or, How the Summer Course radiates inside and out
The 2023 edition was my first time at the Darmstadt Summer Course and will presumably stay a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. My two weeks in Darmstadt were distinctly terrific and quite eventful. This applies to my world of thoughts and the outside impressions I got from the various concerts, performances, lectures and workshops I attended. Therefore, this article is double layered. First of all, I want to give an insight into my gradually changing world of thoughts during my stay. These changes occurred during my many conversations with countless people. Furthermore, the essay is to be accompanied by reviews of performances that were the most significant for me.
Years after my first application for the Words on Music course in 2020 (what bad timing!) and the postponed and almost entirely cancelled summer courses of the last few years, I finally arrived in Darmstadt on 5 August 2023 by train. The first days were the most overstimulating, since I had to digest a lot of things all at once: the city, the crowd of participants of the Summer Course, the upcoming program and especially my peer group, the Words on Music guys. I felt obliged to position myself within the social biotope that is the Darmstadt Summer Course. But that wasn’t already everything that overwhelmed me. Personally, I also had a lot on my plate at that time: I was at the end of a multi-year musicological PhD process, with the submission of my thesis galloping towards me in a few weeks’ time. So Darmstadt wasn’t the only thing I had on my mind during my time here, but the immersive effect of the Ferienkurse didn’t leave me much time to think about anything else.
This year’s Summer Course pre-opened with Language Music by Anthony Braxton. I have to emphasize the exceptionality because it was the first time Braxton had been invited to Darmstadt. The piece was a conducted improvisation for a large orchestra consisting of a huge variety of instruments, ranging from the viola da gamba to conventional orchestral instruments, a jazz ensemble to a subcontrabass flute and electroacoustics. It was a pleasantly electric mixture. Suprisingly, there was no score in place. Rather, the conductor posed signs to parts of the orchestra to lead on the improvisational process. These signs are part of Braxton’s concept of language music. Not knowing much about Braxton, it was exciting for me to make guesses about the connection between the signs and the acoustic result during the performance. Braxton’s further performances of Thunder Music and Ghost Trance Music were equally impressive and mind-shifting for me.
During the first days, I wasn’t really able to loosen up, since there was another non-summer course related event coming up. On August 8th my brother sent me a text message, wishing me a happy birthday. He roughly knew that I was in Darmstadt but not why. To be honest my whole family and friends are more or less oblivious to what the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik even are. So I gave my brother the explanation that Darmstadt is kind of the Woodstock for contemporary art music. Although he actually lived in Darmstadt for several years, he was unaware that the world-famous Summer Course takes place here every two years. What I’m trying to say by addressing this pardonable knowledge gap in my family and friends is that my involvement with Darmstadt is neither induced by my family nor friends. I first heard of the importance of Darmstadt in a musicological seminar during my bachelor studies. Given I come from the very state that Darmstadt belongs to (Hessen), of course I knew of the existence of this uncharmingly named city (Darm = gut/intestine) but not of the Ferienkurse. Maybe the sole fact that Darmstadt isn’t very far away from where I grew up (170 km as the crow flies) initiated my interest in the world of contemporary music, which remains lively to this day. Nothing wrong with a pinch of local patriotism, don’t you think?
By far the most intriguing concert/performance that I was able to experience in Darmstadt this year was Jennifer Walshe’s and Matthew Shlomowitz’s Minor Characters. Walshe’s work is so unique that she had to coin the term “New Discipline” for it. It is a collective term for works where the physical, theatrical and visual aspects are as important as the sonic. Walshe performed with the Ensemble Nikel, consisting of drums, guitar, sax and synthesizer. The performance was an absurd and comedy-ridden piece of quite direct social criticism. Walshe sings and performs a clearly comprehensible arc of narration of a female student that gets dumped by her boyfriend. She then trusts herself into the fateful hands of her seemingly esoteric professor. In the refrain, Walshe states that an exorcism should be organised seemingly stress-free. It seemed to me as if this confusingly laconic refrain was just a narrative coping mechanism for what actually happened to the student in the cellar of the professor. Jennifer Walshe portrays seriousness with grotesque humour. The ensemble playing music by Shlomowitz accompanies Walshe’s absurdly brilliant performance tightly, always on point. For me it was like a pop song enriched with contemporary art music aesthetics. The best experience of the 2023 Summer Course.
I must elaborate more on my Darmstadt trauma before we get to the point. During my studies, the existence of the Ferienkurse was one of the many things you ought to be familiar with, what the professors assumed to be known especially when visiting a seminar on Neue Musik. Back then the reference of the early history of the Ferienkurse was (and probably still is) Gianmario Borio’s and Hermann Danuser’s three-volume work Im Zenit der Moderne (roughly translated as In the zenith of modernity). Being the eager student that I was I swiftly devoured all three volumes. Since these books only covers the period up to the year 1966, for a long time the summer courses were only a historical phenomenon for me. I knew about figures like Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, Maderna, Berio, Nono and so forth and what for an important role this otherwise charmingly insignificant city played after the end of Second World War. For me, the situation was as follows: every important composer, every canonised work of modern music, every newly established compositional style, practice and aesthetic had to pass through the eye of the needle that was Darmstadt. The Ferienkurse seemed to be the most important and uncompromising gatekeeper of 20th music in the world. Over the years, my curiosity grew into an academic attention: I wrote my master thesis on the aesthetical intersections of serialism and aleatoricism in the 1950s. The main intellectual setting for this was, yes, Darmstadt. My PhD deals with the so-called “simultaneous scene” in avant-garde opera in the 1960s to the 1980s. I deal with central figures such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Hans Werner Henze and Hans Zender. Guess where they all at least temporarily were part of? And where my research therefore always leads me back to? You guessed right: D to the Armstadt!
