Most frequently performed in those and lots of other festivals - but I reckon there's a fair chance he may have been the most frequently performed living German composer overall in that country as well (Orff would probably have been his closest rival for that). The latter is hard to ascertain without a huge amount of data, though a statistical sample may give a rough idea.

This is a subject about which a number of people (including myself, in the context of West Germany) are currently engaged in research. There have been various rather simplistic theories touted around in the past - the 'Stunde Null' of music, music as anti-fascism, music as anti-communism, music as anti-capitalism, all of which in my view have some truth in them but none of which really provide a remotely comprehensive explanation of the history. On the other hand, as ideologies that at various points could be propagated in support of certain aesthetic tendencies, they are very important. I'm gradually starting to think that political 'image' was more important at this time (at least in Germany, though also to some extent elsewhere) than political 'effect'. Even supposedly politically neutral discourses, such as those of positivist science as found in the Cologne electronic composers including Stockhausen, themselves had a ideological dimension, not least in terms of attitudes towards history, ideals of progress, and the like.

I believe so, and not just in the post-war era; the lack of a proper bourgeois revolution may be connected with the lack of serious engagement (to this day) with a Beethovenian model of bourgeois subjectivity - though that type of argument could be put very differently, in terms of the relationship of the development of artistic subjectivity to the division of labour in the UK from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this type of hermeneutical approach tends to rely upon a degree of conjecture that cannot easily be proved or disproved; I tend to look at things more in terms of institutions, economics, critical reception and the like instead at the moment. But for all that Britain was behind in developing an avant-garde, the same could be said, after 1945, of Spain, Portugal, most of the Scandinavian countries, East Germany, and various other places. And in Western countries not formerly belonging to the Axis, it was more an issue of restoration rather than major régime shift, though of course the experience of occupation surely had a major effect upon consciousness.


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Including his proscriptions for music?

Or as Stockhausen famously put it in 1953:

Vergesse man aber nicht, dass selten eine Komponistengeneration so viele Chancen hatte und zu solch glücklichem Augenblick geboren wurde, wie die jetzige: Die Städte sind radiert – und man kann von Grund auf neu anfangen, ohne Rücksicht auf Ruinen und geschmacklose Überreste.

Let no one forget that seldom has a generation of composers had so many chances and been born at such a fortunate moment as this one: the cities have been erased - and one can build again from the ground up, without consideration of ruins and tasteless relics.

(Since the Nazis and the war had killed both his parents you would certainly have to say he was accentuating the positive.)

What could certainly be said is that the countries which did 'develop an avant-garde' in that sense are in such a minority (Germany, France and to a lesser extent Italy, no?) that the question might be not so much why other places didn't as why they did.

That's a claim that many have made, but none have been able to truly substantiate, certainly not in the case of Darmstadt. Toby Thacker (Music after Hitler and various other essays), David Monod (Settling Scores), Amy Beal (New Music, New Allies) and Ian Wellens (Music on the Frontline) have all written detailed critiques of these unfounded claims. On which basis do you make this claim?

The situations were very different for art and music. There is clear evidence of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom backing Abstract Expressionist art; also, under the patronage of Nicolas Nabokov, of it supporting some musical activity, though the directions in which Nabokov pushed CCF money were certainly not those of the avant-garde. The only possible link that anyone has found in this respect is through H.H. Stuckenschmidt, who was a CCF member in the 1950s, though the person who's looked most deeply into this, Thacker, is insistent that Stuckenschmidt was, through his various activities in writing about composers and recommending to various festival directors, acting off his own back.

This has become a cliché that was offered originally as conjecture, and through repetition has entered the level of ideology.

Other whims to satisfy, and lots of individuals in charge of things who had by necessity their own ideological agendas to satisfy - not least because of their own records during the Third Reich, necessitating some sort of association with that which could be promoted as somehow anti-fascist.

All of this post derives from insubstantiated hearsay and ideology.

When you've found any concrete reason why in the absence of any other version of things we shouldn't take Stockhausen's word for it concerning either his childhood or his artistic aims after the war I'm sure you'll be letting us all know.

 

Call me a woolly old English liberal, but there's something in that sentence that makes me very uneasy.  Stockhausen was 16 when the war ended?