the musicians who instigated the patronage arrangements, actively approaching the state for help and selling the project in terms designed to appeal to politicians.108 In other words, when Dent wrote flatteringly to Mussolini, whose politics he privately deplored, who was manipulating whom? If we use such a document merely to characterise the Italian festivals as fascist bluster, we also fail to capture the fundamental plurality of such events, and thus risk overstating their effectiveness as propaganda. One could also think of the Italian festivals as a means of drawing on the relative latitude afforded to the outsider in order to open up alternative perspectives to the hegemonic discourse of the ruling regime. At the

Florence festival of 1934 – by which time fascism had come to seem significantly more dangerous – Dent used his opening speech, by his own account, to underline ‘the dangers of nationalism and the necessity of free thought and speech for the artist. It was the sort of thing no Italian would dare to say now, but I gathered that they were all enormously pleased to hear someone else say it!’109

The rhetoric of patchwork internationalism helped to enable such dialogue. Yet for a musician such as Casella, it also provided a framework through which to reconcile being both a committed fascist and an influential figure in the ISCM – until, that is, the geopolitical tensions of the later 1930s cut short the Italian section’s participation.110 After the invasion of

106 Haefeli, IGNM, 206–9; Ceriani, ‘Mussolini, la critica musicale italiana e i festival della SIMC in Italia negli anni Venti’. 107 Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy, 66–70; Boyd-Bennett, Opera in Postwar Venice, 6–12. 108 See, for example, Casella to Mussolini, 15 April 1928, quoted in Nicolodi, ‘Su alcuni aspetti dei Festivals tra le due guerre’, 160. 109 Dent to Herbert Thomson, 4 April 1934, in From Parry to Britten, ed. Foreman, 172. 110 For perspectives on Casella’s politics, see Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 134–49; Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy, 93–110; Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 747. From 1936, as Casella himself recounted, Italy’s participation in ISCM

141

Ethiopia in late 1935, Italy pivoted increasingly towards cultural partnerships with Nazi

Germany; the resulting channels of cultural exchange, festivals primary among them, promoted what the historian Benjamin Martin calls the ideology of ‘inter-nationalism’, which

‘allowed “pure” nations, represented by powerful, state-run institutions, to interact profitably with one another without submitting to any new, hybrid, “international culture”’.111

The line between this vision of international cooperation and that underpinning the nationalist display of cultural heritage at ISCM festivals is far from clear; the difference is surely one of degree rather than kind.112 In light of these imbrications with fascist activity, patchwork internationalism leaves a mixed taste. It offered a structure by which cooperation could occur, for a time, across political differences – which, by one definition, would be precisely the purpose of internationalism. But at what point do the multiple impulses of an international festival become sufficiently contradictory that the antagonisms demand to be confronted? For international cooperation, in and of itself, is not always a moral or political good. These are problems that the adherents of the ISCM, falling back on the then predominant discourse of patchwork internationalism, largely sought to wish away.

festivals became limited, following the sanctions imposed on Italy by the League of Nations in response to the invasion of Ethiopia; Casella, Music in My Time, 213. In March 1939, Alessandro Pavolini, the minister of popular culture, instructed Casella to withdraw the Italian section from the ISCM entirely; Casella to Edward Clark, 29 March 1939, Music Collections, British Library, Add. MS 52256; Benjamin G. Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016), 130. 111 Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, 114. 112 The proximity also caused problems for the adherents of exchange among Axis countries, who resorted, as Martin notes, to ‘reductive caricature’ of the rival initiatives of liberal internationalists (using slogans such as ‘international music’); Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, 121.

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Chapter Four

A ‘Musical League of Nations’: Musician-Diplomats in Times of Crisis

As we have seen, the question of how to respond to fascists and extreme nationalists hung over the ISCM from the moment it was founded. During the mid- to late-1930s, that question became impossible to ignore. With deepening geopolitical crises encroaching on its sphere of activity, the organisation and many of the musicians associated with it faced existential threats; in culture as in politics, the beleaguered liberal internationalism of the 1920s appeared to be in retreat.1 The new challenges began in earnest with the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany in early 1933, which led to the disbanding of the ISCM’s

German section and forced many musicians into exile. In the following years, the ISCM would be confronted with problems that it had not been fashioned to meet; its adherents would be sharply divided about how it should adapt.

The turbulence of the 1930s intensified another dilemma that the ISCM had contended with since its founding: how to become ‘international’ without being drawn into the political arena which, to a large degree, defined the field to which the term referred. The problem could never be fully resolved: at its heart was the paradox, highlighted by Anton

Haefeli in his 1982 history of the ISCM, of an organisation that embraced the politics of internationalism yet still claimed to be ‘non-political’.2 This contradiction was encapsulated in the organisation’s unofficial nickname: the ‘musical League of Nations’.3 The moniker

1 For an overview of cultural internationalism’s embattled tenacity in the 1930s, see Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order, 91–130. See also Annegret Fauser, ‘Some Challenges for Musicological Internationalism in the 1930s’, in The History of the IMS (1927–2017), ed. Dorothea Baumann and Dinko Fabris (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017), 20–24, in which Dent features prominently. 2 Haefeli, IGNM, 190–232; idem, ‘Politische Implikationen einer “unpolitischen” Organisation’. 3 For an extended riff on this trope, see Paul Stefan, ‘Ein Völkerbund der Musik’, in Atti del primo congresso internazionale di musica, Firenze, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1933 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1935), 233–39. The League itself made some tentative steps into the musical sphere through its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC); meetings were organised, proposals drafted and questionnaires circulated, but little was achieved in the way of practical action. See Christiane Sibille, ‘La musique à la Société des Nations’, Relations Internationales, no. 155 (2013), 89–102; idem, ‘The Politics of Music in International Organisations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, 265–72. Thanks in part to his role at the ISCM, Dent was invited to join the ICIC’s Sub-Committee on Arts and

143 recognised, through analogy, a necessary proximity to the era’s chief prototype of an international structure; but it clung, with its adjective, to an imperilled detachment from the treacherous waters of politics and diplomacy.

What Haefeli seems to have viewed as hypocrisy could also be described, more generously, as a delicate balancing act. The ISCM’s adherents sought to serve internationalism from a position at the margins of international politics, without relinquishing the advantages associated with that marginality: not only prestige and relative independence (commonplace rewards for artists who assert their independence from politics), but also avenues of international cooperation unworkable at the level of inter-state relations.4 The challenge – to be international, but not political – was shared by many of the projects associated with interwar cultural internationalism. But the ISCM worked through the problem in ways that were distinctive to the musical sphere and, in particular, to musicians of a modernist tendency – many of whom (though by no means all) cherished the principle of music’s autonomy from politics as sacrosanct.

This chapter shows how the enactment of internationalism lent a new geopolitical edge to musical culture in early twentieth-century Europe. But it also addresses broader questions, essential to any extensive account of interwar internationalism. How did internationalists respond to the new moral and political dilemmas of the 1930s? How might their decisions be assessed or at least understood? And how did those decisions transform international organisations? I begin by describing one strategy through which the ISCM’s adherents negotiated the paradox of a non-political internationalism: appropriating the conventionalised behaviour of diplomats. The ISCM’s General Assembly, I suggest, imitated the language and etiquette of conference diplomacy, thereby forging an institutional framework in which musicians might be recognised as valid international actors. My subsequent sections examine how the General Assembly’s habitual practices were disrupted

Letters, and served as an expert on musical questions from 1928 to 1930. He described the meetings as ‘a great waste of time, and on the whole a bore’; Dent to Lawrence Haward, 10 July 1931, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/4/111/10/8. 4 Germany, for example, was a key player in the ISCM from 1922 (until 1933), even though it only became a member state of the League in 1926.

144 during the geopolitical crises of the mid- to late-1930s. With its liberal, democratic values under threat, the ISCM was compelled to decide whether to move beyond imitation: whether, that is, to overhaul its structure and leadership, and intervene more directly in diplomatic affairs. Following interventions from both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,

Dent came under intense scrutiny: some of his colleagues came to see his vision of a musical internationalism grounded in friendship (described in Chapter One) as naive or amateurish, while others deplored his insistence on avoiding politics at all costs. Yet critics of the existing order would find it difficult to agree on an acceptable path forward. The political climate exposed multivalent fault lines in the ISCM; the pressures from without threatened to break the organisation apart from within.

General Assemblies

The newspapers, newsreels and radio broadcasts of the interwar years were awash with reports of summits and treaties, beginning with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Statespersons and diplomats were the emblematic protagonists of the ‘international’ sphere.

Consequently, the discourse about the ISCM was saturated with references to diplomacy and statecraft. As Alfredo Casella recalled in his memoirs, the organisation’s founding ‘was truly a peace treaty between musicians’.5 In Weimar Germany, the ISCM’s national section was described as a musical ‘foreign office’ undertaking ‘foreign propaganda’.6 Dent’s supporters regularly praised the ISCM president for his ‘talent for diplomacy’.7 In the run-up to his resignation in 1938, one proposal was that Dent should continue to serve as the ‘foreign minister’ to his successor’s ‘state secretary’.8 In part, these analogies provided a convenient language for describing the ISCM, a new kind of musical organisation. But musicians also

5 Casella, Music in My Time, 165. 6 Martin Thrun, ‘“Feste und Proteste”: Über das nationale Prinzip der Organisation der “Internationalen Gesellschaft für Neue Musik” nach 1922’, in Nationale Musik im 20. Jahrhundert: Kompositorische und soziokulturelle Aspekte der Musikgeschichte zwischen Ost- und Westeuropa. Konferenzbericht Leipzig 2002, ed. Helmut Loos and Stefan Keym (Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder Verlag, 2004), 457–70 (p. 469). 7 Basil Maine, Behold These Daniels: Being Studies of Contemporary Music Critics (London: H. & W. Brown, 1928), 28. 8 Wellesz to Dent, 9 May 1937, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/4/446.

145 drew on the terminology and conventions of diplomacy as a means of fashioning themselves as international(ist) agents, a performative inflection of their identities rendered especially conspicuous by its novelty in the musical sphere.9

Diplomacy’s imprint on the ISCM’s structure and practices is demonstrated most clearly by its so-called General Assembly – alongside the concerts and receptions, a fixture of the annual festival. Chaired by Dent until his departure, this meeting was attended by delegates of the ISCM’s national sections, who voted on decisions such as electing the committee of jurors to choose the music for the following year’s festival. We gain a striking glimpse of the General Assembly in Figure 9, which shows the 1931 meeting, hosted in

Oxford. Musicians from across Europe, and two from the United States, are gathered collegially around tables much laden with papers. The tableau could come from almost any of the multitude of international conferences held in interwar Europe. As mentioned in the

Introduction, since at least the end of the nineteenth century, such gatherings had served as one of the core components of the ‘mechanics of internationalism’.10 After the First World

War, as a group of historical geographers has highlighted, ‘conferencing the international’ was crucial to how internationalism was envisaged and experienced.11 Conferences not only proliferated across humanitarian, political and technical domains, but also became more central to the conduct and public profile of international diplomacy. ISCM festival participants could hardly have failed to notice the parallels between diplomatic summits and their own endeavours. As the delegates were photographed in Oxford on 25 July 1931, for

9 This kind of imitation is far from unique: research on the ‘unofficial diplomacy’ of ‘state-like nonstate’ bodies has demonstrated how extensively mimicry of official diplomats’ practices has been employed by those attempting to gain recognition as (and thus, in effect, to become) valid international actors; Fiona McConnell, Terri Moreau and Jason Dittmer, ‘Mimicking State Diplomacy: The Legitimizing Strategies of Unofficial Diplomacies’, Geoforum 43 (2012), 804–14 (p. 806). 10 Geyer and Paulmann, ‘The Mechanics of Internationalism’. 11 I refer to ‘Conferencing the International: A Cultural and Historical Geography of the Origins of Internationalism (1919–1939)’, an AHRC-funded research project led by the historical geographer Stephen Legg at the University of Nottingham from 2015–2019, which aimed to resituate internationalism’s seemingly abstract ideals in particular historical sites. See https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/interwarconf/home.aspx (accessed September 2019). See also Jake Hodder, ‘Conferencing the International at the World Pacifist Meeting, 1949’, Political Geography 49 (2015), 40–50.

146

Figure 9: The 1931 meeting of the ISCM’s General Assembly, Rhodes House, Oxford, 25 July 1931 (photographer unknown). Dent is sat in the middle of the back row, with Edwin Evans on his right (with the beard) and Alfredo Casella on his left. Heinz-Tiessen-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2342.

instance, the newspapers were speculating on the consequences of the recently concluded seven-power conference on the German economic emergency.12 In its subject matter and framing, the image restages the conventionalised visual language of internationalist and diplomatic conferencing, in all its starchy earnestness.

The greater prominence of conferences in international affairs after the First World

War was a symptom of the so-called ‘new diplomacy’. This development has been little discussed in the growing literature on music and diplomacy, which, in common with research on cultural diplomacy more generally, has focused above all on the United States,

12 ‘Conference and After: New Steps; Expert Inquiries on Foot; Mr. Stimson’s Mission’, The Times (25 July 1931), 13.

147 especially during the Cold War period.13 Yet in the standard literature on international relations, post-First World War Europe is depicted as the site of an epoch-defining paradigm shift. Before the war, the usual narrative runs, European stability had been largely reliant on secretive negotiations between the ‘Great Powers’. But the reputation of this system was severely damaged by the self-evident failure to preserve peace in 1914; the new aspiration, encouraged especially by Woodrow Wilson, was for a diplomacy based on transparency, national self-determination and collective security – principles that would, in theory, be embodied and safeguarded by the newly founded League of Nations.14

The ISCM’s General Assembly paralleled that of the League – likewise a gathering of national representatives who convened on an annual basis. (In 1929, ISCM festival attendees would have experienced this connection especially vividly, since that year’s event, hosted in

Geneva, included a tour of the League’s headquarters.15) As a genuine forum of inter-state diplomacy, the League necessarily made greater concessions to Realpolitik: its executive body was not the Assembly, which served more as a debating chamber, but the smaller

Council, in which the ‘Great Powers’ were granted the privileged status of permanent membership. Embracing the spirit of the League rather than its practical example, the ISCM took a different approach: its General Assembly, in which each national section was afforded equal voting rights, served as the ultimate seat of institutional sovereignty.16 By invoking the basic template set down by the League, the ISCM’s General Assembly putatively established modernist musicians as the representatives of a nation’s music-making, a cultural-political

13 Two landmark monographs are: Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 14 See, for example, Henry Kissinger, ‘The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles’, in Diplomacy (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 218–45; Cornelia Bjola and Markus Kornprobst, ‘The New Diplomacy after World War I’, in Understanding International Diplomacy: Theory, Practice and Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 28–43. 15 VIIme Festival de la Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine: Genève 6–10 Avril 1929 (Geneva: 1929), 10, British Library. 16 The pre-eminence of the General Assembly is retained in the ISCM’s current statutes (see especially Article 28), which also specify ‘[o]pen and democratic procedures’ as one of the organisation’s core values (Article 6); ISCM 2018 Statutes, https://iscm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Statutes- 2018.pdf (accessed November 2020).

