Cage / Lockwood / Ferrari

Xenia Pestova Bennett (piano)
City University, Tuesday 29th October 2019

Part of City University’s excellent series of free concerts – for news of which, along with other avant-classical performances, I’m indebted to a particular mailing list which keeps an eagle-eye out for such events – this concert was for sure headlined by Luc Ferrari’s “collection de petites pièces”, a kind of epic-in-miniature / miniature epic entitled 36 enfilades pour Piano et Magnétophone, the longest and most (formally / conceptually) intricate piece on the table, and one which does some hard (but humorous) thinking on the ritual of the solo piano recital while at the same time revelling in the recital's capacity for virtuosity and display. This said, the Ferrari was paired with two Annea Lockwood pieces – RCSC, from 2001, and Red Mesa, from 1993 – which, wile they offered less in the way of conceptual questioning / thought-experiment tricksterism, perhaps offered more in terms of pianism, of an approach to the instrument-as-machine, machine-as-instrument, moving inside to strum and pluck the harp inside the piano’s box: an exploration of extended technique that might be familiar, perhaps even expected, in certain forms of improvised music, but which in contexts like these comes to seem a radical extension of vocabulary, timbre and the rest, and which has its own negotiation of place and placement within musical and geological histories.

Pestova Bennett began with a brief work by John Cage: as she told us after the piece, she’d planned on including some of the prepared piano pieces, as a programming fit with Lockwood’s inside-piano work and Ferrari’s extra-piano use of amplification and synthesized sounds, but the preparations would have been confiscated on her flight (a more banal take on the figuration of art as weapon). So instead we got the early piece of accompanying Merce Cunningham's now (presumably) lost choreography, ‘Dream’, a miniature that’s the accessible side of Cage, nothing to scare anyone off, though the modern-ness of its sound in the late 1940s has perhaps become rather unfairly lost in the wake of the ambient musics it can be said to have anticipated. The programme notes describe the piece as “unfold[ing] in a haze of piano resonances” – the score specifying that there be no silence, with tones freely sustained beyond notated duration. Despite that ‘haze’, Pestova Bennett’s combination of touch—the respective pressures applied to the pressing of fingers on and lifting of fingers off keys—and of pedalling seemed to emphasize the joins and cuts within that single-line melodic ‘haze’. As much as a matter of interpretation, this might simply have been due to the fact that, as she announced after playing the piece, she had just got off a plane and had a blocked ear; thus, was taking the audio temperature, testing the room’s resonances and her own hearing in comparison to everyone else’s volume levels. Either way, it brought a refreshing crispness to a piece that can otherwise become too easily soporific (rather than dream-like) in its resonant prettiness.

Annea Lockwood’s RCSC, part of a commissioned tribute to the much-neglected Ruth Crawford Seeger, draws pitch content from tone rows in Crawford Seeger's String Quartet as well as from palindromes based on Seeger's name. This shouldn’t suggest, though, that we have here a Schoenbergian / Darmstadtian concern with form as a kind of grid, as pitch arrangement outside certain tonal characteristics but within established formal structures. Instead, like Cage, Lockwood’s here interested in that relation of keyboard and pedal, of temporal extension blurring the struck qualities of the piano through an extended exploration of continuance and decay. A short piece, this extension of piano as instrument from keyboard to pedal, pedal to inner string developed as a study in resonance: note re-struck, pedal-clustered in transpositions, of touch and the movement of finger to key, foot to pedal. If audio archive projects like Lockwood’s Hudson river project have to do with certain ideas of collective explorations of voice and place, with sound as repository for memory and its traversal of space and time, the tone rows and palindromes of RCSC suggest a different way of viewing lineage, inheritance, gender and the like that might be smaller in scale. Likewise, a work like Red Mesa aims to be more what she calls “a personal exploration of terrain”. The programme note locates the work in a “solo journey I made in the Four Corners country (where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colarado meet) in 1988”, and Lockwood has said that she returned to writing for acoustic instruments in order to explore the resonances that drew her to those instruments in the first place. That’s the personal, or the solo: to write a piece based on the significance of a particular place for one’s self, at a particular time, an unpretentious claim that at the same time locates its narrative of wandering, travelling, etc, squarely within a Romantic conception that might just as easily animate certain powerhouses of piano or symphonic repertoire from which the work at least initially seems removed. And Red Mesa does announce itself as, in essence, a piece of programme music; so that whereas the first piece can use the occasion of its composition and the tribute to Seeger as a way to explore its areas of interest as ‘purely’ technical problems (an interesting consideration given the trajectory of Seeger’s own career from avant-composer, not much concerned with political or ‘external’ content, to matriarch of the Seeger clan and major figure in the mid-century American folk revival), here – in the programme note, at least – we’re told of the desert, the Mesa, the whole histories of imperial sublime, of Monument Valley and silhouetted Native Americans, hinted at if not explored at length.

