City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Pace, I. (1998). Positive or negative 2. The Musical Times, 139(1860), pp. 4-15. This is the published version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/5415/ Link to published version: Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] Positive or negative2 IAN PACE concludes his introduction, begun last month, to the music of Helmut Lachenmann 1. From UBSEQUENTto completing Accanto, whose form of socialism has been found Stalinist by many4 Lachenmann's very medium implies a wholescale confronta- Or alternatively the work could be considered as a note programme tion with the 'tradition', Lachenmann wrote musical analogue of Caudwell's 'dying culture'? for 'A portrait of Lachenmann' Salut far Caudwell (1977) for two guitars, a A comparison of this work with Mauricio Kagel's concertin the medium which contrariwise suggests folk and popu- Tactil, for the similar instrumentation of two guitars Huddersfield lar musics. In Lachenmann's words, 'The typical aura and piano, demonstrates how Lachenmann, despite translated Festival, which attaches to the guitar as folk and art instru- his engagement with non-'classical' media, is very by Niall Hoskin. ment encompasses the primitive as well as the high- much a composer arising from the Austro-German 2. ibid. ly sensitive, intimate and collective - it also includes symphonic tradition. Kagel's greater innate empathy 3. ibid. motives which may be exactly described in historic, with popular forms enables him to isolate and geographic and sociological terms." Whilst compos- estrange gestures with high irony, whereas Lachen- 4. See, for example, ing the at first untitled piece, Lachenmann found mann creates para-symphonic structures around TerryEagleton: Criticismand that 'I constantly had the feeling that this music was them. Such a difference in musical background and ideology (Verso, "accompanying" something - if not a text, then indi- 'outsider' status is similarly one factor which distin- 1976) and Marxism vidual words or thoughts.'2 He thus introduced frag- guishes Lachenmann's work from a composer of si- and criticism literary mented phonemes for the players to speak, from milar ideological persuasions as Mathias Spahlinger, (Routledge,1976) Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and reality, as well not to mention the more neo-absurdist minded Hans- 5. RichardToop: as at one point a counterpointed quotation from Joachim Hespos. 'Breakingtaboos', 'Das trunkene Lied' from Nietzsche's Zarathustra ('O But popular genres were to continue to inform for programmenote Mensch! Gib one of the few occasions Lachenmann's most obvi- CD MO 782019. acht!'), very compositional lexicon, when Lachenmann has referred to an explicitly poli- ously in his next work, Tanzsuitemit Deutschlandlied 6. From tical text and as such from the super- (1979--80), for amplified string quartet and orches- Lachenmann's distinguished structural concerns of Accanto. tra. This work is structured in five continuous sec- programmenote for of the the within each of which there are several subsec- the work, supplied Very soon after the opening work, play- tions, by Breitkopf ers become almost strait-jacketed into an insistent tions alluding to popular dance forms, such as a & Hartel. beat (ex.1), which by its particular nature creates an waltz, a march, a siciliano, a tarantella and a polka. 7. ibid. at least popularistic, if not militaristic, aura. This These provide a 'backbone' to the work, facilitating lasts for the first seven minutes, after which the the shaping, containing and clarifying of essentially 8. From 'Vier music dies down to almost The beat abstruse musical arguments. The dance models are Grundbestimmungen nothing. begins des Musikhorens again but now seems to arise from within rather than usually reduced to a few characteristics, or arche- (1979-80), in being imposed from without. Wondrous exchanges typal qualities, such as rhythms or gestural contours, Neuland:Ansdtze between the players are then possible (ex.2). or general formal properties. In the first section, it is zur Musikder Lachenmann opens up crevices in the texture which unlikely that one would be able to recognise the par- GegenwartI, ed. without HerbertHenck extend beyond such a length as would make them ticular forms utilised prior knowledge, (Cologne:Musik- comprehensible as aberrations, and consequentially though in a live performance the theatrics of the verlagHerbert re-contextualises what has preceded. As in so many conductor beating a waltz (ex.3) provides an impor- Henck, 1980), p.68, of his pieces, the formal thinking, as radical as the tant component. Nonetheless, the sources 'feed' the translatedand sonic Lachenmann is in no sense a formal- final it would sound different were these in Elke (though work; very quoted is what makes the music so much more than seeds not in Their function is similar to the Hockings:'Helmut ist), place. Lachenmann'scon- a catalogue of unusual effects or an assemblage of chaconnes or passacaglias that serve to shape cept of rejection',in 'sound-worlds'. episodes in Berg's Wozzeck: they are a means to an no.193 Tempo (July The overall progress of the work is from the pro- end, rather than an end in themselves. 