Proposal

The Darmstadt Courses for New Music were founded with two main objectives: firstly, to re-educate the German population with a view to the establishment of democratic institutions, and secondly as a meeting place where musicians from former fascist or fascist-occupied regions in Europe could bring back into public life styles and techniques that had been banned or otherwise silenced during the fascist years. In a way, the courses succeeded in the case of the Spanish 'Generación del 51', a description that was coined by one of the leading participants, Cristóbal Halffter, since many of the composers who fell into this category graduated from the Madrid Royal Conservatory in this year. As the Franco regime increasingly introduced technocratic economic planning and limited freedoms, if still within an authoritarian political climate, composers like Halffter (b. 1930), Ramon Barce (1928–2008), Carmelo Bernola (1929–2002), Anton Garcia Abril (b. 1933), Agustin González Acilú (b. 1929), Juan Hidalgo (1927–2018), and Luis de Pablo (b. 1930) were able to travel to Darmstadt to encounter what was—from the perspective of a democratic Western Europe, let alone still Francoist Spain—some of the most radical music yet produced, by young firebrand composers like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono, in the latter case even an active Marxist, and a member of the Italian Communist Party. Thus, in Spain, the Darmstadt new music courses did exactly what they were supposed to do: They showed the way out of a fascist past and into a future of musical avant-garde. Perhaps this should be seen as an even greater success in Spain, since it was achieved with Franco still in power. In fact, participation in the courses has often meant a significant change in compositional concerns, as shown, for example, by Hidalgo's introduction of aleatoric elements in his Offenes trio and Ciu-Quartett Music (both 1958), following his participation in the courses in 1957, or the sequence of Módulus compositions (1963–67), which follows closely on from the years when he attended the courses (1960-66), or the integration of serial techniques into Halffter's music in his Sonata para violin solo (1959) and Cinco microformas (1960), in the wake of his attendance in 1958.
The institutional influence of the European avant-garde should not be underestimated either: encounters with John Cage, amongst others, in the context of Darmstadt were key factors in the founding of the Zaj Ensemble —by Barce and Hidalgo, along with the Italian, Walter Marchetti. Tomás Marco (b. 1942), a Darmstadt attendee through most of the 1960s, was not only a member of Zaj for a time, but also, with Barce, one of the founders of the new music periodical, Sonda, clearly indebted aesthetically and intellectually to, inter alia, Die Reihe, the Darmstädter Beiträge and Incontri musicali. Halffter would ultimately be reinvited to Darmstadt to lead composition teaching in 1976 and 1978, with Marco and Josep Mestres Quadreny (b. 1929) having been featured composers in 1974.
Yet in the historiography of the Darmstadt courses there is virtually no discussion of Spanish composers —none of the aforementioned composers are even mentioned in Martin Iddon's New Music in Darmstadt (2013), for example— whereas in the discourses of music in post-war Spain, the impact of the international avant-garde, as mediated through the Darmstadt courses, is seen as essentially peripheral, even in the hands of Marco (1993) himself. This project seeks to bridge this surprising gap by posing three questions:
1) What did the Darmstadt New Music Courses do for new music in Spain?
2) What has been the influence of Spanish composers on the Darmstadt New Music Courses?
3) Why it is that what ought to be, from the Darmstadt perspective, a success story has been pushed into the margins?

METHODOLOGY
Unexplored documents in the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt Archive (IMD) make it possible to answer these questions. At Darmstadt 2018, I was able to conduct digital research in the archive thanks to an extensive digitisation and indexing project. I found hundreds of files containing photos, letters, telegrams, registration forms, recordings, programme notes, and correspondences that refer to many of the composers I have named. As part of this research, these resources will be read closely, beside published accounts of the course (Trudu 1992; Grassl and Kapp 1996; Borio and Danuser 1997; Iddon 2013) which will be negotiated to determine what kind of exclusions were made, when and by whom. In particular, I will address the following questions: Why is there an absence of Spanish composers in the history of the Darmstadt New Music Courses? To what extent did the Spanish political situation play a role in the marginalisation of these composers? How much control did Spanish composers have in the organising of events related to the New Music of Spain? And finally: How do published histories about Darmstadt’s New Music Course deal with problems caused by blank gaps in the documentation?
Additionally, to properly account for such aesthetic entanglements within the music will require me to interview four composers: Cristobál Halffter, Luis de Pablo, Anton Abril, and Tomás Marco. I will conduct two interviews with each composer, the first will be an open interview in which the composer can express their own ideas, and then a final interview with more specific questions about how and where they get their ideas for certain works that I will develop throughout the project. However, due to the current situation with Covid-19, these interviews will be conducted by telephone or other audio/video means of communication, to avoid any contact with the participants. The interviews will be conducted in Spanish and will then be translated by myself, which will be possible thanks to my proficiency in the language, which I acquired during my master's studies in Valladolid.
I will also use musical analysis to trace the influence of Darmstadt's aesthetics in the music of the Spanish composers who participated in the course. The music of Spanish composers is kept at the SGAE’s Documentation and Archive Centre (CEDOA) in Madrid. This archive contains the final scores and drafts of many works by the composers before and after their attendance at Darmstadt. I am also concerned with works by composers that were selected to be performed as part of the official Darmstadt programme: works such as Hidalgos Ukanga (1957) under the direction of Bruno Maderna and Pablos Módulos I (1963) under the direction of Pierre Boulez. I seek to reflect comparatively on the different approaches to technical and aesthetic musical structures, and those that they choose to avoid. I am interested in reconstructing the network of influence for a composition encapsulated into the network of actants often overlooked. As my use of the term ‘network of actants’ here suggests, I am interested in building on theoretical insights from Actor Network Theory as a means of understanding the social, cultural, and personal structures that help form the compositions. By using specific elements and traces (interviews, scores, and the archival material) it is possible to map the operationalisation of knowledge within the network, potentially highlighting the blind spots when considering the influence of extra-musical on the compositional process.
Archival work should occupy less than one-sixth of the research period (i.e. two months spread out over the year). However, due to recent digitisation efforts of both archives this is likely to be greatly reduced. As I have already located the materials and have the relevant Shelf marks and ISWC codes, I can begin work on the project immediately upon arrival in Darmstadt or Madrid. I have also started to contact the composers concerned to organise their participation in the project.
For all these reasons, I believe that I am the best candidate to carry out this project. Given my experience of Spanish music, acquiring a Master's degree in Hispanic Music from Valladolid, and my extensive knowledge of local geography and archives —as part of my master's degree, I took an introductory course at CEDOA on the use and research of their archive.
This is an important time and space to be asking these questions. Given the age of the surviving composers, this could well be the last chance to get answers and insight into a turbulent and complex period of Spanish history. Through a better understanding of what was achieved by Spanish composers at the Darmstadt Summer Course, and their exclusion in the writing of the institution’s history. The project offers space to rethink and reassess Hispanic composers in the Darmstadt school.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Some key texts that frame this study include:
Hay, J. (2001). Locating the Televisual. Television & New Media, 2(3), 205–234.
Iddon, Martin, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. OUP Oxford, 2005.
Marco. Tomas, Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Rodríguez, Eva Moreda, Music Criticism and Music Critics in Early Francoist Spain (Oxford University Press, 2017)
Trudu, A. La "Scuola' di Darmstadt. Milan (Ricordi 1992)
Zalduondo, Gemma Pérez, and Germán Gan Quesada, Music and Francoism (Brepols, 2013)