Post-Music Post
A blog dedicated to new music discourse in the form of articles and concert reviews
October 2026
Introduction
There is an evident premonition of Hauntology in the current landscape of New Music. I formed this idea when I participated in the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025's student programme "Next Generation". Motivated by this experience, this article will examine the dominant curatorial concept present in New Music through the socio-political notion of Hauntology, employed in the context of musical aesthetics. The theory is that the concept of Hauntology helps to explain the present state of the New Music scene, whose institutions provide curatorial privileges to works that implement the established past grammar of New Music. To examine this, Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025 will serve as a case study. I will discuss which pieces were presented and awarded with major competition prizes, how the "Next Generation" programme was organised, how the media portrayed the festival, and how these aspects taken together, signalled an adherence to the established aesthetics, fuelled by institutionalism caught in the spectre of Hauntology.
New Music during the post-World War II period provided a fantastic prospect. It offered the promise of abolishing musical hierarchies starting from tonality, rhythm, and eventually form. However, as I will observe in this article, this promise has lost its validity. Instead of continuous re-evaluations of established aesthetic grammars and the development of new ones, New Music crystallised into a musical genre with its own set vocabularies and fixed parameters. This is demonstrated in the curatorial decisions of many established New Music festivals, including Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025, which seem to encourage this "genre-ification" by selecting and awarding works under established musical grammars of the past. This tendency of the New Music establishment inevitably enables a contradiction: my argument is that if the premise of avant-garde reinvention is not functional anymore, then the scene is left with a stagnating aesthetic repetition, and there cannot be any criteria to differentiate New Music from classical western art music that it had once promised to resist, either.
Describing aesthetic stagnation of contemporary popular culture in his book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Marxist theorist Mark Fisher proposed the following argument: "Rather than the old recoiling from the "new" in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms."1 To elaborate the motive of such repetition of old forms, Fisher refers to Hauntology, a philosophical concept first coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida, which describes the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past that haunt the present. Using this term, Fisher emphasises how the nostalgia of once promised but lost futures has been quintessential to the stagnation of popular culture.
I will use Fisher's articulation of Hauntology to show how it corresponds to the present outlook of New Music. The suggestion is that New Music promised a radical aesthetic future that never arrived – yet the remnants of its past aesthetics still haunt the present. In this article I will investigate the current state and values of New Music through Hauntology and come to suggest that there is a connection between New Music's Hauntology and its institutionalism through the particular case study of Donaueschingen 2025.
I will begin chapter 1 with an overview of what New Music is, and how it has missed its radical promise of constant renewal and a permanent radicality, and how particular musical conventions are favoured instead. Then I will examine how institutionalisation and the academy has affected the New Music scene. In chapter 2, I will introduce the concepts of Hauntology and lost futures via a reading of Mark Fisher's texts in Ghosts of My Life. I then apply these concepts to the New Music scene in order to examine the stagnation of aesthetics. This will create the ground for chapter 3, where I will undertake a case study of Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025, showing the impact of institutionalism and clarifying the hypothetical problem of New Music as being haunted and held back by its initial past project.
Chapter 1What is New Music?
The term New Music is the translation of the German term "Neue Musik". It refers to a broad school of thought in European art music that emerged in early 20th century, which, as the adjective "new" suggests, attempts to differ and renew musical writing. In practice, New Music compositions tend to avoid or reinterpret the fundamental tonal grammars of Western Art Music, such as the paradigm of the diatonic tonal system. They are in vast majority instrument-centred, and notated, either in conventional or unorthodox manner, as a way for musicians to perform them.
