«The true internationalism of music in our time» : politics and dodecaphony in Europe, 1947-1951

Abstract

Introduction: The Wages of Dodecaphony

Histories of post-war music in Europe have long been buttressed by the claim that twelve-tone music exercised a near-dictatorial control over institutional music-making. While there have been numerous and extensive critiques of this narrative, there has been relatively less notice given to the finer details of how and why such a dominance came to be - or appeared to be - the case. That is where this article comes in. Using discursive analysis of texts written in and around the new centers of new music in post-war Europe, it nuances metanarratives of dodecaphonus ex nihilo, throwing light on the activity of expansive and conflicting international networks of musicians attempting to negotiate on the contingencies of a wide variety of musical practices competing for institutional support. These negotiations take place in two moves. The bulk of the chapter is occupied with the first, which involves the conflict between Schoenberg's practice - represented entirely in absentiaby a number of figures, most prominently Rene Leibowitz and Theodor W. Adorno - and various alternative methods of twelve-tone composition, especially those of Josef Matthias Hauer. Both Schoenberg's and Hauer's exegetes depicted their chosen method as an organic and inexorable evolution in music, while the rival's methods were portrayed as ex-centrically unmoored from historical progress. Significantly, Leibowitz and Adorno connected Schoenberg's practice to the internationalist discourse propagated by institutions of new music in post-war Europe. The second move, suggested in the conclusion, involves the shift from Schoenbergian dodecaphony to "post-Webernian" serialism.