ABSTRACT

From 1946 to the mid-1960s, West Germany was the international centre for avant-gardism in music, and its institutional support for new music, through festivals and radio stations, served as a symbol of post-war cultural renewal. 1 the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, held at Darmstadt, were one of the key institutions, and facilitated the international careers of now established composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel and Pierre Boulez as the main representatives of post-war avant-gardism. After the first post-war cultural phase, which lasted until about 1968, much of the institutional support remained in place, but the discourses and practices of art music in Germany, as elsewhere, became more fragmented. one manifestation of this shift was that the composers who had established international reputations in the early Darmstadt years became voices amongst others, such as Hans Werner Henze and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, who were less closely aligned with the Ferienkurse.