Heather O’Donnell
Helmut Lachenmann (1935) was born to a protestant pastor family in Stuttgart.
One characteristic of his music is a continuous occupation with
what Wolfgang Rihm calls a "grinding away of the familiar". His musicality is thoroughly permeated
by tradition, as shown by his body of works that includes over a dozen pieces
written for the most tradition-laden of western art music's institutions- the
symphony orchestra, as well as an opera and several concerti. At the same time, and seemingly
paradoxically, he is the creator of some of the most radically new works written today. A composer who has achieved an
expression that is in its essence progressive, he transcends any mannerist
"newness" that several other composers of avant-guard music fell prey
to- as Lachenmann calls it, "a coquettish pseudo-radicalism" intended
merely to shock, tickle, or scandalize concert audiences.
Lachenmann's music offers the potential to sharpen the perception
of a listener by challenging very basic assumptions about the nature of music
and how we experience sound. He developed a vocabulary for instrumental sounds
that were previously discarded or suppressed in order to conform with a rather
settled and predefined notion of what a "beautiful tone" is. He masterfully uses the unwieldy
mechanics of an instrument (e.g. scrape-sounds on strings or clicking-noises on
woodwinds), sounds that are always present in the process of instrumental sound
production, but covered up with great effort by classically trained
musicians.. Such use of normally
discarded sonic material can be compared to someone wandering through a scrap
yard to salvage objects that, with closer observation, radiate beauty, a kind
of beauty, though, that may not be in keeping with conventional notions. .
Lachenmann takes these forgotten or neglected sounds and arranges
them in such a way as to shine a new perspective on them, liberating them from
their previous status as unwanted sonic residue. This process should not only be understood as a metaphorical
act of salvation. Lachenmann's music also emanates a sensous and aesthetic
enjoyment of and fascination with sound in-and-of itself, as well as playful
and burlesquely humorous sides.
Lachenmann's Serynade, with its 30-minute length, is to date his most extensive work
for solo piano written for his wife, the pianist Yukiko Sugawara. The
"Y" in the title is a reference to her first name. It is a piece that challenges one very
basic tenant in piano physics - that a tone produced from a piano cannot be
altered or manipulated after the attack, as it always immediately enters into a process of
decay. Lachenmann uses the
extensive resonance capabilities of the piano to affect the tones after they
have been struck, making a large part of the music "inbetween the
tones", so to speak. He does
this by using silently depressed keys that open the strings for responsive
resonance, or by unconventional usage of the pedals. One can imagine two planes of perception in this piece: on
the one hand, the stark reality of the forceful block chords, the pounded
clusters and angular figurations - pronounced acts of instrumental sound
production; and on the other, the "ghost resonances" emerging from
these attacks, producing an alternate world of lingering memory, hidden
references, fragile lightness, and ethereal beauty.
Walter Zimmermann was born 1949 in rural Franconia.
His
most pronounced musical influences come from American music, namely John Cage
and Morton Feldman. Zimmermann
notes, "I tried to combine Cage and Feldman within me, so to speak: the
Cage of the matrices and chance systems, and Feldman's lyricism".
Zimmermann refers to a myriad of extra-musical influences in his
work ranging from writers from antiquity (Plato, St. Augustine, Lucretius)
through Meister Eckart's surrendering of the self, to Noam Chomsky's theory of
generative grammar and Shunryu Suzuki's book "Zen Mind, Beginner's
Mind".
One important element in Zimmermann's work is a fascination with
numbers and systems, matrixes and magic squares. Zimmermann once stated, "Magic squares have rows of
numbers that are seemingly all muddled up, but which in reality have an inner
order beyond the insight of the composer... These magic squares yield certain pitch groupings, which
really come to you from the outside, which aren't produced in one's inner
self. This is probably what one
calls 'automaton': that there exists a self-regenerating machine, which is
almost something natural in itself, something one is confronted with, and
something into which one then intervenes." In this way of limiting the
traps and temptations of unbridled self-expression, a poetics of purity and
allegory emerges in the music of Walter Zimmermann.
Desert imagery is a recurrent theme in Zimmermann's works, going
back to a collection of interviews with American composers he conducted in
1975. This collection was entitled "Desert Plants" (referring to the
difficult cultural climate in the U.S. for contemporary composers who
nevertheless found ways to flourish).
In Wüstenwanderung (Desert Journey) the desert is a metaphor for an
empty and unstable internal state, as expressed by a text of the 17th Century
German poet and visionary Angelus Silesius that appears in the preface to
Zimmermann’s score:
Wo
ist mein Auffenthalt? Where
is my resting place?
Wo
ich und Du nicht stehen. Where
you and I are not.
Wo
ist mein letztes End? Where
is my last end?
in
welches ich sol gehen? to
which I should go?
Da
wo man keines findt. Where
nothing can be found.
Wo
sol ich dann nun hin? Where
should I go now?
Ich
musz noch über Gott I
must seek out God
in
eine Wüste ziehn. in
the wilderness.
The piece (in the composer’s words), "depicts the
creation of the world soul according to Plato’s Timaeus, getting increasingly complicated and
collapsing from its own complexity, which has become machine-like." The piece begins serenely. Matrices of
harmonic fields are interwoven, fluctuating gently so as to avoid the dominance
of one field over another. The
textures accumulate and become increasingly complex like a tangle of
vines. At a key point the pianist
quotes Nietzsche:
Die
Wüste wächst. The
desert grows.
Weh’
dem, der Wüste birgt. Woe
to the one who holds a desert in himself.
At this point the complexity of structures start to self-destruct,
like a fantastically malfunctioning machine, imparting an awe and fascination
on the onlooker. Zimmermann,
uncharacteristically, makes virtuostic demands on the player that verge on the
impossible, "These excessive demands match the prescribed path: a path
that goes astray, into a desert that one has to overcome".
The breakdown culminates in the shouting of a text (in German
translation) of Ezra Pound :
RE
USURA : I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is
AVARICE.
Robert Schumann initiated a society in 1833- the Davidsbündler - the league
of David - (referring to the biblical King David in his struggle against the
Philistines- antagonists of art and culture). Members of this society carried
pseudonyms- Schumann’s own characters (namely the flamboyant and fiery
Florestan, and the poetic and introverted Eusebius) carried out polemical
attacks in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik against the superficiality and crass
display of predominant musical expressions of the day.
Special thanks to Yukiko Sugawara, Walter Zimmermann, and Helmut
Lachenmann for their help in preparing the program.