1922–1923

The history of the founding of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) / Internationale Gesellschaft fur neue Musik (IGNM) has been well documented, but its sudden burst into life in August 1922 was neither spontaneous nor entirely calculated; rather an opportunity recognised and seized to give contemporary music a forum and an internationalist outlook. Previous fragmented efforts included the various festivals which had captured Dent's attention that summer, the high point being the festival of contemporary chamber music at Salzburg from 7 to 10 August, organised by the Schoenberg circles in Vienna, largely the brain-child of composer Rudolf Reti, who had enlisted Dent's friend Egon Wellesz in a Vienna coffee-house the winter before. Reti was an idealist, an enthusiast, who wanted a ‘celebration’ (Feier) of contemporary music rather than simply another festival. His idea was to expand the Schoenberg circle by inviting like-minded contemporary musicians – ‘composers, interpreters, critics, etc.’ – from all lands, even the USA, in an internationalist spirit, a contrast to the current strong nationalist tendencies Dent had been documenting. His gushing enthusiasm and verbosity were later unkindly compared by Dent to ‘a dribbling tap’, but he carried the tricky project through. Having no money, and with inflation in Austria nearly as bad as in Germany, they persuaded Viennese bookseller-cum-concert agent Hugo Heller and Emil Hertzka of Universal Edition to underwrite the event, very much in their business interests as the main publishers of contemporary music. Younger composers in Vienna had felt stifled; music was dominated by the conservative critics Joseph Marx and Julius Korngold – the latter, as Dent remarked, ‘would recognize no modern composer except his own son’, a Dentish exaggeration, but close. The Schoenberg private contemporary concerts – Privataufführungen – had been set up in direct response to such local obstructions, but now the composers involved wanted to expand the remit of these.