Leseprobe_Figures of Modernity

Figures of 

Modernity 

International Society for Contemporary Music 

and the Modern Music Movement in Lithuania 

Rūta Stanevičiūtė

Figures of Modernity

Rūta Stanevičiūtė 

Figures of Modernity 


and the Modern Music Movement in Lithuania 

Translation into English by Laimutė Servaitė

Supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT) 

Rūta Stanevičiūtė: Figures of Modernity. International Society for Contemporary Music and the Modern Music 

Movement in Lithuania. Translation into English by Laimutė Servaitė. 

Vienna, Hollitzer Verlag 2024 

Cover and Layout: Nikola Stevanović 

Printed and bound in the EU 

All rights reserved 

www.hollitzer.at 

ISBN 978-3-99094-110-2

xxxx 

CONTENTS 

Acknowledgments 7 

Abbreviations 9 

Introduction 11 

I 

International Society for Contemporary Music: 

Festivals and Wars for New Music 19 

The New Music Movement and the International Society 

for Contemporary Music 19 

International versus National in the ISCM’s 

Structure and Activity Guidelines 29 

Programming the ISCM Festivals: Locomotive against Metaphysics 40 

II 

Lithuanian Composers 

in European Movements of Contemporary Music 57 

Leningrad Association for Contemporary Music and Jurgis Karnavičius 57 

Vytautas Bacevičius: Paris Lessons 74 

Franz Schreker, Vladas Jakubėnas, and the New Music Scene in Berlin 94 

From Klaipėda to Prague: Jeronimas Kačinskas and Alois Hába School 107 

Hába’s Doctrine of Liberated Music: Between Ideology and Technology 114 

Jeronimas Kačinskas and His Early Microtonal Experiments 122 

III Towards Progressive Music 131 

To Kaunas, to Kaunas 131 

Muzikos barai, New Music, and Chords of Nationality 139 

Jeronimas Kačinskas and the Development of the Hába School 149 

The Society of Progressive Musicians 157 

Muzika ir teatras and Other Utopias of Vytautas Bacevičius 171 

IV Tracing the Footsteps of the ISCM Lithuanian Section 187 

Composers’ Cooperation and Ideological Contrapositions in the 1930s 187 

The ISCM Lithuanian Section in Paris (1937) and London (1938) 199 

5


V On the Eve of the War 217 

The ISCM Polish Section before the Second World War 217 

Tadeusz Szeligowski and the Modern Music Scene in Vilnius 222 

Warsaw–Krakow, 1939 234 

VI Oblivion and Return. Music and Politics during the Cold War 245 

Political tensions. The ISCM in the Early Post-war Years 245 

From Bacevičius’s Musical Movement to the Return Festival (1989) 261 

Post Scriptum 267 

List of Sources 271 

List of Illustrations 297 

Index 301 

6

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

This book was prompted by the legend of the ISCM Lithuanian Section which 

spread in the Lithuanian musicians’ community as an oral story, poorly based 

on facts. The book was encouraged and supported by several colleagues and 

institutions, to whom I am sincerely grateful. My interest in the history of 

the International Society for Contemporary Music was spurred by my participation 

in the Lithuanian section of the ISCM and the reconstruction of past 

concerts at the organisation’s contemporary festivals – an initiative supported 

by the long-standing members of the Society’s Executive Committee: Henk 

Heuvelmans, Lars Graugaard and Franz Eckert (1931–2017), who entrusted 

Anton Haefeli’s archive to the Royal Library of Denmark, and who helped me 

access it. I am also grateful to Vytautas Germanavičius for involving me in the 

activities of the ISCM Lithuanian Section, which gave me knowledge about the 

functioning of the organisation. Special thanks to Danutė Petrauskaitė for her 

professional support, advice and sharing of archival materials – the monograph 

was written as part of the joint Research Council of the Lithuania Global Grant 

project ‘Lithuanian Musical Culture in the Contexts of Migration: the Interaction 

of National Identity and Musical Expression (1870–1990)’ funded by the 

ESFA (European Social Fund Agency). Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (1941–2023) 

and Jūratė Burokaitė repeatedly responded and advised on searches of material. 

I am grateful to the monograph reviewers Judita Žukienė and Vita Gruodytė 

for their comments and critiques, which were important for the preparation of 

the updated English version of the book (the translation was financed by the 

Research Council of Lithuania, project No. S-LIP-21-12). I would also like to 

thank those researchers whose work, insights and interpretations on related 

topics laid the foundation for my research and stimulated scholarly discussion. 

Colleagues and specialists from archives, libraries and museums have been 

of great practical help in gathering material for the research. I would like 

to thank Vlasta Reittererová, who gave me access to Alois Hába’s archival 

funds, Hába’s school research materials, and photographic collections; Markéta 

Kabelková (Czech Museum of Music), who gave me access to the archive of 

the Czech Nonet; Dietmar Schenk (Berlin University of the Arts Archives), 

who advised on the documentation of the studies of Vladas Jakubėnas and the 

Franz Schreker School, and who shared the iconographic holdings of the Berlin 

School of Music; Elżbieta Jasińska-Jędrosz and Magdalena Borowiec (at the 

Warsaw University Library), who helped open the archives of the Polish Society 

for Contemporary Music as well as the Archives Centre of King’s College 

Cambridge, the British Library Sound Archive, the BBC Written Documents 

Archive, the Austrian National Library, and the archives of the Berlin Academy 

7


of Arts, the staff of the Manuscripts Department of the Russian Institute of 

Art History, the Central State Archives in St Petersburg, the Austrian Section 

of the ISCM, the Royal Danish Library, the Rare Prints, Collections and 

Manuscripts Department of the Klaipėda University Library, the Lithuanian 

Archive of Literature and Art, and the Lithuanian Museum of Theatre, Music 

and Cinema for their information and assistance. 

My warmest thanks go to translator Laimutė Servaitė, proofreader Kathryn 

Puffett, as well as to the Hollitzer Publishing House, and especially to Michael 

Hüttler and Sigrun Müller-Fetz, for their interest in my book and for their 

cooperation. 

The love and support of my family made it possible for me to realise my idea. 

I dedicate this book to my husband Edmundas – for his patience and inspiring 

conversations about the highways and byways of 20th century musical 

modernisation. 

