Not Music

From an interview with Helmut Lachenmann:

"LACHENMANN: Yes. Tonality was something that wasn't rejected, but had to be overcome. We have to find new antennae in ourselves, to listen more, and this is a wonderful adventure of discovery. For me, my music has as much beauty as any conventional music, maybe more. Beauty is a precious idea. I want to liberate this term from the standardized categories. I'll give you a little example. I used to teach children, and I presented them the music of Stockhausen, etc. They said that it wasn't beautiful, they didn't like it. I asked them what they liked, what they thought was beautiful, and they first hesitantly named some pop music. The next week, I went there and brought two pictures with me. One was an attractive photograph of the movie star Sophia Loren. The other was a drawing by Albrecht Dürer, who had drawn a picture of his mother: very old, with a long nose, and bitter looking face. She had a hard life, and her face was full of wrinkles. I showed the two pictures and asked "Who is more beautiful?" They were totally confused, and then came the wonderful answer I'll never forget - it was the highlight of my life. A girl said "I think the ugly one is more beautiful". This is the dialectical way. Looking at this picture, one feels the precise observation of her son. Not to make it more beautiful, not idealized, just showing it. It was full of intensity. To me, as important as beauty is the word intensity. I search for this in music."

"But rejection? I'm allergic to the idea that my music is rejection. Did Schoenberg reject tonality because he made atonal music? No. He was going with what he had learned from tradition. The whole direction of occidental music is going on from tradition by provocation. Provoking humankind to new experiences. This is human, this is beautiful, this is serene, and it requires the participation of the listener in this adventure. Provocation in this sense is not a negative thing. Society's laziness creates these polemical situations. I've had such scandals because of these thoughts, where people were angry because, on the one hand they love music, and this was a music they couldn't follow, they were lost, and on the other hand, they preferred a comfortable way of thinking about music. Maybe they need such comfort, because they are full of fear in everyday life, there are so many catastrophes. Going to an opera or concert hall, they don't want to be confused. But I think in that situation, you shouldn't have fear of being confused. You should be glad to be confused. It's the most active way to live. Confusion is to discover oneself in a new way. This is my dialectic of provocation and beauty, and music as a great and wonderful adventure. I like to speak of music in positive terms. I was so happy when you asked me if it's not music, what is it then. This is a question we should cultivate. I wait for pieces that bring me to this existential question."

Comments

[Mr. Waggish]

Fascinating comments. I think Lachenmann's attention to texture and timbre has given a lot more to modern music than, e.g., the structuralism of people like Carter.

But see hyper-radical Radu Malfatti's criticism of Lachenmann for indeed not rejecting enough:

"For me, there are three basic modules within music - and any other kind of activity as well - these are form, material and structure. I think we can easily observe all kinds of new activities in the light of these three items. Whenever something really new happens in music, there must be at least one of the three phenomena involved in the renewal. Lachenmann, for instance, was deeply interested in the renewal of material, but with all his love (as he told me once) for his own work, he neglected, or forgot, the aspect of form and structure. For me, his pieces still are hopelessly old-fashioned, the structures and the forms tumble around in 19th century-idiomatics: with all his beautiful sounds, I still hear rondos, climaxes, anti-climaxes, and so on."

http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/malfatti.html

[Amie]

Interesting that HL would bring in pictures -- a photograph and a drawing -- in attempting to get the kids to think about music?!

[YH]

Hi Mr Waggish, interesting point, and I don't know Malfatti, unfortunately. I guess Lachenmann might respond that he's talking about 'overcoming' rather than 'rejection' of traditional classical forms. His mention of 'dialectical' later on in the quote makes me suspect he means more of an Aufhebung than a simple negation of existing musical structures. Dialectics, a musicologist friend tells me, was one of the recurring talking points of the Darmstadt festivals, fuelled partly by the presence of Adorno, though Nono might be a more direct source for Lachenmann.

Amie, I agree the image thing is an unusual thing to do, music being, at least on the Romantic model, aesthetically privileged by its non-visuality. Pedagogically I can see why he did it though.

[Ray Davis]

My credo:

http://www.pseudopodium.org/ht-20030328.html#2003-04-15

Amie, isn't crossing cognitive/disciplinary boundaries usually a good way to get people to think outside their ruts? I rely on that approach so often it's more a wooden leg than a crutch.

