While the New Manchester Group were popularly regarded by the later 1950s as leaders of a British wing of Darmstadt-style musical modernism, they were hardly alone in their awareness of trends being promulgated forcefully by European contemporaries. Boulez's assertion that "all composition other than twelve-tone is useless" 1 was famously brash (even down to his polemic-italics), but his critique of Schoenberg's own serial music as "twisted romantic classicism" set the scene, in 1952, for a decade of debate among younger composers. Boulez's call was for a new language, moving beyond Schoenberg's traditional melody-accompaniment textures and "poor, even ugly, rhythms." 2 His suggestion that row organization should structure non-pitch parametersduration, tone-production, intensity, and timbrewas taken up most directly by the younger composers who visited Darmstadt in the 1950s, but such thinking quickly permeated discussions internationally. In the Cold War standoff, serial thought was itself portrayed as a supra-national phenomenon (a position with its own ideological charge), 3 but beyond journalistic bluster and artistic posturing, British responses centered on the questions of structure and style framed by Boulez. Davies, in a feisty 1956 article, rebuffs claims that newer techniques were "too cerebral to be compatible with what is called 'musical expressiveness.'" 4 His early works, like those of Goehr and Birtwistle, were received with excitement or dismay, but in either case, were taken as accomplished reflections of what Darmstadt radicals had to offer; the Manchester colleagues attracted the publicity they did ("Modernest Moderns") precisely because they were articulating the artistic concerns of many in their generation, and of some slightly older. Glock's Score magazinethe venue for the Boulez and Davies articles just quotedpublished ongoing debate on serial aesthetics throughout the 1 Boulez, "Schönberg is Dead," The Score 6 (May 1952), 21. The essay was first published in English; a French text appeared in Boulez's 1966 essay volume, Relevés d'apprenti. 2 Boulez in 1972 again cited Schoenberg's "rhythms of insufferable squareness," a result of his neoclassical adoption of "dead forms": Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège, 30, 31. 3 See Chapter 2 above, in particular "Cold-War internationalism and the British." 4 Davies, "The young British composer," 84; see also Chapter 1 above.