The conceptualisation of New Music has undergone transformations over time. Historical literature from the post-World War II period in Europe tends to depict New Music primarily as an aesthetic attitude more than a fixed tradition. In describing this new musical attitude in Theodor W. Adorno's 1960 essay Music and New Music, Marcus Zagorski wrote: "Morally speaking, "new music" was defined as that which embodied a critical resistance to the existing order and preserved the freedom of subjective expression as demanded by a Hegelian view of history."2 Georg W. F. Hegel's view on history is dialectical, i.e. the present is by necessity developing from its conflict with the past. Another observation highlighting New Music's fundamentally critical stance during this period is made by Kévin Gohon, mentioning how the study of the theoretical essays written by Pierre Boulez during the 1950s, and of the critical response indirectly provided to them by Adorno's thought, has emphasised a "sense of urgency" shared by European composers, which could be understood in two respects: the need to break with the fixity of the musical text and the quasi-automatic generation of its structures as sketched out in serialism as well as the equally necessary maintenance of the composer's responsibility of musical writing that is open to new perceptions.3
However, current discourse often characterises New Music as a musical genre of a distinctive tradition. In her 2015 chapter "New Music" as Patriarchal Category, Lauren Redhead provides the following definition: "a specifically European musical modernist tradition, believed to have originated from Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, which now incorporates composers from North America, Australia and Asia who identify with this approach to music."4 Helmut Lachenmann emphasises the fundamental link that New Music has with its canonised past, notably Darmstadt School. "Like it or not: we all bear the imprint — one way or another — of the Darmstadt experience and of discussions about what happened then (naturally, we are talking about the 1950s). All of us are — more or less consciously — parricidal children of Darmstadt."5 This quote articulates how the present-day definition of New Music, however transforming over time, is closely linked to its original European tradition, instead of being merely a form of resistance to past aesthetics and autonomous to other socio-cultural impositions, as implied by Adorno.
I understand this to suggest that what had motivated the birth of New Music, a resistant avant-gardism of the first half of the 20th century, is now less relevant in defining New Music, presumably with the New Music scene having established its own set vocabularies from the past.
Then, how did this shift of relevancy emerge? How has New Music betrayed its principle of resistance?
As Institutions Emerge, the Canon follows
The concept of canon, referring to artworks that achieved a classic status that suggest certain orthodoxy, seems to contradict the "[embodiment of] a critical resistance to the existing order and preserved the freedom of subjective expression,"6 the avant-gardism of New Music. However, the organisation of the Darmstadt School was eager from its birth to create orthodoxy. In Inge Kovács' words, Pierre Boulez's generation "all worked, so to speak, towards a singular project, the new creation of an authentic contemporary language".7
Signs of canonisation of "Darmstadt School aesthetics" emerged with the institutionalisation of the New Music scene, represented by academia and festivals. Despite the general anti-dogmatic stance of Darmstadt School composers towards the establishment of classical western art music, the socio-political constitution of New Music, deriving from the European academy and festivals that gained a status of prestigiousness, was largely undifferentiated to that of the scene that they attacked vigorously. Christopher Fox emphasises the emergence of modernist orthodoxy fuelled by the institutional support New Music enjoyed with following arguments: "first, that there is evidence that a modernist orthodoxy became predominant in the institutional support for new music in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and that the model for this orthodoxy stemmed from Darmstadt; second, that in the 1990s the reaction against modernism in music also became an orthodoxy."8
Other established New Music institutions that emerged following the Darmstadt School also proceeded on this way to canonisation. Georgina Born provides the following example of institutionalisation in the case of IRCAM under Boulez's direction, and its pursuit of a canon:
"By contrast with the aesthetic uncertainty of the culture of music production, IRCAM's concert programming and courses, publications, records, and video cassettes – everything that contributed toward musical reproduction—constructed and maintained an extremely consistent and forceful perspective on the modern musical past. In other words, they embodied a canon: a view of the sacred landmarks in modern music, a genealogy of modernism in music. […] With IRCAM, Boulez's genealogical statement took on a far grander scale than before, in the Domaine Musical. In effect, the modern canon enunciated by IRCAM is one that, not least through Boulez's own historical efforts, has been largely accepted both by the musical establishment and by musicologists. In reproducing it, then, IRCAM risked nothing and gained status by giving this orthodoxy its most intensive and prestigious international statement."9
As the quote reads, the establishing of a New Music canon by notable institutions represents the scene's aspiration to reframe itself as a practice that would be recognised by the musical establishment including musicologists.
