Switched-on Deutschland: The Sounds of Germany

I focus on the compositional strategies put to work by the Cologne School in an extension of twelve-tone composition known as elektronische Musik. I analyze this notoriously difficult movement and the crises of aesthetic production and theory in Germany after the Second World War. This examination of elektronische Musik and its surrounding debates considers the complex historical and cultural context and consequences, including the legacies of German Romanticism and Idealism, fascism, Cold War anxieties and policies, and the questions raised by Stockhausen's recent compositional and discursive interventions.