2004 - Beal Am AvGarde & Germany 72

The Twentieth Century and Beyond
A Place to Ply Their Wares with Dignity:

American Composer-Performers in West
Germany, 1972
Amy C. Beal
Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org at Univ. of California, Santa Cruz on November 22, 2010
Reflecting on their careers at home and abroad, several American com-
posers (including Earle Brown, Alvin Curran, Gordon Mumma, Frederic
Rzewski, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff) cite German support that
rewarded them generously for their work, kept them “in business,” and
allowed them to “survive” professionally.1 In fact, West German individ-
uals and institutions have played a leading role in the production and
dissemination of postwar American experimental music—a tradition
rooted in the music of Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and John Cage.
Especially since the 1950s, German engagements helped shape much
of the history of that branch of composition and performance. The Ger-
man reception of American music was not free of tension: in the 1950s
German audiences came to know Cage’s ideas only cautiously, and some-
times with great hostility; in the 1960s the West German new-music
community polarized in vigorous acceptance or bitter rejection of those
ideas. Despite years of official ambivalence about radical new composi-
tions from the United States, performances of experimental music in-
creased dramatically during the early 1970s.2 West German interaction
with American experimental music between the end of World War II in
1945 and reunification in 1990 peaked, in a series of new-music festivals,
in 1972.
A handful of influential West German cultural administrators,
music critics, composers, and performers deserve credit as champions
of American experimentalism (see Table 1). Some wrote often about
new American music for print media and radio. Others performed and
recorded that music, making it widely available in Germany and else-
where. Producers and directors of radio and festival programs often com-
missioned, recorded, and broadcast experimental compositions from the
United States. Between the 1950s and the early 1990s, these supporters
(and others, including Mary Bauermeister, Wolfgang Becker, Eberhard
Blum, Erhard Grosskopf, Werner Heider, and Rainer Riehn) maintained
The Musical Quarterly 86(2), Summer 2002, pp. 329–348; DOI: 10.1093/musqtl/gdg011
© 2004 Oxford University Press 329
330 The Musical Quarterly
Table 1. Primary supporters of American experimental music in West Germany

Supporters Location Main areas of contribution Mainly active
Wolfgang Steinecke Darmstadt New music festival 1946–1961

Heinz-Klaus Metzger many Broadcasts, publication mid-50s–present
Dieter Schnebel many Performance, publication mid-50s–present
Hans Otte Bremen Radio, recording, festival 1959–1984
Josef Anton Riedl Munich/Bonn Festivals, performances early-60s–present
Reinhard Oehlschlägel Cologne Radio, recording, publication 1970–present
Ernstalbrecht Stiebler Frankfurt Radio, recording, festivals 1970–1995
Walter Bachauer Berlin Radio, recording, festivals 1972–1978
Walter Zimmermann many Performance, publication 1974–present
a contemporary music network that directly advanced the professional

situations of many American composers. Their steady support might be
framed as a historical phenomenon that resulted from lavish cultural
budgets and the constant presence of American culture in Europe during
the cold war. Even today, however, some of these supporters continue
performing, programming, and disseminating information about Ameri-
can experimental music, music that still finds limited distribution and
reception in the United States.3 Though these people boosted the over-
seas careers of several American composers, none are well known in the
United States as contributors to the history of some of this country’s
most imaginative and internationally influential music.
Several of these individuals played the part of patrons—people
with abundant monetary resources who supplied compensation for com-
posing, offered opportunities for performance, and provided means of
distribution. This article describes the German patronage of American
experimental music through the work of Hans Otte (b. 1926), Walter
Bachauer (1943–1989), and Josef Anton Riedl (b. 1929), men who as-
sured American experimental music’s powerful presence at three cele-
brated new-music festivals in 1972. That year provides paradigmatic ex-
amples of West German circulation and dissemination of this music
during the cold war. In Germany at the time, dissatisfaction with the
state of new music dominated musicological discourse. For example,
Hans G. Helms, increasingly disturbed by the capitalist consumer cul-
ture ruling the production, performance, and dissemination of avant-
garde composition by the early 1970s, wrote a penetrating critique of
the myriad—and in his view, unfortunate and ultimately destructive—
ideological, social, economic, and creative ramifications of the explosion
American Composer-Performers in West Germany 331
of festival culture.4 Nevertheless, American composers who were in the

spotlight in 1972 eagerly embraced German support and have since ac-
knowledged its importance for their professional health. And while ex-
perimental music dominated new-music festivals in Bremen, Berlin,
and Munich, an American composer speaking in Darmstadt that sum-
mer indirectly suggested why some composers and performers gratefully
welcomed these engagements abroad.
The Price of Freedom
When Christian Wolff accepted an invitation to Darmstadt in the sum-

