Claus-SteffenManhkopf’s Second Modernity in Context

History, Politics, and Serial Aesthetics in the 1950s and 60s

In very general terms, we can say that the catastrophe of World War II, and the crimes commited by fascist states, made many desire a new beginning after the war. In Germany, in particular, there was an effort to overcomFe the cultural propaganda of the Nazi regime. And because Schoenberg had been persecuted by the Nazis, his 12-tone method became more widely appealing after the war: it was free of the stench of collaboration, it was thought to symbolize resistance, and it offered an alternative to tonal harmony.[1]

The method became even more appealing in democratic Western Europe when the Soviet’s Division of Propaganda denounced “formalism” in 1948, which included 12-tone music, and promoted socialist realism: many artists “saw a clear analogy between the repressions of the Third Reich and those of Stalin.”[2] Recent scholarship has shown that serial music was actually practiced in many parts of the Eastern bloc and even supported by some socialist governments.[3] But Western observers at the time saw direct parallels between communism and National Socialism because both condemned or prohibited particular techniques and figures in modernist music.[4] Western governments responded to this by increasing their support for modernist art. The Darmstadt New Music Courses, for example, which were founded in 1946 to help promote music banned by the Nazi regime, became a center for the promotion of music prohibited in the East and a beacon for compositional approaches such as serialism, which was thought to represent the values of Western democracies.[5]

Thus we have one very broad account of the historical and political contexts of postwar serialism in Europe: serial music’s perceived antagonism to the aesthetic agendas of authoritarian regimes, and its new sound possibilities, made it sing like a voice of freedom. The composers themselves were, no doubt, influenced by this image, but they also created an additional justification for the method through a shared philosophy of history. It can be found in the writings of Dieter Schnebel, György Ligeti, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example, and goes as follows: over the course of the 19^th century increasing chromaticism was said to lead to the freely atonal works of Schoenberg; Schoenberg was then said to be required to develop the 12-tone method as a means to control excessive expression and provide formal rules for fully chromatic composition; but the 12-tone method was seen to have its own limitations, according to postwar composers, and these were said to be solved by the “total” serial approach of the early 1950s, in which the serial method was applied to multiple elements of music besides pitch.[6]

There is no objective truth to this philosophy of history, of course. It is merely a story—a “fairy tale,” as Carl Dahlhaus put it[7]—that seeks to justify the aesthetic preferences of the time. It reduces something of terrifying complexity and scale—in this case, history—to easily understandable proportions. It is anthropocentric and domineering in the extreme. But it is remarkable because so many composers in the postwar period, despite their vastly different backgrounds and varied approaches to serialism, shared this unsophisticated—and Germanocentric—view of history. They also extended it to include post-serial developments of the later 1950s and 60s, many of which were understood as attempts to grasp and control new kinds of musical material. Specific examples were given by Koenig, among others, in an article on the topic of musical material: therein he stated that at the beginning of serialism, the concept of material applied to “pitches, durations, intensities, and timbres. Then other [things] became pressing: groups, which consisted of many tones; spatially conceived sound events; new musical instruments or new ways of playing old instruments; liberties given to performers; musical action.”[8]

 

Koenig’s statement describes an ever-expanding idea of musical material. It was a view shared by many composers in the period, who saw it as objectively determined rather than subjectively chosen. Fifty years later, as we will see, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf’s idea of a Second Modernity tries to continue this process of expansion by including new materials in the same philosophy of history. And Mahnkopf is guided by the same constellation of ideas we find in postwar serialism: the concept of musical material, the goal-directed philosophy of history, and the absolutist, ethically tinged claim that one approach to composition is somehow demanded by history or more legitimate. Both the serialists and Mahnkopf were led to this constellation of ideas by the music philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno.

 

The Influence of Adorno

Adorno returned to Europe from exile abroad in 1949 and quickly made an impact through the publication of his Philosophie der neuen Musik, his teaching at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, his radio lectures, and his presence in the German Feuilleton. In fact, it would be hard to find someone who had more influence on the philosophical discussions around 12-tone and serial music than Adorno.[9] His book Philosophie der neuen Musik presented his ideas about Schoenberg’s 12-tone method, among other things, and it became so influential that there are stories of non-German composers learning German in order to read it.[10] In the book, we find that particular constellation of ideas I mentioned: the concept of musical material, the philosophy of history, and the ethical pretense that makes aesthetic preferences seem like objective imperatives.

