Darmstadt and the Institutionalisation of Modernism

Abstract

The practice of new music composition, performance and education in the Darmstadt courses, and the extent to which this practice then served as a model for the development of new music institutions in the United Kingdom and the USA, is discussed. Various critiques of modernist music offered in the 1990s are also considered, particularly those related to ideas of a ‘new tonality’; it is argued that a re-examination of the music of the Darmstadt School reveals a greater diversity than its monolithic representation in music history might suggest and that such a re-examination presents the most satisfactory response to these anti-modernist critiques.