The Role of the Academy
With the recognition from the musical establishment, the New Music scene has built a close relationship with the academy. The latter plays a crucial role in the financial sustainability of New Music, where "composers, performers, venue operators, funders, scholars, audiences each occupy their own specialized niche in a new-music economy".10 Julia Kuhlman describes the suggested New Music economy to be "requiring a backstop in the very same institutional structures that Babbitt had advocated for: university patronage and private philanthropy."11 In the quote, Kuhlman is referring to composer Milton Babbitt's controversial 1958 essay The Composer as Specialist, which reflects on New Music's academic survival. "It is only proper that the university, which – significantly – has provided so many contemporary composers with their professional training and general education, should provide a home for the "complex," "difficult," and "problematical" in music."12 Home refers here to security, primarily in financial terms via the securing of fundings for New Music considered as a research field. In their research through survey method on the economic situation of "emerging composers" of New Music, "an epithet that has only recently come to the fore to denote individuals who are supposedly on the cusp of a professional career"13, "usually highly trained, multi-degree-holding individuals, usually between their early twenties and early thirties (though occasionally older), with considerable experience of performance and, often, significant experience with professionals"14, Neil Thomas Smith and Rachel Thwaites emphasise that "Despite the high level of experience evinced by many, steady income and financial stability are rare. Only a very select few composers exist on composition alone, with just over a quarter of our sample describing university or research council funding as their chief source of income, demonstrating the importance of the academy in supporting new music"15. This suggests close economic connections between the New Music scene and the academy.
However, New Music's close attachment to the academy, while being beneficial in providing the financial and spatial conditions for its persistence, also contributes to the aforementioned stylistic adherence. The academic responsibility given to composition students is one notable element that enables this.
"Today, university-level composition students are trained to demonstrate their mastery of the full gamut of their predecessors' groundbreaking post-1945 sonic techniques. Often, this means compressing them all into rehearsably short electroacoustic chamber pieces for their recitals every semester. Thus, a highly distinctive "maximalism in miniature" — one which is considerably difficult to learn fluently without university-level resources — has become a standard foundation for aesthetic norms in the new music field as a whole."16
The largely competitive nature of academic research funding model in general, grounded in the premise of academic assessment, is another fundamental contributor to the canonisation and the following aesthetic stagnation. "Writing and teaching in the arts is more and more heavily imbued with anxiety about "excellence", defined, again, not as a measure of inherent quality but as a quantitative function of system-level readiness to respond to the asynchronous interests of evaluators and stakeholders […]"17 Now, the musical orthodoxy of modernism advocated by New Music institutions resides as a canonised reference point for such evaluations in the academy of music, represented by standardised New Music principles which I will discuss below.
Why Is It a Problem?
Such institutionalism and academisation of New Music contradicts the aesthetic position that emerged with the birth of New Music, a desire to be a resistant avant-gardism. Instead, through institutionalism, the rejection of conventional tonal language is merely replaced with a preference for other styles recognised by the institution, namely, timbral exploration through extended instrumental techniques, microtonality and acoustic analysis. At the same time, the fundamental premises of notation and instrumentation largely remained. Indeed, a good number of New Music compositions premiered now are almost exclusively within the domain of mentioned premises.
I consider this situation to be a problem in mainly two regards. Firstly, there's an evident philosophical paradox between the historical imperative of New Music to reject inherited musical language and New Music's institutional endorsement of canonised aesthetics. When New Music institutions begin conserving and transmitting a canon of approved techniques, they replicate precisely the academic conservatism the original avant-garde defined itself against, rendering New Music's critical gestures sterile.