8

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ABBREVIATIONS 

AdKA 

BL 

BUW 

CGA 

CKCAC 

ČMH 

DKB 

IGNMSÖ 

ISCM 

KUBRSS 

LCVA 

LLMA 

LTMKM 

MAK 

ÖNB 

PTMW 

RIII 

UdKA 

Akademie der Künste Archiv (Archives of the Berlin Academy 

of Arts) 

British Library 

Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie (Warsaw University 

Library) 

Centralny Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv (Central State Archives) 

Cambridge King`s College Archive Centre 

České muzeum hudby (Czech Museum of Music) 

Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Royal Danish Library) 

Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Sektion 

Österreich (ISCM Austrian section) 


Klaipėdos universiteto bibliotekos Retų spaudinių, 

kolekcijų ir rankraščių skyrius (Klaipėda University Library, 

Department of Rare Prints, Collections, and Manuscripts) 

Lietuvos centrinis valstybės archyvas (Lithuanian Central 

State Archives) 

Lietuvos literatūros ir meno archyvas (Lithuanian Archives of 

Literature and Art) 

Lietuvos teatro, muzikos ir kino muziejus (Lithuanian 

Theatre, Music, and Cinema Museum) 

Museum für angewandte Kunst (Austrian Museum of Applied 

Arts) 

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National 

Library) 

Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyki Współczesnej (Polish Society 

for Contemporary Music) 

Rossiyskiy Institut Istorii Iskusstv (Russian Institute of Art 

History) 

Universität der Künste Archiv (Archives of Berlin University 

of the Arts) 

9

10 


Introduction 

INTRODUCTION 

The facts of Lithuanian composers’ participation in the activity of the International 

Society for Contemporary Music before the Second World War spread 

for decades as an influential narrative that strengthened the self-awareness of 

the involvement of modern Lithuanian music in the processes of European music 

modernisation. Very little was known about the early activities (1936–1939) 

of the Lithuanian Section of the ISCM: the data about individual events and 

their interpretations were mostly based on modest information from articles in 

inter-war Lithuanian periodicals and later, mainly post-war, memoirs of Lithuanian 

composers. The Soviet occupation put an end to the activities of this 

organisation and of numerous other artistic and cultural societies of the independent 

Republic of Lithuania as early as 1940. After the Second World War, 

active members of the section, composers Jeronimas Kačinskas (1907–2005), 

Vytautas Bacevičius (1905–1970), and Vladas Jakubėnas (1904–1976), found 

themselves in emigration. As they were fleeing Lithuania, valuable records of 

the early activities of the Lithuanian Section of the ISCM must have been lost 

along with many other documents. Thus, Kačinskas in his memoirs remembered 

having had contacts with some prominent modern musicians established 

during the festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music between 

1937 and 1939. 1 This correspondence, as well as the presumed sources of 

correspondence between Lithuanian composers on the issues of the Lithuanian 

Section, remains unknown – at least the part left in occupied Lithuania has 

been lost. 2 

In attempting to reconstruct, or at least clarify, the facts and circumstances of 

the involvement of Lithuanian composers in the activities of the International 

Society for Contemporary Music, one is faced with a paradoxical situation, 

which was influenced not only by the political processes of the twentieth 

century and the shifts in cultural reception, but also by the specificity of the 

organisation’s activity. The International Society for Contemporary Music, 

founded in 1922, was one of the most important factors in the dissemination 

and cultural reception of modern music until the Second World War. However, 

the organisation, which brought together leading composers and music 

1 Danutė Petrauskaitė (ed.), Jeronimas Kačinskas. Gyvenimas ir muzikinė veikla. Straipsniai, 

laiškai, atsiminimai [‘Jeronimas Kačinskas. Life and Musical Activity. Articles, Letters, and 

Memoirs’] (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1997), pp. 61–62. 

2 Such a possibility is suggested by the surviving early letters of Jeronimas Kačinskas to 

Vytautas Bacevičius (1932–1933) kept in the Lithuanian Theatre, Music, and Cinema Museum 

(Lietuvos teatro, muzikos ir kino muziejus, hereafter LTMKM, fond 73, inventory 

No. 84, Vilnius). 

11


critics as well as promoters of modern music, did not keep a consolidated 

documentary archive until the late 1960s. Anton Haefeli, the author of the 

only representative monograph on the ISCM, which was intended to have 

been published for the fiftieth anniversary of the organisation, had many bitter 

words for the leadership of the society and the members of the national sections 

for the gaps in the documentation in the book’s introduction. 3 The archives of 

many sections are believed to have perished as a result of the war and other 

political processes. In the early 1970s, Haefeli was able to access the records of 

only five national sections, and it is probable that there were no more archives 

of these sections in a collective form. However, the official documentation of 

the ISCM national sections and other associate members is not the only source 

of information on the organisation and the musicians involved in it. Since its 

inception, the ISCM’s strategy and activities have been strongly influenced by 

the musicians – active participants in the society’s undertakings. Because of 

the international nature of the organisation and the scope of its activities, the 

new information, opened up by researching the accomplishments of the active 

members of the ISCM, constantly adds to the established images and narratives 

of the most important medium for the dissemination of music in the milieu of 

the first musical avant-garde and modernism. An equally important context 

for research into the history of the society is the activities of modern music 

dissemination societies established in various countries, as well as related periodicals 

and performers. In accordance with the Statutes of the International 

Society for Contemporary Music, national sections were formed on the basis 

of national musical societies and other institutions that were most active in 

promoting the work of composers. For this reason, documents relevant to the 

operation of the ISCM and to the international interaction of the promoters of 

modern music were not necessarily kept in the archives of the official sections 

of the society. This makes it extremely difficult for researchers interested in the 

history of the society to build a more complete picture of its activities, but at 

the same time it opens the door to new interpretations and narratives. 

In recent decades the operation of the International Society of Contemporary 

Music has been the subject of increased scholarly interest because of shifts in 

musicology and the critical revision of musical culture in the twentieth and 

twenty-first centuries. The cultural turn in musicology has shifted the attention 

of musicologists away from the so-called ‘techno-essentialist’ paradigm 

of the musical processes of the past century and towards the broader concept 

of musical culture. Moving away from a reduced history of composers and 

compositions as well as the genesis and development of musical trends and 

compositional techniques, the need for an integrated study of the production 

3 Anton Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM). Ihre Geschichte von 

1922 bis zur Gegenwart (Zürich: Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, 1982), p. 14. 

