Lachenmann, Cassidy, and Esotericism

[Dana]

      I recently attended a performance/composition workshop by the Jack Quartet (check them out here), in which they lectured extensively about modern chamber music techniques, along with performance examples. They spoke particularly reverently about Helmut Lachenmann, whom they called the Grandfather of the quartet -

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/ulsKoqaX36o&feature

      They're a very young quartet, and they talk as if their primary goal is to get performance grants and residencies - while they're committed, talented musicians, I didn't hear them once talk about the power of their music. Here is a group of people who get together to try things that nobody has ever tried before and to what purpose? What kind of an effect does this music have on people? Performance grants and residencies attract primarily one kind of audience - academia. Saying this may cast me as a philistine, but the whole experience didn't really strike me as being musical - more like a science lab. Sure, we may have seen this type of scene before with the Second Viennese School, but if Schoenberg's methods were warped, his entire goal was to recapture the power music and make it expressive all over again. I don't know what this music is trying to do.

Will this kind of music ever be more than an esotericism? What is it trying to do?

[not edward]

I've actually met Lachenmann once and talked to him briefly. His music tends to focus around a few things; the idea that unconventional sounds *can* be beautiful (or at least expressive), the idea that conventional playing of the instruments can be shocking and revelatory when in the context of unconventional sounds, a fascination with the history of music (particularly his love/hate relationship with the Austro-German symphonic tradition--his obsession with Bruckner comes out in a lot of his more recent orchestral works) and an often very bitter sense of humour.

I don't believe he ever expects his work to be popular, but it was very obvious from talking to him that he feels it expresses his views on art and life in a way that he cannot imagine any other style of writing doing (and it has to be said I've heard Pression for solo cello in a few concerts and it's always gone down a bomb).

I have to say I think Gran Torso is about as unapproachable as Lachenmann's music gets: an approachable counterpart would be Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied which uses the same techniques to provide musical commentary (often bleakly humorous, sometimes affectionate, sometimes both) on the history of Austro-German music (both popular and serious). It might be playing with German popular songs or Bach in almost unrecognizable fashion, yet it's practically a four-movement symphony in disguise.

[some guy]

Gran Torso was what hooked me. I'd heard Harmonica and the Tanzsuite piece, and liked them very much, but Gran Torso was what really pulled me in to Lachenmann's sound world, what really got me enthused and buying everything by Lachenmann I could find.

So I would say that, for me anyway, Gran Torso was the most approachable.* That and Salut für Caudwell and Pression and the clarinet piece, Dal niente (Intérieur III). I hate seeing words like approachable used as if they had a content independent of context, as if the particular kind of listener they assume as typical is the only listener. Approachable to whom? is what I always say. Why, I just said it again!!

*I just had dinner with a young composer here at the Donaueschinger Musiktage festival who mentioned that Gran Torso was his first Lachenmann piece. And that Pression was an obvious influence on his own solo cello piece that he recently finished. So at least two people have found it to be "approachable," and not only approachable, but downright inviting.

Let me repeat that: INVITING.

Yeah. That felt good!!

[jochanaan]

No time to check out this music now, but Lachenmann sounds like a very adventurous musical mind.

And I suspect that some musicians, especially younger ones, play this kind of music for the same reason some people climb Mount Everest:

.
.
.

Because it is there.

[Dana]

I don't believe he ever expects his work to be popular, but it was very obvious from talking to him that he feels it expresses his views on art and life in a way that he cannot imagine any other style of writing doing (and it has to be said I've heard Pression for solo cello in a few concerts and it's always gone down a bomb).

      Make no mistake about it, I respect Lachenmann, and his music has a unique appeal - I simply wonder what the chances that his ideas (and ideas like his) become a permanent, influential fixture in the wider world of music. I mentioned one parallel between Schoenberg and Lachenmann earlier, and here's another one - while there are plenty of composers who imbued their own ideas with some of Schoenberg's musical ideas, incorporating serialist ideas into their music, or executing atonal music in exciting new ways, the greater musical world appears to have dropped serialism as mainstream art. Does this kind of music await a similar fate?