148 move working to the favour of both specific individuals and the broader movement of

‘contemporary music’ they supported.

Democratic governance – voluntarily embraced by musicians invigorated by the

‘Geneva spirit’ of the 1920s – was, then, structurally and symbolically foundational to the

ISCM’s new-music internationalism. Yet there was no place for the demos as such. The delegates, nominated by their national section, were members of a modernist elite. They were largely from similar social backgrounds, and as the photograph from 1931 readily exemplifies, they were nearly all male.17 Women did participate in ISCM festivals, chiefly as performers; but national sections tended to send composers, conductors, critics or musicologists as their representatives, and these professions were dominated by men.18 The

General Assembly was an intensely homosocial environment. But masculinity shaped it in ways that were more subtle and ambiguous than in the case of those iconic modernist institutions led by a single authority figure, such as Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical

Performances or Boulez’s IRCAM.19 In the ISCM, the high-handed behaviour of modernist patriarchs coexisted, sometimes awkwardly, with an emphasis on the ‘softer’ values of deliberation, compromise and consensus: the values, in short, of diplomacy.

Seeking to appeal to the moral authority of League-style internationalism in the post-

First World War climate, the ISCM positioned the diplomatic conference as an aspirational model for musicians. Yet it was vital that professional diplomats and politicians were kept away.20 For the emulation was also a repudiation, involving as it did an insistence that

17 Women attained positions of considerable influence in other internationalist institutions of the era, especially humanitarian ones. The British nurse Rachel Crowdy, to take one prominent example, led the Social Questions and Opium Traffic Section of the League of Nations from 1919 to 1931. 18 One impressive exception was Pauline Hall, who founded the Norwegian section of the ISCM in 1938 and led it until 1961. See Astrid Kvalbein, ‘Musikalsk modernisering: Pauline Hall (1890-1969) som komponist, teatermenneske og Ny Musikk-leiar’ (PhD thesis, Norwegian Academy of Music, 2013), 274–376. 19 The composer and musicologist Paul Pisk recalled how the ISCM’s ‘juries consisted of different nationalities’, who had ‘discussions about the value of compositions’, whereas in the Society for Private Musical Performances: ‘there was only one opinion, that of Schoenberg’; Elliott Antokoletz and Paul A. Pisk, ‘A Survivor of the Vienna Schoenberg Circle: An Interview with Paul A. Pisk’, Tempo 154 (1985), 15–21 (p. 20). On Boulez as IRCAM’s charismatic patriarch, see Born, Rationalizing Culture, esp. 102–163. 20 In the run-up to a meeting held in London in January 1923 to formalise the establishment of the ISCM, Dent’s correspondence registered the ambivalence of imitating diplomats, while also keeping them at arm’s length. He referred to the event casually as the ‘conference of ambassadors’, but was

149 politics could be superseded by the transcendence of the musical. ‘Will it be the mission of artists to redeem the institution of international conferences from the discredit which statesmen have brought upon it?’, asked Edwin Evans, the chairman of the ISCM’s British section, in 1923.21 Mimicry allowed musicians to have their cake and eat it: to declare that their activities were at once ethically valuable and supra-politically neutral. The sacrifice – and the boundary to be carefully policed – was forgoing the possibility of accruing more worldly forms of political power, or of using the General Assembly as a platform for campaigning or other directly political action. The payoffs included opportunities for enhanced prestige, and, more selflessly, the hope of serving music and internationalism in a deeper and more lasting sense – albeit a less tangible one.

Prague, 1–8 September 1935

The conventions of the General Assembly were forged in the optimistic atmosphere of the early 1920s. By the mid-1930s, however, the liberal internationalist cause was withering in the face of geopolitical crises and the resurgence of nationalist ideologies and policies. As the

League proved incapable of preserving a peaceful European order, public attitudes towards it grew increasingly disillusioned. As a consequence, comparisons between the ISCM and the

League were recast: Geneva was no longer a symbol of international cooperation, but one of malfunction and acrimony.22 The conductor and patron Paul Sacher, who became president of the ISCM’s Swiss section in 1935, described how at that year’s festival, ‘the grim image of a

League of Nations in miniature presented itself’.23

perturbed by the prospect that the French delegation might include actual politicians: ‘I am not much attracted’, he told Evans, ‘by a representation of the French government – or of any government: having an Englishman’s natural mistrust of governments in the arts’; Dent to J.B. Trend, 14 October 1922, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/4/111/17/2; Dent to Evans, 10 January 1923, Music Collections, British Library, Add. MS 71144. In the event, France was represented by Ravel; Haefeli, IGNM, 56. 21 Edwin Evans, ‘The International Conference’, The Chesterian 29 (February 1923), 139–41 (p. 139). 22 Christiane Sibille also observes the same phenomenon, in ‘The Politics of Music in International Organisations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, 272 n. 69, citing Ernst Krenek, ‘Zur Situation der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Neue Musik’, Anbruch 16, no. 3 (March 1934), 41–44. 23 ‘hat sich [...] das betrübliche Bild eines Völkerbundes im kleinen geboten’; Paul Sacher to Hermann Scherchen, 8 January 1936, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. This was a longer version of the open letter published in ‘Musikfeste und Musikalischer Alltag (Vorschläge, Einwände und Impressionen, anlässlich des Prager Festes der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, 1935.)’,

150

Analogies with League-style summitry, once a way of paying homage to exemplary scenes of international cooperation, were now employed to describe the replication of geopolitical belligerence.24 This rhetorical shift registered a genuine transformation in the character and function of the ISCM’s General Assembly, one whose most obvious hallmark was an intensification of activity in and around the meetings. When the status quo had been relatively stable, these had tended to be perfunctory, getting through their business in a single stint of an hour or two. But in the mid-1930s they expanded into marathon sessions held over several days, which threatened to overshadow the rest of the festival. Some delegates were energised by the new robustness of debate; others, more comfortable with the breezier customs of the 1920s, were deeply unsettled.

The critical year was 1935. At its festival in Prague in September, the ISCM was led as never before to a reckoning with the increasingly troubled state of international politics; what ensued has been described, most notably in Anne Shreffler’s meticulous account, as a pivotal test of the organisation’s ‘non-political’ mandate.25 The event was dominated by efforts to negotiate a ‘neutral’ path between political extremes. It had originally been planned to take place in the Bohemian spa town Karlsbad (now usually known by its Czech name,

Karlovy Vary); in July, however, the city council abruptly announced it was cancelling the event. The volte-face was widely understood to have been precipitated by the

Czechoslovakian parliamentary elections two months earlier, which had seen a decisive surge of support in German-speaking regions such as Karlsbad for the Sudeten German Party, a right-wing group with ties to the National Socialists in Germany.26 At one stage, it seemed

Musica Viva 1, no. 1 (April 1936), 1–8 (p. 4; the passage quoted was omitted in the abridged published text). 24 Describing the 1935 General Assembly meeting in his memoirs, Ernst Krenek would write: ‘To me the most arresting and amusing aspect was that the behavior of the delegates, without their being conscious of it, reflected minutely and grotesquely the attitudes of their countries’ representatives in the League of Nations’; Krenek memoirs [handwritten manuscript], Ernst Krenek Institut, Krems an der Donau, LM-034-05 (p. 237). Krenek’s memoirs have been published in a German translation: Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit: Erinnerungen an die Moderne, trans. Friedrich Saathen, rev. trans. Sabine Schulte (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1998); the quoted passage is at p. 907. 25 Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’. The events of 1935 are also described in Haefeli, IGNM, 196–99, 228–31, 236–43. 26 Haefeli, IGNM, 228; Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 61–64.

151 there would be no ISCM festival in 1935. But Alois Hába and Erich Steinhard, the leaders of the Czechoslovakian section, secured last-minute support from the national government to reorganise the festival in Prague.

If this disruption was not enough, the ISCM also found itself confronted with a Nazi- backed rival to its previously unassailed position in European musical life. The Permanent

Council for the International Cooperation of Composers (Ständiger Rat für die internationale

Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten) was founded in 1934.27 It was led by Richard Strauss, then president of the Reich Chamber of Music (Reichsmusikkammer), a sub-division of the

Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) headed by Joseph Goebbels.28 One of the

Permanent Council’s main activities was to stage music festivals, which were declared to promote ‘healthy’ national styles, rather than ‘degenerate’ cosmopolitan modernism. As a result, it was widely perceived as a fascist-backed competitor to the ISCM, differentiating itself from the latter structurally as well as aesthetically: it disdained democratic governance for the top-down doctrine of the Führerprinzip.29 In September 1935, the Permanent Council put on an ambitious festival at Vichy, in central France, whose dates clashed with those of the ISCM event in Prague – an act which most delegates in the General Assembly recognised as deliberately hostile.30

As it struggled with the multiple pressures deriving from Nazism, the ISCM received an offer of support from a perhaps unexpected source: the Soviet Union. During the 1920s, as discussed in Chapter Two, exchange between the ISCM and the Soviet Union had been

27 The Permanent Council was often known by its French name, Conseil Permanent pour la Coopération Internationale des Compositeurs (partly as a way of enhancing its credibility as an ‘international’ project, rather than simply a German one). 28 Strauss’s intentions for the Permanent Council were not simply propagandistic: in large part, he seems to have created it to further his decades-long campaign to strengthen the authors’ rights of composers. See Scott Warfield, ‘Strauss and the Business of Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. Charles Youmans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 242–56. On the Permanent Council’s copyright reform activism, see Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, 21–26, 39–41, 91–93. 29 The most polemical critique of the Permanent Council along these lines was Austriacus [Ernst Krenek], ‘Die Blubo-Internationale’, 23: Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift, no. 17–19 (December 1934), 19–24. ‘Blubo’ was Krenek’s satirical contraction of the Nazi slogan Blut und Boden (‘blood and soil’). 30 Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 66–71. For more on the Permanent Council’s founding and its activities in 1934–5, see Michael Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 229–30, 249; Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, 17–26, 32–43.

152 facilitated by the Moscow-based Association of Contemporary Music (ASM), until it was dissolved in 1932. Just weeks before the Prague festival, the Comintern officially committed itself to Popular Front internationalism – a broad-based coalition of anti-fascist politics and activism – and there were hopes in its affiliated International Music Office (IMB) that the

ISCM might be brought into the fold. The IMB’s chairman was the composer Hanns Eisler, an exile from Germany. In early August, when it seemed the ISCM festival would have to be cancelled, he announced that Moscow was prepared to commit generous funds to hosting the festival there in November. The proposal was not taken up – Dent especially was wary of the

ISCM being drawn into association with the Soviet Union – although it was credited by more sympathetic observers with having spurred the Czechoslovakian government into supporting the relocation of the festival to Prague.31

Further overtures from the Soviet Union, including an offer to host the 1936 festival, were conveyed at Prague by Eisler and his colleague Herman Reichenbach, another German

émigré. Acting under instructions from Moscow, they attended the General Assembly as observers.32 Eisler urged his colleagues to open their eyes to their true social circumstances, to renounce the ‘isolation’ of modern music from society, and to recognise the Soviet Union’s show of solidarity as demonstrating ‘where the front is that defends progressive music against the fascists’ oppressive measures and acts of sabotage’.33 For some delegates in the

General Assembly, unaccustomed to hearing such explicitly political sentiments, Eisler’s and

Reichenbach’s roles as go-betweens and intelligence gatherers pushed uncomfortably beyond the ‘non-political’ imitation of diplomacy. Their presence was welcomed by the

Czechoslovakian hosts and especially by the left-leaning Hába; but at least according to

31 Haefeli, IGNM, 228; Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 64–65. One of the most openly pro-Soviet contemporary accounts was: Alan Bush, ‘The I.S.C.M. Festival at Prague’, The Musical Times 76, no. 1112 (October 1935), 940–42. 32 Eisler and Reichenbach could not appear as official delegates in the General Assembly, because the Soviet Union had not had an ISCM section since the dissolution of ASM in 1932 – a situation that emerged as something of a sticking point in the negotiations and was never resolved. 33 ‘wo die Front ist, die die fortschrittliche Musik gegen die unterdrückenden Massnahmen und die Sabotageakte der Fascisten verteidigt’; Eisler, ‘Einiges über die Lage des modernen Komponisten [II] (Anlässlich des 13. Festivals der I.G.N.M.)’ (1935), in Gesammelte Schriften 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Faßhauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007), 315–18 (p. 318).

153

Sacher, everyone else ‘was somewhat astonished by this strange “Russian” delegation’ – not least because, as Dent drily observed, neither of them could speak Russian.34

Ultimately, Eisler and Reichenbach failed to bring the ISCM into the Popular Front.

Dent’s original plan to have the 1936 festival hosted in Barcelona prevailed. After three days of fractious meetings, the General Assembly agreed to issue a declaration: yet another gesture revealing how the delegates modelled their actions on the conventions of diplomatic summitry. This text affirmed the ISCM’s commitment to intellectual and spiritual freedom, and decreed that suitable composers would never be excluded from its festival programmes on the basis of nationality, race or religion.35 In its emphasis on the freedom of the individual artist, the resolution represented an attempt to renounce both Nazi Germany’s extreme nationalism and Soviet Russia’s restrictive understanding of the artist’s social responsibilities.36 This affirmation of a purportedly apolitical centre, argues Shreffler, anticipated the basic ideological divide of the cultural Cold War, between socially committed communist art and the high modernist ideals of the West.37

The external political pressures of September 1935 would soon subside. The international prominence of the German-led Permanent Council’s festivals faded.38 In

Moscow, meanwhile, an alliance with the ISCM began to look increasingly unlikely. Soviet politics was changing rapidly; the dark atmosphere of the Great Purge would soon descend.

In January 1936, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist party, published its infamous ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ editorial attacking Shostakovich. The prospects for

Soviet involvement in the ISCM, which organised the emblematic Western festival of

34 ‘Ich glaube, dass in Prag, ausser den Tschechen, jedermann etwas über diese merkwürdige “russische” Delegation erstaunt war’; Sacher to Werner Reinhart, 18 December 1935, Briefwechsel Werner Reinhart, Musikkollegium Winterthur, deposited in Stadtbibliothek Winterthur, Dep MK 339/27. Dent’s remark is recalled in Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit, 909. 35 The full text of this proclamation is provided in Haefeli, IGNM, 197. 36 Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 77. 37 Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 80–82. 38 After 1935, Strauss became less actively involved in the Permanent Council. The organisation continued to organise festivals, but as Benjamin G. Martin has shown, because these prioritised an adherence to ‘national’ traits over musical excellence, their programmes largely came to consist of ‘second- and third-tier figures’, and so did little to undermine the ISCM’s authority; Martin, The Nazi- Fascist New Order for European Culture, 83. On the Permanent Council’s festivals during 1936–38, see ibid., 82–85, 124–28.