A historical aura seemed hovered over my next concert highlight. Irvine Arditti (violin) and Nicolas Hodges (piano) performed duo pieces by Olga Neuwirth, Brian Ferneyhough and Iannis Xenakis amongst others. Arditti, especially, has made a name for himself as an interpreter of many world premieres at Darmstadt. For me he is Darmstadt history made human. Both musicians played these extremely difficult pieces as if they were etudes. And I mean that in the most positive sense: such delicacy, such ease. Incredible to watch and listen to. Through the duration of the concert, I had the feeling of being deeply immersed into the history of the Summer Course. I directly experienced the aesthetics of these three important composers in their pure form: Neuwirth’s preferences for the continuous change of timbre, Ferneyhough’s complexity and virtuosity only Arditti can seem to master, and Xenakis ‘sounding’ architecture.
Darmstadt was always on my mind, but it was never an event I could experience, discuss and share with others. That changed in these past two weeks. Finally I wasn’t just able to attend all the concerts, performances, lectures and workshop that I read about so many times. I also was able to meet and talk to so many people who shared their individual Darmstadt stories with me. Those stories, which I am about to retell you, are unique, but they all share something. I would like to start with the people whom I only spoke to occasionally. The first was a cellist from San Diego University. I will call him Peter. He learned about Darmstadt early in his life, even before his studies, which is very rare. A lot of people from his musical peer ground have been to Darmstadt and they encouraged him to apply. Some days after our chat, I saw him being part of the Kontra-Punkte performance (you will find my review below). The next person I informally talked to was the Florida-born, Den Haag-based composer Nigel. He first heard of Darmstadt during his bachelor studies in the States. He told me that when his professors evaluate their contemporary musical festivals in the States, they were said to be “good, but nothing like Darmstadt”. So Darmstadt is obviously the benchmark to be measured against. I suppose Nigel had quite similar professors like me, who assumed Darmstadt knowledge. Even though Nigel was well informed about the history of Darmstadt and even though he is an aspiring and uprising composer from whom a work is scheduled to be played this year just like Stockhausen back then, he does not feel any pressure or the burden of history at all. Well, at least that’s what he said in the quick chat we had.
The Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern did two concerts of which Resonances I was the first. The evening consisted of three world premieres: ten-minute pieces by Wukir Suryad, Anahita Abbasi an Yiran Zhao. The multi-instrumentalist Suryad accompanied the ensemble during his piece Mandep Manteb on his self-devised musical instruments. His music was fast-pacing and eventful while always staying consumable. At no time was it overstimulating. Unfortunately, Abbasi’s Situation Xii – In Our Dwelling, We Reside did not really fit into the dramaturgy of the evening due to its many musical voids, especially after the entertaining work by Suryad. Compared to its predecessor, I found Abbasi’s piece to be under-stimulating. Whereas Zhao’s Fictional Nonfiction offered an entertaining and technically highly sophisticated video installation. She filmed the members of the ensemble, then edited and transformed these videos. The music derives from the speech and the movement of these videos.
During a lunch break at Lichtenbergschule, I started chatting with another cellist. His name was Ove and he was from Norway. He told me how he first heard of Darmstadt during his undergraduate. Nota bene, this is a common thread running through my conversations: almost everybody – no matter which country they come from – heard about Darmstadt in their undergrads. Ove told me how the coronavirus pandemic corrupted his exam concert and how he struggled in the last couple of years as an artist and a music teacher. The Summer Courses is supposed to get him back on track. One morning at the breakfast table in the hotel, I talked to an Australian composer called Sue. She was one of the reoccurring interview partners I had. She also was a composition student of Chaya Czernowin, who taught her a lot about the so-called Darmstädter Schule. Still, she does not feel any weight or baggage in coming to Darmstadt. Is this an American trait?
The second concert of the Ensemble Modern was called Resonances II and was more of an installation. The presented piece was called TILDE [~] and was composed by Anda Kryeziu. While the audience was allowed to walk around while the musicians were stationary at different places in the room. Video screens introduce a narrative element into the sonic installation. For the musical material, Kryeziu worked with certain frequencies that got reproduced by the spatialized instruments and sine wave generators. In the darkened room, this undramatic, static form of the musical material created an at times oppressive and eerie mood. The screens fortunately broke up this mood somewhat. They counteracted the robotic-like music with the human-like feeling of nostalgia by showing photos from the ensemble’s archive. All in all, the performance could have been 15 minutes shorter, after approximately 30 minutes a lot of people stuck to their phones again.
