Spectres of Darmstadt

Abstract

The word ‘Darmstadt’ has come to stand for a broad set of discursive tropes: whether positive or negative, the word is often used as a convenient shorthand for organising ways of thinking about music in the post-war era. I suggest that, after the many symbolic deaths of the avant-garde, the word Darmstadt has come to function, too, as a sort of Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, an idea which need have little to do with the father ‘proper’: rather it is a structuring principle, one which authorises and delimits the boundaries of the known, the prescribed and proscribed world. I argue, too, that the death of that symbolic father, however it becomes extended and perpetuated, surely presages rupture and collapse within the symbolic order. From this position, I examine the ways in which various spectres of Darmstadt – borrowing from Derrida's Marxian hauntologie – return, both within the world of New Music and beyond.

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