Audibly, at least, this isn’t much of a presence: what does seem important is Lockwood’s concern with the conversion of small sounds to larger ones, through electroacoustic technology elsewhere, the internal acoustics of the piano itself here; not for purposes of ironic extension / critique (as we’ll see with the Ferrari), but for an exploration of those sounds as modes of attention and possibility. One critic calls the piece “thoughtfully severe”, emphasizing the piece’s difference from the general trajectory of contemporary piano repertoire; I’m not sure how helpful that is, the piece seems to me rather luxuriant in its resonant explorations, though perhaps, in the wake of prepared and burning pianos, of which Lockwood’s 1968 piece Piano Burning is probably the most famous experiment, some sense of threat or decay hovers in the wings. As the titles to Lockwood’s Piano Transplants series suggest—Piano Burning, Piano Drowning, Piano Garden—the piano might here itself be imagined as a kind of ecosystem, to which the performer is in ambiguously protective, curative or destructive relation, so that performance environment (piano as ‘culture’, as the indoors, yet as conduit for a sublime or prettified codification of nature as tone poem, paysage, etc—think Liszt, think Ravel as random samples) blurs with the kinds of ‘open field’ conceptions of audition and performance that 4’33” ushered in – the site-specific, the incorporation of field recordings or outdoor performance environments, etc. (That said, it’s a strange sidenote that some of the more popular recent instances of the latter trend—say, the large scale piano concerti-type works by Michael Pisaro which have resonated particular strongly, July Mountain or the Fields Have Ears series for starters—tend to combine their extension into sonic landscapes of ‘country’ or ‘city’ with fairly conventionally played, tonally and melodically ‘pretty’ piano sounds.) And this, of course, is where certain technical problems of explorations explicitly become part of a social exploration, whether the ‘social’ is simply the consideration of performance space and what is brought into it (where it is brought out into), or whether it’s seen to resonate more widely. In other words, the Red Mesa programme note’s gesture towards landscape, history and the like – more specific than Cage’s ‘dream’, which simply takes the score into amorphous and generalised territory that can be read any way you want – are deliberate gestures, and introduce a tension—between machinic and ‘natural’, between the empty and the populated, at least hinting at the literal or artistic removal of human presence in the interests of a fetishized sublime (of which Ford’s Monument Valley would be the principal mark), a secondary erasure used to justify a primary act of genocidal erasure. So that, in the programme note, a phrase like “magnificence and geometric purity”, used to describe the Painted Desert, comes up against “often-filmed Monument Valley” and the fact that “cliff dwellings dat[e] back to the middle ages and are still home to the Hopi and Navaho nations”. How this sounds in the work itself is certainly harder to map programmatically, which is where the piece’s apparent nature as programme music, tone poem, etc, falls (thankfully) short. Not having thought much on any of this when listening, at the time I noted the contrast in focus to the first piece that Pestova Bennett played. RCSC in general might be said to consist of more gestural alternations of registral area – lower strings’ thicker, extended groan in contrast to a near-skittish, guitar-like mid-register or abrupt upper shrill – alongside a repeating (and varied) figure going from low to high – a sketch. Red Mesa, over a longer temporal span, becomes progressively more clangorous, declarative and flourish-laden – in terms, at least, of loudness and resonance (pedalled fortissimo, sustained rub and scrape of inside string—rather than virtuosity as runs / number of keyboard notes played). All this building to some chunky left-hand thunders and assertive chords, ending with the pleasure of a kind of ‘main theme’ restatement, dying away. If my writing here builds up a whole interpretative schema, or suggestion of adjacent ecological / political concerns, that the piece itself doesn’t seem to integrate formally, that’s not necessarily to the detriment of the piece itself, fascinating for sure.

