Positive or Negative 2 Author(s): Ian Pace Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 139, No. 1860 (Feb., 1998), pp. 4-15 Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1004287 Accessed: 02/06/2009 22:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mtpl. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Musical Times Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical Times. http://www.jstor.org Positive or negative 2 IAN PACE concludes his introduction, begun last month, to the music of Helmut Lachenmann 1. From UBSEQUENT to completing Accanto, whose form of socialism has been found Stalinist by many.4 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 fur 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.'l 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: Criticism and 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. Richard Toop: as at one point a counterpointed quotation from Joachim Hespos. 'Breaking taboos', 'Das trunkene Lied' from Nietzsche's Zarathustra ('O But popular genres were to continue to inform note for programme 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 distinguished from the super- (1979--80), for amplified string quartet and orches- Lachenmann's structural concerns of Accanto. tra. This work is structured in five continuous sec- programme note for soon after the of the the within each of which there are several subsec- the work, supplied Very 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 nothing. The beat begins abstruse musical arguments. The dance models are Grundbestimmungen 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 Musik der zur Lachenmann crevices in the texture which that one would be able to recognise the par- ed. opens up unlikely Gegenwart I, make them ticular forms utilised without Herbert Henck extend beyond such a length as would prior knowledge, in a the theatrics of the (Cologne: Musik- comprehensible as aberrations, and consequentially though live performance verlag Herbert 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 translated and sonic Lachenmann is in no sense a formal- final work; it would sound different were these in Elke (though 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's con- 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 Tempono.193 (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 contains much nounced, through passages grea- longer part section, further discussion ter 'individualism' towards fragmentation, dessica- a dotted rhythm is foregrounded (ex.4), the same as of the subject of 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, 'Schattentanze' of his set 4 THE MUSICAL TIMES / FEBRUARY 1998 3 k ._1 V-- of short piano pieces, Ein Kinderspiel (1980), written P , 3 t ... e . 3 1. - | - l _ ^ 1 1 around the same and which comes closest to [' 1 :1i 1 ,-L,~ - -: I I t time, ^, _ the music of Lachenmann's near-contemporary Ni- ^ ^ {,, I I ,^ I l colaus A. Huber, in its restriction of particular para- meters such as pitch, so that others, such as reso- ' 32 1 i 1 2-1 - 3)l. nance, become more apparent Within the dance sections, however, Lachenmann continues to our as when he play upon expectations, - - I- 1= =L inserts 3/16s into the 4/4s of the t I- 'Capri- *{;?I -i - r e .lt unexpected nI- n 1ufn kCA ' I - - P-3 6 3 cio'. In the 'Gigue', the xylophone writing is allowed U :_I___-?-- - 2 - T-AZ.---l-p i K' to move towards the verge of banality, but is imme- ----?. 11v diately drawn back. Remarkable new instrumental colours are created, for example the combination of piccolo and high piano, and there are occasional Ex.1: Salutfur Caudwell moments vaguely reminiscent of composers such as Berlioz or Bartok. But more controversially, the music makes exten- L ' n im ^7ft^^^7(t!SMprrr';. sive oblique allusion to the German national an- as an untouchable them. This was widely regarded '' area amongst composers of the left because of its IFitIItI .t .. ._ appalling associations with Nazism, as Stockhausen was criticised for his use of it found when he heavily W G v-L___r Wb1776nl,AM in Hymnen. Stockhausen had taken a rather naive view of this anthem like emb- as, any other, merely Ex.2: Salutfur 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).