12

Introduction 

and reproduction of modern music has been emphasised, while simultaneously 

seeking to uncover the impact of various non-musical processes and contexts 

on musical practices, experiences, and values. 4 In this line of work, it is important 

not only to identify and analyse the musical manifestations of artistic 

ideologies and the trends of their historical development, but also to consider 

the ways of receiving and authorising different strategies of creativity through 

which selective hierarchies of composers and works have been established and 

legitimated, new interpretations of the process of modernisation have been 

developed, and certain meanings have been assigned to musical phenomena 

and subsequently naturalised. Therefore, when considering the relationship 

between music and socio-political and socio-cultural contexts, interest has 

been increasing in the processes of the reproduction of modern music – the 

institutions, milieus, movements, and media that affect its dissemination and 

reception, the discursive practices that are important for its legitimation and 

manifestation, and the place of contemporary music in performers’ repertoires 

and in cultural consumption. 5 

The trend of overcoming the traditional historiography of music is reflected in 

the growing number of works by musicologists on the activities of societies, 

media, festivals, and other institutions and their impact on the history of twentieth-century 

music. As a result, the institutions of art music dissemination 

have come to be examined as structures that condition and legitimise creativity 

and influence the construction of musical meaning. The development of the 

general study of modernism coincides with the emergence of works important 

for understanding the dissemination and reception of modern music: a historical 

distance favourable to the study of modernism has been created which 

makes it possible to revise previous interpretations. Most contemporary scholars 

tend to undertake a fundamental revision of the evaluation of modernism 

(as well as other artistic ideologies defined in relation to it) and its legacy, distancing 

themselves from the stale debates of the past on these issues and the 

concepts that were canonised therein. Moreover, the evaluation of the legacy 

of modernism requires a kind of reappropriation of it, and at the same time its 

critical assimilation: ‘Every age and movement constructs its own genealogy, 

and the concept of modernism […] traces aspects of the present in the past, 

thereby to an extent legitimizing the former.’ 6 

4 See Christopher Williams, ‘Of Canons and Context: Toward a Historiography of Twentieth-Century 

Music’, in Repercussions 2/1 (1993), p. 37. 

5 Cf. Yayoi Uno Everett, ‘Intercultural Synthesis in Postwar Western Art Music. Historical 

Contexts, Perspectives, and Taxonomy’, in Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi 

Uno Everett and Frederick Lau (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 

2004), p. 11. 

6 Björn Heile, ‘Introduction: New Music and Modernist Legacy’, in The Modernist Legacy: 

Essays on New Music, ed. Björn Heile (Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), p. 4. 

13


The critical revision of the twentieth-century historiography of music and the 

development of the studies of modernism are of fundamental importance for 

the research into the International Society for Contemporary Music and its national 

sections. The official history of the ISCM has so far been identified with 

the canons of the European musical avant-garde and modernism, in particular 

the history of the Second Viennese School founded by Arnold Schönberg, and 

the progressive, unidirectional images of the development of twentieth-century 

music that emerged from it. This perspective strongly influenced Haefeli’s monograph, 

written before the post-war glory of the Schönberg movement as well as 

the international recognition of the second musical avant-garde (especially its 

German manifestations) had faded. As Anne C. Shreffler has pointed out, Haefeli 

did not avoid a political interpretation of the processes, sympathising with the 

ideas and phenomena of musicians who were close to the left-wing ideology. 7 For 

this reason, the activities of quite a few national sections and alternative discourses 

on modern music have remained on the margins of the official history of the 

ISCM. On the other hand, Haefeli’s monograph, which has so far been the most 

important source of knowledge of the organisation’s activities, is not without factual 

errors, which can be corrected by the ‘archival revolution’ that has affected 

the historiography of music, resulting from the opening up of previously limited 

access to historical sources and documents after the Cold War. 

The object of the monograph is the early activity of the Lithuanian Section of 

the International Society for Contemporary Music, its prehistory and reception, 

as well as the history of the Vilnius-Wilno chapter of the Polish Section 

of the ISCM, which is considered to be an integral part of the modernisation of 

Lithuanian and international musical culture. The aim was first of all to critically 

reconstruct and add new data and interpretations to the narratives about 

the section’s activities that had developed in the historiography of Lithuanian 

music. The musical culture of the inter-war Republic of Lithuania is considered 

to be one of the most researched layers of music tradition. After 1990, 

the research into the historical period ideologically distorted by the Soviet 

regime was given special attention: monographic studies and collective overviews 

were written, and autobiographical literature, letters, literary works and 

criticism by composers, and memoirs of contemporaries were published. These 

works dealt with musical culture mainly based on the paradigm of nationality, 

highlighting the features of national style, school, and identity construction, 

the interaction between the formation and development of the modern state 

and national cultural institutions, 8 and therefore the activity of the Lithuanian 

7 Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Modern Music and the Popular Front: The International Society for 

Contemporary Music and its Political Context (1935)’, in Music and International History, ed. 

Jessica Gienow-Hecht (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Press, 2015), p. 83. 

8 See Algirdas Jonas Ambrazas (ed.), Lietuvos muzikos istorija. II knyga. Nepriklausomybės metai, 

1918–1940 [‘A History of Lithuanian Music. Book 2. The Years of Independence, 1918–1940’] 

14

Introduction 

section of the ISCM was covered only fragmentarily and in isolation from the 

changes in national music. 

The field of research was shaped by the view that the renewal of creativity, performance, 

and critical discourse were inextricably intertwined in the culture of 

musical modernism, and that the attitude of overcoming the past, of a conflict 

with tradition, that served as the basis for the ideology of modern music, inevitably 

influenced the activities of its institutionalisation. The book does not 

attempt to rewrite the history of the inter-war national modernism, however, 

by linking individual cases of Lithuanian and Polish composers’ involvement 

in international institutions for the dissemination and promotion of modern 

music based on new data and interpretations. Rather, it seeks to highlight the 

uniqueness and at the same time the transnational character of the modernist 

movement, which justified the founding of the Lithuanian section of the International 

Society for Contemporary Music in Kaunas and the Polish section 

in Vilnius/Wilno. Therefore, the definitions ‘modernisation’, ‘modern music 

movement’, and ‘renewal’ are used synonymously in the identification of music 

processes. In the inter-war period, Jurgis Karnavičius (1884–1941), Jeronimas 

Kačinskas, Vladas Jakubėnas, and Vytautas Bacevičius had the experience of 

participation in foreign organisations linked to the structures of the ISCM, 

and the figure of Tadeusz Szeligowski (1896–1963) was important for the inter-war 

modern music scene in Vilnius/Wilno. Not only the creative styles and 

concepts of modern music, but also the principles of the cultural activity of 

these composers were influenced by their studies at music schools abroad in St 

Petersburg (Karnavičius), Paris (Bacevičius, Szeligowski), Berlin (Jakubėnas), 

or Prague (Kačinskas), and by the musical contacts and professional friendships 

they had established there. 