[Henrynewton]

      I recently attended a performance/composition workshop by the Jack Quartet (check them out here), in which they lectured extensively about modern chamber music techniques, along with performance examples. They spoke particularly reverently about Helmut Lachenmann, whom they called the Grandfather of the quartet -

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/ulsKoqaX36o&feature

      They're a very young quartet, and they talk as if their primary goal is to get performance grants and residencies - while they're committed, talented musicians, I didn't hear them once talk about the power of their music. Here is a group of people who get together to try things that nobody has ever tried before and to what purpose? What kind of an effect does this music have on people? Performance grants and residencies attract primarily one kind of audience - academia. Saying this may cast me as a philistine, but the whole experience didn't really strike me as being musical - more like a science lab. Sure, we may have seen this type of scene before with the Second Viennese School, but if Schoenberg's methods were warped, his entire goal was to recapture the power music and make it expressive all over again. I don't know what this music is trying to do.

Will this kind of music ever be more than an esotericism? What is it trying to do?

Dana, I don't know the context of the talk, so I won't take you to task too much.  But it really is unfair to accuse Jack of playing for academics rather than playing to affect people.  The New York Times in December ranked their performance at Le Poisson Rouge in which they played all four Xenakis quartets as one of the five most memorable concerts of 2008, along with the New York Philharmonic's performance in North Korea, Elliott Carter's 100th birthday celebration at Carnegie and several others.  Take a look at last Wednesday's Washington Post article which describes Jack as having "a band-like mentality and a funky contemporary vibe."  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/13/AR2009101303565.html

Or see yesterday's New York Times about Jack's sold out performance of Xenakis  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/arts/music/19miller.html?pagewanted=all

I take it you're in an academic setting somewhere.  Get out of academia.  The real world is better than you think.

[Dana]

      I didn't accuse Jack of being academic - on the contrary, it's very clear that they're passionate about their music (note the part where I called them committed, talented musicians), and I'm well aware of their accomplishments. Rather, my queries are about the music itself (note my second post where I spend more time talking about Schoenberg and Lachenmann than about the Jack Quartet). Thanks for being so lenient What do you think Lachenmann, Xenakis et al are trying to do with their music? Are they trying to make music personal and unique in the same way that Schoenberg did?

[jochanaan]

      Make no mistake about it, I respect Lachenmann, and his music has a unique appeal - I simply wonder what the chances that his ideas (and ideas like his) become a permanent, influential fixture in the wider world of music...

I seem to recall reading similar speculations about Beethoven's last quartets.

Henrynewton, despite some strong evidence to the contrary, most academics are people too.

[Henrynewton]

      I didn't accuse Jack of being academic - on the contrary, it's very clear that they're passionate about their music (note the part where I called them committed, talented musicians), and I'm well aware of their accomplishments. Rather, my queries are about the music itself (note my second post where I spend more time talking about Schoenberg and Lachenmann than about the Jack Quartet). Thanks for being so lenient What do you think Lachenmann, Xenakis et al are trying to do with their music? Are they trying to make music personal and unique in the same way that Schoenberg did?

Since I'm not a mind reader, I can't tell you whether Lachenmann and Xenakis intended the same things Schoenberg did.  I can only tell you, objectively, their music affects people personally and uniquely, as does Schoenberg's.  I heard a Lachenmann performance in Lucerne, and that hall was packed out, mostly with young people, some of whom no doubt were in academia, but not all.  Unless New York has a lot more academics than I think, I doubt that the packed out audiences the New York Times has reported for Xenakis concerts are all academics either.

[not edward]

      Make no mistake about it, I respect Lachenmann, and his music has a unique appeal - I simply wonder what the chances that his ideas (and ideas like his) become a permanent, influential fixture in the wider world of music. I mentioned one parallel between Schoenberg and Lachenmann earlier, and here's another one - while there are plenty of composers who imbued their own ideas with some of Schoenberg's musical ideas, incorporating serialist ideas into their music, or executing atonal music in exciting new ways, the greater musical world appears to have dropped serialism as mainstream art. Does this kind of music await a similar fate?

I imagine in the long term they'll be assimilated amongst other aspects of music, just as so many other ideas have been in the past. I've certainly heard some good, though less radical, music that probably would have been different without Lachenmann's example (as well as some absolutely dire sub-Lachenmann crap, often from young composers still struggling to find a voice).

