Tompkins on Beal, 'New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification'

H-German Tompkins on Beal, 'New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification'

Review published on Sunday, April 1, 2007

Amy C. Beal. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xvi + 340 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-24755-0.

Reviewed by David Tompkins (Department of History, Carleton College) Published on H-German (April, 2007)

Experience and Experiments Abroad

In this meticulously researched monograph, Amy Beal offers an exhaustively detailed picture of the West German reception of a segment of post-World War II American music from 1945 to 1989. She focuses on American "experimental music," which she defines as originating from Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse, who "provided later composers with alternatives to Stravinsky-influenced neoclassicism or Schoenbergian serialism" (p. 2). Its main figures after 1945 included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Conlon Nancarrow, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. These unconventional men (Pauline Oliveros is the only female composer to appear occasionally) were generally neither academics nor connected to institutions. They sought to develop new sounds and their works often proved difficult to subject to traditional forms of musical analysis. Beal does not analyze these musical works or provide the reader with a sense of their sound, but rather focuses on the social and personal networks surrounding this music.

West Germany's state-subsidized musical life provided significant opportunities for American composers, and included festivals, radio play, exchange programs, private recitals, and of course public concerts. After the censorship and extreme nationalism of the Nazi era, West German musical circles sought to promote a wide range of musical styles, and thus new classical music at home and from abroad benefited from a relatively secure programming position. This support was crucial to continued production by American composers, who often struggled both economically and for recognition in the United States.

The core of the book is a chronological narrative, with six chapters devoted to three- to eight-year periods save for a final chapter covering 1975-90. Chapter 1 looks at the immediate postwar period and describes the American occupiers as firmly in control of German musical life and bent on reeducation. Her picture is rather different from that described in David Monod's recent monograph on the period, which demonstrates that early American influence was largely abandoned as the United States sought to garner German support in the intensifying Cold War against the USSR.[1] Both authors do agree that official American attempts to encourage American music through Amerika Häuser and visiting artists during the occupation period had mixed success among a German population largely skeptical about American cultural and musical achievement.

The pervasive view among German elites about the backwardness of American classical music began to change in the 1950s. The next five chapters show in painstaking detail numerous venues in which American music was heard in the Federal Republic and describe the radio stations, festivals, and important individuals that promoted this experimental music. Music festivals played the largest role in this process and the most influential in this early stage was likely the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. Its director through 1961, Wolfgang Steinecke, encouraged experimental music and featured the influential Cage and Tudor in residency there in 1958. Visits by Cage and Tudor to Cologne in the 1950s and to the important festival in Donaueschingen in 1954 were other key moments in West German awareness of and support for this music. Beal focuses especially on Tudor, a celebrated American pianist who visited West Germany during the period 1954 to 1961, served as an ambassador for the postwar generation, and helped to establish permanent professional relations for American experimentalists. While largely convincing, her large claims about his importance and influence could have been better substantiated.

Several other cities were important centers for the intersection of German musical life with American experimental music. Cologne had a lasting impact, as the location of Mary Bauermeister's studio in the 1960s, Walter Zimmerman's Beginner's Studio in the 1970s and 1980s, and through the efforts of Wolfgang Becker at WDR, the West German public broadcast network based in Cologne and directed at North Rhine-Westphalia. Bremen was another important site, through its radio station and the music festival Pro Musica Nova, led by composer Hans Otte. Munich was also a notable center, especially in the 1970s with music festivals organized by Josef Anton Riedl. Frankfurt, through the efforts of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler at Hessischer Rundfunk (the public broadcast network for the state of Hesse), featured a great deal of experimental music in the two decades before 1989. West Berlin was unsurprisingly an important venue as well with, among other events, Walter Bachauer's Metamusik festivals.

Broader contexts for the details on this musical activity are sometimes difficult to find in this book. The many cities mentioned above are not adequately evaluated with respect to the various occupation zones. At times, Beal seems to indicate that the American presence in places such as Bremen and Munich affected the performance of experimental music, but then fails to comment on the fact that Cologne lay in the British Zone and Donaueschingen in the French. Perhaps most oddly, she ends her book with a Cage organ work that is now being slowly played over several centuries in the former East German city of Halberstadt, and fails to comment on this curious location. A more complete sense of the wider musical world and the other genres of contemporary classical music performed would also have helped to contextualize the particular place of American experimental music in the postwar Federal Republic. The broader European context is also missing here; the reader is left to wonder about the reception of this music in Britain or France, and how it might compare to the situation in West Germany. Finally, Beal fails to give a larger sense of who was listening to this music. Outside of the few elites mentioned by name in the book, it is difficult for readers to get an idea of who attended festival concerts or tuned in to radio broadcasts. Assessing reception is, of course, a famously difficult task, but at least a vague sense of the audiences for this music would have been most useful.

Throughout her monograph, Beal does impressive work in showing how American experimental music achieved prominence in the Federal Republic, but she fails to adequately answer why this happens. In her conclusion, she states that the time has come to do so, but she then devotes a scant

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Tompkins on Beal, 'New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45030/tompkins-beal-new-music-new-allies-american-experimental-music-west Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German two pages to the task. Clearly, West German state support for classical music was vital to this process, but these subsidies do not explain the particular success of experimental music by American composers. More convincingly, Beal also shows that a small group of engaged West Germans, including Bachauer, Otte, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Riedl, Stiebler, Wolfgang Steinecke, Heinrich Strobel, and Zimmerman, felt an affinity for these American experimentalists. These men occupied positions of influence in the musical world and worked hard to promote this music. Perhaps most intriguing but disappointingly underdeveloped is the seemingly contradictory notion that American experimental music failed to fit into traditional German understandings of music as following ideas of progress. Beal argues that this "difficulty" in explaining American music kept debate swirling. Relatedly, a further explanation for this success is that many Germans viewed Americans as operating outside of the traditional narrative of European classical music, and thus saw this particular music as the authentic expression of an American tradition of novelty and experimentation.

Overall, this book will appeal to specialists interested in the musical life of West Germany as well as to scholars of American experimental music. Due to Beal's exhaustive research and impressive use of interviews, personal and public archives, and newspapers, it is almost certainly the definitive work on the subject of the reception of one strand of American music in postwar West Germany so far.

Note

[1]. David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945-1953 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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Citation: David Tompkins. Review of Beal, Amy C., New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2007. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13067

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