In many ways, Darmstadt is a typical German city. It has a local beer, an opera house, parks and museums and an efficient tram network, and one night in September 1944 it was devastated by an Allied bombing raid. When people emerged from the shelters, they discovered a city in which four out of every five buildings was ruined. A year later, with the second world war over, reconstruction began. The fabric of the city was slowly restored – buildings, jobs, a political structure – and in the process, more or less by accident, something remarkable happened.
Casting around for ways to regenerate cultural life in the city, its new mayor, Ludwig Metzger, was persuaded by a local musicologist, Wolfgang Steinecke, to consider the possibility of establishing an institute for contemporary music. Because Darmstadt was in the American-controlled zone of occupied Germany, Metzger and Steinecke needed the approval of the American forces to develop their ideas and by happy coincidence the officer in charge of such initiatives was a former Harvard University music student, Everett Helms. The permissions were granted, and in the summer of 1946, American army trucks delivered grand pianos to a hunting lodge on the outskirts of Darmstadt, the temporary home for the first "courses for international new music".
The courses were initially intended to denazify German musicians by introducing them to the modern music of the 1930s and 40s, music by Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, all of which had been outlawed as "degenerate" under Hitler. But soon new music by the next generation of composers became part of the courses too and by the early 1950s, the summer school, now subtly redesignated as the "international courses for new music", was acquiring a reputation as the meeting place for aspiring avantgardistes not only from Germany but across Europe and beyond.
Four composers in particular – the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the German Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the Italians Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono – emerged as the leading figures. In 1958 Nono came up with a name for this collegial grouping, the "Darmstadt school", but as is often the case, no sooner was the tendency named than it split apart, riven by the usual mixture of musical differences and rampant careerism, so for most of the 1960s Stockhausen alone dominated proceedings. Darmstadt still attracted ambitious young musicians from around the world but the courses were stagnating, stifled by what American composer Morton Feldman used to call a "hardening of the categories". "Darmstadt" became a perjorative term used to describe arid abstract music, glass bead games with notes and, like all cliches, it contained some truth.
The antidote to this creative inertia arrived in 1980 when a new director, Friedrich Hommel, installed the British composer Brian Ferneyhough – coordinator of Darmstadt's composition course from 1984 to 1994. Ferneyhough and his near-contemporary Michael Finnissy had made reputations for themselves on the European new music scene with boldly ambitious scores whose intricate notations pushed performers over the boundaries of what they had thought was possible. One of their great supporters, the critic Harry Halbreich, said that for the first time since John Dunstaple in the 15th century, British music was influencing developments in the rest of Europe. In turn, Ferneyhough and Finnissy inspired a generation of younger British composers to be similarly bold and Hommel encouraged us to see the Darmstadt courses as an ideal summer home, a respite from the conservatism of insular musical life.
This summer the Darmstadt courses will happen again, under another new director, Thomas Schäfer but, before that, there is a chance to sample some British perspectives on Darmstadt. Over the weekend of 19-21 February the ever-enterprising Cambridge arts space, Kettle's Yard, is presenting Modern Times: Connecting Composers. Five concerts present a combination of classic Darmstadt (Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Maderna) and British Darmstadt (Ferneyhough, Finnissy, Fox, Redgate, Barrett and others). There will also be a first public showing for David Ryan and Andrew Chesher's new film, Knots and Fields, a fascinating documentary that examines the history of the Darmstadt courses and the ways in which that history still shapes the courses today.
The evolution of the courses over the last 60 years has provided one of the most telling case studies in the institutionalisation of modernism, the process music historian Richard Taruskin sees as "the transformation of the avant-garde into the arrière-garde precisely because of its commitment to an old concept of the new", a process to which Darmstadt has sometimes acceded, sometimes resisted. And Darmstadt's British decade offers a rare example of a moment when UK music was, if not ahead of the game, at least in the same game as our continental colleagues.
Above all the Darmstadt courses have played a part in the creation of some great music and the Kettle's Yard concerts include some of these wonderful pieces. From the early days there's Messiaen's Cantéyodjayâ, a piano piece begun in Darmstadt in 1949 during the composer's first visit to the city and given its German premiere there during the 1952 courses. James Clarke's Oboe Quintet is perhaps the pick of the Hommel crop, alternating concentrated bursts of instrumental weeping and wailing with moments of wounded repose, like a cross between free jazz and eastern Mediterranean folk music heard under the influence of some potent beverage. Typical Darmstadt? Maybe Darmstadt wasn't so typical after all.
For more information on the Modern Times season, visit kettlesyard.co.uk/music/connectingcomposers