The new music of the 1950s and 1960s is considered in the special historical perspective. The author points to the huge role the political situation of the Cold War era played in its development. While the USSR and its satellites put art at the service of propaganda and preferred consonant works reminiscent of folk songs and dances, in Western Europe, and especially in Western Germany, dissonant music based on the Schoenberg’s dodecaphony (former “entartete Kunst”) received strong financial support. The aesthetics of this abstract art, which has not yet received recognition from a wide audience, was focused on the constant innovation and on the full, unhindered discovery of the composer’s individuality. As a result, the development of the new music was determined by phenomena that would have been marginal in a different political and economic situation, and the avant-garde turned out to be the voice of the world on the western side of the Iron Curtain, just as socialist realism was the voice of the socialist camp.