Secondly, this situation imposes an inevitable limitation on the expansive potential of the avant-garde. When New Music's critical gestures become exhausted and certain acknowledged conventions are instituted as central parts of the canon, artistic attempts deemed disruptive are administratively suppressed in the festival circuit, the academic prize system, and the conservatory curriculum. This constricts potential aesthetic expansion of New Music as well as the pursuit of destructive kinds of New by encouraging composers to conform to the set premises of a hegemonic position acknowledged by institutions.
The New Music scene's loss of ability to recognise and respond to the exhaustion of its own premises results in a distinctive manifestation of the philosophical and cultural concept of Hauntology.
Chapter 2
Hauntology, a portmanteau that combines "haunting" and "ontology", was first coined by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International18 to describe elements of the past persistent in the present socio-cultural landscape, notably Marxism. The term was later used by theorist Mark Fisher mainly in the context of electronic music of the UK to explain what he called "lost futures". "What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate. The futures that have been lost were more than a matter of musical style. More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live."19 In this chapter, I will read Fisher's two books, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, particularly the chapter The Slow Cancellation of the Future, to provide a theoretical conceptualisation of Fisher's Capitalist Realism and Hauntology applied to New Music.
Fisher contextualised the aforementioned state of inability to imagine an alternative to, or the destruction of the hegemonic state of capitalism, naming Capitalist Realism "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."20 Applied to New Music, it is indeed extraordinarily difficult to imagine an alternative grammar to its canonised aesthetics, signalling what might be called New Music Realism. The presence of a generally agreed upon idea of "how New Music sounds", or more precisely, "how the avant-garde of New Music sounds", might be seen as evidence that New Music's avant-garde is now itself an institutionally canonised style. Fisher provides a relevant example of the concept of "futuristic" in music. "The "futuristic" in music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be different; it has become an established style, much like a particular typographical font."21 In New Music, it is the term "avant-garde" which signifies an established style. The institutionalisation of the avant-garde as style rather than rupture represents precisely the condition Fisher diagnoses: the moment when what was once disruptive becomes the default. The result is a field in which the performance of newness has replaced the production of it, where novelty is measured not against the genuinely disruptive new, but against the established coordinates of a style that merely calls itself avant-garde.
What renders this condition of avant-garde in New Music particularly problematic is that it is not experienced as conformity, but instead experienced as seriousness, craft, and professional maturity. The aesthetic foundations of the Darmstadt generation, that is, Spectralism, musique concrète instrumentale or New Complexity do not return as explicit mandates but as hauntological presences, shaping compositional decisions before the composer has had occasion to consciously examine or contest them. This is precisely what Fisher identifies as the first direction of Hauntology: "that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic "compulsion to repeat", a fatal pattern)."22 In other words, the distinctive avant-garde style of New Music – or "how its lost futures sound" – is presented to composers as the neutral ground of compositional seriousness and not as an aesthetic resource that one consciously chooses to employ.
One evident representation of this imposition is the New Music's institutional insistence on the score as the only legitimate form of compositional output. The vast majority of conservatoire curricula, festival commissions, and academic prize submissions demand work in conventional notation, rarely as an aesthetic preference, but as a self-evident professional standard. The paradox is significant: New Music's own historical avant-garde produced some of its most radical ruptures precisely through a destabilisation of the score, notably in forms of graphic notation, musique concrète or chance procedures. Yet the institutions that claim guardianship of that tradition have maintained conventional notation as the neutral medium of serious composition. As a result, it favours compositional aesthetics which are loyal to this medium. Meanwhile, the disruptive avant-garde impulses that challenge not only harmonic or formal convention, but the score itself as the medium of composition are foreclosed. The institutional privileging of the score has thus performed a selective absorption: retaining the sounds of certain historical ruptures whilst discarding those whose radicalism was inseparable from their resistance to notation. Fisher identifies this phenomenon of selective absorption as formal nostalgia, "a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience."23 This operates not through explicit conservatism, but through the normalisation of a particular set of outcomes as the neutral conditions of serious practice.