So to the Ferrari enfilades. Written in the 1980s, the programme note tells us that this ‘collection’ was revised to remove the elements of music theatre originally present, but still haunted by the ghost of the performative, if in aural rather than explicitly physical form. Not that the ritual of concert performance is anything but – of course! – performative, and these kinds of considerations, dancing between levels of aurality, the electronic-machine and the piano-machine, the acousmatic and the live voice, teasing if not outrightly mocking traditions of musical legitimation to which concertgoers are generally inured, are an essential part of what makes the work interesting, playful, provocative, etc. The titular enfilades are an architectural term summoning the intricately connected rooms of museums, palaces, galleries, a kind of elaborate formal structure designed to enable ease of passage, at once foregrounding and hiding its own intricacy behind an array of baroque constructions, and the description might well suggest how the piece functions, though the analogy is far from exact. What that title does open up are certain parallels, recurring themes, variations, mirrorings, duplications, interruptions, conversational strategies that sound more monologic than dialogic, the replacement of a tape recorder with a laptop, the (non-speaking, occasionally whistling) pianist a more competent Krapp, “wondering about music”. If Lockwood and Cage turn to desert and dream as sound/landscapes, Ferrari more explicitly asks what the formal/conceptual framing of his piece means in terms of music history, music and history (as well as dream’s metaphorical transports): “So, is this is a suite? Maybe it’s theatre. Is it that old dream to never finish, or to always start over again?” So far so familiar, perhaps, and easy to fit into a certain modish discourse of the post-modern which would swallow a piece like this up, spit it back out in a neat package. But there’s more going on, even if the emotional texture tends towards polish, smoothness, ironized façade. In 36 pieces (“small pieces form a whole one”), what can you note but fragments, main elements: the piano ghosting, commenting on and obstructing the intentionally cheesy electric organ / synthesizer line which plays from the electric sound source alongside fragments of recorded speech, mainly single words, countings-in or down, instructions or questions. The obvious parallel here is to the music lesson: to error and repetition by ear as parody of practice, teleology and perfectibility, of unison and technical skill, of solo performer as always more than one. But this process is neither in defiance of technical training, nor ecstatic heterophony, as the synth lines become more and more cheesy, less believable as simulacra of acoustic instruments, and the voice, which at times seem to function like a music teacher-drill sergeant, switches genders and authoritative positions, asking ‘pourquoi’ or commanding ‘ecoute-moi’. To pick a point at random, the 13^th piece, a waltz whose title announces it as such with a mixture of bombast and bathos – ‘C’est la Valse’ – is not Ravel’s gradual swelling to lush apocalyptic im/explosion, but cheesy burling synth and the music teacher / composer voice barking out a countdown (‘un, deux, trois’), offering curt compliments (‘bon’), calling for an encore as praise or simply demanding the exercise be repeated as punishment, asking ‘comment’ and eventually gurgling out something that sounds like ‘a i i i’ – perhaps the end point of all the discourses of beauty as achievement, as virtuosity and mastery of form, of tradition – for what. Straight after the waltz we have ‘Zarathoustra’, Richard Strauss thus speaking via a 1980s Hollywood, post-Star Wars cash-in sci-fi version of Kubrick, as once again the piece’s virtuoso task of intersecting with and doubling the electronic line is made to sound not so much as concert hall mastery, but as increasingly troubled idiom, western concert tradition, piano recital, Fascist sublime incised from inside. Does this undercut the music as a whole (or even music as a whole per se) as repository of feeling? Not quite: the piece that follows a few pieces later is marked ‘tendrement’, and that’s how it sounds; and the recurring ‘danse’ seems written to beguile, emerging from a kind of Ravel—Poulenc—Roussel residuum of French neoclassicism, ironized and seductive, feeling always held in check but always present. I’m thinking here of pieces in the piano tradition that might be named ‘souvenirs’, ‘impromptus, ‘cartes postales’, etc, and with the compressed derangement these pieces might at times almost contain—principally, as melancholy; or on the other hand, with the gestures towards Strauss, Schumann, and so on, the potential for explosion all the more vivid for being held within a form that names itself joy, celebration, etc.  So we soon move from not one but two Hommage[s] à Schumann: who is made to hammer it out?, that inner derangement flourished as repetition, obsession compulsion: the presence of narrative, hearing a figure through repetition; the Romantic valourisation of impromptu-improvisation-passion as core at core already troubled, vexations (via Satie)...Who knows?

