“Part of my entertainment factor is lying to you”
David Bowie was conceived six months before the first Darmstädter Ferienkurse.
Pain in a stranger
My first hours here are a blur. I’d taken ten over-the-counter sleeping pills on the plane and slept for maybe one broken hour. When we land I am buzzed and irritable. I arrive in Darmstadt in the late morning and I’m too cheap to pay the thirty euro to check in early. So I wander, jetlagged as hell, trying to stay awake. I stumble into a record store which becomes my first musical experience of the city. What might it reveal about Darmstadt’s taste? Surely a commercial enterprise reflects what people actually listen to. Up the back, past the Pulp Fiction poster and the life-size cutout of Batman, is a section marked AVANTGARD/NEUE MUSIK. Sifting through I glimpse an alternative lineage linking William Basinski and Jasmine Guffond and Merzbow and Audrey Chen and Ale Hop.
Nothing to read
I keep clicking on Wikipedia’s ‘recent deaths.’ I must keep several composers alive and I don’t know how I’ll deal when I read their names. Maybe I’ll die long before. Living in New York as I do means wondering if the end will be from wandering into someone’s gunfire or being pushed in front of a train. Odds are we’ll fade out from some over-lit hospital room.
Bowie’s lyrics keep looping in my head. They come unbidden. The couplet below is from the title track of his final record Blackstar, released on his sixty-ninth birthday. Two days later he died of cancer. I’m worried. We’re all hurtling towards this, some kind of black star. Next year, with luck, my mother will turn sixty-nine. I learned our family’s cultural grammar from her Bowie records from the seventies. On one, the skeletal singer lacks eyebrows and has the genitalia of a dog. On another, his face is drawn into quarters: lightning strike makeup, mullet, leather jacket, cadaver’s stare. He can never coalesce.
At the centre of it all / at the centre of it all
Darmstadt looks like other German cities that have visibly wrestled the past. Artefacts of prior centuries – cobbled streets, gingerbread houses – against utilitarian housing: big rectangles studded with square windows. Function over form, like a designer tousling between Blackletter or Arial. What happens in the twenty-three months between courses? Do the locals know that their city is neue musik famous? They look disinterested. Maybe Europeans, like Americans, grow up knowing their historical import and just get on with it.
Nobody’s perfect
My point is: it will never end well. We just have to learn to live with it.
“I love death, the more of it the better”
Hide the saddest view
I miss the opening concert because I am buying a €9 kettle. The woman at the front desk warns me that under no circumstances can I have one in my room but my next-door neighbour also sneaks one in. Each morning I pack it away but the cleaners never arrive.
The world was asleep
Day one. I read composer Gloria Coates’ Facebook post. She thanks everyone for supporting her and now she has cancer and not long to live. She is just a few hours away in Munich and I consider leaving to visit. But this is foolish. We’ve never met. What would I say? Instead I wonder if Darmstadt has ever played her music. Her oeuvre is mind-blowing: Chiaroscuro writhes with glissandi and nightmarish drones, as if Ligeti disinterred Purcell. I search the Institut’s online archive and find exactly one entry, from 1988, when she is mentioned but not performed. Bartok, who died right before the first Course and never came, features 594 times; Stockhausen 2770. Damn, what does it take? You can live for almost ninety years, mostly a short train away, and still be left outside. “I was a woman composer and without any sort of support system, so no one took me seriously.”
Precisely 1’36 into the music video of Blackstar we zoom into an empty cosmonaut’s helmet and a solitary candle in the centre. The music: scattered snares, recorder dyads, strained vocals doubled at the fifth. Bowie, so long an ageless chameleon, is finally old.
Seeing more and feeling less
I never stopped to think that Darmstadt was an actual place. Somehow it only existed to me as a trigger word. A metonym. It’s like ‘Oxford’ which in Australia stands in for the rite of passage you undergo to become a prime minister or media baron. I just recently discovered that Oxford is not just a concept but a real town, with its obligatory Primark, Ladbrokes and Nando’s. In my head Darmstadt floated as a set of black and white rooms full of black-and-white twenty-something-year-old men in glasses facing a black-and-white twenty-something-year-old man chalking up twenty-something black-and-white diagrams.
