in the legato style of Schweitzer) was his speciality, and although he made

every organ he played sound like that of St Michael’s, he won a worldwide

reputation as a performer. He founded the St Michael’s Singers in 1919,
and remained its conductor until 1966. Vaughan Williams and Howells,
among others, composed works for his choral festivals. During the absence
on war service of Boris Ord, Darke was acting organist of King’s College,
Cambridge (1941–5), and then a Fellow (1945–9). In later years his powers
did not diminish: he recorded Elgar’s Organ Sonata in his early 70s and
gave recitals at the Royal Festival Hall to mark his 75th, 80th and 85th
birthdays. He composed extensively for organ and choir, but will probably
be best remembered for his Meditation on Brother James’s Air and for his
tuneful setting of the carol In the bleak mid-winter. An Oxford DMus and an
honorary Cambridge MA, he was president of the Royal College of
Organists (1940–41) and a member of the RCM teaching staff (1919–69).
He was appointed CBE in 1966.
STANLEY WEBB

Darmstadt.
City in Germany. From 1567 to 1918 it was the residence of the
Landgraves of Hesse, and also, from 1806, that of the Grand Dukes of
Hessen-Darmstadt; from 1919 to 1945 it was the regional capital, and has
since been a centre of local government. Its musical and theatrical
traditions date from the 17th century, when Singballette, tournaments and
masquerades were performed. The Pädagogium, founded in 1629, had a
boys' choir to provide sacred music. In 1670 a comedy theatre was
established; among works performed there were Das triumphierende
Siegesspiel der wahren Liebe (1673) by Wolfgang Carl Briegel,
Hofkapellmeister from 1671 to 1712, and Lully's Acis et Galatée (1687).
Under Count Ernst Ludwig, himself a composer, court music flourished,
particularly opera. In 1712 the count appointed as Hofkapellmeister
Christoph Graupner, who composed hundreds of church cantatas, at least
three operas and other works for Darmstadt.
Under Grand Duke Ludwig I (1790–1830) the court opera reached its peak.
The Hofkapelle, often conducted by Ludwig himself, comprised 89
musicians, in addition to a chorus of 54, and included many fine singers.
Georg Joseph Vogler was Hofkapellmeister and director of a music school,
and Weber and Meyerbeer were among his pupils. J.C.H. Rinck was
organist between 1805 and 1846. In 1819 the Grossherzogliches
Hoftheater was opened with a performance of Spontini's Ferdinand Cortez.
The theatre was burnt down in 1871, replaced in 1879 and finally
destroyed, together with many of Darmstadt's other musical institutions, in
1944. Important Wagner productions, produced by Kapellmeister Louis
Schindelmeisser in collaboration with the scenic designer Carl Brandt (who
had worked in Bayreuth), were mounted after 1850. Subsequent
conductors have included Willem de Haan, Weingartner, Michael Balling,
Böhm, Erich Kleiber, Szell, Hans Drewanz and Marc Albrecht. The last
grand duke, Ernst Ludwig (1892–1918), was sympathetic towards modern
art, and a tradition of contemporary opera production grew up, with such
directors as Carl Ebert and Arthur Maria Rabenalt working in Darmstadt.
Musical societies flourished in the 19th century, including the Musikverein
(founded in 1832; conducted by C.A. Mangold, 1839–89), the Mozartverein
(1843), the Stadtkirchenchor (1874; conducted by Arnold Mendelssohn,
1891–1912) and the Instrumentalverein (1883). The Städtische Akademie
für Tonkunst, founded in 1851, encouraged chamber music and orchestral
playing. Today the academy is divided into a music school for amateurs
and a department offering professional training. The chair in musicology at
the Technische Hochschule (renamed the Technische Universität in 1997)
has been held by Wilibald Nagel (1898–1913), Friedrich Noack (1920–58)
and Lothar Hoffmann-Erbrecht (1961–90). A new choir, the Konzertchor