mer of 1972, he became the first American composer to give a series of
composition seminars there since Milton Babbitt in 1964. Wolff reestab-
lished the presence of American experimentalism at the international
courses for new music after a period of partial neglect following the death
of Wolfgang Steinecke, the first director, in late 1961. The new director,
Ernst Thomas, snubbed the path of increasing radicalism that had grown
since John Cage’s catalytic visit to Darmstadt in 1958. As a result, much
of the American music Thomas brought to Darmstadt during the 1960s
included music that some Darmstadt participants considered academic
and therefore uninteresting.5 From 1970 on the Darmstadt courses suf-
fered significant growing pains linked to some participants’ frustration
with the aesthetic proclivity of the artistic advisory board. The situation
in Darmstadt constituted a local reaction to a climate of social protest
that had afflicted western Europe since the 1968 student uprisings against
elite culture, capitalist systems, and conservative institutions. By the
early 1970s, contemporary composition and the established venues
supporting it had weathered a storm of vehement criticism throughout
West Germany. Wolff arrived in Darmstadt amidst the “pamphlets and
protests” circulating in response to the tense atmosphere.6
At the beginning of his first seminar, before discussing his recent
composition Burdocks, Wolff spoke about the context for avant-garde
music in the United States and introduced themes often associated
with American experimentalism, including isolation, nonconformism,
and a lack of patronage. He connected personal freedom with an image
known—metaphorically, at least—to his German listeners: the vast
North American landscape. For Wolff, the geographical traits of the
land added to “the myth of a tradition of individual self-sufficiency and
independence.” He suggested that some avant-garde composers were iso-
lated yet free, and that the freedom associated with a lack of patronage
amounted to a principal difference between experimental composers and
other composers in the United States. Wolff stated that “the freedom
has also come about by virtue of the fact that the avant-garde has, until
fairly recently, existed in a kind of social vacuum” and that this group
had “not been taken up or supported by any of the normal social agen-
cies.” In addition, he pointed out that though artistic freedom did not
dull the pain of chronic economic pressures, the situation clearly had
advantages for young composers searching for their own musical voice.
“But on the other hand,” he concluded, “you pay a very great price for
this sense of isolation.”7
Wolff’s introductory remarks exposed to his mostly European audi-
ence some American composers’ need for support. From a historical dis-
tance of thirty years, his characterization of the situation in the United
States might seem like an exaggeration. If the music establishment he
cites included academies of higher education and private foundations,
then he and his colleagues had been taken up by some of the “normal
social agencies.” But, as had been suggested by the writer and impresario
Peter Yates nearly ten years before Wolff ’s lecture, a powerful trait of
some American composers included a reputation as outsiders, even
though many of them (especially those born during the 1930s) studied at
universities or conservatories, received national grants and international
fellowships, and eventually became effective college teachers themselves.8
More important, however, Yates pointed to the basic struggle for profes-
sional support in the United States, especially for composers pushing
the established limits of musical conventions: “Our concentration camp
for the nonconforming artist is silence, a polite exclusion, no jobs, no
grants, no performance, no distribution, therefore no reputation and no
income, modified by the saving intervention of a minority who provide
occasional jobs, occasional grants or gifts, occasional performance, but
can’t overcome the largest problem, distribution.”9 Foreshadowing the
situation for composers in the early 1970s as well, Yates’s provocative
statement exposed the crux of Wolff ’s remarks: How does a “noncon-
forming artist” in the United States best disseminate his or her music?
One fertile answer to that question transcended national boundaries.
Wolff, for example, understood the distinction between private funding
for new music in the United States and state-subsidized funding for new
music in West Germany.10 He was well aware that the amount of public-
ity, critical reception, and payment for commissions and performances
provided by West German venues far surpassed what he might be offered
for a campus engagement in the United States. (Such engagements,
moreover, were rarely reviewed or recorded.) He knew that the legal sit-
uation in Germany required radio stations to pay royalties to composers
every time a recording of one of their compositions or concerts received
airplay. Finally, Wolff could be sure that a handful of supporters in Ger-

many maintained an influential combination of healthy budgets and
professional autonomy, more so than nearly any possible patron for new
music in the United States. In 1972, in the north German city-state of
Bremen, Hans Otte led the group.
“Otte Was the First”
The first widely influential new-music festival of 1972 took place in Bre-
men, where the local radio station sponsored Pro Musica Nova in early
May. Radio Bremen’s music director, Hans Otte, had initiated the festi-
vals in 1961. Even though he had been threatened with dismissal from
the station early in his career if he continued to broadcast Cage’s music,
he hoped Cage would be among the festival performers and invited him
on many occasions.11 Early in 1971 the European Broadcasting Union
granted Radio Bremen several thousand marks for sponsoring a Cage
concert at the 1972 festival.12 Otte immediately invited Cage and Tudor
to the 1972 Pro Musica Nova. “Europe needs Cage,” he pleaded in a
telegram to the composer.13 After lengthy negotiations about repertory,
Cage and Tudor accepted Otte’s offer and agreed to give two simultane-
ous performances of new works by each composer. Otte complemented
the rest of the festival with concerts by the Sonic Arts Union (Robert
Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma, with
Katherine Morton), the Steve Reich Ensemble (performing with the
Laura Dean Dance Company), an evening of new string quartets (in-
cluding a commissioned work by Christian Wolff), and music by La
Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Otte also included works by several
non-Americans: Carlos Farinas, Helmut Lachenmann, and Nam June
Paik (see Table 2). Otte spent well over half of his budget for the four-
day festival on commissions and fees for the Americans alone; the largest
honoraria went to Cage and Tudor, Otte’s leading attractions.14
News about the ambitious program spread quickly. Before the festi-
val began, Otte contacted radio producers and invited music critics. He
also received a large volume of enthusiastic mail requesting programs
and tickets. All the West German network radio stations ordered tapes
of the festival, as did European city stations in Belgrade, Bern, Brussels,
Hilversum, Lausanne, Madrid, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and Zurich, and
the national stations of Denmark, Italy, Norway, and Portugal.17 Imme-
diately following the success of the festival, Otte also took orders for
tapes of the concerts for radio distribution worldwide. Radio Tokyo, for
example, asked for recordings for its “serious music division,” and the
Table 2. Pro Musica Nova program, 1972
5 May: John Cage, Mueau [Mureau], and David Tudor, Rainforest15

6 May: Exhibition opening: “Hearing and Seeing: Texts—Pictures—Environ-
ments,” including works by Cage, Dick Higgins, La Monte Young, Mauricio
Kagel, Hans Otte, Nam June Paik, Dieter Schnebel, and Karlheinz Stock-
hausen; opening accompanied by performance of Cage’s Music for Marcel
Duchamp
3:30 P.M.: Christian Wolff, Lines, for String Quartet (premiere); Helmut Lachen-
mann, Gran Torso; and Carlos Farinas, Tatomaité (performance by Società
Cameristica Italiana)
6:00 P.M.: Hans Otte, “Apropos” [commentary]; Sonic Arts Union: Robert Ash-
ley, In Sara Mencken Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women; Alvin
Lucier, The Bird of Bremen Flies through the Houses of the Burghers; Gordon
Mumma, Ambivex (for pairs of performing appendages); and David Behrman
and Katherine Morton, Pools of Phase Locked Loops
9:00 P.M.: Nam June Paik, Reading, Experimental Television, and Sonata for Piano,
Candle, and TV
7 May: 11:00 A.M.: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, “tape concert”: Map of
49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven, Dorian Blues, Sunday Morning Blues, and
The Well-Tuned Piano
4:00 P.M.: Steve Reich and Musicians, Drumming (with Laura Dean Dance Com-
pany)
8 May: 4:30 P.M.: “New Music and Radio,” discussion by West German radio pro-
gram directors
9:00 P.M.: John Cage, Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham, and David Tudor, Untitled
(New Electronic Piece)16
South African Broadcasting Corporation expressed interest in tapes as

