Who is buried in Webern's tomb? Orientations in the reception of serial music from Messiaen to Stockhausen

Abstract

In the program of the 1959 Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Swiss composer Jacques Wildberger writes: “Tell me your attitude to Webern and I will tell you who you are.” By this date, this would hardly be the gauntlet toss that Wildberger might have thought: most composers of the so-called “Darmstadt School,” for whom Anton Webern was purportedly the singular figure of their critical reception, had almost entirely ceased to demonstrate any sustained interest in Schoenberg’s pupil. Less than a decade prior, Webern’s musical practice was heralded by numerous cultural gatekeepers—festival organizers, radio producers, music critics, and the press—as the foremost exemplar of a universally valid musical language of the avant-garde, pointing the way to a generalized adoption of serial procedures to multiple individual parameters of composition. This image of Webern was bitterly contested by an established generation of composers, musicians, and philosophers, most prominently René Leibowitz and Theodor W. Adorno. Their grievances were at once analytical and ideological, claiming that the newly christened Darmstadt School had fundamentally misunderstood both the musical content and the historical context of twelve-tone music in general and Webern in particular. Yet despite this conflict, the Darmstadt School has been assimilated into a fundamentally Adornian avant-garde tradition, characterized by a socially hostile but historically necessary approach towards musical material, conditioned by “the desperate antihumanism [sic] of the early atomic age. [excerpt]