Darmstädter Ferienkurse

The Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, a series of summer schools held in Germany from 1946 that became the central forum for the post-war European avant-garde. Boulez attended as both student and teacher, and the Darmstadt circle — including Stockhausen, Nono, and Maderna — shaped the compositional direction of structuralism and serialism in the 1950s.

Understanding the Darmstadt context helps frame Boulez's piano works: the Piano Sonata No. 2 was a landmark work that the Darmstadt circle viewed as the definitive rejection of the pre-war tonal tradition. Approaching it requires grasping what it was deliberately destroying.