Egbert Hiller
Music and society 1968 - 2018: rebellion and abstraction
A feature on Deutschlandfunk
When the youth revolt in the spring of 1968 began to shake up everything established, it was accompanied by a whole new kind of music. Rock bands such as Can and Amon Düül combined the spirit of rebellion with experimental sounds. Serious music in West Germany also reacted to the social upheaval.
Happening and Fluxus documented protest with new, innovative means. The radical left-wing wind orchestra around Heiner Goebbels and Rolf Riehm, for example, was strongly inspired by the Frankfurt Sponti scene; Brokdorf, Gorleben and Runway West were on everyone's lips.Today, in the wake of digitalisation and globalisation, the artistic tension between rebellion and abstraction is more exciting than ever before. Composers such as Iris ter Schiphorst and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Stefan Prins, Yannis Kyriakides and Nikola Lutz explore it in very different ways...