Don’t fake it, baby
Chris posts a sober photo. “The treatment no longer works. I have between two and eight weeks left. I may or may not meet my daughter.” Facebook feels like a graveyard. I barely know Chris; our only connection is that I looked after his cat when he went to study at Oxford. I can’t remember her name. His dad had her put down before Chris came back.
“Things have turned from the beginning of this century, where the artist reveals a truth, to the artist revealing the complexity of a question”
I just can’t seem to get it right
I start to feel insecure. Alarmingly young composers are here feted as both the recent past and future. A friend of mine, long established in Australia, confides that here they feel too old. Even the most relaxed participants mention the history books. The Musikinstitut is said to be the world’s most thoroughly arhived new music initiative whose website alone boasts 89,000 records. It is where the canon was and continues to be formed. The first step is to be anointed by the artistic director. There is only one. This is the old model that Darmstadt’s contemporary art cousin documenta, further north here in Hesse, dislodged with the Indonesian collective ruangrupa. Here we are un/made through one man’s body.
On Nürrnberger Straße
A man lost in time
I keep thinking about what it means to lead, to be pivotal, to be considered the center. The MainMan, the hauptbahnhof, the prettiest star. Here in Darmstadt the centre of gravity is the score and the auteur and the very, very good soloist and/or ensemble.
Bowie archived himself as assiduously as the Musikinstitut. He stored everything, some 80,000 objects, in acid-free tissue in a New Jersey warehouse. The thing is, it is an archive not of David Jones, the legal entity, but Bowie. It catalogues a fifty-year fiction. Whilst its ephemera, from post-it notes to ticket stubs, is as vast as the costumes and props it is still selective. Curated. Rolling Stone called Bowie “an unflinching self editor.”
Keep your mouth shut
My hotel room is cheap which in Germany means it is also large, stylish and well-resourced. I’ve paid double for a Sydney room with a rag for a curtain and carpet layered with decades of other people’s stench. A halfway house more than a hotel. Meanwhile, in this lodging, tourists gather in the foyer. Who besides new music tragics visits for leisure?
Fatherless scum
It won’t be forgotten
At the hotel I can recede. I feel secure. I lie in my bunk, curl up on my side, endlessly scroll a million TikTok videos. Someone said we now live in the theatrekidification of everything, in which you need to dial up your bad acting and your bad lip-syncing and sell us your elevator pitch and proscribe which of today’s ethical codes we all need to follow.
Bowie was the thin white glue that held my family together. I remember a baking hot day, just like these in Hesse, long after my parents split. I met my father on an empty railway platform to hand over mum’s copy of Heroes, the album recorded here in Germany. Sometimes it’s hard to love Bowie. Such a blank cipher. And despite all the canonization there are hovering accounts of impropriety including several accusations of rape. I’m surprised he hasn’t at least been cancelled for queerbaiting. Or those fascist salutes.
The centre of things
Darmstadt really believes in the concert. Unfortunately for me, this is my least favourite artform. I always panic. My eyes and ears follow everyone else’s but I want to evaporate. Yet so much new music here depends on this ritual. Like Fluxus (take one) it unlocks its energy from taunting the rules. This feels like a strawman. It relies on us, the listeners, knowing these conventions. I’m not immune to them but I fret that they are illegible to newcomers. Maybe I worked in public radio too long but I want to treat the visitor kindly, to reassure them that they don’t have to be consecrated into a tiny network of specialists.
Pale blinds drawn all day
On the final day of the festival, Gloria Coates dies.
Apple Music tells me that what I assumed was the Bowie canon – his 27 studio albums – is surprisingly fluid. There are at least three core versions of A Space Oddity and, stripped of eighties production, a devastatingly spare Loving the Alien. No werktreue heard here.