[Dana]

I seem to recall reading similar speculations about Beethoven's last quartets.

      But Beethoven was still working with essentially the same materials - even if his harmonies and thematic ideas were completely alien. This new wave of composition is changing the fabric with which music is made altogether.

      Henry - how does this music affect you? If you had to pick a phrase, or an emotion to describe what it does to you, what would it be? This question is the key to everything I'm getting at - is it even possible to describe this music as anything other than spectacular (in every sense of the word)? If not, what does it do?

      Schoenberg thought that in order to make music personal again, you had to do something that was completely different. This wasn't because he was some sort of a rebel-without-a-cause type of guy, but because he wanted to express his own emotions - why on Earth would his anguish sound like Brahms' anguish, or Mahler's (I'd like to think that Schoenberg considered Brahms to be a panderer, but this is only a supposition)? Ridding himself of convention was the only way that he could come up with an art that was truly personal. To hear Edward tell it Lachenmann has reached the same conclusion (albiet, through a less egotistical course ) The catch is that when your art expresses itself in an unconventional manner, how does it connect to other people? And to take that one step further, if your art doesn't adequately communicate your ideas to an audience... what does it do (this isn't to accuse anyone of poor communication, the question is mostly abstract)?

[UB]

From an article in Wholenote Magazine November 2003 - Sorry I can not give a link - I just have a number of articles on him and his music in my files.

STEENHUISEN:
  You've gone to great effort to find new types of sounds in your music.  What was your intention?

LACHENMANN:  It's true that I'm trying to search for new sounds, but this is not my aesthetic aim or credo as an artist.  With conventional or unconventional sounds, the question is how to create a new, authentic musical situation.  The problem isn't to search for new sounds, but for a new way of listening, of perception.  I don't know if there are still new sounds, but what we need is new contexts.  One attempt was dodecaphonic music, which was an incredibly courageous step by Schoenberg, trying to separate conventional from formality.  It wasn't perfectly received in society, because occidental society kept being administrated by the tonal conventions, until today.  In our everyday life, we are surrounded by an art and entertainment service which is dominated by the tonal music tradition.

I was raised with the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, and of serialism, for those of us in Europe, as well as with the aleatory techniques of John Cage, which seemed to be a sort of redemption of our serialistic attempt.  I felt that I needed to find my own concept of music.  When I searched for it in the late sixties, I called it musique concrête instrumentale.   The original musique concrête, as developed by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, uses life's everyday noises or sounds, recorded and put together by collage.  I tried to apply this way of thinking, not with the sounds of daily life, but with our instrumental potentialities.  Thinking that way, the conventional beautiful philharmonic sound is the special result of a type of sound production, not of consonance or dissonance within a tonal system.  In that context, I had to search for other sound sources, to bring out this new aspect of musical signification.

[some guy]

But Beethoven was still working with essentially the same materials - even if his harmonies and thematic ideas were completely alien. This new wave of composition is changing the fabric with which music is made altogether.

This gets said pretty often. How true is it? People in Beethoven's time certainly weren't all that convinced that he was working with essentially the same materials, though now, after a couple of centuries, we certainly see it that way, just as many listeners now, after one century, hear the essentially Romantic qualities of Schoenberg's music.

Two things could be true of "this new wave of composition"*, one that it will also be seen, two hundred years from now, as using essentially the same materials, and two that it really is changing the fabric. Either way, I think things are fine.

If you had to pick a phrase, or an emotion to describe what it does to you, what would it be? This question is the key to everything I'm getting at - is it even possible to describe this music as anything other than spectacular (in every sense of the word)?

Yes, it is key to what you're trying to get at. And that's where we differ. I'm not looking for music to create some emotion in me. I listen to music a lot, most of it post-Lachenmann. I always respond emotionally. I'm a human,** as are the composers and performers. We have emotions. Nothing special has to be done to elicit them. They're there.

(Spectacular is fine by me, just by the way.)

The catch is that when your art expresses itself in an unconventional manner, how does it connect to other people? And to take that one step further, if your art doesn't adequately communicate your ideas to an audience... what does it do...?