1995). This article militaristic beat of In the 'Siciliano' of the second containsmuch nounced, through passages grea- longer part section, furtherdiscussion ter 'individualism' towards fragmentation, dessica- a dotted rhythm is foregrounded (ex.4), the same as of the subjectof tion and alienation. So Lachenmann's tribute to that which features in the first movement of Beet- Lachenmann Caudwell, who 'demanded an art which realistically hoven's Seventh Symphony, from which a type of and tonality. confronts reality and its multi-layered contradic- ostinato is developed in the piano, playing the top tions'3 would seem to reflect a position of ambiva- two notes of the instrument with damped strings. lence towards this figure whose crude and didactic This resembles the last part, 'Schattentainze'of his set 4 THE MUSICAL TIMES / FEBRUARY 1998 of short piano pieces, Ein Kinderspiel (1980), written P 3 around the same time, and which comes closest to ..- the music of Lachenmann's near-contemporary Ni- colaus A. Huber, in its restriction of particular para- 21 I 7--,T 1 meters such as pitch, so that others, such as reso- nance, become more apparent Within the dance sections, however, Lachenmann p 3 E43 ....W _6 3 continues to our as when he play upon expectations, J - 2 (Ica, 33 inserts unexpected 3/16s into the 4/4s of the 'Capri- - _•- cio'. In the the is allowed Wp1 6 3 'Gigue', xylophone writing : Salut Caudwe Exo f----T---r I. --- to move towards the verge of banality, but is imme- Am 6- (I.Ot diately drawn back. Remarkable new instrumental colours are created, for example the combination of piccolo and high piano, and there are occasional Ex.l: Salutfar Caudwell moments vaguely reminiscent of composers such as Berlioz or Bart6k. But more controversially, the music makes exten- I --I sive oblique allusion to the German national an- 4?4 : ?- _ - - -I - - a•,W . _ _ . _ . , them. This was widely regarded as an untouchable area amongst composers of the left because of its appalling associations with Nazism, as Stockhausen found when he was heavily criticised for his use of it in Hymnen. Stockhausen had taken a rather naive view of this anthem as, like other, emb- any merely Ex.2: Salutfar Caudwell lematic of a people, but Lachenmann was much more acutely aware of its connotations. Consequently his use of it is in no sense affirmative: whilst it subtlely linearity, as well as a more conventional type of cli- informs parts of the work (as also does the 'Pastoral max. Passages featuring fierce crescendos on single symphony' from Bach's Christmas oratorio), its only pitches, or toccata-like repeated notes in the trum- recognisable appearance is near the end, in a dis- pet, are presented in a manner which suggests a torted, grotesque form (ex.5), developing into the greater affinity with more mainstream ensemble wri- 'Galop', which is displaced by a lullaby, the last of ting (though it would be hard to deny that today three 'Arias' (and the only one in which there is any Lachenmann stands at the centre of the European semblance of a melody (in high strings) - the others mainstream). However, it has become Lachenmann's reflect more upon the conditions within which an most performed work, though its instrumentation, aria can arise). Richard Toop has commented that for a relatively standard 'new music ensemble', is from the use of the lullaby at the end 'one might well most probably the main reason for this. infer the infantile character of most 'nationalist' aspi- Beyond the iconic use of tonal materials in rations. But it's no happy ending.'5 Accanto and the Tanzsuite, Lachenmann entered into This 'critical' approach of Lachenmann, in which a re-engagement with tonality itself. He had said in he brings his own imagination into an interaction 1979: with popular forms and then uses this medium to It does not matterhow much one wants to free one- articulate a serious musical statement, also deeply self from It catches on The informs the ensemble work Mouvement (-vor der tonality.