154 formalist cacophony, would never recover from this state-sponsored censure of musical modernism.39 Eisler’s term as president of the IMB lasted only until April 1936; in 1938, both he and Reichenbach emigrated to the United States.40

Although the political ferment of 1935 turned out to be short-lived, the consequences for the ISCM would be lasting. Bitter fractures would emerge within the General Assembly, ones that were symptomatic of a loss of faith in existing forms of musical internationalism.

Yet the sheer effort expended on the General Assembly during this period undermines any attempt to draw a simple contrast between the optimistic, internationalist 1920s and the pessimistic, nationalist 1930s. Musicians did not turn away from the ISCM, but rather threw themselves into their quasi-ambassadorial roles as delegates with more energy than ever before. With the 1920s infrastructure for contemporary music threatened by political extremism, the ISCM festival seemed to offer a refuge, and some hoped for the organisation’s activities to expand considerably. In cultural-political terms, the organisation remained a potent source of prestige and authority. But after Prague, the soft consensus that had previously enabled musicians to smooth over the contradictions of a ‘non-political’ internationalism was compromised. One enduring issue was the opposition, described by

Shreffler, between leftist and ‘non-political’ conceptions of the organisation’s purpose. As we will see, though, the General Assembly was also rocked by other vectors of conflict – ones related to that ideological schism, but not reducible to it.

‘The Yugoslavian affair’

A further sub-plot from September 1935 exemplifies the split between socially committed leftist musicians and those who claimed to be non-political.41 During the Prague festival,

39 In March 1936, Eisler had not entirely lost hope, but as he wrote to Hàba: ‘It must be clear to you that, owing to the music discussions in the Soviet Union, these questions [whether the USSR would rejoin the ISCM] are more complicated than a year ago’ (‘Es muss Dir klar sein, dass durch die Musikdiskussion in der Sowjetunion diese Fragen komplizierter stehen, wie vor einem Jahr’); Eisler to Hàba, 20 March 1936, in Eisler, Briefe 1907–1943, ed. Jürgen Schebera and Maren Köster (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2010), 117. 40 Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 76, 86–87, n. 68. Shreffler suggests it may be no coincidence that Eisler ceased to work for Moscow shortly after he and Reichenbach were criticised for the apparent failure of their mission in Prague. 41 ‘Die jugoslawische Affäre’; Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 304.

155 news spread that three young Serbian-Yugoslavian composers – Dragutin Čolič, Ljubica

Marić and Vojislav Vučković – had been arrested and tortured by the Yugoslavian police. As was typical for modernist-inclined Yugoslavian musicians of their generation, all three had studied at the Prague Conservatory, where their tuition had included Hába’s quarter-tone composition class. Influenced by the politics advocated by Hába and others in Prague, they returned to Yugoslavia as young radicals in both the aesthetic and the political senses. As the events of 1935 proved, their overt support for the Left in a politically unstable country, where the Communist Party had been banned since 1920, involved considerable personal risk.42

These musicians endured real political violence, a situation that divided the General

Assembly. Some called for immediate action. Shortly after the 1935 festival, Hába sent the

ISCM’s national sections a draft appeal protesting the ‘arrest, imprisonment and inhumane torture’ of his former students.43 Hába asked each national section to sign a copy of this declaration and send it to Dent. He also requested Dent to contact the Justice Minister in

Belgrade and the Yugoslavian Embassy in London on behalf of the ISCM.44 Dent responded that he was ‘very surprised and appalled by the grim news from Belgrade’, and contacted a diplomat he knew ‘to get more precise information’. But he did not write to Belgrade or the

Embassy; nor did he sanction the publication of the resolution.45

Hába was motivated by a combination of personal ties, political sympathies and humanitarian concerns; but what ultimately convinced him to act, despite some initial hesitation, was insistent pressure from Eisler. According to Eisler and Reichenbach’s report on the 1935 festival, it was Eisler who dictated a first version of the appeal, and who

42 Before long, the dangers would become graver still: in 1942, Vučković, forced into hiding in German-occupied Belgrade, was tracked down and murdered by the Gestapo. On the place of Vučković and his contemporaries in the cultural politics of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, see Melita Milin, ‘Continuities and Discontinuities in Serbian Music, 1930–1950’, Musicology Today: Journal of the National University of Music Bucharest 7, no. 3 (2016), 229–38. 43 ‘Verhaftung, Einsperrung und unmenschlichen Martern’; ‘Appell der Mitglieder der IGNM zur Befreiung der jugoslawischen Komponisten’ [September 1935], in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 215. 44 Hába to ISCM national sections [September 1935], in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 216. 45 ‘Ich war ganz überrascht und entsetzt über die grauenhafte[n] Nachrichten aus Beograd. Ich habe sofort an einen mir bekannten Diplomaten geschrieben, um genauere Informationen über Alles zu haben’; Dent to Hába, 16 September 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 212.

156 instructed Hába to circulate it.46 The attempt to persuade the ISCM to campaign on behalf of the Serbian composers must therefore be understood in the context of efforts to pivot the organisation towards the USSR.47 This complicates the question of how we should assess the appeal: concern for the welfare of likeminded colleagues was genuine; but it also dovetailed conveniently with the desire for a gesture that would, as Reichenbach reported to Hába in

October 1935, make ‘an excellent impression’ in Moscow.48 The political agenda was obscured in the text of the appeal itself, which, in a nod to the ISCM’s recent resolution on artistic freedom, made its demands ‘in the name of humanity and freedom of artistic creativity’.49 Further underlining the moral urgency, it also asserted norms of interpersonal responsibility – on a scale ostensibly remote from geopolitics – by invoking an explicitly gendered obligation for ‘the delegates of the national sections [to] protest as men out of gentlemanly feelings’ against the brutal torture of the pregnant Marić.50

If this way of putting the case was intended to persuade Dent, it did not prove effective. After Prague, he was wary of efforts to pull the organisation towards Moscow; he was especially suspicious of Hába, with whom he had clashed repeatedly. Citing the failure of a comparable appeal in 1934 (this time to the Austrian government on behalf of David Josef

Bach), he dismissed the Czech composer’s actions as posturing: the only answers they were likely to get would be ‘polite and evasive’ ones, telling them ‘that we foreigners have no right

46 Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 304–5. 47 The cause was also taken up enthusiastically by leftist musicians elsewhere; the American composer Marc Blitzstein even began sketching a song, ‘Marić and Colić’, protesting their imprisonment (‘We the musicians of America say no!’, the text proclaimed). See Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 146. 48 ‘Besonders Deine Resolution in der jugoslawischen Sache machte hier [Moscow] einen ausgezeichneten Eindruck’; Reichenbach to Hába, 13 October 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 219. 49 ‘im Namen der Menschlichkeit und Freiheit des künstlerischen Schaffens’; ‘Appell der Mitglieder der IGNM zur Befreiung der jugoslawischen Komponisten’, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 215. 50 The appeal claimed that Marić had ‘been abused in brutal ways, such that her sexual organs have been injured’ (‘[...] ist besonders die Komponistin Frau Ljuba Maričova [Ljubica Marić] in grausamer Weise misshandelt worden, wobei ihre Geschlechtsorgane verletzt worden sind. [...] protestieren die Delegierten der Staatssektionen schon als Herren aus Gentlemansgefühlen’); ‘Appell der Mitglieder der IGNM zur Befreiung der jugoslawischen Komponisten’, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 215. In July 1935, Marić was admitted to hospital; it is thought that she had an abortion; Melita Milin, personal communication to the author. Marić’s detainment is also discussed in Milin, Ljubica Marić: Komponovanje kao graditeljski čin (Belgrade: Institute of Musicology SASA, 2018), 89–92.

157 to get upset about it’.51 Dent’s justification of his refusal to act implied a mixture of principle and pragmatism. The plight of the musicians in Yugoslavia, however terrible, was beyond the

ISCM’s remit as he understood it: an internationalist organisation might promote friendship between nations, but should exercise caution about intervening in the affairs of sovereign states. And in any case, what was the appeal expected to achieve in practice? To Dent, the gesture appeared futile: it seemed unlikely that the declaration would help the musicians (it could even have made things worse), but it was certainly liable to draw the ISCM into political controversy and thus, in an already challenging year, undermine its capacity to facilitate international cooperation.52 To put all this another way: although the ISCM borrowed patterns of behaviour from diplomacy to structure its internationalist gatherings,

Hába and Eisler were mistaken to think that it could therefore become empowered to act as a political entity; Dent felt able to write to a diplomat in a personal capacity, but not as the holder of an office that was somehow equivalent. During the 1930s, as Annegret Fauser has observed, Dent’s internationalist activities involved a tension between his antipathy to fascism – expressed with increasing clarity in the anti-Nazi tenor of his scholarship – and his propensity to prioritise mediation and conciliation when faced with potential conflict.53 In this instance, he chose discretion. But from another perspective, Dent’s appeal to pragmatism could not explain away a basic question of integrity: what kind of association, as

Eisler pressed Hába, ‘does not protest against the torture of its delegates’?54

51 ‘man bekommt nur höfliche und ausweichende Antworte[n] [...] dass wir Ausländer kein Recht haben, uns darüber aufzuregen’; Dent to Hába, 16 September 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 212. Bach had suffered financially after the prohibition of the Social Democratic Party and the Arbeiter-Zeitung in the wake of Austria’s February Uprising. See Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 151–53. 52 Dent remained consistently sceptical about the practical value of international musical associations publicly intervening in political matters. In 1946, Egon Wellesz tried to persuade him that the IMS should join the campaign to denounce the behaviour of Erich Schenk, then director of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna, for his involvement in the theft of Guido Adler’s library after the eminent musicologist’s death in 1941, and in the deportation of Adler’s daughter, Melanie, to a concentration camp, where she was murdered in 1942. ‘I never have any use for making protests & statements just to express indignation or anything like that’, Dent told Wellesz. ‘They never have any result, as a rule’; Dent to Wellesz, 1 August 1946, Egon Wellesz Nachlass, Musiksammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, F13.Wellesz.1198/16. In this case, Dent did eventually relent and added his signature to the appeal; Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 257–58. 53 Fauser, ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 242. 54 ‘gegen die Marterung ihrer Delegierten nicht protestiert’; Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 305.

158

To be clear: although Dent was wary of Moscow, he was not opposed to the Left; his own politics broadly aligned with Fabianism. But he had long positioned himself strongly against the ISCM’s involvement in politics as such, drawing on established notions of aesthetic autonomy. Accordingly, he interpreted the General Assembly’s resolution on freedom in quite different terms from those implied by Hába and Eisler’s appeal: ‘Our proclamation in Prague’, he told Hába, ‘explicitly stresses that we want to remain distant from all politics.’55 (In fact, the resolution did not explicitly mention politics at all.) Dent had long held to a schism between his personal commitments – which included, during the

1930s, significant efforts to help refugee musicians – and the more limited duties of the

ISCM. Back in 1923, he had declared: ‘The International Society for Contemporary Music has neither political interests nor financial interests. It concerns itself with music and concerns itself only with music. It does not even want to come to the aide of composers.’56 In this statement, the institution’s responsibilities are confined to a disembodied, and thus presumably depoliticised, ‘music’. But as Eisler’s outrage demonstrates, this narrow commitment was coming under growing pressure in the 1930s, when the lives of an increasing number of music’s human creators became disrupted and imperilled, and when, in response to such challenges, other international institutions were taking up the emergent discourse of ‘human rights’ to define their mission.57

Dent’s continued upholding of the music/politics distinction – even in the face of torture – evinced an anxious defensiveness about the whole project of a musical

55 ‘Unsere Proklamation in Prag betont ausdrücklich, dass wir von aller Politik fern bleiben wollen’; Dent to Hába, 16 September 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 212. 56 ‘La Société Internationale pour la Musique Contemporaine n’a ni intérêts politiques ni intérêts financiers. Elle s’occupe de musique, et ne s’occupe que de musique. Elle ne veut même pas venir en aide aux compositeurs’; Dent, ‘Internationalisme et Musique’, La Revue Musicale 4, no. 10 (August 1923), 58–60 (p. 60). 57 PEN International, which had started in the 1920s as the nearest thing to a literary equivalent to the ISCM, shifted during the 1930s and 40s to the human rights agenda that defines its work today. Human rights discourse made it possible to reconfigure culture internationalism to incorporate a humanitarian agenda, without necessarily renouncing the claim to political neutrality. However, writers were less beholden than musicians to the ideal of aesthetic autonomy, and they were not aiming to organise expensive festivals that required the support of local or national governments. On PEN’s transformation, see R.A. Wilford, ‘The PEN Club, 1930–1950’, Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 1 (1979), 99–116; Rachel Potter, ‘Modernist Rights: International PEN 1921–1936’, Critical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2013), 66–80.

159 internationalism. From the moment of the ISCM’s founding, conservative nationalists, especially in Germany, lambasted the organisation as encapsulating a pernicious symbiosis between cosmopolitanism and modernism; for these critics, a ‘musical League of Nations’ was, by definition, complicit with the anti-German conspiracy of the Versailles settlement.58

Such accusations targeted the foundational disjunction of an organisation that claimed to be international but not political. They had a lasting impact on Dent. ‘[W]e do not want to give the impression that the International Society is linked to any particular political movement’, he told Hába; ‘otherwise everyone will immediately say that our music is only a fig-leaf for political agitation.’59 While Shreffler is right to stress the significance of Prague as a turning point for the ISCM, Dent’s efforts amidst the turbulence of the mid-1930s to steer the organisation away from public controversy were consistent with his established approach to the hostile Right.60

In the end, Dent succeeded in resisting Eisler and Hába’s campaign: Čolič, Marić and

Vučković were soon released, putting an end to the dispute, without the ISCM issuing a statement.61 Yet the larger predicament raised by the episode remained unresolved. When the agents of internationalism produced by the ISCM – the male musician as would-be diplomat – were confronted with political violence, it was unclear how they should act. Dent, abidingly anxious about how the ISCM might be perceived, sought to preserve a stage for the performance of multilateral diplomacy set apart from the domain of governments and embassies. The boundary between ‘performed’ and ‘real’ diplomacy was, however, becoming uncomfortably ambiguous. Invoking the cosmopolitan ethics of humanitarianism, Eisler and

58 Haefeli, IGNM, 77–80. 59 ‘wir wollen nicht den Anschein geben, dass die I.G. mit irgend einer bestimmten politischen Bewegung in Zusammenhang steht; sonst sagen alle Leute sofort, dass unsere Musik nur ein Deckmantel für politische Agitation sei’; Dent to Hába, 16 September 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 212. 60 Compare, for example, Dent’s own account of the first ISCM festival proper at Salzburg in 1923: when ‘the Hakenkreuzler, the larval stage of the Nazi party, had threatened to throw stink-bombs if we performed songs in the Czech language’, the compromise ultimately arrived at was to avoid controversy by having them sung in German instead; Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, 12–13. 61 Marić was released in October 1935; Vučković was probably freed before the appeal was even circulated; Melita Milin, personal communication to the author. See also Herma Bienenfeldová [Čolić’s mother-in-law] to Hába, 25 September 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 214.