Martin Thrun, who has systematically reconstructed and documented the German 

Neue Musik (New Music) movement until 1933, argues that, in examining 

the activities of the new societies, milieus, music performance initiatives, and 

the related music periodicals, it is important to reveal the paradigmatic shift 

between the idea of the modernists’ unification (Vereinsidee) and the traditional 

musical culture and regular musical life (Bürgerliche Hauptkultur). 9 The methodological 

approach proposed by Thrun for discussing the movement of societies 

(to examine and evaluate the general course, ideological direction, initiators, 

organisational goals, programmatic policy, the range of specialised performers 

and listeners, etc.) is only partially applicable to the study of similar phenomena 

in Eastern Europe. In the Republic of Lithuania, for example, specialised 

(Vilnius: Lietuvos muzikos ir teatro akademija; Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 

2009). 

9 Martin Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis 1933 (Bonn: Orpheus-Verlag, 1995), 

vol. 2, p. 630. 

15


institutions of the modernist movement were short-lived and inconsistent: 

they were supported by a small circle of musicians, and efforts to obtain more 

substantial state support were unsuccessful. Partly for this reason, the book 

does not limit itself to the institutions of modern music dissemination, but 

also seeks to highlight the changes in the discourse of music modernisation 

in the 1930s in a few selected aspects. During this period, a young generation 

of composers, educated in Western music centres, entered the national music 

scene, representing a different conception of the interaction between music 

modernity and the national tradition than the one which had been established 

in local culture. 

In order to place Kaunas and Vilnius/Wilno movements of music modernisation 

in an international context, the book critically reviews the ISCM’s strategy 

and the festival history between the wars and the early Cold War period. 

Not only the confluences and inconsistencies of artistic ideologies, interactions 

and repercussions, but also the political contexts of the society’s activities were 

important. Political events and processes pervaded the history of the ISCM 

from its foundation to the end of the Cold War: the society was founded as a 

rebound to the cultural confrontations of the First World War, it maneuvered 

and avoided ideological entanglements in the inter-war period, declined during 

the Second World War, and was affected by the post-war geopolitical and 

ideological tensions. On the other hand, it is difficult to avoid ideological and 

political divides when analysing the music movements of the twentieth-century 

avant-garde and modernism. As Richard Taruskin aptly pointed out, the 

use of politicised rhetoric – ‘words like progressive or conservative or radical or 

reactionary […] (not to mention revolutionary, a word that is also sees a lot of use 

in marketing)’ 10 – was a deeply ingrained habit of music interpretation, and 

even when avoiding political issues, it was used to reflect on or describe artistic 

phenomena. 

The ambiguous links between the development of music and political processes 

are further explored in the discussion of the reception of the inter-war modernist 

movement and the relationship with Lithuanian emigrants in Soviet Lithuania. 

For the development of the historical research strategy, a new cultural 

history, especially the micro-history, has been used, which has inspired the 

prioritisation of the history of events and performances, of cultural practices, 

and of the traces of historically developed forms of knowledge and experience, 

of so-called ‘hot’, reflexive, individual testimonies rather than ‘cold’, serial, 

collective characteristics, while taking into account case studies, informal 

relations and milieus, interpretive communities, and channels of communi- 

10 Richard Taruskin, ‘Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?’, in The Journal of Musicology 26/2 

(2009), p. 281. 

16

Introduction 

cation and networks. 11 The research is arranged chronologically, while at the 

same time emphasising the time and context of the positions, utterances, and 

interpretations of the creators involved in historical events. The thing is that 

in emigration, the evaluation of previous events and personalities changed 

considerably, and the factual record was not always accurately remembered: 

contradictions, especially interpretative ones, were not camouflaged, rather an 

effort was made to record their historical context. In this way, interpretative 

strategies, shaped by a posteriori knowledge, were combined with the principle 

of historical simultaneity, critically reconstructing the events and phenomena 

that organised the narrative and simultaneously keeping in view the musical 

worlds of the time, from the public musical life to the imagined individual 

cultural experience. 

The book is structured in six chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the interaction 

between music modernisation and organisational unification, as well as the 

origins, ideology, and activities of the International Society for Contemporary 

Music between the First and Second World Wars. Chapter 2 focuses on 

the experiences of studies of Lithuanian composers Karnavičius, Bacevičius, 

Jakubėnas, and Kačinskas, on their early creative development, and their involvement 

in international modern musical societies and musical movements. 

Chapter 3 is devoted to the aspects of activities of the institutions established on 

the initiative of the younger generation of musicians (the Society of Progressive 

Musicians, and the Muzikos barai (Music Fields) and Muzika ir teatras (Music 

and Theatre) journals) in the formation of the modern music scene and discourse 

in Lithuania during the 1930s. After discussing the prehistory, Chapters 4 and 

5 of the book analyse the context of the establishment of the Lithuanian section 

of the ISCM, the participation of its representatives and the representation of 

Lithuanian music at the organisation’s festivals in Barcelona, Paris, London, 

Warsaw and Krakow (1936–1939) as well as the links between the Vilnius/ 

Wilno modern music scene and the Parisian school and societies in the 1930s. 

The final chapter of the book discusses the displacement, political oblivion, and 

subsequent return of Lithuanian modernist composers to the cultural space of 

Soviet Lithuania in the context of interactions between international music 

and political processes as well as the early post-war history of the ISCM. The 

book is an updated version of the monograph in Lithuanian which was published 

by VDA Press in 2015. 

11 See Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices (Parallax: Re-visions 

of Culture and Society) (Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 

pp. 22–23. 

17

18 


International Society for Contemporary Music: Festivals and Wars for new Musik 

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR 

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC: 

FESTIVALS AND WARS FOR NEW MUSIC 

The New Music Movement and 

the International Society for Contemporary Music 

In the twentieth century history of music, the First World War was often seen 

as a boundary between early modernism and the musical avant-garde. No less 

than in the changes in the musical style, the caesura of the second decade of the 

twentieth century was felt in musical life. After 1918, the elegant concert life 

rituals and the salons of bohemian artists of the old empires were replaced by 

enthusiastic institutions of newly formed or restored states and international 

musical societies. The founding of national institutions in order to strengthen 

the cultural identity and the development of supranational societies of composers, 

performers, and musicologists were two intertwining inter-war trends that 

complemented each other and at the same time highlighted the impact of nonmusical 

processes on European musical cultures between the Armistice Treaty 

of Compiègne in 1918 and the September campaign of 1939. In the history 

of musical gatherings and movements, the inter-war period stood out for the 

particular activity of composers and an abundance of initiatives in the formation 

of groups and societies aimed at promoting and disseminating modern 

music. Differently from the groupings based on shared artistic ideology, which 

inspired the fin de siècle and the abundance of artistic manifestos of the early 

twentieth century, the energy of composers’ joint activities between the First 

and Second World Wars was directed towards a specific goal: the performance 

of new music. Composers’ resolute efforts to establish themselves in the music 

world were fueled by dreams of avant-garde musical utopias and the images of 

scientific and technological advances. Music writers expected the era after the 

global catastrophe, as contemporaries called the war of 1914 through 1918, to 

be a time of more modern cultural self-awareness, conducive to radical artistic 

pursuits, as well as a time of progress in the dissemination of music. 

