A Return to the Future or Forward to the Past?

This article traces the literary origins of the 1945 'zero hour' concept and explores its relation and importance to post-war avant-garde music, as well as the power of its concomitant polemics. The apparent hegemony of the resulting total serialist music and its associated ideas of newness and history are questioned and then compared to the reaction against it in the 1960s, when radical ideas about man's relationship with, and understanding of, time and history grew. It is suggested that the real break with the past began then rather than in the immediate post-war period.