The Celebration of Beethoven's Bicentennial in 1970: The Antiauthoritarian Movement and Its Impact on Radical Avant-garde and Postmodern Music in West Germany

Kutschke discusses the antiauthoritarian movement and its impact on radical avant-garde and postmodern music in West Germany. Although in West Germany and elsewhere, the musical fields in which the revolutionary climate of the 1960s and 1970s manifested itself most clearly were undoubtedly rock music and the singer-songwriter scene, the significance of the New Leftist spirit for West German avant-garde music since the late 1960s can't be neglected. The New Leftist critical attitude toward the bourgeoisie and "bourgeois" music enterprise led to the rejection of the classical-romantic ideal of beauty and the development of an aesthetics of negativity that drew on Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectic and was promoted by composers such as Helmut Lachenmann and Nicolaus Huber. The New Leftist spirit manifested itself particularly clearly in the new enthusiasm for improvisation and musical creativity. Here, she also looks at the Beethoven bicentennial of 1970.