An Introduction to Helmut Lachenmann

Helmut Lachenmann sits at his desk and begins to compose. But what thoughts are going through his mind? When I interviewed Lachenmann for The Wire magazine in 2003, he attempted to demystify the process. ‘It’s very easy to write ‘expressive’ music using the old patterns,’ he explained, ‘but this is a cheap way in my eyes.’

‘People think tradition is there to be preserved and protected,’ he continued, ‘but this is a way of forgetting history. People today fear the future and so they flee backwards, hearing Beethoven and Mahler as an escape from today’s problems. But this music was written not to flee – it was written to awake!’ All of which posed as many questions as it answered – how do such ideas transform themselves into sound? Moving from declarations of musical philosophy towards deciding which notes, harmonies and textures to commit to manuscript paper – how does that work?

Lachenmann was born in Stuttgart in 1935 and studied music in his hometown until a fateful decision changed everything: he decamped to Venice to study with senior Italian composer Luigi Nono. Based there between 1958 and 1960, he was absent from important and highly influential premieres, like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras, and other epoch-defining premieres by post-war giants of the avant-garde like György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez. Compared to Berlin, Cologne or Paris, Venice had very little new music activity, isolation that, Lachenmann told me, ‘meant I could see the avant-garde from the outside.’

In works like the cantata Il canto sospeso (1956), Luigi Nono knitted idealistic Marxism into his own take on Schoenbergian serialism. He encouraged his pupil to consider questioning, deconstructing and reverse-engineering the music he already knew and loved. And then reconstruct a musical language from out of the debris.

While convention might dictate that Lachenmann’s landmark early Pression (1969) was written ‘for solo cello’, he described the piece as being ‘für einen cellisten’ (for a cellist). Pression concerned itself as much with the way sounds are produced, as those sounds themselves. Playing Mozart or Schubert, string players deploy their technical expertise to shield the full sonic impact of placing a bow on a string – it’s the note they want, not the audible attack of bow against string. But Pression anchored itself around the efforts and exertions required to make a sound. Using delicate caresses, having violent drags of the bow across the string produce belching white noise, all while telescoping in on that unstable area which lies behind the bridge of cello (beyond the fingerboard), Lachenmann reformatted our view of the cello.

Discussing the sorts of textures and timbres he unleashes, Lachenmann often invokes the German word ‘Geräusch’, which translates as ‘noise’ – but with none of the negative connotations that word has in English. ‘In German we describe the sound of wind blowing as ‘Geräusch’,’ Lachenmann said, ‘to imply a beautiful and natural sound. It’s so stupid when people say that instead of making beautiful sounds in my music I make noise.’

Rendering these ideas orchestrally required equally bold thinking. His 1975 orchestral piece Schwankungen am Rand remade orchestral protocols from scratch. At the core of the piece were thunder sheets – massive metal sheets, modified by Lachenmann himself – which the orchestral percussionists whacked with conventional percussion mallets and hammers, and scratched with their fingernails. The sounds that emerged that had nothing to do with the orchestral palette everyone knows. At the time Lachenmann described his thunder sheets as ‘radically deformed monster violins with super-pizzicato-fluido sounds’ – while the actual orchestral violins, reviving the sorts of techniques tested in Pression, were deployed as resonating sound objects. From inside this viciously expressive music another kind of granite beauty spilt out.

My music might not be music, but what is it? That’s the crucial question: what is music today?

A year later, in Accanto for clarinet and orchestra, Lachenmann diced and spliced scraps of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto into another radically modifed orchestral soundscape. Twitchy motor rhythms ticked excitedly at the very edge of audibility in the orchestral accompaniment. Familiar Mozartian melodic patterns were set in motion, but with the notes rubbed out, replaced by a breathy, toneless memory of melodies held tantalisingly out of reach.

Ausklang, a piano concerto in everything but name from 1985, refined those ideas further: by centring the piano inside a spectrum of other keyboard instruments (xylomarimba, antique cymbals, vibraphone, harp, orchestral piano, tubular bells), Lachenmann gave birth to a mutant-keyboard instrument capable of resonating apparently into infinity. Those supplementary keyboard instruments acted as a resonating chamber for the piano, amplifying its attack and decay – and Lachenmann had the remainder of the orchestra encircle this hybrid keyboard instrumental mass with another, grander resonating chamber. The resonating layers that resulted provided enough internal impetus to keep Lachenmann’s narrative airborne for 50 minutes.

In the opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl) on which Lachenmann worked for most of the 1990s, the Japanese instrument the Shô occupied a central role. This piece contained some of the most overt melodic string writing of Lachenmann’s career – but, acting as a counterweight, the work hit its endpoint as melodic lines were pushed towards conflict against pockets of controlled randomness in the rest of the orchestra. An operatic ‘mad scene’ like you’ve never heard before.

The transcendent power of melody means too much to Lachenmann for him to merely rewarm the melodic patterns of old, claiming them as his own – and his music stands in opposition to neo-Romanticism, Holy Minimalism, and indeed any other ‘ism’ that scoops the surface beauty off tonality without engaging with the nature of tonal composition more deeply. In two recent orchestral pieces, March Fatale and My Melodies, Lachenmann has refocused on the fundamental questions of his career. March Fatale collapses a march into itself, while My Melodies, for eight French horns and orchestra, investigates the archetype of the French horn within Austro-German tradition: an instrument that was central to the orchestral thinking of Schumann, Mahler and Bruckner. The music does indeed contain overt melodic utterances, which Lachenmann has punctured with holes to reveal toneless, noteless, hissing, breathing sounds underneath – a melody of ‘Geräusch’ rather than of notes. Some may conclude this isn’t ‘music’ at all. But perhaps that’s precisely the point. As Lachenmann concluded back in 2003: ‘My music might not be music, but what is it? That’s the crucial question: what is music today?’