160

Hába’s appeal was an attempt to push the ISCM to draw on its unique status in the musical world – accrued, in part, through its miniaturised restaging of League-style summitry – to become an actor in international affairs, a diplomatic agent in its own right with the authority to converse with nation-states on behalf of musicians as a transnational collective.62 In its internationalist turn, the musical culture of interwar Europe witnessed the forceful emergence of dilemmas that remain pressing today: how should musical (and musicological) organisations respond to moral and political crises? When are gestures of collective protest meaningful or productive? Is it possible not to express objection to that which we find abhorrent without, in effect, acquiescing to it?63

New shoes

The questions raised by the torture of the Serbian musicians represented just one strand of a broader debate about the future of the ISCM. In the wake of the Prague festival, some sought drastic reform, which they tried to realise by producing a new version of the organisation’s statutes. Previously, few had concerned themselves with the by-laws, which had remained largely unchanged since the ISCM was founded. But the statutes were brought back to the fore in 1935 by Eisler and Reichenbach, who had been eager to secure copies (this would be concrete intelligence to convey back to Moscow).64 After the dust had been brushed off this neglected document, other delegates came to realise its potential. It determined how and when decisions were made in the General Assembly; these procedural matters became a central point of contention in 1935, when Dent was accused of undemocratically exploiting the vagueness of the existing rules to achieve the outcomes he desired.65 More

62 The stage/actor distinction is borrowed from Clavin, Securing the World Economy, 4. 63 Cusick, ‘Musicology, Torture, Repair’; Katia Chornik, ‘Should Academic Societies Make Public Statements about Political Incidents?’, RMA Newsletter (November 2017), https://www.rma.ac.uk/rmawp/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/KChornik_Should-Academic- Societies-Make-Public-Statements-about-Political-Incidents_RMA-Newsletter-21.2-Nov-2017.pdf (accessed July 2019). 64 Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 297. 65 As Hába would complain in 1936: ‘It seems [...] that the only “rules of the game” that can be ascribed to the “democrat” Prof. Dent are those that he himself improvises as needed or allows others to improvise!’ (‘Es scheint […], daß dem „Demokraten“ Prof. Dent nur solche „Spielregel“ angerechnet sind, die er nach Bedarf selbst improvisiert, oder andere improvisieren läßt!’); Hába to Krenek, 30

161 fundamentally, the statutes defined the ISCM’s objectives and the scope of its activities.

Rewriting this text was an urgent mission for those who felt the time was ripe to reimagine new-music internationalism.

The original constitution, drawn up by Dent and Edwin Evans, was deliberately concise and flexible.66 Dent believed in ‘a strict distinction (which some of our foreign delegates have not quite grasped) between what needs to be laid down & ratified formally as the constitution of the society – and what we agree to as formal principles of policy’.67 The statutes established the organisation’s basic structure as a federation of national sections, as well as committing the ISCM to organising an annual festival and stipulating how the international jury should be elected and scores submitted. But they conspicuously avoided defining ‘contemporary music’, leaving it down to the ‘discretion’ of the national sections and the General Assembly (Article 5). When Eisler and Reichenbach inspected the constitution in

1935, they sensed that its informality and imprecision arose from a conceptual lacuna: the

ISCM’s structure was ‘very relaxed and non-binding’, because of the ‘difficulty [...] of knowing what modern music actually is’.68

After Prague, the initial momentum for reform was associated with the effort to pull the ISCM to the Left. Not long after the Prague festival, an extensive draft of new by-laws was drawn up by the Polish composer Józef Koffler (remembered today as the first musician from his country to employ twelve-tone technique). Koffler was scathing about the old statutes: ‘One does not repair completely worn-out, unusable shoes’, he told Hàba, an ally in this project; ‘one makes new ones.’69 His proposal was certainly comprehensive: whereas

December 1936, Krenek Nachlass, Handschriftensammlung, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Vienna, H.I.N.-115952. 66 Haefeli believed the original statutes to be lost and reconstructed their principles from what could be gleaned from other sources; Haefeli, IGNM, 56–57. However, there are at least two extant copies of a 1928 pamphlet in which the statutes are printed in English, French and German. One is International Society for Contemporary Music [1928], Heinz-Tiessen-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, 2109; this source was brought to my attention by Thrun, ‘“Feste und Proteste”’. I found another copy in the Berg Nachlass, Musiksammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, F21.Berg.450/1. 67 Dent to Evans, 6 January 1923, Music Collections, British Library, Add. MS 71144. 68 ‘Die Schwierigkeit [...] zu wissen, was ist eigentlich moderne Musik. [...] sehr locker und unverbindlich’; Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 294. 69 ‘Man repariert nicht ganz zerschliessene, unbrauchbare Schuhe; man macht neue’; Koffler to Hába, 9 November 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 219.

162

Dent and Evans’s constitution had just sixteen articles, his had more than seventy.70 In

Koffler’s world, there would be no ambiguity about rules and responsibilities. The exhaustive scheme was supported by Eisler, who suggested additional clauses designed to protect the interests of left-wing composers – with the primary aim, one suspects, of rendering collaboration with the organisation more palatable to Moscow.71

Koffler envisaged a politicised and expanded institution, in ways that appear indebted to the projects led by the conductor Hermann Scherchen since he had gone into exile from Germany in 1933. Like Scherchen’s annual Arbeitstagungen (working conferences) in modern music, Koffler’s ISCM festival would devote as much time to lectures and debates as to traditional concerts; the passive audience of the existing format would be replaced with a community of critically engaged participants.72 And following the example of

Scherchen’s multi-armed Musica Viva project – which comprised an orchestra, a publishing house and a journal (whose first issue in April 1936 published extracts from Koffler’s plan) – the ISCM’s remit would be ambitiously augmented.73 In addition to its festival, the organisation would establish a journal, a music library and a ‘propaganda bureau’, which would publish scores and forge links with concert institutions and broadcasters. With Musica

Viva as the probable inspiration, Koffler designed an ISCM that would expand into a complete new-music ecology.74 To musical modernists whose careers had been disrupted by the political and economic upheavals of the 1930s, centralised panaceas held a deep appeal.

70 Dent was aghast at ‘73 Paragraphen!!!’; Dent to Hába, 23 February 1936, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 222. Of the several drafts in Krenek’s archives, the most voluminous – which appears to be the one Koffler sent him – has 94 articles: Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.1.6. 71 This agenda emerged most explicitly in the decree that composers were permitted to be represented by works ‘of socialist content’. Koffler thought this supplementary clause inadvisably blatant: ‘one should not refer to certain things by name, for otherwise our old men will start raving’ (‘sozialistischen Inhalts [...] soll man nicht gewisse Dinge beim Namen nennen, da unsere alten Herren sonst rabiat werden’); Koffler to Hába, 9 November 1935, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 219. 72 Compare also the proposals in Hába, ‘Neue aktuelle Aufgaben der I.G.f.N.M.’, Anbruch 16, no. 3 (March 1934), 44–45; and Eisler, ‘Einiges über die Lage des modernen Komponisten’. Hába explicitly refers to the Arbeitstagungen as a model for the ISCM. 73 ‘Musikfeste und Musikalischer Alltag’, 1–2, 6–8. 74 Examining Musica Viva as a case study in the ‘forced internationalism’ of émigrés and refugees, Shreffler has described Scherchen’s project as an attempt to recreate, in exile, the key components of the infrastructure for contemporary music that had flourished in the Weimar Republic; Shreffler, ‘Utopian Orchestras, Agit-Prop Entertainment, and Musical Olympics: Cultural Activism in the

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Koffler sent his plan to Dent in early 1936. The ISCM president was unimpressed, criticising it as unrealistic and illegitimate.75 Despite Dent’s evident opposition to reform, at the Barcelona meeting in April, Hába persuaded the General Assembly to establish a five- man sub-committee charged with scrutinising plans for new statutes and presenting its findings at the following year’s festival in Paris. Apart from Hába himself, the most active member of this sub-committee was the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek, who also saw the old statutes as an ‘al fresco’ arrangement, only ‘sufficient for less critical times’.76 Yet Krenek was no acolyte of the Left.77 Like Dent, he held to a new-music internationalism in which states would ‘interfere as little as possible’.78 He argued, though, that the organisation needed a more focused aesthetic agenda, with an emphasis on radical Central European trends (above all the dodecaphonic idiom that he himself had adopted in 1932–3), which would clearly distinguish the festivals from those of the conservative Permanent Council.79

To recall a distinction assayed in the Introduction, Krenek called for the ISCM to side with the radically ‘new’ over the merely ‘contemporary’ – a demand that prompted Dent to a staunch defence of musical pluralism as an internationalist principle.80

Krenek had no complaints when Koffler’s draft statutes declared that the ISCM would not just serve ‘contemporary music’ in general, but ‘support the less accessible and problematic tendencies especially’.81 But he railed against the idea of using festival time

1930s’, keynote lecture at ‘A “Musical League of Nations”?: Music Institutions and the Politics of Internationalism’ (Institute of Musical Research, Senate House, London, June 2018). 75 Dent to Hába, 23 February 1936, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 222–24. 76 ‘für weniger kritische Zeiten gerade ausreichend’; Krenek, ‘Von der Pariser Tagung der IGNM’, 23: Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift, no. 31–33 (September 1937), 40–42 (p. 41). The other members of the sub-committee were Sten Broman, Edward Clark and Jacques Ibert. 77 For an overview of Krenek’s conservative politics in the 1930s – he detested German Nazism but was initially sympathetic to Austro-fascism – see Gregory Dubinsky, ‘Křenek’s Conversions: Austrian Nationalism, Political Catholicism, and Twelve-Tone Composition’, repercussions 5, no. 1–2 (1996), 242–315. 78 ‘so wenig wie möglich einzumischen’; Krenek, commentary on amendments to draft statutes, Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.1.2. 79 Austriacus [Krenek], ‘Die Blubo-Internationale’. 80 Dent, ‘Zum 13. Internationalen Musikfest in Prag 1935’, Der Auftakt 15, no. 7–8 (1935), 97–99, which induced a further reply from Krenek: ‘Eau de Vichy auf unsere Mühle’, 23: Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift, no. 22–23 (October 1935), 22–29. 81 ‘die schwer zugänglichen und problematischen Richtungen besonders zu unterstützen’. This wording remained consistent throughout all the drafts produced during 1935–7.

164 previously allocated to concerts for speeches and discussions – or, as he put it, ‘endless prattle’, which would inevitably descend into ‘politicising’.82 He also deplored Koffler’s attempts to reconceive the ISCM as democratic not just in the limited sense of equitable relations between national sections, but also through greater accountability to the membership at large.83 This would have involved blurring the distinction between internal procedures and public profile which had until then been crucial to sustaining the image of the institution as non-political. Krenek was horrified by the prospect of this additional scrutiny: ‘This is a democracy’, he complained, ‘that is worse than the most sinister police state!’84 He maintained the value of confidential discussions away from political grandstanding and public pressure, a position akin to that of those who were sceptical of the new diplomacy.85

At the Barcelona festival, for reasons examined below, Dent had announced his intention to step down as ISCM president at the following year’s gathering. This complicated the task of producing new statutes, since these would need to be acceptable to Dent’s successor. By spring 1937, Paul Sacher had emerged as the leading candidate for the role.

Krenek was keen on Sacher, who he felt would offer ‘more vigorous and purposeful leadership’ than Dent, and used a visit to Prague in April to cajole Hába into backing the

Swiss conductor.86 One reason Sacher stood out was his immense personal wealth; had

Eisler and Reichenbach still been interceding on Moscow’s behalf, they would have been appalled by the prospect of his presidency, which would hardly have rendered the ISCM

82 ‘Politisieren [...] uferlosen Geschwätz’; Krenek, commentary on amendments to draft statutes, Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.1.2. 83 As Krenek pointed out, Koffler’s scheme displayed some confusion on the question of membership; in the ISCM’s federational structure, the only recognised ‘members’ were the national sections; Krenek, commentary on amendments to draft statutes, Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.1.2. 84 ‘Das ist eine Demokratie, die ärger ist als der finsterste Polizeistaat!’; Krenek, commentary on amendments to draft statutes, Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.1.2. 85 A stance exemplified by Eric Hobsbawm’s dismissal of the new diplomacy as a misguided reaction against ‘the habitual and sensible processes of international negotiation’, in Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 34. 86 Krenek memoirs, Ernst Krenek Institut, LM-034-05 (p. 278). See also Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit, 945. Krenek reported on his talks with Hába in Krenek to Sacher, 16 April 1937, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung.

165 more socialist.87 Sacher himself, though, was wary of becoming a cash cow for grandiose schemes. Though only in his early thirties, he had established an impressive track record of leading musical organisations – he had transformed Basel into an important musical hub – and had strong ideas about what was realistic.88 He was opposed to a dramatic expansion of the organisation’s activities, and felt that the president should be granted more discretion than Koffler’s strict rules allowed. In early June, just a couple of weeks before the 1937 ISCM festival, Krenek met Sacher in Basel. With Sacher ‘anxious to simplify and concentrate the whole design’, they condensed radically the existing draft.89 It was this version that was presented to the General Assembly in Paris, where it was passed by the delegates with only a handful of minor amendments.90 The new statutes came into effect at the following year’s festival in London, although Sacher, as we will see, never did become president of the ISCM.

After the ‘elimination of some all too extravagant and fantastical plans’, as Krenek put it, Koffler’s elaborate scheme was never officially scrutinised by the General Assembly.91

Even so, his discarded vision of a more politicised, expansive and democratically accountable

ISCM indicates how the challenges of the 1930s fired up alternative ‘international imaginaries’, through which existing practices were inventively (if not always realistically) reconceived.92 By contrast, what was perhaps most remarkable about the statutes passed in

Paris was that, after two years of scheming and negotiation, little differed from what had

87 In 1935, Eisler and Reichenbach had described the Swiss section as ‘decidedly reactionary’ (‘ausgesprochen reaktionär’); Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 290. In 1934, Sacher had married the widow Maja Stehlin, whose first husband had inherited shares in Hoffmann-La Roche, the giant pharmaceutical company. Sacher joined its board of directors in 1938. 88 Sacher rose to prominence through his work with the Basler Kammerorchester, which he had established in 1926. Sacher’s other administrative experience included the presidency of the ISCM’s Swiss section since 1935, as mentioned above, and a position on the board of the Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein since 1931. 89 ‘bestrebt, den ganzen Aufbau zu vereinfachen und zu konzentrieren’; Sacher to Hába, 10 June 1937, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 232. 90 The draft that seems to have been at hand in Basel – with handwritten annotations documenting the many cuts – is Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.1.5. This produced the typescript ZPH 291 1.11.1.4, which has annotations that appear to reflect discussions in Paris. The finalised 1937 statutes are reprinted in full in Haefeli, IGNM, 623–28. 91 ‘die Ausschaltung mancher allzu ausschweifender und phantasticher Pläne’; Krenek, ‘Von der Pariser Tagung der IGNM’, 41. 92 I borrow this phrase from Glenda Sluga’s account of discarded proposals for the covenant of the League of Nations, in Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 45–55.