The imperative of special performances of modern music was embedded in the 

very conception of Neue Musik, which reflected the transformation of German 

and Austrian musical avant-garde consciousness and a marked breakthrough 

in the processes of musical modernisation in the 1910s and 1920s. As early as 

at the beginning of the century, the concept of the Neue Musik (New Music), 1 

1 See Ferruccio Busoni, Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Berlin: Salzwasser-Verlag, 

1907; revised 2nd edn Freiburg: Insel-Verlag, 1916). 

19


used with the aim of dissociation from Romanticism, was first conceptually 

redefined in the works of influential German music critic Paul Bekker. In his 

highly acclaimed presentation Neue Musik (1919), Bekker linked this category 

with the idea of the musical present and, more broadly, of musical modernity 

(Musikalische Neuzeit). 2 Bekker’s primary intention was to separate the past of 

music by a clear distance from the present and to raise the idea of modernity 

as a valued orientation. In the development of the concept of Neue Musik, the 

musical present was conceptually linked to the renewal of musical material 

and the sensory experience of music. Thus, the three components of the renewal 

– language, perception, and performance – underpinned the ideological 

configuration of Neue Musik. The need to embrace what represented radical 

novelty, or ‘new musical times’, was more of a problematic aspiration than 

merely a reflection of emerging musical practices. During the period under 

discussion, the texts of influential music critics (Bekker, Adolf Weissmann, 

Paul Stefan, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Heinrich Strobel, Hans Mersmann, 

etc.) introduced Neue Musik as a pluralistic idea; that is, from the aesthetic and 

technological point of view, its conception was not strictly linked to a specific 

trend in the stylistic renewal of music. Guides to musical progress were looked 

for among the favourites of post-war music, from Arnold Schönberg and his 

school, Igor Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók to Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, 

and other younger composers. 

After 1918 artistic as well as social and political factors fueled the intensified 

struggle of musicians for new music and its establishment in the international 

scene. International cooperation was supported by the basic ideology of internationalism, 

promoted by the need to overcome nationalism that had strengthened 

during the war and to compensate for the trauma of the war. Heinz Tiessen, 

an active participant in the new music movement in Berlin, associated the 

echoes of getting over the war with the aesthetics and ethics of communalism 

in early post-war works of art and with the images of the ‘brotherhood of 

nations’ as ones of ‘a better future’ and ‘new humanity’. 3 However, the driving 

force of the conflict was present in the ideology of Neue Musik, which rejected 

peaceful coexistence with the musical past and the musical life that continued 

to cherish its values. The comparatively peaceful coexistence of the early musical 

modernists and the late Romantic epigones typical of the early twentieth 

2 The text of Bekker’s ‘Neue Musik’ was first published in the Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit 

(1919) and before 1920 was reissued five times and republished in his collection of articles, 

Neue Musik, in 1923. See Christoph von Blumenröder, ‘Neue Musik’, in Handbuch der 

musikalischen Terminologie [8th edn], ed. Hans–Heinrich Eggebrecht (Freiburg, Wiesbaden: 

Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981). In this book, the term Neue Musik is also used to refer to 

avant-garde orientations. In other cases, new music encompasses the pluralistic totality of 

contemporary music. 

3 Quoted by Anton Haefeli in Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM) (Zürich: 

Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, 1982), p. 19. 

20


century was, after the First World War, replaced by the tension between the 

old and the new and by the open contraposition of the pre-war modernism and 

the post-war avant-garde. Martin Thrun called the early era of the struggle for 

new music ‘the overthrow of commanders’ implemented by the weapons of 

music criticism. 4 

It should be noted that, behind the fantastic acrobatics of Richard Strauss, behind 

the Teutonic rage of Hans Pfitzner, and behind the professorial cunning 

of Reger, there are no longer any roads leading to Rome. Claude Debussy’s 

refined nervousness has also been exhausted. 5 

Moreover, we know for sure that gone are the times when one could idly and 

formally imitate Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, Debussy, Strauss, and Reger. Be 

that as it may, we are in favour of New Music: all the healthy, vital, and advanced 

forces, whichever camp they belong to, recovered when the dust from 

the old wigs had been shaken. The old composing factories and their gigantic 

scores with no content and no harmony between the idea and the means 

collapsed into stagnation; machines are emitting smoke, window glasses are 

broken, and brick walls are crumbling. 6 

However, the pre-war modernists, who had been pushed off the pedestal of 

advancement in the musical world and dethroned by the younger generation 

of music critics, still held far stronger positions than the heralds of the Neue 

Musik era. Germany can be named as an example, whose repertoires of musical 

institutions until the middle of the century featured the works of Richard 

Strauss and Max Reger, major representatives of the German fin de siècle. 7 

The criticism of concert organisations and opera houses’ programme policies, 

which had been intensifying since the early twentieth century, turned into 

a fierce conflict in the inter-war period, called ‘the rage of leaders’ by music 

critics. 8 The rage of composers was caused by the ever-growing gap between 

4 Martin Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis 1933 (Bonn: Orpheus-Verlag, 1995), 

vol. 1, p. 18. 

5 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (1921). Quoted in Thrun, ibid., p. 15. 

6 Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen (1931). Quoted in ibidem, p. 21. 

7 See Thrun, op. cit., p. 27. Based on the example of Germany, Thrun provided statistical 

data that showed a steady decline in the position of contemporary music in the first half of 

the 20th century. While at the beginning of the century the works of contemporary composers 

accounted for about 30 per cent of opera and concert repertoires, in the 1930–1931 

season only 78 new operas (out of 140 premières) were staged. Thus new works were performed 

almost twice less frequently (1,610 out of 11,512 performances), i.e. 14 per cent of 

the total number of the performances. It was argued that, in the region probably most favourable 

for new music, the share of contemporary music in the market had dropped by 5 

per cent by the early 1930s. 

8 See Haefeli, op. cit., p. 22. 

21


Fig. 1. Poster for Arnold Schönberg’s concert. Vienna, 26 March 1919 

© Georg Mayer / MAK 

22


contemporary composers and the institutional structure of musical life. The 

“museum of musical works” that was being established in repertoires was seen 

and described as a catastrophe and an anachronism by the proponents of Neue 

Musik, while performers, especially conductors, were accused of seeking instant 

fame and pandering to the taste of the general public. 