Unintentionally but luckily, my most frequent conversation partner was Silvia, a Swiss-Australian composer. Just like Sue, I met her at Breakfast and unlike Sue, I kept meeting her here and there. We talked about the gravity of Darmstadt. She quickly let me into her world of thoughts, including the fact she had just finished composing a string quartet. The next morning, she told me that she found the courage to talk to musicians to ask if they were interested in performing her piece. A few days later, I saw her at a concert and she told me joyfully that not only had she found a suitable quartet, but she had got a performance scheduled. Needless to say, I went along. And let me tell you, it was the most heartening experience to see this piece she was telling me about these past few weeks finally come to life. I was really rooting for Silvia and her quartet.
My feelings and opinions about the performance Growing Sideways by Brigitte Wilfing & Jorge Sánchez-Chiong are ambivalent. It was a choregraphed performance for dancers, turntables and percussions such as timpani. It started out as a very promising, entertaining work of art. The instruments were mobile and could therefore be integrated into the choreography. There were both group and solo performances. A most memorable moment consisted of a French horn player who simultaneously danced with great filigree while pulling one of her arms into the bell of her instrument. The choreography oscillated between grace, absurdity and action. Annoyingly, they overdid it with the stroboscopic effect at the end, drawing the understandable ire of many photosensitive viewers.
Among my many conversations, the most in-depths ones were those I had with my peers in the Words on Music posse with whom I shared a classroom for two weeks. Through day and night we discussed music, literature, language, hierarchies, the mundane and the seemingly essential. Unsurprisingly, we shared many common thoughts on Darmstadt. Of course, we sometimes disagreed and misunderstood each other. We came from Ireland, Australia, Japan, USA, Germany, Philippines and Belgium to name a few. Like me, everyone had their own story with the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. There was Kevin, the Irish percussionist and composer, who – like me – felt partly intimidated by the history of the Ferienkurse. Then there was Marat, the most outgoing person I know, who didn’t seem to hesitate speaking to all the composers. Mikkel in turn was very critical toward many things: the organisation, the presentation, the communication and so forth. My co-participants gave me different perspectives that enriched my point of view me a lot.
Besides the many concerts and performances, one of the most insightful events at the Ferienkurse are the lectures of the composers. Given I am a musicologist, I am keen on getting a glimpse into the world of thought of all the contemporary composers, and I tried to visit them all. That was close to impossible regarding my commitment to the Words on Music workshop. The most convincing, pedagogically valuable and audience-oriented lecture was given by Matthew Shlomowitz. The Darmstadt lectures are infamous for being highly theoretical, complex and self-promoting. Shlomowitz’s lecture was the exact opposite. He took a critical look at the concept of both “voice” and “practice” of a composer. He chose entertaining case studies for this purpose. Afterwards, he answered the questions of the audience charmingly with wit, humour and a disarming friendliness.
Almost at the end of the summer course, my phone rang. This time it was my mom asking me how I’m doing in Darmstadt. She told me that she tried to listen to my podcast but quickly realised it was in English, which she doesn’t understand very well. I explained to her that there are people from all around the world in Darmstadt and that’s why the podcast is in English. I raved to her about the diversity I have experience here. That I met such interesting people with the most diverse backgrounds, education and music-related professions. I caught myself realising that during my participation, the heaviness had lifted off my shoulders with each and every day I spent in Darmstadt. From the message from my brother to the call from my mother, something must have happened to me. While writing to my brother, I still felt the gravity of Darmstadt. Back then, I caught myself thinking that maybe Boulez shouldn’t have fantasised about blowing up opera houses but the Lichtenbergschule. While talking to my mom, I was relieved, felt light hearted and in sync with my surroundings.
My last review shall look back to the first years of the summer course. Under the musical guidance of Peter Veale, the participating musicians rehearsed Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte for ten musicians from 1953. This was preceded by a call for musicians. This piece is considered a key work of the serialism, representing the pointillistic style. Its structure is predominantly effected from tone to tone, without superordinate formal conceptions coming to bear. Furthermore, Kontra-Punkte adds progressively longer insertions of denser note groups, often in single instruments, while at the same time gradually replacing more and more long notes with groups of rapid, shorter ones. The concert was made up of two performances of the piece by partly different casts, separated by a lecture by Ulrich Mosch about the history of the piece. Therefore, the audience was able to hear two very different, but both equally convincing and technically skilled interpretations. It was impressive what the young musicians achieved together within a week.
For me, Darmstadt is no longer just Stockhausen, Boulez, and all those historical figures who once shaped the face of the Summer Course. I am glad I was a part of this year’s edition, if only to demystify the place. Now it isn’t just about the composers of today – Sarah Nemtsov, Jennifer Walshe, Chaya Cherzowin, Clara Ianotta, Malin Bång and others. It’s about Wynold, Sue, Nigel, Kevin, Marat, Silvia, Ove and all the people with whom I now share an unforgettable experience. And it’s also about me. The force of the Darmstadtium radiates through time and space and there is no other cure but to expose yourself to it. It’s not so bad after all.
Words On Music 