Unheard Modernisms

Hans Werner Henze felt personally attacked at the 1957 Donaueschingen Festival. The festival provided high-profile visibility for his new vocal work _Nachtstücke und Arien_, which set poetry by his close friend Ingeborg Bachmann. While pleased with soprano Gloria Davy's performance, Henze recalls that "after the first few bars, Boulez, Stockhausen, and also my friend Nono, got up together and left the auditorium, making sure everyone saw them. They weren't even prepared to listen to this music that sounded so different from theirs." Because they had identified Henze's music as compositionally regressive, the trio did not listen to how the performance challenged their largely white, heteropatriarchal artistic community. Walking out prevented them from hearing the first work with text written by a woman and the first performance featuring an African American woman in the festival's history. As much as histories of Donaueschingen and similar festivals tout the aesthetic diversity of the music they supported, these narratives often occlude collaborative efforts behind works like _Nachtstücke_ and ignore the dynamics of coalitions built by minoritized artists. 
In this paper, I draw on original archival research to expose the rift between the premiere's political optics and Henze, Davy, and Bachmann's individual investments in _Nachtstücke und Arien_. I argue that correspondence and other ephemera document a series of conflicting intimate relationships rather than a coordinated effort to unsettle or diversify high modernist hegemony. Instead of resuming the aesthetic battles waged at Donaueschingen, I trace how Bachmann and Davy were brought to the festival through a series of decisions made in the name of love, money, and beauty. Cumulatively, these decisions make up what I suggest is Donaueschingen's intimate economy-the patterns of investment that prioritize the material and emotional support of specific relationships over others. Focusing on intimate relationships rather than fixed social identities, I account for the incorrect and, in some cases, injurious assumptions Henze, Bachmann, Davy, and the festival's management made about each another during their collaboration. Thus, this paper considers the "how" rather than the "who" of the intersections of identities to develop a mode of political redress beyond individual recognition.

Tom Stoppard's play _Travesties_ portrays confabulations among James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin in Zürich, 1920. Although in reality the three never met, the fictional characters' lofty and light discourse on global history, art, and politics is a detailed portrait of the ideological and cultural agendas on offer at the time. And although Stoppard weaves his narrative through a historical actor from Joyce's theater troupe, there was a real witness to the diorama of post-war Zürich: a teenaged Otto Luening.

A bright young composer and flutist from Milwaukee, Luening had come to Switzerland to study with the influential Italian composer and pedagogue Ferruccio Busoni; once there, he came into the orbit of Joyce, performing in one production with his English Players. In his autobiography, Luening describes Joyce's fascination with the fundamentals of composition, and his finely-grained poetic sensibility. In the cafes of Zürich, Joyce interrogated Luening on sonata form, counterpoint, and religion. Luening in turn gained from Joyce an appreciation of the "great warmth that [a] sharp intellect could radiate," sensing that monstrous precision and humane, sympathetic understanding were not opposed but allied talents.

In this paper, I use biographical and manuscript evidence to argue that Luening's prompt incorporation of tape technique in 1950 stems from a Joycean drive: an avaricious compulsion to know every detail by describing, and capturing it. As he absorbed diction from Joyce and counterpoint from Busoni, Luening internalized an encyclopedism that drew him to the radical new potentials of magnetic recording technology. Luening's musical biography, in other words, connects otherwise distant historical scenes, closing a circuit between the aesthetic ontologies of Italian Futurism and modernist prose on one hand, and that of the proliferating tape music practices of international post-1945 avant-gardes, on the other.

The slow movement of Ruth Crawford's String Quartet 1931 is undoubetdly her best-known work, often performed in concert as a string-orchestra arrangement titled Andante for Strings. Examining long-overlooked sources in the Seeger collection at the Library of Congress, this presentation shows that the currently available scores for these pieces--originally edited by Henry Cowell and currently published by Theodore Presser Co.--contain several significant errors. 
In particular, I focus on the case of Andante for Strings, where most of the double-bass part is missing, and the remainder is incorrect. Using reproductions from the Seeger collection, I show that Crawford wrote two drafts of Andante for Strings' double-bass part, neither of which corresponds to the publicly-available score. Presser's published materials contain only the final third of Crawford's early (and incomplete) sketch of the bass; her final version bears no resemblance to this abandoned draft, yet the draft version has been performed and recorded several times. While other scholars (Hisama 2001, Straus 1995) have noted some smaller errors in these scores, the defective double-bass part seems to have been overlooked.
The results of this research were performed in concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas in 2017, who premiered my revised score. I have since signed a contract with Theodore Presser to print this revision; however, Presser currently seem to be in breach of this contract, and are ignoring all communication. In this context, my presentation reflects on some of the challenges inherent in securing republication of new editions of comparatively lesser-known composers like Crawford.