Adorno claimed that Schoenberg’s 12-tone method was “truly the fate of music […] The rules are not arbitrarily conceived. They are configurations of the historical obligation in material.”[11] The reason why Adorno saw the 12-tone method as “truly the fate of music” is the same reason why he claimed “the rules are not arbitrarily conceived”: Schoenberg did not so much choose to compose in this way, Adorno argued, but was required to compose in this way. Adorno believed that this music resulted from a historical process in which musical expression developed through the breakdown of formal conventions, increasing chromaticism, and increasing dissonance to atonality, as well as through the use of the variation principle in composers like Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms. These developments were said to be consolidated in Schoenberg’s 12-tone method and subjected to rational control.[12] But we should, of course, critique this supposedly “objective” history: Schoenberg was not required to compose 12-tone music, he merely choseto do so. Also, Adorno’s historical narrative favors practices from a specific period of Austro-German music while ignoring other periods and other cultures—and ignoring also Schoenberg’s own reasons for inventing the 12-tone method.

A few years after Philosophie der neuen Musik appeared, Adorno wrote an essay about postwar serial music titled “Das Altern der Neuen Musik.” Tellingly, the title replaced the lower-case adjective of his book on “neue” Musik with an upper-case proper noun “Neue Musik,” and it criticized the postwar practice for falling behind the “world spirit” and forgetting the imperatives of “New Music.” Those imperatives, for Adorno, were: a critical resistance to the existing order; the preservation of subjective freedom; and the expression of the individual before the abyss of the administered world.[13] All worthwhile undertakings, it would seem. In another essay on the topic, Adorno stated the ideal more succinctly: “the goal of New Music must be the complete liberation of the human subject.”[14]

But from where did this ideal come? Oddly enough, liberated subjectivity and New Music both have their roots in the same place for Adorno: in Beethoven. In writings on New Music, Adorno asserted that musical works “gain in importance in proportion to the resoluteness with which they give shape to their own negation,” and this “is the greatness of Beethoven’s last works.”[15] Paradoxically, if not to say absurdly, a genuinely New Music should follow Beethoven’s lead, according to Adorno. To protest the falsely affirmative gestures of tonality—the closed forms and consonant resolutions—new music should “generate connections from within itself.”[16] The ideal of new music is an ideal of organicism. Or so Adorno would have it.

Adorno’s emphasis on Beethoven may have been, in part, an effort to rehabilitate the image of German culture after the Nazi period. But the connection between Beethoven and the idea subjective freedom had been around for a while. Busoni, for example, believed that “with Beethoven, the human element first came to the fore as the primary argument of musical art.” And Scott Burnham has shown that “[this] perception is an eminently common one.”[17] Burnham argued further that “Beethoven [became] the hero of Western music, ‘The Man Who Freed Music’.” Indeed, in a 1961 recording of the Beethoven symphonies conducted by René Leibowitz, which Adorno reviewed and praised, the original liner notes proclaim this in bold capital letters: “BEETHOVEN: THE MAN WHO SET MUSC FREE.”[18]This would be the place to turn to Mahnkopf’s ideas about a Second Modernity.

 

Mahnkopf’s Second Modernity

The contemporary German composer Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf is also a prolific writer about the theory and aesthetics of contemporary music—including a movement that he considers himself a part of, which he calls the “Second Modernity.” One of his many essays on the topic begins by naming the art music of modernity as “New Music” (capitalizing the adjective “New,” as Adorno did), and then asserts, “New Music should be understood not so much as a result of the Schoenbergian ‘revolution’ (atonality), but rather as a consequence of something that began with Beethoven: the compositional self-determination of the musical subject out of freedom.” Like Adorno, Mahnkopf traces the roots of New Music back to Beethoven—the man who set music free and showed us the way, it would seem, to the art music of modernity, the New Music. Mahnkopf also adds the philosophy of history and concept of material to his thoery and thereby completes the constellation of ideas I mentioned earlier. He claims that Beethoven’s late works “set off the process of musical modernization extending to serialism via the central stages of Wagner and atonality, and thus unleashed an unstoppable dynamic of escalation that meant both technical ‘progress’ and artistic autonomy […] Postwar serialism, in its claims not only to total control over the material, but also to a seemingly ahistorical production of musical meaning from a tabula rasa, represented a sort of summit, needle’s eye, crisis, and turning point in one.”[19]