Modern musical expression was also a great challenge to performers, as it 

required dedication and consistent work. In the inter-war period, the hope 

of composers was not ‘any performance at any cost’, but rather ‘a good performance 

at any cost’. 9 Arnold Schönberg sought not just good, but almost 

‘perfect performance’ of music when he established the Verein für musikalische 

Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performances) in Vienna in 

1918. For Schönberg, the founder of the Second Viennese School, the necessity 

of a specialised milieu for the promotion of Neue Musik was particularly urgent: 

in the first decades of the twentieth century, the performance of his music was 

constantly accompanied by scandals, and more than once the angry audience 

had to be tamed by the police, performers, and even the composer himself. 10 At 

the première of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913, the laughter 

and protests of a Paris audience thirsty for sensation were caused by choreography 

rather than by music. 11 Meanwhile, Schönberg’s early works, both tonal 

and atonal, disturbed audiences with their musical expression. Researchers 

into the reception of Schönberg’s early works described his circle at the time 

as a specific kind of Viennese subculture that opposed the city’s conservative 

musical environment. 12 The concert programmes of the Verein für musikalische 

Privataufführungen, which operated over three years, were created by 

Schönberg himself and his closest students – Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Paul 

A. Pisk, Josef Rufer, Rudolf Kolisch, and others. From November 1918 to 

December 1921, weekly concerts were organised during the concert season, 

which only registered members could attend. The Verein was called by contemporaries 

simply Schönberg’s Society. Already in the first years of its existence, 

the Society grew to 320 members, though concerts were usually attended 

by only about 60 to 80 listeners. The results of the Society’s activity over several 

years were truly impressive: in 117 concerts 154 works of contemporary 

composers were performed, some of them repeatedly. Altogether, 364 musical 

compositions were performed. 13 The Society’s programmes were not limited 

to works of the Second Viennese School, the radical branches of Neue Musik, 

9 Richard Specht (1921), quoted in ibid. 

10 Egon Wellesz, ‘Begegnungen in Wien’, in Melos 33/1 (1966), p. 9. 

11 See Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Early Twentieth Century 

(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), vol. 4, pp. 184–190. 

12 See Walter Pass, ‘Schönberg und die “Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler in Wien’”, in 

Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 6 (1974), pp. 298–303. 

13 Haefeli, op. cit., p. 25. 

23


or, more broadly, the aesthetic and stylistic novelties of the centre of Europe, as 

Austrian and German composers of the time considered themselves. Schönberg 

based his selection of works exclusively on the criteria of musical mastery, the 

potential, and the significance for the progress of music: ‘No style is preferred 

in the selection of works. One must perform all modern music, or almost all, 

that has a name, a face, or a character, from Mahler and Strauss to the youngest 

ones.’ 14 In the first concerts of the Society, the audiences particularly liked 

and remembered Béla Bartók’s 14 Bagatelles, Op. 6 (1908); Alban Berg’s Piano 

Sonata, Op. 1 (1907–1908), and String Quartet, Op. 3 (1910); Claude Debussy’s 

vocal cycles Proses lyriques (1892–1893) and Fêtes galantes (1891–1904); as well as 

Josef Matthias Hauer’s Nomos, Op. 1 (1912), and Apokalyptische Fantasie, Op. 5 

(1913). 15 The Society brought together prominent performers dedicated to new 

music, with 10 to 20 rehearsals devoted to the preparation of each composition 

and, in some cases, up to 30. 16 Typical examples of sophisticated interpretation 

include Debussy’s Suite for Two Pianos En blanc et noir (1915), performed by 

renowned pianists Eduard Steuermann and Rudolf Serkin for Society evenings 

in 1920, or Schönberg’s melodrama Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), performed 

three times and conducted by himself in 1921, with Erika Wagner in the role 

of Pierrot; they established themselves as the benchmark interpretation of that 

Expressionist melodrama and atonal Sprechstimme for several decades. 

From the distance of time, Egon Wellesz regretted that, in the historiographical 

discussions of the period of Schönberg’s activity in Vienna, he was mostly portrayed 

as an egocentric and intolerant musician, thus never expressing his admiration 

and respect for the work of his contemporaries and younger colleagues. 17 On 

the contrary, the Society’s concerts featured a record number of compositions by 

Max Reger, 18 and the works by Richard Strauss, Debussy, Webern, Berg, Maurice 

Ravel, Stravinsky, Hans Pfitzner, and Bartók were frequently performed. 

In addition to the abovementioned composers, foreign music was represented 

by a number of composers of various generations, from Alexander Scriabin 

and Franz Schreker to Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Ferruccio Busoni, and 

14 Wellesz, op. cit., p. 10. 

15 Ibid. 

16 Particular mention should be made of performers such as Eduard Steuermann, Rudolf 

Kolisch, Rudolf Serkin, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, Felicie Hüni-Mihacsek, Erika Wagner, 

and Arthur Fleischer. Quite a few compositions of the composers of the Second Viennese 

School were prepared and performed. 

17 Egon Wellesz, ‘Schönberg und die Musik seiner Zeitgenossen’ (manuscript). Austrian National 

Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, hereafter ÖNB), Egon Wellesz Collection, 

f. 13, No. 2301, l. 2. According to the note of Wellesz, the quoted manuscript was 

being prepared for publication in English, but, such an article was never found. 

18 At the concerts of the Society, Max Reger’s compositions were performed the most times 

(37). Wellesz explained the fact by Schönberg’s personal interest in some of Reger’s principles 

of composition and in his works. (Wellesz, op. cit., l. 10). 

24


Karol Szymanowski. In the case of interest in a composition for a symphony 

orchestra or an opera, Schönberg made arrangements for a chamber orchestra 

or the piano. Contemporaries, for example, remembered an evening of Johann 

Strauss’s waltz arrangements in 1921, prepared for piano quintet and performed 

by Schönberg, Berg, Webern and several prominent artists. 19 In 1919, in a booklet 

about the Verein, Berg wrote that its purpose was not to promote composers 

or compositions, but to ‘gain a deep and genuine knowledge of modern music’. 20 

In his comments on the Society’s programming goals, Anton Haefeli noted that, 

seeking to share with other artists and art followers the in-depth conception of 

Neue Musik, Schönberg echoed Debussy’s pre-war ideas about the need to establish 

an esoteric musical society and treat music as a mysterious knowledge. 21 

While the Second Viennese School sought to protect the performance of music 

as well as the Society itself from ‘accidents and dissatisfaction’, 22 and its events 

were accessible only to full members of the organisation, Schönberg’s Society 

soon became an exceptional object of international attraction. Concerts held in 

Vienna were frequently attended by Ravel, Bartók, Milhaud, Poulenc, and other 

foreign composers. Following the example of the Society, similar organisations 

were established in Prague, Hamburg, Berlin, and Frankfurt; Ravel wanted to 

replicate its model in Paris, and Bartók in Budapest. Unlike private evenings in 

Vienna, these new societies and groups of composers focused on public concert 

life and the wider public, not just connoisseurs. 