Darmstadt, was founded in 1987 and a summer festival, Sommerspiele
Kranichstein, inaugurated in 1994.
After World War II a temporary theatre was established at the
Orangeriehaus, enabling the operatic tradition to be maintained, and in
1972 a new theatre, the Grosses Haus, was opened. Darmstadt's operatic
tradition has also been enriched by the city's associations with
contemporary music, particularly that of the avant garde. The Internationale
Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (‘Darmstadt summer courses’) were initiated in
1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke, who continued to be closely associated with
them until his death in 1961. His successors have been Ernst Thomas
(1962–81), Friedrich Hommel (1981–94) and Solf Schaefer (1995–). The
courses, held annually until 1970 and subsequently every two years, have
encompassed both composition and interpretation and include premières
of new works. They have made Darmstadt a major centre of modern music.
Among the many distinguished lecturers to have appeared are Adorno,
Fortner, Alois Hába, Heiss, Krenek, Leibowitz, Messiaen, Varèse,
Scherchen, Kolisch, Rehfuss, Steuermann, Wildgans, Babbitt, Berio,
Boulez, Cage, Christoph Caskel, Morton Feldman, Gazzelloni, Henze,
Lejaren Hiller, Aloys Kontarsky, Ligeti, Maderna, Nono, Palm, Pousseur,
Rihm, Stockhausen, David Tudor and Xenakis.
The Städtisches Fachinstitut für Neue Musik was founded by Steinecke in
1948 to provide an institutional basis for the courses. It was known as the
Kranichsteiner Musikinstitut from 1949 to 1962, and in 1963 became the
Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, an international information centre
for contemporary music, housing a library and various archives. In 1983 an
international jazz centre was founded as part of the institute; it became an
independent organization, the Jazzinstituts Darmstadt, in 1990, and
houses a library and an extensive collection of historic recordings and
photographs of jazz musicians. The archives of the music department of
the Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek also contains important
documents, including the autograph manuscripts of 1450 cantatas by
Graupner. The Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung, founded in
Bayreuth in 1948 to encourage the inclusion of contemporary music in
German musical education, moved its base to Darmstadt in 1951. Since
then its annual spring conferences have made an important contribution to
music teaching in Germany.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MGG2 (F. Noack)
W. Nagel: Zur Geschichte der Musik am Hofe zu Darmstadt (Leipzig, 1900)
K. Steinhäuser: Die Musik an den Hessen-Darmstädtischen Lateinschulen
im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1936)
H. Kaiser: Barocktheater in Darmstadt (Darmstadt, 1951)
H. Kaiser: Modernes Theater in Darmstadt, 1910–1933 (Darmstadt, 1955)
Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik (Mainz, 1958–94) [DBNM]
H. Kaiser: Das Grossherzogliche Hoftheater zu Darmstadt, 1810–1910
(Darmstadt, 1964)
E. Noack: Musikgeschichte Darmstadts vom Mittelalter bis zur Goethezeit
(Mainz, 1967)
H. Unverricht and K. Oehl, eds.: Musik in Darmstadt zwischen den
beiden Weltkriegen (Mainz, 1980)
E.G. Franz and C. Wagner: Darmstädter Kalendar: Daten zur Geschichte
unserer Stadt (Darmstadt, 1994)
H. de la Motte-Haber and J. Gerlach, eds.: Vom Singen und Spielen zur
Analyse und Reflexion: eine Dokumentation anlässlich der 50.
Arbeitstagung des Instituts für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung
(Darmstadt, 1996)
R. Stephan and others, eds.: Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart: 50 Jahre
Darmstädter Ferienkurse, 1946–1996 (Stuttgart, 1996)
Darmstadt-Dokumente I, Musik-Konzepte (1998) [special issue]
ERNST THOMAS/WILHELM SCHLÜTER