166 come before. For Shreffler, the most notable change is the new commitment to ‘less accessible and problematic tendencies’ – although arguably even this was already implicit in the prefatory text accompanying the original statutes, which described the ISCM as a response to the ‘distrust and hostility’ directed at ‘music of a pioneer type’.93 As Sacher himself summed it up, ‘in the end not much more is left than what was already contained in the old statutes, albeit made more precise in the details and stated somewhat more comprehensively’.94

Yet this new level of legalistic detail – a change in style if not in substance – was an important step. A British model of common law was replaced with a Continental European one of civil law. This shift marked the ascent of a different model of internationalist homosociability, a reconfiguring of how the men in the ISCM’s General Assembly thought they should relate to one another.95 As we saw in Chapter One, male friendship was a core tenet of Dent’s internationalism. Throughout his involvement in the ISCM, he advocated that the organisation should ‘have as few rules as possible and agree to interpret them (and to suspend them if at any time desirable) in a liberal spirit, guided by an honourable sense of good will and mutual confidence in each other’.96 For Dent, part of the appeal of conference diplomacy’s conventions was surely their intimate character; as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht observes, ‘the well-established pattern of showing deputies to the League of Nations united around a table [...] seems to fulfil the dream of an international politics that will resemble the private relations of a family’ – a dream, one might say, of rendering internationalism non- political.97 Not least in their informality, the original statutes were imbued with the

93 International Society for Contemporary Music, 3; Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’, 78–80. 94 ‘So ist schliesslich nicht viel mehr stehen geblieben, als was schon in den alten Statuten enthalten war, im Einzelnen allerdings präzisiert und etwas ausführlicher gehalten’; Sacher to Hába, 10 June 1937, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 232. 95 One model for my emphasis on gender here is Patricia Clavin’s account of how the internationalism of British bankers – as ‘gentlemanly’ capitalists – was shaped by codes of masculinity; Patricia Clavin, ‘Men and Markets: Global Capital and the International Economy’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 85–109. 96 Dent, draft of an unsent letter to Wallingford Riegger, 21 March 1949, Dent Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, EJD/2/8/7. 97 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘League of Nations’, in In 1926, 126–31 (p. 130).

167 assumption that interpersonal affiliations were the basis for international cooperation.

Article 7 had urged the national sections to encourage ‘the exchange of visits by its members’, whereby ‘each member of a National Section of the International Society shall be regarded as an honorary member of the National Section within whose area he finds himself at any time’

– an attempt to legislate for a quasi-Kantian ideal of cosmopolitan hospitality.98

This article was dropped from the 1937 statutes, a decision that exemplifies how the social relations of new-music internationalism were being reconceived. Krenek described the original statutes as a Panglossian relic: ‘an agreement of gentlemen and friends who trust in a continual improvement of all things’.99 For Krenek, the sanguine attitudes of the 1920s were no longer sufficient for the modern international man; the new arrangement would foster cooperation on the solid foundations of proper institutional structures, not the whims of personalities. Even after Sacher had sought to render the new statutes ‘more humane and rational’, they represented a turn away from Dent’s gentlemanly values.100 Political pressures may have set statute reform in motion, but this did not result in the ISCM’s politicisation.

Instead, the outcome was increased bureaucracy and professionalism, a further step in the ongoing institutionalisation of musical modernism. In this new regime, it was unclear what place there might be for a figure such as Dent, as he himself had realised on receiving

Koffler’s scheme: ‘One would even need lawyers to translate it exactly! It is becoming more and more clear to me that after Barcelona I must definitively step down from my position as president, once and for all.’101

98 International Society for Contemporary Music, 7. 99 Krenek, ‘Contemporary Problems: Functions of the I.S.C.M. Festival’ (1938), Ernst Krenek Institut. 100 ‘menschlicher und vernünftiger’; Sacher to Dent, 16 June 1937, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. Dent had complained bitterly of the prior draft: ‘What irritates me are certain paragraphs, which seem to assume that all people are dishonest schemers; here [i.e. in Britain, presumably], in the case of such an association, one has more trust in the members of a society with non-material aims’ (‘Was mich ärgert sind gewisse Paragraphen, welche zu voraussetzen scheinen, dass alle Menschen unehrliche Intriganten sind; hier, bei einer solchen Vereinigung, hat man mehr Vertrauen zu den Mitglieder[n] einer Gesellschaft mit ideellem Zweck’); Dent to Sacher, 2 June 1937, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. 101 ‘Man würde auch Juristen brauchen, um es genau zu übersetzen! Es wird mir immer klarer, dass ich nach Barcelona mein Amt als Präsident einmal für allemal definitiv niederlegen müssen werde’; Dent to Hába, 23 February 1936, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 224.

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Succession geographies

The two debates examined in detail thus far – about the plight of the Serbian composers and statute reform – were resolved not by some disinterested process of rational deliberation, but by the shifting distribution of power in the General Assembly. In this forum, as in any representative democracy, pacts and coalitions were essential; a delegate’s influence was proportional to the number of colleagues they could convince to vote with them. Power flowed along the lines of collective interest and personal loyalty. At the 1935 festival, the confrontation with Politics, with a capital ‘P’, produced a new and unstable institutional politics within the ISCM, which would absorb the delegates’ attention even as the geopolitical situation took further ominous turns.

Although the General Assembly offered a reassuring tableau of international cooperation, there had always been fissures between the delegates. Countries were often thought of as belonging to informal blocs, determined primarily by geography, language and aesthetic principles. The tensions between these groupings were most pronounced during the election of the festival jury, since delegates from a dozen or so countries were required to pick just five jurors. Although not every country could be represented on the jury, there was usually an effort to ensure a balance of regions. At the 1931 meeting of the General Assembly

– the one pictured in Figure 9 – the vote had to be repeated multiple times, after the French,

Italian, Polish and Spanish delegates protested that ‘the Latin countries were not adequately represented’.102 Earlier in the same year, Berg, who served on the jury for the 1931 festival, would write to apologise to Hába for the paucity of Czechoslovakian music on the programme: it was only because he was ‘in the minority (the position which Central

European music occupies in the ISCM)’, he explained, that ‘Western-oriented music (or let us call it that of the Entente countries) dominates to a disproportionately high degree’.103

102 ‘Minutes of the Tenth Council of Delegates of the International Society for Contemporary Music’ (1931), Heinz-Tiessen-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, 2109. 103 ‘wenn ich nicht in der Minorität (die die mitteleuropäische Musik in der I.G. fnM einnimt) gewesen wäre [...] die westlich orientierte Musik (oder nennen wir sie die der Entente-Länder) in unverhältnis hohem Maß dominiert’; Berg to Hába, 24 January 1931, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 137.

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Terms such as ‘Latin’ and ‘Central European’ were derived from entangled assumptions about climate, heredity, language, religion, political interests and musical aesthetics. They were born, in other words, of the fluid boundaries between nation, ethnicity and race. The pervasiveness of these categories in the discourse around the ISCM indicates the enduring legacy of nineteenth-century efforts to taxonomize the peoples of Europe, through schemas such as the tripartite model of ‘Latins’, ‘Germanics’ and ‘Slavs’.104

Classifications of this kind did not map neatly onto the post-First World War geopolitical order of nation-states that the ISCM’s General Assembly echoed through its assigning of equal representation to each national section. As European history since 1918 has amply demonstrated, an inter-national schema of ‘patchwork internationalism’ (see Chapter Three) could never be fully reconciled with the multitude of alternative patterns of national, ethnic and religious affiliations that traversed and disrupted it. For the delegates in the General

Assembly, though, the discrepancies were as much an opportunity as a problem: national representatives, looking to enhance their own country’s standing by forming coalitions with others, could come together on the shared ground of ‘imagined communities’ that were larger than the ‘national’ – or at least spilled over the borders of existing nation-states – but smaller than the ‘international’.105 As Krenek’s trips to Prague and Basel in 1937 exemplify, in negotiating and maintaining such pacts, musicians really did become cultural-political

‘diplomats’ of a kind.

In a musical terrain divided into geographical blocs, one of Dent’s challenges as ISCM president was to strike a satisfactory balance between competing factions. He depended on trusting relationships with the national delegates: his friendship ideal, though genuinely held, masked how his personal authority was bolstered by his cosmopolitan aptitude to cultivate ties with musicians from across Europe. After the Prague festival, though, that authority appeared to be waning. Although Dent was ‘re-elected unanimously’ at the final

104 Richard McMahon, The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 105 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991).

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General Assembly meeting, the minutes record that he ‘spoke of his regret at feeling that there was a certain loss of confidence in him’ and ‘deplored the increase of controversies of which he was kept in ignorance’.106 The problem was compounded by a decline in Dent’s physical health, which created a power vacuum in the General Assembly.107 The resulting instability was heightened by the shifting geography of new-music internationalism. The

German section of the ISCM had been one of the most active and influential, until it was disbanded in 1933. Italy had also been prominent during the ISCM’s first decade; but, as discussed at the end of Chapter Three, it began to withdraw after the 1935 festival. Dent had had allies in both countries. In Central Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, meanwhile, energetic new voices were emerging, ones with little historic loyalty to the ISCM president.

Although the statute revisions ultimately adopted were relatively modest in scope, Dent’s inability to prevent reform he did not support was indicative of a more general atmosphere of insurrection. For those who saw the existing regime as a ‘paternalistic dictatorship’ –

Eisler and Reichenbach’s somewhat exaggerated characterisation – this was nothing to be lamented.108 As Hába put in 1937: ‘Since Prague 1935, democracy has prevailed in the ISCM, even against Prof. Dent!’109

Hába had reason to feel smug: he was the principal beneficiary of the General

Assembly’s shifting terrain. In 1935, he became almost a second, shadow president, thanks to his wide-ranging connections with other delegates.110 He had longstanding ties with Austrian and German musicians: he had known Krenek and Eisler, for instance, since his student days in Vienna in 1918–20. After moving to Prague in 1923, via a stint in Berlin, Hába was able

106 ‘Minutes of the Fourteenth Delegates’ Conference. Prague. 1935. Held at the Umelecka Beseda, Prague, by Kind Permission of the Directors’, Hanns-Eisler-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, 2990. 107 In the mid-1930s, Dent suffered severely from gastric ulcers. At Barcelona, he ‘was so seriously ill that he could hardly participate at all in the events of the music festival’ (‘so schwer erkrankt war, daß er an den Manifestationen des Musikfestes fast gar nicht teilnehmen konnte’); ‘Bericht der österreichischen Delegierten über das XIV. Musikfest der IGNM, Barcelona, 19. bis 25. April 1936’, Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.2.2. 108 ‘patriarchalische Diktatur’; Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 288. 109 ‘Seit Prag 1935 hat die Demokratie in der I.G.N.M. gesiegt, auch gegen Prof. Dent!’; Hába to Sacher, 9 December 1937, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. 110 Eisler and Reichenbach identified Hába as ‘after Dent, and in fact as opposition, the most important person of the music festival’ (‘nach Dent, und zwar als Opposition die wichtigste Person des Musikfestes’); Eisler and Reichenbach, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der IRTB’, 296.

171 both to sustain his connections with the centres of Austro-German modernism and to foster ties with more far-flung peripheries. For modernist-inclined composers from the Balkans, such as the Serbian musicians who were tortured in 1935, it became an almost obligatory rite of passage to study with him in Prague.111 Hába used his transnational affiliations to bolster his standing in the ISCM. In December 1934, months before they began to collaborate on statute revisions, he and Koffler – another contemporary at the Vienna Conservatory – agreed to formalise an association between the Czechoslovakian and Polish sections, on the basis of their shared interests as ‘Slavic’ peoples.112 As well as looking to his connections with friends in neighbouring countries, Hába also sought to foster the solidarity of musicians who shared the experience of living at the ‘periphery’. In 1935, as Krenek would later recall, ‘Hába privately rounded up delegates from the smaller countries’, including those from

Scandinavia and Spain – the Catalonian composer Roberto Gerhard, a former Schoenberg student, was a natural ally – in order to challenge the supposed hegemony of Britain, France and Italy.113

If Central Europeans musicians had once been in the ‘minority’, as Berg claimed in

1931, Hába was moving into a position from which to seek redress. At the Prague festival, he used an ancillary meeting of sympathetic delegates to prepare a list of jurors, in advance of the official vote. When Hába’s shortlist was put before the General Assembly, Dent pressed the delegates to reconsider; but unlike in 1931, they ignored him.114 In 1936, Hába did the same again, this time without having to overcome Dent, who was too unwell to attend the

111 Jim Samson, Music in the Balkans (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 358–68. 112 Minutes of meeting between Hába and Koffler, December 1934, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 157. The pact was soon expanded to include the Slovenian composer Slavko Osterc, the leader of the Yugoslavian section and another former student of Hába. See Vlasta Reittererová and Hubert Reitterer, ‘Alois Hába – Slavko Osterc: Briefwechsel 1931–1940’, in Musikerbriefe als Spiegel überregionaler Kulturbeziehungen in Mittel- und Osteuropa – Eine Edition (2003), https://www.gko.uni- leipzig.de/fileadmin/user_upload/musikwissenschaft/institut/arbeitsgemeinschaft/musikerbriefe/14 _ReittererEd.pdf (accessed February 2019), 19–23. 113 Krenek memoirs, Ernst Krenek Institut, LM-034-05 (p. 239). See also Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit, 909. Hába’s scheming with others from the peripheries had begun in 1932, when he and the Swedish composer Sten Broman had organised secret meetings with other delegates from ‘small’ countries, in order to coordinate their votes in the election of the jury. See Haefeli, IGNM, 177–78. 114 ‘Bericht der Delegierten der Oesterreichischen Sektion der IGNM über die Delegiertenkonferenz anlässlich des XIII. internationalen Musikfestes in Prag, 2.–7. September 1935’, Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.2.1.