No catch, is what I'd say. I'd go even farther. I'd say that only if it is unconventional, will art be able to connect on any but an, um, well, conventional way. If you want to connect in a deep and permanent way, unconventional is the way. (That is not, I hasten to add, to say that unconventional equals deep, only that conventional does not.) As for that word "audience," it is not a description of one single identifiable thing. That that's almost always the way it's used is bound to cause trouble. The musics of Schoenberg, Cage, Stockhausen, Lachenmann, et al., do indeed communicate to audiences. Maybe not to the people who make up the audiences one might find in, oh, symphony hall (though even there...), but people do go to concerts of modern/contemporary music, which makes them members of an audience. And that music communicates to that audience.

To say that new music doesn't communicate to "the" audience is to at best marginalize and at worst deny the existence of the (growing) audience that does indeed go to hear that music and does indeed enjoy it.

*I'm just playing along, here. I really have no idea what, specifically you are refering to.

**This is a debatable point, but it should be debated in The Diner, eh? I'll have an Irish coffee.

[Dana]

This gets said pretty often. How true is it? People in Beethoven's time certainly weren't all that convinced that he was working with essentially the same materials, though now, after a couple of centuries, we certainly see it that way, just as many listeners now, after one century, hear the essentially Romantic qualities of Schoenberg's music.

      Beethoven's late quartets differed from earlier music mainly in that they melded melodic and harmonic material more cohesively than just about any music before that (excepting Bach), and in the advanced chromatic harmony they dealt with - he was still dealing with melodic and harmonic material. I have an endless admiration for the revolutionary power of Beethoven's quartets, but you can't possibly tell me that they changed the fabric of what music was made of when we're still talking in terms of (mostly) diatonic harmony. (watch the youtube at the top to see what genre I'm referring to)

I'd say that only if it is unconventional, will art be able to connect on any but an, um, well, conventional way. If you want to connect in a deep and permanent way, unconventional is the way. (That is not, I hasten to add, to say that unconventional equals deep, only that conventional does not.)

Brahms 1st Symphony begs to differ.

The musics of Schoenberg, Cage, Stockhausen, Lachenmann, et al., do indeed communicate to audiences.

      I'm not critiquing modernism (I do enjoy some works from the 2nd Viennese School, and really dig some serialism & atonal music) - that would indeed be shortsighted. I'm only talking specifically about the music referred to in the first post - and no one seems to be able to figure out what it's trying to communicate (or if they can, they aren't saying).

[some guy]

I also cannot speak to either the workshop you attended, nor to the youtube clip, as the computer I'm on apparently doesn't have any soundcard, so I can only deal with what you've said.

What kind of an effect does this music have on people?

I don't know about "people," but a couple of us have tried to say that we enjoy this music ourselves. It's effect on me is to exhilarate.

I don't know what this music is trying to do.

Fair enough, just don't try to draw any conclusions from that. (Or draw a more fruitful one, like "I am apparently not ready yet for this music." That's the conclusion I always drew whenever I came across something I didn't understand right away, like Carter and Mumma and Berio, for instance. Even, to go back even further, like Sibelius, if you can imagine. That conclusion has worked very well for me. It's meant I'm always open for new things. It means I never worried about things like what is this music trying to do. Eventually, I got whatever it was trying to do, from which point I could then go on to like it or not, depending.)

Will this kind of music ever be more than an esotericism?

I think you know how I would answer this!!

...no one seems to be able to figure out what it's trying to communicate (or if they can, they aren't saying).

No one? This conclusion seems a trifle on the hasty side. Are you suggesting that all the people who go to concerts of this music and who apparently enjoy it (I so much that I spend about five months a year traveling around to world to hear it) cannot actually figure it out?

Otherwise, I suppose I would say that I don't find the "communication" metaphor all that useful. The music sounds good. Lachenmann's, for instance, is well-crafted, though I enjoy a lot of musics for which the "craft" metaphor would be impertinent. Indeed, I think I rather prefer musics that don't seem to be trying to tell me something, that leave me alone with the sounds, to deal with them, to enjoy them without imposing any program on them.

