1963 Amsterdam

Jun 8, 1963 – Jun 14, 1963
Amsterdam

Festival info

Start: Jun 8, 1963

End: Jun 14, 1963

Locations: Amsterdam

Hosting member(s)

Description
Description

From contemporaneous reviews of the festival

“As I.S.C.M. festivals go, this one was about par for the course. The uninteresting, contrived, and occasionally downright bad works outnumbered the significant ones by a considerable margin. This is neither surprising nor a cause for alarm. At any given point in music history much the same proportion of wheat to chaff will be found. … Some of the pieces … might well have caused a small riot ten years ago. But the public that concerns itself with very modern music has developed, through constant exposure, an immnuity to crashing dissonance, jagged melody, fragmented rhythm, whining glissandos and all the other earmarks of New Music, some of which is beginning to sound very old.”

–Everett Helm, “No Sensations at I.S.C.M. Festival,”
The New York Times, June 23, 1963, Section X, p. 11.

“Altogether it was a good festival. The organization was excellent, and there was a smaller proportion of complete rubbish than in London last year. … But if one wanted to form a general picture of the state of contemporary music one would have been struck by the number of small-to-medium scale, competently written very enjoyable orchestral pieces that were certainly not devoid of genuine ideas but nevertheless somehow failed to say anything of great significance.”

— Bernard Jacobson, “Going Dutch,”
in Music and Musicians, August 1963, p. 35.

The ISCM Festival (June 8-14) was, from a chauvinist viewpoint, notable for being the first since 1945 at which Britain was not represented. As there were the usual morasses of bad, really bad, works upon which it would be otiose to comment the implications are provoking.”

— Howard Hartog, “Amsterdam. ISCM Festival,”
The Musical Times, Vol. 104, No. 1446 (August 1963), p. 567.

“It was not an exciting festival: there were no sensations and no riots. But it justified the continued existence of the ISCM (which has been questioned in past years) by presenting a panoramic view of what is going on in modern music around the globe.”

–Everett Helm, “A Panoramic View of Modern Music,”
San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 1963, Section W (This World), p. 27.

Programme information
Locations