Fisher's example of normalised postmodernist aesthetics, a once disruptive style in popular culture that has become an invisible default, provides a helpful frame to understand the "naturalisation" of New Music.
"If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current crisis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the first decade of the 21st century that what Simon Reynolds calls "dyschronia" has become endemic. This dyschronia, this temporal disjuncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reynolds calls "retro-mania" means that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted. Jameson's postmodernism – with its tendencies towards retrospection and pastiche – has been naturalised."24
The score endures not because it has been chosen, but because it has ceased to be questioned. The theoretical framework established in this chapter, i.e. New Music Realism and the hauntological persistence of Darmstadt Aesthetics through the selective absorption performed by institutional structures, requires grounding in concrete institutional observation. The following chapter will take the 2025 edition of the Donaueschinger Musiktage, one of the oldest and most institutionally authoritative festivals of New Music as a case study through which these dynamics become directly observable. As Fisher suggests, Hauntology is diagnosed not only through what persists, but also through what has been foreclosed. It is precisely this double structure of presence and absence that the Donaueschingen programme, its commission culture, and its student framework render legible.
Chapter 3
The material that forms this chapter is based on my observations of the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025 as a participant of the festival's student programme called "Next Generation". To briefly account for the position from which I received the festival: I went to Donaueschinger Musiktage 2019 as an audience member. A younger enthusiast of New Music largely unaware of its institutionalised reality, the fantastic prospect of resistant avant-garde that New Music presented was a genuine concept to me, which was partially affirmed by premieres presented in the 2019 programme, including Eva Reiter's Wächter for its predominant employment of unconventional instrumentation and Simon Steen-Andersen's Trio for its theatricality and formal self-consciousness that placed it in productive tension with the conventionally notated orchestral commission. Especially regarding Trio, the polarising public reaction provoked both by the piece itself and by the fact that it was awarded the Orchesterpreis, (widely considered the "Grand Prize" of the festival) seemed to indicate proper institutional support for the disruptive avant-garde. The premiere of Trio was a massive project involving orchestra, big band, and choir (with their dedicated conductors) that were provided by the SWR (Südwestrundfunk) which has organised the Donaueschinger Musiktage since 1950.
It is uncertain whether, if I experienced the 2019 programme for the first time now in 2026, after I had obtained the knowledge and experience of institutionalised New Music Realism as a student, I would feel the same degree of disruptiveness, especially since I have developed my compositional practice largely avoiding the practice of score writing. However, the programme of Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025, which I encountered this time as a participant, came to me as an endorsement of hauntological representation beyond the premise of notation: the concert stage pieces premiered in the Baarsporthalle were not only loyal to the premise of notation, but also to the established aesthetic grammars mentioned in previous chapters, while premieres that evidently deviated from the New Music canon were scattered over the other festival areas, as if the festival were treating them as mere exceptions and marginal outputs played for the sake of variety. For instance, the works that conceptually involved multimedia were noticeably outside of the Baarsporthalle; Tristan Perich and HANATSUmiroir's Reflections of a Bright Object, Mariam Rezaei's The Scholar's Record – Part II, Koka Nikoladze and Klangforum Wien's Masterpiece were all presented elsewhere. The fact that these works were not orchestral pieces does not only indicate that there are added difficulties of multimedia realisation in an orchestral setting; it also signifies the curatorial decision of "orchestra as orchestra": emphasising the aesthetic apparatus of orchestral music by exclusively selecting pieces with instrumental and notational approaches.
