Mégevand, Martin

The community out of tune. About uses of choral form in New Music - 2020.


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What do “community” and “make community” mean? To try to shed some light on these current ant untimely questions, this article presents a key moment in the history of contemporary music known as the Darmstadt School, showing its internal dynamics, and the role Literature played in it. This leads to examine the treatment and the value conferred to text in choral forms composed by Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio within the frame of the New Music’s experimentations in the years 1950s-1970s. By situating itself in the perspective of an historicized reflection on the collective forms of artistic expression, this study is in tune with the return of a thinking of the “common” and the “community” which appeared in France in the early 80s.