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.
The Sixties : from memory to history
This collection of original essays represents some of the most exciting ways in which historians are beginning to paint the 1960s onto the larger canvas of American history. While the first literature about this turbulent period was written largely by participants, many of the contributors to this volume are young scholars who came of age intellectually in the 1970s and 1980s and thus write from fresh perspectives. The essayists ask fundamental questions about how much America really changed in the 1960s and why certain changes took place. In separate chapters, they explore how the great issues of the decade--the war in Vietnam, race relations, youth culture, the status of women, the public role of private enterprise--were shaped by evolutions in the nature of cultural authority and political legitimacy. They argue that the whirlwind of events and problems we call the Sixties can only be understood in the context of the larger history of post-World War II America. Contents "Growth Liberalism in the Sixties: Great Societies at Home and Grand Designs Abroad," by Robert M. Collins "The American State and the Vietnam War: A Genealogy of Power," by Mary Sheila McMahon "And That's the Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News," by Chester J. Pach, Jr. "Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy," by David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta "Nothing Distant about It: Women's Liberation and Sixties Radicalism," by Alice Echols "The New American Revolution: The Movement and Business," by Terry H. Anderson "Who'll Stop the Rain?: Youth Culture, Rock 'n' Roll, and Social Crises," by George Lipsitz "Sexual Revolution(s)," by Beth Bailey "The Politics of Civility," by Kenneth Cmiel "The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution," by David Farber
"If the Pretty Little Hand Won't Stretch": Music for the Fair Sex in Eighteenth-Century Germany
The image of the young lady at music is part of the mythology of the eighteenth century, nostalgically summoning a bygone era in European manners. How should such images be read, and to what uses are they put in the construction of the past and the present? Richard Leppert appeals to eighteenth-century iconography to argue the disciplinary function of music on women. This article extends Leppert9s arguments in a newly uncovered repertory of songs and keyboard works published in eighteenth-century Germany "for the fair sex." Moving between prescriptions about musical practice specifically and women9s character and place in the world more broadly, this music evinces cautionary and disciplinary rhetorics that accord with Leppert9s readings. But whereas Leppert deals with paintings-more or less official representations-musical performance and reception complicate the picture. In performance, music offers possibilities for negotiation. On closer examination, instrumental music for the fair sex reveals a complex web of generic and stylistic motifs that undermine the manifest rhetoric of easiness and simplicity in the repertory and invoke the professional and public spheres. Questioning as well as espousing virtue, and haunted by the figure of the rake, songs for ladies reflect the instability in the emergent discourses of bourgeois femininity and the private sphere.