Polyphonie-Rhythme sounds to me like Tron touring the piano: I’m not sure if that’s even a particularly fanciful analogy, given that TRON came out in 1982, Ferrari’s piece in 1985, and that Wendy Carlos soundtracked the movie. I’m not sure if the piano here is the Tron car or simply the soundtrack to the Tron car. But either way, you tap your foot, for all of a minute – or, in the next piece, for all of 10”, of one phrase. Hardly a leitmotif, idee fix, repetition as romantic concern gets gestured at through the reference to the suite, to theme and variation, but as the tape recording says “je ne sais plus. Je ne sais plus rien”. Sometime you snap the same shot – development less a factor than stasis, déjà vu, or a something else the pieces can never quite reach. Hence Ferrari’s programme note ambiguity: “…No sooner have they started and are already over. Sometimes, they don’t even start, they have no beginning.” Ça glisse ça glisse. With finger-bleeding gliss runs (it shouldn’t be understated that is an extremely difficult piece to play) again rendered tinny, ghostly, unimpressive through the electronic doubling, yet another stale / stalled future like the revolutionary Romantic canon which gets filtered in and out of the mix like the switch on a radio (or these days, an ad-interrupted shuffle). Ferrari’s programme note mentions the absence of beginnings or endings – a fantasy of permanence that’s more like the death drive, that also refers to or once again elides the tradition where one is always being condemned to ‘start over again’, in the interests of perfectability, teleology, progress. Practice exercises, conditioning—is it Brahms or life, as the 34^th piece (‘Les Brahms ou la vie’) asks, and why are those even choices? Who’s at the other end of Téléphone? The score folds out without tuner or tuner, ipad and tablet substituting page and score, Mac laptop substituting for radio and tape, digital and analog dance, the sound is echoed movie theatre / tape hiss / aloud breath as the telephone voice declares its unmooring. And then the finale is furieux et triste: furious and sad the piano shakes under the onslaught of its two-handed accomplice, its elbow-clustered, finger-planted simulation. Do you get to be both furious and sad at once (isn’t that what most fury or most sadness is)? In this context, can you be either? Ambiguity inheres at every turn, kept at arm’s length, at finger’s tip and touch, resolving to what a certain trend of western classical music tradition figures as struggle, as winning through to beauty / resolution, etc. But electronic ringtone drowns out the biggest and grandest of two-hand chords, fortissimo pianoforte made to sound electronically distant, ghosted, as what we hear, audio gesture, misaligns with what we see, the physical gesture right in front of our eyes: acousmatic. Is that a gunshot, a drumbeat, metronomic, machinic tic intended, under compulsion, play the phrase again, dread return and end.

Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Martin Iddon’s book, backed up by extensive archival research, is, as its publishers tell us, the first full-length study of Darmstadt to appear in English. However, as its subtitle, indicating a focus on four of the Darmstadt big guns, suggests, its focus is somewhat more narrow than might have been expected from such a publication. This is not to say that it merely enshrines a canonical narrative, in which Nono, Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez line up to take their respective places as grand masters within an accepted view of musical history – quite the contrary, in fact. The book’s purpose is twofold: first, to demolish the myth of the ‘Darmstadt school’ as stable compositional style or method and to situate the origin of that myth in the discussions that were taking place in and around Darmstadt during the 1950s; second, to examine the impact of Cage’s visit to Darmstadt in the late ’50s as, in some ways, the nail in the coffin of serial unity that never really existed. As Iddon shows, this unity was one promoted partially by the composers themselves – though never consistently, and often in line with shifting personal and musical relationships – and partly by organizers and critics such as Herbert Eimert and Hans-Klaus Metzger.

In this regard, his method is, in general, to focus on key performances and points of debate – lectures and essays by Adorno, Hans-Klaus Metzger, Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and Cage – with detailed analyses of particular pieces, often drawing on previous work by other critics, peppering proceedings. Thus, central parts are played by: the early confrontation in one of Adorno’s workshops between Adorno, Stockahusen and Karel Goeyvaerts over the latter’s Sonata for Two Pianos – one which is obliquely referred to in Adorno’s essay ‘The Ageing of the New Music’, an attack on what he perceived as a tendency towards a quasi-totalitarian, a-humanist construction of music through ‘objective’ tables and quasi-mathematical methods; a 1953 radio debate on the influence of Webern in which Eimert polemically responded to Adorno; Metzger’s own responses to Adorno over the years; and lectures by the composers themselves, which increasingly came to consist of veiled and direct attacks on each other, including Boulez’s ‘Alea’ (whose target was in part, Cage) and Nono’s ‘The Historical Reality of Music Today’.