172 meetings.115 The shifting balance of power in the General Assembly, and especially Hába’s interventions, led to a more focused emphasis in the festival programmes on the

Schoenbergian Neue Musik of Central Europe.116 Krenek’s call for the ISCM to adopt a more radical aesthetic agenda was partially realised – a shift that left some delegates, such as

Casella, feeling bitterly resentful.117

Hába’s ascendancy was disturbing to Dent, and not only because it undermined his own authority. Whereas Hába thought of himself as challenging the alleged dominance of

Western Europe, Dent saw him as unwittingly abetting the German claim to musical supremacy, which, as we saw in Chapter One, Dent believed it was essential for the ISCM to resist. On receiving Koffler’s draft statutes in February 1936, he wrote to Hába:

I was very much involved (before the war) with the old I.M.G. [i.e. the Internationale Musikgesellschaft, the precursor to the International Musicological Society]. I am acquainted all too well with the great danger for all international music societies: they gradually become completely German. The danger is still greater today, because every displaced Jew is culturally German, and even the Jews in the countries bordering Germany. You do not notice it, even though you are 100% Czech; because nearly everyone who lives East of the Rhine receives their culture from German universities and German books; German is their international language.118

115 ‘Bericht der österreichischen Delegierten über das XIV. Musikfest der IGNM’. One of the musicians elected on this occasion was Osterc, who wrote to Hába to thank him for securing his place on the jury and promised that ‘I will not do anything important without your agreement’ (‘mache ich nichts Wichtiges ohne Einvernehmen mit Dir’); Osterc to Hába, 5 May 1936, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Alois Hába – Slavko Osterc’, 34. 116 On the ‘profiling’ (Profilierung) of the festival programmes in 1934–9, see Haefeli, IGNM, 233–61. 117 Casella would later complain that during the 1930s: ‘The [ISCM’s] truly revolutionary but generous spirit of sincere internationalism was replaced by degrees by a rather demagogic intrigue on the part of certain interests. This new spirit was due to the preponderance of a number of central-European elements, especially Czechoslovakian, who began to pursue a slow but tenacious anti-Latin campaign through the work of the assembly of national delegates and through the juries’; Casella, Music in My Time, 166–67. As Ben Earle points out, the English translation of this passage is bowdlerised, softening the blatant antisemitism of Casella’s original text, which railed against ‘certain Jewish central-European elements’; Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy, 69 n. 16. 118 ‘Ich hatte mit der alten I.M.G. (vor dem Krieg) sehr viel zu tun. Ich kenne nur zu gut die grosse Gefahr bei allen internationalen Musikgesellschaften: allmählich werden sie ganz Deutsch. Die Gefahr ist heute noch grosser, weil jeder ausgetriebene Jude kulturell Deutsch ist, und auch Juden in den Deutschland angrenzenden Ländern. Sie bemerken das nicht, trotzdem Sie 100% Čech sind; denn fast Alle, die [ö]stlich vom Rhein leben, bekommen ihre Kultur aus Deutschen Hochschulen, und Deutschen Büchern; Deutsch ist ihre internationale Sprache’; Dent to Hába, 23 February 1936, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 223.

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During the 1930s, Dent’s view of the German sensibility as an insidious transnational phenomenon was reinforced, as his reference above indicates, by his encounters with Jewish refugees. Although he expended much time and money on helping displaced Jewish musicians and scholars, he worried that they were potential carriers of the dreaded German sensibility.119 Confronted with Hába’s coordinated bloc, Dent was determined – despite his diminished authority and weakened health – to stand up for the ‘Latin’ faction, in which he included Britain.120 This endeavour to ‘stabilise the equilibrium’, as he put in 1935, seems to have informed his response to the challenges of the 1930s just as much as his determination to keep the ISCM ‘non-political’.121 His insistence, for example, that the 1936 festival should be hosted in Barcelona, not Moscow, was propelled not only by his aversion to the politicisation of the ISCM, but also by his ambition to strengthen the organisation’s ‘Latin’ camp.122

The General Assembly was divided in the mid-1930s by factionalism. After Dent announced his intention to step down from the presidency, Hába became a pivotal power broker in the search for a successor. He never seems to have been considered a likely candidate himself, though; as a composer whose aesthetic predilections were well known, he was perhaps too obviously partisan. Sacher, by contrast, emerged as the potential unity candidate: here was a musician who, as Krenek put it, ‘was less exposed to the bitter attacks from the group of Hába and his eastern followers’, but who, as a conductor, was not so firmly associated with any one strand of musical modernism.123 Initially, Dent was supportive of

119 Fauser contextualises Dent’s ‘anti-Semitism of remarks’ (a phrase she borrows from Anthony Julius) as a facet of his anxieties about Germany, in ‘The Scholar Behind the Medal’, 250–54. 120 ‘As an Englishman’, his letter to Hába continued, ‘I quite naturally have more contact with France, Italy and Spain, since culturally we English count ourselves among the Latins, not the Germans’ (‘Ich als Engländer habe ganz selbstverständlich viel mehr Kontakt mit Frankreich, Italien und Spanien, denn wir Engländer rechnen uns kulturell zu den Romanen, nicht zu den Deutschen’); Dent to Hába, 23 February 1936, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 223. It is characteristic of Dent’s anti-clericalism that his cultural map ignored the sectarian divides that had been crucial historically to the carving up of the European population into ‘Latins’, ‘Germans’ and ‘Slavs’. 121 ‘das Gleichgewicht zu stabili[si]eren’; Dent to Sacher, 22 July 1935, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. 122 See Calmell i Piguillem, ‘El III Congreso Internacional de Musicología en Barcelona 1936’, 166–67. 123 Krenek memoirs, Ernst Krenek Institut, LM-034-05 (p. 278). See also Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit, 945.

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Sacher, who had been an ally in the effort to resist pro-Moscow voices in 1935. The location of the ISCM’s central office was dependent on the president’s country of residence, and Dent did not want it to be moved from London to anywhere too strongly associated with particular aesthetic or political tendencies. As he told Sacher in March 1936, ‘to my mind, only

Switzerland comes into consideration. Vienna is just as impossible as Prague or Moscow!’124

Since the First World War, multilingual Switzerland had consolidated its reputation for

‘neutrality’, which helped to enshrine its now-familiar role as a base for international organisations, including, of course, the League of Nations.125

When Krenek and Sacher met in Basel in June 1937, they worked under the assumption that the Swiss conductor would be elected ISCM president at the forthcoming festival in Paris. But although the General Assembly accepted their statutes, the vote for

Dent’s successor was delayed until the following year, a move that Krenek saw as a barely disguised attempt to block Sacher.126 Dent had grown anxious about Basel. The city was home to the headquarters of the International Musicological Society, which he had led since

1932. By mid-1936, he had come to see the Swiss musicologists at the central office as afflicted by Nazi sympathies and antisemitism.127 Basel’s compromising associations were probably not dispelled by the conduct of Sacher, who had urged the ISCM to restore relations with Nazi Germany, and gave two concerts in Germany in the run-up to the postponed election of 1938.128 For Dent, it seems, Basel had revealed itself to be hazardously receptive to the German sensibility; only Britain could guarantee the ISCM’s security. When the

124 ‘kommt meines Erachtens nur die Schweiz in Betracht. Wien ist eben so unmöglich wie Prag oder Moskau!’; Dent to Sacher, 18 March 1936, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. 125 Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen, and Sven Widmalm, ‘Introduction’, in Neutrality in Twentieth- Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture, and Politics after the First World War, ed. Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen and Sven Widmalm (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–15. 126 ‘Bericht der oesterreichischen Delegierten über die Tagung der IGNM, Paris, 20.–27. Juni 1937’, Krenek Nachlass, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, ZPH 291 1.11.2.3. 127 The turning point had come when they had resisted his plan to break with Breitkopf & Härtel, the distinguished German firm that had until then published the IMS’s journal, Acta Musicologica; Dent to Adler, 15 July 1936, quoted in Fauser, ‘Edward J. Dent (1932–49)’, 48 n. 14. 128 Sacher, in ‘Musikfeste und Musikalischer Alltag’, 4. Sacher conducted the Basler Kammerorchester in Heidelberg on 8 April and in Donaueschingen on 11 June; Alte und neue Musik: Das Basler Kammerorchester (Kammerchor und Kammerorchester) unter Leitung von Paul Sacher, 1926–1951 (Zurich: Atlantis, 1952), 273–74. Sacher signed documents affirming all the players in his orchestra to be of ‘Aryan’ origins; Haefeli, ‘Politische Implikationen einer “unpolitischen” Organisation’, 111.

175 election of the new president was eventually held at the London festival in 1938, the majority of delegates voted not for Sacher but for Edwin Evans. The ISCM’s headquarters would stay in London, and the presidency would pass to the co-drafter of the original constitution. If

Sacher was the putative unity candidate, he was bested by the continuity candidate.

By Krenek’s account, Hába also turned his back on Sacher, although it was not clear whether the Czech composer was convinced by British ‘prattle’ about Nazi influences, or if

‘he ultimately suspected Sacher’s capitalistic standing’.129 Either way, Hába probably realised by 1938 that he was no longer in a position to command a majority of delegates; his informal coalition had begun to disintegrate, through events far beyond his control. In July 1936, the

Spanish section was thrown into chaos by the outbreak of civil war. In June 1937, amidst a wave of antisemitic persecution, Koffler was barred from the Polish section on account of his

Jewish heritage; he died in the Holocaust in 1944.130 In March 1938, the Austrian state was dissolved in the Anschluss; Krenek began preparing immediately for his emigration to the

United States. And in March 1939, Czechoslovakia – or what remained of it after the concessions of the Munich Agreement – was invaded by Germany; performances of Hába’s works were banned. External political events had reshaped the geography of the General

Assembly, creating a window in which political action, radical reform and new leadership had seemed possible; but they also closed that window, as Europe’s turbulent 1930s pitched towards their grim conclusion. There was a sense in which musicians were right to claim that their imitation of diplomatic conventions was ‘non-political’: they were powerless to govern the larger political forces that could nourish or destroy any attempt at international cooperation.

With the benefit of hindsight, the fates of Hába, Koffler and Krenek expose the futility of the power struggles that engulfed the ISCM in the later 1930s. International solidarity among musicians was needed more than ever. But longstanding aesthetic and regional rivalries, which the ISCM spanned but by no means surmounted, were not abandoned.

129 Krenek memoirs, Ernst Krenek Institut, LM-034-05 (p. 289). See also Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit, 954. 130 Koffler to Hába, 2 June 1937, in Reittererová and Reitterer, ‘Musik und Politik – Musikpolitik’, 231.

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Preoccupations with the organisation’s internal affairs absorbed valuable time and energy that could have been devoted instead to, for example, using the ISCM’s international reach and authority to lead a coordinated response among musical institutions to the refugee crisis. Such a course of action, though, would have required rethinking the terms of the ‘non- political’ internationalism that ensured the ISCM’s independence, prestige and indeed survival through the vicissitudes of the 1930s.

Although old habits proved tenacious, the internal strife sparked by the political turmoil of the 1930s did transform the ISCM in fundamental ways. The organisation was pushed by some delegates to move beyond the mere performance of diplomacy and intervene more directly in the affairs of states. It adopted a new constitution, which registered a more professionalised institutionalisation of musical modernism that would later be consolidated through the support of governments, broadcasters and universities. And the long reign of

Dent was over – although following Evans’s death in March 1945, he would feel duty bound to return to the post until 1947. The final ISCM festival before the Second World War was hosted in Warsaw in April 1939. International participation was much reduced from previous instalments, and many of the General Assembly’s usual delegates did not attend.

Hába was barred from travelling by the occupying authorities in Prague.131 Sacher felt the political situation too fraught to risk the journey.132 ‘International music festival? ... Now? ...

In Warsaw?’ asked one incredulous observer.133 When German troops marched into the same city just six months later, it was the final confirmation of what was already known: the first chapter of new-music internationalism was at its end.

131 The barring of Czechoslovakian musicians from travelling to the 1939 festival was discussed in the General Assembly: ‘The International Society for Contemporary Music: Minutes of the 18th Conference of Delegates, Warsaw, 1939.’, ISCM Archive, Kongelige Bibliotek, Box 5. 132 Sacher to the Secretariat of the 1939 ISCM festival, 11 April 1939, Fonds Paul Sacher, Paul Sacher Stiftung. 133 ‘Internationales Musikfest? ... Jetzt? ... In Warschau?’; Alexander Jemnitz, ‘Das XVII. Internationale Musikfest in Warschau’, Schweizerische Musikzeitung 79 (1939), 265–67 (p. 265), quoted in Haefeli, IGNM, 258.

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Epilogue

The ISCM survived the Second World War, but never recaptured the prestige and prominence it enjoyed in the 1920s and 30s. During the conflict itself, most national sections either became inactive or were dissolved under Nazi occupation. The American branch organised festivals in New York and Berkeley in 1941 and 1942 respectively, occasions that were lent an ‘international’ character primarily through the involvement of exiles and

émigrés from Europe such as Krenek and Milhaud. (Some coverage depicted the ISCM itself as ‘a refugee from violence and tyranny overseas’.1) As the war continued, opportunities for further gatherings dried up. But when Victory in Europe was declared, the central office, now led once more by Dent, began to reconstitute the ISCM. In July 1946, the festival returned to

Europe, with London hosting the event’s revival as an annual venture. Although new-music internationalism was still maintained to be ‘non-political’, the festival was framed in part as a celebration of the triumph over fascism, and the programme included a number of works –

Dallapiccola’s Canti di prigionia, Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, Prokofiev’s Ode to the End of War and Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon – which overtly responded to recent experiences of war, persecution and authoritarianism.2 London’s News Chronicle, which sponsored the event, trumpeted the restoration of international links among musicians, in a claim to postwar primacy that echoed accounts of the festival at Salzburg in 1922 at which the ISCM was founded:

For seven years the nations of the world have been isolated. The exchange of ideas was succeeded by the exchange of bombs. Today, the pendulum swings slowly back to sanity, and the artistic soul of Europe is released from its long nightmare of oppression […] From the formerly occupied countries and from all over the world leading musicians are coming to London. They will meet in an atmosphere where the

1 Olin Downes, ‘Concert is Given by World Society’, The New York Times (20 May 1941), 27. 2 Canti di prigionia, composed between 1938 and 1941, is a complex case. The programme book for the 1946 ISCM festival claimed: ‘The original idea of the work occurred to the composer in September 1938, when the “racial laws” were first introduced into Italy.’ International Society for Contemporary Music: Programme of the 20th Festival, London 1946 (1946), 20, British Library. However, the postwar reputation of Canti di prigonia as a ‘protest’ work has been questioned: see Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy, 194–234.

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stifling influence of political and racial discrimination is but an evil memory of the past.3

This report registers the double temporal logic of peacetime. It describes a return to prewar normality, with the conflict itself figured as an aberration. But it also proclaims the beginning of a new era, a leap into the future that will help erase the traumas of recent history.

Making such a leap was easier said than done. As it re-emerged from the war, the

ISCM struggled either to restore its former role or to make a fresh start. Continuities with the interwar period were evident in the collective desire to recommence the festival, as well as in the programming in the late 1940s of familiar names such as Prokofiev and Schoenberg

(both of whom had had works performed at the first official ISCM festival back in 1923).4 Yet the war had caused decisive ruptures. The Austrian section, re-established in 1945, offers a vivid example: many of its leading figures from the interwar period had either died (Berg,

Webern) or emigrated to Britain (Bach, Wellesz) and the United States (Krenek, Réti). Faced with this kind of disruption, it was not possible for the ISCM simply to pick up where it had left off in the 1930s. The conditions that had facilitated its unique standing in interwar

Europe had shifted – and were shifting – in fundamental ways.

International politics looked very different in the postwar era. As Patricia Clavin writes, the transition from the League of Nations to the United Nations – from Geneva to

New York – ‘signalled the end of European predominance in the arrangement of world affairs’.5 In the contexts of decolonisation and the Cold War, many endeavours in cultural internationalism became more ‘global’ in scope.6 The ISCM made some tentative steps in this direction, as indicated by the renaming of its annual gathering as the ‘World Music Festival’ in 1952 – a typical phrase of the 1940s and 50s, when ‘world’ became the new catchword of

3 News Chronicle (6 July 1946), 2, quoted in Peter Roderick, ‘Rebuilding a Culture: Studies in Italian Music after Fascism, 1943–1953’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2010), 61. 4 The works in 1923 were Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes and Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. 5 Clavin, Securing the World Economy, 359. 6 Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order, 131–76.