Skull designs upon my shoes
It’s Sunday so everything is closed. I commit to staying in bed and avoiding the world but by lunchtime I fold and catch a cab to hear Chicago theorist Seth Brodsky link composing to Jacques Lacan. Seth is reassuring: he has a deep voice, clever eyewear and a discreet line drawing tattoo common to a certain type of left-leaning scholar. I try my best to follow his discourse on the mirror phase but once the algebra comes out I continue to nod but draft notes on a different topic. Somehow losing the plot on Lacan lets other ideas in fast. The stream continues into the concert but I’m too self-conscious to tap out notes.
If I never see the English evergreens
I keep thinking about the 45-year-old multi-millionaire who pops a hundred pills a day and spends thirty thousand dollars a week to stay young. He once mixed his plasma with that of his son and his father: a weird holy triune. He calls his regime Project Blueprint just like a tech-bro would. Apparently his hourly probes and early nights have killed his love life.
“Everyone else, take note of this: Bowie couldn’t have staged a better death”
Bodies go to body hell
By the second week I start avoiding the Institut. Fourteen hours a day – it’s too much. Instead I walk into the centre of the city and detune by buying cheap clothes (yes, fast fashion) in shockingly bright colours: pink, green, yellow. The Ferienkurse cohort mostly leans into variations on the neue musik uniform – blacks, greys, muted tones – which helps me stand out. This is useful for starting conversations with composers and performers but attracts puzzled or hostile looks in the streets. In the mall a living statue whistles the Barbie theme as I pass. Yet here I feel unusually breezy with strangers. Perhaps it’s because I am an outsider dropping in: the stakes are low. On the flipside, I dread that if this is where reputations are made then mine seems prematurely shelved.
Something happened on the day he died
I am in the toilet when I read the news (here I can finally say toilet rather than the euphemistic bathroom in New York). Chris is dead. A second later my therapist messages to ask where on earth I am. I’ve just left an Anthony Braxton talk, not because I want to but because I’m starting to crash. I climb into bed and wake up sometime the next day.
“Q. Are you a hero yourself?
A. No. I’m de-mythed”
Putting pain in a stranger
In his talk, Matthew Shlomowitz conjures another statute from the past, that composers are still driven by innovation. I thought we all debunked this ages ago? It’s a remnant of the singular teleology, always rooted in Europe and usually centred on Germany (Richard Taruskin calls it “neo-Hegelian”): music was invented by gormless monks who could only conceive of monody but it gradually improved as, one by one, other European men determined the next logical step. Adding two lines! Adding four! Adding more instruments! Building bigger and bigger ensembles to play the music of fewer and fewer people!
I know something is very wrong
Distant, dizzy, dissociated. Conversations start to swirl and recede. F*ck – right when I made it to the successful people’s table: the famous composer, the famous singer, the other singer, the other composer. They ask me things as they shrink. I swallow, over and over, compulsively. I need to gauge my body and breathe. I excuse myself and find the bathroom. Maybe it’s psychosomatic, a bodily feedback loop. Too many antihistamines.
“If you’re an artist then you measure everything by what you produce, because you have to. If you ask me whether or not I have fifteen good years left, or twenty or twenty-five, then I’m just going to think, What do I fill them with?”
The European canon is here
Lacan seemed to believe that the world is organized by language. I am glad when a performer reminds us that music is embodied. I don’t get it when Darmstadt folk discuss new music’s performative turn and the return to the body. When were these things ever separate? You’d have to be pretty caught up in complicated scores or textbooks to forget.
I can’t reach it
In the bone-dry mining town in which I was born, I head out to hear a country-jazz-rock band of ageing men. Two were friends of my father’s: his old bandmate plays keyboard next to a man on upright bass. Tony looks comically small. This surprises me because in the old photos he bursts out of his clothes. My aunt shakes her head. “It’s so sad.” I ask what she means and her brother-in-law replies “well, he ain’t getting any bigger.” Six months later, I click on Facebook’s ‘Remembering Tony.’ In his final days, propped up in a metal bed, Tony looks even tinier, fleshless, like someone drew a face on a skeleton.
