Chris Swithinbank

A Talk About Hel­mut Lachen­mann’s Gran Torso

For those of you in Man­ches­ter, I am giv­ing a talk with the won­der­ful Quatuor Danel this Thurs­day on Lachen­mann’s first string quar­tet, Gran Torso. The talk runs from 14:30 to 16:00 at the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter (map), but is pre­ceded at 13:10 by a free lunchtime con­cert fea­tur­ing Beethoven’s String Quar­tet in F major, Op. 18 No. 1, and the UK première of Pierre Bartholomée’s quar­tet Envol et Mort d’un Pa­pil­lon. I will cover sound, struc­ture and his­tor­i­cal con­text as much as pos­si­ble in the time avail­able, as well as as briefly touch­ing on the two later quar­tets, ‘Reigen seliger Geis­ter’ and ‘Grido’.

The Danels are per­form­ing all three Lachen­mann quar­tets in the com­ing months. Gran Torso is Fri­day night at 19:30 along­side Bartók 3 and Beethoven “Harp”. It is an in­cred­i­ble work, not to be missed.

List­ings: Face­book / Venue

‘Be­fore Christ­mas I got to hear my adop­tive or­ches­tra from King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety in full flow at their con­cert of Elgar and Du­ruflé, so it was with ex­cite­ment that I pre­pared to kick off the New Year with my first work­shop with the or­ches­tra. The or­ches­tra are busy prepar­ing some tricky Bruck­ner and Strauss for their next con­cert at the start of March but we man­aged to find an hour in the sched­ule to work­shop some of my ini­tial ideas last Tues­day.’

Read more on adop­ta­com­poser.org »

My first work­shop with the or­ches­tra of King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety is on Tues­day — 11.1.11! — and I’m look­ing for­ward to play­ing around with some semi-im­pro­vised ex­per­i­ments mix­ing tra­di­tional no­ta­tion and graph­i­cal el­e­ments that will hope­fully let us cre­ate some in­ter­est­ing co­in­ci­dences and ar­rays of in­ter­act­ing lines. I will post some­thing about how it goes over on the Adopt a Com­poser blog next week, but in the mean­time why not read about the ex­pe­ri­ences so far of the other com­posers in­volved.

Here’s an anec­dote to her­ald in 2011:

‘At one time Karl­heinz [Stock­hausen] and I would talk and ex­change ideas. You know the story about the talk about singing? Well, he was writ­ing a song for Cathy Berber­ian, who I later also wrote for, and he said, “if you were writ­ing for a singer, would you write music, or would you write for the singer?” And I said, “I would write for the singer”, and he said, “well that’s the dif­fer­ence be­tween us, be­cause I would write music.” So then he wrote this song for Cathy, and he asked her to whis­tle. And she can’t whis­tle. So that’s the dif­fer­ence be­tween us. Hmhmhmhm!’

— John Cage

FROM: Steve Sweeney Turner and John Cage, ‘John Cage’s Prac­ti­cal Utopias: John Cage in Con­ver­sa­tion with Steve Sweeney Turner’, The Mu­si­cal Times, cxxxi/1771 (Sep­tem­ber, 1990), p. 469.