The awarding of the Orchesterpreis to Philippe Leroux's Paris, Banlieue rendered this curatorial logic explicit. The work, which places the SWR Symphonieorchester with electronics developed at IRCAM, could be integrated seamlessly within the location of the main hall programme. Its orchestral and electronic merging belongs to the recognisable lineage of spectralist and post-spectralist writing. In giving this piece the prize, the festival renewed the institutional contract that Fisher's analysis anticipates: the prize does not merely recognise a composer, but ratifies a particular conception of what musical seriousness sounds like. The contrast with the 2019 Orchesterpreis is instructive. Where Trio provoked a polarising public reaction – the very sign, perhaps, of a genuinely disruptive encounter – Leroux's work confirmed rather than unsettled the aesthetic expectations of the main hall. This is the trajectory that hauntological institutionalism produces: an award that once signalled risk, gradually re-calibrated toward the already-sanctioned. Fisher's observation that the futuristic in music "has become an established style, much like a particular typographical font"25 was, in the prize ceremony, almost literally staged.
One could speculate at this point that it is indeed the purpose of the Donaueschinger Musiktage as a festival, to highlight the already established musical grammar and its proponents. Looking through the history of Donaueschinger Musiktage however, one can discover that it has historically attempted to expand the grammar of New Music. The festival's thorough embrace of such expansion arguably dates back at least to the 1993 edition under the direction of Armin Köhler, where Nam June Paik premiered his Video Opera with Einstürzende Neubauten, an industrial rock band, alongside the presentation of 7 sound and multimedia installations challenging New Music's stagnation. For years onward, Donaueschinger Musiktage had further invited artists of varying backgrounds, tackling in particular the prevailing Eurocentric tendencies of curation, shedding a light to artists and works located in the borders of European New Music. This directional change is evident from year 1993, as the 1994 and further editions included arguably historically unorthodox figures such as Horatiu Radulescu, James Tenney, Renate Hoffleit and Henry Threadgill among others. Nonetheless such expansion seems to have stagnated from this time. The works of conceivably unconventional nature were presented extraneously, as if it was to ornament the more significant main hall programme.
A further and more openly contradictory dimension of the festival concerned its stated feminist commitments. The 2025 programme was organised under the slogan Voices Unbound, a curatorial framing that proposed, in the words of artistic director Lydia Rilling, the promotion of a politically threatened plurality of voices. Rilling herself is the festival's first female artistic director appointed in 2022, and her tenure has demonstrably feminised the programme: in 2025, thirteen of the twenty-three world premieres were by women composers. Yet the SWR Symphonieorchester, whose institutional infrastructure underwrites the festival's main hall identity and whose chief conductor opens and anchors the prestige programme, was led by François-Xavier Roth, a figure whose appointment had been publicly contested. Roth had been the subject of media coverage in France and Germany in 2024 following allegations that he had sent unsolicited intimate images to members of his ensembles.26 Though no criminal proceedings followed, his tenure at the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln ended by mutual agreement, and a part of the orchestra expressed its incomprehension at his continued leadership position at SWR. I could observe the evident tension this produced: a festival that had consciously cultivated a feminist identity over recent years was opening its main programme under the baton of a conductor whose presence generated exactly the discomfort that feminist critique of institutional music culture specifically targets. The boos that greeted Roth's appearance at the podium were the only openly dissonant moment of an otherwise securely administered festival.
The festival's response to this tension was to manage it discursively rather than resolve it structurally by hosting panels on questions of power and misconduct (Machtstrukturen im Musikbetrieb) whilst retaining the appointment itself. This is what performative institutionalism looks like in practice. The language of structural critique is absorbed at the curatorial level – in the theme, in the commission statistics, in the presence of panels – while the institutional arrangements that feminist analysis specifically targets remain undisturbed. Voices Unbound, as a curatorial concept, did not extend to the question of who conducts.