well.18 Additional broadcasts on radio stations as far away as Jerusalem,
Johannesburg, Reykjavik, and Toronto brought the Americans interna-
tional exposure far beyond central Europe. Otte later told Cage that no
fewer than twenty-four stations from around the world had ordered tapes
of his concerts with Tudor.19
Radio Bremen had a wide impact through international distribu-
tion. Still, in the network of West German radio, Otte’s station was one
of the smallest, with a limited budget and no ensembles of its own. By
comparison, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne and Südwest-
funk (SWF) in Baden-Baden had enormous financial means for promot-
ing new music. Yet despite his modest resources, Otte did more than just
offer commissions, schedule concerts, and create publicity for Pro Mu-
sica Nova, and even many months before the 1972 festival his reputa-
tion had spread across the Atlantic. Between 1959 and 1972 at Radio
Bremen, Otte made studio recordings of music by Cage, Curran, Morton
Feldman, Rzewski, Musica Elettronica Viva, and the Sonic Arts Union.
One month after his 1972 festival, when Philip Glass was still fairly un-
known in Germany, Otte recorded that composer’s still unpublished Mu-
sic in Twelve Parts. Otte shared these recordings with other radio sta-
tions, and they provided an ongoing source of royalties and exposure
abroad for the composers. Increasingly aware of these benefits, many
American composers sought and received Otte’s support after 1972,
and he soon offered similar opportunities to Joan La Barbara, Meredith
Monk, Conlon Nancarrow, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and many
others.20 As early as October 1971, Steve Reich had praised Otte’s work,
writing that Radio Bremen “was doing more for new American music
than any other single organization in Europe.”21 More recently, Reich
has recalled that he was not “actually able to pay the rent” from his
music alone until chances for playing in Europe arose in 1972.22 Some
consequential overseas tours for Reich and other Americans came about
with help from Otte, who also advocated the exploration of live elec-
tronic music. Gordon Mumma, a beneficiary of Otte’s support in this
area, called him, simply, “a hero.”23
The 1972 Pro Musica Nova festival offered a large European audi-
ence fresh exposure to American composers who had reached maturity
since the 1950s and provided listeners—including music critics, who did
their part to disseminate both criticism and applause—an introduction
to the uncharted terrain those composers had conquered in recent years.
Never before in Germany had Cage been publicized so prominently, and
the composers associated with him also gained from this fundamental
change in attitude.24 Furthermore, though Otte and others had invited
Cage to Germany throughout the 1960s, Cage’s arrival at Pro Musica
Nova firmly established his star status in Germany, a status that steadily
gained intensity over the next two decades.25 In the early 1970s curiosity
about new American music emerged from hibernation, and Otte’s festi-
val warmed the aesthetic soil at a time when, in many minds, European
new music suffered from a creative winter. For some young Germans, the
musical innovations of Cage, Tudor, Reich, Wolff, and Young offered an
alternative path.26 In retrospect, Otte’s untiring enthusiasm for Ameri-
can experimental music recalls Wolfgang Steinecke’s success in bringing
Cage (once) and Tudor (four times) to Darmstadt between 1956 and
1961. Like Steinecke, Otte avoided ideological and aesthetic debates,
supporting unconventional American music despite substantial conflicts

surrounding it in other parts of West Germany. Today Otte’s colleagues
and friends laud him for bringing the new American music to Germany.
In the words of one admirer, “Otte was the first.”27
A Week of Avant-Garde Music in Berlin
A Berlin radio employee named Walter Bachauer sat captive in the au-
dience at Otte’s Pro Musica Nova in May 1972. In July 1972 Bachauer
organized a similar festival on a much larger scale, an eight-day celebra-
tion of avant-garde music at several West Berlin venues. For this un-
precedented event, Bachauer took advantage of the European tours of
Cage, Tudor, Reich, and other Americans, such as Feldman and Rzewski,
who traveled or lived in Europe that summer. Following the Pro Musica
Nova model, Bachauer presented daily concerts (see Table 3), as well as
exhibitions, tape demonstrations from three continents, and three differ-
ent seminar series. Like Otte, Bachauer framed his festival with Cage
and Tudor, who gave the first concert (Cage’s Mureau and Tudor’s Rain-
forest, listed in the program as “An Event”) as well as the last (Cage’s
and Lejaren Hiller’s enormous multimedia installation piece HPSCHD
in West Berlin’s Philharmonic concert hall). Three concerts featured
works by Feldman. Steve Reich’s Drumming astonished the music critics.
Typically for the time, unruly audiences disturbed some of the perfor-
mances, many of which lasted five hours or more and late into Berlin’s
hot summer nights.28
Several West Berlin institutions sponsored Bachauer’s eleven con-
certs. These included the Academy of the Arts, the Berlin radio stations
Radio im amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS) and Sender Freies Berlin, and
the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Berlin Artist-in-
Residence program, which served to bring culture (especially American
culture) to West Berlin during the cold war. From the building of the
Berlin Wall in 1961 until its fall in 1989, West Berlin enjoyed a huge
cultural budget. Luckily, Bachauer’s festival was held when the postwar
economic boom in West Germany was cresting (in 1972 the average un-
employment rate there was 1.1 percent) and before the international oil
crisis and rising inflation that began in 1973.29 According to one pub-
lished source, Bachauer had approximately $65,000 at his disposal for
the festival, including funds to commission five new works.30 That sum
equaled more than half the amount distributed by the National Endow-
ment for the Arts for contemporary music projects in the entire United
States for the whole year of 1972 and nearly two-thirds the amount the
Table 3. Week of Avant-Garde Music in Berlin, 1972: American music performances
11 July: John Cage, Mureau, and David Tudor, Rainforest

