Chris Swithinbank

In cel­e­bra­tion of Hel­mut Lachen­mann’s 75th birth­day, Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter new music en­sem­ble Va­ganza are pre­sent­ing two con­certs of his music this Fri­day. A free lunchtime con­cert will see Ad Solem Cham­ber Choir per­form Lachen­mann’s Con­so­la­tion II along­side works by stu­dents, in­clud­ing Tom Coult and Joy Chou. The evening sees a more thor­ough ex­am­i­na­tion of Lachen­mann’s early music with per­for­mances of Trio flu­ido, Guero, Wiegen­musik and Not­turno. To com­plete the focus, for­mer stu­dent and scholar of Lachen­mann Matthias Her­mann, from the Musikhochschule Stuttgart, is giv­ing a talk at 2pm on the Thurs­day on com­po­si­tion tech­niques in Not­turno. That is fol­lowed at 4.15pm by a panel dis­cus­sion and open forum on the im­por­tance of tim­bre as a struc­tural pa­ra­me­ter in con­tem­po­rary music.

For those of you equipped with 2011 di­aries, it is also worth not­ing that Lachen­mann’s temA will be per­formed by Trio Atem (formed for that very work) on 17 March and the uni­ver­sity’s string quar­tet in res­i­dence Quatuor Danel will be per­form­ing all three Lachen­mann quar­tets be­tween Jan­u­ary and May. I will be talk­ing with the Danels on that very topic on 20 Jan­u­ary.

I was asked to write pro­gramme notes for the Lachen­mann works being per­formed this Fri­day and thought it might be in­ter­est­ing to post them here, along with videos or record­ings where avail­able. How­ever, this is music to which first-hand lis­ten­ing is es­sen­tial, so I would urge you to get to the Mar­tin Har­ris Cen­tre later this week.

Con­cert 1 (1.10pm)

Con­so­la­tion II, for 16 voices (1968)

The late ‘60s saw Lachen­mann focus heav­ily on writ­ing for voice, com­pos­ing Con­so­la­tions I and II (1967 and ’68 re­spec­tively) and the trio temA, for flute, voice and cello (1968), some­thing he didn’t re­turn to until the 1990s with his opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwe­felhölzern (1990-96). It has been sug­gested that in pe­ri­ods of rapid de­vel­op­ment the phys­i­cal­ity of the voice and the frame­work of a text have sup­ported avant-garde com­posers in their ex­per­i­men­ta­tion. Arnold Schoen­berg led the way with works such as Pier­rot lu­naire and the Vier Lieder für Gesang und Or­ch­ester at cru­cial points in his de­vel­op­ment, the same can be said of Anton We­bern, and later Pierre Boulez, Lu­ciano Berio and Luigi Nono all turned to the voice at turn­ing points in their re­spec­tive mu­si­cal lan­guages. The late ‘60s marks Lachen­mann’s com­ing of age as a com­poser and the de­vel­op­ment of the first stage of his ma­ture style, so per­haps it is no sur­prise that he found him­self be­gin­ning to ex­plore his newly coined idea of ‘musique concrète in­stru­men­tale’ with the help of singers.

Con­so­la­tion II sets an eighth-cen­tury prayer known as the Wes­so­brun­ner Gebet and, in a fash­ion not un­com­mon for the 1960s, frag­ments the se­man­tic ma­te­r­ial, leav­ing only the pho­netic ma­te­r­ial ex­posed as the bare bones of the text. The prayer’s med­i­ta­tion on find­ing God in the noth­ing­ness be­fore time is dis­solved into a shud­der­ing land­scape of let­ters, hiss­ing with a hol­low wind, shiv­er­ing with rolled ‘R’s, stut­ter­ing away into the noth­ing­ness where God can per­haps be found, end­ing on the ‘t’ of ‘Gott’, not sung but struck: two fin­gers com­ing to­gether in a quiet clap.

Mir ge­s­tand der Sterblichen Staunen als Höchstes
Das Erde nicht war, noch oben Him­mel
Noch Baum, noch ir­gend ein Berg nicht war
Noch die Sonne, nicht Licht war
Noch der Mond nicht leuchtete
Noch das gewaltige Meer
Da noch nir­gends nichts war
An Enden und Wen­den
Da war der eine allmächtige Gott

Mor­tal won­der as the great­est was con­fided in me
That there was nei­ther the earth nor the heaven above
Nor was there any tree nor moun­tain
Nei­ther the sun, nor any light
Nor the moon gleam
Nor the glo­ri­ous sea.
When there was noth­ing
No end­ing and no lim­its
There was the One Almighty God

Con­cert 2 (7.30pm)

Trio flu­ido, for clar­inet, viola and per­cus­sion (1966)

Though writ­ten six years after Lachen­mann left Venice and full-time study with Luigi Nono, Trio flu­ido is still heav­ily in­flu­enced by Nono’s punc­tu­al­ist music. Rather than ac­cept­ing this con­cept fully, it ex­plores the var­i­ous po­ten­tial de­vel­op­ments of and es­capes from such point-to-point writ­ing. In the course of the work the sep­a­rated se­quence of sounds is grad­u­ally both dis­solved and paral­ysed, push­ing the music at dif­fer­ent points into the ex­treme world of sparse, sep­a­rated ges­tures com­mon in his music as well as a more con­tin­u­ous, co­he­sive tex­ture of blown, bowed, rubbed and stroked sounds. The kind of ges­tural ma­te­r­ial that is in­creas­ingly vital in Lachen­mann’s later music is fore­shad­owed in Trio flu­ido by a form of pitch ges­ture where in­stru­ments move through nar­rower and wider fields of pitch, and the el­e­vated im­por­tance of in­stru­men­tal tech­niques and phys­i­cal ges­ture also fore­shadow his more com­plete move away from pitch that began not long after this piece was com­pleted.

