Re-hearing the “Darmstadt School”: Or, Politics Beyond Pluralism

Recently music critics have fallen over themselves to paint a picture of musical modernism as plural and multifaceted, democratic and open. The composers of the so-called “Darmstadt School” have especially benefited from this treatment, which serves a more general effort to rehabilitate this music after it came under intense scrutiny in the 1980s and 1990s. There is undoubted merit in illuminating the diversity amongst composers whose distinctness has long been shrouded. However, these pluralizing accounts are not innocent. The understandings developed have—whether programmatically, unwittingly, or surreptitiously—propagated an ideologically loaded understanding, beholden to liberalism. Thus, just as they promise more nuanced, detailed understandings, numerous contemporary commentaries have obscured meaningful historical energies that are otherwise incompatible with this “pluralist” perspective. As an antidote to these repressions, this article will re-examine the pluralist hypothesis against the historical record with respect to the so-called Darmstadt School. This examination will show that the composers’ coming to be grouped under this terminology is in itself instructive to our present historical situation, precisely because it registers a collective aesthetic-politics that is directly opposed to the liberal pluralism that has become the baseline ideology of recent music studies.