A guide to Helmut Lachenmann's music

Ok team, hold on to your hats: how's this for a start to the day, a concept to get your head and your ears around? "Musique concrète instrumentale". Boom. That's just one of the ideas that you need to hold on to when you're listening to the music of 76-year-old German composer Helmut Lachenmann. He's a senior figure of musical modernism, and a guru-like presence for generations of younger composers who want to follow in his essential, extreme, focused, critical, and explosive footsteps.

Way to curdle a metaphor. The point is, pace that previous paragraph, you don't actually require any of the baggage of Lachenmann's ideas or ideologies to appreciate the thrill of his music. I'll come on to the whole "musique concrète" thing in a minute, but for a starter, get your ears atuned to his music, works whose aim is the simplest and most direct that you can have as a composer – a desire to create beauty and transcendence.

But you must throw your preconceptions about musical conventions out the window, and be prepared to find and hear beauty where you may have thought none was possible – in the scrapes, scratches, and sighs that instruments and instrumentalists can produce as well as the actual notes they make. You will find an expanded palette of musical possibility in Mouvement (-vor der Erstarrung), in his opera The Little Match Girl, in Grido, ('Cry'), his Third String Quartet, in any of his solo piano music, or in the vast, visionary orchestral soundscapes of NUN and Ausklang, his music for piano and orchestra.

If you've clicked through any of those links, you may need some help with the astonishment you may well be feeling just now. So much of Lachenmann's music is inspired by an idea that's simple on the surface, but which has produced some of the most significant developments in instrumental music in the last 50 years. And yes, it's embodied in that phrase, "musique concrète instrumentale". The notion is the creation of a subtlety of transformation of timbre, a manipulation of a continuum from sound to noise, from pitched notes to pitchless textural exploration, and all that in the sphere of (mostly) purely instrumental music. That means that in Lachenmann's music, there's a world of sound that rivals and even surpasses what electronic and electro-acoustic composers can achieve. (The phrase, "musique concrète", comes from Pierre Schaeffer, one of the pioneers of electro-acoustic music in the 1940s.)

The result in, say, Lachenmann's music for two guitars, Salut für Caudwell, or his ensemble work Schwankungen am Rand, is music that rehabilitates the parts of musical culture that conventional music and music notation had forgotten: the percussive clack of nails on string, the weird glissandos you can make from fingers and hands sliding up and down the fingerboard; the grain of bow-hair on string, and the whole universe of sounds that are possible in the space between pitch-free noise and the beginnings of a recognisable note on a violin, a cello, a double-bass; the breaths and bleats that woodwind and brass players can make; the symphony of noise-making that a percussion section can produce. Lachenmann reveals the sheer beauty and the astonishing compositional potential of these previously unloved sounds.

Born in 1935, Lachenmann grew up in the generation just after Stockhausen, and he oriented his creative priorities in the Germany of the 1950s, as a pupil of Luigi Nono's in Italy, and at the Darmstadt summer schools from the 1960s, giving him a fundamental sense of the redundancy of previous musics and the necessity of finding something new, of finding some way to create meaningful musical expression in the physical rubble he saw around him and the cultural rubble of European music. And Lachenmann's attempt to find this language in the 60s enacted a kind of politics of musical production. In realising or hearing his music, the idea is that you don't just perceive the surface of a note or a rhythm, but something deeper: as he says, "you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered". That "resistance" is obvious if you've seen Lachenmann's music performed live: this is a music that requires a gigantic virtuosity and commitment from its players, a concentration on the minutiae of every sound and every gesture that is superhumanly demanding.

His programme note for Mouvement – a piece that his favourite interpreters of his large-scale music will play in Aldeburgh, Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern – says that the piece is: "A music of dead movements … pseudo-activity which consists of nothing more than rubble … like a beetle floundering on its back". But it's what happens from the combination of that "rubble" that amounts to much more than musical emptiness or deathliness. Mouvement is a piece that points to the unique achievement of Lachenmann's later music, pieces such as Concertini or his opera. It's not just that he has opened up a world of sound that we wouldn't otherwise have heard – or even realised was there! – it's that he has given us a way of hearing the "resistance", the "materials and energies" in all musical sounds, including "conventional" notes and rhythms. Lachenmann's work now encompasses the whole range of sonic possibility; immersing yourself in his music (as you will be able to at the Aldeburgh festival in the company of Ensemble Modern, the Arditti Quartet, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and the composer himself) will make you hear all music differently, so that you hear the grain, the noise, the materiality, of Mozart, Schubert, or Strauss, as much you hear the melodies, the sensuality, and the expressive transcendence of Lachenmann's own music.

Five key links

Mouvement (-vor der Erstarrung)
A beetle on its back never sounded so phantasmagorically energetic!

Grido
Lachenmann's existential exploration of the string quartet, one of the performances from the Arditti Quartet.

Concertini
One of Lachenmann's most thrilling recent pieces, throwing sound around the listener with virtuosic abandon.

SerYnade
Lachenmann's masterpiece for solo piano – music of modernist rigour – and Brucknerian depth.

'Interesting is boring'
Lachenmann in interview in 2010 ... see what he means here.

Next week: Arvo Pärt

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