In the preface to the 2016 International Summer Course for New Music programme booklet, the festival's artistic director, Thomas Schäfer, repeated a question that Irvine Arditti had put to him when they were discussing the Arditti Quartet's concerts: ‘shall we attack the future or dig up the past?’. This question, posed in order to establish some form of discursive framework for the course, became a subliminal trace throughout the festival. The participants' bags, for instance, were imprinted with the slogan, ‘attack the future’ and Schäfer ended his preface by stating, ‘let me call out to everyone involved, and to our audience: let's attack the future!’. The air of the festival itself, however, seemed slightly more reserved throughout its lengthy 17-day span. There were, of course, moments of theatrical flamboyance, such as Fantasises of Downfall (2015) by Johannes Kreidler, metalized void (2015/16) by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, The Lichtenberg Figures (2014/15) by Eva Reiter, Sideshow (2009/15) by Steven Kazuo Takasugi, EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2015/16) by Jennifer Walshe, and Living Instruments (2015) by Serge Vuille. Yet, overall the atmosphere of the festival seemed to be one of quiet vigilance as events unfolded.
The festival got off to rather a shaky start. Not only was there an obvious confusion over certain aspects of the ticket system, but staff and participants of the summer course were sometimes being turned away from programmed concerts because they were too full. It was on the second evening of the festival, however, that a most disconcerting experience occurred. Held in the Staatstheater Darmstadt, five composer finalists – Sivan Cohen Elias, Marta Gentilucci, Carsten Hennig, Patricia Martinez and Abel Paúl showcased their entries for the International Music Theatre Competition Darmstadt, the jury's prize being a full-length commission for a music theatre piece for 2018. An audience prize was awarded to Carsten Hennig's selbstversuch, Musik but the official jury were instructed not to deliberate behind closed doors, but instead announce their vote, without discussion, straight after the final performance. The idea backfired because no reliable criteria for assessing the performances had been established. The jury was soon in difficulty, and it became increasingly painful to witness the names of the potential winning composers being toyed with publicly. Awkwardly, the jury eventually announced they were postponing any official announcement until the following day (their eventual winner was Sivan Cohen Elias) a downbeat end to what had been a sometimes colourful and vibrant evening.
It was during the festival's public lecture series that voice was given to some of the ideas entwined in the festival. Chaya Czernowin, for instance, spoke about her compositional interest in the process of ‘breath’ to ‘voice’, and how it is in the slowing down of such a process that particular hidden areas become unveiled, lending themselves to rigorous enquiry: ‘the breath is not an introduction to the singing, the breath is a place in itself. When we use the tongue to make noises, it is not a pre-cursor to speaking, but it is a whole place independent by itself’. The audience listened intensely to the unfolding of this particular process in Adiantum Capillus-Veneris I and III (2015/16), described by the composer as a series of ‘etudes’ – but also ‘pieces in their own right’ – that have been crucial to ‘test the water’ of her latest opera, Infinite Now. The lecture concluded with a highly insightful Q&A session, in which the composer elaborated on how ‘the mouth is this universe’, ‘an orchestra’, and that ‘every obvious space is what tells me there is something underneath that I have to try and figure out’. Infinite Now will be premiered on 18 April 2017 in Ghent, Belgium.
There were many fine performances throughout the festival. Morton Feldman's String Quartet no. 1 (1979) performed by the Arditti Quartet, Mark Andre's S2 (2015) performed by Christian Dierstein, and the world premiere of Ashley Fure's The Force of Things. An Opera for Objects (2015/16), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), all offered a sense of grounded assurance. Rebecca Saunders's open rehearsal on her piece Fletch (2012) with violinist Ashot Sarkissian, and Quartet (1988) with a selection of summer course participants, as well as the piano class workshop concert performances of her Mirror, mirror on the wall (1994) by Mari Kawamura, and Crimson (2004/05) by Helga Karen, all demonstrated the same sense of an intense weight of sound. Georg Friedrich Haas's Koma (2015), a production by Staadtstheater Darmstadt in co-production with the Schwetzinger Festspiele, and his In iij. Noct. (2001) performed in an open space classroom by Quartetto Maurice (this fine Italian quartet was awarded one of six fellowships for participation at the 2018 Darmstadt Summer Course, alongside Ine Vanoeveren, Nina Guo, Bethany Younge, Reiko Yamada, and Mikołaj Laskowski), also proved to be exceptional, especially in implementing the technique of ‘echolocation’.
Toward the end of the festival, there was a sense of a new momentum. The GRID project (Gender Research in Darmstadt) established a commitment to improving the course's diversity and gender equality issues. Helmut Lachenmann made a brief appearance, in which he warned his audience to ‘be careful please’, ‘don't only cultivate your garden, open and develop it. … A musician has to learn how to learn. I hope with each piece the musician had the opportunity to learn again, to open his horizon’. Along with performances of Lachenmann's Air (1968/69, rev. 1994/2015), by Dierstein and the hr-Sinfonieorchester at the hr-Sendesaal (Frankfurt), and a choreographed version of Saunders's Still (2011/16), by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, Sasha Waltz, and Guests, in Darmstadt's Böllenfalltorhalle, – a performance that was also programmed alongside the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1860) – it did seem that the festival's closing might also represent a new opening.