12 July: Morton Feldman, Vertical Thoughts for Two Pianos; Christian Wolff, Bur-
docks; Alvin Lucier, Chambers; Feldman, Durations 2; Terry Riley, Dorian Mix
(Gentle Fire Group, London)
13 July: Steve Reich, Drumming, Four Organs, Stamping Dance, Piano Phase, and
Phase Patterns (with Laura Dean)
14 July: Feldman, Vertical Thoughts no. 11, and Wolff, Duo for Violinist and Pianist
15 July: Frederic Rzewski, Falling Music, Coming Together, Last Judgment, Attica,
Two Poems, and Les Moutons De Panurge (Rzewski and Ensemble)
16 July: Feldman, Pianos and Voices (Cage, Feldman, Rzewski, Tudor, and Cardew)
18 July: Cage and Lejaren Hiller, HPSCHD (Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Lejaren
Hiller, Riedl, Rzewski, Tudor, and others)
NEA gave as direct aid to individuals in music for the same year—
state-subsidized aid that included support for American composers.31
With a generous budget at his discretion, Bachauer, like Otte, of-
fered a large stage, a diverse audience, and top billing to many American
experimental composers.32 An Austrian-born music critic, Bachauer
had moved to Berlin in 1963 to study musicology at the Free University.
RIAS hired him a year later, and he worked simultaneously as a West
Berlin music correspondent for several newspapers. In 1970 he became
a music editor at RIAS. Bachauer traveled extensively, especially in
the United States and Asia, and engaged more with popular and non-
Western music than nearly any other established German new-music
specialist at the time.33 After a trip to the United States in the early
1970s, he wrote a detailed report for radio about the California Institute
of the Arts in Valencia and about several music schools on the East
Coast. In particular, he felt that Europe could learn from progressive
American schools how to incorporate technology, multimedia projects,
and non-Western music into music curricula (and composition).34
After the success of the Week of Avant-Garde Music in Berlin in 1972,
Bachauer produced the unprecedented international Metamusik festivals
in 1974, 1976, and 1978. Most important, Bachauer pioneered the
creative coexistence and synthesis of avant-garde, popular, and non-
Western music.
Despite his connection to the radio establishment in West
Germany, Bachauer opposed what he called the “temples of serialism,”
including those institutions that had been under fire since the student
rebellions began in 1968.35 His unprejudiced musical frame of reference
and his overtly leftist agenda set him apart from festival organizers such
as Ernst Thomas in Darmstadt, or even Otte. By revolutionizing the
concert world through musical pluralism, he hoped to win back an audi-
ence for avant-garde music. The growing appeal of group improvisation,
electroacoustics, alternative tuning systems, heavy amplification, and
pulse-and-pattern-based tonal “minimal” music suited his cause. Many
critics doubted that the solution could be found in the United States,
the home of most performers he invited to the 1972 festival, and some
journalists interpreted his agenda as a subversive wish to introduce het-
erogeneous, egalitarian American attitudes as alternatives to more dog-
matic, stylistically pure European compositional methods.36 In this way,
opponents and supporters alike wielded radical American music as a
weapon in an internal aesthetic conflict increasingly divided along
generational lines.37
Despite anti-American sentiments in Germany during the Vietnam
War, American music shifted to a prominent position in new-music
discourse, owing in part to Bachauer’s visionary instincts. To be sure,
the generational, ideological, and aesthetic battles being fought on
the stages of western Europe also affected performances of American
music: audiences aiming to challenge outmoded hierarchical social sys-
tems and the elite nature of new-music concerts disrupted all types of
contemporary performance.38 At the same time, American experimental
music itself challenged musical hierarchies and concert conventions. In
this politically charged climate, it helped that some of the Americans—
especially Cage, Rzewski, and Wolff—and their European friends Cor-
nelius Cardew and Erhard Grosskopf embraced revolutionary ideology
and allowed it to inspire their compositions and performance practice
at the time.
The Cultural Olympics in Munich
On 30 August, six weeks after Bachauer’s festival, Morton Feldman,

Gordon Mumma, and Frederic Rzewski met at a Munich street café
for some Bavarian beer.39 Their conversation occurred the day before a
performance in Munich of Feldman’s Pianos and Voices 2. Feldman lived
in West Berlin from 1971 to 1972 as a guest of the DAAD Artist-in-
Residence Program, and he traveled widely in Germany that year, enjoy-
ing many performances of his work; several commissions gave him the
opportunity to expand the time scale of his music and to write for full
orchestra, and for Feldman’s own compositional output, 1972 was a
clear turning point.40 At the time of their meeting in the Munich café,
Mumma had toured extensively with both the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company and the Sonic Arts Union. Rzewski, who first met
Mumma in West Berlin in 1964, had been in Europe for much of the
past decade.
In the summer of 1972, the three Americans came together in the
Bavarian capital because it was the host of the Summer Olympic Games,
the first to be held in Germany since the 1936 games in Hitler’s Berlin.
The Munich Olympics gave postwar West Germany a chance to show
the world that it was a place of peace, tolerance, and culture (though its
efforts were tragically overshadowed by a terrorist attack on the Israeli
national team). In planning the Olympics, West Germany made a seri-
ous effort to appear both sophisticated and international, a goal that
resulted in an impressive cultural agenda. The events of this program
took place between May and September in several cities and included
exhibitions, plays, and many concerts. The Munich composer Josef
Anton Riedl, who had collaborated with Cage in HPSCHD at Bachauer’s
Berlin festival several weeks prior, directed the avant-garde music pro-
gram. Riedl had admired and supported the work of Cage and other
American composers for more than a decade, and he saw his cultural
Olympics as a chance to introduce experimental music to a large audience.
Riedl’s background as a composer was unconventional. He explored
environmental sounds, percussion music, and electronic composition be-
fore encountering radical new compositional methods during the 1950s.
His earliest musical experiments involved spontaneous comparisons of
the sonorities and pitches of various kitchen dishes and utensils. In 1951
he wrote possibly the first European composition for percussion alone,
Stück für Schlagzeug. As a young man, Riedl first discovered works by
avant-garde American composers by borrowing scores and recordings
from Munich’s America House; he was also allowed to use the electronic
equipment and space there for concerts he organized himself.41 But
when he first saw Cage and Tudor perform, in Donaueschingen in 1954,
he dismissed their techniques of deriving unconventional sounds from
a conventional instrument such as the piano. With the advent of elec-
tronic sound production, Riedl found such exploitation of acoustic in-
struments unnecessarily theatrical.42 From 1959 until 1966 he directed
one of the most advanced electronic music facilities in Western Europe,
the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music in Munich, sponsored by the
West German–based electronics corporation.43 Around 1960 he met
Cage and Tudor when they passed through Munich on their way to
Zagreb; soon he arranged a concert for them that included Cage’s
Theater Piece, with Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown.44 Riedl had
enjoyed steady contact with Cage since the early 1960s, and he became
an important organizer of experimental music performances in Munich
and in the capital city of Bonn.
In 1960 Riedl had established an alternative to Munich’s most
renowned new-music festival (Musica Viva), offering a parallel series
that would feature music absent from the official concerts. Riedl’s venue
was specifically intended for the performance of music neglected by
major concert series. Several other venues, as well as special events and
ensembles, kept experimental music alive in parts of West Germany’s
new-music circles after a conservative turn in the well-established festi-
vals in Darmstadt and Donaueschingen.45 Such alternatives included
Mary Bauermeister’s studio series in Cologne, the ensemble Gruppe
Neue Musik Berlin, composer Werner Heider’s Ars Nova Ensemble in
Nürnberg, Rainer Riehn’s Ensemble Musica Negativa, and the Feedback
Studio in Cologne—all established between 1960 and 1970. Riedl later
remarked that his new-music series (Neue Musik München)—which was
partly funded through Munich’s cultural budget—“had the goal of intro-
ducing lesser or unknown music in Munich, new music that was ignored
or hardly acknowledged by other Munich concert programmers and that
included border-crossing genres (multimedia installations, new instru-
ments, visual art, and literature) and represented international trends of
more experimental directions.”46 In 1967 he established a performing
ensemble and venue (called Musik/Film/Dia/Licht-Galerie) for similar
reasons. When listing American composers who fell into the category
of “more experimental directions,” Riedl mentioned Cage, Cowell, Feld-
man, Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Harry Partch, Reich, Terry Riley,
Tudor, Wolff, and Young.47
The international showcase Riedl offered during the Munich
Olympics—called a “monstrous show of experiments” by the new-music
journal Melos—extended to several of these American composers, by
then familiar names in West Germany: Cage, Feldman, Riley, Tudor,
Wolff, and Young (see Table 4).48 In a program booklet for the new
music events, Riedl published the first complete text of Cage’s Mureau,
which had been performed earlier that year in both Bremen and
Berlin.49 Like his colleagues elsewhere, Riedl offered Cage and his
friends not only opportunities to have their works performed in the
highly publicized festival, but international exposure for their composi-
tions as well: according to an official Olympic publication, over 300,000
visitors from around the world attended the Olympic concerts.50
Table 4. Munich Olympics, 1972: American music in the avant-garde music

