Darmstadt and Its Discontents

Though the Darmstadt New Music Courses have often been the site of critique, relatively few of those critiques have brought about concrete change. This might be illustrated in its fullest form in the history of the courses in the 1970s. A sequence of protests appear, on the superficial level, to have been the proximate cause for a gradual transformation of the institution, in its move away from the authority of its earlier senior figures in favour of a more egalitarian model, where different approaches can co-exist. Yet this history belies the ways in which that apparent diversity both repeats the ways in which the territory of new music was historically divided up and that territorial disputes actually prevent criticism of the institution itself, critiques which were being undertaken by a small group of composers who arguably represented a very different possible, unrealised future for new music in the 1980s: Fernando Grillo, Moya Henderson, Christina Kubisch, and Davide Mosconi.