[Amie]

er Ray, I have a lot of appreciation for wooden legs, and for any form of "pedagogy" that would foster a sense of listening to images and looking at music. So I'm for "crossing boundaries" which is what I think HL is suggesting when he speaks of provoking confusion and new experiences. After all, the word experience -- the latin ex-periri -- means traversal, crossing, test, risk. But then, I don't quite understand the importance of the "new" so dear to the avant-garde, for in a sense is not all experience new?
I didn't mean to infer that HL was "wrong" in bringing in the images, I just found it very suggestive, which it would take me too long to develop in a comment and would go far afield, for e.g., why a photograph and a drawing, and why two women...etc.
More significantly perhaps, it suggests to me that HL, in keeping with a long tradition, thinks of music as figurative, in terms of plasticity, as musica ficta.
Ficta derives from fingere, which is the latin equivalent of the greek plassein/plattein: fashioning, modeling, sculpting -- figuring. And the nuance exists already in greek, such figuring is (a) fictioning!
So music is highly -- dangerously -- pedagogical! So I do think that when HL refers to "pop" music, he is not just concerned with aesthetics -- beauty -- but with the "political" in so far as music is the pop art par excellence, the art of the "masses". One might think of Wagner and his operatic Gesamtkunstwerk, which is a musica ficta that "combines" the visual and the acoustic. I'd also like to refer, in this context, to the recent discussions at Pas-au-Dela on the "philosophy of pop music."

YH, I don't know if any of the preceding responds to any of your concerns. I do have a question that perhaps you could help out on: it concerns what HL calls his "dialectical" approach. HL affirms provoking confusion and new experience, but why would this be submitted to 'dialetics', if you will, to 'mastery'? BTW, thanks very much for the post. The HL interview is "beautiful" enough to make me want to listen to his music, with which I am unfamiliar.

[YH]

Hi Amie, I think he probably doesn't see the dialectical as involving mastery. I know mastery is the take on dialectics of say a Bataille or a Derrida, but I think HL is coming out of a German tradition more sympathetic to the dialectical as merely an awareness of reversals and contradictions in experience, not a belief that material and experience can only fit a certain mould as it were, the plaything of the intellect. The dialectical in this sense is quite compatible with the unpredictable, the avant-garde 'new', though perhaps not with the aleatory in a Cageian sense, which arguably surrenders novelty to fate. I think the notion of mastery in music would be complicated by questions of subjectivity and the authorship of the composer, both of which can't be completely eclipsed. Nor should they be. Adorno would say, and I think HL might agree with him to an extent, doing so would reproduce the disempowerment of the subject symptomatic of our verwaltete Welt.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

'NOT MUSIC' is definitely the right title, because that seems to be more of what he's interested in.

'ad-hoc players using a variety of conventional and unconventional instruments, ranging from ping-pong balls to toy frogs to bathtubs and beyond; one or two electric guitars (one of the first composers to consistently use this instrument in an orchestral context); Hammond organ and/or pianos,'

Not as interesting a 'soundworld' as Harry Partch's constructed instruments full of quarter-tones and srutis, nor as interesting as something like Boulez's 'Repons' where the computers extend the sounds made by the live orchestra. More like some of the things Ives did so clumsily (although not all of it is clumsy).

Malfatti much more convincing, Lachenmann doesn't care about anything sharp--like you could just do without it, and get into this gemuttlich schnappes-and-cookies mood. Whole Malfatti interview worth reading, unless you go for all this warmth stuff Lachenmann thinks has to do with music, which sounds like he wants a version of Brahms that 'isn't easy to listen to'.

HL talks as if music that is 'difficult to listen to' and 'not beautiful in the conventional sense' hadn't been around for a full century. Does mention Schoenberg, but the early Schoenberg never was 'hard on the conventional don't-want-to-be-disturbed' ears of the bourgeois concertgoer.

Lachenmann gets played, to be sure. Certain pianists who have been looking for something to play that other people haven't done too much, since a number of people have done the big Xennakis pieces and orchestras can slip in something '20th century' between the Tchaikowsky and Sibelius, because the big orchestral Berios and Boulezes and chamber music Carters are also pretty familiar. It's actually Lachenmann that's 'comforting', in a sort of slobbering way, because it is not really interested in moving ahead, or even remembering that Schoenberg said there were still a lot of pieces to be written in C Major. (Leonard Bernstein alone proved that was true, innumerable times, even if it was sometimes G Major, etc.; although Yanni and John Tesh sure didn't.)

Anyway, I don't see that the little photo and drawing thing matters much about it being two women, as two men would have served the same kind of 'comparison is odorous' function. Ridiculous to make children decide between two perfectly legitimate forms of female beauty, though. He seems to have no trace of irony, though, which might have led him to say 'well, now that you've made the right choice, it is actually the wrong choice that won an Oscar for "Two Women"--and she didn't get all glitzed up and cleavage-focussed for that one either, as her character and character's daughter were raped' (but he probably didn't know that.)

[YH]

Patrick, no offence, but this is a slightly miserly appraisal, and you're even more guilty than me of adopting Ecclesiastes' "there's nothing new under the sun". I really don't see how you could say HL is 'gemutlich'; parts of Boulez' Repons (a very fine work) are just as much or as little saccharine. The 'familiarity' you decry is also a function of reception and context and hence unavoidable. The same would happen if Partch was regularly sandwiched in between the crowd-pleasers.