Darmstadt School.
A designation associated primarily with the serial music written in the
1950s by Nono, Maderna, Stockhausen and Boulez and promoted by them
in the 1950s at the Darmstadt summer courses. The term was coined by
Nono in his 1957 Darmstadt lecture, ‘Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik’
(the development of serial technique). The lecture presented analyses of
the serial practice in Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra op.31 and
Webern's Variations op.30, before going on to a briefer consideration of
new developments in recent works by Boulez (the first movement of
Structures I), Maderna (his 1955 string quartet), Stockhausen
(Elektronische Studie II and Zeitmasze) and Nono himself (Incontri).
Nono explicitly located the new serial techniques within the historical
development of musical modernism, claiming direct lineage from the
Second Viennese School. He also drew parallels between the work of the
Darmstadt School and that of the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus in the
1920s and 30s. In the work of the new generation of composers, Nono
argued, the series no longer has any thematic function; instead the series,
together with its various permutations, had become the basis for the entire
composition, determining not only pitch but also tempo, duration, register,
dynamic and articulation.
Although the principal composers associated with the School were Nono,
Maderna, Stockhausen and Boulez, the compositional techniques of the
Darmstadt School were widely adopted by other composers anxious to be
at the cutting edge of modernism. Darmstadt serialism may have grown out
of expressive necessity but, like any philosophy for which historical
inevitability is invoked, it soon hardened into dogmatic orthodoxy for its
disciples. The activities of these zealots – Franco Evangelisti called them
the ‘dodecaphonic police’ – has led in latter years to the use of ‘Darmstadt’
as a pejorative term, implying a desiccated, slavishly rule-based music.
The adherence of the School’s founders to their collegial aesthetic ended
with the 1950s. Nono reacted with some hostility to the analysis of his Il
canto sospeso in Stockhausen's 1958 essay ‘Musik und Sprache’;
Stockhausen in turn was angered when Nono's 1959 Darmstadt lecture,
‘Presenza storica nella musica d’oggi’ indirectly attacked the work of John
Cage. Aleatory, electronic and ‘moment’ forms took the music of all four
composers in new, divergent directions and by 1961 the Darmstadt School
had effectively dissolved, though Boulez, Stockhausen and Maderna
continued to be active at the summer courses.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
K. Stockhausen: ‘Musik und Sprache’, Die Reihe, vi (1960), 36–58; Eng.
trans. in Die Reihe, vi (1964), 40–64
J. Stenzl, ed.: Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik (Zürich, 1975)
E. Restagno, ed.: Nono (Turin, 1987)
R. Fearn: Bruno Maderna (London, 1990)
A. Trudu: La ‘Scuola’ di Darmstadt (Milan, 1992)
R. Stephan and others, eds.: Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart,
1996)
C. Fox: ‘Luigi Nono and the Darmstadt School’, CMR, xviii/2 (1999), 111–
30
CHRISTOPHER FOX

Darnton, (Philip) Christian

(b nr Leeds, 30 Oct 1905; d Hove, 14 April 1981). English composer. He
studied with Harry Farjeon and later at Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge (1923–6), with Charles Wood, where he wrote the highly
chromatic Piano Sonata op.33 and cultivated a close friendship with Walter
Leigh. He subsequently studied the bassoon and conducting at the RCM
(1926–7) and composition privately with Butting in Berlin (1928). Following
a brief, unsuccessful appointment at Stowe School (1929), he became
assistant editor of the Music Lover (newly launched under the editorship of
Edwin Evans, 1931). Principal works of this period are the Piano Concerto
(1933), the cadenza of which is an early attempt to notate an inner tempo
of extreme waywardness, and Swansong (1935, now lost) for soprano and
orchestra. In 1936, with Hallis, Sophie Wyss, Rawsthorne and Britten, he
became a founder member of the Hallis Concerts Society, for which his
Suite concertante was written (first peformed with Sascha Parnes as solo
violinist and Goodall as conductor, London, 1937). Further successes were
the remarkably advanced Five Orchestral Pieces (ISCM Festival, Warsaw
1939), the publication of a general introduction to music (You and Music,
1940) and a left-wing cantata Ballad of Freedom (1941–2). From 1944 to
1946 he provided scores for newsreels and documentary films. During the
war he was injured in a fall, and left partially paralysed. A conversion to
communism necessitated a severe simplification of his dissonant avant-
garde style, in response to a desire for a more widespread understanding
of his work. This change of direction, together with discouragement at his
lack of recognition, resulted in the loss of his ability to compose further for