Just as in the writings of postwar serialists, music history is reduced by Mahnkopf to the following stages of progress: increasing chromaticism led to Schoenberg’s freely atonal music; this free atonality was then rationally ordered by means of the 12-tone method; finally, the twelve-tone method asserted its “total control over the material” by extending serial ordering to other parameters in postwar serialism. It is extraordinary that someone could hold this view of history at any time, but especially in the 21^st century. And it is asserted as an absolute truth; there seems to be no recognition that it is a fairy-tale that reflects a particular time, place, and culture.

Mahnkopf’s Second Modernity aims to continue this philosophy of history, and it does so by utilizing new material: “as far as the material is concerned, a progressive conception of material has a decisive role once again: microtonality, complex rhythms, nested formal constructions, poly-works, live electronics, computer assisted composition, the whole spectrum of pitch and noise, hybrid playing techniques.”[20] This list reads like an updated version of Koenig’s account of the material explored by serial and post-serial composers in the 1950s and 60s, quoted earlier.[21] And like postwar composers, Mahnkopf believes that material should be used to generate form: “material and form should form a cohesive unity once more.”[22] Unlike postmodernism which, he claims, avoided this problem, Second Modernity returns to the question of “how material and form can be connected internally […]. That was and still is the great question of modern music as a whole.”[23]

But is this really the “great question of modern music as a whole”? It was indeed the question that vexed Boulez at the time he wrote “Schoenberg is Dead” and composed his Structure Ia, both of which had a great impact on serial aesthetics. And it recalls Stockhausen’s early writings on serialism—in particular, his obsession with “Widerspruchslosigkeit” [a state of being without contradiction or opposition] and his call for an “agreement of the laws of form with the conditions of the material.”[24] It is, in short, an ideal of organicism. But that does not make it “the great question of modern music as a whole.” It seems, rather, more like an attempt to reassert the aesthetics values of serialism from the 1950s and 60s.

 

Conclusions: Returning to the Question of “Why?”

Why would the ideas that shaped Western European modernist music aesthetics of the 1950s and 60s still seem valuable to some composers today? We can understand why a young postwar generation wanted to create a new world after fascism and war. But what purpose does the idea of progress serve today? Others have attempted answers to this question. One answer claims that “the concept of progress [is] a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”[25] This idea almost seems worthy of Adorno, but it comes from popular culture. Adorno, for his part, would have pointed to the progressive domination of nature that accompanies the process of enlightenment, which he and his research partner Max Horkheimer argued can be traced back to the first chapters of Genesis.[26]

The first chapters of Genesis take us far beyond the topic of my short essay on Mahnkopf in all but one respect: anthropocentrism. Whereas now, just as in the postwar period, the belief in progress provides a sense of security in an unknowable universe or an undesirable world (because it provides human explanations about this universe and world), and whereas we can recognize the accomplishments brought by the efforts toward progress, we should not overlook the fact that the idea of progress seems rooted in a misguided, erroneous, and unwarranted anthropocentrism. Thus, anthropocentrism is the true object of investigation: its role in prompting humans to claim to know how history unfolds, or to author historical narratives that favor particular aesthetic preferences, has not been properly studied. But that is a task for a different, and much longer, essay than this one.

 

Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor W.: “Classicism, Romanticism, New Music,” Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 106-22.

Adorno, Theodor W.: “Musik und Neue Musik,” in Quasi una fantasia, Gesammelte Schriften 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978, 476-92.

Adorno, Theodor W.: Philosophie der neuen Musik, in Gesammelte Schriften 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 65-8.

Herbert, Frank: Dune, New York: Ace, 1965.

Jay, Martin: The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 2^nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Kapp, Reinhard: “Shades of the Double’s Original: Rene Leibowitz’s Dispute with Boulez,” Tempo 165 (1988): 2-26.

Koenig, Gottfried Michael: “Das musikalische Material – Ein Begriff und seine Fragwürdigkeit,” Ästhetische Praxis: Texte zur Musik, Saarbrücken: Pfau, 1992, vol. 2, 142-52.

