PARTISAN CRITIQUE @ DARMSTADT SUMMER COURSES

by Assaf Shelleg The Darmstadt summer courses, one of the storied and contentious hubs of contemporary music since 1946, is transitioning in high decibels while rebranding itself silently. Amid Germany’s sweltering summer heat, young composers and musicians rush from classes to workshops, from concerts of very recent works to lectures on machine subjectivity, the non-binary […]

The following is a transcript of the the roundtable discussion in response to the brochure “Specters of Kranichstein: What was the Darmstadt School“ by Jim Igor Kallenberg. It was held on July 22, 2025, 2pm during the Darmstadt Summer Course at Lichtenbergschule, in Takasugi’s teaching room 313, and transcribed by Lucian Spohr and Christian Gregori; […]

(26. Juli bis 2. August 2025) The “Visite Critique” accompanies the second festival week of the Darmstadt Summer Course 2025 with open and free discussion sessions in which we articulate and exchange our experiences of the concerts and critically discuss aesthetic tendencies in contemporary music and its history. Together we will listen to and discuss […]

by George Lewis In 2016 I first heard I Can’t Breathe, Georg Friedrich Haas’s haunting work for solo trumpet, performed by Marco Blaauw at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Haas’s work, written just after the birth of the Black Lives Matter organization, and well before the concept of Black Lives Matter came to international prominence, […]

by Jim Igor Kallenberg This text was originally published in Musik-Konzepte 199: Georg Friedrich Haas (2023), edited by Ulrich Tadday and translated by the author with the friendly permission of the publisher edition text+kritik. JIK: Sex is not music, and music is not sex. Music and sexuality are not identical. They relate to each other. […]