The book is, then, not so much a strictly analytic study of particular compositions as one which is concerned to carefully record the musicological reception and the various narratives of influence and development that emerged from within and outside Darmstadt during its most formative period. Yet, in a sense, this means that it is neither one thing nor the other: in terms of specifically musical detail, the analyses are generally kept to a minimum, while, on the other hand, one at times wishes that the parameters were slightly wider, and that the socio-political background to the debates were addressed more fully. If Iddon’s summaries and delineations of various positions expressed within Darmstadt debates are detailed almost to fault, there is, nonetheless, little real sense of audience reception – who exactly, for example, are the various discontented individuals who boo and whistle through various different premieres, and what sort of contemporary impulse do they represent? Furthermore, how and out of what might any collective entity that might be described through terms such as ‘audience’, ‘students’, ‘performers’ and ‘composers’ be said to have come to be? And what of the status of musical institutions in post-war West Germany; the status of repertoire and of modernism in the wake of Nazi suppression, American-influenced conservatism, Cold War suspicion, and the like; and the tensions that might exist between these contexts and Darmstadt’s avowed intent to be an international course? Addressing these obviously complex questions might truly allow Darmstadt to be presented as something more than the mythic institution which, for all Iddon’s efforts to show up through examining the narrative constructions and administrative niceties behind the façade, it somehow seems to remain.

An introduction, for instance, sets up the founding of the summer courses and the role of Darmstadt’s first director, Wolfgang Steinecke, within the post-war climate of West Germany and the American-led process of de-Nazification, but this thread is dropped throughout the rest of the book to focus on the details of the various music-focussed polemics. Yet such concerns are clearly to the fore in both Adorno’s and Metzger’s arguments around the political implications of serialism, as well as in Nono’s polemical attack on Cage and indeterminacy, a 1959 lecture translated in English as ‘The Historical Reality of Music Today’, which is given a useful and typically detailed reading towards the end of the book. The three-page conclusion, in which Cage’s presence at Darmstadt is read through Zygmant Bauman’s figure of the ‘stranger’, is frustratingly cursory and brief, and perhaps suggests a different study – one in which, for example, Iddon himself might lay down his own analyses of or opinions on the political implications of Cage’s music, and, indeed, of multiple serialism, and their place within both the musical and political situations both of Germany and of America. Mention of Cornelius Cardew, then Stockhausen’s assistant, leads one to make the tantalizing connection between discourses surrounding improvisation, graphic scores and indeterminacy and Cardew’s own graphic score ‘Treatise’, even if the dating of that work falls outside the range of Iddon’s study. Certainly, the recent discourse surrounding Cage and improvisation is one that extends far beyond the parameters of the often over-simplified understanding of improvisation in the Darmstadt discourse Iddon describes (by which I don’t mean to imply that he necessarily shares it). It’s also something which would open up beyond the callous dismissal of all non-western art music that might be suggested, for instance, in Boulez’ statement, quoted on p.252, that “he, as a westerner, had been shocked to discover the absence of ‘masterworks’ in non-western musics.” (The statement as quoted is somewhat perplexing – Iddon’s sentence construction implies that either Cage or Boulez might be the shocked subject: “Cage did not feature at all, although Boulez mentioned that he, as a westerner…” – and statements made elsewhere by Boulez suggest a more nuanced attitude: in relation, for instance, to the echoing of non-western timbres in his own Le Marteau Sans Maitre, he discusses the risks of “a clumsy appropriation of a ‘colonial’ music vocabulary” of a piece with early twentieth-century exotica.)

Iddon’s book is not intended to be a definitive history of Darmstadt, as his focus on the composers named in the book’s title indicates, and a broader sense of Darmstadt’s evolution and situation might be gleaned from an examination of his stand-alone articles published elsewhere, such as ‘Trying To Speak: Between Politics and Aesthetics, Darmstadt 1970–1972’, which deals with controversies surrounding the organisation of courses during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the wake of the political upheavals of May ’68, as well as a volume of Contemporary Music Review, ‘Other Darmstadts’, co-edited with Paul Attinello and Christopher Fox. That said, it feels somewhat frustrating that one has to burrow around in various different sources in this manner when the book itself – as a University Press-produced book, rather than a single-issue article – might reasonably be expected to give some sense of scope as well as of specific detail, particularly given that it was published in 2013, some years after much of Iddon’s previous work on Darmstadt.