program
29 August: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Dream House and The Theater of
Eternal Music
30 August: John Cage and David Tudor, Birdcage/Monobird 1970/1972
31 August: Morton Feldman, Pianos and Voices 2 for Five Pianos and Five Sopranos
(performed by Simone Rist, soprano, members of the Schola Cantorum
Stuttgart, Cardew, Feldman, Nicolaus A. Huber, John Tilbury, and Wolff);
and Christian Wolff, Burdocks
1 September: Philip Glass, compositions (unspecified in program)
2 September: Terry Riley, The Phantom Band
1972 and Beyond: An Alternative Canon?
In addition to concerts at Pro Musica Nova in Bremen, the Week of

Avant-Garde Music in Berlin, and the Olympic cultural program in Mu-
nich, programming at other 1972 festivals led to an indisputable preemi-
nence of American experimental music in West Germany that year and
in years to follow. In 1972 these festivals included: in January, West-
deutscher Rundfunk’s contemporary music festival in Cologne (includ-
ing performances by Cage, Reich, and Young); in April, the series of new
chamber music in Witten (with music by Cage, Feldman, and Riley); in
June, WDR’s week of electronic music in Cologne (including music by
Brown, Cage, Lucier, Riley, Rzewski, Wolff, and Young); and, in late July
and early August, the Darmstadt courses for new music (including music
by William Albright, Lukas Foss, Rzewski, and Wolff). Additional festi-
vals and concerts in Baden-Baden, West Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg,
Kiel, Mannheim, Nürnberg, Rottweil, and Saarbrücken included compo-
sitions by Brown, Cage, Feldman, Ives, Roger Reynolds, Rzewski, Gun-
ther Schuller, Edgard Varèse, and Young. John Cage’s sixtieth birthday
that year also provided an opportunity to honor his oeuvre and his influ-
ence in many contexts, including an ambitious eighteen-day January
project with performances at the Kleber Gallery in West Berlin and two
showings of Hans G. Helms’s documentary film on Cage, titled Birdcage
—73’20.958 for a Composer, at the Donaueschingen festival in Octo-
ber.51 In retrospect, all these performances provided direct access to a
distinct species of American music. In a broader context, West German
interest constituted a first breakthrough in the reception of Cage’s music.
In the reception of American experimental music, it was nothing short
of a second Nachholbedürfnis (the desire to “catch up” or to make up for

lost time), outrun only by the race for information about new music after
the end of World War II in 1945.52 Barely a concert series or new-music
festival occurred during 1972 in Germany that did not include several of
the names mentioned here.
The critical reception and support of experimentalism in 1972
stand out in the history of German-American musical interaction after
the war.53 By then several West German composers interested in experi-
mental music had entered into a powerful institutional space as patrons.
At times generous cultural budgets were in their hands, and their deci-
sions to channel large sums of money toward American experimental
composers went almost completely unchallenged. Owing to the deliber-
ate actions of individuals such as Otte, Bachauer, and Riedl, some com-
paratively wealthy festivals and institutions began to gravitate strongly
toward experimental music, and they celebrated composer-performers
and their ensembles as representatives of an American musical tradition
worth cultivating. To be sure, stereotypes of the United States as a land
of unlimited possibilities contributed to this pull. Some composers
seemed conveniently to fit the image of Americans as revolutionary in-
dividualists, radical eccentrics, and self-reliant inventors. In Germany,
however, few people contemplated the context of experimental music
within the complex web of America’s musical history. Since detailed
knowledge of American music was limited, some German historians,
critics, and composers came to believe that the tradition stemming from
Ives, Cowell, and Cage alone represented the vast terrain of contempo-
rary concert music in the United States. One consequence of the 1972
festivals and the particular taste for American music cultivated during
that year has been the construction in West Germany of a canon of
American music—a canon comprising composers and collaborators,
if not works. German scholarly writing has tended to perpetuate a dis-
torted history of American music. For example, in 1998 the new edition
of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart included a new article on music in
the United States. The section on American art music between 1950
and 1980 surveys the New York School, Black Mountain College,
Fluxus, studios for electronic music (including the San Francisco Tape
Music Center), the serial publication of Source: Music of the Avant-
Garde, the ONCE group, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
the Sonic Arts Union, and live electronic music, minimalist music, in-
teractive environments, and mixed-media installations (such as Tudor’s
Rainforest). In other words, the essay outlines a thirty-year history of
experimental music in the United States. Out of a total of eleven, one
paragraph describes the “elite climate of American universities,” naming
but not discussing Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Jacob
Druckman, Ross Lee Finney, George Perle, and Charles Wuorinen—