Guero — Study for Piano (1970)

Be­tween 1968 and ’70, Lachen­mann de­vel­oped a more de­fined ver­sion of his lan­guage to de­scribe which he coined the phrase ‘musique concrète in­stru­men­tale’. Hav­ing spent time dur­ing 1965 at the elec­tronic music stu­dios of the Uni­ver­sity of Ghent and writ­ten his only purely elec­tronic piece Szenario, Lachen­mann bor­rowed tape music pi­o­neer Pierre Schae­fer’s term ‘musique concrète’ mean­ing music con­structed with con­crete sound record­ings rather than ab­stract no­tated struc­tures and for­mu­lated a com­po­si­tional ap­proach that treated in­stru­ments and per­formed ges­tures as con­crete phys­i­cal in­stances, the en­ergy of whose per­for­mance formed the struc­ture of a work.

While de­vel­op­ing this idea he wrote a se­ries of solo stud­ies that in­clude Guero as well as Pres­sion, for cello, and Dal niente, for clar­inet. Each of these stud­ies take as their start­ing point a thor­ough ex­plo­ration of the in­stru­ment’s acoustic pos­si­bil­i­ties — in­spired by a col­lec­tion of short piano pieces by Al­fons Kon­tarsky — and pro­ceeds to build struc­tures that re­veal the mech­a­nisms of per­for­mance. In his pro­gramme note, Lachen­mann de­scribes Guero as a ‘six-man­ual vari­ant of the epony­mous Latin Amer­i­can in­stru­ment’. The piece moves from the ver­ti­cal sur­faces of the white keys, to their hor­i­zon­tal sur­faces, via the black keys into the piano, play­ing the pegs and fi­nally the strings. An ex­treme ex­am­ple of Lachen­mann’s con­cept of re­jec­tion — in which all fa­mil­iar as­pects of tra­di­tional in­stru­men­tal tech­nique are avoided — Guero is an at­tempt to build struc­ture not from ex­ist­ing for­mu­las but from the ground up, tak­ing the con­crete, rip­pling sound of the fin­ger­nails along the keys as its basic ma­te­r­ial.

Wiegen­musik [Cra­dle music], for piano (1963)

Trained orig­i­nally as a clas­si­cal pi­anist and still per­form­ing, Hel­mut Lachen­mann has al­ways had an im­por­tant com­po­si­tional re­la­tion­ship with the piano, hav­ing writ­ten a dozen solo, cham­ber and con­cer­tante works for the in­stru­ment. One of the ear­li­est works still in­cluded in the of­fi­cial Lachen­mann cat­a­logue, Wiegen­musik is an early ex­am­ple of Lachen­mann’s par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est in sta­sis as a mu­si­cal phe­nom­e­non. Un­like the repet­i­tive sta­sis of Steve Reich or the weight­less sta­sis of Mor­ton Feld­man, Lachen­mann uses sparse tex­tures to in­duce an at­mos­phere of ten­sion and draw at­ten­tion to small, pre­cise, richly de­tailed sounds. Later works such as the Sec­ond String Quar­tet ‘Reigen seliger Geis­ter’ (1989) or Mou­ve­ment (— vor der Er­star­rung) (1982-84), for en­sem­ble — which makes its theme (the shift from move­ment to paral­y­sis) ev­i­dent in its title — both take this con­cept to log­i­cal ex­tremes. Con­so­la­tion II and Not­turno, both of which are per­formed tonight, also make use of this type of writ­ing. In Wiegen­musik, Lachen­mann takes a gen­tle ap­proach, draw­ing on the idea of a child falling asleep as the work grad­u­ally falls into still­ness. Like his ear­lier pieces for piano, Fünf Vari­a­tio­nen über ein Thema von Franz Schu­bert (1956) and Echo An­dante (1962), Wiegen­musik still treats the piano in a rel­a­tively tra­di­tional fash­ion. As you have heard, by 1970 with Guero Lachen­mann was find­ing an al­to­gether dif­fer­ent way of mak­ing sound with a piano.

Not­turno, for small or­ches­tra with cello solo (1966-68)

Hel­mut Lachen­mann writes of Not­turno that it is ‘a meet­ing point for two dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics: one older, which treats sound as the re­sult and ex­pres­sion of ab­stract or­gan­i­sa­tion con­cepts, and one newer, in which all or­gan­i­sa­tion should serve a con­crete and di­rect acoustic re­al­ity.’ The cello writ­ing is close to the solo cello work Pres­sion writ­ten the fol­low­ing year — for the same cel­list, Italo Gomez — and mainly takes the lat­ter ap­proach, ex­plor­ing the acoustic po­ten­tial of the cello ap­proached not as a tra­di­tional in­stru­ment but as a mul­ti­fac­eted sound­ing body.

De­spite the ex­tended solo pas­sage that makes up the core of the work, the cello’s role is not so much as tra­di­tional soloist ac­com­pa­nied by a sub­servient or­ches­tra but as a kind of leader and opener of doors, draw­ing the en­sem­ble into dif­fer­ent worlds and un­cov­er­ing new per­spec­tives. In a sense, the work is for a meta cello or ex­tended cello as the en­sem­ble all con­tribute to a uni­fied sound, led and de­rived from the cello proper, a pow­er­ful re­al­i­sa­tion of Lachen­mann’s sug­ges­tion that ‘com­pos­ing means build­ing an in­stru­ment’ and an in­trigu­ing take on the con­cer­tante tra­di­tion.