Likewise, brief mentions of other composers and students present at Darmstadt are often frustratingly brief, even though some of them – most notably, Henri Pousseur – were often enlisted as figures in these debates. Here, they barely even receive walk-on parts, with the result that the contextual backdrop to the debates Iddon does address, or even the details of arrangements and cultural situation of Darmstadt in general, sometimes feel a little fuzzy, despite the wealth of correspondence, reviews and radio broadcasts cited. This is not necessarily to do with a lack of focus on politics, more to do with the fact that it might be useful to have some sense of how personalities beyond Goeyvaerts, Metzger, Steinecke, Adorno, Bruno Maderna, David Tudor and the book’s titular figures might have functioned within Darmstadt and within the debates surrounding it. But it is also to do with politics, or with politically-inflected issues. To take one example, the brief mention of the controversy over Sylvano Bussotti’s Pieces de Chair II, which Stockhausen, Steinecke and others agreed should not be performed due to the homosexual and “possibly paedophilic” content of their texts, raises issues concerning sexuality touched on in Antonelli’s essay ‘Gay Darmstadt’, which centres on the tension between Bussotti’s open sexuality and preference for transgressive, theatrical work in the tradition of Artaud, Genet and others, and the more ‘academic’ approach of the closeted Boulez. Likewise, if Cage’s ‘otherness’ in this context is perhaps as much to do with his status as an American and his particular and distinctive theorisation of the role of composition and the composer, it’s worth noting that he was also gay – as was Metzger, at that point Bussotti’s partner – and that sexuality might have been worth at least a brief digression.

To be sure, Antonelli’s distinction between Boulez and Bussotti could easily be caricatured into an opposition between a bloodless, academic, closeted serialism and a chance-influenced, theatrical and flamboyant approach which could be seen to reproduce unhelpful binary visions of Darmstadt, as well as mapping these onto sexual characterisations which they don’t necessarily fit. He himself is careful to qualify and to avoid this – and, indeed, his article is cited by Iddon in the discussion of Pieces de Chair – yet the impression one gets is that, in situations such as these, Iddon seems to feel that the wider ramifications of sexuality, or politics, are not worthy of a place in a book which insists on unpacking the actual technical workings of multiple serialism as method against the oversimplifications of both its detractors and advocates. Yet, beyond any caricatures, they might nonetheless still be said to form part of a political and musical discourse whose examination could well have enriched his study. In another instance, we are presented with a tantalizing remark from an anonymous member of the ‘Schoenberg school’, quoted in a secondary source: “enough with feeling and alcohol! I am an engineer!” It’s conceivable that this might be explored further, not to suggest not the crass distinction between ‘mechanistic’ or ‘technocratic’ mathematical procedures and – say – an expressionist or neo-romantic ‘access’ to emotion, but the actual social environment in which such music was created, presented and performed, and the emotional, political, social and cultural lives out of which it emerged. Nono’s letters to Steinecke, frequently quoted from here, are full of exaggerated punctuation, colloquialism and the like, and something of this spirit must be recoverable without necessarily descending into an exclusively gossipy biographical focus. Similarly and beyond this, institutional complications potentially caused by Nono’s political commitment – which Iddon mentions in passing with reference to the fact that Nono, a member of the Italian Communist Party, was present at Darmstadt a time when West Germany, just as Hitler had done, had outlawed its own Communist Party, the KPD – seem a further area of concern that might usefully have been explored. Even if performances of Nono’s music were not necessarily as politically charged in Darmstadt as they were at, say, both the Italian and American premiers of his opera Intollorenza 1960, which was blighted by right-wing protests in both countries, Nono’s politics is surely a more central topic than it is allowed to be here. Indeed, Cage’s role as an American, and what might be termed his performance of Americanness, given the complex history of American influence in West Germany, is perhaps somewhat under-stressed as well. In the conclusion, Iddon argues that “the order that Cage truly ruptured was hardly musical but social”, and an expanded sense of what is here meant by social – not just in relation to Cage, but to Darmstadt as a whole – would have given the study a greater resonance and range than it has, however useful it is as a source of research.