179 internationalism.7 (The festival is now known as the ‘World Music Days’.) In 1954, in a move that further underscored the ISCM’s anti-Nazi credentials, the relabelled event was hosted in

Haifa, Israel. ‘The I.S.C.M. was founded and developed in the atmosphere of Europe’, observed the Danish flautist and administrator Johan Bentzon, the organisation’s president in 1953–4; but by accepting the invitation of the Israeli section, ‘the society has placed on record its recognition of its widening international responsibility’.8 Israel, though, was not such a departure as the geographical distance implied. The main local organisers of the festival – including the composer Erich Walter Sternberg, the president of the Israeli section

– had emigrated from Europe in the 1930s, and had previously studied and worked in

Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland.9 Like the American festivals held during the war, the

1954 gathering shows how the borders of ‘European culture’ stretched into complex new formations following the mass displacements of the 1930s and 40s. But it did not lead to a lasting shift in location for ISCM festivals. In fact, the event only really started to take place outside Western Europe regularly in the 1990s. The change of policy was driven by a renewed aspiration to expand the ISCM’s geographical scope – an undertaking that seems admirably intentioned, but has also raised problems of its own, not least those arising from the traditional Eurocentrism (and implicit whiteness) of ‘contemporary music’, and the considerable gap in material resources between national sections in the West and those in the Global South.10

7 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 81–87. ‘World music festival’ did not refer to ‘world music’ in the sense of non-Western traditional and popular musics, a genre category (and marketing term) that only became widespread in the 1980s and 90s. 8 Johan Bentzon, ‘Introductory Note’, in 28th World Music Festival: Mount Carmel, Haifa, May 30th–June 10th, 1954 (1954), ISCM Archive, Kongelige Bibliotek, Box 2. 9 The other board members of the Israeli section were Paul Ben-Haim, Peter Gradenwitz, Frank Pelleg and Josef Tal. 28th World Music Festival, ix. 10 These issues are explored in relation to post-apartheid South Africa in Michael Blake, ‘South African Composers on the World Stage: The ISCM in South Africa’, Fontes Artis Musicae 54, no. 3 (2007), 359–73; and Mareli Stolp, ‘New Music for New South Africans: The New Music Indabas in South Africa, 2000–02’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 143, no. 1 (2018), 211–32. Since 2015, ISCM World Music Days have been hosted in Ljubljana, Tongyeong, Vancouver, Beijing and Tallinn. See ‘Previous Festivals’, https://iscm.org/wnmd-world-new-music-days/previous-festivals/ (accessed October 2020).

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In the immediate postwar period, the more pressing challenge for the ISCM was the new geopolitical order of Europe itself. The Iron Curtain became rapidly established as the continent’s primary fault line. The ISCM was not best placed to traverse this divide: its modernist conception of contemporary music was hard to reconcile with the notions of socially responsible art promulgated in the Soviet Union and its satellites. As Shreffler highlights, this ideological opposition had been anticipated in the mid-1930s by the struggles over the ISCM’s ‘non-political’ status.11 But it entered a new and more volatile phase when the Soviet regime began its campaign against ‘formalist’ composition in 1948, which saw musical modernism denounced with renewed vigour as an ideologically suspect import from the West. The atmosphere of artistic experimentalism that spawned Mosolov’s Iron Foundry was a distant memory. Soviet composers were now charged with writing socialist realist works that would appeal to a mass public, ideally through drawing on the national heritage of folksong. The Prague Manifesto, published following the Second International Congress of

Composers and Music Critics held in Prague in 1948, described musical culture as having arrived at a juncture of crisis, which could only be overcome if composers ‘manage to dispense with extreme subjective tendencies in their music’, and ‘pay closer attention to the national culture of their country and defend it against cosmopolitanism, because true internationalism in music stems from the development of diverse national characteristics’.12

In this text, which was widely discussed in the West, we see earlier distinctions between good internationalism and bad cosmopolitanism (as discussed in Chapter Three) rehearsed in terms chillingly redolent of the brutal antisemitism of late Stalinism. The Prague Manifesto also called for the founding of an International Association of Progressive Composers and

Musicologists. Like the Nazi’s Permanent Council, this proposal seems to draw on the example of the ISCM to imagine an alternative body, purged of cosmopolitan modernists and with quite different political aims.

11 Shreffler, ‘The ISCM and Its Political Context’. 12 Quoted in Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39.

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Faced with the kind of rhetoric found in the Prague Manifesto, some of the ISCM’s adherents saw no possibility for productive exchange. For them, the Soviets had excised themselves from the ‘contemporary’ world, as Western moderns understood it.13 Others, especially those with an enduring loyalty to the Popular Front internationalism of the 1930s, were determined to maintain ties with the communist states.14 But enthusiasm alone could not overcome the ideological fissure. Despite the efforts of Eisler and Reichenbach in the mid-1930s, the Soviet Union never reconstituted an ISCM section following the dissolution of Moscow’s Association for Contemporary Music (ASM) in 1932. Russia only re-entered the

ISCM in 2005.15 Other countries in Eastern Europe did re-establish national sections shortly after the war. However, in 1951 the Czechoslovakian section withdrew – it would be followed by Hungary and Poland in 1953 – on the grounds that ‘the evolution of music in the world increasingly follows paths that differ from those of the ISCM’, whose festivals were

‘desperately weighed down by a formalist past’.16 Under communism, in other words, musical modernism was no longer deemed contemporary. Czechoslovakia, Hungary and

Poland all rejoined the ISCM in the later 1950s, when Khrushchev’s Thaw saw an easing of political tensions. But relations with Eastern Bloc countries were never stable. When the

ISCM jointly hosted its festival with the Warsaw Autumn in 1968, the collaboration ended in acrimony after a large proportion of participants from the West pulled out at the last minute to protest Poland’s involvement in the military suppression of the Prague Spring.17 The ISCM

13 See, for example, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, ‘New Soviet Music’, trans. Nora Bickley, Music Today 1 (1949), 68–80. 14 One such figure was Edward Clark, who was elected Dent’s successor as ISCM president in 1947. In 1952, he argued: ‘In the East of Europe, [...] a tremendous work is being devoted to musical developments which we are following with intense interest; if, at the present moment, we lack organised contacts with these new democratic countries, it certainly represents a loss on both sides which we must hope will soon be repaired’; ‘Geleitwort des Präsidenten’, in 26. Internationales Fest der IGNM in Verbindung mit dem 3. int. Zwölftonkongress Salzburg 20. Juni bis 3. Juli 1952 (1952), ISCM Archive, Kongelige Bibliotek, Box 2. 15 ‘ISCM – Russian Section’, https://member.iscm.org/about/members/iscm-russian-section/ (accessed October 2020). 16 ‘l’évolution de la musique dans le monde suit de plus en plus des chemins qui diffèrent de ceux de la ISCM [...] désespérément accablés d’un passé formaliste’; Czechoslovakian section to the central office of the ISCM, 7 March 1951, quoted in Haefeli, IGNM, 223–24. The Polish section did not formally withdraw, but did become inactive. It is no coincidence that the decision to host 1954 festival in Israel, with support from the American Fund for Israeli Institutions, was taken after the departure of these sections in Eastern Europe. 17 Haefeli, IGNM, 201–6; Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 139–63.

182 did not return to Eastern Europe until 1986, when the festival was held in Budapest. The organisation’s struggle to facilitate exchange and understanding across the East/West divide raised questions about the purpose of its internationalism in the postwar world. Its multilateral conferences of unofficial musician-diplomats lost impetus, and came to be overshadowed by the government-funded initiatives in cultural diplomacy prompted by the

Cold War, such as the ambitious ‘Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’ festival (L’Oeuvre du XXe Siècle) organised in Paris in 1952 by the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural

Freedom.18

Doubts about the ISCM’s relevance were compounded in the 1950s by shifts in the aesthetic and institutional landscape of contemporary music. Despite efforts to refresh its constitution and leadership in the later 1930s, the ISCM retained an ethos of amateurism that seemed increasingly outmoded. A new generation of modernist musicians (in the West) quickly grew impatient with this ‘institutional relic from the years when New Music still dwelt in the ghetto’.19 As public funding for the arts expanded, they looked to the support of better-funded, more professionalised institutions, particularly European radio stations, which sponsored other festivals (such as the revitalised Donaueschingen) and institutes for electronic music (such as those in Cologne and Milan).20 Internationalism remained a core principle of new-music culture in all these settings, but not to the ISCM’s benefit. Thanks especially to the iconic Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music

(Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, from 1946), the high modernists of

18 On this festival, see Giles Scott-Smith, ‘The “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century” Festival and the Congress for Cultural Freedom: Origins and Consolidation, 1947–1952’, Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 1 (2000), 121–43; Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle Against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe. The literature on musical diplomacy during the Cold War more generally is extensive. See, for example, Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World; Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy; Kiril Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition During the Early Cold War, 1945–1958 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015). 19 ‘ein institutionelles Relikt aus den Jahren, da die Neue Musik noch im Ghetto wohnte’; Klaus Wagner, ‘ISCM-IGNM – was soll’s noch?’, in ‘Bedeutung und Aufgabe der IGNM’, ed. Heinrich Strobel, Melos 25, no. 5 (May 1958), 147–59 (p. 158). 20 David Osmond-Smith, ‘New Beginnings: The International Avant-Garde, 1945–62’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 336–63.

183 the 1950s were able to exchange ideas with an intensity that seemed to render the ISCM festival superfluous.21 The organisation also held little appeal for the more avant-garde wing of contemporary music. Despite some abortive experiments with alternative approaches, the inherited format of the festival, in which an elected jury of musicians sifted through scores, had not been created to accommodate practices such as happenings and graphic notation.

(Cage was not performed at the event until 1972.22) It is perhaps no wonder that by the early

1960s, some observers had begun to pun on the organisation’s German abbreviation (IGNM) as ich geh’ nicht mit: ‘I’m not keeping up’.23

Embracing a more radical aesthetic agenda risked closing the door entirely on collaboration with countries in the Eastern Bloc. Yet the more contemporary music seemed to be flourishing outside or even in spite of the ISCM, the larger questions about its continuing purpose loomed – a quandary that recalls the concerns that emerged already in the mid-1920s about the organisation growing old (as discussed in Chapter One). In 1958,

Boulez expressed the high-modernist case against the ISCM with characteristic polemical flair:

For me, the solution – if there is a solution – is to allow this aged and obsolete society to die peacefully, and to create first of all an association between the different European organisers who have made a real effort since the war on behalf of living music [...] Europe’s relations with the rest of the world must be considered on the basis of this new circuit.24

Once again – and it is in a way a measure of the organisation’s achievement – we are confronted with a vision of a kind of anti-ISCM which relies heavily on the ISCM itself as a model. On this occasion, though, the antagonism motivating the proposal was not primarily political; Boulez was clearly sympathetic to the broader project of pursuing new-music

21 Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also the comments on ‘Cold-War internationalism’ in Philip Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 67–77. 22 The composition was Cage’s Variations III (1962), which was itself ten years old. 23 Haefeli, IGNM, 295. 24 ‘Pour moi, la solution – si solution il y a – est de laisser mourir tranquillement cette société vieillie et caduque et de créer d’abord une liaison entre les différents organisateurs d’Europe qui ont fait depuis la guerre un réel effort en faveur de la musique vivante [...] Les relations de l’Europe avec le reste du monde doivent s’envisager à partir de ce nouveau circuit’; Boulez, in ‘Bedeutung und Aufgabe der IGNM’, ed. Strobel, 149.

184 internationalism through an institutionalised transnational network, centred in (Western)

Europe. Instead, it derived from an inter-generational rift among musical modernists.

Boulez’s attitude exemplifies the typical fate of the ‘anti-institutional institutions’ of modern art, as Pierre Bourdieu termed them: they become absorbed over time into the established landscape, making it possible for future generations to take up their own positions of rebellion, a trajectory subsequently reiterated in Boulez’s own journey from young firebrand to patriarchal figurehead.25

The ISCM’s woes in the 1950s were deepened by mismanagement and internal disputes, which mired almost everything it did in an exhausting atmosphere of crisis. The statute revisions of the later 1930s did not so much offer resolution as open the door to years more wrangling over policies and procedures. The drawn-out anguish of the General

Assembly meetings was particularly acute towards the end of the tumultuous presidency of

Edward Clark, which lasted from 1947 to 1952. Clark’s reign concluded with him being ousted by the national delegates; the unhappy aftermath culminated in him punching the composer Benjamin Frankel and taking him to court for slander, events that did not exactly accord with Dent’s visions of gentlemanly friendship.26 After Clark was forced out in 1952, the General Assembly heatedly debated the question: ‘Are you of the opinion that the

I.S.C.M. shall go forward or not?’27 The organisation stumbled on through proclamations of its demise, and the problem of finding a long-term successor to Dent was finally resolved in

1956 with the election of Heinrich Strobel.28 But by the end of the decade, there was widespread consensus that ‘the heroic era of the ISCM is over’.29 Even Rudolph Réti, the

25 See the discussion in English, The Economy of Prestige, 52, citing Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 258. On Boulez, see Born, Rationalizing Culture. 26 See Haefeli, IGNM, 298–99; Annika Forkert, ‘“Always a European”: Edward Clark’s Musical Work’, The Musical Times 159, no. 1943 (2018), 55–80 (pp. 77–78). 27 ‘International Society for Contemporary Music: Minutes of the General Assembly of Delegates: Salzburg – 1952’, ISCM Archive, Kongelige Bibliotek, Box 5. 28 Strobel, who led the ISCM until 1969, was also the director of the modernist-oriented music department at Südwestrundfunk, the public broadcasting corporation in southwest Germany. His appointment is thus representative of how radio stations became the engine rooms of contemporary music in Western Europe after 1945. 29 ‘l’âge héroïque de la SIMC est révolu’; Massimo Mila, ‘Keine Richtung, sondern Qualität’, in ‘Bedeutung und Aufgabe der IGNM’, ed. Strobel, 153.

185 instigator of the chamber music festival in Salzburg in 1922, came to believe that the organisation ‘has outlived some of its aims and principles’.30

What Haefeli called the ‘stagnation’ of the ISCM after 1945 was not the end of new- music internationalism: even as both phenomena transformed into novel postwar configurations, new music and internationalism remained tightly wound together in the practice and perception of musical modernism.31 The widespread adoption in the 1950s of the aesthetic ideal of abstraction, and of post-Webernian dodecaphonic procedures in particular, cemented the idea of an international language of contemporary music.32 For some musicians in the Eastern Bloc, meanwhile, modernism promised access to a larger, more international culture from which they feared becoming isolated (which is not to say that modernist and avant-garde techniques were straightforwardly ‘dissident’, or that knowledge and views of them were uniform or stable).33 Yet the fading of the ISCM’s reputation does confirm that the 1920s and 30s represent a distinctive phase in the entangled histories of modernism and internationalism. Situated in the longue durée, the organisation’s ‘heroic era’ between the wars represents a defined historical period, one brought to an end not simply by the Second World War, but also by the mid-century shifts in politics, patronage, aesthetics and personnel that reduced its annual gathering to being just another international festival of contemporary music. In this sense, the ISCM was undone by its own legacy: in Western Europe at least, its events were so successful at helping to launch an international, festival-centred culture for new music that they came to seem dispensable.