The press reception of the festival gave this contradiction a further, and in some respects more troubling, articulation. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 21 October 2025, critic Lotte Thaler opened her review of the festival by asking whether men are simply the better composers, a provocation she presented as one that the Donaueschingen programme had made unavoidable.27 The question is not only reductive; it is, in the precise sense this article has been developing, politically regressive. To respond to the institutional failure of a feminist curatorial project by implying a natural hierarchy of compositional ability is to confuse the symptom with the diagnosis. The underperformance – in Thaler's own evaluative terms – of several works by women composers at Donaueschingen 2025 is not evidence of inherent creative limitation. It is evidence of what Redhead's analysis of New Music as a patriarchal category makes structurally legible: that a field whose aesthetic standards, institutional gatekeepers, and prize culture have been shaped overwhelmingly by men for decades does not produce equal conditions for composers whose formation has taken place at the margins of that tradition. To commission women into a canonic framework built largely without them, and then judge the results against criteria that framework has normalised, is not a feminist gesture. It is a test designed to confirm the hierarchy it claims to question. That a prominent critic could pose this question seriously, in a major publication, is itself a measure of the political regression that the New Music establishment's performative progressivism fails to address. Thomas Meyer, writing in the Schweizer Musikzeitung,28 and Georg Rudiger in BackstageClassical29 both noted the festival's lack of genuine provocation: its preference for the accomplished and the legible over the genuinely unsettling. None of these critics linked this aesthetic conservatism to its structural cause: the institutional mechanisms of canonisation and selective absorption that this article has examined throughout. The dyschronia of the main hall programme, its sonic fidelity to a moment that has passed, was not experienced as anachronism by those who reviewed it. It was received, described, and transmitted as the contemporary.
Taken together, the main hall programme, the prize culture, the Voices Unbound contradiction, and the press reception reveal Donaueschingen 2025 not as an aberration within the New Music landscape but as its most authoritative institutional expression. The festival does not merely reflect the hauntological condition this article has described. It actively reproduces and legitimises it, transmitting the spectre of a radical aesthetic promise to the next generation of composers who will be expected to carry it forward.
Conclusion
This article set out to examine whether the concept of Hauntology, as theorised by Mark Fisher, offers a useful framework for understanding the present condition of New Music, and whether Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025 could serve as a concrete illustration of that condition. Having moved through the history of New Music's institutionalisation, the theoretical apparatus of Fisher's Hauntology, and the evidence of the festival itself, I believe the answer to both questions is yes.
What emerges from this investigation is a picture of a musical culture caught between its own mythology and its institutional reality. New Music defined itself through the promise of perpetual renewal, a commitment to resisting inherited musical language and imagining something genuinely different. That promise, as I have argued, has not been openly abandoned. It continues to be invoked in festival programmes, prize ceremonies, curatorial themes, and conservatoire curricula. However, it is no longer operative. The aesthetic grammar of the post-war avant-garde has become the new tradition, transmitted and enforced by the very institutions that claim to carry forward the spirit of radical music. The result is a scene that performs newness whilst reproducing the familiar, which is, in essence, what Hauntology describes.
Donaueschingen 2025 made this legible across several registers simultaneously: in the main hall programme's aesthetic consistency, in the prize awarded to a work squarely within the established canon, in the feminist theme that did not reach the question of who conducts, and in a press reception that noted the absence of provocation without asking why provocation had become structurally difficult. These are not isolated phenomena; instead they are symptoms of a shared hauntological condition.
Various infrastructures in New Music, including publishers, festivals and the academy, seem to have created an aesthetic palette that composers inevitably need to choose from for their creations, where certain works that are not conventionally notated are welcomed to a lesser degree in the intellectual apparatus of the New Music scene. These invisible compositional protocols are anything but the prospected autonomy of art that the scene has always emphasised.
What I am less certain about is what follows from this diagnosis. Fisher himself was notably pessimistic about the prospects for escaping the cultural conditions he described, and there is something honest in that pessimism that this article is not prepared to dismiss. Just as Fisher, quoting Jameson,30 found it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is easier to imagine the end of New Music altogether than the end of the protocols that currently define it.
[1] Fisher, Mark. "The Slow Cancellation of the Future." Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, 2014, p. 7.