Kovács, Inge: “Die Ferienkurse als Schauplatz der Ost-West Konfrontation,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 116-39, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997.

Kovács, Inge: “Gründung und Zielsetzung,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 65-75, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997.

Lindstedt, Iwona: “Serialism in Central and Eastern Europe,” and Peter Schmelz, “Serialism in the USSR,” in The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 241-65.

Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen: “Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity—Provisional Considerations,” trans. Wieland Hoban, Search Journal for New Music and Culture 4 (Spring 2009): 1-13.

Schubert, Giselher: “Adorno’s Auseinandersetzung mit der Zwölgtontechnik Schönbergs,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 46 (1989), 254.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz: “Arbeitsbericht 1952/53: Orientierung,” Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 32-8.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz: “Situation des Handwerks (Kriterien der punktuellen Musik)”, Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 17-23.

Zagorski, Marcus: “‘Nach dem Weltuntergang’: Adorno’s Engagement with Postwar Music,” Journal of Musicology 22/4 (2005), 680-701.

Zagorski, Marcus: “Hearing Beethoven, Truth, and ‘New Music’,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 44/1 (2013): 49-56.

Zagorski, Marcus: “The Aesthetics of Serialism,” The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 20-36.

 

[1] Reinhard Kapp, “Shades of the Double’s Original: Rene Leibowitz’s Dispute with Boulez,” Tempo 165 (1988): 2-26, here 13.

[2] Inge Kovács, “Die Ferienkurse als Schauplatz der Ost-West Konfrontation,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 116-39, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997, here 117. Translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

[3] See Iwona Lindstedt, “Serialism in Central and Eastern Europe,” and Peter Schmelz, “Serialism in the USSR,” in The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 241-65.

[4] See Kovács, “Ost-West Konfrontation.”

[5] Inge Kovács, “Gründung und Zielsetzung,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 65-75, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997.

[6] For a detaild examination of this philosophy of history see Marcus Zagorski, “Material and History in the Aesthetics of ‘serielle Musik’,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134/2, 271-317.

[7] Marcus Zagorski, “Carl Dahlhaus and the Aesthetics of the Experiment,” Acta Musicologica 87/2 (2015), 249-64.

[8] Gottfried Michael Koenig, “Das musikalische Material – Ein Begriff und seine Fragwürdigkeit,” Ästhetische Praxis: Texte zur Musik, Saarbrücken: Pfau, 1992, vol. 2, 142-52, here 149. See also Marcus Zagorski, Adorno and the Aesthetics of Postwar Serial Music, Hofheim: Wolke, 2020, 65.

[9] A reception history is presented in Marcus Zagorski, “‘Nach dem Weltuntergang’: Adorno’s Engagement with Postwar Music,” Journal of Musicology 22/4 (2005), 680-701.

[10] Giselher Schubert, “Adorno’s Auseinandersetzung mit der Zwölgtontechnik Schönbergs,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 46 (1989), 254.

[11] Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, in Gesammelte Schriften 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 65-8.

[12] A more detailed analysis can be found in Marcus Zagorski, “The Aesthetics of Serialism,” The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 20-36.

[13] See Theodor W. Adorno, “Musik und Neue Musik,” in Quasi una fantasia, Gesammelte Schriften 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978, 476-92; see also Zagorski, Adorno, 53.

[14] Theodor W. Adorno, “Classicism, Romanticism, New Music,” Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 106-22, here 121.

[15] For a detailed examination, see Marcus Zagorski, “Hearing Beethoven, Truth, and ‘New Music’,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 44/1 (2013): 49-56.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, “Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity—Provisional Considerations,” trans. Wieland Hoban, Search Journal for New Music and Culture 4 (Spring 2009): 1-13.

[20] Ibid.

[21] See note 8, above.

[22] Mahnkopf, “Provisional Considerations,” 12.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Arbeitsbericht 1952/53: Orientierung,” Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 32-8, here 32. Stockhausen’s comments about “Widerspruchslosigkeit” appear in Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Situation des Handwerks (Kriterien der punktuellen Musik)”, Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 17-23, here 18-21.

[25] Frank Herbert, Dune, New York: Ace, 1965, 521.

[26] See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 2^nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.