Darmstadt Events. The Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music from 1964 to1994 as a space of aesthetic, theoretical and political action

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The goal ofthis project is the evaluation of the Darmstadt summer courses during the directorships of Ernst Thomas and Friednch Hommel, based on careful examination of original audio recordings which were made, during the courses. We examine the "Darmstadt events" from three distinct perspectives, each of which is dealt with in a separate publication: First we look at the historical evolution of aesthetic questions during the courses. Secondly, we systematically analyse the development of music theory under the specific conditions of the courses. And the third focus is of socio-political nature. An additional volume supplements the study by providing an edition of major sources. It is our goal to develop an alternative method of music historiography based on the context of actions, as opposed to the custornary historical description of music in the second half of the twentieth century.From the beginning, we felt it would be necessary to complement the historical, aesthetic and socio-political perspectives of the project with a focus on the theoretical perspective, and this hypothesis has proven to be correct, both in reference to the sources themselves and to the resulting line of argumentation. Thus the extension period will be used to complete the two monographs begun in the first period and which are already well advanced, as well as to develop an additional monograph with the working title of Theory and/as Praxis and a further volume which will consist of an edition of numerous sources.The recordings of lectures, courses and discussions, which have already been largely evaluated, will be examined closer in respect to processes of theory construction. In comparison to written texts, oral statements are often formulated spontaneously and in a tentative theoretical context, and thus they yield rich information both on blank spaces and on connections between theoretical concepts which are often considered to be contradictory. A separate publication (volume 2) will enable the application of a systematic approach to thematic clusters of sources apart from their actual chronological order. Together with the historical and aesthetic perspectives (volume 1) and the socio-political perspective (volume 3), a broad critical reconstruction of the history of the Darmstadt summer courses from 1964 to 1994 is ensured. A volume of edited documents (volume 4) win be the first publication of sources hitherto unavailable and will underline the specific qualities of the various clusters of transcriptions, written sources and photos examined in this project. For pragmatic reasons, we have decided to document the directorships of Thomas and Hommel - beginning in 1962 and lasting until 1994 - as far as the sources permit. This will not affect the overall concept, but it will improve the overall usability of the documentation and enhance the view of the organizational structures that our argumentation is based on.