composers considered far more than minor figures in their home country.54
In Germany, in part because of the continuing consequences of the
events of 1972, an idiosyncratic historical account of American music
is now firmly in place.55
In exchange for their physical presence at West German festivals,
composers such as Cage, Feldman, Reich, Riley, Rzewski, Tudor, Wolff,
and Young (and, later, Alvin Curran, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros,
James Tenney, and many others) could expect unparalleled exposure,
recording opportunities, and ongoing royalties. As Wolff implied in
Darmstadt that July, support and recognition of this nature carried vital
consequences for American composers making a living as performers of
their own work, work they perceived as existing in the United States in
a “social vacuum” or, in Yates’s impassioned words, in a “concentration
camp of silence.” In 1972 and after, some nonconforming composers
found in West Germany what they lacked at home: performance, distri-
bution, reputation, and income. In short, they found a place to ply their
wares with dignity.56
Notes
An earlier version of this text was read at the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Soci-
ety for American Music in Charleston, South Carolina, March 2000. I am grateful to
Ralf Dietrich, John Holzaepfel, Gayle Sherwood, and Christopher Shultis for reading
drafts and suggesting improvements. For research assistance the author thanks Marita
Emigholz at Radio Bremen, Wilhelm Schlüter at the International Music Institute in
Darmstadt, and especially Earle Brown, Alvin Curran, Erhard Grosskopf, Gordon
Mumma, Reinhard Oehlschlägel, Hans Otte, Steve Reich, Josef Anton Riedl, Frederic
Rzewski, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, Christian Wolff, and Walter Zimmermann. This article
is dedicated to Hans Otte and to the memory of Pro Musica Nova.
1. Gordon Mumma: “When we were paid well, it was usually in Germany”; communi-
cation with the author, 13 Nov. 2001. Frederic Rzewski: “If I’m honest with myself, I
have to admit that I have been able to survive largely through German radio, and a
forty-person network”; interview by the author, Brussels, 2 Apr. 1998. David Tudor: “In
Germany, the avant-garde has a great appeal, and [they] wouldn’t dream of having a fes-
tival without including an avant-garde concert—at least one. That kept us in business”;
interview by Jack Vees and Christian Wolff, 11 Oct. 1995, as part of Oral History, Amer-
ican Music Project, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
2. My research suggests that performances of American experimental music nearly
tripled in 1972. See Amy Beal, “Patronage and Reception History of American Experi-
mental Music in West Germany, 1945–1986” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan,
1999), 232–80, 344–84.
3. The Cologne-based new-music journal and press MusikTexte and its editors, Gisela
Gronemeyer and Reinhard Oehlschlägel, are valuable examples of the continuation of
this work in publishing; in the last ten years they have released previously unavailable
or uncollected texts (most in bilingual editions) by several prolific American composers.
See John Cage and Morton Feldman, Radio Happenings I–V (1993); Alvin Lucier,
Reflections, Interviews, Scores, Writings (1995); Christian Wolff, Cues, Writings, and Con-
versations (1998); and Robert Ashley, Music with Roots in the Aether: Interviews with and
Essays about Seven American Composers (2000 [English edition]; 2001 [German edition]).
4. Hans G. Helms, “Festivals für neue Musik: Ihre sozialökonomischen Bedingungen,
Funktionen und Perspektiven.” First published in: Otto Kolleritsch, ed., Studien zur Wert-
forschung VI (Graz, 1973), 90–109; reprinted in: Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Reiner Riehn,
eds. Musik-Konzepte 111: Musik zwischen Geschäft und Unwahrheit (Munich: Edition Text
+ Kritik, 2001), 83–100.
5. Exceptions to this charge include lectures by Earle Brown in 1964, 1965, and 1967
(and performances of his music in 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1969) and a concert including
Lukas Foss’s Baroque Variations and Terry Riley’s In C (and other works) in 1969.
6. Christoph Caskel, “Die Arbeit des Programmbeirats,” in Von Kranichstein zur Gegen-
wart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse, ed. Rudolf Stephan et al. (Stuttgart: DACO Ver-
lag, 1996), 411. All translations are by the author.
7. Christian Wolff, speaking at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in
Darmstadt, West Germany, 28 July 1972. Transcribed from tape by the author; tape
held at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.
8. It is worth noting, however, that academic appointments for these composers tended
to be offered by institutions especially tolerant of experimentation, such as the State
University of New York–Buffalo; Mills College in Oakland, Calif.; the California Insti-
tute for the Arts in Valencia; and the University of California, San Diego. As in Ger-
many, such appointments often came about through the efforts of one person who con-
tributed to an institution’s progressive reputation by bringing in friends, colleagues, and
collaborators from the informal experimental music network in the United States. For
example, William Brooks invited Gordon Mumma to take up an appointment at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, in the fall of 1973, for the purpose of setting up an
electronic music facility. Mumma recalled that Brooks showed interest in potential fac-
ulty members who “did real stuff,” not just those with prestigious educations. Mumma,
interview by Ralf Dietrich, tape recording, Oakland, Calif., 9 Mar. 1999.
9. Peter Yates, “An Open Letter to the Foundations,” Arts and Architecture (Aug.
1963): 32.
10. Wolff remarked: “Germany is where the money is. There are practically no oppor-
tunities at all in this country—you are happy just to have your music played . . . but you
didn’t get any money for having it played.” Taped telephone interview by the author,
26 June 1997. Earle Brown had similar experiences: “I can’t imagine my music without
Europe! I would conduct a piece for WDR [the radio station in Cologne] and they would
pay me! I didn’t get a nickel when Available Forms 2 was conducted by Lennie [Bern-
stein] and myself with the NY Philharmonic.” Taped telephone interview by the author,
23 June 1997.
11. Otte, interview by the author, tape recording, Bremen, 7 Feb. 1998.
12. Letter from Otte to Cage (in English), 1 Feb. 1971, Radio Bremen Archives.
13. Telegram from Otte to Cage, 3 May 1971; reprinted in program booklet for Pro
Musica Nova, May 1972 (Radio Bremen, 1972).
14. Otte estimated a total budget of over $20,000. Listed in document labeled “Nova—
Finanzierung,” dated 5 Nov. 1971 and signed by Otte, for the 1972 Pro Musica Nova;
Radio Bremen Archives.
15. In 2001 New World Records released a recording of the first of Cage and Tudor’s
1972 Bremen performances (NW 80540). According to Matt Rogalsky, however, Tudor’s
composition is misnamed in the release, and the liner notes include erroneous informa-
tion about the content of the piece. See Matt Rogalsky, “Tudor, Cage, and Rainforest,
Too (Er . . . Three?),” Musicworks 82 (Winter 2002): 59.
16. This concert was billed in the program as “European Broadcasting Union Concert
under the auspices of the series Music of the Twentieth Century” (“UER/EBU-Konzert
im Rahmen der Sendereihe Musik des XX. Jahrhunderts”), indicating that it had been
sponsored by, and would be broadcast on, European Broadcasting Union member stations.
17. Lists held at Radio Bremen.
18. Letter from Radio Tokyo to Radio Bremen, 4 May 1972; letter from South African
Broadcasting Corporation to Radio Bremen, 2 May 1972; Radio Bremen Archives.
Other requests were reproduced in the program booklet for the 1972 Pro Musica Nova.
19. Letter from Otte to Cage, 6 Dec. 1972; Radio Bremen Archives (radio distribution
lists held at Radio Bremen corroborate Otte’s sum). Publicity about Cage’s music (and
political ideas) spread in print media as well. For example, see Nikša Gligo, “Ich traf
John Cage in Bremen,” Melos 1 (Jan. 1973): 23–29.
20. Extensive correspondence between Otte and these (and other) American com-
posers is held at Radio Bremen.
21. Letter from Reich to Otte, 17 Oct. 1971; Radio Bremen Archives. In January 1972,
months before the festival, Otte had recorded Reich’s Four Organs and Phase Patterns.
22. Steve Reich, speaking at the University Musical Society Master of Arts Interview
Series, Ann Arbor, Mich., 9 Apr. 1999.
23. Gordon Mumma, “Live Electronic Music,” in The Development and Practice of
Electronic Music, ed. Jon H. Appleton and Ronald C. Perera (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice Hall, 1975), 318.
24. In a radio broadcast review of Pro Musica Nova for WDR in 1972, Reinhard
Oehlschlägel remarked that the amount of publicity for Otte’s small festival nearly
equaled that of the more established and internationally renowned festival in
Donaueschingen. Reinhard Oehlschlägel, “Neue Musik: Bericht-Informationen-
Kommentare,” radio broadcast, 15 May 1972, Historical Archive, Westdeutscher
Rundfunk, Cologne.
25. Cage was not invited back to Donaueschingen for many years, after his 1954 per-
formance, or to Darmstadt after his 1958 debut. However, his music was played fre-
quently over the radio in Germany during the 1960s, and his music was performed at fes-
tivals throughout Germany during that decade. Cage himself also performed in Germany
on several occasions. See Beal, 395–98. Furthermore, the DAAD Artist-in-Residence
program invited Cage for an all-expense-paid Berlin residency during 1971. Correspon-
dence outlining the invitation in 1970 is held at the Historical Archive, Westdeutscher
Rundfunk, Cologne.
26. During the early 1970s, for example, the young German composer Walter Zimmer-
mann (b. 1949) felt that European music was in a state of “crisis,” and his encounter
with new American music in Bremen in 1972 gave him “unbelievable hope” in the face
of that crisis; interview by Reinhard Oehlschlägel, in Walter Zimmermann, Insel Musik
(Cologne: Beginner Press, 1981), 527. Zimmermann’s presence at this festival also might
have had significant consequences for the canonization of American experimental music
in West Germany. In 1975 he traveled to the United States and conducted a series of in-
terviews with American composers. The journey resulted in Zimmermann’s unprece-
dented interview collection Desert Plants: Conversations with Twenty-Three American
Musicians (Vancouver: Aesthetic Research Center Publications, 1976).
27. “Otte war der Erste”; Oehlschlägel, interview by author, tape recording, Cologne,
2 June 1998. Alvin Curran, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, Christian Wolff, and Walter Zimmer-
mann also affirm that Otte was the most important supporter of American music in Ger-
many during this period.
28. Wolfgang Burde, “Berlin: Woche der avantgardistischen Musik 1972,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik 133, no. 9 (1972): 518.
29. Irmgard Wilharm, ed., Deutsche Geschichte, 1962–1983 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990),
104.
30. According to Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (in “HPSCHD und Anderes,” Neue
Züricher Zeitung [17 Aug. 1972]), Bachauer’s budget was DM 200,000.
31. The National Endowment for the Arts allocated $123,000 for contemporary music
projects (commissions, production, and research awards) in 1972. See New Dimensions in
the Arts, 1971–1972: National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1973), 87. In 1972, direct aid to individuals in music equaled
$95,000. See Dick Netzer, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United
States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 220.
32. Much of the biographical information presented here comes from Bachauer’s un-
dated résumé typescript (c. 1972), held at the German Radio Archive Historical Branch
in Berlin-Adlershof, and from RIAS Berlin: Eine Radio-Station in einer geteilten Stadt
(Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1994), 402. In 1980 Bachauer moved to Hollywood to work
with Francis Ford Coppola; he collaborated with Coppola and Philip Glass on the film
Koyaanisquatsi, and soon after returned to Berlin.
33. The DAAD program in Berlin financed several of Bachauer’s trips to the United
States specifically for the purpose of making contact with American composers who
might participate in the Metamusik festivals; these duties are documented in contracts
held at the German Radio Archive Historical Branch, Berlin-Adlershof. The first Meta-
musik festival, in 1974, included Alvin Curran, Philip Glass, Robert Moran, Pauline
Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Christian Wolff, and Musica Elettronica Viva, as well
as musicians from England, Holland, India, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Poland, and
Switzerland.
34. Bachauer, “Wie man Fantasia unterrichtet: Walt Disneys Traumschule in Kali-
fornien,” undated manuscript held at German Radio Archive Historical Branch, Berlin-
Adlershof.
35. Bachauer, quoted in Wolfgang Burde, “Gelächter als Begleitung: Woche der Avant-
gardistischen Musik eröffnet,” Tagesspiegel, 13 July 1972.
36. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Cage, Computer, Kommunikation: Acht Tage
avantgardistischer Musik in Berlin,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 July 1972;
Rudolph Ganz, “Sinnenorgie und Zwang zur Versenkung: Woche der avantgardistischen
Musik in Berlin stellte Amerikaner vor,” Bremen Weser-Kurier, 23 July 1972.
37. Ensemble Musica Negativa’s 1972 recording Music Before Revolution (EMI-Electrola
1 C 165-28954/57Y) is a case in point: the major record label EMI marketed the idea of
American music’s central role in the onslaught of an inevitable cultural revolution. The
ensemble, led by Rainer Riehn, recorded Feldman’s The Straits of Magellan, For Franz
Kline, and Between Categories, and Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (with Solo for
Voice 1 and Solo for Voice 2). The liner notes reproduced a conversation between Brown,
Feldman, and Heinz-Klaus Metzger on music and politics (an excerpt was published in
“Aus einer Diskussion,” in Morton Feldman, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn,
Musik-Konzepte 48/49 [Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1986]: 148–54), as well as
Metzger’s politically loaded essay “Attempt at a Pre-Revolutionary Music.”
38. One dramatic disruption occurred during a performance given by the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company (with Cage, Tudor, and Mumma providing live music)
in Cologne on 2 Oct. 1972. Mumma recounts the situation in an interview with Matt
Rogalsky. See Rogalsky, “—In Rehearsals, or Preparation, or Setup, or from One Perfor-
mance to Another: Live Electronic Music Practice and Musicians of the Merce Cun-
ningham Dance Company” (master’s thesis, Wesleyan University, 1995). An eyewitness
description of the same event describes Cage’s unhappy reaction to the extremely hostile
Cologne audience (documented in a letter from Howie Konovitz to Morton Feldman,
23 Dec. 1972; Paul Sacher Stiftung, Morton Feldman Papers, Basel). A performance of
the same program a few days later in Düsseldorf was more successful, however, suggesting
that the disruptions had less to do with the music and dance itself, or with a reaction
to the American music performed, and more to do with the polarization of audiences
during the early 1970s. See Melissa Harris, ed., Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (New
York: Aperture, 1997), 171, 186.
39. Mumma recorded and later transcribed the conversation, which also included
Agathe Kaehr.
40. See Sebastian Claren, Neither: Die Musik Morton Feldmans (Hofheim: Wolke,
1996), 537. When asked to sum up his year in Berlin, Feldman remarked that he had
begun to write “masterpieces” in Germany, because life there was so “boring.” In Richard
Bernas and Jack Adrian, “Counterpoint: The Brink of Silence,” Music and Musicians 20,
no. 10 (June 1972): 7. The composer Erhard Grosskopf also commented on his friend’s
new motivation: “Feldman began to see a real possibility [that his] orchestral works could
be performed; only then did he actually begin writing orchestral works in the first place.”
Interview by author, tape recording, Berlin, 10 Dec. 1997.
41. Josef Anton Riedl, interview by author, tape recording, Munich, 10 July 1998.
42. Riedl, interview. Riedl realized later that theatrical action was an integral part of
Cage’s whole performance concept and not just a physical means to an aural end.
43. In 1963 Cage and Tudor recorded brief punched-tape “Sound Experiments” at
the Siemens studio (available on the CD “Siemens-Studio für elektronische Musik,”
Siemens Kulturprogramm, audiocom multimedia, 1998). I am grateful to Mr. Riedl for
bringing this recording to my attention.
44. The performance probably took place during Munich’s Week for Modern Dance on
2–3 October (for which Cage and Tudor accompanied Merce Cunningham to Munich).
45. See Martin Thrun, ed., Neue Musik seit den achtziger Jahren: Eine Dokumentation
zum deutschen Musikleben (Regensburg: Con Brio, 1994), 179.
46. Riedl, “Neue Musik München, Siemens-Studio für elektronische Musik und
Musica Viva (1953–63),” in Eine Sprache der Gegenwart: Musica Viva, 1945–1995,
ed. Renate Ulm (Mainz: Schott, 1995), 71.
47. Riedl, “Neue Musik München,” 71.