Even in Vienna, the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen was not the 

first music society to bring together active composers and interpreters of their 

works. 23 However, Schönberg’s Society, with its regular purposeful activities, its 

requirements of high quality performance, and its openness to the international 

community of musicians became a prototype and a stimulus for the movement 

of the dissemination of music, which music critics at the time called special 

care for new music or the development of specialised music as part of ‘common 

musical life’. 24 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, music critic and participant in the 

music unions in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, Prague, and Berlin, saw a meaningful 

relationship between the breakthroughs in the music of the time (primarily 

dodecaphony and neo-Classicism) and the activities of composers and critics: 

19 Wellesz, ‘Begegnungen in Wien’, p. 10. 

20 See Haefeli, op. cit., p. 14. 

21 Ibid., p. 15. 

22 Berg, quoted in the Society’s booklet (1919). Ibid. 

23 The Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler in Wien is regarded as the first society of its 

kind, founded by Schönberg and Zemlinsky in 1904. For a short period of time, merely 

two years (1904 and 1905), the honorary president of the society was its member Gustav 

Mahler. Wellesz believed that Schönberg had taken ‘the fanatical principle of rehearsal’ 

specifically from Mahler. See Egon Wellesz, ‘Anfänge der “Neuen Musik” in Wien’, in 

Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 5/6 (1970), p. 314. 

24 Thrun, op. cit., p. 23. 

25


The fact that those phenomena [dodecaphony and neoclassicism – R. S.] 

were simultaneous with the organisations in Paris (Les Six), Vienna (Verein 

für musikalische Privataufführungen, Musikblätter des Anbruch), and Berlin 

(the Melos Group, Novembergruppe concerts) was not a coincidence. Across 

Europe, a new spirit of music had been seeking public recognition. Therefore, 

quite soon the armada of young talents took over the older generation’s ideas 

and developed them in their own unique way. 25 

Stuckenschmidt, like Theodor W. Adorno, called the inter-war period, and 

especially the 1920s, a heroic era of new art; the sense of an epic breakthrough 

was reinforced by the intensity of change. 26 The movement of new music societies 

that began after 1918 was followed a year later by a supportive initiative 

– specialised musical periodicals devoted to topical creation. In 1919 Emil 

Hertzka, director of the Universal Edition publishing house close to the Second 

Viennese School, began publishing the Musikblätter des Anbruch (1919–1937); 

a year later, conductor Hermann Scherchen initiated the music journal Melos 

(1920–1934) in Berlin; in the same year, Der Auftakt (1920–1938) was first published 

in Prague; and soon afterwards in New York, the Modern Music review 

journal (1924–1946), a publication of the League of Composers, emerged. 

Dozens of specialised journals and newspapers instantly became a forum for 

new music and a place for fierce debates on current affairs and advancements in 

music, which brought together and made heard, in particular, the young generation 

of composers and music critics. At the same time, the critical discourse 

of music supported and uniquely catalysed the culture of new music festivals, 

which gained unprecedented momentum in the 1920s. 

In the Industrial Age, the romantic tradition of music festivals became more massive 

and conquered ever new geographic territories. However, it changed little in 

terms of programme: festivals typically celebrated composers as cultural heroes 

(the Bach Festival, the Beethoven Festival, the Wagner Festival, etc.) or widely 

exhibited the chosen genre (the song, the opera, or symphonic or chamber music). 

The events of contemporary music societies opposed the culture of the worship 

of the classics through exclusivity and a determination to reveal new talent. Soon 

new music festivals became for the international community of composers a possible 

place for the dissemination of innovation. Although an event of this sort 

confined to local music was very rare, two international events in the early 1920s 

were considered to be the beginning of international new music festivals: the 

25 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Neue Musik (Zwischen den beiden Kriegen) (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 

1951), vol. 2, p. 142. 

26 However, participants of the movement who evaluated the breakthrough in musical modernisation 

from a historical distance, such as, e.g., the above-mentioned Tiessen, were inclined 

to admit that, despite the abundance of initiatives, representatives of the Neue Musik ideology 

were ‘an absolute minority, beating against the current’. Quoted in Haefeli, op. cit., p. 29. 

26


Donaueschingen Chamber Music Days (1921) and the Salzburg Chamber Music 

Days (1922). Both festivals were inspired by the initiative of private musicians, reflecting 

competition between Berlin and Vienna in the projections of music modernisation. 

Heinrich Burkard, the librarian and music director of the Duke Max 

Egon zu Fürstenberg Palace, designed the Donaueschingen Festival as a forum 

for discovering young unknown musical talents. Open to international music innovation, 

the event programme was primarily designed to showcase the works 

of German composers and was patronised by Richard Strauss. The premières of 

the works of young composers Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, and Alois Hába 

gained international recognition in the early days of the Donaueschingen Festival. 

Before 1933, the milieu of new music in Berlin, primarily Hindemith and Franz 

Schreker’s School, played a major role in shaping the programmes of that festival. 

Although Donaueschingen did not seek to oppose the Second Viennese School, 

Schönberg’s musical ideas and his works were considered ‘the tarting-up of conservatism’: 

according to Burkard, Schönberg had secured the past and future of 

music, while Hindemith and the Donaueschingen Festival were concerned with 

the present, ‘the German type of new music’. 27 

In contrast, the Salzburg Chamber Music Days were from the very beginning 

designed as an international event of contemporary music, uniting nations 

and representing diversity in musical composition. The initiative of 

young composers and musicologists Rudolf Réti 28 and Egon Wellesz 29 to 

27 Ibid., pp. 32–33. 

28 Rudolph Réti (1885–1957) studied piano and musicology at the Vienna Conservatory as 

a young man, made friends with Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, and was considered 

to be spiritually close to Schönberg’s ideas. In 1911, as a pianist, he prepared the première 

of Schönberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (1909), yet did not belong to any of the 

known schools. Numerous works of Réti (an opera, symphonic works, two concertos for 

piano and orchestra, chamber music, and songs) did not gain wider cultural recognition; 

only his Concertino for Piano and Orchestra, performed at the ISCM Festival in Prague in 

1925, and the orchestral suite David and Goliath, performed in Amsterdam in 1938, achieved 

anything like this. Wellesz believed him to be a gifted composer, and Nicolas Slonimsky 

defined his music as ‘formalistic’ in his Music since 1900 (New York: Norton, 1938, p. 262), 

however, the ISCM critics called his Concertino an extremely bland piece. In 1939 Réti 

emigrated to the USA and became famous for works in the theory of music, particularly for 

his Thematic Process in Music (New York: Macmillan, 1951) and Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality 

(London: Rockliff, 1958), both published after the author’s death. Contemporary researchers 

in the history of music theory tend to emphasise fundamental links of the theoretical 

conceptions of Réti, Schönberg, and Heinrich Schenker as well as typicality, characteristic 

of the development of music theory in the first half of the 20th century. See Jonathan Dunsby, 

‘Thematic and Motivic Analysis’, in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. 

Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 907–926. 

29 Egon Wellesz (1885–1974) studied musicology and law at the University of Vienna, was 

Schönberg’s first private student, and belonged to the closest circle of pupils of the founder 

of the Second Viennese School, although he developed his work individually, based on 

different stylistic idioms (from Impressionism and Expressionism to free atonality and se- 

27


organise a festival and to establish an international network of composers 

and promoters of modern music was supported by one of the most influential 

institutions of modern music dissemination, the Universal Edition publishing 

house in Vienna. It was no accident that Salzburg was chosen to represent 

the composer community: the city symbolised the spirit of humanism, universal 

musical tradition, and festival culture. 30 After the Second World War, 

Réti, in clarifying the circumstances of the Salzburg idea, wrote: ‘Compared 

to the former monarchy, post-war inflation-inflicted Austria was a small, 

helpless country. After losing its former glory and splendour, Austria had 

only one value in the eyes of the world – […] music.’ 31 Réti felt that ‘in no 

other spiritual sphere is the revolution of our times as strongly and clearly 

felt as in music; still, compared to the other arts, it is very little known and 

hardly accessible to the general public.’ Called the Viennese ‘fantasist’ by 

contemporaries, Réti imagined a chamber music festival as an impetus for 

the implementation of a broad programme of spiritual renewal and service to 

a new kind of creativity which would unite national and international origins. 

32 In the process of the idea’s implementation, his likeminded colleague 

Wellesz soon brought together influential musicians from Paris and London: 

composers Milhaud, Poulenc, and Arthur Honegger; musicologist Edward 

Dent; singer Dorothy Moulton; and Austrian and German music critics 

and organisers. The Salzburg Chamber Music Days, under the auspices of 

Richard Strauss, were held from 7 to 10 August 1922. The concerts featured 

50 compositions by 46 composers. The historical importance became immediately 

apparent to the participants of the meeting: ‘Salzburg was […] a 

celebration of peace, a breakthrough for victory – as in war maneuvers. No 

more walls – that’s what Salzburg meant.’ 33 

lective serialism). Wellesz wrote the first monograph on Schönberg, Arnold Schoenberg: the 

Formative Years (London: Galliard, 1920) and greatly contributed to the popularisation of 

the Second Viennese School. However, eventually his relationship with Schönberg went 

awry. Before the annexation of Austria, Wellesz was one of the most popular Austrian 

composers of the time: his operas Alkestis (1923) and Die Bakchantinnen (1930), as well as 

his ballets, mainly on topics of antiquity, were frequently staged at European theatres; his 

symphonic works were favoured by the prominent conductors of the time. In 1938 Wellesz 

emigrated to Great Britain. From the first decade of the 20th century, Wellesz was an 

important integrative figure in the international music scene, active in composer societies, 

artist gatherings, the International Musicological Society, and other organisations. 

30 Egon Wellesz, ‘Salzburg’, in Melos 4 (1924), pp. 13–16. 

31 Rudolf Réti, ‘Die Entstehung der IGNM’, in Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 3 (1957), 

p. 113. 

32 Rudolf Réti, ‘Die Salzburger Idee’, in Anbruch 4 (1922), pp. 193–195. See also Paul Stefan, 

‘Ein Weltbild der Musik’, in Anbruch 4 (1922), p. 245. 

33 Stefan, op. cit., p. 243. 

28


During the event, the international community of musicians agreed to establish 

an International Society for Contemporary Music. Wellesz, the first private 

pupil of Schönberg, denied the direct impact of the Society for Private Musical 

Performances on the establishment of the new society: allegedly Schönberg 

had merely shown how that was to be accomplished. 34 Wellesz tended to relate 

the idea of the International Society for Contemporary Music with the musicians’ 

efforts, typical of the post-war period, to recreate relationships broken 

during the war and to seek international unity and collaboration. He, like Paul 

Stefan, a music critic and a member of the Viennese Committee who had organised 

the first meeting, considered the Mahler Festival held in Amsterdam 

in 1920, the first international gathering of composers after the war, to be an 

important impetus for the movement. Alongside the impressive panorama of 

Mahler’s works, concerts of contemporary music of various countries were 

held. 35 According to Dent, before the First World War, no one would have 

thought of holding an international festival dedicated exclusively to contemporary 

music, 36 and cross-border music exchanges were sporadic. The Salzburg 

Chamber Music Days, called in music historiography the ‘zero festival’ of the 

International Society for Contemporary Music, laid the foundations for a new 

tradition and became a widely discussed model and a prototype for many similar 

events against the background of vigorous debates on how to represent and 

promote new music. 

International versus National in the ISCM’s Structure and 

Activity Guidelines 

Nine countries became the nucleus of the International Society for Contemporary 

Music: the First Conference of Delegates held in London from 19 to 

22 January 1923 was attended by musicians from England, Denmark, Italy, 

France, Switzerland, Austria, the United States, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, 

representing the agreement of those countries in approving the organisation’s 

statute and selecting the jury for the upcoming festival. An already existing 

international union of composers and musicians with the object of the dissemination 

of contemporary music could have a national section in a particular 

country, although in some countries such sections were formed by groups of 

private members unrelated to any organised structure. The ISCM brought 

together composers, performers, musicologists, and music critics, publishers, 

concert organisers, and other members of the new music movement who joined 

34 Haefeli, op. cit., p. 35. 

35 Wellesz 1966, ‘Begegnungen in Wien’, p. 11. 

36 Edward Dent, ‘Looking Backward’, in Music Today (Journal of the ISCM), London, 1949, 

p. 7. Like German and Austrian music critics, Dent emphasised the simultaneous founding 

of the International Society for Contemporary Music and other similar organisations, e.g., 

the PEN club in Bloomsbury (1921). 

29

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