Revisiting the Historiography of Postwar Avant-Garde Music

This collection of essays delves into the historiographical traditions that have dominated how the stories of European postwar avant-garde music are told, seeking to approach commonplaces of that history writing from new perspectives. The contributors revisit subjects as varied as the impact of long-playing records on the emergence of open works, Messiaen’s interest in non-European musical traditions, Xenakis’s turn to information theory, Kagel’s strategic invention of a new genre, Berio’s dependence on funding from American foundations, and the ways in which figures like Boulez, Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Nono constructed their musical ancestries. Leading experts in their respective fields, the volume’s authors have sought to rethink the historiography of European experimental music of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in ways that resituate that small but influential milieu in broader historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, they suggest new directions and insights for students and specialists of twentieth-century music and music historiography.

Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Université de Lorraine; she also teaches at the Université de Strasbourg. A specialist of European avant-garde music and of the composer Iannis Xenakis, she is currently finishing a biography of Xenakis that will be published by Fayard in 2022. Barthel Calvet previously edited Propositions pour une historiographie critique de la création musicale après 1945 (2011).

Christopher Brent Murray is a Professor at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et danse de Paris and teaches at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is co-author, with Yves Balmer and Thomas Lacôte of Le modèle et l’invention: Olivier Messiaen et la technique de l’emprunt (2017).