48. Salomo Fränkel, “Melos berichtet: Monsterschau der Experimente in München,”
Melos 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1972): 349–55.
49. The first complete publication appeared in Josef Anton Riedl, ed., Neue Musik
Sondernummer (zum Kunstprogramm der Olympischen Spiele München 1972), 13–33.
Mureau was later published in John Cage, M: Writings ’67–’72 (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 35–56.
50. Olympischer Sommer, München 1972; Das offizielle Kunstprogramm für die Spiele der
XX. Olympiade München 1972 (Munich: Atlas, 1972), 236.
51. Some of the material used in the film is preserved on a recording of an interview
conducted by Helms with Cage in his Bank Street apartment in New York on 7 Apr.
1972; produced by S Press Tonbandverlag, nos. 27–29, Düsseldorf/Munich, 1975. In the
interview Cage discusses his current political and social interests, in particular his en-
gagement with Maoism.
52. See Gisela Gronemeyer, “Anything I Say Will Be Misunderstood: Wie John Cage
rezipiert wurde,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 9 (1992): 8; Reinhard Oehlschlägel, “Neue
Musik: Bericht-Informationen-Kommentare,” radio broadcast, 15 May 1972; Historical
Archive, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne.
53. The strong showing of American experimentalism in West Germany during 1972
resonated in that country and in other parts of western Europe as well and may have
contributed to several publications codifying this music as part of a unique American
tradition. See, e.g., Zimmermann, Desert Plants, and Michael Nyman, Experimental
Music: Cage and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, Cassell, and Collier Macmillan, 1974).
54. Volker Straebel, “Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, 1950–1980,” in Musik in
Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Ludwig Finscher, vol. 9, 2d rev. ed. (Kassel: Bärenreiter,
1998), 1375–79.
55. Some German music historians are working to offer a more balanced view. Her-
mann Danuser, for example, has written on the rather one-sided view of American
music in German historical writing. See Danuser, “Plädoyer für die Moderne: Über die
amerikanische Musik der fünfziger Jahre,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, 22 Nov. 1985, 41– 42.
This essay was also published under a slightly different title in Die Musik der fünfziger
Jahre, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz: Schott, 1985), 21–38.
56. Alvin Curran’s comments on support in Germany inspired the title for this article:
“A serious place was made for this music, and that place was given to us, to ply our
wares, to show ourselves and our work. It was given with the encouragement to go way
beyond our imagination. These systems are in place and they give a minimum of recogni-
tion and dignity to the profession for a young person going ahead in music. They know
at least that they aren’t walking on eggshells. They are walking on something a little
more solid, and they can turn to the radio stations or other festival producers to find
places and money to produce their work.” Interview by author, tape recording, Oakland,
Calif., 8 Mar. 1999.