[2] Zagorski, Marcus. "Melos-Ethos International Festival of Contemporary Music 2015." vol. 70, no. 276, Apr. 2016, p. 91.
[3] Gohon, Kévin. Penser le discours musical électroacoustique: Trajectoire Boulez-Nono [Reflecting on electroacoustic musical discourse: The Boulez-Nono trajectory] Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2022, p. 256. My translation.
[4] Redhead, Lauren. "‘New Music’ as Patriarchal Category. Gender, Age and Musical Creativity", edited by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton, Ashgate, 2015, p. 171.
[5] Lachenmann, Helmut. "Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt." Contemporary Music Review, vol. 23, no. 3/4, Sept./Dec. 2004, p. 43.
[6] Zagorski, p. 91
[7] "sie alle arbeiten ja gewissermaßen an einem gemeinsamen Projekt, der Neuschöpfung einer authentischen zeitgenössischen Sprache." Kovács, Inge. Wege zum musikalischen Strukturalismus: René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, John Cage und die Webern-Rezeption in Paris um 1950. 2004, p. 71. My translation.
[8] Fox, Christopher. "Darmstadt and the Institutionalisation of Modernism." Contemporary Music Review, vol. 26, no. 1, Feb. 2007, p. 116.
[9] Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Univ. of California P, 1995, p. 171.
[10] Kuhlman, Julia. The Composer as Generalist? Specialization, Collaboration, and the Funding of New Music. 2025. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, PhD dissertation, p. 5.
[11] Kuhlman, p. 6.
[12] Babbitt, Milton. "The Composer as Specialist." The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, edited by Stephen Peles et al. Princeton UP, 2003. p. 53.
[13] Smith, Neil Thomas, and Rachel Thwaites. The Composition of Precarity: ‘Emerging’ Composers' Experiences of Opportunity Culture in Contemporary Classical Music. The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 70, no. 2, Mar. 2019, p. 593.
[14] Smith and Thwaites, p. 593.
[15] ibid.
[16] Prevedini, John Dante. "Ivory Tower Values Are Keeping New Music Inaccessible and Unaffordable." I Care If You Listen, 23 July 2025, icareifyoulisten.com/2025/07/ivory-tower-values-are-keeping-new-music-inaccessible-and-unaffordable/. Accessed 10 Apr. 2026.
[17] Valiquet, Patrick. "Epistemological Stagflation and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Music Research." New Music and Institutional Critique, edited by Christian Grüny and Brandon Farnsworth, J.B. Metzler, 2024, p. 95.
[18] Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994.
[19] Fisher, Mark. "What Is Hauntology?" Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, Fall 2012, p. 16.
[20] Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Zero Books, 2009, p. 2.
[21] Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life, p. 5.
[22] Fisher, "What Is Hauntology?" p. 18.
[23] Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, p. 4.
[24] Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life, p. 7.
[25] Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, p. 5.
[26] Welscher, Hartmut and Merle Krafeld, "A Stale Start." VAN Magazine, 25 Sept. 2025, van-magazine.com/mag/francois-xavier-roth-new-allegations-swr-debut. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.
[27] Thaler, Lotte. "Die Donaueschinger Musiktage boten viel dumme Werke." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 Oct. 2025, www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/musik-und-buehne/konzert/die-donaueschinger-musiktage-boten-viel-dumme-werke-110742488.html. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.
[28] Meyer, Thomas. "Im Labyrinth der Labyrinthe." Schweizer Musikzeitung, 22 Oct. 2025, www.musikzeitung.ch/berichte/2025/10/im-labyrinth-der-labyrinthe. Accessed 18 Apr. 2026.
[29] Rudiger, Georg. "Es fehlt der Stachel im Fleisch der Musik." BackstageClassical, 19 Oct. 2025, backstageclassical.com/es-fehlt-der-stachel-im-fleisch-der-musik/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2026.
[30] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 2.
image: Odilon Redon, Hantise (1893)
edited by R.Belfiore