Matthew’s point echoes one made by Bowie shortly before his heart attack. He appraised his work in the early seventies as being “post-culture” made by distancing himself diffidently from the subject matter. Like Matthew he refers to “hybridization, this pluralism.”
Knowledge comes with death’s release
In contemporary art, innovation has long attracted suspicion because it perpetuates at least two faded ideas: the genius and the close-knit circle of influencers. Matthew, to his credit, unpacks it as an assumption and argues that we composers ought to deprioritize finding our special voice in favour of simply writing more interesting pieces. Of course, Matthew is also a very celebrated figure who has arguably innovated his way out of the kinds of circular rock-like aesthetics that used to define Darmstadt. I like that he wants us to feel less neurotic about sculpting consistent careers but I find it hard to detangle this from the elevated platform from which he speaks. Everything flows through the centre.
I might just slip away
Just for the day
Q. “Should we be worried about you?”
A. “No, I’m fine-ine, I’ll b OK I just took-too-too many-any pillsss”
“What people see in my songs is far more interesting than what I actually put into them”
Where are we now?
Walking in one morning, a very hungover Mikkel asks me about ambient music. I spark up because it’s one of the few genres I regularly listen to. The timbres sound as advanced as the most finely-attenuated Saariaho score. However, I get bored of stasis. And although Brian Eno rubber-stamps music that is “ignorable” I don’t want to admit that I still like to put it on in the background because I fear that it makes me a bad new music fan. After all, the responses to scheduling Eno’s Music for Airports here late one night were … mixed.
Nobody’s perfect
It’s a moving world
When people are dying of cancer they are offered babies. This is both joyous and grotesque. Like the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey when the collapsing cosmonaut becomes the cosmic baby. We feel a need to remind the dying person that, yes, they will be missed but that they are also being replaced. In his final days, Chris was handed his baby daughter. When Tony shrunk into his beanie someone handed him a granddaughter. Bowie clearly ghosted too soon: his granddaughter was born six months after he died.
Mike Garson, the pianist who stabbed out those discordant flights on Aladdin Sane, said that Bowie once saw a psychic who told him that he would die at the age of sixty-nine.
His song went on forever
These endlessly hot days feel familiar. I remember that this time last year I was further north for documenta, the art world’s Darmstadt except vastly bigger and longer. Memo Review’s Paris Lettau described that iteration as the first “to truly take place ‘in’ Germany, as opposed to in the universal, contextless tabula rasa typical of global contemporary art exhibitions.” I wonder if the Ferienkurse admits to being rooted in this city. It is funded by the German state and its industry and never has and probably never will exist outside the country. Yet it purports to define new music. Of course, as with its northern cousin the world comes to it and is packaged back in return. One curator, one town, one set of funding anchors. An echo: “only if our new musical blood comes into contact with the true creative forces of our time can these possibilities fruitfully renew German musical life.”
Somebody else took his place
A composer in the lunch queue says that when they were a baby they were handed to their dying grandmother. Their parents say that their souls transferred between bodies.
“David Bowie doesn’t really exist, does he?”
Rest your head
Rosie Middleton’s talk is about collaboration and consent and how harm can arise when power dynamics are askew. She brings up hierarchy and perfectionism. What worries me is that we keep baking these values back into new music by rote. Maybe if we can define our field’s centre/s of gravity more clearly and creatively we can assuage such problems?
Safe in the city
Darmstadt is over and I wander through Berlin’s Mitte. Not quite the streets that Bowie walked in the seventies – he lived for two years in the American-controlled district Schöneberg in the city’s west. Nor is the song in my head from his German period but a dystopian Los Angeles. I silently restage the nine-minute trilogy Sweet Thing – Candidate – Sweet Thing (reprise) from Diamond Dogs, the closest Bowie got to a rock opera cabaret. He called its world “profligate.” The mood is bleaker and more self-serious than Minor Characters, the music theatre work by Matthew Shlomowitz and Jennifer Walshe that premiered at Darmstadt, but mentally I fuse them. They are similarly melodramatic and over/underdressed and OTT and too too much. Suddenly I snap to and it evaporates.
You promised me that the ending would be clear
Words On Music 