Try, just for fun, to say what it is you think Brahms' first is "communicating," precisely and accurately, remembering that Brahms is/was the king of "abstract" music, or so we've been led to believe.

[Luke]

      Beethoven's late quartets differed from earlier music mainly in that they melded melodic and harmonic material more cohesively than just about any music before that (excepting Bach), and in the advanced chromatic harmony they dealt with - he was still dealing with melodic and harmonic material. I have an endless admiration for the revolutionary power of Beethoven's quartets, but you can't possibly tell me that they changed the fabric of what music was made of when we're still talking in terms of (mostly) diatonic harmony. (watch the youtube at the top to see what genre I'm referring to)

I'm not entirely sure about that....Beethoven's late quartets differed from earlier music in many ways, not just melodically and harmonically but formally and - importantly - texturally. And also, strikingly, in the use of texture to articulate form. And the term texture also includes, in Beethoven's case, not just concepts such as homophony, polyphony etc, but also much more (string) instrument specific sounds and techniques. So, the structure of op 133's fugue is determined not just by key, tempo and metre changes but also, importantly, by huge switches in textural type. The rough, jagged and deliberately scrappy sounds of the open string-dominated opening fugue opposed to the more melifluous stopped-string legati of the episode in G flat (is it G flat, I forget.....?). And the structure of the scherzo in op 131 is articulated to an immense degree by Beethoven's use of ponticello writing....and the structure of the first movement of op 130 is also articulated to an extent by Beethoven's highly unusual demands upon the cello (to play high up the C string at significant moments)....and the structure of the Helige Dankgesang is lit up from within by Beethoven's use of bright string-specific techniques in the D major episodes, contrasting with more 'vocal'  non-string sounds in the lydian music....and the trio of the same quartet is full of bright A major string-specific techniques......and in the last movement the registral switch of viola and cello which leaves the cello soaring and keening in a kind of desperate major key very high up is a use of unusual register to articulate both structure to impart a unique emotional quality...and so on and on on almost every page of the scores. In fact, these particular quartets exult in this kind of writing, where string-specific sounds become formal markers, in a way that even, say, the op 59 quartets do not, so I think the point carries extra force.

And that point, of course, is that Lachenmann's concentration on extended tecniques functions in a similar way, although taken to the nth degree and - as you would rightly point out, I'm sure - to the exclusion of much else that we find in Beethoven within the context of which this textural play takes place. This is one way in which late Beethoven is exceedingly modernistic, to an extent, of course, so it doesn't necessarily negate your point...I just thought it was worth saying! 

[Dana]

Are you suggesting that all the people who go to concerts of this music and who apparently enjoy it (I so much that I spend about five months a year traveling around to world to hear it) cannot actually figure it out?

      No, only that no one in this thread had actually answered the question directly (thanks for doing so!). Describing what music sounds like isn't synonymous as describing the impact that it has.

Try, just for fun, to say what it is you think Brahms' first is "communicating," precisely and accurately, remembering that Brahms is/was the king of "abstract" music, or so we've been led to believe.

      Sure! Brahms first symphony communicates triumph over some looming, oppressive force, and excites and inspires. I might go so far as to call Beethoven this force, but Brahms is, as you say, the king of abstract music

[not edward]

In terms of what Lachenmann is "communicating", I'd simply say that like other composers, that varies from work to work. I wouldn't necessarily want to say what Gran Torso communicates as honestly it's not one of my favourites; but amongst the most common things his music communicates to me are an (often rather bitter and sarcastic) wit, a sense of wonder, a kind of weird sideways view of the tradition, and a feeling of repressed energy which eventually breaks free of the music's bonds.

[jochanaan]

...Brahms 1st Symphony begs to differ...

Hmmm...You choose an interesting piece as a "model of conventionality."  Lots of things in Brahms 1 that defy convention.

And going back a little farther, Haydn, who established many of the so-called "conventions" in the first place, uses lots of unconventional devices in his music.  He was a master of the musical surprise, not just in Symphony #94 ; nearly all his later music has some kind of unexpected twist.  I love his sudden silences, a device that Beethoven also used very effectively.

Maybe "some guy" has a point.

[some guy]

Maybe "some guy" has a point.

Made me laugh!!