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An Apprenticeship and Its Stocktakings: Leibowitz, Boulez, Messiaen, and the Discourse and Practice of New Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2020

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Abstract

The textbook historical account of post-war New Music describes a logical and radical succession from Schoenberg to Webern to the Darmstadt School. Against this narrative of inevitability, I provide a more contingent account of the institutionalization of a particular discourse of New Music in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. What is contingent here is not so much why or how certain figures – chiefly Pierre Boulez and René Leibowitz – were important, but the shape and the logic by which this importance was established and maintained. Accordingly, this article first of all provides a summary of just what it meant for Leibowitz's understanding of New Music to be reproduced in an institutional capacity. From here, I undertake close critical reading of Boulez's break with Leibowitz in order to discover what, exactly, Boulez began to do differently to establish a new practice.

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Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 71 - 93
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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