Tuning in and Dropping Out: The Disturbance of the Dutch Premiere of Stockhausen’s Stimmung
The disruption of the Dutch premiere of Stockhausen’s Stimmung in June 1969 has become an often-told aspect of the piece’s early history, but existing accounts—including Stockhausen’s own—significantly misrepresent the event. The performance was interrupted, not (as Stockhausen later claimed) by young, politically engaged composers such as Peter Schat and Louis Andriessen, but by a group of composition students who wished to ‘participate’ in the piece. In an impromptu debate following the aborted performance, Schat and Andriessen defended Stockhausen’s right to have his music heard in silence. I interpret this clash of young Dutch musicians in terms of the sharp schism that emerged in 1969 between Amsterdam’s thriving hippie counterculture, whose communal ‘happenings’ encouraged the dismantling of the performer–audience distinction, and the city’s student movement, whose emphasis on political action found reflection in Schat’s and Andriessen’s growing interest in communism. It is clear, however, that Schat’s and Andriessen’s stance was also motivated by commitments to musical professionalism and to the ideology of musical progress, commitments that sat as uneasily with the musical preferences of the student movement as they did with the hippie counterculture.
A Revoutionary Proposal: Alexander Trocchi, Dramaturgies of Disruption and Situationist Genealogies
Occasionally in history, a keen and perceptive thinker captures the pulse of an era long before others, pinpointing and giving voice to ideas that later become defining features of an age. Such figures are sometimes historically obscured because incipient renderings often escape retrospective tendencies to categorize and periodize chronologically. Others are purposely avoided, over-written or forgotten. It is in this way that Alexander Trocchi’s work, particularly his manifestos that start in 1962, have eluded scholars despite anticipating the ideas and countercultural upheavals that characterized the mid-1960s and the watershed year of 1968. Trocchi’s first manifesto ‘A Revolutionary Proposal’—subtitle, ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’—prefigured what sociologist Herbert Marcuse would seven years later call a generation’s need for a ‘revolution in perception’. 1 In it, Trocchi combined dramatist Antonin Artaud’s call for spiritual awakenings with the political philosopher Guy Debord’s demand to intervene in capitalism’s commodity spectacle. ‘The cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind,’ he wrote, suggesting a collective spectatorparticipant approach to transforming theatre, and thereby, society. Little has been written on Trocchi, however, and the relevance of his work to key shifts in twentieth century literature and theatre is immense. Trocchi’s 1962 vision of a revolutionised theatre represent the earliest conceptualizations of a Situationist theatre concerned with what I will call disruptive dramaturgies, or actions that rupture collective theatre experiences. Proposing a revisionist historiography centred on Trocchi, this essay focuses on lesser-known links between
German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music
Acknowledgements Author's note Introduction: terms of discourse 1. What does instrumental music mean? 2. Answering with a unified voice 3. Answering with a German voice 4. Answering with aesthetic criteria 5. The importance of being correct 6. The reign of genius 7. A call to order 8. Epilogue: segue to the nineteenth century Notes Bibliography Index.