Buhne, Film, Raum und Zeit in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (review)

Many a musician could be forgiven if their eyes glaze over at the very mention of the word 'Vienna'. It is a city of mythic proportions in a manner that no other in the Austro-German musical tradition can ever be. Even the protagonists of the so-called Second Viennese School felt themselves indebted to the weight of this tradition; and the power and devastating critique implicit in Viennese modernism throughout the arts and social sciences could hardly have developed elsewhere than in this so perfectly preserved of urban environments, an environment so superbly beautiful as to suggest that by the law of averages at least there must be something more threatening lurking under the surface.

Despite this, Vienna is not the first city that springs to mind when we think of more recent new music. Although Universal Edition played a significant role in fostering young composers in the 1950s and thereafter, it is Paris, Cologne, and New York that form the most obvious axis in the official histories. Other conglomerations certainly have great local significance, but it is surprising, in the introduction to this book, to learn of the key global role Vienna and Viennese composers play in the music of the present day. Surprising, that is, until one realizes that the short introduction stems from a member of the local government, one of the patrons of the annual festival in which this book has its genesis: Wien Modern.

Wien Modern was initiated by the conductor Claudio Abbado in 1988 with the intention of bringing not only the most recent but also 'classic' works of new music to the Viennese public. In addition to this focus on local audiences, a decision was made early on to complement the concerts with a symposium, and these symposia—which form the reservoir from which this book's contents are taken—have been conducted with more consistency and concentration than those of many another festival. The book under review here is the third in a series of derived publications, all of which are playing catch-up: it took over ten years for the first to appear. They are also not proceedings in the normal sense, since the decision was made not to publish the contributions from individual years separately, but instead to pluck out individual papers with thematic common ground and publish them in one of six projected volumes dedicated to these themes.

This unusual and initially very promising approach explains why, in this volume, three authors are represented with two different papers. It does not quite explain, however, why there is so much overlap in the content, and why so much else is missing. Though the title of the book and the editorial approach might suggest a collection outlining the whole complex of issues surrounding approaches to visual, audiovisual, spatial, and temporal aspects in recent composition, there are only brief moments in which the breadth of the spectrum is illuminated. There are two articles on Kagel, two on Stockhausen, two on Henze, and frequent references to Dallapiccola. References to composers working in Austria are, with the exception of Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, conspicuous by their absence. Further composers represented include Hanns Eisler and—more unusually—Bernard Herrmann, both in relation to film music. Then there are three papers on the film director Andrej Tarkowski, including one, by Paola Wolkowa, in which, apart from a brief analogy between Tarkowski's manner of proceeding and the thematic development of Chopin's music, there is no reference to music at all.

Such seemingly random points of concentration would not be out of place in a more usual volume of proceedings, but this collection seems to strive for more, and does not quite get there. Many of the articles, particularly those concentrating on individual composers, read like slightly elaborate programme notes or the kind of general and not entirely path-breaking statements that visitors to pre-concert talks, particularly...