Helmut Lachenmann at 90

A composer who knows what he wants only wants what he knows — and that is not enough. A composer has nothing to say, he has to create something, and what is created will say more than the composer suspects.    – Helmut Lachenmann

Helmut Lachenmann, the boundary-pushing musical conceptualist associated with the “musique concrète” style and one of the leading German composers of our time turns 90. Belonging to a generation of composers associated with Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Lachenmann was deeply influenced by the Darmstadt School and became one of the earliest students of Luigi Nono in the late 50s. Thus the drive to leave previous musical dogmas behind and broaden the scope of instrumental and technical possibilities in composition was almost etched into his mind. Developing his musical language in the 1960s, Lachenmann deepened his preoccupation with those parameters that lie beyond rhythm, frequency or articulation, but emphasise the deeper sound from within texture, where, according to the composer himself, “you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered.”

Lachenmann’s oeuvre is prominently documented on ECM’s New Series with two principal recordings: 2002’s Schwankungen Am Rand with  the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Modern Orchestra under the direction of Peter Eötvös and the composer’s groundbreaking opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern in the Tokyo Fassung from 2002 (released in 2004), which the composer regards as the definitive version of his opera. A third recording, Dal Niente – with solo performances by Eduard Brunner on clarinet – was released in 1997. On it, the Lachenmann title piece is heard alongside works by his composer contemporaries Stockhhausen, Stravinsky, Boulez, Giacinto Scelsi and Isang Yun.

The three compositions on Schwankungen Am Rand are Schwankungen am Rand – Musik für Blech und Saiten, Mouvement (-vor der Erstarrung) – für Ensemble and …Zwei Gefühle…, Musik mit Leonardo – für Sprecher und Ensemble from 1974/75, 1983/84 and 1992 respectively. They represent key moments in Lachenmann’s restless voyage of sound-discovery, capturing  the conceptual development of the composer’s approach in the period between his first theoretical exposition Klangtypen der Neuen Musik (Sound Types of New Music) and its revision in 1993.

The sound composition arising in his processes differs e.g. from György Ligeti’s “textural sound,” forming a “polyphony of configurations,” which Lachenmann called “structural sound.” The components of these compositional structures were arranged by Lachenmann in his own typology of sounds with the overarching categories “sound as process” and “sound as state,” whereby the temporality of the individual sound types have an effect on the shaping of the composition’s form.

To notate his “musique concrète instrumentale” – a term the composer himself used to describe his musical language –, Lachenmann usually chose tablature notation during the time of his first experiments in 1969/1970, in which the actions of the instrumentalists were written down in place of the sonic result. Subsequently, he developed standardized symbols that could be integrated into the five-line staff and used without lengthy explanations.

As early as 1975, Lachenmann was planning a staged work based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl as the culmination of his work.  The basis for the actual success of the opera, which premiered in 1997, is the strategy of bringing the structures of the music close to extramusical realms, “as if a causal chain were leading from the immanent construction of the music to the image.” The opera turned out to be the revelation that he had intended. Writing for The New York Times, Paul Griffiths noted, “not only is ‘The Little Match Girl’ by far the biggest work of one of Europe’s most esteemed composers, but it magnifies the qualities of strangeness and intensity, of huge but frustrated power, that have given him his reputation”.

In his programme-note accompanying the CD, Lachenmann outlines the changes he made resulting in the Tokyo Fassung of the opera, and how they add “a further and pivotal ‘hallucination’ – the forces of nature as an expression of the burning human desire for knowledge and a glance into the awe- and yearning-inspiring cave… “