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The Twentieth Century and Beyond

A Place to Ply Their Wares with Dignity:

Table 1. Primary supporters of American experimental music in West Germany

Wolfgang Steinecke Darmstadt New music festival 1946–1961

a contemporary music network that directly advanced the professional

of festival culture.4 Nevertheless, American composers who were in the

When Christian Wolff accepted an invitation to Darmstadt in the sum-

airplay. Finally, Wolff could be sure that a handful of supporters in Ger-

“Otte Was the First”

Table 2. Pro Musica Nova program, 1972

5 May: John Cage, Mueau [Mureau], and David Tudor, Rainforest15

South African Broadcasting Corporation expressed interest in tapes as

supporting unconventional American music despite substantial conflicts

A Week of Avant-Garde Music in Berlin

Table 3. Week of Avant-Garde Music in Berlin, 1972: American music performances

11 July: John Cage, Mureau, and David Tudor, Rainforest

The Cultural Olympics in Munich

On 30 August, six weeks after Bachauer’s festival, Morton Feldman,

Table 4. Munich Olympics, 1972: American music in the avant-garde music

1972 and Beyond: An Alternative Canon?

In addition to concerts at Pro Musica Nova in Bremen, the Week of

of a second Nachholbedürfnis (the desire to “catch up” or to make up for

Druckman, Ross Lee Finney, George Perle, and Charles Wuorinen—

47. Riedl, “Neue Musik München,” 71.

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