As I write this in late 2020, that culture’s future – like so much else – has rarely seemed so uncertain. For the first time since 1945, there has been no ISCM festival this year:

30 ‘einige ihre Ziele und Prinzipien überleben hat’; Réti, ‘Die Entstehung der IGNM’, 113. 31 Haefeli, IGNM, 286–344. 32 In 1956, Stockhausen proclaimed: ‘Around 1950 a generation began to formulate a new musical language, premised on the possibility of a collective, supra-national and entirely supra-personal idiom. Concepts of “pointilist” or “serial music” were chosen for this purpose, and if the concept of the “European” had not so gone to the dogs politically and commercially, one might actually speak of a “European music”’; Stockhausen, ‘Musik kennt keine Grenzen?’, 1956 Stockholm Radio talk, quoted in Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 68. 33 Peter J. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music During the Thaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland.

186 it was due to be hosted in Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand, but had to be cancelled.

It is unclear where the organisation will go from here. Modes of cultural exchange involving international travel have had to be paused or reimagined, and musicians across much of the world face existential threats to their careers.34 As vaccines for COVID-19 are beginning to be rolled out (in certain prosperous countries), there is reason to hope that some of the current restrictions could be eased in the coming months. But it is too early to say when international gatherings, especially those aspiring to a global scope, will become commonplace again. Some might wonder whether they should. An even bigger crisis is ahead, one that will compel us to reckon more fully with the environmental costs of the forms of cultural internationalism to which we have grown accustomed since the late nineteenth century. Perhaps 2020 will come to be seen as the year in which a century of new- music internationalism drew to a close. But then again, perhaps not: this alluring, malleable pairing has reinvented itself before.

34 In response to these problems, the ISCM has launched a ‘Virtual Collaborative Series’, an online showcase for recordings and videos submitted by the national sections. See ‘The ISCM Virtual Collaborative Series’, https://iscm.org/iscm-activities/collaborative-events/iscm-virtual- collaborative-series-2020/ (accessed December 2020). One challenge for such a project is that the current market for online cultural events and experiences is very crowded.

187

Appendix 1: Itinerary of the 1931 ISCM Festival, Oxford and London

This itinerary is primarily based on the official programme book for the 1931 festival. Where information is drawn from other sources, footnotes are provided.

Tuesday 21 July (Oxford) Oxford University Press offices: attendees register and receive their tickets.

Wednesday 22 July (Oxford) 8:15pm, reception and concert, Oxford Town Hall: hosted by the Mayor of Oxford. Choral music performed by the choirs of New College (cond. J. Dykes Bower) and Christ Church (cond. W. H. Harris).  Robert White, ‘O Praise God in His Holiness’  Thomas Weelkes, ‘Hosanna’  Orlando Gibbons, ‘Hosanna’, ‘O Lord Increase My Faith’  Weelkes, ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’  William Byrd, ‘Christe qui Lux es et dies’, ‘Ave Verum Corpus’  Thomas Tallis, ‘I call to thee (O sacrum convivium)’  John Blow, ‘Salvator Mundi’  Henry Purcell, ‘Jehovah Quam Multi Sunt’ Interval: welcoming speeches by the Mayor of Oxford and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University, and a response by Edward J. Dent, ISCM President.1  ‘Sumer is icumen in’ (encored)2  Byrd, ‘Lullaby’  Weelkes, ‘To Shorten Winter’s Sadness’  John Dowland, ‘Awake, Sweet Love’  Thomas Morley, ‘Fire, Fire, My Heart’

Thursday 23 July (Oxford) 3pm, concert, Sheldonian Theatre: chamber music selected by the jury.  Lew Knipper, Lyric Suite (BBCSO Chamber Orchestra, cond. Hermann Scherchen)  Roger Sessions, Piano Sonata (pf: Frank Mannheimer)  Józef Koffler, String Trio (vn: André Mangeot; va: Eric Bray; vc: Jack Shinebourne)  Jean Huré, ‘Âme en Peine’ (The Wireless Singers, cond. Stanford Robinson)  Egon Wellesz, Three Unaccompanied Choruses (The Wireless Singers, cond. Robinson)  Jan Maklakiewicz, Four Japanese Songs (S: Eva Bandrowska-Turska, BBCSO Chamber Orchestra, cond. Gregor Fitelberg)

1 Cecil Gray, ‘The Oxford Festival: Concert of Choral Music’, The Daily Telegraph (23 July 1931), 8; ‘Music Festival in Oxford: European Visitors’, The Oxford Times (24 July 1931), 8. 2 ‘Oxford Festival’, Monthly Musical Record 61, no. 728 (August 1931), 228; Edwin Evans, ‘The Oxford Festival’, The Musical Times 72, no. 1063 (September 1931), 803–6 (p. 804).

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 Ernesto Halffter, Sinfonietta (BBCSO Chamber Orchestra, cond. Halffter)

Friday 24 July (Oxford) 2:15pm, ballet performances, New Theatre:  Constant Lambert, Pomona: The Camargo Society, choreog. Frederick Ashton; The Orchestra of the Camargo Society, cond. Lambert  Erwin Schulhoff, La Somnambule: The Milča Mayerova Dancing Group, choreog. Milča Mayerova; The Orchestra of the Camargo Society, cond. Schulhoff  Ralph Vaughan Williams, Job: A Masque for Dancing (arr. Lambert): The Camargo Society, choreog. Ninette de Valois; The Orchestra of the Camargo Society, cond. Lambert

Saturday 25 July (Oxford) 10am, assembly of the national delegates, Rhodes House: chaired by Dent. The meeting primarily centred on voting on the jury for the 1932 festival. The following representatives were present:  Austria: Paul Stefan  Belgium: Ernest Closson  Czechoslovakia: Alois Hába, Erich Steinhard  England: L. Dunton Green, Edwin Evans  France: Henry Prunières  Germany: Hermann Springer, Heinz Tiessen  Holland: Paul F. Sanders  Hungary: Emerich Waldbauer  Italy: Alfredo Casella, Mario Labroca  Poland: Mateusz Gliński  Spain: Adolfo Salazar  Switzerland: Werner Reinhart  United States: Aaron Copland, Frederick Jacobi3

2:30pm, Wir bauen eine Stadt, Holywell Music Room: performances of Paul Hindemith’s work for children by pupils of local schools (cond. Ronald Briggs), with a spoken introduction by the critic Basil Maine. The work is repeated several times to accommodate all those who want to see it.4

4pm, garden party, Wytham Abbey: hosted by Colonel Raymond ffennell. Charabancs collect guests from central Oxford. Two teams of young people from Wytham and Headington perform Morris dances on the lawns, with accompaniment on mouth organ.5

8:15pm, concert, Sheldonian Theatre: chamber music selected by the jury.  Marcel Delannoy, String Quartet (The Krettly Quartet)

3 ‘Bericht über die Delegierten-Versammlung der I.S.C.M. in Oxford, Rhodes House, am 25. Juli 1931, 10 Uhr vorm’ and ‘Minutes of the Tenth Council of Delegates of the International Society for Contemporary Music’, Heinz-Tiessen-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, 2109. See also Thrun, ‘“Feste und Proteste”’. 4 ‘Modern Music at Oxford: Building a Town’, The Times (27 July 1931), 8; L. Dunton Green, ‘The International Music Festival at Oxford and London’, The Chesterian 13, no. 97 (September–October 1931), 15–22 (p. 17). 5 ‘Modern Music at Oxford: Building a Town’; ‘International Music Festival: Ballets at New Theatre: Brilliant Performances of Modern Work’, The Oxford Times (31 July 1931), 15; Henry Prunières, ‘Le Festival de La Société Internationale de Musique Contemporaine à Oxford et à Londres’, La Revue Musicale 12, no. 119 (October 1931), 254–60 (p. 260).

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 Otto Jokl, Sonatina for Piano Op. 21 (pf: Rita Kurzmann)  Jean Cartan, Sonatina for Flute and Clarinet (fl: René Le Roy; cl: G. Hamelin)  Eugène Goossens, Violin Sonata no. 2 (vln: Albert Sammons; pno: William Murdoch)  Mario Pilati, Piano Quintet in D (pf: Pilati; The International String Quartet)

Sunday 26 July (Oxford) 8:30pm, concert, Christ Church Cathedral:  Christ Church Cathedral Choir, cond. W.H. Harris: John Taverner, ‘Christe Jesu, Pastor Bone’ (motet a5), ‘Agnus Dei’ (2 settings, a3 and a5), ‘The Leroy Kyrie’ (a4)  International String Quartet: Purcell, Fantasias 1, 2, 3 and 4 for Strings in 4 parts  W.H. Harris, organ: Leo Sowerby, Symphony for Organ Solo, First Movement (British premiere)  Christ Church Cathedral Choir, cond. Harris: William Mundy, ‘O Lord the Maker of All Things’ (anthem a4); Christopher Tye, ‘Omnes Gentes Plaudite Manibus’ (motet a5); Byrd, ‘O Magnum Mysterium’ (motet a4)  International String Quartet: Purcell, Fantasias 6, 7 and 9 for Strings in 4 parts  International String Quartet and H. Campbell Stewart (va): Purcell, Fantasy on One Note

Monday 27 July (London) 3pm, concert, Queen’s Hall: this was not a fully official part of the festival (it did not feature in the programme book). But it was attended by ‘a large number of members’ of the ISCM.6  Madrigals: John Bennett, ‘All Creatures Now are Merry-Minded’; Weelkes, ‘On the Plains Fairy Trains’; John Ward, ‘Hope of My Heart’  Gustav Holst, Three Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, for female voices and harp  Arnold Bax, Sonata for Two Pianos  Part songs: Hubert Parry, ‘Come Pretty Wag’; Charles Stanford, ‘The Blue Bird’; Edward Elgar, ‘Go Song of Mine’ Interval  Part songs: Frederick Delius, ‘To Be Sung on the Water on a Summer Night’ (two parts); Peter Warlock, ‘The Corpus Christi Carol’; Bax, ‘This Worldes Joie’  Pieces for two pianos: Hugo Anson, ‘The Lonely Sailing Ship’; Arthur Benjamin, Dance Music Suite  English folksongs, arranged for unaccompanied chorus: Vaughan Williams, ‘Wassail Song’; Hubert Foss, ‘O I Have Seen the Roses Blow; Vaughan Williams, ‘Ca’ the Yowes’; W. Gillies Whittaker, ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ The Oriana Choir, cond. Charles Kennedy Scott; Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson (pf); Sidonie Goossens (harp); Gladys Currie (S), Beatrice Hughes-Pope (Mez) and Percy Manchester (T)

8:15pm, concert, Queen’s Hall: orchestral music selected by the jury.  Roman Palester, Symphonic Music (BBCSO, cond. Gregor Fitelberg)

6 E.K., ‘English Music: Madrigalists & Moderns’, The Daily Telegraph (28 July 1931), 6. See also Monday, July 27, 3 p.m., in the QUEEN’S HALL, LONDON: A Concert of English Music: By kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. P. Malcolm Stewart [1931], Heinz-Tiessen-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, 2109; Evans, ‘The Oxford Festival’, 805; ‘Modern English Music: Festival Concert at Queen’s Hall’, The Times (28 July 1931), 10.

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 Anton Webern, Symphony, Op. 21 (BBCSO, cond. Hermann Scherchen)  Virgilio Mortari, Rhapsody (BBCSO, cond. Alfredo Casella)  Vladimir Dukelsky, Symphony no. 2 (BBCSO, cond. Fitelberg)  Constant Lambert, Music for Orchestra (BBCSO, cond. Lambert)  George Gershwin, An American in Paris (BBCSO, cond. Casella)

Tuesday 28 July (London) 8:15pm, concert, Queen’s Hall: orchestral and choral music selected by the jury.  Juan José Castro, Three Symphonic Pieces (BBCSO, cond. Casella)  Fernand Quinet, Three Symphonic Movements (BBCSO, cond. Quinet)  Karol Szymanowski, Polish Songs (The London Select Choir, cond. T. Arnold Fulton)  Ferencz Szabó, Songs of the Wolves (The London Select Choir, cond. T Arnold Fulton)  Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benedicite (S: Elsie Suddaby, The National Chorus, BBCSO, cond. Adrian Boult)  Vladimir Vogel, Two Studies for Orchestra (BBCSO, cond. Scherchen)  Albert Roussel, Psalm 80 (T: Parry Jones, The National Chorus, BBCSO, cond. Boult)

Tourist excursions organised by Thomas Cook for festival attendees Wednesday 22 July, 9:30am–7pm: guided day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick Castle and Kenilworth Castle. Thursday 23 July, 9am–1:30pm: half-day drive to Cheltenham, stopping off at Birdlip for view of Gloucester. Friday 24 July, 9am–1pm: half-day drive to Sulgrave Manor. Saturday 25 July, 9am–1pm: half-day drive to Burford, Bibury and Fairford. Sunday 26 July, 9am–7:15pm: guided full-day tour to Gloucester, Worcester, Tewkesbury and Stratford-upon-Avon. Every day (except Sundays): steamer trips departing from Folly Bridge, Oxford.  9:30am–1:10pm: return trip to Nuneham or Abingdon.  9:30am–7pm: return trip to Wallingford.

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Appendix 2: Musica antica italiana at the 1928 ISCM Festival, Siena

Monday 10 September, 4pm, Basilica of San Francisco Orchestra of the Augusteo, Rome, cond. Bernardino Molinari  Vivaldi, arr. Molinari, The Four Seasons (vn: Enrico Campajola)  Cimarosa, Il matrimonio segreto, Overture  Corelli, arr. Ettore Pinelli, Sarabande, Gigue et Badinerie, after movements from the Violin Sonatas, Op. 5  Monteverdi, arr. Respighi, Recitative and Aria from Arianna, ‘Arianna’s Lament’ (S: Anna Maria Mendicini Pasetti)  Rossini, Semiramide, Sinfonia

Thursday 13 September, 9pm, Basilica of San Francisco Polifonica Romana, cond. Raffaele Casimiri  Palestrina, ‘Exaltabo Te’ (a5)  Josquin des Prez, ‘Ave Maria’ (a4)  Luca Marenzio, ‘Dum aurora finem daret’ (a6)  Palestrina, ‘Paucitas dierum’ (a5)  Palestrina, ‘Alleluja Tulerunt Dominum meum’ (a5)  Orlando di Lasso, ‘Velociter exaudi me’ (a5)  Palestrina, ‘Peccantem me’ (a5)  Victoria, ‘Ave Maria’ (a4)  Palestrina, ‘Credo’, from Missa Papae Marcelli (a6)

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Bibliography