I'm not so sure about that. I think Boulez is much better-known and more often heard than Stockhausen, except perhaps in Wire-ish/electronica circles.

Please do start a Kurtág thread when you have time, Tim. My feelings are more or less akin to Richard's (can rarely get into the mental space that makes me want to listen to him), although I'm less convinced than Richard that it's the lower quality of Ligeti's late works that has allowed Kurtág to challenge him in popularity; indeed, it seems to be mainly the late works (mid-80s onwards) of Ligeti that are now widely acknowledged, alongside the early/mid-60s ones, with pieces like Lontano, Melodien, San Francisco Polyphony (which to me are the masterpieces) almost ignored by comparison.

It's really these I'm thinking of, but it's still a substantial number of people who have little other contact with contemporary concert music. A concert of Stockhausen or Xenakis is a guaranteed sell-out (and Stockhausen gigs are priced like U2 concerts) - I don't think an all-Boulez concert would be the same (although maybe Cage).

George - it's scheduled for the January issue of Tempo.

That doesn't really include Cage, does it? Regarding Boulez on the one hand and Stockhausen/Xenakis on the other, it's interesting how nowadays their reputation is situated in completely different audiences, isn't it? (as opposed to a time when they would all be mentioned in the same breath) Boulez tried so hard and so expensively to "master" the application of electronic/digital technology to music, but as far as most of today's practitioners of electronic music are concerned it's clear that it was the imaginations of Stockhausen and Xenakis and a few others which really laid the foundations. Good thing Boulez has the day job.

Yes, though it does have the prestige associated with being called The Oxford History of Western Music; it's also extraordinarily well-written and accessible, so I think it will last for some time. Major histories of long periods in 20th century music don't seem to occur that often - in English I think Taruskin's is the first comprehensive study since Morgan, Griffiths and Whittall in the 1990s (the latter two of which were essentially updatings of earlier books).

Do you think there really has been particularly significant study of Darmstadt as a sociological phenomenon, though? The stuff I know (Borio/Danuser, the Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart volume and the Musik-Konzepte volume Darmstadt-Dokumente 1) doesn't really seem to engage with this in great detail; earlier work of Metzger and in particular Helms (who wrote a very interesting article on New Music Festivals back in the 1970s) makes a start, but this hasn't seemed to be developed all that much to date? There's stuff in English attacking Darmstadt and all its represents, as part of post-modern critiques, but very little of that demonstrates much knowledge of the area other than as a stereotype. But there's bound to be stuff I don't know - have you come across any Eastern European studies of Darmstadt in your research?

That's the real challenge, and very difficult to do. Actually, I feel Taruskin probably does so as successfully as most (relating the notes to the wider concerns). I'm very interested to know more about the particular ways in which you use Jauss and more general thoughts about the recent increase in reception studies of new music (seemed really to be the flavour of the month at York, didn't you think?). The one problem I have is that many such studies tend to focus (by necessity) on reviews, internal correspondence between the co-ordinators of new music, essays from the time, and so on - but these are generally written by highly specialised people, often quite deeply embroiled in that very music world, and are really not representative of the wider public by any means. There's some study of public responses (I think in particular those of young people) to new music on West German radio in the early 1950s, which showed them to be highly negative, if I recall (don't have the source to hand at the moment). But what I'm totally in two minds about is whether one can say something about a work, that is meaningful, if it is at cross-purposes with how it was/is/might be received? Does a work have some degree of autonomous existence in this sense (I know various composers would think so, but that of course doesn't necessarily make it true)?

Alistair, I think it has something to do with demonstrating the freedom of speech and creativity in the West as opposed to (and as superior to) the strict state control of art in the East. The idea that abstract impressionism and serial music were only of significance as propaganda strikes me as dangerously close to subscribing to a "conspiracy theory of modernism".

I'm aware of that! but it's a pretty ridiculous way to look at things. Enormous amounts of music from the Western classical tradition were used as window-dressing in an analogous way by the aristocracy but I don't hear anyone claiming it has lost its relevance because we no longer live under feudalism.

Well, Taruskin, alas, uses that sort of argument most of the way through his Oxford History, as far back to the troubadours. The odd thing is that he doesn't do it from what seems to be a leftist position (which I could sort of respect even if not agreeing with it), more an angle akin to Murdoch-style populism.

The plethora of amusing but entirely muddled and misguided ideas about Art history exposed to view in this thread shows what happens when we forget the first and paramount principle "Art for Art's sake"!